It's a long time since any new pictures came out of France, and most of the theatres which show foreign films are reconciled to bringing the old ones back again. "Claudine," presented by the French Foreign Films Committee, is well worth sitting through the travelogue which precedes it. The French have a reputation for putting out very good or very bad pictures, and this one has the traditional simplicity and down-to-earth quality that characterizes the Gallic touch at its best.

Claudine is an impulsive and sensitive student at a middle class girls' school in Burgundy. Too much of an individualist to be popular with her classmates, she is ignored by her father, who lives in his chateau with no other purpose than the breeding of snails. Her only friend is a charming Parisian waif, Mouloud, whom her father picked up in the city one day and brought back with him.

There is Aimee, the selfish, ambitious new teacher who becomes principal of the school by marrying the nephew of the school board's head, and who forsakes Claudine just as she thought she had found someone in whom to confide; there is Miss Sergent, the former headmistress, whom Claudine detests because she senses that the older woman's interest in her is beyond what it should be; and Docteur Dubois, a dashing young physician with whom Claudine falls in love as terribly and superficially as only girls of her age can. The worst moment of her life, when Dubois suddenly introduces her to his fiancee, on graduation day, is soon forgotten in the happiness and gayety of the occasion.

Claudine's schoolmates give a fine performance; the directing is aptly done; and the score is excellent. Like many of the better French pictures, plot is almost non-existent, but the audience is too captivated by Claudine to bother about such irrelevancies.