Jean Grémillon is more admired than he is widely known for his silent films (Maldone, Gardiens de phare), but here is a master well worth rediscovering. Maldone has the span and depth of an engrossing novel, one written entirely in compositions of light and shadow, in impressionist pastorale and swirling musical movement, in an extraordinary attention to physical detail, in each scene shot from many angles, in an actor's face. Charles Dullin, an actor of the Comédie Française who started his own film production company, portrays Olivier Maldone, the prodigal son of a landed family who finds his true heart in being a vagabond, a docker, and a cowboy, and who is passionately drawn to the gypsy Zita (Genica Athanasiou). On the death of his brother, he inherits a new life of respectability, and a wife he is bound to destroy with his yearning for freedom...and for Zita. It was a gypsy who saw in Maldone's palm "a man and his enemy in the same man, and one must destroy the other." Grémillon creates an external portrait of this internal state. (JB)