When Jean returns home, he becomes resentful of his stepmother Jeanne whom he sees usurping his mother's place, and his feelings find their outlet in his growing hostility towards Arlette.

One day in winter while travelling in a sled, Jean surreptitiously throws Arlette's beloved childhood doll onto the track.

Jacques Feyder received a film commission from two Swiss producers, Dimitri de Zoubaleff and Arthur-Adrien Porchet, who were based in Lausanne, and he offered them Visages d'enfants.

He also embedded the story in a "social study of an isolated Catholic community's rituals and customs, in a landscape that alternately separates, endangers, and forces people closer together".

Feyder's cameraman, Léonce-Henri Burel, who had worked regularly with Abel Gance, achieved some striking visual effects, such as the night scenes of the search party lit by torches (instead of the more usual day for night technique); he also employed a subjective camera viewpoint to depict the onward rush of an avalanche.

Local people were used as extras to play peasants and villagers, notably in the funeral and wedding scenes; (many of them had never seen a film or a camera before).

The opening sequence in particular, depicting a village funeral, and lasting for about 11 minutes, has been admired for the skill of its exposition which combines narrative clarity with social detail and psychological insight.

[3] Georges Sadoul regarded Visages d'enfants as one of Feyder's best films;[4] and Jean Mitry in 1973 declared that, apart from the triptych in Gance's Napoléon and Clair's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, of all the French productions of the 1920s, Visages d'enfants was the one he would choose to save: it was the most consistent, even and balanced, the only one which was still today resolutely modern.

In 1993 the Belgian and French cinematheques were assisted by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) in a new restoration which added colour tinting.