The Swallow and the Titmouse

In Britain, during the revolution, the nephew of the Marquis de Lantenac, Gawain (P. Capellani) befriends Cimourdain (H. Krauss), a priest who follows the precepts of the Revolution. During the Terror, the Marquis went into exile in England while his nephew is a soldier in the Revolutionary Army ...

As Jean is walking across the countryside in search of work, he helps and befriends a young woman, Françoise, who is having trouble controlling the cow that she is leading. Jean finds work at a local farm, but he soon finds himself caught in the middle of the conflicts in Françoise's family.

At trial the prosecuting attorney makes a startling confession: the defendant is his son whose pitiful fate led him to murder. The attorney left the young man's pregnant mother, and the unwed poor thing had to fight against a hostile world.

Thibault de Croucy campaigns against the Jews, in the circle of rue Royale, before learning that he is the son of one of them: the prominent banker Gotlieb had been his mother's lover — an adaptation of an Henri Bernstein play first presented in Paris in 1908. The legendary French director André Antoine, working in Italy after the war, struggles to import his usual style, remaining close to the Italian melodramas of the 1910s. Taking a more incisive path than Bernstein, he frontally accuses the Catholic Church of being responsible for antisemitism. Not received well by Italian critics, the film's release is short-lived. A unique element was found by Philippe Esnault in the collections of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome in 1973 and served as the basis for a 2005 restoration.