"I like in Marcel L'Herbier his sure taste for the popular novel, his care to remain in contact with the literary and artistic movements of his time, and his definition, 'The director is the first spectator of a film.'"-Alain Resnais(Man of the Deep). L'Homme du large is considered L'Herbier's first masterwork, and we are pleased to present it in a restored print from Gaumont. The story, loosely based on Balzac, tells of a Breton fisherman who despairs of his son's attraction to the pleasures of the big town. He sets the profligate young man, who is in fact afraid of the sea, bound and alone onto the stormy blue. The film was L'Herbier's first to introduce musical techniques of editing, a "visual symphony" as he called it. For L'Herbier, the Breton sea with its storms and immense stretches was itself the protagonist. Juxtaposed were the seething rhythms of the cafe scenes (which were censored as too provocative) and the atmospheric, semidocumentary interpretation of Breton life.