French Cinema—A Critical Filmography, Volume 2: 1940–1958 0253016959, 9780253016959

Citation preview

F R CINEMA E N C H

F R CINEMA E N C H OLIN CRISP

A CRITICAL FILMOGRAPHY volume

2, 1940-1958

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of India na Universit y Pr ess Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2015 by Colin Crisp All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crisp, C. G. French cinema : a critical filmography / Colin Crisp. volume cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. 1929–1939. ISBN 978-0-253-01696-6 (vol 1 pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01703-1 (vol 1 ebook) — ISBN 978-0-253-01695-9 (vol 2 pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01702-4 (vol 2 ebook) — ISBN 978-0-253-01795-6 (vol 3 pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01796-3 (vol 3 ebook) 1. Motion pictures—France—Catalogs. I. Title. PN1993.5.F7C783 2015 016.79143’750944—dc23 2015008318 1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15

The road ahead is one of collaboration. —Marshall Pétain, 16 June 1940 The flame of French resistance can never be extinguished, will never be extinguished. —General Charles de Gaulle, 17 June 1940 Very few [members of the film community] manifested the spirit of collaboration, very few the spirit of resistance. —F. Courtade, 1978 Compromises? Cohabitation? Collaboration? But in a system where everything was subject to authorization, in order to work, you had to be at least “legally” a collaborator. —G. and J.-R. Ragache, 1988 It’s all a mess, you know, all rotten to the core. Apart from myself I only know of three or four real national-socialists in the whole of Europe. And just quietly, I’m not at all sure that Adolf Hitler is one of them. —Lucien Rebatet, 1941 The masters of the international cinema have for too long been businessmen (and, what’s worse, Jewish businessmen . . .). —Gaston Derycke, 1943 In the history of the cinema, the first generation belonged to producers, the second to directors; now a third generation is coming onto the scene, that of authors. —Jean Renoir, 1938

The cinema as spectacle is dying out; make way for the cinema as world-view. —Roger Leenhardt Behind the screen, the author has completely disappeared; what a relief. —Paul Claudel The cinema is a minor art. —Marcel Pagnol The cinema too easily becomes bogged down in technique. It can sometimes see material progress as the discovery of a new style. —Jacques Feyder One crucial thing the sound cinema invented was silence. —Robert Bresson From the moment when people only see films without flies in them, they will naturally think of the world as without flies, and will unconsciously tend to bring about such a world. —Alexander Arnoux Henri Jeanson is an anarchist, and I detest anarchists. He’s a boulevardier and I spit on all boulevardiers. He’s indecisive and a wimp, and I’m all for the extermination of such people. But I have to admit, he has talent. —Nino Frank, 1950

CONTENTS

Introduction PART I.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

1

1940–1945

La Fille du puisatier (released Paris, 24 April 1941) 25 Premier Rendez-vous (14 August 1941) 27 L’Assassinat du père Noël (15 October 1941) 30 Nous les gosses (2 December 1941) 33 Les Inconnus dans la maison (16 May 1942) 36 Le Lit à colonnes (9 July 1942) 39 La Nuit fantastique (10 July 1942) 42 Le Mariage de Chiffon (6 August 1942) 44 L’Assassin habite au 21 (7 August 1942) 47 Le Voile bleu (18 November 1942) 50 Les Visiteurs du soir (5 December 1942) 53 Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (11 December 1942) 56 Goupi Mains-Rouges (14 April 1943) 60 Marie-Martine (11 May 1943) 62 Lumière d’été (26 May 1943) 65 Les Anges du péché (23 June 1943) 68 Adieu Léonard (1 September 1943) 71 L’Inévitable Monsieur Dubois (22 September 1943) 74 Le Corbeau (28 September 1943) 77 L’Éternel Retour (13 October 1943) 80 Jeannou (10 November 1943) 83 Voyage sans espoir (15 December 1943) 85 Le Ciel est à vous (2 February 1944) 88 Le Voyageur sans bagages (23 February 1944) 91 Premier de cordée (23 February 1944) 94

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. PART II.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

viii

Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (26 April 1944) 96 Les Enfants du paradis (22 March 1945) 99 Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (21 September 1945) 102 Boule de Suif (17 October 1945) 105 Sortilèges (5 December 1945) 108 1946–1951

La Bataille du rail (27 February 1946) 113 Sérénade aux nuages (6 March 1946) 116 La Fille du diable (17 April 1946) 118 L’Idiot (7 June 1946) 120 La Symphonie pastorale (26 September 1946) 122 Le Père tranquille (11 October 1946) 125 Un revenant (18 October 1946) 128 La Belle et la bête (29 October 1946) 130 Macadam (27 November 1946) 133 Les Portes de la nuit (3 December 1946) 136 Panique (15 January 1947) 138 Farrebique (11 February 1947) 141 Le Silence est d’or (21 May 1947) 144 Le Diable au corps (12 September 1947) 147 Quai des Orfèvres (3 October 1947) 150 Antoine et Antoinette (31 October 1947) 153 Monsieur Vincent (5 November 1947) 155 Le Printemps de la liberté (never released) 158 Les Dernières Vacances (24 March 1948) 161 Dédée d’Anvers (3 September 1948) 163 Impasse des Deux Anges (3 November 1948) 166 Les Parents terribles (1 December 1948) 168 La Danse de mort (8 December 1948) 171 Une si jolie petite plage (19 January 1949) 173 L’École buissonnière (8 April 1949) 176 Le Silence de la mer (22 April 1949) 178 Jour de fête (4 May 1949) 181 Les Paysans noirs (5 May 1949) 184 Retour à la vie (14 September 1949) 186

Contents

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Au-delà des grilles (16 November 1949) 188 Rendez-vous de juillet (6 December 1949) 192 Manèges (25 January 1950) 194 La Beauté du diable (17 March 1950) 197 Justice est faite (20 September 1950) 200 La Ronde (27 September 1950) 202 Orphée (29 September 1950) 205 Meurtres (10 October 1950) 208 Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (7 February 1951) Juliette, ou la clé des songes (18 May 1951) 214 L’Auberge rouge (24 October 1951) 217

211

PART III. 1952–1958

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (13 February 1952) 223 Le Plaisir (29 February 1952) 226 Casque d’Or (16 April 1952) 229 Jeux interdits (9 May 1952) 232 Nous sommes tous des assassins (21 May 1952) 235 Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (4 June 1952) 238 Les Belles de Nuit (14 November 1952) 240 La Fête à Henriette (17 December 1952) 243 Manon des Sources (16 January 1953) 245 Le Carrosse d’or (27 February 1953) 249 Le Salaire de la peur (22 April 1953) 252 La Môme vert-de-gris (27 May 1953) 254 Madame de . . . (16 September 1953) 257 Les Orgueilleux (25 November 1953) 260 Si Versailles m’était conté (10 February 1954) 262 Touchez pas au grisbi (17 March 1954) 265 L’Amour d’une femme (28 April 1954) 268 Le Rouge et le noir (29 October 1954) 270 Du rififi chez les hommes (13 April 1955) 273 French Cancan (27 April 1955) 276 Les Grandes Manœuvres (26 October 1955) 279 Lola Montès (23 December 1955) 282 Cela s’appelle l’aurore (9 May 1956) 285

Contents

ix

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

Le Mystère Picasso (18 May 1956) 288 La Traversée de Paris (26 October 1956) 290 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (11 November 1956) Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (28 November 1956) 296 Porte des Lilas (25 September 1957) 300 Mon oncle (10 May 1958) 303 L’Eau vive (13 June 1958) 305 Les Tricheurs (10 October 1958) 308

Appendix: Festivals and Prizes for French Personnel and Productions 313 Bibliography Index

x

323

329

Contents

293

F R CINEMA E N C H

INTRODUCTION

Social, Political, and Institutional Context The films dealt with in this filmography were produced during a time of intense political, social, and institutional change. The most dramatic events, of course, relate to World War II, so the period can initially be divided into two distinct if unequal sections: first, the war years (September 1939–September 1945, including the German occupation of France from June 1940 to August 1944), and second, the postwar period, marked by progressive prosperity, reconstruction, and the development of what was to become known as neo-capitalism or consumer capitalism. If the declaration of war provides a clear-cut initial date for this filmography, the terminal date is less obvious. In political terms, however, the period 1946–1958 corresponds to France’s Fourth Republic and ends with the signing into existence of the Common Market, while in institutional terms, the years 1958–1960 saw the production (and, for the most part, release) of the first feature films by many of those directors later classified as the New Wave—Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, both produced in 1958), François Truffaut (Les 400 Coups, 1958), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, 1958), Pierre Kast (Le Bel Âge, 1958), Jacques Rivette (Paris nous appartient, 1958), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (L’Eau à la bouche, 1959), Jean-Luc Godard (À bout de souffle, 1959), and Éric Rohmer (Le Signe du lion, 1959). Those years also saw the production of the final (or, where they continued, the final significant) films of most members of the previous “generations”—Julien Duvivier (Marie Octobre, La Femme et le pantin, 1959), Marcel Carné (Les Tricheurs, 1957, #101), the Allégret brothers, Claude Autant-Lara (La Jument verte, 1959), Henri-Georges Clouzot (La Vér ité, 1960), Abel Gance and Roger Richebé (Austerlitz, 1959), Jean Delannoy (La Princesse de Clèves, 1960), and Jacques Becker (Le Trou, 1959), while both Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir metaphorically bade farewell to the cinema with Le Testament d’Orphée and Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier (both 1959), respectively. I have confined the entries here to feature-length films, so it is logical to leave all material related to the “apprenticeship” of those figures who established the New Wave—their short and mid-length films, many of which nevertheless created a degree of controversy—to be dealt with in the volume covering their ascendancy in the following decade.

Rather than organizing the films discussed here into two unbalanced segments, of six and thirteen years respectively, I have divided the book into three roughly equal periods, since any close look at the postwar period reveals a series of social and institutional disjunctions around 1951–1952, which in turn contributed to an evolutionary transformation in the types of films that were produced before and after that year. The following factors, illustrated in the table, are relevant to this disjunction:  Spectator numbers in France reached a record high of 420 million in 1947, and descended steadily thereafter to 370 million in 1952, after which they began to rise again.  Undoubtedly as a result of this, but with an inevitable delay due to the delayed feedback to producers, the number of films produced, after climbing to 120 in 1949 and 1950, began its plunge in 1952 toward a low of 80 in 1954, recovering in 1955.  Some critics feared a “crisis of quality” in 1951, when no film was judged worthy of the Prix Louis Delluc.  New and costly technologies were introduced in 1952–1953. The number of color films jumped from 3 in 1950 to 19 in 1953, then to 42 in 1956 (40% of production), while the numbers of widescreen productions jumped from 0 in 1952 to 28 in 1956 (26%).  Increased ownership of television sets and of cars began to pose a real threat to the attraction of the cinema as a way to spend leisure time and available money—the French owned fewer than 4,000 television sets in 1950 but 1.9 million in 1960. Likewise car ownership increased from 1.7 million private cars in 1950 to 5.5 million in 1960.  In order to fund the increased cost of production caused by new technologies, and the better to compete with these alternative forms of leisure activity, French producers focused on high-quality lavish spectacle and sought financial support with international coproductions, notably in conjunction with Italian producers. These factors justify seeing 1953–1958 as a quite distinct period in which producers were subject to significantly new pressures and spectators subject to significantly new temptations and distractions. The industry struggled to find satisfactory responses to this situation, especially when attendance began a dramatic downward slide in 1958, but ultimately evolved responses first in what we now call the New Wave (unknown cheap actors and crews, location shooting 2

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 TOTALS

3 2 5 21 23 24 41 32 15 23 190

1

Color

3 12 28 25 10 9 87

Scope

1 4 7 12 21 21 15 18 20 17 29 167

2

Coproduction with Italy

French and Majority French Productions

1 1 4 2 2 8 9 5 7 6 3 10 58

Coproduction with Other Countries Total Productions 30 59 77 59 20 72 96 79 95 107 108 96 96 92 80 91 108 110 96 97 1,668

411 371 353

395

359

370

424

402

Spectators (millions)

rather than studio hire, using new technologies that cut costs rather than scope and color that increased them, etc.), and, second, in the hitherto untapped pornography market.

The War Years Everyone interested in the cinema of the first of these three periods is aware to some extent of the conditions under which films were being made: after a “phony war” of eight months during which it was still possible to believe that France was safe behind its defensive Maginot line, the German forces invaded Belgium then France, Allied defenses proved inadequate, Paris was occupied in June 1940, and for the next four years, the Germans governed France. They established a horizontal “demarcation line” dividing France into a northern “zone occupé” (ZO) but including the Atlantic coast ruled directly by them, and a southern “zone libre” (ZL), which they ruled indirectly through the État Français headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the World War I hero, who established his headquarters at the spa town of Vichy. As the Germans advanced on Paris, approximately 10 million people fled southward, particularly from Alsace-Lorraine, which was promptly integrated into Germany, but also from Paris, which lost 1.3 million people—two thirds of the population—and did not regain its prewar population until at least 1942. Those fleeing Alsace-Lorraine were not allowed to return, and those who had remained there but wished to retain French nationality were expelled. Shame at the humiliation of the military collapse led the conservative authorities to a policy of scapegoating—particularly of those traditional scapegoats, the Jews, but also of Freemasons, communists, and intellectuals (principally teachers), who were now designated as responsible for undermining the national morale under the prewar (left-wing) Popular Front. Hundreds of thousands of these categories of people, especially Jews, fled into exile in the South or abroad, or went under cover. In order to “restore the moral fiber of the nation,” the government in Vichy inaugurated a “National Revolution” based on conservative and traditional values rather than the modern/modernist and urban/ sophisticated values insidiously spread by the scapegoats. The prime focus was on working the land, on religion, and on the family (notably mothers and the young), all seen as essential to the creation of a New France. These values were summed up in the slogan “Travail, Famille, Patrie,” which replaced the now unacceptable—indeed inappropriate—“Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité.” This was not, of course, a totally new campaign, since conservative authorities had for some years before the war been advocating “Le Redressement moral du pays,” but now they seized the opportunity to formalize and systematize it.1 4

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Life everywhere was difficult, particularly in the ZO. Rationing of essentials was imposed, queues were a daily chore, black markets sprang up, and a chain of restaurants for the poor was established to cope with the most needy. Curfew and lack of gasoline ensured that bicycles were the norm in cities, and that even within zones, travel was restricted. Censorship, the banning of many books, and the closing of various leisure outlets further limited cultural activity, while the disbanding of unions and banning of strike action eliminated any possibility of campaigning for an improvement in these conditions. The French government was required to fund the German army of occupation, an obligation that absorbed most of the government’s available funds over these years. Two million prisoners of war remained in concentration camps in Germany, and Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO) was introduced in February 1943 to conscript French workers to work in Germany in return for a trickle of released POWs. Consequently, labor within France was extremely restricted. Naturally enough under these conditions, the French economy withered: production fell and harvests rotted. Austerity early in the occupation evolved into stark want, and France suffered more severely than most other occupied countries. There was little resistance to the occupying forces in the first years, since for most people, the war seemed already to be over, and they had lost it. But in the winter of 1941–1942, then again in 1942–1943, the tide of war in other theaters turned. In December 1941, the German advance on Moscow stalled, and Pearl Harbor provoked the United States into action against the Axis powers. Late 1942 saw the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and the retreat of both the Japanese in the Pacific and the Germans in North Africa (El Alamein, October 1942). The Resistance began to receive a steady stream of conscripts for its sabotage activities, though those willing to participate actively never exceeded 2–3 percent of the population. The Allied landings in Sicily (July 1943) and Calabria (September 1943) led to the surrender of Italy (also September 1943), while the invasion of Normandy (June 1944) and of Provence (August 1944) led to the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944. At that point, there were still 2.5 million French POWs and STOs in Germany, and the war would not be over for another year. Vichy was thoroughly discredited, as were the middle classes who had been more inclined to support it, or at least to adapt to it. Its policing of the ZL had allowed Germany to govern France with a mere three thousand policemen, releasing German troops for other fronts, while Pétain’s preoccupation with the maintenance of France’s colonial empire led it to compromise with both Germany and Japan. In exchange for formal control of those territories, Vichy allowed the use of airfields in Tunisia and Indo-China for raids on Allied forces, and fought British and Free French forces openly in Morocco, Dakar, Algeria, Introduction

5

Madagascar, Lebanon, and Syria. Urged by Adolf Hitler to declare war explicitly as an ally of Germany, Pétain refused, but Pierre Laval and his successor as deputy to Pétain, François Darlan, both detested Britain and could scarcely have done more if openly at war. Nevertheless, Charles de Gaulle, who had established his headquarters in London, was by no means seen by all Frenchmen as a potential savior: for many he initially seemed a traitor for allying himself with France’s traditional enemy, England, and this distrust had peaked with the Allies’ sinking of large numbers of French warships to avoid their falling into German hands. Left-wing slogans said, “Neither Pétain nor de Gaulle; neither cholera nor the plague.” In the immediate postwar years, the left was, moreover, at its strongest, since communists had predominated in the Resistance. In the wake of the liberation, factional distrust and recriminations were widespread, and there was a sometimes ruthless settling of accounts, both formal and personal. • These social and political factors affected the wartime cinema in a number of ways, not all of which were negative. The anarchic industrial structure of the 1930s—under-regulated, financially unstable, featuring a proliferation of smallto medium-sized fly-by-night production companies, mostly making no more than one or two films each per year, and about a third of which went bankrupt each year—was replaced by a rigorously disciplined structure, a stable legislative framework under which production was permitted only to approved firms with approved personnel and a demonstrable funding base. Reliable finances, together with state aid—introduced in May 1941, sometimes amounting to 65 percent of production costs—ensured stability and predictability, but material shortages led to a normal maximum film length (98 minutes) and to a limitation of annual production, which, in turn, resulted in the recycling of 1930s films and prominent screenings of dubbed German imports for two years. As is well known, Joseph Goebbels saw the cinema as a key weapon in his armory and established a systematic but surprisingly discreet control of it through the Propaganda Abteilung in Frankreich under Alfred Greven, a cinephile and Francophile for whom many French film personnel came to have a sneaking regard. Vichy created a parallel institution to the Abteilung called the Service du Cinéma under Guy de Carmoy, whose report on the state of French cinema in 1936 had contained a number of salutary recommendations that the weak government of the time had been unable to act on but that he was now himself in a position to implement, notably a series of funding initiatives that further stabilized production. The Service had no more than limited independence from German control, because though nominally based in Vichy, it worked in close 6

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

cooperation with the Abteilung in Paris. As an executive arm, the Service du Cinéma was responsible for creating the cinematic equivalent of those hierarchical industrial committees that the occupying power had decreed were to govern materiel, production, and distribution in all fields of industry. In the case of the cinema, this committee was called the Comité d’Organisation de l’Industrie Cinématographique (COIC). Headed by Raoul Ploquin, who had worked with Greven in Germany during the 1930s, COIC received requests from the various industrial subcommittees and passed down to them resources and instructions.2 Jointly, Greven, de Carmoy, and Ploquin were successful in restoring film production in the North early in 1941. In the South, where large numbers of film personnel had taken refuge, film production boomed and the studios worked to capacity for the first and only time in their existence—all six of the French films produced in late 1940 were made there, as were sixteen of the fifty-nine made in 1941 and thirty-five in all during the occupation, including many of the most famous (Les Visiteurs du soir, #11; Lumière d’été, #15; L’Éternel Retour, #20; Les Enfants du paradis, #27). The proportional shift of production away from Paris also factored in a relative shift in the setting of wartime films to provincial towns and regional settings. Exhibition was as rigorously regulated as production: entry prices were fixed, and the single program replaced the double or triple bill. Large numbers of short films thus became necessary to bulk out the first half of each film program. Unappreciated by audiences, these nevertheless proved a useful training ground for future filmmakers. Since newsreels, in contrast to feature films, were heavily propagandist and repellant to many spectators, a law had to be introduced forbidding audiences from noisy manifestations during screenings. Shortages of film-stock ensured that multiple takes were no longer viable; improvisation, once a valued if marginal factor in French cinema, was no longer possible, and scrupulous preplanning became the norm. Shortages of paper limited film journals to a single industrial paper (Le Film) and a single fan magazine (Ciné Mondial). A branch of the German production company UFA called Continental Films was set up in the northern zone and produced 30 of the 220 occupation films, but without the general public ever being aware that the products were produced under the aegis of the occupying power. At the same time, two German distribution firms (ACE and Tobis) moved in to supplement and partially displace the mass of French firms. A professional work-card became necessary to obtain entry to the profession, though several individuals, including personnel of Jewish extraction, managed to work clandestinely under cover of friends who had such cards and whose names consequently appear in the credits (for instance, Henri Jeanson, who worked as Monsieur Privey—an oblique reference to his having been “deprived” of the right to participate). Estimates vary, Introduction

