René Clément directs Brigitte Fossey, Georges Poujouly and Laurence Baudy in this wartime romance between a farmer’s youngest son and a diddy Jewish war orphan in rural France.

Incredibly cute and unavoidably dark, we open with a sequence of harsh sentimentality that out manipulates Spielberg. A refugee family is shot down on a bridge, the only survivor a cute infant in a party dress carrying her dead puppy. Things get better, a bickering family take her in, the son takes a shine to her and to avoid the horrors of war and death they begin stealing crucifixes for a makeshift animal cemetery of their own creation. There’s neighbour squabbles, cute flirting and prankish larks… but eventually reality catches up with the pastoral fun.

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