Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1929 • France
Starring Maria Jacobini, Francis Lederer, Jean Dax

Stylishly mobile camerawork animates this elegant late-silent melodrama from Julien Duvivier, one of the leading lights of French poetic realism, in which a wealthy baroness (beautifully played by Maria Jacobini) trapped in a loveless marriage finds release from her gilded cage in a passionate affair with a dashing, much younger military officer (Francis Lederer). Determined to escape the stifling pressures of bourgeois propriety, the pair flee to Algeria—but can their love survive in the far-off desert?