Cesar (1936), the final film in Marcel Pagnol's Marseille trilogy, is the only one of the three directed by Pagnol himself. The series began with Marius (1931), written by Pagnol and based on his play, and directed by Alexander Korda. Fanny (Orane Demazis), the daughter of a fishmonger on the Marseille waterfront, is in love with Marius (Pierre Fresnay), the son of Cesar (Raimu), who runs a waterfront bar. Marius is torn between his love for Fanny and his longing to go to sea. In the end, he goes, leaving Fanny pregnant. In Fanny (1932), also based on a Pagnol play and directed by Marc Allegret, Fanny marries the much older Panisse (Fernand Charpin) to give her child a father. Cesar takes place 20 years later. Marius and Fanny's son, Cesariot (Andre Fouche), is grown up and does not know that Marius is his birth father. When Panisse dies, Fanny tells her son the truth and with Cesar's help, Cesariot sets out to find his father.

A lot had happened in the five years between the first and the last films in the trilogy. After the success of Marius, Pagnol had abandoned the theater to concentrate on films. He had formed his own production company, Les Films Marcel Pagnol, to make Fanny, and began writing and producing, and eventually directing, most of his own films. One of the things that had been unique about Marius in that early talkie era, when many films carried over the conventions of silent film, was its naturalism. (Italian directors Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica later called Pagnol the father of neorealism.) Pagnol refused to be enslaved by the cumbersome sound equipment, and insisted on shooting on location in Marseille and its environs. The films' themes are universal - love, family, restlessness, loyalty - but the stories are rooted in Southern France, familiar and beloved by the Provencal-born Pagnol. So his actors spoke in the accent of the region, which was rarely heard in French theater or film. A writer first, language was important to Pagnol, and he was not afraid of long passages of dialogue -- comic, earthy, sometimes poetic, and rarely boring. As director Jean Renoir said, "Cinema in itself existed before talking films. Not in Pagnol's eyes. Speech is as vital to him as color was to Michelangelo." It was a style of filmmaking that Pagnol seemed to be making up as he went along. Yet the French public was enthralled, and Fanny had been even more popular than Marius. The public wanted a resolution to the story of the star-crossed lovers, and Cesar provided it. Unlike its predecessors, it was not based on a play, but written originally for the screen. The stage version of Cesar, first produced in 1946, was based on the screenplay.

By the time he made Cesar in 1936, Pagnol had a core group of production staff and a stock company of actors to help him realize his vision. The leading actors in the trilogy reprised their roles in two sequels, and in between acted in other Pagnol films. Pagnol's relationships with some of them were complicated. He was married, but for years had an on-and-off relationship with actress Orane Demazis, who played Fanny. In 1930, he had a son by an English dancer. Demazis gave birth to Pagnol's second son Jean-Pierre in 1933. By 1935, Pagnol had moved on to a worker in his Paris production office who also had a child with him. Demazis would appear in two more Pagnol films, Harvest (1937) and Le Schpountz (1938), and although she continued in films into the 1970s, and worked with directors such as Luis Bunuel (Le Fantome de la Liberte, 1974) and Andre Techine (Souvenirs d'en France, 1975), she never again had the kind of success she'd had with Pagnol.

Pagnol had cast music hall comic Raimu as Cesar in the stage version of Marius (1929), the first time Raimu was taken seriously as an actor. He had appeared in some silent films, but when he appeared in the film version of Marius, his film career took off. His Cesar was the heart of the trilogy, gruff, sentimental, practical, comical and lovable. Over the next fifteen years, Raimu became one of the most revered actors in French films, working with the country's leading directors and earning the praise of international luminaries such as Orson Welles, who called him "the greatest actor who ever lived." In 1943, Raimu took a break from film acting to join the prestigious Comedie Francaise, appearing in the plays of Moliere. Raimu died in 1946, at the age of 63. In the biography The Pagnol Years (1989), the authors write that Pagnol recalled his "often stormy relationship with actor Raimu. Even in difficult times, and there were many between those two men who had the same accent as well as the same 'passionate' temper, they would find suitable tone and words to talk to each other. They would be 'at daggers drawn' with each other only to get together even better later on. They both considered, just like Cesar and Panisse, that nothing can be serious enough to justify the most irreparable loss, the loss of a friend."

Pagnol directed more than 20 films, and in 1946 became the first filmmaker to be elected to the Academie Francaise. In the mid-1950s, he abandoned filmmaking and turned to writing memoirs of his youth, novels, and translations of Virgil and Shakespeare. He died in 1974, acclaimed as a giant of French film and literature, the creator of some of the most beloved films and characters in French cinema.

Director: Marcel Pagnol
Producer: Marcel Pagnol
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol
Cinematography: Willy Faktorovitch
Editor: Suzanne de Troeye, Jeannette Ginestet
Art Direction: Galibert
Music: Vincent Scotto
Principal Cast: Raimu (Cesar Olivier), Pierre Fresnay (Marius), Orane Demazis (Fanny), Fernand Charpin (Honore Panisse), Andre Fouche (Cesariot), Alida Rouffe (Honorine Cabanis), Milly Mathis (Aunt Claudine Foulon), Robert Vattier (M. Brun), Paul Dullac (Escartefigue).
BW-168m.

by Margarita Landazuri