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MONTREAL (CP) -- It took 37 years, but shooting has begun with a vengeance on a massive film version of Gabrielle Roy's prize-winning novel, The Tin Flute.

The result will be two feature films, one in French and one in English, and two television series based on the novel, one in each language.

They are all being produced at the same time on location in the French-speaking working-class Montreal district of St. Henri, at the foot of the slopes of wealthy Westmount.

The novel, published in 1945 in French as Bonheur d'Occasion, established Manitoba-born Gabrielle Roy as a major writer. It takes the Lacasse family through its life in St. Henri at the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the Second World War.

The Tin Flute attracted world attention and won the Prix Femina in Paris, although people in St. Henri who read the book were not particularly happy to have the rest of the world know, for example, that premarital sex occurred in the district. The novel was condemned at the time from several local pulpits.

Director Claude Fournier says he has been working on the script for the last four years. Anne Cameron of Vancouver did the English script.

"I am a great believer in Canada", said Fournier, "and this kind of thing is a microcosm, as confusing and amusing as Canada can and should be."

Fournier's first feature film, Deux Femmes en Or in 1969, beat all attendance records for a Canadian movie. He also directed Alien Thunder with Donald Sutherland, and several other feature films.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen, March 20, 1982.

Courtesy of Canadian Press.