7

but as many as 50 percent of directors and 80 percent of producers who had made two or more films in the previous decade were now excluded from the profession or had departed overseas (Renoir, Duvivier, René Clair, Max Ophüls, etc.). An alternative perspective would see this period as an inspiring moment of renewal, with a wave of new producers, directors, and actors seizing the opportunity to enter the profession. Despite these undoubtedly radical changes to the industry, however, the occupying power made no attempt to introduce the monolithic industrial structure prevailing in Germany. Aside from Continental, sixty-one firms were approved to produce films during the occupation, and over half of those did not make more than two films in the four years. Moreover, the membership of COIC included a number of producers who had been active in the 1930s, and who were anxious to recommence production as soon as circumstances permitted. It was in their interests to see something of the earlier fragmentation of production retained, and, in fact, nearly all of COIC’s members turned (or returned) to production in the course of the occupation—Richebé, who became director of COIC, recommenced production, as did Bernard Borderie (Pathé), Marcel Pagnol (his own firm and Gaumont), Ploquin (Les Films Raoul Ploquin), Roland Tual (SynopsMinerva), Pierre O’Connell (Regina), and Edouard Harispuru (Compagnie Commerciale Française Cinématographique). It is not, therefore, so surprising that while nominally under totalitarian control, the industry retained something of the fragmentary structure of the 1930s—a relatively large number of small firms (though now with a reliable funding base), mostly with no plants of their own and no long-term production programs or long-term contracted personnel, put together one-off packages for sale to circuits that they did not own. In the Midi, the producer André Paulvé (Discina) constituted an exception, since as well as funding production, he managed the studios at St. Laurent du Var and at Nice (La Victorine), as well as two exclusive release cinemas. Both the German and Vichy administrations introduced forms of censorship, but that of Vichy was the more assertive. The Vichy state did its best to foster films promoting the National Revolution and to ban those that might harm it, but its remit did not extend to films approved for production by the Germans in the ZO, who were profoundly indifferent to Vichy’s moral agonizing. Nevertheless, even in the North, there were clearly things that could not be said in any film during this period if the film was to get production approval, so a degree of self-censorship on the part of scriptwriters and directors became essential. Much debate took place after the liberation concerning the degree to which some oblique trace of the spirit of the Resistance might nevertheless have infiltrated into the wartime cinema. Claims were made in particular for Pontcarral (#12) and less convincingly for Le Ciel est à vous (#23), Les Visiteurs du soir (#11), 8

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

and Lumière d’été (#15)—claims that Raymond Borde dismisses out of hand. Then a militant communist, his scathing criticism of these supposedly resistant films is a useful corrective to the desperate attempts of postwar critics to salvage some modicum of national self-respect. He sees all of these films as characteristic of “the bourgeois cultural production of the time,” serving the interests of Vichy, and Le Ciel est à vous, in particular, he categorizes as “one of the last exemplars of a shameful fascism, of the French sort, as embodied by Marshal Pétain.”3 In this view, nothing of note escaped the combination of censorship and self-censorship. But if there were constraints on production, there were also benefits. Competition was greatly reduced. All British films were banned (together with American films from December 1941, when that country entered the war), first in the ZO, then in the ZL as well, ensuring that French films attracted 80–85 percent of receipts against 50 percent in the 1930s. Since the limited forms of leisure entertainment available ensured packed houses, and since there were now far fewer films to benefit from this increased attendance, those French films that did receive approval were almost guaranteed to make profits. Many cinemas programmed extra screenings. Possibly for the first time since World War I, French films could regularly expect to make a profit on the home market alone. It thus became feasible for producers to think in terms of large-scale productions with casts of thousands and quality technical finishes (characteristics that, however, the New Wave critics later attributed to the 1950s industry and castigated it for). Recalling these painful but profitable years for the cinema, Raymond Borde talks of “the crowds, the interminable queues at the ticket offices, spectators packed in like sardines and seats fought over by a flood of humanity. Never had audience numbers been so high, never had the French cinema been so healthy. Cinemas were constantly packed and as in all periods of crisis the entertainment industry raked in the shekels.” But he is less than complimentary about the obligatory short films played before intermission; about the jugglers, tight-ropewalkers, and so on, who filled out the program and thus allowed the manager to impose a supplementary charge; and about the constant harassment during the intermission by people demanding contributions for those in prison camps, for boy-scouts, for veterans, and for the Secours National.4 But the spectators, he notes, passive, apathetic, desperate for their ration of dreams, would tolerate all this and more. One final event of significance from this period: the Service du Cinéma funded the establishment of the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), which was to become the model internationally for a film school. A qualification from IDHEC was soon to become almost a necessity for entry to the profession. The Service also reinstituted in 1942 the prewar Grand Prix du Introduction

9

Cinéma Français, with awards retrospective to 1941. For all such awards, see the appendix. COIC and IDHEC were based at 92 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and Nino Frank left a vivid and self-mocking account of his (marginal and tardy!) participation there in the liberation of Paris, alongside fellow members of the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français (CLCF). In August 1944, he was introduced to the CLCF by Louis Daquin, where he “worked” with André Zwobada, Nicolas Hayer, Pierre Bost, Maurice Hilero, Christian-Jaque, Jean Delannoy, Marc Allégret, Alexandre Arnoux, Jean Grémillon, and dozens of others (most improbably Henri Langlois), not to mention several leading lights who went under strategic codenames—Commandants Marceau (Jean-Paul Le Chanois), Boulanger (Jean Painlevé), and Lartigue (Pierre Blanchar), and the effective head, Commandant Montargis (Daquin himself). In Frank’s hilarious, self-deprecatory, and far from heroic account, the group managed to demonstrate “an absolute inability to organize anything at all.” Not least fascinating is his description of their successful plundering of the COIC wine-cellar, generously stocked by Monsieur Greven.5

The Fourth Republic The Germans made no attempt to turn French feature films into an overt propaganda tool, and the general view was (and still is) that those made during the occupation were free of any obvious taint of collaboration. Consequently, the cinema largely escaped the sometimes violent purges prevailing elsewhere at war’s end. A few critics were executed for their extra-cinematic activities, such as participating in pro-Nazi broadcasts and betraying fellow citizens, as was one documentary filmmaker. Lesser penalties (reprimands, banning from the profession for months or years) were exacted for participating in films considered by left-wing critics to have been derogatory to the French people (e.g., Le Corbeau, #19; Les Inconnus dans la maison, #5; La Vie de plaisir), for being too visibly on good terms with Goebbels (for instance, the cast of Premier Rendez-vous, #2), or for working too frequently with the German production company Continental (four times was somewhat arbitrarily decreed to be too often). Arletty was subject to such a penalty for “horizontal collaboration” with the enemy—her defense that “my arse is international” carried no weight with the Resistance. Few had been guilty of outright “collaboration” with the Nazis, but a far greater number of film personnel had seen in Pétain an honorable man attempting to do a difficult job in trying circumstances. Several such people suffered reprimands for uncritically accepting Vichy ideology (Charles Vanel, Sacha Guitry, Maurice Chevalier, Pierre Fresnay). In total, however, this retribution was relatively mild 10

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

compared to that exacted in other cultural and social arenas. Nevertheless, film personnel such as Paulette Dubost, who had systematically shunned the roles offered by Continental, report having enjoyed a plethora of job offers in the immediate aftermath of the liberation.6 De Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government, entered Paris in triumph and oversaw a new constitution that in 1946 (technically not until 9 August 1949) inaugurated the Fourth Republic, effectively asserting that France was and, since the revolution, always had been a republic. The Vichy regime thus became a mere “gouvernement de fait”—an unfortunate interlude, an atypical parenthesis that could now be closed. Material losses during the war had been significant, of course, and took several years to make good. Agricultural losses had been worse than in the First World War, and over 1.2 million apartment buildings had been destroyed. Damage to the energy and transport infrastructures inhibited and delayed much of this repair work. French debt to America dating back to World War I but including that for World War II was immense, and Léon Blum was sent to the United States to negotiate its cancellation, together with new credits and the dispatch of aid shipments of matériel and food (the Blum-Byrnes agreement). But after a brief period of material hardship, rationing was terminated in 1949 and the budget balanced in 1950. One quarter of the “national wealth” had been lost during the occupation, compared to one tenth during World War I. State intervention to stimulate the economy and to restore cultural pride was the order of the day—national mobilization in the name of reconstruction, with the state as prime planner, arbiter, and coordinator. Infrastructural arenas were nationalized—gas and electricity, coal and oil, steel and cement, Renault, the Banque de France, and main deposit banks (and thus credit and insurance). Five-year plans, owing something no doubt to the Soviet model, were initiated. Left-wing activism prevailed for some time, while a distrust of capitalism and of the middle classes was widespread. Between 1945 and 1950, the state’s share of investment was never less than 50 percent, sometimes as much as 66 percent. The benefits of this period of growth were widely spread across the population, with less than 1 percent unemployment. Over the following years, the performance of the French economy surpassed that of either Britain or the United States, attaining 5–6.5 percent growth per year between 1949 and 1973, with one minor recession in 1953 and two periods of inflation in 1951 and 1956–1957, relating respectively to the Korean and Algerian Wars. This positive evaluation of the postwar period needs to be, of course, severely qualified, precisely because of the large-scale colonial unrest that marked this period and that resulted in France’s retreat from empire in East Asia and North Africa. The Korean War (1950–1953), the deposing of King Farouk and the Introduction

11

Suez War involving both Britain and France (1956), the demands of Morocco for independence (1952, finally recognized 1956), the recognition of Tunisia’s independence in 1957, the Hungarian insurrection in 1956 that was rapidly repressed by the Soviets, and the war in Indo-China (1951–1954) all made the decade a painful period of reassessment of the role of colonial powers in the modern world, and not least France. Moreover, these events came in conjunction with a series of unstable national governments at home, sometimes three a year, which made long-term policy formulation and implementation unusually difficult. The postwar coalition of left-wing parties (left Catholics, socialists, and communists) had soon collapsed, and the Marshall Plan resulting from the Blum-Byrnes agreement increased pressure on the nation to move to the right to accommodate U.S. interests and institute a market economy. The Cold War, to which most of the above decolonization conflicts can be related, consecrated these developments. But the Marshall Plan undoubtedly served to prime European economies and to reassure private investors, who progressively in the 1950s took over from the state the major role in investment. Devaluations of the franc, together with early moves toward globalization, further boosted the national economy. More immediately, integration among European nations tended to make their economies progressively more interdependent. An initial treaty signed in 1951 led to a common program dealing with coal and steel, which came into force in 1953, while the European Union itself came into being on the first day of 1959. In the course of 1958, a sudden financial crisis saw the left-wing government forced from power and the return of de Gaulle, who settled the Algerian War in an unexpected series of concessions. A new constitution was inaugurated, marking the introduction of the Fifth Republic. • In his account of the liberation, Nino Frank regretted the potential for a radical renewal squandered at this point, when everything seemed momentarily possible. In fact, despite the recriminations at war’s end that might seem to suggest a violent disjunction within the cinema between past and present, most of the systemic reforms introduced under the German occupation were perpetuated or reintroduced after the liberation, and the studio system, partially destroyed by war’s end, was quite rapidly reconstructed. COIC was renamed, first the Office Professionnel du Cinéma (OPC), then the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), but retained the same responsibilities as during the war, namely to produce legislative proposals and monitor their subsequent implementation; to coordinate, rationalize, and develop industrial procedures; to control entry prices; to monitor the financing and profitability of the industry; to dispense government funding; and to organize the technical and 12

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

artistic training of personnel. The result was, as Jean-Pierre Jeancolas writes, that “the French cinema in the 1950s existed under the tutelary care of the State.”7 Figures for production and profitability suggest that it did a good job. The production, distribution, and exhibition firms (mainly Jewish) previously taken over by the Germans were nationalized as the Union Général du Cinéma (UGC). Regulations were retained governing membership in the profession, the banning of double programs, the monitoring of admissions and receipts, and the regulation of financing and the visas necessary for filming to begin, and for a film to be exhibited or exported. The fragmented structure of the industry that had survived into the war years was also confirmed with a vengeance in the postwar years: by 1947, there were already 250 production firms registered, in a year when 75 films were produced; by 1952, there were 300 firms, and by 1958, there were 463 (attaining a maximum of 698 production firms in 1964). Of these, during the 1950s, between 100 and 180 were involved each year in funding the annual production of movies, which itself varied from 40 to 100 “purely French” films, and from 110 to 160 films to which French producers contributed some degree of funding. Those to which French producers contributed all or most of the funding became known as the “quota films” and were officially recognized as “French.” Roger Weil-Lorac, who became secretary-general of the Chambre Syndicale Française de la Cinématographie at the time, gave a succinct account of the state of the industry at the end of the war: foreign competition again became an obsession, inflation increased enormously the cost of production, taxation was oppressive, film-stock (especially positive stock) was in extremely short supply, all color film-stock had to be imported, sound patents were all held by foreign companies and constituted a constant drain of funds, plants and equipment were worn out and had not been maintained, and large numbers of cinemas had been destroyed. Nevertheless, 13 studio complexes still existed with 40 stages, 10 laboratories for printing and developing, about 100 firms involved in camera and related production, many of them highly regarded worldwide, 4,800 normal cinemas, and 9,000 16mm projection points.8 Film production, disrupted by the Allied invasion and the German retreat, resumed in December 1944, and from 1945 onward, the number of “quota films” produced each year stabilized at about one hundred. Worries about competition focused primarily on American films, given the backlog of four years of films (approximately 2,000–2,500) that the French public had not seen, and that, as the Communist Party was quick to point out, had already been amortized on the home market so were effectively being dumped on the French market at below cost. In 1946, U.S. films already accounted for 41 percent of new releases, while in 1947, this rose to 175 out of 323 releases (54%). So if in one sense this was an exhilarating period, when several key foreign films generated great critical exciteIntroduction

13

ment and commentary—Brief Encounter and Citizen Kane, for example—on the other hand, the industry, which had become accustomed to a protected market in which profits were almost guaranteed, found the influx highly threatening. This situation was exacerbated when in 1946, an attachment to the Blum-Byrnes agreement formalized the entry of American films onto French screens as a precondition for canceling the national debt and providing aid. As Léon Blum said at the time, “I admit that, if it had been necessary, with the superior interests of France in mind, I would willingly have sacrificed the [entire] French film industry.”9 Foreign films (primarily American) were to be allocated up to thirty-six weeks of screen time per year, with French films guaranteed no more than sixteen. The industry, already anxious, was motivated by this threat to engage in a campaign to have the agreement rescinded. In December 1947, a Committee for the Defense of the French Cinema was established, and the following month organized a demonstration by ten thousand film personnel through the heart of Paris. Continuing agitation forced the government to modify the terms of the agreement unilaterally, increasing the quota of French films to 20 weeks of guaranteed screening per year (38% of screen time) and limiting dubbed film imports to 186 per year (121 U.S.). In fact, French film production was insufficient at the time to supply much more than sixteen weeks per year. Moreover, French importers were to blame for importing more than the quota, but the film community was reacting to the threat rather than the reality. The film industry considered the threat acute for some three years, and the committee continued to pressure the government until 1951. In 1953, the Blum-Byrnes agreement was again renegotiated, but by then the debate was less vitriolic because it was apparent that the profitability of the French industry was no longer in doubt. During the 1950s, American releases stabilized at 35–40 percent of the market, somewhat less than in the 1930s and much the same as French films themselves—but the latter earned a markedly greater share of receipts (for instance, in the 1955–1956 season, 53% of receipts from 30% of films, compared to U.S. films’ receiving 34% of receipts from 38% of the films released). Figures for other Western countries suggest that France was unique in this ability to resist the inroads of American films, which attracted 75 percent of receipts in Australia, 80 percent in Canada and South Africa, and 70 percent in Holland, Italy, and Britain. This action to protect and revitalize the industry was supplemented by an unashamedly protectionist Aid Law (23 September 1948) introducing a tax on all new films and on entry prices, the funds to be used to subsidize the production and exhibition sectors, ultimately to a maximum of 21 percent. From 1954 when it was confirmed for another five years, the tax was specifically targeted to benefit films “of a nature to serve the cause of the French cinema and to open new perspectives in filmic art, or to promote the great themes and problems of 14

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

the French Union.”10 It is not hard to see how this might favor the development of a New Wave of ambitious filmmakers. One unintended consequence, however, was the perpetuation of a particular array of production companies, since those benefiting from the aid were able to reinvest the profits and become dominant players in the field. In the exhibition sector, the intent of the law was to upgrade cinemas. Partly as a result of this, but also because of the massive postwar growth in audiences, new cinemas were constructed, and the number of cinemas in France attained an all-time high in the 1950s of just under six thousand. Little had been done, however, since the introduction of sound to update the equipment and technology of the industry. Moreover, considerable damage had been inflicted on the studios during the war, both by requisitioning and by bombing. In the years immediately after the liberation, there were limited funds available to rectify this situation, and a concerted campaign was waged by technical and artistic personnel dissatisfied with the dilapidated state of their equipment. The renovation of studios had been specifically excluded from the Aid Law, and workers spoke of a constant dust haze that had to be settled by the use of sprinklers before each take, of insulation that was inadequate to exclude sound and vibration, of fire risk that had already resulted in the destruction of several stages, and of a lack of air conditioning, which quite regularly generated temperatures of 120–130 degrees Fahrenheit (with a reputed record of 145 degrees). Only in 1956 was the Aid Law extended to the studios. Nevertheless, the number of studio stages available to the industry had by 1948 risen to an all-time maximum of sixty-seven. Despite these benefits, the Aid Law was frequently cited by reactionaries as an instance of the state’s getting its foot in the door with a view to (even further) nationalization. After the Blum-Byrnes agreement and the Aid Law, the third critical matter for the French cinema in the immediate postwar years was the formal initiation of international coproductions. There had been numerous “internal” coproductions between French production companies, but there had also been several international coproductions in the past, notably with Germany throughout the 1930s, and with Italian firms before, during, and after the war, but these had been individually negotiated undertakings without any shared structure. A tentative agreement was signed into existence with Italy on 29 October 1946 and renewed in 1947. Finally, on 19 October 1949, a formal accord was negotiated, tying shared funding to a guaranteed release in both participating countries. Similar agreements followed with other European countries, notably Germany and Spain in 1953, but the majority always involved Italy. By the middle of the 1950s, international coproductions were accounting for nearly 50 percent of production and, given that budgets for such films were regularly 2–2.5 times higher than others, for some two thirds of all monies invested in film production. ReIntroduction

15

turns from these prestige productions were commensurately higher, too: in 1955, the three top earners (out of 106 films produced that year) were coproductions, and the fifteen top earners returned one third of all receipts. In the course of the 1950s, there were 383 coproductions, 325 of them with Italy (about a third of all production), such that by the end of the decade, commentators talked of the two national production systems as effectively twinned. Of the 325 FrenchItalian coproductions, just over half (166 of 325) were majority French productions (quota films). Among them, these three moves—the limitation of foreign imports and guaranteed space for the local product, the Aid Law providing a billion francs a year to both production and exhibition, and the international funding of prestige productions—established the basis for a very profitable decade for the cinema. Although attendance was still low by English-speaking standards, the French population on average now went to the cinema nine times a year, as against less than six times in the 1930s (and less than four times per year by the 1970s). Unfortunately, however, as attendances rose, the controlled entry price, set centrally, was halved in real terms, so packed theaters did not automatically mean additional money in industry pockets. Nevertheless, producers’ returns on investment were estimated to average 32 percent during this decade, and for both producers and exhibitors, the 1950s subsequently became mythologized as the good old times, “les belles années.” The fact that export earnings were steadily increasing throughout the decade further contributed to this euphoria: in 1950, export earnings had returned a mere 1.2 billion francs (4.6% of receipts), but by 1957, this had increased to 4.8 billion, and by 1960, to 7.8 billion francs (11.9% of receipts). In The Classic French Cinema, I summarize the situation of this postwar film industry in the following terms: (1) a large number of production companies, each involved in relatively few productions per year. (2) a divorce between production companies and production facilities, which must usually be rented on credit. (3) a lack of any large-scale vertical integration between production, distribution, exhibition, and manufacturing sectors. (4) an unreliable funding base for production, which must often be renegotiated for each film. (5) the personalization of the production system, such that specific individuals were both the focus for production activities and the guarantee (or otherwise) of funding reliability.

