La Roue

The restoration of Abel Gance's second best-known work, LA ROUE, should have been cause for celebration in the 1990s. But this 1923 family tragedy from the director of NAPOLEON (1927) dates badly today: the restored four-and-a-half-hour print is often agonizing to sit through.

Sisif (Severin-Mars) is a widowed engineer working in the railyards of post-WWI Nice, whose routine existence changes dramatically when he rescues a little English girl, Norma, from a train wreck near his station. After Sisif discovers that Norma's mother has died in the crash, he adopts Norma and takes her home to live with him and his young son, Elie. Sisif initiates future misfor...