Charles Boyer, Gaby Morlay and Michel Simon star in this polished study of the lives of film stars. As if to retaliate against the very system which forced him into the making of commercially viable sound films, L'Herbier, a genius of the silent era, creates in Le Bonheur a “remarkable achievement (in) its ambivalent portrayal of the fraudulence and fascination of the movies themselves - most particularly the brand of swanky sentiment the movie itself purveys. Boyer's sympathetic anarchist hero rages against the glossy trumpery of that new opiate of the multitudes, the cinema, and his bitterness is compounded at the discovery that his own private love story has been traduced for the sake of a banal movie script, with Morlay re-enacting for her public the role she had played so persuasively for him alone.... Their liaison may be hopeless, but as Boyer reminds Morlay at the last, ‘We have a rendez-vous at the movies.'”
Photographed by the excellent American cinematographer Harry Stradling, Le Bonheur “shimmers with L'Herbier's characteristic attention to the plastic values in his work, both in terms of decor and technical legerdemain. Throughout, Le Bonheur is visually ravishing...with bursts of rapid cutting...high-moderne sets...floating tracking shots and tilt-angle framing....” --Stephen Harvey, Museum of Modern Art