16

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

(6) the absence of any ongoing contractual basis for most of the intellectual and technical personnel [and from 1948 even studio workforce].11 The industry, that is, retained the artisanal character that it had developed during the 1930s and never quite lost during the war. Nevertheless, there were new pressures on the system toward professionalization. The establishment of IDHEC rapidly led to the formalization, articulation, and regulation of work practices, a rejection of “amateurism” in favor of a meticulously preplanned quality product, and the expectation that any potential candidate for entry into the industry would have graduated from the relevant IDHEC course and acquired “appropriate” professional techniques. Moreover, the spirit of collective action that prevailed at the liberation led not to the collectively administered cinema based on democratic institutions imagined in those heady years, but to a unionization of personnel that saw the (communist-led) Confédération Générale de Travailleurs (CGT) regularly confronting “bosses” in employer/employee conflicts typical of a capitalist economy. Already in the last years of the 1950s, the good fortune generated by large attendances and reliable funding was beginning to wear thin as the effects of television and of leisure mobility provided by car ownership drained audiences from the cinema. It became apparent in France as in several European countries that there was a tipping point when increasing prosperity quite suddenly led to a decline in cinema attendance. The French audience had always been primarily urban. In 1956, the seven major cities contributed 82 percent of admissions (Paris alone provided one third, and its ten major first-release cinemas one tenth of the national audience), whereas many rural areas were still effectively out of reach of the cinema. Now this wealthier urban population began to expect entertainment to be delivered to their homes or to involve leisurely trips to the countryside; consequently, the cinema suffered, and audience numbers plummeted dramatically after 1957. There were other pressures facing the cinema during this benign decade that led to the gradual transformation of the industry. The development of new technologies brought considerable financial pressures onto studio owners from 1952 onward to upgrade their facilities, and in conjunction with the financial boom from large audiences, this led producers to contemplate large-scale productions in color and scope. But it also motivated some smaller producers to reject the studio altogether in favor of location shooting, beginning what was subsequently to be seen as the decline of the studio system. Fires and bombing had knocked out several stages during the war, but instead of learning to live with the resultant deprivation as the Italian neo-realists had, the French had aimed

Introduction

17

to reinstitute their prewar, studio-made quality production. Renewed demand led to the bombed studios’ being rebuilt or replaced with new complexes. At its greatest capacity between 1948 and 1953, France’s 67 studio stages were capable theoretically (at the slow national average of 2 films per stage per year) of generating a maximum of about 140 films per year—fewer in reality, because the 2 major southern studios (Nice and Marseilles) averaged 1 film per stage every 2 years in the postwar period. One reason for the low production was that laboratory complexes were separate from the studios, so “rushes” might take days or weeks to confirm, and sets had to be left in situ pending that confirmation. Another was that studio owners conspired to reduce costs and industrial disruption in a way that ultimately undermined efficiency. In 1947, Pathé and Gaumont merged their diverse facilities as Franstudio, with two studios in Paris (Clichy and Francœur), two in the suburbs (Joinville and St. Maurice), and one in Marseilles. The following year, Franstudio disbanded all of its permanent labor force. From this point on, a new labor force had to be drafted by each producer for each film, along with cast and crew. Without a permanent staff, maintenance in the studios suffered. Moreover, several were commandeered by the television industry or sold off to developers as the urban land on which they sat became valuable for residential redevelopment. By 1956, five of the twelve Paris complexes had disappeared. There were still fifty-one stages available for film production in 1961, but by 1976, only fifteen, exploited to 30 percent of capacity. Studio hire had averaged 22 percent of a film’s budget in 1948, but less than 2 percent by 1976. In effect, by the end of the 1950s, studios were becoming regarded as superfluous. By then, new technologies allowed most filming to be done on location, often with handheld cameras, rapid film-stock, and portable tape recorders. The 1950s was not just a boom decade, then, but the end of an era. In fact, where Jean-Pierre Jeancolas entitles his study of the years 1930 to 1945 15 ans d’années trente, some cynics saw the lack of postwar innovation as perpetuating a lack of structural change that justified seeing the whole period from 1930 to 1959 as 30 ans d’années trente. Joël Magny, in particular, focusing on the “failed revolution” of 1947–1948, sees the 1950s as a continuation of the prewar situation, but with the excitement and inventiveness of the 1930s gradually fizzling out. He lists the “grand old men” of the French cinema who were still making films then, only to observe that none of them are any longer at the top of their game. A slow erosion is evident. Whether it be Becker, Clément, Carné, Clair, Clouzot, Grémillon or even Renoir, to name the most talented, or again your Allégrets, your Autant-Lara, your Duvivier, it’s not in the 1950s that they produce their best work. I would go even further: 18

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

between the beginning and the end of that decade a steady process of degradation had set in within each filmography: Les Tricheurs is not La Marie du port; Porte des Lilas is not La Beauté du diable; La Jument verte is not Le Blé en herbe; Les Aventures d’Arsène Lupin is not Casque d’Or; . . . for that matter, Eléna et les hommes and even French Cancan are not as personal as La Règle du jeu or Toni.12 Much the same was said of the scriptwriters, the art directors, and the producers. This all goes some way to explaining the bitter comments during the 1950s of the Cahiers du cinéma critics who were to constitute the New Wave. But any negative evaluation of the decade should be balanced against the fact that those critics were themselves part of a broad critical community seething with excitement and a commitment to transform French cinema. They saw other national cinemas as more innovative than their own—notably the American (Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, John Ford, George Cukor) and Italian (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni), but also the Scandinavian (Ingmar Bergman, Alf Sjöberg), Spanish (Luis Buñuel, Juan Antonio Bardem), Japanese (Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi), and even British (David Lean)—and they never ceased debating, evaluating, theorizing. The media for these debates were the ciné-club (film club), where the critics presented their preferred films, and the film magazines that proliferated in these fifteen years. There had been a few ciné-clubs before the war, but in the postwar years, their number proliferated dramatically: there was only 1 in all of France in November 1944, 6 by March 1945, 83 by June 1946, 130 by June 1947, 185 by June 1948, and never less than 200 throughout the following decade. This was a movement with a missionary zeal, spreading the word as widely as possible through the French film-going community that a revolution in filmmaking practices was necessary and possible. Producing dossier after dossier and summary after summary, they were forming an audience for the art cinema that was to come. This enthusiastic analysis overflowed into an explosion of film magazines. L’Écran français, begun by resistance fighters, was the first but failed after a decade as French society moved to the right. La Revue du cinéma, which had failed in the early 1930s, was resuscitated in 1946–1948 for sixteen wonderful issues. Objectif 49 and the Festival du Film Maudit gave rise to the Gazette du cinéma, which morphed in 1951 into Cahiers du cinéma, soon to promote the auteurist line. Positif was established in Lyons in 1952 with a no less auteurist line but oriented more toward sociopolitical auteurs, while Radio-Cinéma-Télévision and Téléciné put forward Catholic positions. Image et son and Cinéma 55 (and other years) were less doctrinaire but no less committed to the transformation of the cinema, while Cinémonde and Mon film catered to the starry-eyed and the “cinéIntroduction

19

phages.” A decade of passionate and adversarial critics like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, André Bazin, Bernard Chardère, Georges Sadoul, Henri Agel, Jean-Pierre Chartier, Olivier Barrot, Alexandre Astruc, Kast, Lo Duca, Charles Ford, René Gilson, Jacques-Bernard Brunius, and indeed Langlois himself promoted and condemned the films they loved or hated. It was an exciting decade to be involved in the cinema, and prepared a generation of filmmakers and spectators for the “revolution” of the following decade. So if Chardère’s wholesale condemnation of contemporary French cinema as “that melancholy magma constituted by the bleak decade of the fifties” is understandable, his own account of the decade’s activities gives it the lie.13 • As in the first volume of this filmography, which dealt with the 1930s, a limit of one thousand words per film has been imposed to ensure wide coverage of the period, though this has the disadvantage of preventing justice being fully done to those films that have been the subject of extensive critical debate. In each entry, where no English title is available, the French title has been literally translated and shown in parentheses on the line beneath the French title. Again, as in the previous volume, films have been selected for inclusion on the basis of one, or usually more, of the following criteria:  They are generally agreed to be among the best films to have been produced during these years.  They are widely regarded as significant in the careers of the relevant personnel or in the development of certain techniques.  They are representative of certain themes, techniques, and genres that have sociopolitical or ideological implications for their times.  They have been the subject of extensive debate and contention within the critical community. Attempting to reconcile these criteria has occasionally led me to include films for which I have little sympathy (e.g., Si Versailles m’était conté, #85; L’Éternel Retour, #20; La Symphonie pastorale, #35; Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, #68), but it has also allowed me to include certain films that deserve to be better known (e.g., Meurtres, #67; Macadam, #39; La Danse de mort, #53; Les Paysans noirs, #58; La Fête à Henriette, #78; L’Eau vive, #100). Some extremely popular films and series have nevertheless been omitted, when I consider them no longer watchable except by the committed historian—for instance the Noël-Noël comedies, the Luis

20

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Mariano musicals (a great voice but rabid clichés), numerous Fernandel films, Fanfan la Tulipe, and the maudlin costume kitsch of Caroline chérie and its descendants. I have made an exception for the Eddie Constantine action parodies, since at least one of them is still tolerable (La Môme vert-de-gris, #82). This was an extraordinary period both for France and for the French cinema —early on, each could be seen as threatened in its very existence, while later on, both enjoyed economic booms that were never to be equaled. That the cinema survived and flourished through both highs and lows was an indication of the extent to which it was (and still is) central to the very idea of French culture.

Notes 1. See Crisp, Genre, Myth, and Convention, 258–262. 2. The producers’ subcommittee included André Remaugé, Roger Richebé, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Painlevé, Jean Lallier, and Louis Daquin. The “creative” subcommittee included Marcel Achard (scriptwriters), Jean Galland (actors), Léo Joannon (directors), and Jean Bachelet (technicians). From May 1942, COIC consisted of Richebé, Achard, and André Debrie, and from January 1944, Richebé alone. 3. Quoted in Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 13–14. 4. Ibid., 11–12. 5.. Frank, Petit Cinéma sentimental, 195–201. 6. Dubost, C’est court la vie, 129. 7. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “Le Cadre,” In Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 16. 8. Weil-Lorac, 50 ans de cinéma actif, 82–83. 9. Jeancolas, “Le Cadre,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 22. 10. Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 249–250, 257. 11. Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 86. For more detail on the material in this introduction, see chapters 1–2. 12. See Joël Magny, “La Chute des valeurs ou la fin des années trente,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 56. 13. Bernard Chardère, “Figurez-vous qu’un soir en plein Sahara,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 94.

Introduction

21

PART I

1940–1945

1. La Fille du puisatier The Well-Digger’s Daughter Filming began May 1940, then resumed 13 August 1940; released Marseilles and Lyons, 20 December 1940; Paris, 24 April 1941 190 min, b&w Dir and Scr Marcel Pagnol; Prod Films Marcel Pagnol; Cinematog Willy; Music Vincent Scotto; Art dir Cot and Marius Brouquier; Sound Marcel Lavoignat; Edit Jeannette Ginestet; Act Josette Day (Patricia), Raimu (Pascal Amoretti), Fernandel (Félipe Rambert), Milly Mathis (Nathalie), Line Noro (Marie Mazel), Fernand Charpin (Monsieur Mazel), Georges Grey (Jacques Mazel), Claire Oddera (Amanda Amoretti), Roberte Arnaud (Roberte), Raymonde (Éléonore Amoretti), Rosette (Marie Amoretti), Liliane (Isabelle Amoretti), Félicien Tramel (waiter), Marcel Maupi (shop assistant), and Charles Blavette (dyer). La Fille du puisatier is often listed as the first French film to have been made under the German occupation. In fact, it was begun in May 1940, before the invasion, and resumed on 13 August, barely two months after the fall of France and the entry into Paris of German forces. Marcel Pagnol had established his production unit in Provence, which was by that time in the (somewhat optimistically named) zone libre (ZL, free zone). In the zone occupé (ZO), there was to be a drastic reorganization of the film industry, as of so much else, and filmmaking did not recommence until February 1941. In the ZL, by contrast, there was as yet little regulation, and shooting began on some seven films before that point, most of them in Pagnol’s Marseilles studio. Of these the first, and the only major, film was La Fille du puisatier. Pagnol was able to proceed so rapidly not just because of the lack of regulatory hindrances in the Midi but also because he had already prepared and initiated shooting, and because, unlike his Paris colleagues, he was in total personal control of production. His film had initially been plotted in melodramatic ways recognizable from earlier Pagnol movies (seduction of the innocent country lass, illegitimate child, parental outrage at once moving and comic, class oppositions between whole-

1940–1945

25

some provincials and dubious city folk), but like many phony-war films, it was modified to exploit the outbreak of war for dramatic purposes: it is because he is mobilized that Jacques Mazel cannot marry Patricia as he had intended, and it is because he crashes behind enemy lines, believed dead, that the fate of Patricia’s “fault” (the illegitimate child) has to be decided publicly by the Mazel family and her father, Pascal, the well-digger. Indeed, the war provided an opportunity to mobilize several familiar myths of the age—not just the “believed dead/reappears” trope but also the mythic status of the aviator that guarantees Jacques’s romantic worth. As Pascal, Raimu is provided with his standard role of Provençal patriarch standing on his comic dignity, and Fernandel is used against type as Félipe, the worthy but uncharismatic country lad willing to marry Patricia and assume responsibility for the illegitimate child. Standard city/country oppositions make of the Mazels a snobbish middle-class family obsessed with money and unhappy at the thought of such a lowly alliance, until their son is reported dead and the possibility of a grandchild suddenly becomes more interesting. On the other hand, the earthy well-digger is rude but direct, and Félipe “may not have much self-respect, but he has a lot of love.” As always in Pagnol the simple Provençal folk are the source of all genuine affection and honor. As the welldigger says, “You should never trust people who sell tools but don’t know how to use them.” Patricia herself has been away in Paris training as a dressmaker, and has returned totally transformed—this urban experience goes some way toward explaining her ready seduction. (Of course, it also helps to explain her appearance and accent, rather too sophisticated for a Provençal girl—Josette Day, who played her, was Pagnol’s partner at the time.) The defeat and occupation initiated a modification to the original scenario: what resolves the conflict and brings together the two families of different classes is not just their mutual sentimentality about the baby but the “débâcle”—the collapse and defeat of the French Army—and the consequent necessity for all French people to unite. They all listen together to Marshal Pétain’s speech of 17 June in which he announces the armistice and bestows upon the nation “the gift of his person” as leader. When Madame Mazel grieves over Jacques, still believed dead, Patricia claims rather that it is precisely the willingness of such people to risk their lives for the nation that makes being French still worthwhile. Pétain, of course, proposed a return to traditional virtues as essential to the moral regeneration of a nation corrupted by an alien (Jewish and/or Marxist) ideology of despair and despondency, which the prewar poetic realist films were seen to have been a main agent in propagating. This “Vichy ideology” of national redemption was embodied in the slogan “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (Work, Family, Native Soil), and involved a mythologization of the peasant and consequent return to the land. Christian traditions and the passing on of land and customs from fa26

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

ther to son in hierarchical fashion were central to it. There was no place for class conflict in this “révolution nationale,” but generational distinctions became more important: the younger generation would now be crucial as representing the future of the nation. These young people would constitute a new start, free from the errors of their parents’ generation, so the grandson, now recognized by both families, is duly glorified, as young children were glorified throughout the occupation. La Fille du puisatier is thus the first wartime film to embody, if still tentatively, the Vichy ideology, though the set of values that it proposed had already been incorporated in Pagnol’s Jofroi (1933) and Regain (1937), not to mention La Terre qui meurt (1936). These values are made explicit here by Patricia, when she says to Jacques, “This farm, these un-worked fields, . . . couldn’t you do something with them? I don’t mean become a peasant, exactly . . . but there are modern ways, tractors, harvesters. . . . It seems to me I could be happy doing the washing and the dishes, and each day at sunset walking to the gate to wait for my man coming home from his land with his workers.” Given what we have learned of Jacques, and indeed of Patricia, this fantasized future is wildly improbable, but it is merely the first of many such improbable peasant fantasies from the occupation years. All films made in the ZL had to be approved by the German censor before they could be released in the ZO. In the meantime, La Fille du puisatier was screened in Lyons and Marseilles (December 1940) before finally being released in Paris (April 1941). It was enormously successful, attracting the largest audiences in Paris of any film during the occupation years, outdone among occupation films only by Les Enfants du paradis (#27), which of course was not released until after the liberation. In view of this, it might seem hard to explain why Pagnol, who had directed one film per year in the previous decade, did not direct any further films until Naïs in 1945. In fact, he was working for several years on a scenario called La Prière aux étoiles, and even filmed large sections of it, but scrapped it all for reasons that commentators disagree on—perhaps simply because he decided it was not up to standard, and he alone in France could afford to make such a costly decision.

2. Premier Rendez-vous (First Encounter) Filming began 22 April 1941; released 14 August 1941 105 min, b&w Dir Henri Decoin; Prod Continental Films; Scr Max Colpé (clandestinely) and Michel Duran; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music René Sylviano; Art dir Jean Perrier; Act Danielle Darrieux (Micheline), Fernand Ledoux (Nicolas), Louis Jour1940–1945

27

dan (Pierre), Jean Tissier (Roland), Gabrielle Dorziat (governess of orphanage), and several young actors who were soon to become stars: Georges Marchal, Daniel Gélin, Jean Parédès, Suzanne Dehelly, Annette Poivre, Simone Valère, and Sophie Desmarets. The Germans permitted production to resume in the ZO in February 1941. Of the eleven films produced that year by their agency, Continental, this was the first to be released. It benefited from intense promotion both in France and in Germany, and the Berlin premiere was the occasion for a grand gala to which all the best-known French stars were invited, including the lead actress. Danielle Darrieux. Joseph Goebbels himself presided, even playing the piano to entertain his guests. Like Abus de confiance (1937), Mademoiselle ma mère (1937), and Battement de cœur (1939), Premier Rendez-vous was designed as a vehicle for Darrieux and directed by her then-husband, Henri Decoin. It was cunningly designed to include a mass of narrative and character tropes popular in the late 1930s, most of which were to become even more popular during the war: orphanhood and the institutionalization of the young, the celebration of youth culture, the wry representation of relations between a young girl and an elderly man, the Oedipal jealousy of the latter for a “filial” rival, the theme of acting and sincerity, and a finale in which the orphan is integrated into a new family. Darrieux plays the orphan, whose melancholy daily routines are sketched (rather clumsily) in the opening scenes, and who dreams of escape “Loin, très loin,” or at least as far as marriage with a suitor whom she has contacted through the Lonely Hearts column of a newspaper. Nicolas, the suitor, an elderly teacher, realizing there has been a misunderstanding, tactfully allows her to believe it is his “nephew,” Pierre, who has been communicating with her. He conceals her in his college lodgings, and the bulk of the narrative thereafter concerns her interactions with Nicolas, with Pierre, and with the students whom Nicolas teaches (Pierre is in fact a former student). When the authorities discover her whereabouts and return her to the orphanage, the students lay siege to it and manage to gain her release. Nicolas will adopt her, and Pierre will marry her. But the film is not as schematic as this account suggests. Nicolas (who, as the waiter at their encounter notes, “could be her father”), though basically kindly, is represented in quite a sinister and threatening light when he insists on taking her back to his lodgings, yet very soon comes to seem pitiful as his “high-spirited” (but in fact repulsive) students mock and torment him, constantly interrupting his lectures. But the repulsive students in turn are seen not just as “youth” but as “privileged youth”—the progeny of businessmen, bankers, and the aristocracy, whose repulsiveness had long been considered normal in French films. Premier 28

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Rendez-vous, however, ultimately has to engineer these young people’s rehabilitation as fundamentally good-hearted. It does so by having Micheline take pity on her “savior” and harangue his students for their boorish behaviour (“they are just daddy’s boys, snobs”), thus shaming them into a rather unconvincing transformation. Henceforth they will be helpful and supportive. Cumulatively, therefore, the representation of youth is curiously ambivalent, and it is surprising to read commentators of the time referring to the film as “a triumph of youth and love,” “a hymn to Joy and Life,” endowed with “all the delights of youth and optimism.”1 Moreover, the opposition between “father” and “son” is not weighted in any simplistic way in favor of the latter. Indeed, at one stage, faced with a lack of beds in Nicolas’s lodgings and asked where she will sleep, Micheline suggests alternate nights with father and “son.” Finally, however, she comes upon them arguing angrily over her, and acknowledges the Oedipal discord she has introduced into the household. The film moves to resolve it: she opts for youth rather than age, passion rather than punctuality, trendiness rather than timidity, and when in the final scene Pierre dashes after her departing train and leaps athletically onto the rear carriage, Nicolas mutters, “I could never have caught that train.” So Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier are at least partially justified in writing Nicolas off as, “from the opening images an object of repulsion and of pity,” the first of a string of quasi-incestuous wartime fathers whose desires by contrast with those of their 1930s predecessors are to be rejected and/or thwarted during the war years.2 Nevertheless, largely because of the intense humanity that Fernand Ledoux brings to the figure of the elderly teacher, it is easy to see Micheline as having made a drastic mistake in opting for the youthful Pierre. But if the film’s preference for youth over age is frequently ambivalent, what is not in doubt is the film’s preference for youth culture over traditional culture. When Micheline sings the theme song to Pierre’s piano, the music suddenly modulates into a hip jazz beat, and she sways and bounces in time, hands in the air, to show that she (like Pierre and all modern youth) is totally “with it.” Nature too sides with Pierre, when in park and guinguette (bar-restaurant) settings, he and Micheline act out a reprise of their first meeting, though even here the balance is nicely maintained when she tells him she finds his version of their meeting less satisfactory than his “father’s.” He agrees to take lessons, and this is the pretext for introducing a debate concerning the stock theme of “sincerity and acting.” Finally, adopted by Nicolas and committed to Pierre, Micheline has re-

1. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 49; Régent, Cinéma de France, 27–28. 2. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 87–90.

1940–1945

29

covered the sense of belonging that her status as orphan had defined her (and indeed her whole age-group) as lacking. Technically the film is efficient without being remarkable, except for the astounding proliferation of forms of punctuation to be found throughout: there are 64 such linkages between scenes (61 per 100 min), 50 percent more than normal for the period, but symptomatic of a trend that was to culminate with Le Voile bleu (#10, 95 per 100 min) and Le Chant de l’exilé (105 per 100 min). In this film, most punctuation consists of cross-dissolves, with 14 wipes and 6 fades to black or white, but one instance toward the end involves a “hole” ripped in the screen— the newspaper in which Pierre has advertised for news of her (much as in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1936), and through the torn hole we see the station where he will reencounter her. Darrieux’s impending separation from her director-husband Decoin was already common knowledge when the film was made, and she married the Portuguese businessman Porfirio Rubirosa in Vichy the following year. At that time, she broke not only with Continental but with all filmmaking for three years (1942–1945), only reestablishing herself as a leading lady in 1950 with the films of Max Ophüls.

