One of the best films of 1934 was Jacques Feyder's "Le Grand Jeu", in which Pierre Richard-Willm leaves his high maintenance girlfriend Marie Bell, only to encounter her low-rent doppelganger in a faraway whorehouse.
It's an amusing coincidence that the film itself has a low-budget doppelganger in this picture by Louis Valray, which premiered two months earlier. In "La Belle de nuit", a playwright (Aimé Clariond) finds that his actress lover is cheating on him with his old war buddy. He ditches her and goes on a long journey to forget her, only to find... her lookalike in a Toulon whorehouse. Instead of sleeping with her, as Richard-Willm does in "Le Grand Jeu", Clariond weaves a plan in which he will use her to exact revenge on his former friend.
In the dual role, the statuesque Véra Korène is coolly elegant as the actress Maryse and coldly severe as the world-weary, man-hating prostitute Maïthé. It was her second feature film, but Korène was already an established stage actress and her performance here, while less alluring than that of the eroticised Marie Bell in Feyder's picture, is intense, striking and complex. Korène's promising film career was cut short by the Nazi Occupation after only a dozen features. As a Jew, she was forbidden from acting and fled to Canada.
Louis Valray was also a relative newcomer to film. He made just three films as director, of which this is the second. His handling of the melodrama, and of the actors' performances, is perhaps a little stiff and theatrical for modern tastes. However, there is evidence of a creative intelligence at work. He uses camera movements and dissolves to good effect, often linking scenes by dissolving between shots that are visually or audibly related: a dog yapping at Maryse's expulsion dissolves into a train whistle announcing the departure of his master. In a later shot, the camera pans from a metal mask on a wall to the steely face of Maïthé as she prepares the deception that will seduce her victim.
The final scenes, on a rocky seashore and fleeing through woodland, have a surreal, almost dreamlike quality, lifting the film out of the "merely melodrama". "Le Grand Jeu" is the greater film, and the work of a true master, but this is an interesting companion piece.
