Letters from My Windmill / Les lettres de mon moulin (1954)

Alphonse Daudet's short stories were tailor made for a Provençal director such as Pagnol. If you go to Provence, you can visit the windmill where Daudet was supposed to write his "letters." Actually, he never lived in this place, but in the castle of some of his friends near the legendary mill. However, it's true that most of the stories which were included in "Lettres de Mon Moulin" are true stories. Daudet was told about Maitre Cornille, Mr. Seguin's goat and others by peasants and shepherds he met in his walks across the hills.

There are four stories that Marcel Pagnol transformed into films: "The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher", "The Secret of Master Cornille", "The Three Low Masses", "The Cure of Cucugnan".
In "The Three Low Masses", a priest with a love of food tries to get his clerical duties out of the way as fast as possible so that he can partake of his Christmas feast. In "The Elixir of Father Gaucher", a monk manages to rescue his brothers from poverty by distilling and selling a powerful elixir, but ends up succumbing to its charms himself. In "The Secret of Master Cornille", an ageing miller tries to keep up the illusion that his windmill enables him to earn a living, in spite of the fact that all the villagers make use of the more efficient steam-driven flour mills.

Theoretically any first-rate director should be able to tackle any genre and emerge with a worthwhile product and there are those - like Howard Hawks - whose careers illustrate this but on the other hand a producer toying with the idea of remaking say, The Lower Depths or Crime and Punishment would not automatically think of approaching Francis Veber just as John Ford would not be the automatic choice for a lavish musical. Guys like Veber and Ford have established a style/genre that they do as well and/or better than anyone else and so it was that Marcel Pagnol was a logical choice to bring the Provencal stories of Alphonse Daudet to the screen. As it turned out this was to be Pagnol's cinematic swansong though he lived another twenty years and as swansongs go it is as good as any and better than most. Pagnol settled on three stories - not unlike Max Ophuls in Le Plaisir - which illustrate the range of Daudet and certainly allow us to sample his unique flavour whether it be tipsy monks creating a new form of absolution along with the wine, a mill running on empty or a priest facing devilish temptation. We may regret that Pagnol was unable to bow out with something of his own but we also applaud a distinguished swansong.

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