It may be admitted that the first French talkie of any real importance, Sous les Toits de Paris, displayed faults inevitable at that period, for it made use of music and also of silence in rather haphazard fashion. The introduction of the street singer, who keeps the film perfectly static while he sings his lines, was almost obligatory at the time…. Every detail is based on real life, the most vulgar incidents of real life. But if we compare this realism with that of the settings in German pictures, we see that in them the realism was dignified by a loving care for lighting and by a prodigious use of the pictorial medium. Theirs was the realism of a painter; but René Clair's realism is, as before, that of the ballet. He puts his characters in fancy dress and provides them with the appropriate accessories, but at the...