Au bonheur des dames, an adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola, was Julien Duvivier's last silent film, and one of the last great productions of the silent era in France. It tells the story of an orphan (Dita Parlo) whose uncle's small shop is being overwhelmed by a giant department store across the road. Complications arise when she takes a job in the store and falls in love with the boss.

Visually and technically, this may be the most virtuosic of all Duvivier's films. From the opening shots of Dita Parlo's arrival in Paris we are plunged into seething crowd scenes, some filmed with hidden cameras in the street, others inside the palatial Galeries Lafayette. The camera swoops and thrusts, evoking through movement and editing the headlong pursuit of pleasure that the department store offers to satisfy. Only when we enter "Au Vieil Elbeuf", the musty little shop of Parlo's uncle, does the pace settle and the camera become more sedate. Until, that is, the two worlds collide in a stunning montage sequence...

Other technical points of interest include the first use of matte shots in a French film (for the external views of the store), and a slow motion diving sequence that foreshadows the famous shots in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938). As a drama, the film is less successful: Dita Parlo makes a winsome heroine but the love story is unconvincing, and the melodramatic elements of the plot, transposed from Zola's 19th century novel to the modern age, look stiff and heavy-handed.

Au bonheur des dames was released in 1930 in a crudely "sonorised" version with music and sound effects. One critic of the time complained about the German marching band music and the crowd scenes that sounded like cats in heat and baying dogs. The film flopped. The Jazz Singer had come out in 1927, and the public wanted talkies from now on. Much like the little shop in Duvivier's film, silent movies were about to be swept aside by the unstoppable march of progress, commercialism and modernity.

Michael St Aubyn