La Comédie du bonheur is a French-Italian film directed by Marcel L'Herbier as a dual-language production. It was filmed in Rome in the early months of 1940, but after Italy joined World War II on the side of Germany, the French and Italian versions of the film were completed separately. The Italian version was released in December 1940 under the title Ecco la felicità!. The French version was released in July 1942.
Poster for the French version of the film, released in 1942
Poster for Ecco la felicità! on its release in Italy in December 1940.
Marcel L'Herbier was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC).
Marcel L'Herbier