If Jacques Feyder's Pension Mimosas is the prototype of poetic realism (see May 2 and 30), Le Grand Jeu is certainly that of the Foreign Legion tale, in which a lonely Frenchman joins up after being destroyed by love, and finds in a Moroccan prostitute a substitute for the woman who deserted him. If the “then popular theme of legionnaires and passion in the hot sands of North Africa” appears melodramatic by today's standards, Georges Sadoul points out that the film “offers an evocative portrait of colonial life. Marie Bell gives a remarkable dual performance as the two women (but with the prostitute's voice ingeniously dubbed by another actress) and Françoise Rosay and Charles Vanel are excellent as the managers of a large bistro frequented by legionnaires.”
Feyder is considered the master craftsman of the French cinema. One of several French directors who enriched the Hollywood product for a time (he directed Garbo in The Kiss and Anna Christie in 1929), he returned to France in 1933. “With Hollywood behind him,” writes Sadoul, “and now once again out of his system, Feyder was able to give himself up to naturalism, the naturalism of Zola and Maupassant. Feyder, who had a natural gift for imbuing realism with poetry...had a leaning towards precision and minute detail...(and) a very real love of life and men - observed in his work with great penetration, sometimes also with bitterness....” Le Grand Jeu and Pension Mimosas were two of Feyder's finest films; both featured his wife, Françoise Rosay.