3. L’Assassinat du père Noël Who Killed Santa Claus? Filming began 15 February 1941; released 15 October 1941 105 min, b&w Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Continental Films; Scr Pierre Véry and Charles Spaak; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Henry Verdun; Art dir Guy de Gastyne; Edit René Le Hénaff; Act Harry Baur (Cornusse), Renée Faure (Catherine), Raymond Rouleau (the baron), Marie-Hélène Dasté (la Mère Michel), Robert Le Vigan (Villard, the schoolteacher), and Fernand Ledoux (the mayor). The first of Continental’s films to be put into production, L’Assassinat du père Noël was released two months after Premier Rendez-vous (#2). It is readily classifiable as “rural gothic,” and inaugurated a series of such films, often as here based on the fantastic narratives of Pierre Véry—L’Assassin a peur la nuit, Goupi Mains-Rouges (#13), and Madame et le mort (all 1942), and Le Pays sans étoiles and Jacques Prévert’s Sortilèges (#30) (both 1945). Never less than weird, and often, as their titles suggest, rather sinister, these films focus on remote provincial regions preferably cut off temporarily from all contact with urban France (“civilization”). In these isolated, claustrophobic, and potentially barbaric conditions, 30

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

eccentric characters interact in mysterious ways, and death invariably results. Yet the overall mood is fantastic and fascinating rather than grim and threatening. This is not a variety of film noir. L’Assassinat du père Noël is set (like Sortilèges) in a remote mountainous region isolated by deep snow. Much of the action takes place at night, setting up oppositions typical of the gothic—whiteness and blackness, purity and evil, innocence and guilt. In this context, it is understandable that everyone should fantasize about dreams of escape to exotic foreign lands, symbolized by the globes and maps that Cornusse fabricates and displays in his shop window. To accompany them, he has a fund of fantastic stories set in the past or far away, often borrowed from chivalric tales of knights errant and bandits. The baron of the local chateau returns from scouting the world for a suitable wife, and the villagers come to suspect that he has contracted, and is rotting away from, some unspeakable disease—perhaps the plague or leprosy. But then “we are all more or less leprous,” mutters the local madwoman, evoking a rotting society. In the village, the baron encounters Cornusse’s unworldly daughter, Catherine, who lives in a fairy-tale world of her own devising, and he is fascinated by her childlike innocence. But so is the distinctly odd local schoolteacher (played by Le Vigan): when he goes up to Cornusse’s attic to propose to her, he finds it crammed with a typically gothic assortment of oddities and fragments, notably dolls that Catherine has fabricated. He tells Catherine he will make her rich and happy, and take her away from all this. It is Christmas, and as usual Cornusse the mapmaker is to be Santa Claus. The invalid son of the baron’s concierge would like nothing better than to walk like other boys, to escape from his disability. His request to Santa Claus is for the globe outside Cornusse’s shop. A manger scene is being set up in the church, including (“somewhat imprudently”) a rich jewel. At intervals throughout the film, we see a dark, hooded figure slinking around, clearly intent on stealing it. He knocks out the priest, then trails Cornusse through the snow as the latter, in his guise as Santa Claus, circulates from family to family, getting ever drunker and making ever wilder promises, so it is no great surprise when Santa Claus is found dead in the snow. The villagers fear for Cornusse, but it turns out that the baron, having found Cornusse drunk, had borrowed the Santa Claus suit to bestow a pair of earrings on Catherine; he, in turn, had been knocked out and tied up by the thief, who is now dead. But who killed him, and what has happened to the jewel? Clearly at this stage an element of murder mystery is beginning to structure the narrative, but only feebly. Gothic genres in general are not strong on narrative drive, often borrowing from other more driven genres to obtain a perfunctory narrative structure. Here, within the context of a rural gothic film, there 1940–1945

31

are three generic narrative patterns at work—the theft and murder, the potential romance between the baron and Catherine, and the melodrama of the lame boy dreaming of the globe and of a miraculous cure. All three are wrapped up at the end. When the police finally arrive, we find that they have captured the thief (the pharmacist, who was a fairly obvious suspect from early on) and recovered the diamond; the baron affixes the recovered earrings to Catherine’s ears; and, to the saintly singing of the villagers, Cornusse as Santa Claus says to the lame boy that he can have the wonderful globe, but he must walk to get it. “Arise and walk!” The boy does so. But if these three narratives are dealt with somewhat perfunctorily, it is because the film was never centrally interested in them. They serve primarily to allow the introduction of a range of eccentric characters, baroque settings, and hysterical overacting. The genre’s interest is in atmosphere, the weirder the better, and a number of technical codes strive mightily to achieve it. The art director’s task was central, since this film initiated a string of wartime films evoking magical locations through an exotic clutter of suggestive objects. Cornusse’s shop and attic receive due attention, while the madwoman’s cat, for which she has been searching throughout the film, is finally revealed in a coup de théâtre in her fiercely defended cupboard—stuffed, mounted, and poised to strike. Gothic contrasts are frequently edited into the film, notably that wartime favorite of communal gaiety intercut with images of individual death and desolation, as when progressively more riotous singing and dancing at the inn is intercut first with Catherine grieving because the baron seems to have jilted her, then with the discovery of Santa Claus’s body. Moreover, punctuation is almost as frequent and as inventive as in Premier Rendez-vous (#2). The camera is exceedingly mobile, given to circular tracking and panning, and assumes angles and levels (to the extremes of vertically up and down) that sometimes render the image difficult to read at first sight, while the theatrical lighting in the night shots, especially in the night landscape shots, makes for dramatic patternings and contrasts typical of the genre. This film (like Sortilèges, #30, its companion piece from war’s end, also directed by Christian-Jaque) is a technically ambitious film, and gives the lie to any claim that Christian-Jaque was without artistic ambitions, a mere “studio director” who simply photographed the script he was given. Perhaps inevitably, the proliferation of films such as this came to be seen as symptomatic of a schizophrenic and claustrophobic nation, leprous, divided, and turned in on itself, dreaming impossible dreams of potency and of escape. In particular, however, the final sequence where Cornusse/Santa Claus is seen telling the no-longer-lame boy the story about Sleeping Beauty waiting for her Prince Charming to come and wake her to life again (as the baron has just awo32

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

ken to life Cornusse’s daughter) was retrospectively (and somewhat tenuously) interpreted as an oblique allegory of France’s occupied state. She is a sleepwalking nation, dreaming of the kiss that will awaken her to liberation.

4. Nous les gosses (Us Kids) Filming began 10 July 1941; released 2 December 1941 85 min, b&w Dir Louis Daquin; Prod Pathé Cinéma; Scr Gaston Modot, Maurice Hilero, and Marcel Aymé; Cinematog Jean Bachelet; Music Marie-François Gaillard; Art dir Lucien Aguettand; Sound Maurice Carrouet; Edit Suzanne de Troeye; Act Louise Carletti (Mariette), Gilbert Gil (teacher), André Brunot (chief of police), Paul Fran keur (his secretary), Pierre Larquey (le père Finot), Raymond Bussières (Gaston), Jeanne Pérez (Mariette’s mother), Madeleine Geoffroy (Fernand’s mother), Mar tial Rèbe (Fernand’s father), Louis Seigner (headmaster), Marcelle Suire (Georgette), Marcel Pérès (workman), Anthony Gildès (le père Castor), Lucien Coëdel (Jeannot’s father), Émile Genevois, Léonce Corne, and André Zibral. The devastating fire that gutted the Joinville studio complex in 1939, combined with the outbreak of war, led to the total abandonment of that complex for two years and the dispersal of its workforce. In 1941, the Vichy authorities funded a renewed Pathé, and Nous les gosses was the first film authorized for production in the new complex. The film’s art director, Lucien Aguettand, published a vivid account of the efforts required to bring Joinville back to working condition— to renovate the various offices, stages, editing rooms, and cinema, and finally to erect the principal set for the film, of 38,000 square feet, in the studio backlot. Rust and dust had overtaken the studio, renovation was hampered by the lack of necessary materials and by a 180 percent inflation rate in the two years since it had been abandoned. But after five weeks’ hard work, “we heard shouts and cheers: in the middle of a group of kids we saw Louis Daquin and Jean Bachelet. Our job was done: now filming could take over and bring life for a few weeks to this working-class suburb [that we had built].”3 The script for Nous les gosses consisted of five typed pages when Daquin first saw it, and was based on Maurice Hilero’s memories of his own schoolboy

3. Lucien Aguettand, “Construire une cité,” Technique et matériel, 27 September 1941.

1940–1945

33

childhood. His collaborator in developing it was the left-wing actor Gaston Modot, a friend of Jacques Prévert and formerly of the Groupe Octobre, which accounts perhaps for the echoes of 1930s films and specifically for Mariette’s role as a (never less than metaphorical) flower-seller. If Pathé-Cinéma was willing to contemplate producing it at this crisis-ridden moment, it was no doubt because the primarily youthful cast would keep costs to a minimum—as it turned out, 3.5 million francs when the average cost of production was already 5 million and would rise to 7.3 million the following season—but also because the emphasis on youth was clearly compatible with Vichy’s nascent National Revolution, which promoted family values. The central trigger of the narrative is a school window pane that one of the kids breaks while he and his mates are playing ball in the yard. He will have to pay for it; but his parents are poor. The other kids will help, but they too are from poor families, and the only way to earn the required money is by doing odd jobs. We see them busking, cleaning windows, and shining shoes (which they have previously ensured will need cleaning). When they have collected enough money, they discover it has been stolen. They begin again, but this time keep an eye on the funds and identify the thieves. The film ends as it began, with them playing in the schoolyard . . . and breaking another window. If the narrative is constructed around this particular incident, it nonetheless mobilizes two broader themes: first, a rosy view of childhood (kids are basically lovable but a bit feckless—“kids will be kids”), and second, the solidarity of the poor (tribal enmities among the kids are forgotten as they unite in a common cause; the working class and its solidarity are sentimentalized as the site of true humanity). The “bad apple” among the boys (Gros Louis) is allied to Gaston, a petty thug played by Raymond Bussières in the role of “selfish louse,” which he was to make his own over the coming years, while Pierre Larquey plays the role of helper to the boys—a sort of comically disguised Sherlock Holmes, the benign counterpart of Bussières, which Larquey was likewise to make his own. Roger Régent remembered the screening of Nous les gosses as providing a wonderful Christmas present at the end of that bleak year of 1941, “like a shout of joy resounding through our darkened cinemas. This film had a freshness, a spontaneity, a delicious verve . . . signaling that [in Daquin] a new man of the cinema had been born.” 4 The film attracted large audiences (over half a million in Paris alone) and universal praise from the critics of the day, with one exception: general disapproval was reserved for the sentimental element of the adult’s 4. Régent, Cinéma de France, 36–38.

34

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

romance. Daquin in his memoirs agreed: “Under the pretext that the public ‘demands’ a love story the producer of Nous les gosses required Marcel Aymé and me to expand the role of Mariette and the teacher. Result: the film goes off the rails as soon as we move into the ‘love scenes,’ which are intolerable because not contributing to the action; so they jar with the extremely natural behaviour of the children.”5 For Régent, this was the manifesto of a new generation; and in a realist mode, it certainly recalls that other memoir of childhood which constituted such a manifesto, if on a distinctly surrealist mode, Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933). Jacques Siclier pointed out that it also recalls Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, and went on to enumerate an impressive list of films relating to childhood that the wartime French cinema would engender, frequently calling upon the child actors to reconcile a disunited family or shame their adult counterparts into that morality appropriate to a revitalized France.6 There is, therefore, in this film a faint but perceptible overlay of Vichy morality modulating a set of recognizable prewar themes and characters. Technically the film is at times interesting and at times awful. The camerawork is often clumsy, but worse is the crass and incongruous use of extra-diegetic music, corresponding to no useful function, except for the occasional painful attempt to be “comical.” Less irritating is the proliferation of punctuation (twentythree cross-dissolves, fourteen wipes, seven fades in and out) including several weird variants and one series of nine frequentative cross-dissolves combining with superimpositions as the money rains down on the kids. This is just one of several rapidly edited sequences. (The fast average shot length [ASL] of 9.6 seconds includes a series of 33 shots of less than 5 seconds each, and a series of 81 shots averaging 6 seconds.) Other shots feature Dutch tilts and steep camera angles. In general, it is clear that Daquin is reveling in exploring the potential of the medium in this, his first solo film. There are also a few self-referential images that film enthusiasts might find engaging, as when the kids “happen” to walk past a cinema screening La Dame aux camélias (Fernand Rivers and Abel Gance, 1934), or again Les Filles du Rhône (Jean-Paul Paulin, 1937) in which Larquey had featured, screening in a Pathé cinema. Overall, the film is marked by a populist optimism and sentimentality about childhood and the working class that is a little hard to take now, but that is understandable in context.

5. Daquin, Le Cinéma, notre métier, 145–146. 6. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 88–93.

1940–1945

35

5. Les Inconnus dans la maison Remade in 1967 as Stranger in the House Filming began 29 November 1941; released 16 May 1942 92 min, b&w Dir Henri Decoin; Prod Continental Films; Scr Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the novel by Georges Simenon; Cinematog Jules Kruger; Music Roland Manuel; Art dir Guy de Gastyne; Sound Jacques Carrère; Edit Marguerite Beaugé; Act Raimu (Loursat), Juliette Faber (Nicole Loursat), Héléna Manson (Madame Manu), André Reybaz (Émile Manu), Jean Tissier (Ducup), Jacques Grétillat (judge), Marc Dolnitz (Edmond Dossin), Marcel Mouloudji (Luska), Jacques Baumer (Rogissart), Jacques Denoël (young Destrivaux), Pierre Ringel (young Daillat), Tania Fédor (Madame Dossin), Gabrielle Fontan (Fine), Lucien Coëdel (Jo), and Noël Roquevert (Inspector Binet). Voiceover: Pierre Fresnay. This film was adapted from a recently published novel by Georges Simenon, whose bleak thrillers, mostly involving a murder and a disenchanted view of humanity, were to occupy a disproportionate amount of screentime during the occupation—three were made in 1941 (Annette et la dame blonde, La Maison des sept jeunes filles, Les Inconnus dans la maison); three in 1942 (Monsieur la Souris, Le Voyageur de la Toussaint, Picpus); two in 1943 (L’Homme de Londres, Cécile est morte); and a final one in 1944 (Les Caves du Majestic). If the three Inspector Maigret films were somewhat vitiated by the frivolous personality of Albert Préjean in the lead role, the rest emanated a sinister odor of corruption. Henri-Georges Clouzot, to whose bleak and cynical attitude the storyline of Les Inconnus (first published in 1940) not surprisingly appealed, was quick to adapt it, and production began in November 1941 under the auspices of the German production company Continental. The three major reasons for looking at it closely are all related to debates that were of importance in these years—relations between generations, the representation of the provinces, and the representation of Jewishness. The most immediately obvious of these is relations between generations. Raimu plays Loursat, an alcoholic barrister who was destroyed twenty years previously by his wife’s adultery and departure, and who has excluded Nicole, his daughter, from his life, partly because he suspects she may not be his. Discovering a dead body in the attic, he comes to learn that his daughter is involved with a “club” of marginally criminal young layabouts who routinely steal for kicks and who have been using his attic as a clubhouse. They had stolen a car and run over

36

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Big Louis, whose body they had then parked in Loursat’s attic. It is clear that one of them has shot Louis, but who and why? Most have wealthy parents who protect them, and by general agreement, the blame falls on Manu, who is the son of a poor but honest single woman and in love with Loursat’s daughter, Nicole. The first half of the film sets up the murder mystery and the oppressive atmosphere, while the second half presents the trial of Manu, whom Loursat, struggling to shrug off his alcoholism, successfully defends by trapping Manu’s buddy Luska into an admission of guilt. But if the film sets up the young as guilty of various misdemeanors, it is not in order to blame them—not even the murderer, Luska—but rather their parents, the older generation, including Loursat himself. In a grand rant during the trial scene, Loursat asserts that real guilt lies with the dysfunctional families, with the respectable and notable of this little provincial town. It is the ruling class that is implicitly on trial. They (and he) have abandoned their children and not provided the healthy family environment essential to the young, who consequently have sought an alternative form of belonging in their antisocial gang. Polite society is hypocritical, irresponsible— “too many bars, too many brothels, too much cinema [!], too few forms of healthy recreation.” Many commentators have reasonably enough seen this as a vehement denunciation of provincial life, here represented in a way that would have been unacceptable to Vichy, for whom the provinces were rather the epitome of moral order, of regeneration and revitalization. For such commentators, the film could only have been made by Continental, which could afford to ignore Vichy’s sensibilities and override any bans. Other commentators, most notably François Garçon, have also pointed out that the film carefully avoids pandering to the nascent anti-Semitism of Vichy.7 In Simenon’s book, Luska the murderer is Jewish, and his first name is Ephraïm. Clouzot and Henri Decoin suppress the incriminating name and make no mention of Jewishness. Indeed, Garçon uses this instance to propound a general principle concerning the cinema of the occupation: in contrast to the cinema of the 1930s, it systematically avoided or suppressed any representation of Jewishness. For Garçon, this is all to the honor of the filmmakers of the period, who, had they chosen the opposite course, would have found favor with the authorities, and indeed with the public, who were reputedly ecstatic at Lucien Rebatet’s diatribes against the Jews. However obliquely the film

7. Garçon, De Blum à Pétain, 180–183.

1940–1945

37

might have impugned the Jews, the collaborationist press would have seized on it and headlined it. Less than convinced that Les Inconnus called into question Vichy’s values and worldview, other critics point out that Raimu’s rant against the hypocrisy of the provincial bourgeoisie is precisely the sort of critique of which Vichy would have approved, since it appealed for a return to “that patriarchal family structure which henceforth Loursat will attempt to embody. . . . His redemption is nothing short of Pétainist.”8 The older generation has failed; France needs to recognize this and seek redemption of and through the young, especially the provincial young. Spectators might well have been encouraged to read the film in these Vichyist terms by the fact that screenings of Les Inconnus were accompanied by the short fiction Les Corrupteurs, which had been commissioned by the Société d’Études des Questions Juives, and was one of the few outright fascist and antiSemitic films produced during the war. The first of its three sections deals with a recognizably similar situation—a young man, led astray by Jewish American films, becomes a layabout and criminal.9 (The second shows a young girl aspiring to be an actress, but prostituted by Jewish producers; in the third, small investors are ruined by Jewish bankers.) But aside from its thematic content, certain techniques of Les Inconnus are worth noting. The atmospheric opening is particularly impressive—an offscreen voice intones phrases reminiscent of Paul Verlaine (“rain is falling on the city” is repeated a dozen times, with “into these grim streets,” etc.), long pans and tracks through night and rain lead us to the Loursat house and the cluttered attic where Big Louis lies dead, while the sad figure of Loursat himself slumps drunkenly, insulted by servants, and his grieving daughter wonders why he has never loved her. The trial that in the second half of the film will begin the redemption of this dysfunctional family is less eventful and technically less inventive than the first half. Throughout, intrusive punctuation is rare, and extra-diegetic music is remarkably faint and discrete. One of Decoin’s better films, Les Inconnus looks forward to his atmospheric adaptation of Simenon’s L’Homme de Londres two years later. Les Inconnus was banned at liberation, however, seen by the resistance (like Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, #19) as one of the Occupation films that had shown France in a bad light.

8. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 105, 94. 9. Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 206–207.

