Thursday October 13 8:15 am ET

Edith Piaf (1915-1963), that most iconic of French singers, whose voice remains instantly recognizable decades after her death, made only eight films. The popular French crooner, Yves Montand (1921-1991), made 60. They made only one film together, Etoile sans lumiere (Star Without Light, 1946). Piaf, that tiny icon from the streets of Paris, turned only sporadically to film. She was too busy on the concert stage and recording studio, singing her heart out, gripping audiences as she turned the pains and longings and transports of love into her own inimitable gravel-voiced yet always full-hearted stream of gripping sound. She took Montand, five years her junior, under her wing after meeting him at the Olympia Music Hall in Paris. She became his lover, mentor, and booster rocket to status as an international star. When Piaf journeyed to America it was to sing. Each cracked the American hit parade, Piaf with "La Vie en Rose," Montand with "Autumn Leaves."

Montand became for a time a transatlantic film star as well, topcast in half a dozen high-profile Hollywood productions. They did little to build his acting credentials. In the end, he was most vividly remembered on this side of the Atlantic for his off-camera affair with Marilyn Monroe in the fiasco, Let's Make Love (1960). With his tall, dark looks and suave manner, he simply was slotted into the job Hollywood always has had available for the right handsome Frenchman and never was able to escape stereotype in such other Hollywood-spawned multinational bloat as Goodbye Again (1961), My Geisha (1962), Grand Prix (1966), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970). Ironically, in the latter, a WWII caper movie, Montand was cast as a German Sturmbannfuehrer!

It's his French film roles for which he will be remembered. In 1966, the same year as Grand Prix was released, he delivered a memorable performance as a Spanish communist party chief on the run in Paris for Alain Resnais in The War Is Over. (Making her debut, as a woman who gets him out of a passport jam, is Genevieve Bujold.) Possibly his depth of conviction here, never approached in his Hollywood work, stemmed from the fact that The War Is Over tapped Montand's leftist sympathies. So did the Best Foreign Oscar®-winning Z (1969), in which he played a murdered Greek leftist minister for Costa-Gavras, a director he returned to for a similarly-themed anti-rightist film set in Uruguay, State of Siege (1972). Any lingering doubt about his legitimacy as an actor of stature was put to rest by his greedy landowner scheming to wrest Daniel Auteuil's property away in Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon of the Spring (1986).

Promise was present in Montand's film work early on. His trucker driving a load of explosives through a South American jungle in Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953) holds up impressively today. It's there, too, in this first film of his. There's no point pretending that Etoile sans lumiere is little more than a vehicle for the immensely popular Piaf to show her face to a pre-TV audience without the price of a ticket to Paris or the Olympia. But it has the great virtue of not taking itself too seriously, gets on with its simple story efficiently, with flavorful supporting performances, including from the lanky and far from suave novice, Montand, who stood more than a head taller than Piaf. Shrewdly, his role is shaped to dimensions he can convincingly handle. He's the auto mechanic boyfriend of the provincial chambermaid Piaf plays, a diamond in the rough. What he lacks in sophistication, he more than makes up for as a steadfast figure who follows her to Paris to look after her and pick up the pieces if necessary after her voice is discovered by a vacationing showbiz couple on the eve of sound pictures.

They're thrilled to think they've solved the problem presented by the fact that the silent-era star can't sing. The naive little chambermaid tells them that nothing makes her as happy as singing songs of heartbreak - deft self-mockery of Piaf's vocal persona. Next thing she knows, she's recording the songs to be synchronized in the star's transition to sound pictures. The deal, however, is that nobody must know. The maid must remain anonymous. On the literal level, the film's title thus makes sense. To its credit, the film is absolutely unsentimental about the movie biz. Everybody has an agenda, and the ex-maid's determination to become recognized in her own right takes a couple of unexpected turns.

If Etoile sans lumiere seems to echo Singin' in the Rain (1952), one must remember that it preceded that musical milestone by six years, and All About Eve (1950) by two. There isn't a shred of nostalgia in it, and it's bolstered by savvy supporting performances. Marcel Herrand and Mila Parely vigorously inscribe the roles of the impresario and the diva he hopes to transition into sound films (she has a delicious name: Stella Dora!). Jules Berry's unscrupulous agent adds liveliness, and Serge Reggiani is a plus as the sound engineer whose inventions include an advanced new mike and a host of other gadgets that recall the era's dotty embrace of any technology calling itself new.

None of the songs ever made it to Piaf's greatest hits compilations, or belong there, but she brings them to life enticingly enough when she's singing them, whether a formulaic love song sung to Montand ("It's Wonderful") in an open car against a back projection of countryside, or a busy soundstage where the blond diva presides over a deckful of buccaneers as Piaf's voice slashes through the clamor like a cutlass ("Pirate Song"). Throughout this trim, shipshape 82-minute outing, nobody from Piaf on down ever forgets to seem as if they're having fun in this minor, but tasty, little cinematic milestone.

Producer: Eugene Tucherer
Director: Marcel Blistene
Screenplay: Andre-Paul Antoine, Marcel Blistene
Cinematography: Paul Cotteret
Editing: Ginou Bretoneiche
Production Design: Jean d'Eaubonne
Music: Guy Luypaerts, Marguerite Monnot
Cast: Edith Piaf (Madeleine), Marcel Herrand (Roger Marney), Jules Berry (Billy Daniel), Serge Reggiani (Gaston Lansac), Yves Montand (Pierre), Mila Parely (Stella Dora), Colette Brosset (Lulu).
BW-82m.

by Jay Carr