Marius (1931, Fr.)

In director Alexander Korda's romantic comedy, characterized by the authentic-sounding vernacular dialect and rolling Southern France accents, with a story adapted from Marcel Pagnol's 1929 stage play; it was noted as the first installment of Marcel Pagnol's Fanny (or Marseille) trilogy (followed by Fanny (1932) and Cesar (1936)):

• the title character: restless and unfulfilled 22 year-old Marius (Pierre Fresnay) living in the port city of Marseille, helping his doting and overbearing widowed father - bar owner Cesar Olivier (Raimu); Marius had two conflicting loves:
  (1) a troubled romance with 18 year-old childhood sweetheart Fanny (Orane Demazi, scriptwriter Pagnol's wife), the daughter of the local widowed fishmonger Honorine Cabanis (Alida Rouffe), who ran a shellfish (cockles) concession, and
  (2) Marius' adventurous and yearning desire to travel and sail away ("a madness for the sea") from his provincial community
• Marius' jealous dilemma when Fanny announced that she would marry the 50 year-old recently-widowed Honoré Panisse (Fernand Charpin), a lonely yet prosperous, local sailmaker
• the comic bridge card-game sequence (full of obvious cheating, for instance: "You break my heart!"), starting with four card players, including Cesar and cuckolding ferryboat captain Félix Escartefigue (Paul Dullac), with the famous accusatory quotes: "You'd treat an old school chum like a cheat?...If friends can't cheat, why bother to play?", and "The French Navy tells you to go to hell"
• in the highly-dramatic ending, the self-sacrificing Fanny, who had become engaged to Marius but realized that he was unhappy, encouraged him to leave on a ship for an extended expedition, and then distracted his father while the sailing vessel was departing from the Marseille harbor

Marius' Departure From Fanny