38

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

6. Le Lit à colonnes (The Four-Poster) Filming began 16 March 1942; released 9 July 1942 103 min, b&w Dir Roland Tual; Prod Synops; Scr Charles Spaak and Jean Cocteau, from the novel by Louise de Vilmorin; Cinematog Pierre Montazel; Music Jean Françaix; Art dir Serge Pimenoff; Cost Christian Dior; Sound René Louge; Edit Yvonne Martin; Act Fernand Ledoux (Porey-Cave), Jean Marais (Rémy Bonvent), Odette Joyeux (Marie-Dorée), Valentine Tessier (Madame Porey-Cave), Mila Parély (Yada, the mistress), Jean Tissier (Jacquot, her conductor friend), Pierre Larquey (DixDoigts, a jailer), Georges Marchal (Olivier), and Michèle Alfa (Aline). Le Lit à colonnes is a fine film that deserves to be better known. Produced and directed by Roland Tual, it is based on a novel by Louise de Vilmorin. Although this was Tual’s first attempt at both production and direction, he had had, with his wife, Denise, a long association with the cinema. Heavily involved in the surrealist movement around 1925, he subsequently moved in the same circles as Jacques and Pierre Prévert, Yves Allégret, Alexandre Trauner, and Maurice Bacquet. Appointed director of the Billancourt studios, Tual appeared as director of production in the credits of an astutely selected series of films—Mollenard, La Bête humaine, Remorques, La Piste du Nord, and L’Espoir. On the basis of this experience, at the beginning of the occupation he was appointed to COIC, which consisted almost entirely of past and/or future producers. The following year, in order to conform to Vichy requirements, the Tuals reorganized Synops Films as a production company to produce Le Lit à colonnes and his next film, together with Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du péché (#16). Le Lit à colonnes may seem an unlikely scenario for a committed surrealist. It was initially suggested by Gaston Gallimard, and rapidly agreed to by Louise de Vilmorin who saw its production as a pretext to return from her Hungarian “exile” to Paris and her Parisian friends. Charles Spaak’s adaptation had to be significantly revamped by Jean Cocteau, and when the proposed directors proved unavailable, Tual himself took it over.10 It is not hard to see its importance to an occupied country yearning for liberation. The story has a lot in common with Beethoven’s Fidelio, which, of course, is based on Léonore and re-

10. See Tual, Au cœur du temps, 244–251.

1940–1945

39

counts historical events under the French revolutionary terror. Florestan, an unjustly imprisoned man, is there sustained by the love of his faithful wife, who visits him in male disguise, while his dream of liberation (ultimately realized) is subsumed into a theme of national liberation and general human fraternity. Here, Rémy is likewise unjustly imprisoned, or at least is imprisoned for an unjust duration, and in the charge of a ruthless prison director, Porey-Cave, and a more compassionate jailer Dix-Doigts (equivalents of the opera’s Pizarro and Rocco). Rémy’s faithful partner, Aline, visits him in a nunlike disguise. What de Vilmorin has grafted onto this basic structure is the artistic theme: the imprisoned Rémy is a musician (Florestan in Fidelio is, of course, necessarily this too), and endures his seclusion by composing songs and piano pieces inspired by the jailer’s beautiful daughter, Marie-Dorée, glimpsed through the bars of his cell. Meanwhile, Porey-Cave, angry that his mistress is obsessed with a violinistconductor in town, wants urgently to find out what it is that seems to endow artists with this power to fascinate women. He encourages his prisoner’s talents in order to find out, and drifts into allowing the resultant compositions to be credited to himself. Wife, daughter, mistress, and townsfolk are all amazed at his unsuspected musical abilities, which soon include an opera, Le Lit à colonnes, based on a tale about brigands that Rémy’s mother used to tell him. Its success will allow Porey-Cave’s daughter to marry the man she loves, a count, whose mother has hitherto disdained the prison director’s family. But Rémy discovers that his works have been misappropriated and that his muse is about to marry. He breaks out of jail (so easily that one wonders why he hadn’t thought of doing it before) and kills Porey-Cave. Any potential allegory of contemporary conditions is carefully distanced by setting the story in 1880 (likewise, Léonore is set in historical Spain). Nevertheless, this denouement was too controversial for the authorities, who saw all too well the danger of any such vengeance by prisoners. As Jacques Siclier pointed out, under a regime whose prisons were overflowing with political adversaries, this ending posed a distinctly undesirable example. Spaak was obliged to modify it: Rémy accosts Porey-Cave accusingly (“You’ve stolen my soul”); Porey-Cave backs away from him in alarm and falls over the balustrade. The police burst in and shoot Rémy, who dies whispering “Marie-Dorée.” The artist’s talents are loosely associated with religion and more closely with nature in what is an unmistakable allegory: Dix-Doigts, the jailer played by Pierre Larquey, breeds pigeons in an empty cell. The birds are locked away just like the political prisoners. In short, the film juxtaposes prison, jailer, and police to liberty, creativity, religion, and nature—a somewhat loaded opposition—asserting the former are the worse criminals while the latter have the truer mo40

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

rality. Moreover, in an elaboration meant perhaps to appeal to Vichy, we learn that Rémy had been a peasant, tilling the land until locked away for a hunting accident that resulted in death, and that his female visitor, Aline, has bought the farm and is looking after it for him. No better actor than Fernand Ledoux could have been chosen to play PoreyCave, whose constantly understated feelings the stony-faced Ledoux incites us to imagine—not least when he begins taking credit for appropriated music, and even more when he begins to actually view himself as an artist. The role of Rémy had originally been offered by de Vilmorin (informally and against the producers’ wishes) to Alain Cuny, who fortunately was unable to take it up. Jean Marais had, however, all along been the producers’ (and of course Cocteau’s) choice. It was a distinctly controversial choice, and not only because he was relatively unknown. Marais’s loving association with Cocteau was no secret, and according to various reports, he was despised by Germans and their collaborator allies as an example of the incipient decadent France. Perhaps to counter this one-sided view of his sexuality, Marais recounted in his memoirs his nocturnal encounters during the shoot with an enthusiastic Mila Parély, whose noisy participation penetrated the thin hotel walls where the cast was staying and led to pointed jokes at their expense from fellow actors. But Marais took a special delight in the role because it reminded him of an analogous plagiarism executed by his bête noire, the fascist critic Alain Laubreaux, whom Marais had recently beaten up publicly for his vicious criticism of a Cocteau play.11 Clearly the quality of the music that Rémy is credited with composing is crucial to the credibility of his role and to the moral oppositions being established, and Jean Françaix (more generally known for his oratorios) does the film proud (though de Vilmorin hated it). Roger Régent remembered in particular the languorous waltz, and ranked the film music as among the very best of the war years.12 There is a classically contrapuntal moment when a bland waltz carries on regardless of the climactic confrontation then taking place, which results in the protagonist’s death. Finally, it is possible to see in this film the beginnings of a wartime shift from prewar forms of realism toward forms of fantasy—toward mythic histories, legends, and fairy tales, those timeless metaphorical narratives that were to dominate the coming few years, at once because they were the only safe forms of speech and because they were the only way to speak (however indirectly and riskily) about contemporary reality.

11. Marais, Histoires de ma vie. 12. Régent, Cinéma de France.

1940–1945

41

7. La Nuit fantastique The Fantastic Night Filming began 1 Dec 1941; released 10 July 1942 103 min, b&w Dir Marcel L’Herbier; Prod UTC; Scr Louis Chavance and Maurice Henry; Dial Henri Jeanson; Cinematog Pierre Montazel; Music Maurice Thiriet; Art dir René Moulaert and Marcel Magniez; Sound Maurice Carrouet; Edit Émilienne Nélissen and Suzanne Catelain; Act Fernand Gravey (Denis), Micheline Presle (Irène), Saturnin Fabre (Thalès), Jean Parédès (Cadet), Charles Granval (Adelbert), Michel Vitold (Boris), Marcel Lévesque (Tellier), and Bernard Blier (Lucien). This film would be worth including purely for the exhilarating effect its release had on the wider community in the “famine-grey days” of the occupation. As Roger Régent wrote, “At last a film that captured the wave-length of the cinema.” For Jacques Siclier, “Barely recovered from the trauma of 1940 the French cinema could thus reaffirm its greatness by way of visual and aural experimentation.” Pierre Leprohon recalls the fine enthusiasm it aroused—Marcel L’Herbier was rediscovering his youth and, at the same time, the youth of the cinema itself, “reminding people that there is a way of telling stories that is specific to cinema”—while for Francis Courtade, it seems one of the few brief moments of respite from “the boy-scout cretinisation of [Vichy].”13 In addition, however, it is memorable as yet another precursor of that series of wartime films based on dream, hallucination, fantasy, myth and legend that came to seem (despite their relatively small number—about ten, most of which are included here) a product peculiar to the times and circumstances of their production. L’Herbier had not found adaptation to the commercial pressures of sound at all easy, and his recent prewar films had tended toward the pompous historical “chronicle.” Paradoxically, the war was to provide an opportunity for a productive liberation and renewal. In large part this was due to Louis Chavance, who proposed the script to L’Herbier and who had a proclivity for the fantastic, the whimsical, and the extravagant. A critic in the 1920s with the Revue du cinéma, Chavance had edited Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), had worked as assistant on Charles Trénet’s first film, had hawked (unsuccessfully) since 1933 the script that was to become Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (#19), and would adapt in 1943 Le Baron fantôme. Chavance’s script for La Nuit fantastique wrapped a relatively 13. Ibid., 71; Siclier, La France de Pétain, 142; Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 42–43; Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 15.

42

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

straightforward narrative in the trappings of surrealism and a sort of comic expressionism—movements that the commercial pressures attendant on the coming of sound had seemed to banish definitively from the cinema. It presents us with Denis, a student exhausted by work in the markets, hallucinating while half asleep about a dream-woman. A real woman resembling his dream-woman trips over his feet as she rushes past; he shambles after her, discovers she is being forced into a loveless marriage by her father, and rescues her. But all the interest of the film is in the surrealist elaboration of this simple narrative, and in the technical means mobilized to convey that surrealist atmosphere. Already in the opening images the borderline between hallucination and reality is blurred: Denis dreams the woman, she appears, and neither Denis nor the spectator is entirely sure thereafter of her actual status, not least because a poster on his wall has already threatened to transmogrify into her. The vision he follows turns out to be called Irène, and her father, Thalès, is a magician, which is further pretext for weird sets in the Académie de Magie, for visual trickery, and for odd images. (Also, incidentally, for odd acting, because Thalès is played by Saturnin Fabre, notorious for his fiercely hypnotic acting style.) Again, to escape being forced to marry her father’s assistant, Irène is pretending to be mad, a pretext for wild and inconsecutive conversations. Furthermore, that evening at Thalès’s performance (amid the Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre!), Denis gets drunk, but not so drunk he does not register that Irène has really been “disappeared” in her father’s trick sarcophagus. Denis follows and saves her, taking her to a blind professor’s flat, but she is again kidnapped, leaving a trail of her clothes for him to follow. He does so, finding that Thalès has locked her away in an asylum amid the mad inmates. Searching for her, he releases all the insane, escapes with her first onto the roof, then by bicycle/magic carpet to a basement nightclub where some (but not all) of the clients are dummies. Drugged by one of the villain’s assistants, Denis is returned to the market and dumped where the film began. Has it all been a dream? Certainly sleep, exhaustion, dream, hallucination, sleight of hand, magic, drunkenness, drugs, feigned and real madness, dummies resembling humans, and humans resembling dummies—all are conducive to the representation of borderline states of perception, and the film exploits these to the full. Special effects generate superimpositions, distortions of sound and of image (at one stage, the sound is reversed, as in Vigo’s Zéro de conduite, 1933), and an image that divides and subdivides. There is play with echoes and with clocks/time shifts, and inevitably an array of extravagant punctuation forms. L’Herbier saw all this as a play on Blaise Pascal’s conjecture that, “since half of life is passed in sleep, who knows if the other half, where we believe we are awake, is not just another sleep, from which we wake when we seem to go to sleep.” 1940–1945

43

If all this is surrealist, it also recalls Caligari and other expressionist films, not just because of stark images, distortions, and whited rooms, but because of the rooftop escape, which is a direct homage. The film was dedicated by L’Herbier to the memory of Georges Méliès, the supreme trickster of the early cinema, though in his later memoirs, he preferred to see it, on the contrary, as a homage to Louis Lumière, a sort of “féerie réaliste,” with the emphasis on realism— using “real” sets and “real” events but generating out of them a surrealist experience for the viewer.14 There can be no doubt that L’Herbier exploited Chavance’s script to rediscover the joy of experimentation that had prevailed during the 1920s in French cinema. But if the film looks back to L’Herbier’s and to the cinema’s past, it also looks forward, in quite concrete ways, to Marcel Carné’s Juliette, ou la clé des songes (#69), and to L’Année dernière à Marienbad. And above all, it would have had an intensely contemporary relevance: it is not hard to see in the visionary female figure with drifting draperies that Denis pursues through Egyptian antiquities, the Académie de Magie, and a madhouse a reference to Marianne, La Semeuse, symbol of the French Republic. It is national liberation that he pursues—an interpretation that L’Herbier himself was (naturally enough) happy to confirm in his memoirs. And if the name Thalès may have been chosen for no more than its vaguely exotic evocation of a Greek philosopher, the name that the visionary woman acquires—Irène—is of course Greek for “peace.” However obliquely, her name and the manner of her representation constituted surely one of the most interesting cinematic references in the early years of the war to the parlous state of the nation and to the hopes (and fears) of those experiencing the occupation.

8. Le Mariage de Chiffon Chiffon’s Wedding Filming began 20 August 1941; released 6 August 1942 103 min, b&w Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Industrie Cinématographique (Pierre Guerlais); Scr Jean Aurenche and Maurice Blondeau, from the novel by Gyp; Cinematog Jean Isnard and Philippe Agostini; Music Roger Desormières; Art dir Jacques Krauss; Sound Robert Ivonnet; Edit Raymond Lamy; Act Odette Joyeux (Chiffon), André Luguet (Duke Gérard d’Aubières), Jacques Dumesnil (Uncle Marc), Suzanne

14. See L’Herbier, La Tête qui tourne, 283–287, for this and the following reference.

44

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dantès (Madame de Bray), Louis Seigner (Philippe de Bray), Georges Vitray (Van Doren), Pierre Larquey (Jean), Robert Le Vigan (Me Blondin), Monette Dinay (Alice de Liron), Raymond Bussières, and Bernard Blier. Also Douce Love Story Filming began 12 April 1943; released 10 November 1943 104 min, b&w Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Pierre Guerlais; Scr Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, from the novel by Michel Davet; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Jacques Krauss; Sound Robert Ivonnet; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Odette Joyeux (Douce), Madeleine Robinson (Irène), Roger Pigaut (Fabien), Jean Debucourt (Douce’s father), Marguerite de Moreno (the Countess), and Gabrielle Fontan (Estelle). Claude Autant-Lara directed three generically similar films during the occupation years, of which the third, Douce, was generally considered the best. Roger Régent described it as a near masterpiece, and Jacques Siclier thought it the most provocative of the three.15 On the basis of these three films, Autant-Lara came to be categorized with the “third wave” of directors (following the first wave of silent directors and the second of early sound directors). Yet he was no newcomer to the cinema, having been a set-decorator from 1919, notably for Marcel L’Herbier, assistant to René Clair from 1923, director of French versions in Hollywood for MGM (Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks), and “technical director” for Maurice Lehmann from 1937 to 1939 (and probably the effective director). In fact, Autant-Lara had directed the first widescreen film with anamorphic lens in 1927, together with Ciboulette in 1935 and My Partner Master Davis in England (1936). Yet twenty years in the industry had failed to provide for him the desired breakthrough to financial independence and public recognition that these three wartime films were finally to achieve. All three are, on the surface, delicate, romantic fairy tales—costume dramas set between 1865 and 1905, a period that they reconstruct with a meticulous precision deriving from Autant-Lara’s Beaux-Arts training as a painter-decorator and his years at his parents’ theatrical “laboratory,” Art et Action, designing costumes and sets. To make the three films, he put together a team consisting of the scriptwriter Jean Aurenche, the art director Jacques Krauss, the cinematog-

15. Régent, Cinéma de France, 213–217; Siclier, La France de Pétain, 225–236.

1940–1945

45

rapher Philippe Agostini, and the actress Odette Joyeux, whose “emploi” (typecasting) is evident fom the names of the roles she was to embody—Chiffon, Zélie, Douce, Sylvie, Elfie. In the first of the three, Chiffon meets and is to marry an elderly military man but is secretly in love with her (only slightly less elderly) Uncle Marc, a pioneer aviator. Her preference is revealed in a page of her diary that comes to the eyes of her prospective husband, who tactfully withdraws. The tenuous social commentary of the novel on which the film is based was greatly expanded by the team to make of the film an ironic critique of the hypocrisy of society, and to make of the protagonist a rebel, a “sauvage,” a “sale gosse.” Within this schema, there are several tropes typical of the time—it is a coming of age film in which an adolescent is matched with not one but two elderly men; the proprieties are embodied in a shrewish old woman, Chiffon’s mother, and of course the film focuses on that mythical moment when aviators were assuming the role of romantic hero. Despite its slightly formulaic nature, this is a thoroughly charming film, which it is possible to like even more than the much vaunted Douce. In the intervening film, Lettres d’amour, which was less successful than the framing two, Zélie is chief, in the small village of “La Boutique,” of the clan of those who work for a living, and thus opposed to “La Société,” the clan of the aristocrats, so the class thematics are clearly more explicit than in Chiffon. In Douce, Joyeux again plays the leading role of forceful, rebellious heroine, a role that again is deliberately at odds with the dated atmosphere. The class opposition is powerfully foregrounded: Douce is in love with Fabien, the family’s groom, which horrifies her shrewish, domineering grandmother, the countess, because “we are a family of standing”—we employ the lower classes, we don’t marry them. A marriage alliance would be socially and morally unacceptable. What she doesn’t know is that Fabien is already sexually involved with Douce’s governess, Irène, who in turn is the object of desire of Douce’s one-legged father. These cross-class liaisons between an aristocratic family and its servants can seem to threaten to undermine the social order. In a crucial scene, the old countess takes Irène and Fabien with her to visit a needy family to whom she offers charity. She counsels the family to patience and resignation, whereupon Fabien intervenes to counsel on the contrary impatience and revolt. This altercation captures the central conflict of the film between those who protect or submit to the existing order, and those who wish to disregard or demolish it. Douce is of the latter camp, which is why she is fascinated by Fabien. She elopes with him, but that night, as she is leaving him to return home, a fire breaks out that consumes her.

46

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

It is easy to see why Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier would admire a film “in which [the heroine] becomes an emblem of female resistance and revolt,” and which “shows that social oppression and patriarchal oppression are two sides of the one coin.”16 It is also easy to see why in the circumstances, the Aurenche/Autant-Lara team would have thought it wise to shelter their potentially revolutionary theme behind a costume drama in order to avoid the risk of censorship. As the director said in an interview at the time, “A certain temporal distance is essential if one wants to express oneself freely.”17 Nevertheless, Vichy required that Fabien’s counsel to the oppressed (Roger Pigaut, who played Fabien, was later revealed as a communist in the resistance) be cut from the film before it could be screened; it was reinstated at the liberation. The British censors, incidentally, required that the whole ending be rearranged, leaving Douce—no fire, no death—still alive and staring moodily out of the window of her family home. In this British version, class barriers are absolute. But even Autant-Lara was unhappy with the existing ending, for the opposite reason: it substituted a moralistic, punitive ending for that of the novel, where Fabien died helping Douce to escape. There are then continuities among these three films of period, setting, costume, character, and theme. Moreover, there are recurrent Freudian instances of “forgotten” gloves that allow Chiffon and d’Aubières to meet, and Irène’s “forgotten” umbrella that Douce abandons when she flees the confessional. Then there is Uncle Marc’s broken arm to reinforce Freudian interpretations, not to mention Douce’s father’s missing leg and Fabien’s damaged hand. These, then, are all carefully thought-out films with a coherent program, but if Douce is undoubtedly more ambitious and important than its predecessors, it is arguably less coherent than Chiffon—perhaps because, in the political context of the time, it was not possible to carry its revolutionary thematics to their logical conclusion. In none of the endings can the mythic escape to a new life in Canada be realized.

9. L’Assassin habite au 21 The Murderer Lives at Number 21 Filming began 4 May 1942; released 7 August 1942 84 min, b&w

16. See Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 184–190. 17. Jean-Pierre Vivet, “Le Présent et l’avenir du cinéma français,” La Revue de cinéma, no. 6, Spring 1947, 59.

1940–1945

47

Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot; Prod Continental Films; Scr Clouzot and StanislasAndré Steeman, from the latter’s novel; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Maurice Yvain; Art dir André Andrejew; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Christian Gaudin; Act Pierre Fresnay (Commissaire Wens), Suzy Delair (Mila-Milou), Jean Tissier (Lallah Poor), Noël Roquevert (Dr. Linz), Pierre Larquey (Colin), René Génin (the drunkard), Huguette Vivier (Yana), Odette Talazac (Madame Point), Maximilienne (Mademoiselle Cuq), Raymond Bussières (Turlot), and Léon Bellères (the impresario). This was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s first official film as director. Between 1931 and 1933, however, he had subdirected in Germany the French versions of several UFA films, and scripted and adapted several others. After a long illness (four years in a mountain sanatorium), he resumed work in the late 1930s, contributing in all to fifteen films in the course of the decade, mostly for Adolphe Osso, and directed by Anatole Litvak, Victor Tourjansky, Jacques de Baroncelli, Léon Mathot, Carmine Gallone, and others. In Germany he had worked with Raoul Ploquin and had earned the respect of Alfred Greven and the management of UFA, so it is not surprising that under the occupation, he was appointed artistic director to Continental Films, where in its first year of operation he adapted Le Dernier des six (1941) for Georges Lacombe, then Les Inconnus dans la maison (#5) for Henri Decoin. The success of these films was such as to guarantee that the policier (police procedural/thriller) would figure prominently in wartime production. Le Dernier des six had been adapted from another Stanislas-André Steeman novel, Six hommes morts, with Pierre Fresnay as Commissaire Wens and Suzy Delair as his partner/assistant (in fact, the character of Mila-Milou was invented for the film, and Delair was Clouzot’s partner, but reputedly chosen for this role by Greven). Thus, when Clouzot adapted another Steeman novel as L’Assassin habite au 21, he naturally chose the same actors, not least because he had a good relationship with Fresnay, having adapted Le Duel for him to act in and direct in 1939. Clouzot’s decision to direct this film himself was clearly motivated by a profound belief in the desirability of an auteurist cinema: as he said to Pierre Leprohon, “There are twenty ways of having an actress say Yes. Who can better direct her than the person who scripted that Yes, and invested it with a meaning of which he alone is aware. . . . I don’t see any sense in a director who is not his own scriptwriter.”18

18. Quoted in Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinéma et la presse, 130–131.

48

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Both the Steeman adaptations are “playful” policiers in which the interest lies in a trick of the plot. In the first (an Agatha Christie “ten little Indians” series of murders), the mystery of the killer’s identity is solved when Wens realizes that one of the men who has supposedly been murdered had in fact faked his death and is still alive, murdering the others to collect their communal funds. In L’Assassin habite au 21, everyone knows from early on that the murderer is one of the boarders at No. 21 rue Junot (the Pension Mimosas, no doubt in homage to Jacques Feyder), but each time one person is suspected and arrested, the murders resume and each has to be released. Finally Wens realizes that three of them have been in cahoots, and there is a trio of murderers. Both the Steeman adaptations are aware of their generic responsibilities in sets and lighting, beginning with paranoia and threat in the rain-drenched cobbled streets of a nocturnal city, with splashes and pools of light and firstperson camera. But both are again “playful” rather than somber and sinister in their use of these techniques, closer to Agatha Christie in mood than to Mickey Spillane. The main source of this lightening of tone is Suzy Delair’s playing of Mila-Milou. Constantly over the top, at once vulgar, vivacious, aggressive, raucous, truculent, pushy, and lovable, Mila supports Wens, tracks him to the lion’s den of murderers at No. 21, then saves him by following a trail of calling cards he had dropped as he was being hustled away by the murderous trio. She is supported in this lightening of the mood by Wens himself, whose improbable undercover disguise as a Protestant pastor is the source of several nice gags, and whose recurrent phrase “Perfectly normal” becomes more and more hilarious as affairs become less and less normal, as well as by René Génin as an inveterate drunkard and Raymond Bussières as a heavily intoxicated journalist whose melancholy rendition of “J’emmerde les gendarmes” (Fuck the cops) while sitting atop a lamppost is not appreciated by the cop at its base. But most of all, the mood of sardonic mockery is established by the eccentric pensioners of the Pension Mimosas—the blind boxer and his seductive nurse; the aging spinstercum-writer (Mademoiselle Cuq) whose “brilliant” idea for a novel based on the murders happening around her provides a lightly reflexive note—but most of all, by the three murderers themselves: Colin, the mechanical dollmaker whose faceless creations echo the faceless nature of the killer; Linz, the glum retired doctor/abortionist; and Lallah Poor, the astrologer/magician who sleeps in his star-spangled sarcophagus. Despite their common purpose, these three are constantly sniping at one another in a sub-malicious way, exhibiting a mutual suspicion and distrust that Wens exploits in the climactic scene, set in a deserted construction site as carefully staged and lit as the opening scenes. The three are about to murder him;

1940–1945

49

each has his preferred method. Wens says he would like to be killed by the genius who thought up their collaborative procedure. Each claims to be that genius, and the resultant squabble delays his execution long enough for Mila-Milou and the police to burst in and rescue him. And in line with that long-established trope of private crisis versus public gaiety, this comically sinister climax takes place in parallel with the communal celebrations in the Pension Mimosas welcoming the released trio (of murderers!) back into the fold. But if the murders are treated in a basically lighthearted way, and if jocularity reigns, there is nevertheless an implicitly more serious aspect to the plot that is gestured toward from time to time, related to the pessimistic view of human nature for which Clouzot was subsequently to become known, and perhaps even to contemporary events. We hear throwaway lines to the effect that all men are monsters, that humanity as a whole is despicable and should be wiped out; that guilt is universal and that the community is beset by evil: “But darkness will not always reign on the earth; the Lord will exact vengeance.” Such portentous, apocalyptic pronouncements are facilitated by Wens’s disguise as a Protestant pastor but can retrospectively be read as auteurist or even as resistant discourse. Again, Roger Régent, referring to the subsequent proliferation of policiers, said that, “Beyond the public’s undoubted taste for such adventures, works of this sort offered producers the clear advantage of not compromising themselves. . . . Unrelated to any contemporary events . . . they could happily film the doings of Commissaire Maigret or Inspector Grey.”19 But as the above implies, in retrospect, the contrary case can also be made, however cautiously, and the film’s critique be seen as targeted at the occupying forces. Moreover, arguably it is primarily in times of social crisis that film noir and its generic relatives flourish. Any debate about contemporary relevance can, however, be seen as a little ironic, if only because the original Steeman novel is set in London, and the murderous trio’s pseudonym is not Durand but Smith. The (voluntary) suppression of any reference to Britain in the occupation cinema resulted in London’s “evil atmosphere” being transferred to France, and implicitly attributed to the German occupation of France.

