In 1927-28, concurrent with the 500th anniversary of the death of Jeanne d'Arc and her recent canonization in 1920, two ambitious films on her life were produced in France: Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Marco Gastyne's La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc. Dreyer's film survives as a timeless work of art, while Gastyne's, the more commercial of the two films, has been relegated to the oblivion of silent French spectaculars of which we know next to nothing today, but which, thanks to the restoration work at the Cinémathèque Française, we now have an opportunity to view. The film traces the life of Jeanne d'Arc from 1428, when as a peasant shepherdess in Domrémy, in Alsace, she had her first visions, to 1431, when she was burned at the stake in the town square at Rouen. Jeanne is marvelously portrayed by Simone Genevois, a well known "tomboy" actress of seventeen, who conveys at once the youthful fervor and the mysterious purity of the Maid of Orleans, her superhuman courage as well as her very human terror of being burnt to death. Gastyne's forté was spectacle, best seen in Jeanne's siege of Orléans, filmed on location at Carcassone on a grand scale but punctuated with low-angle and close-up shots of the action. But he focused equally on Jeanne's solitude in the aftermath of battle and in the courtroom. The film co-stars Philippe Hériat as Jeanne's captain Gilles de Rais, and the expert villain Gaston Modot as the English Lord Glasdall.