One of those deeply human novels, subtly psychological, in the finest French tradition, where the story’s action is not invented just to recount a fact in a pleasurable way but in order to bind together the deep investigation of characters, to analyze the collision of passions determining them (…). In the filmmakers forced synopsis, where the portrayal of a character is reduced to a couple of words in the captions, most of the novel’s good qualities are inexcusably lost andbarely surface from the meager summary of the work’s premises and its conclusion. (…). La piccola parrocchia suffers from this underlying imbalance between novel and film, of this… antithesis, as a result, in terms of plot, the film is worth… what it’s worth whereas the novel is one of the best of contemporary French literature (…). Not that we want to diminish Mario Almirante’s talent: neither can he bang his head against the wall thinking that he’ll break the bricks. Considering the choice of script, it would be difficult for us to say that he could have done more or better (…). As for Italia Almirante- Manzini (…), on the one hand, we recognize in her the qualities of a good actress, the elegance of her gestures, her command of the scene, a spellbinding power all her own that emanates from her and from her penetrating metallic eyes (…) on the other, she leaves us cold and puzzled. She loves enigma, the sphinx; and female sphinxes, femmes fatales belong to an outdated literary genre. She does not adapt herself to the character but models the character to her own image and likeness (…).
Elle.Gi., “La vita cinematografica”, Turin, April 15 1923

In 1923 Mario Almirante shot four films, two of them – Il Fornaretto di Venezia and I Foscari – were costume dramas, the others two were adaptations from contemporary literature: L’ombra from Dario Niccodemi’s play and La piccola parrocchia from Alphonse Daudet’s novel on Italia Almirante-Manzini.
Almirante and Gheduzzi succeeded in deriving from the book – quite appreciated at the time but rather insufferable today – an almost coherent screenplay which allows the director to offer his muse some fine sequences. With his help, Italia Almirante-Manzini trans- forms the horrible middle-class bourgeoise into a romantic heroine, who’s closer to Flaubert than to Daudet. Apparently the film was released in Belgium following the success of L’ombra which had benefited from a massive pubblicity campaign. The print, almost complete, was part of a collection saved by one of the last Belgian touring exhibitors. Following his death, his nephew donated the print to the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.
Jean-Marie Buchet