The Film Society of Lincoln Center will begin a changing of the guard this weekend as its 11-day, two-sided program extolling “Saints, Sinners, Obsession, and Seduction” transitions from American leading lady Jennifer Jones to vintage French screen heartthrob Charles Boyer. Friday’s screening of Marcel L’Herbier’s 1934 “Le Bonheur” is the first of 10 Boyer films (including Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed feature, 1946’s “Cluny Brown,” in which Boyer co-starred with Ms. Jones) showing at the Walter Reade Theater through Tuesday.

Like so many actors before and since, Boyer began performing as an antidote to childhood shyness. He followed his service in a French army medical unit during World War I with stints studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and training theatrically at the Paris Conservatoire. Success on the Parisian stage brought him before the camera in the City of Lights, and then to Berlin’s famed UFA studios, which was an early rival of American filmmakers for global domination of the international film market.

Success in America eluded the star at first, as did offers of worthwhile, three-dimensional roles. Boyer made “Le Bonheur” in 1934 after temporarily giving up on Hollywood, and the film represented something of a return to his roots, reuniting him with L’Herbier, director of the star’s first screen performance in 1920’s “L’Homme du Large.”

Though ostensibly a gushing backstage romance, the exquisitely bonkers plot of “Le Bonheur” (from a play by the socially conscious French melodramatist Henri Bernstein) would not have survived the first round of notes from America’s politically anemic film production establishment of the 1930s.

Boyer plays Philippe Lutcher, a socialist, crypto-anarchist newspaper cartoonist who lives in self-imposed poverty in a Parisian shack. Hired away from his left-wing broadsheet by a centrist paper to cover the ballyhooed return of beloved stage and screen siren Clara Stuart (Gaby Morlay), Philippe takes aim at the star and her fans with his pen as they pack a railway station. But after hearing the star perform the title song at a live appearance, Philippe expresses his emotions with a very different instrument. The romance that ensues and Philippe’s subsequent trial for the attempted assassination of Clara Stuart are a completely sober yet totally off-the-wall tour de force for both Boyer and Morlay.

Though only 35 when he appeared in “Le Bonheur,” Boyer had already perfected the fatalistic, world-weary Gallic equipoise that became his oft-caricatured stock-in-trade on both sides of the Atlantic. Shot by the bicontinental American cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr., “Le Bonheur” has a gorgeous, alternately sooty and glamorous look that is pure Continental hokum. Cradling their leading man’s face in low-angled close-ups, Stradling and L’Herbier fetishized Boyer’s disinterested pout with a photographic reverence worthy of Garbo.

Shortly thereafter, Hollywood came calling once again. This time, Boyer’s talents were better served. Under contract to producer Walter Wanger, Boyer worked steadily and well through the 1930s and ’40s. His alternately gentle and steely countenance — curled lip and high forehead — coupled with a rich Gallic purr of a voice (an untapped resource during his early work in silent pictures) made him a star. Among Boyer’s legion of fans were the animators at Warner Bros.’ famed cartoon factory, the birthplace of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and the creative crucible for directors Chuck Jones, Frank Tashlin, and Tex Avery. Though the “termite terrace” gang, as it was known, featured a cartoon version of Boyer in its periodic Hollywood variety-show mash-ups, Jones went further and used Boyer as the model for his love-crazed French skunk, Pepé Le Pew.

In the dim collective consciousness of golden-age Hollywood nostalgia, Boyer is mostly associated with passionate excess. Writer and director Leo McCarey did, after all, custom tailor the lead role in 1939’s “Love Affair” for Boyer. But the French star was also a gifted comic performer blessed with an amazingly imperturbable deadpan. His character’s shrugging acceptance of the absurdity of English upper-class society (and of England’s pre-World War II neutrality) in the ’30s-set “Cluny Brown” is a show all its own.

Ironically, given that he played so many lovers in myriad stages of romantic sacrifice, forbearance, and disarray, Boyer remained married to the same woman, the British actress Pat Paterson, from 1934 until her death from cancer in 1978. Two days later, he swallowed a fatal dose of sleeping pills, unwilling to live another day without her. A decade earlier, their only son had also taken his own life, at age 21, while in the throes of heartbreak. The end of Boyer’s own saga drew a shroud of despair over an enduring real-life romance that was as rare on-screen as off.

Through Tuesday (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).