10. Le Voile bleu Remade as The Blue Veil (1951) Filming began 20 April 1942; released 18 November 1942 112 min, b&w

19. Régent, Cinéma de France, 30.

50

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dir Jean Stelli; Prod CGC; Scr François Campaux; Cinematog René Gaven; Music A. Theurer and A. Desenclos; Art dir René Renoux; Sound René Lécuyer; Edit Michèle David; Act Gaby Morlay (Louise Jarraud), Pierre Larquey (Antoine Lancelot), Fernand Charpin (Émile Perrette), Elvire Popescu (Mona Lorenza, the artist), Marcelle Géniat (Madame Breuilly), Renée Devillers (Madame Forneret), Jean Clarieux (Henri Forneret), André Alerme (Ernest Volnar-Bucel), Primerose Perret (Georgette Volnar-Bucel), Georges Grey (Gérard Volnar-Bucel), Jeanne Fusier-Gir (Mademoiselle Eugénie), Aimé Clariond (the judge), Jean Bobillot (Julien), and Noël Roquevert (Inspector Duval). In Roger Régent’s account of the occupation cinema, Le Voile bleu was brusquely dismissed as “an abominable melodrama . . . in which every possible means, however illicit, was mobilized to manipulate the viewer’s emotions.”20 Equally vicious about it thirty-five years later, Jacques Siclier conceded that it was nevertheless essential viewing because it had come to typify the maudlin excesses of Vichy’s cultural influence. In it, Gaby Morlay “was consecrated as a symbol, the dominant female figure of a moral order in which maternity, the devotion of woman to the family hearth, and her spirit of self-sacrifice were exalted. As a film it bears witness to this whole era.”21 While I agree entirely with these negative evaluations, it is nevertheless true, as Siclier wrote, that it is important to understand why it had such an enormous appeal to the viewing public—or rather to a certain public, since when it opened in exclusive release in Paris, weak attendance gave no indication of its ultimate success as the top earner of 1942.22 In Paris general release, however, it was second only to Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (#12). It was not to the wealthy and relatively sophisticated “first-night” audience that it appealed, but to those in the suburbs and (judging by its ultimate ranking) to provincial and rural audiences as well—to people, that is, who still held strongly to traditional, conservative values and were more likely to be swayed by emotional responses than critical judgment. The film recounts a lifetime’s devotion to her charges by Louise, a nursegoverness whose husband died in World War I. Faithful to his memory, she refuses to remarry despite several offers, but rather assumes the blue veil, traditional vestment of her trade, and thus becomes pseudo-mother to a multiplicity of children in need of care and affection. The emotional climax of the film has

20. Ibid., 83. 21. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 99–101. 22. Siclier asserted this without supporting evidence.

1940–1945

51

one of her former “sons,” Gérard, now a doctor, discovering her—poor, aging, and despairing—in the hospital where she has ended up as a result of trying to protect one of her wards. He summons all her former “children” to pay grateful homage to her. If it was ever possible to view this tearful melodrama with pleasure or appreciation, it certainly no longer is, yet it is essential viewing for anyone interested in the sociology of wartime France, in Vichy’s reform program, and in the profound conservatism of the bulk of the French people at that time. In support of the National Revolution, Le Voile bleu effectively condemns the moral turpitude of the Third Republic (the 1920s and 1930s), since Gaby Morlay’s Louise has to deal with the moral inadequacies and irresponsibilities of those Third Republic parents whose children she rescues and guides to a more honorable end. In this it picks up where Les Inconnus dans la maison (#5) left off. The parents are variously guilty of greed, of adultery, and of arrogance—in general, of a selfishness that leads them to put their own pleasure ahead of the proper care of their children. Most pointed among the portraits of irresponsible parents are first, the actress, strutting her stuff while the film cross-cuts back and forth to her abandoned children, whose First Communion she doesn’t bother to attend, and who are inevitably growing more and more attached to Louise; and second, the couple who head off to colonial duties in Vietnam for what turns out to be nine years, while the son, left behind with Louise, experiences a rare and potentially fatal illness. When they finally return, Louise tries to flee with the boy, by now effectively her son, but the police oblige her to return him. Undeserving, the parents nevertheless have all the rights in law. All these families are establishment families, traditional or nouveaux riches, and the film can easily be read as a concerted attack on the urban bourgeoisie, which may be one reason why it was such a success in suburban and provincial release. The climax of this tearful narrative takes place at Christmas: surrounded by her many children, Louise discovers that Gérard himself has two children, who will be his Christmas present to her. Where she had been lonely and despairing, she now has a new role as their nurse-governess, and Gérard reverently invests her anew with her blue veil, indicative of a quasi-religious calling. This, in fact, foreshadows Morlay’s subsequent role in Les Ailes blanches (Robert Péguy, 1942; the title refers to the “white wings” of the religious headdress) where she does indeed play a nun. As Vichy had decreed, motherhood is sacred, and children are the world’s best Christmas present. For Siclier, the sociological import of the film extends even further, since he saw it as having appealed to a whole generation of women widowed by World War I, and also to those hundreds of thousands of women left to bring up their

52

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

children in solitude while their husbands languished in prisoner-of-war camps or labored at Obligatory Work Service in Germany. As ever, even more vicious in their critique, Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier describe Louise as More judge than figure of charity, subsuming the values of the patriarchy, which is no longer up to the task [because of the defeat], and leading [all these establishment figures] through her inflexible kindness to reveal their inadequacies. Incarnation of Judeo-Christian guilt, she gets her way by camouflaging under an appearance of submission a figure of authority. The blue veil of the nurse and the white wings of the nun . . . put her beyond criticism; universal mother, she renounces the trivial task of earthly motherhood . . . just as Marshall Pétain, childless, draws from Verdun that paternal dignity which he extends to all French citizens.23 Contemporary posters showed children clustered around Pétain just as in the final scene of this film they are clustered around Louise. However much this hokum might have been to Vichy’s taste, it was beneath the contempt of hard-nosed, profascist collaborators such as Lucien Rebatet, who ridiculed it for its “quasi-obscene appeals to the emotions.”24 But if its main interest now is sociological, it is also of note as an early example of that typically wartime tendency toward episodic narratives contained within a more or less coherent narrative frame. Between World Wars I and II, Louise tends five separate sets of children, each allocated its own episode. And perhaps because of this fragmented storyline, the presence of connective punctuation is overwhelming—90 instances in 100 minutes!

11. Les Visiteurs du soir The Night Visitors Filming began 27 April 1942; released 5 December 1942 123 min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod André Paulvé; Scr Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche; Cinematog Roger Hubert; Music Maurice Thiriet (and Joseph Kosma, clandes-

23. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 100–101. 24. Je suis partout, 4 December 1942.

1940–1945

53

tinely); Art dir Georges Wakhévitch (and Alexandre Trauner, clandestinely); Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Henri Rust; Act Jules Berry (the devil), Fernand Ledoux (Baron Hugues), Arletty and Alain Cuny (Dominique and Gilles, the devil’s envoys), Marcel Herrand (Renaud), and Marie Déa (Anne). Les Visiteurs du soir is basically a costume drama set in medieval France. This genre had been extremely popular during the 1930s—indeed, since the days of the Film d’Art, around 1910. At least 10 percent of 1938’s production belonged to it, and it was to dominate likewise during the war years. It was, however, normal for the material to be drawn from French history, notably the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, rather than as here, an invented, quasi-medieval “legendary” setting. Nevertheless, the overall narrative structure of this film is readily recognizable: outside agents (here, two agents of the devil) intrude on a hitherto closed community, and the resultant clash of values causes a radical disruption to that community. Jealousy and death ensue, but love finally defeats the devil’s strategies. Despite the lovers being turned to stone, their hearts beat on. As often happens in such stories, the diabolical, alien values of the unwelcome intruders turn out unexpectedly to be all too present in the closed community—effectively, the intruders externalize an internal threat—yet the disruption they cause triggers a revolt that proves unexpectedly salutary to that community. It is class and gender relations that were usually the main target of such alien intrusions in prewar years, especially those relations that seemed right and normal to the bourgeoisie but that under the sardonic gaze of an outsider can seem stultifying and oppressive. Here, however, the allegory of a diabolical agency overtaking and oppressing a France where it finds a nation of all-too-willing accomplices would inevitably come to be read retrospectively as political, a reference to the German occupation. For strategic reasons, however, the film presents itself rather as moral, and is perhaps even more interesting when read as sexual. I know of no contemporary evidence to suggest that the allegorical devil and his agents were read by wartime audiences as Hitler and Germany, though in a more general sense, the oppressive atmosphere of many wartime films can retrospectively be read as a product of a time of paranoia. Roger Régent, writing in 1946 and lauding the film to the skies, made no mention of a political reading, which would be distinctly odd if it had been at all widely recognized, and if Georges Sadoul did so fifteen years later, it is for well-known ideological purposes and without conviction. Jacques Siclier, fifteen years later again, mentioned Sadoul’s claim only to mock it, suggesting reasonably enough that to embody Hitler in the person of a rather comically diabolical Jules Berry would have been to trivialize the threat he represented. The first concrete evidence of such a reading that I have found, however, is a car54

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

toon from 1945 representing the lovers whose hearts beat on despite the devil’s machinations as France and De Gaulle, while the foiled devil is Pierre Laval (or perhaps Pétain).25 The film itself represents the threat introduced by the devil’s two agents (Gilles and Dominique) in moral terms. They are damned because unable to feel any true emotion: “Tout prendre, rien donner” (Taking everything, giving nothing), or as Gilles himself says later in a moment of revulsion, “No one really loves anyone anywhere in this world; everyone pretends; these [words and sentiments] are just so many traps, and true happiness consists in avoiding such traps.” Although Gilles eventually escapes this emotional deprivation (how could a troubadour not), Dominique continues throughout the film to mouth such mechanical and insincere phrases, thus picking up on the theme of acting and insincerity that pervaded the previous decade. Then, as here, those mouthing such sentiments to seduce and delude others were known as “monsters,” a metaphor realized literally here in the physical deformities of the devil’s dwarfs. The film then presents two kinds of love—a true and a false love—and the final victory of true love as the hearts beat on—a rather unsubtle symbol that, rather than suggest, belabors. But if the film presents itself as a moral rather than a political conflict, it is most fascinating in its preoccupation with sexuality and gender. It assumes a set of underlying gender oppositions that are rigorously conventional—men are associated with hunting and with war, while women are allocated the more pacific and affective virtues. Women are pure and the source of life, like water, while the devil (who is, of course, male) ensures that blood will stain the pure spring water and that death will intervene to destroy all loving relationships. In this sense, the devil is already master of the castle long before his envoys arrive, or rather, the apparent opposition between outsider and insider is undermined by the fact that the devil’s agents awaken within the castle community an opposition already latent. The masculine principle is already excessively present therein: it is a world out of kilter, a world “without women.” The death of the baronne has deprived it of all human warmth, and the only remaining female protagonist is destined for a loveless marriage. Moreover, the devil’s envoys, while ultimately recognized as male and female, are introduced as two youths. In this perverted world, even the females are in appearance male. The ambiguous sexuality of Arletty, like the ambiguous gender of her name, Dominique, is crucial to this aspect of the film, since it introduces a troubled perver-

25. Régent, Cinéma de France; Sadoul, Le Cinéma français, 91–92; Siclier, La France de Pétain, 143–144.

1940–1945

55

sity into the men’s response to her. While she is still nominally a young man, Renaud responds sexually to the sight of “his” legs, so the subsequent “moment outside time” when he courts her as a woman can be read as a sort of illicit sexual fantasy. It is also in the form of a young man that she arouses the baron, whose hand to “his” breast betrays Dominique to be in fact a woman. Only after that, still nominally a man, does she reveal to Renaud that she is in fact a woman—but too late, since the ambiguity is by now firmly in place. It is over this man/woman that the baron and Renaud fight, and it is in the guise of a man that she leads the baron off to perdition. As the baron most appropriately says when the devil appears at the castle door, “Vous êtes ici chez vous” (Make yourself at home/You will feel at home here). A further perversity is introduced by having the baron slay Renaud, whom he acknowledges having regarded as a son. Oedipal rivalries of this sort, together with a concomitant disparity in age between an older man and a young woman, were so common in the previous decade that mature male actors such as Jean Gabin, Pierre Alcover, Gabriel Gabrio, Charles Vanel, Sacha Guitry, Raimu, Harry Baur, and Pierre Renoir had regularly played the role. Rarely, however, did it as here bring damnation on the older man! But if the devil succeeds in driving Baron Hugues to despair, he does not succeed with Anne, who frustrates the devil’s plan in a way readily recognizable to fans of horror films. Within that genre, when a fascination with perverse sexuality in the form of the monstrous Nosferatu threatens to overrun the world, the pure young woman wins out by apparently abandoning herself to the fiend, but it is a trick to distract him until daybreak, when Nosferatu will evaporate, allowing the couple to be reunited. Here an analogous if less theatrical trick allows Anne (rather too easily) to defeat the devil and thus to win back Gilles. Despite the stately pace of the action, which can now register as labored, the popularity of Les Visiteurs du soir was immense—over half a million spectators in exclusive release in Paris alone, and over three quarters of a million after general release. It was the second most viewed film of a terrific season after Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (#12), and the fourth most viewed film of the occupation years.

12. Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire Pontcarral, Colonel of the Empire Filming began 11 June 1942; released 11 December 1942 119 min, b&w Dir Jean Delannoy; Prod Pathé-Cinéma; Scr Bernard Zimmer, from the novel by Albéric Cahuet; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Louis Beydts; Art dir Serge 56

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Pimenoff; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Jeanne Berton; Act Pierre Blanchar (Pontcarral), Marcel Delaître (Austerlitz), Annie Ducaux (Garlone de Ransac), Suzy Carrier (Sybille de Ransac), Simone de Mareilhac (Blanche de Ransac), Charles Granval (Marquis de Ransac), and Jean Marchat (Hubert Rozans). On the surface Pontcarral is a mildly interesting historical film about a Napoleonic colonel in the Périgord during the restoration of the monarchy (1815– 1830), but it early acquired a wider significance because of its implicit references to the occupation. Colonel Pontcarral’s nostalgia for the Napoleonic empire and steadfast refusal for fifteen years to accept what he considered the illegitimate authority of the monarchy could readily be interpreted, retrospectively, as a metaphoric appeal to the French people to resist “illegitimate” Vichy and foreign rule, while his reinstatement at the head of his regiment in 1830 could be interpreted as a foreshadowing of liberation. Moreover, the film was screened a few weeks after the Allied invasion of Algeria, the colony that the original Pontcarral had contributed to conquering. The film dramatizes this opposition between monarchists and republicans by way of Pontcarral’s antagonism toward the conservative local council headed by the Marquis de Ransac, and by way of his sentimental relations with de Ransac’s daughters—Garlone, whom he marries largely out of vindictiveness and who belatedly comes to love him, and Sybille, who loves him from the start devotedly but hopelessly. The Manichean opposition thus established can be easily schematized:

Napoleonic France

The Restoration

Republic/empire Austerity/simplicity Self-denial/self-control Dignity/directness/honor/fidelity Legitimate authority +

The monarchy Effete fops and nobles Self-importance/self-indulgence Treachery/deviousness/duplicity Illegitimate authority −

This conflict of values is embodied in Garlone, whom Pontcarral marries, and who has unbeknownst to him been the mistress of Hubert de Rozans, an aristocratic wastrel. When Pontcarral discovers this, he provokes de Rozans to a duel and kills him. Ultimately, restored to his position as regimental colonel, 1940–1945

57

Pontcarral leads his cavalry regiment off to colonial conquests in Algeria, and the final images are of a memorial stone in the desert. On the one hand, it is possible to argue that the underlying morality proposed by the film—the need to rediscover a sense of responsibility and discipline in the face of the supposedly disastrous dissipation of the socialist government of the 1930s—would not have offended either Vichy or the Germans. This is the line taken by Raymond Borde, for whom Pontcarral, with its salutes to the flag and its marching soldiers, “inscribed itself like a call to arms in this France of officers and flags.”26 But at least retrospectively, it proved possible to interpret the film as a call to resistance, if only because Pierre Blanchar, who took the role of Pontcarral, was subsequently revealed to have been president of the clandestine Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français (the director, Jean Delannoy, was also a member). But arguably this interpretation was not just retrospective. As Roger Régent, writing in 1946, noted, In several places and under various guises the film surreptitiously nourished the spectator’s patriotism, any overt trace of which was necessarily in the circumstances suppressed. At a time when the French flag was rigorously forbidden on French territory, when all military music and any manifestation of national feeling was considered dangerous and subversive, this film reminded viewers of a past glory and heroism that were clearly apparent to the informed. Those with an ability to evaluate the mood of a cinema . . . could not be in any doubt: Pontcarral would ignite French patriotism.27 At the very least, the film aimed to ignite French pride in its military and cultural past (Chopin makes a guest appearance). Furthermore, the treacherous agent who aims to betray Pontcarral but whom he shames into suicide, can readily be assimilated to a collaborationist spy. For Jacques Siclier, however, relying like Régent on personal memories of the screenings, this reputation as a resistance film, “if not entirely false is nevertheless abusive: . . . It was not felt to be so at the time. Pétain was still revered by the general public, who would never have thought of comparing him to Louis XVIII or Charles X.” Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, on the other hand, supports Régent, noting that numerous (unspecified) commentators talked of applause dur-

26. Quoted in Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 14. 27. Régent, Cinéma de France.

58

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

ing the screenings, and Raymond Chirat records graffiti appearing in the streets of Lyons during the winter of 1942–1943 to the effect that “Pontcarral, c’est Giraud.”28 (General Henri Giraud was perhaps undeservedly seen as something of a hero by resistants for having escaped from prison in 1942, fooled the Germans, and joined with the Anglo-French push then under way in Algeria, as head of the French contingent.) Francis Courtade is the most outspoken of the commentators: “Of some 200 films made during the German Occupation Pontcarral alone can pass as an authentic resistance film. The status of the protagonist—a resistant under the restoration—his outrageous assertions . . . and the final military procession which spectators applauded loudly, even precise indications as to how to resist, all this ought to have earned the film immediate suppression. If it didn’t, it can only be because the censors didn’t suspect anyone would be so rash as to defy them.”29 The authorities were not entirely fooled, however: they censored Pontcarral’s denunciation of “collaborators” to the judge at his trial (“The only proper place for a man of honor these days is in prison,” and “The death sentence is the only thing that can’t be bought these days”). They also eliminated, when his resistance triumphs with the 1830 revolution and the French flag flies bravely over the War Ministry, all images of those French flags. They also eliminated the claim that “It is time to rouse France from its humiliations and to restore to its flag—our flag—something of the glory it deserves.” All this was reinstated at the liberation. In a more general sense, there are other reasons to consider Pontcarral as representative of its age. It repeats the common trope of the misogynous and implicitly incestuous father figure, an older man who bursts the door down and rapes his reluctant young wife—the “taming of the shrew,” as Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier say, sardonically—before effectively seducing her even younger sister.30 But this is also an exquisitely well-made film, establishing Delannoy as central to what in the 1950s would be labeled the Cinema of Quality, which the New Wave later decried as slick but vacuous. This reminds us that it was not postwar conditions but conditions prevailing during the occupation—rigorous institutional control, absence of American competition, limited production, avid public—and even before it that generated this trend toward a well-funded and highly polished product.

28. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 135–136; Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente, 333n; Chirat, Le Cinéma français des années de guerre. 29. Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 209–210. 30. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 115–116.

1940–1945

59

13. Goupi Mains-Rouges It Happened at the Inn Filming began 10 October 1942; released 14 April 1943 104 min, b&w Dir Jacques Becker; Prod Minerva; Scr Jacques Becker and Pierre Véry, based on the latter’s novel; Cinematog Pierre Montazel (or Jean Bourgoin?); Music Jean Alfaro; Art dir Pierre Marquet; Sound Robert Ivonnet; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Fernand Ledoux (Goupi Mains-Rouges), Georges Rollin (Goupi Monsieur), Robert Le Vigan (Goupi Tonkin), Arthur Devère (Goupi Mes Sous), René Génin (Goupi Dicton), Maurice Schutz (Goupi l’Empereur), Albert Rémy (Jean des Goupi), Blanchette Brunoy (Goupi Muguet), Germaine Kerjean (Goupi Tisane), Line Noro (Marie des Goupi), Marcelle Hainia (Goupi Cancan), Guy Favières (Goupi La Loi), Marcel Pérès (Eusèbe), and Louis Seigner (the teacher). Jacques Becker had been assistant director to Jean Renoir for much of the 1930s and had begun directing L’Or du Cristobal in 1939 under Renoir’s supervision, only to resign because of production problems. A prisoner of war for eighteen months in Poland, he returned to France and directed Dernier Atout (1942), which is better forgotten. He was therefore practically unknown when he directed Goupi Mains-Rouges later in 1942. It was based on a novel by Pierre Véry, whose brand of “noir” fantastic contributed significantly to wartime cinema (L’Assassin a peur la nuit; L’Assassinat du père Noël, #3; Madame et le mort; Pays sans étoiles; and Goupi). All of these were set in the provinces, but the provincial world as seen by Véry could not be said in any obvious way to embody the honest peasant virtues promoted by the Vichy authorities. Here the plot focuses on the extended Goupi household, where each family member bears a nickname that relates to personal preoccupations or characteristics. Goupi Monsieur has been “civilized” in Paris and is rumored to have made a fortune as the director of a department store. In their hour of need, the family summon him home with a view to marrying him off to young Goupi Muguet (Lily of the Valley) and getting their hands on his wealth. Much of the first half of the film involves his arrival, his distress caused by the malicious tricks played on him by Goupi Mains-Rouges and Goupi Tonkin, and his horror on discovering the various barbarous, obsessive, and insane practices of the Goupis. Greed is chief among them: the head of the household is Goupi Mes Sous (Tightfist), who has eyes on Monsieur’s supposed wealth. But the old grandfather, Goupi l’Empereur, is equally obsessed, hiding away the family hoard and refusing to reveal the cache, then having a seizure that pre60

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

vents him from telling his descendants where he has hidden it even if he had wanted to. Moreover, before the seizure, he had stolen Goupi Tisane’s money, which she had hidden from the family in the linen cupboard. When Tonkin discovers l’Empereur apparently dead with the money in his hand, he in turn steals it. Crazed with rage at the loss of her funds, Tisane pursues him with a whip but is killed by Tonkin when she is taking out her rage on the gormless Jean des Goupis. This family obsession with money is clearly a form of madness, but there are other forms of madness not far off: Jean des Goupi is himself more than a little witless, and Goupi Tonkin has been driven half mad by his colonial experience in Indo-China (whence his nickname). When his theft is discovered, he is trapped by police in a tree, has a hallucinatory vision à la Rimbaud (Je vois la lumière! Je suis le soleil! / I see the light, I am/follow the sun), and crashes to the ground dead. The only relatively sane member of the older Goupi generation is Goupi Mains-Rouges himself, who has nevertheless (or therefore) left the clan to live alone in a forest hut (as has Tonkin, the other family exile). The family, we learn, had been responsible for the death of the girl he loved. Greed, madness, suicide, murder: this view of provincial family life as barbarous and backward, if not outright criminal, is a negative form of the traditional city/country opposition is often called “provincial gothic.” In other manifestations, it features more prominently such factors as bloodlust, superstition, and witchcraft (indeed, note here the stuffed owls and bats, and the dolls with pins in them, suggestive of black magic, in Mains-Rouges’s hut). In this film, as several times during the occupation, these provincial gothic tropes are played for laughs, but despite the comic register, this representation of the provincial peasant family would hardly have appealed to Vichy. This explains the odd final speech, which hastens to assert that peasants respect money because it allows them to hold the family property together and transmit it to the next generation. L’Empereur’s hoard is not “money earned by the sweat of the brow” but “found money,” so it must be set aside unless needed for “the land.” This final speech about work and land is the more incongruous in that the Goupi family doesn’t ever seem to work, and the family property doesn’t seem to have any land, surrounded as it is in appropriate gothic fashion by lowering forest. Several films of the time, their makers no doubt apprehensive about censorship bans, sought to appease the Vichy authorities by appending this sort of politically correct epilogue to a film of dubious moral rigor. But if a case can be made for Goupi Mains-Rouges and the whole provincial gothic genre’s constituting a gentle (and necessarily indirect) mockery of Vichy ideology, it nevertheless has something in common with many pro-Vichy productions, namely an emphasis on the faults of a bitter, older generation and the 1940–1945

61

need for a more healthy, younger generation to set things right again. The more general context of this theme is of course the collapse of the economy at the beginning of the 1930s, and the previous generation’s collapse and defeat at the hands of the German invader, both supposedly because society had become debilitated by Jewish and/or Marxist influence. L’Empereur’s reverence for Napoleon (whence his nickname) harks back to a time of French empire before that moral collapse; now it will be the task of the younger generation to restore the nation and redeem its predecessors’ errors. Having been tricked and terrified by Mains-Rouges and Tonkin, then revealed as an impoverished fraud and sequestered in the cellar as a thief and murderer, Goupi Monsieur will nevertheless earn the respect of the clan by defending it against outsiders (the police and schoolmaster) as none of the other members of the family could have done. He will marry Goupi Muguet after all, and inherit the grandfather’s knowledge of the family hoard. Goupi Mains-Rouges proved very successful, attracting over half a million viewers in Paris alone, yet Becker made nothing further until Falbalas, set within the fashion industry, in 1944 and not released until mid-1945. At that time, Robert Le Vigan, who here plays Tonkin, was languishing in prison: like his close friend Céline, he had been one of the few outspoken Nazi sympathizers in the French cultural establishment, and was notorious for his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. After the liberation, he was condemned to ten years’ hard labor, confiscation of his property, and “national shame.” He might have fared worse had the tribunal not concluded that, like many of the characters he was called upon to act in films, he was of diminished responsibility. The Resistance-based film magazine L’Écran français dubbed him “Goupi Grand-Reich.”

14. Marie-Martine Marie-Martine Filming began 11 November 1942; released 11 May 1943 103 min, b&w Dir Albert Valentin; Prod Éclair-Journal; Scr Jacques Viot; Cinematog Jean Isnard; Music Georges van Parys; Art dir Jean Perrier; Sound Jacques Vacher; Edit Raymond Lamy; Act Renée Saint-Cyr (Marie-Martine), Jules Berry (Loïc Limousin), Bernard Blier (Maurice), Saturnin Fabre (Uncle Parpain), Jean Debucourt (Monsieur de Lachaume), Marguerite Deval (Mademoiselle Aimée), Louise Sylvie (Maurice’s mother), Hèlèna Manson (Mademoiselle Limousin), and Jeanne FusierGir (Mademoiselle Crémier).

62

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Marie-Martine is one of the most ambitious films to have been made during the war, yet it has been inexplicably neglected. Jacques Viot’s script is structurally complex (as is the film’s moral standpoint), with three “explanatory” flashbacks in reverse chronological order. This recalls the script Viot had written three years earlier for Marcel Carné and Jean Gabin’s Le Jour se lève (1939), where, however, the flashbacks were in chronological order. In the present tense, we meet the novelist Loïc Limousin (Jules Berry), whose book about Marie-Martine has just been published. Then we meet Marie-Martine herself, who is enjoying a happy relationship with Maurice and is angry with Limousin for exploiting and publicizing her past problems. In the flashbacks, first, Marie-Martine tells Limousin about her release from prison and the subsequent help that Maurice and his blind mother provided her. Second, Maurice reads Limousin’s book, which tells of him finding Marie-Martine climbing over a wall, discovering that a man had just been shot there, and deciding to betray her (surreptitiously) to the police (i.e., the second flashback explains how she came to be in prison in the first flashback). Finally third, her kindly old governess tells Limousin of Marie-Martine’s unhappy childhood; of her engagement to the son of an industrialist, Monsieur Lachaume (for whom she was working as a servant), who abandoned Hélène, a wealthy heiress, for Marie-Martine; of how Hélène then killed the young man in a fit of jealous rage; and of how his father, worried about the family’s reputation, then rearranged the evidence to incriminate Marie-Martine (i.e., the third flashback tells how she came to be convicted of a murder she didn’t commit). Limousin sees the opportunity to further exploit this new information in a sensational sequel to his current book: malevolently, he forges an anonymous letter to Maurice revealing a truth that will destroy their relationship, but before he can post it, he is killed in a traffic accident, and the letter is washed away down the drain. Maurice and Marie-Martine can live happily ever after. Several themes typical of the period leap out of this summary. First, the “respectable” Lachaume family will protect their reputation at any cost, even at the cost of destroying the life of an innocent servant-girl. And to reinforce this corrosive condemnation of bourgeois malevolence, Maurice’s “Uncle Parpain” (Saturnin Fabre, in another of his eccentric performances) was barred when young from marrying the girl he loved because he was considered unworthy in her parents’ eyes. As a result, he has permanently retired from existence, a hermit in his windowless, powerless world. Love across class lines is anathema to the wealthy. Second, Marie-Martine is characterized as “an orphan,” and orphanhood had been a constant preoccupation of the previous decade as a symbol of alien-

1940–1945

63

ation. She is a “fille perdue,” a nameless girl with nowhere to call home, and she gets on well with Maurice precisely because both are “all alone in life.” Third, as in Les Visiteurs du soir (#11), Limousin embodies a sinister fate figure, risible in his self-centeredness, intent on using and manipulating everyone he meets. Unusually, he is an author, but here writers are far from favorably represented— they see themselves as gods, enjoying the power over others that their command of language provides. Likewise, the despicable Lachaume family who neglected their own daughter and engineered Marie-Martine’s false incrimination are also bookworms, which was what had initially distracted them from their parental responsibilities. Reading, writing, and literature in general—words—are denigrated as inherently treacherous by comparison with music (Maurice is a young music teacher and viola player). Finally, there are several references to an implied Oedipality in the film that connects with the previous decade, notably when Limousin’s young wife calls her husband “papa.” In general, older men are obsessed by younger women. But if much of this is recognizable from other films of the age, there is a surprising reversal in gender patterns that, along with its structural complexity, is the principal source of the film’s importance: where in Le Jour se lève, for instance, it is François’s story as “remembered” by Gabin himself that is central to the flashback narrative, here the focus is on a female whose story is partly told by herself and her pseudo-mother, and partly betrayed by a treacherous man. As Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier rightly emphasize, the film can readily be interpreted as a critique of patriarchal violence, both symbolical in the theft of Marie-Martine’s life by Limousin, and actual in his and Lachaume’s betrayal of her to the police.31 Men are either malevolent and treacherous or, as in the person of Maurice and the murdered son, naive and amiable, but of limited intelligence—feminized and victimized, conned for their own good by women who are fond of them. It is the women who are strong and knowledgeable—not just Marie-Martine but also Maurice’s mother, whose physical blindness corresponds as usual to a heightened mental and moral perception. And where the violent men are preoccupied by their own needs and reputation, the strong women are heroic in their potential for self-sacrifice. But the central theme of the film, repeated several times in different contexts, is the importance to happiness of ignorance—certain crucial truths are better concealed. This theme is closely related to the suppression of the past, which structured many 1930s films, often through amnesia. Not only must Marie-Martine’s involvement with Hélène’s wealthy fiancé be suppressed, but her incarcera-

31. Ibid., 176–180.

64

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

tion for murder and her subsequent unspecified dubious life must be hidden from Maurice. Limousin’s wife attempts to do the same. Maurice’s blind old mother chases Limousin from the house so he won’t tell Maurice any of this, which she has just overheard, and she conspires with Marie-Martine to ensure he never does find out. The film consecrates this female conspiracy to suppress the past by way of the road “accident” that suppresses Limousin’s intended revelations to Maurice and indeed his ability ever again to raise the ghosts of the past. Not knowing is desirable, even necessary: don’t look back; wipe the slate clean and move on. Arguably the couple’s happiness derives from Maurice’s decision not to know about, or at least not to believe, unpleasant truths about the woman he loves. There is, of course, a link between this theme and the suppression of dangerous truths during wartime, notably about identity, race, and allegiance, while the film’s focus on anonymous letters and informing on others likewise has a certain contemporary relevance, but to take the film’s message, as some do, as relating in any more direct way to the occupation seems less convincing.

15. Lumière d’été Summer Light Filming began 17 August 1942; released 26 May 1943 108 min, b&w Dir Jean Grémillon; Prod André Paulvé; Scr Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Roland Manuel; Art dir Max Douy and André Barsacq, based on Alexandre Trauner’s maquettes; Sound Jean Monchablon; Edit Louisette Hautecœur; Act Madeleine Renaud (Cricri), Georges Marchal (Julien), Madeleine Robinson (Michèle), Paul Bernard (Patrice), Pierre Brasseur (Roland), Jane Marken (Madame Martinet), Marcel Lévesque (Monsieur Louis), Léonce Corne (Tonton), Aimos (Ernest), Charles Blavette (Vincent), and Henri Pons (Amédée). Both Jean Grémillon and Jacques Prévert were committed left-wingers. Their previous collaboration, an adaptation of Vercel’s Remorques (1939), had been interrupted by the outbreak of war. Permission to complete the sea scenes (in a tank) was received in September 1941, and the film was screened in November. In the meantime, Prévert and Pierre Laroche had written two original scripts— Les Visiteurs du soir (#11) for Marcel Carné and Lumière d’été (#15) for Grémillon. This latter had been written for Michèle Morgan (whence the name of the lead female role), but she had already left for Hollywood, so the role ultimately fell to Madeleine Robinson. 1940–1945

65

The setting in the high Provençal Alps was chosen for various reasons. The producer, André Paulvé’s firm CIMEX, managed the Provençal studios at Nice (La Victorine) and Saint-Laurent-Du-Var, and had in 1939 established a FrancoItalian coproduction agreement that was to result in a series of ambitious productions—not just this film, but L’Éternel Retour (#20), Les Visiteurs du soir (#11), and Les Enfants du paradis (#27). Prévert himself was established at Tourrettessur-Loup near Vence, where a small group of refugees depended largely on his sporadic earnings, including the film’s art director, Alexandre Trauner, a Jew, and Joseph Kosma. (Trauner’s maquettes were signed by Max Douy and by André Barsacq when Barsacq returned from captivity during production). Moreover, the harsh grandeur of the Alps provides an appropriately bleak but imposing setting for the action, which itself is sufficiently grim to give the lie to its ironic title (“Summer Light”). The narrative focuses on two groups of people—on the one hand, Julien, an engineer, and the construction workers building a dam on an alpine river, and on the other, the local seigneur, Patrice, in his chateau and his “partner,” Cricri, who owns and runs the nearby inn. Suavely sinister, selfish, and violent, Patrice is a typically corrupt Prévertian patrician figure, and we soon learn in an imaginatively constructed flashback (with subjective soundtrack) that he and Cricri had earlier conspired to dispose of his inconvenient young wife. Opposite this corrupt and vicious but outwardly presentable couple, the construction workers are represented as “good blokes” who establish the underlying worthiness of “the people” as the spearhead of industrial and technological progress. Those moments when the narrative takes us to the dam site are pretext for a flurry of quasi-expressionist shots of trains, machines, smoke, and workers collaborating on a great project. Julien, apparently the engineer in charge, is at once “just one of the boys”—a good fellow—and their spokesman/leader. The narrative trigger that brings these opposing forces into direct conflict is the arrival of Michèle at the inn, where she is to meet her lover, the experimental artist Roland. But by the time he arrives, she has already sparked the interest of the suave aristocrat Patrice, who is ready to abandon Cricri for her, and of Julien the engineer. Moreover, when Roland finally arrives, it is as a distraught and humiliated figure whose experimental production has been ridiculed by the public and critics alike. Pierre Brasseur’s performance of Roland’s distress attracted much admiration at the time but can now seem grotesquely overacted, involving ranting, a twisted face, and excessive gestures. Unquestionably, however, he is established as a pitiful, petulant, self-centered loser, and thus a totally inappropriate partner for Michèle. Coming from Prévert, whose respect for artists was unquestionable, this representation of the artist as clown is surprising, but Roland is far from the committed artisan-artist that 66

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

appealed to Prévert—more the elitist, pretentious, self-important artist of Romantic mythology. So Michèle finds herself in a situation reminiscent of many of Jean Renoir’s films, such as La Règle du jeu (1939) and his 1950s films—a woman courted by three men representing alternative ideologies, and her ultimate choice of Julien makes clear the film’s ideological preference (a preference foreshadowed in the “Freudian” mistake early on when Julien enters her bedroom thinking it is his). Moreover, as in La Règle du jeu, this film is rich in metaphorical and metonymic usages of Nature. There are mechanical animals in the shooting gallery that act out their predestined patterns; there are Prévertian arrays of flowers associated with the nobler characters, and of birds hunted with rifles as the aristocrat will hunt Julien; there is a cricket (Cricri) in a cage that sings when Michèle sets it free; and there is, behind all of this, the bleak landscape that the dam will serve to render productive. A lot of the imagery also picks up on the vocabulary of existentialism, which was being promoted by Jean-Paul Sartre at this time (e.g., Les Mouches)—the absurd, the fear of ennui, the craving for liberty contrasted with people caught up in the machinery of convention. The threat of an impending fatality hangs over the first two thirds of the film, and is worked out in the scene of the fancy-dress ball at the chateau, where Patrice and Cricri are Des Grieux and Manon, while Roland and Michèle are Hamlet and Ophelia. Crises in these established relationships contrast in typically 1930s style with the hectic gaiety of the music and the wild laughter of the crowds scattering a haze of confetti. Disorder and despair are rampant, and Patrice’s murderous threats impend a fatal outcome, so the actual ending (in which the good guys survive a wildly careering car accident; the villains are foiled; and the workers, united, move in on Patrice, who backs away and falls over a cliff to his death, while Michèle departs with Julien) comes as something of a surprise. Until this point, the film had manifested all the tropes of a prewar poetic realist film, then abruptly it appends a happy ending. This may be what saved it. The Vichy government was, of course, deeply distrustful of the poetic realist tradition, which it associated with the Popular Front and the sapping of national morale that Vichy saw as responsible for the French military collapse. But despite this positive narrative resolution, Paul Morand did his best to have Lumière d’été banned, complaining to Grémillon that characters like his could scarcely be relied on to bring about the National Revolution that was so necessary.32 Morand’s

32. Morand was a right-wing diplomat, writer, and anti-Semitic member of the Franco-German Committee founded prewar by the German ambassador to Vichy, Otto Abetz, and the first president of Vichy’s film censorship body.

1940–1945

67

efforts were thwarted by Louis-Émile Galey (who had succeeded Guy de Carmoy as head of Vichy’s Service du Cinéma), perhaps to protect the financial viability of a crucial production firm. Morand resigned and ended the war as Vichy’s ambassador to Switzerland, where he prudently remained at war’s end. Georges Sadoul is not alone in seeing the final images in which workers, shoulder to shoulder, force Patrice over the cliff, as “foreshadowing the union of the French people in the Resistance, sweeping away the Occupying power and its stooges.” Hamlet repeatedly groans, “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” And of France. Courtade also sees this as “the only film in these bleak years that dared suggest salvation might come from the working class,” though Raymond Borde once again demurs, seeing the film as embodying Pétainist values.33

16. Les Anges du péché Angels of Sin Filmed 8 February to April 1943; released 23 June 1943 73 min, b&w Dir Robert Bresson; Prod Synops Scr Bresson and Jean Giraudoux, based on an idea of Father Raymond Brückberger; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Jean-Jacques Grünewald; Art dir René Renoux; Sound René Louge; Edit Yvonne Martin; Act Renée Faure (Anne-Marie), Jany Holt (Thérèse), Louise Sylvie (prioress), MarieHélène Dasté (Mother St.-Jean), Mila Parély (Madeleine), Paula Déhelly (Mother Dominique), Silvia Montfort (Agnès), and Louis Seigner (prison director). Robert Bresson was one of that “new generation” of directors who became known during the war, and this was his first film (aside, that is, from an improbable mid-length comedy called Les Affaires publiques featuring the clown Béby as a comic dictator, which Bresson directed in 1934 and subsequently disowned, along with the rest of his prewar work). Critics have recognized three “periods” in his output—first, the two studio-made wartime works with professional actors (Les Anges du péché, 1943, and Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, 1945, #28), which involve, within a largely female cast, studies in conflict between high-born and low-born women; second, the three postwar works (Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, 1951, #68; Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, 1956, #96; and

33. Sadoul quoted in Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 147; Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 209, 14, 13.

