The marvelous Edwige Feuillère stars in one of Ophuls's key prewar French films. A Montmartre nightclub stripper with a son to raise reconnects with a suitor from more respectable times and, determined to keep up appearances, turns to an underworld kingpin for a loan. But regaining her former station exacts an ever higher price; as the title (and so much of Ophuls) suggests, the future cannot hope to compete with the past. The shattered pretense of Paris in the dawn camera of Eugen Schü;fftan links this film with the Romantic Fatalism of the thirties and (more eerily) predicts Bresson's Les Dames du Bois du Bologne of 1949. But the depths of its women-centered melodrama places it in league with Ophuls's American films like Letter from an Unknown Woman. As Paul Willemen wrote, "Both are films...about total loss, with women as victims of male fantasies as much as of economic forces."(JB)