68

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Pickpocket, 1959) that explore the spiritual state of an isolated male but now acted out by nonprofessionals and filmed primarily on location; and third, a series of films focusing on an individual female as victim “in a coarse, harsh rural setting with its head-on conflicts, greed and meanness.”34 Through all of these films, however, runs a constant set of themes of religious conviction, involving a preoccupation with confinement in a material and/ or spiritual trap, the desire for material and/or spiritual liberation, and a craving for some form of transcendence of the material—some form of salvation. This set of themes had never been common in the French sound cinema, largely because such topics had never proved popular with audiences. In the 1930s, clergymen and nuns had relatively rarely been prominent—appearing in about 8 films out of 1,300—and when they were, it was usually as figures of fun, occasionally even of detestation. Thieves and con-men tended to assume the garb of men of religion and extend to it the disrepute of their trade.35 Even during the war, when Vichy’s conservative morality might have been thought to favor the production of spiritual themes, there are few instances of committed religious films. The year 1939, however, had seen the production of two films—Les Musiciens du ciel and La Charrette fantôme—in which a woman of religion (in each case, from the Salvation Army) by her selfless and tragic death saves another human soul (in each case, admittedly, a handsome villain). The considerable success of the former may have been influential in convincing the producers (Roland and Denise Tual) to invest in this unlikely scenario proposed by an untried director (and refused by Pathé as not sufficiently commercial). Jean Giraudoux’s collaboration undoubtedly also helped, as did, according to scholars Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, Vichy’s desire to promote a liberal “progressive” form of Catholicism, as evidenced in its patronage of the École des Cadres d’Uriage.36 Perhaps Bresson likewise benefited from his status as a combatant recently returned from over a year in a concentration camp. Anyway, the Tuals, who had recently reconfigured Synops to produce Roland’s own film, gave Bresson the same opportunity (though they rejected his proposed cast and undertook further trials).37 Les Anges du péché focuses on the activities of the Sisters of Bethany, a group of nuns committed to rehabilitating female prisoners after their release from

34. See Daniel Millar, “Les Dames du bois de Boulogne,” in Ayfre et al., The Films of Robert Bresson, 33. 35. See Crisp, Genre, Myth, and Convention, 190–195. 36. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 106. 37. Tual, Au cœur du temps, 267–274.

1940–1945

69

prison—one austere closed world to another. Two new recruits to the convent occupy the center of the narrative stage—one freely undertaking work within the order (Anne-Marie) and one hardened offender (Thérèse) who, once released from prison, assassinates the man responsible for her imprisonment and takes refuge in the order. What is important to the film is the relationship between these two—the fact that both in their different ways are in need of salvation (Anne-Marie for her arrogant pride, Thérèse for her embittered rejection of the world), and that Anne-Marie can only achieve hers through sacrificing her life for Thérèse, who in turn can only achieve hers by responding to Anne-Marie’s sacrifice. As Pierre Leprohon puts it, “The religious theme is of redemption, of the salvation of souls brought together by Providence to liberate one another from the demons that inhabit them: that of Thérèse, poisoned by hatred, by a bitter thirst for vengeance, and that of Anne-Marie, too sure of her mission, motivated by pride in her own purity, her drive to sacrifice herself. Only through that sacrifice will Anne-Marie discover humility and abandon herself to God [and] will Thérèse open up to love and abandon herself to human justice.”38 An austere theme called for austere use of technology. The convent, the nuns’ costumes, and the night scenes also motivated stark oppositions of black and white, while Bresson’s late style is prefigured in his refusal fully to indulge the melodramatic potential of the conflict scenes—to some extent he “detheatricalizes” them—particularly in the case of the assassination, which is dealt with peremptorily, the death happening off screen. Nevertheless, Bresson was later to regret several aspects of the film that had escaped his passion for austerity. The extra-diegetic music is often used aggressively, underlining in incongruous fashion certain scenes, which because of this and the acting style become sentimentalized to what he, with some justification, subsequently felt was an unacceptable degree. This is particularly true of the scene where AnneMarie’s mother protests against her daughter’s associating with criminals, after which Anne-Marie, teary-eyed, destroys her family photos. It likewise occurs in a scene in which Anne-Marie becomes overwrought, in an almost suspect way, over the obdurate Thérèse, and the later one in which she crazily accuses the mother superior’s cat of being the devil in disguise. It is also rather hard to endure Renée Faure’s “dewy petulance” and the heavenly music at the end accompanying Thérèse’s salvation.39 Certainly it was these concessions to a more emotive cinema that led Bresson in his postwar films to reject the professional histrionics of consecrated ac-

38. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 360. 39. Durgnat, “Les Anges du péché,” in Ayfre et al., The Films of Robert Bresson, 31.

70

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

tors in favor of nonprofessionals, to reject the “literary” dialogue of professional writers (Giraudoux and Jean Cocteau) in favor of his own pared-down scripts, and, more generally, his ascetic refusal to “exploit the avenues of cheap emotion.”40 And where this and the next film still trail elements of that psychological realism (and the concomitant construction of characters with whom one can identify) that was already coming to typify mainstream narrative cinema, Bresson was subsequently to move toward a minute examination of objects and gestures (rather than faces) in the belief that “the supernatural is only the real rendered more precise: real things seen close up.” Hence the following exchange during a 1963 symposium on Bresson: “There aren’t any sympathetic female characters in Bresson.” “There aren’t any sympathetic characters in Bresson.” “Are there any characters in Bresson?”41 Despite its residue of contemporary practices, this first film of Bresson’s was greeted by critics as revolutionary, groundbreaking, an authentic masterpiece. The exclusive-release figures in Paris were above average, but I can find no evidence that this recognition extended to the general release audiences that followed—quite the contrary, since they seem to have been devastatingly low.

17. Adieu Léonard (Bye Bye Leonard) Filming began 6 January 1943; released 1 September 1943 104 min, b&w Dir Pierre Prévert; Prod Essor Cinématographique Français; Scr Jacques and Pierre Prévert; Cinematog André Thomas; Music Joseph Kosma (clandestinely, as Georges Mouqué) and Charles Trenet; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Maurice Carrouet; Edit Charles Bretoneiche; Act Julien Carette (Félicien Léonard), Jacqueline Bouvier (Paulette), Denise Grey (Bernardine Léonard), Pierre Brasseur (Prosper Bonenfant), Charles Trenet (Ludovic), and Jean Meyer (Tancrède); also Édouard Delmont, Paul Frankeur, Maurice Bacquet, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Marcel Mouloudji, Jacques Dufilho, Simone Signoret, Raymond Bussières, Jean Dasté, and so on.

40. Cunneen, Robert Bresson, 23. 41. Quoted from a symposium reprinted in Cinéma 63.

1940–1945

71

Despite its clumsiness, Adieu Léonard became a cult film, mainly because of the central involvement of the Prévert brothers and their band of largely disreputable friends, who did their best to make of it something subversive. The story is hard to summarize (Jacques Siclier took 1,500 words outlining its intricacies): Léonard sells tricks and jokes. He is being cuckolded by his cousin Tancrède, who with Léonard’s unbearable wife leads a pretentious artistic life. To support this, they force Léonard to do whatever it takes; he tries incompetently to rob a woman in a train, who turns out instead to have robbed him; then he burgles a supposedly empty house. The owner, Prosper, returns and promises not to turn Léonard in if he kills Ludovic, who has just inherited the fortune that Prosper had hoped for. Ludovic is happily squandering that fortune on a bunch of amiable “little people” (wood-cutter, miller, florist, lamplighter, ropemaker, basket-weaver, knife-sharpener, bird-catcher . . .). Léonard’s hapless attempts to murder him (drowning, poison, hanging) all backfire, but Ludovic kindly saves him, and they become mates. Ludovic loves a café waitress. In a chaotic finale, the villains, Prosper and Tancrède, destroy one another, while Léonard abandons his unfaithful wife and departs with Ludovic and the waitress in a gypsy caravan. As must be clear from this rough summary, there is a joyously blatant opposition throughout the film involving some of Jacques Prévert’s favorite themes (antibourgeois, antireligious, antimilitarist). On the one hand, there are the ordinary people, including Léonard and Ludovic, and on the other, the rich and pretentious, including Tancrède and Prosper. Only the former are capable of genuine affection, help one another (or at least are ineffectual and unconvincing in their attempts to kill one another), and come to constitute an alternative community. The latter are, of course, greedy, corrupt, and exploitative. As Ludovic says, “I detest respectable people [“les grands métiers”]; a few simple ideas is all you need.” The respectable villagers reciprocate: “He dishonors the region; it would be no crime to do away with him.” And Prosper cackles as he gloats over ways to assassinate Ludovic, saying, “you can always con the little people because they’re so sentimental.” Charles Trenet, who plays Ludovic, was already a popular singer before the war, and his presence in the cast was forced on the producer by the distributor, Pathé, who had Trenet under contract, in the (vain) hope that his name on the poster would make the film financially viable. Since his character does not appear until halfway through the film, however, those drawn were more disconcerted than delighted. This is reputedly one reason for the film’s flopping so badly. A more cogent reason is that the French public has never been attracted by the zany. Nothing resembling the Marx Brothers has ever been successful in France.

72

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Even Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné’s Drôle de drame (1937), based on an English novel, was a relative failure, while Pierre Prévert’s other film to his brother’s script, L’Affaire est dans le sac (1932)—admittedly cobbled together and shot at night on another film’s sets—had failed even more disastrously. But the principal reason for the failure of both Prévert films, then and now, as well as Pierre’s third in 1947 (Voyage-Surprise), was the slack pace of the action. If there is one thing that a farce needs it is slick timing and rigor, and that was one thing Pierre Prévert was incapable of achieving. Carné’s more rigorous approach to filmmaking and his tight control of his professional actors were undoubtedly in contrast to Jacques’s script, yet the combination of them in Drôle de drame now seems significantly more successful. Pierre Prévert, however, was in total sympathy with his brother’s values and preferences, so he tended to indulge them rather than restrain them. According to André Heinrich, the script for Adieu Léonard had in fact been written at about the same time as that for L’Affaire est dans le sac, “during the filming of Boudu sauvé des eaux, in 1932, but later modified. [In 1937] Carné chose to film Drôle de drame [rather than Adieu].”42 This explains a lot about the film, which, to say the least, must have seemed wildly incongruous in late 1943. Written during that period of intense left-wing political activism from 1930 to 1936, it inherited ten years of close association with the surrealists, who were constantly in and out of the flat where Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy, and Marcel Duhamel lived, at 54 rue du Château (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Raymond Queneau, and Robert Desnos are often mentioned, with Michel Leiris, Paul Grimault, Lou Tchimoukow, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Jacques-Bernard Brunius, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Batcheff, Maurice Baquet, and Yves Allégret). In the year Jacques Prévert wrote this script, he was writing for the Groupe Prémice, which soon split, Prévert departing with the more activist arm that became the Groupe Octobre. The aggressively political performances put on by that group have been extensively chronicled. The war and occupation had required considerable modification of the outspoken political preferences of the original script, but the vigorous social critique of wealth and position survived, as did the absurdist situations that alone make the film entertaining these days, though they still read better on the page than in the film. Consider, for instance, the initial situation, where Léonard is holding up a woman in a train, who then protects him so he receives the grateful applause of other passengers and a bottle of champagne from the colonel, until the police

42. Premier Plan, no. 14, 1960, 62.

1940–1945

73

arrive and cart her off—she is an international thief who hands him back his wallet as she leaves, advising him to take up a job for which he’s better suited. Then there’s the “empty” house he robs, but the owner returns with his mistress, the owner’s wife turns up unexpectedly, and Léonard is blackmailed first into pretending the mistress is his wife, then into killing Ludovic. Moreover, during this whole robbery, Léonard has been accompanied by his children (whom he is supposedly taking to the circus) and helped by a kindly policeman. Then there are his hilarious, bungling attempts at murder, and the uproarious finale when, as everyone tries to kill one another, Léonard departs with his mates, in true Chaplin fashion, in a gypsy caravan.

18. L’Inévitable Monsieur Dubois (The Persistent Mr. Dubois) Filming began 2 November 1942; released 22 September 1943 99 min, b&w Dir Pierre Billon; Prod PAC; Scr Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and Jacques Companeez, based on the play Femme de métier by André-Paul Antoine; Cinematog Paul Coteret; Music Jean Marion; Art dir Roland Quignon; Sound René Lécuyer; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Annie Ducaux (Hélène Mareuil), André Luguet (Claude Orly), Mony Dalmès (Jacqueline Mareuil), Germaine Reuver (Sophie), Félicien Tramel (Monsieur Mouche), Richard Francœur (Verdier), and Jean Sinoël (Honoré). Also Florence est folle (Florence Is Mad) Filming began 13 March 1944; released 8 November 1944 101 min, b&w Dir Georges Lacombe; Prod PAC and Éclair-Journal; Scr Jean Sacha, Alex Joffé, Jacques Companeez, and Henri Jeanson; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Jean Marion; Art dir Lucien Carré; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Raymond Lamy; Act Annie Ducaux (Lucile and Florence), André Luguet (Jérôme Benoît), Roland Armontel (Professor Wonder), Yves Deniaud (Bianco), Pierre Palau (Monsieur Borel), and Marcelle Praince (Madame Chantelouve). It makes sense to discuss these two films together. They are perhaps the best comedies of the war years, combining the French boulevard comedy with the American whacky comedy. The enormous success of the first led the production company to commission a companion piece from the same team, notably Jacques 74

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Companeez (clandestinely), the musician Jean Marion, and the two stars, Annie Ducaux and André Luguet. Ducaux came from the author André-Paul Antoine’s father’s troupe, while Luguet and Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon were both on the (no less clandestine) committee of the resistance review L’Écran français. Both films mobilize traditional misogynous representations of woman, notably that of the harridan, and have amiable male protagonists who “bring the women to their senses” in the style of Taming of the Shrew. In the first, Ducaux plays Hélène, a ruthlessly effective businesswoman with no time for sentimentalities. Driving to work, she has an accident, running into a painter, Claude, on his motorbike. Fascinated by her, Claude pursues her relentlessly, first through her finances (filling in for 2 million francs the blank check she leaves him), then by idling his time away when he is supposed to be working for her, and by making up to her more playful sister. Finally he gets her drunk, and she succumbs to his charms, whereupon she turns the tables on him, tricking him into taking over the reins of her firm, where it is his turn to be required to be ruthlessly effective. Basically, therefore, the plot is built upon a simple set of oppositions—within Hélène (businesswoman and sensual female), between her and her sister (businesswoman and playgirl), between her and Claude (finance and art), and within Claude (an artist finally obliged to take business seriously). The overarching opposition is between order and disorder, money and art, power and creativity, control and happiness, and the narrative mobilizes the traditional trope of the couple who, having initially been spontaneously antagonistic, come to realize. . . . The wartime public loved it, as did contemporary critics, but the remake Florence est folle was greeted cynically by critics who saw it as a pale exploitative imitation of its predecessor. Yet in some ways, it is even more interesting: here Ducaux plays Lucile, the austere, moralizing wife of Luguet’s attorney-general Jérôme, whose whole life (including his sex life) is ruthlessly regulated by her. An accident (again!) leaves the highly moral Lucile in a coma from which she awakes believing herself to be Florence Bolero, internationally acclaimed musichall star, just back from a performance in Barcelona where she wore nothing but a g-string. It turns out the highly moral Lucile has been secretly writing a fantasy fiction about just such an outrageous figure. Now, as Florence, her provocative behavior utterly confounds but also fascinates her husband, whom she doesn’t recognize but assumes to be her impresario-manager. Now she smokes, loves jazzy music, and organizes sexy publicity events for her next show. Initially despising her husband as unutterably stuffy, she gradually (as he too adapts) begins to find him acceptable, especially when, due to a misunderstanding, she believes him to be a big shot in the criminal world—a sort of French Al Capone. In a drunken scene (again), she admits to falling in love with him. 1940–1945

75

Clearly this film, even more obviously than its predecessor, is based on a set of oppositions that are distinctly Freudian, involving the “return of the repressed,” with Florence as Lucile’s repressed id (already evoked earlier in a rapid pan, ascending from a chaste kiss to her husband’s head up to a picture on the wall representing licentious behavior). Freudian psychotherapy is indeed present and gently mocked in the form of a psychoanalyst called Professor Wonder (!) who counsels Jérôme not to try to revive Lucile because the shock might cause irreversible damage. This allows the film to elaborate on two standard male representations of woman, as shrew and as whore. Neither is calculated to appeal to a feminist critic, so it is astonishing to find outspoken feminist critics like Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier praising the film—indeed classifiying it among films that promote the first acceptable representation of female sexuality.43 They seem to assume that Lucile is only pretending to be “mad,” and is in fact using this pretence to remind her husband that she is a sexual being and subject to the same desires as him, but there is no evidence for this in the film that I can see—quite the contrary, the film gloats over the fact that her subconscious sexual desires are “betrayed” when the accident causes her to lapse helplessly into behavior she would never “in her right mind” have found acceptable. A nice problem arises when Florence wants to marry the man she supposes to be her impresario (to whom, of course, she is already married) and formally asks his mother (already her mother-in-law) for his hand. She is outraged when her mother-in-law temporizes, assuring her she would be happier remaining his mistress. Jérôme too cannot disabuse her, since the ending of the novel she has been writing, now discovered, has Florence Bolero shooting her lover for not being what she thought him—just as she now threatens to shoot her impresario. Their altercation results in the inevitable slap that returns her to life as Lucile, but faced with her husband’s nostalgia for aspects of Florence, she agrees to incorporate elements of the sensual into her new existence, and the finale has them singing “their song” (“Call me Florence, since it’s Florence that you love”). Indeed the film somewhat resembles a musical, as befits the story of a woman who believes herself a music-hall star, and there is a nice contrast between this theme song and the effete song Lucile sings at the piano in the opening sequence. But it is hard to know how the song “Nuits d’amour” (Nights of Love) got into the scenario, since it is a fairly direct transcription of the well-known American song “Night and Day,” which the occupation authorities would hardly have ap-

43. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 143–154: “La Femme face à son désir.”

76

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

proved. Admittedly, scripted under the occupation, the film was released at the end of 1944 when the Americans had arrived in triumph in Paris, so it may well have been a late addition.

19. Le Corbeau The Raven; remade as The Thirteenth Letter (1951) Filming began 10 May 1943; released 28 September 1943 93 min, b&w Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot; Prod Continental Films; Scr Louis Chavance; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Music Tony Aubin; Art dir André Andrejew; Sound WilliamRobert Sivel; Edit Marguerite Beaugé; Act Pierre Fresnay (Dr. Germain), Ginette Leclerc (Denise Saillens), Pierre Larquey (Dr. Vorzet), Micheline Francey (Laura Vorzet), Noël Roquevert (Saillens, the schoolteacher), Héléna Manson (Marie Corbin), Jeanne Fusier-Gir (draper), Louise Sylvie (patient no. 13’s mother), Liliane Maigné (Rolande Saillens), Bernard Lancret (substitute), Antoine Balpêtré (Dr. Delorme), Louis Seigner (Dr. Bertrand), Jean Brochard (Bonnevi), Pierre Bertin (deputy director), and Roger Blin (patient no. 13). Le Corbeau was one of the most controversial films of the occupation. It is a grim film portraying a sordid world, and in it, Henri-Georges Clouzot expressed most forcefully his misanthropic worldview. Based on 1922 events in Tulle, and written by Louis Chavance in 1933, the script describes how in a French provincial town (“Saint-Robin”), a spate of anonymous letters accuses the new doctor (Germain) first of a liaison with his colleague’s wife, then of abortion, and subsequently accuses almost everyone in the town of furtive secrets, crimes, or perversions. A cancer victim learns from the letters that he is incurable and commits suicide. Letters fall from his funeral cortege and from the church gallery. All are signed “Le Corbeau.” Dr. Germain is the principal focus of their spite, and we follow his attempts to identify the author. Suspicion falls on Marie Corbin; she is arrested, but after a short respite, the letters resume. Dr. Germain is led to suspect Denise, sister of his host, the schoolteacher, then his colleague’s wife, Laura Vorzet. Both seem guilty. Dr. Vorzet himself acknowledges that, alas, his wife has indeed been driven mad by unfulfilled sexuality (she is young, he is old enough to be her father—a well-known trope of the decade). She is carted off to an asylum, screaming accusations against her husband. A word from her sister leads Germain to realize that indeed she cannot have alone been responsible. He returns to find Dr. Vorzet slumped dead over another half-written letter from the Raven and the vengeful cancer victim’s mother leaving the house. 1940–1945

77

This ends the film but does not entirely clarify the matter. As Vorzet himself had hinted earlier, the sheer number of letters suggests more than one author, and the film leaves open the extent of the Raven’s multiple authorship—almost certainly all those mentioned and, among others, the sexually obsessed adolescent Rolande. The film implies that the first anonymous letter (which Laura acknowledges having written) has provided the opportunity for the townsfolk to vent variously their hatreds, their rancors, and their frustrated sexuality. Indeed, this can be seen as an early attempt to represent on film Freud’s ideas, as we witness the forces of the townsfolk’s (indeed the occupied nation’s) Unconscious being unleashed. In the film’s most famous scene, where Vorzet talks to Germain of the “vicious beast he views in the mirror each morning, accompanied by an angel,” he proceeds to swing the bare bulb in the room, putting their respective faces now in light, now in dark. (“You think light is good, darkness evil? But where is light, where dark? Where does one start and the other finish? Can you be sure of being on the good side?”) Guilt seems not just multiple, then, but universal; the film constitutes an attack not just on the petty bourgeoisie of this town but on humanity as a whole, recalling the views of Céline and other right-wing anarchists. Roger Régent remembered the film as “the most brutal cinematographic sensation of these four years,” and noted that “The outspokenness of the work, its passionate arrogance, its anti-clericalism, its subversive power, its tense sensuality . . . the insult to all forms of conformity . . . couldn’t help shocking your average Sunday cinemagoer and driving away all right-minded families.”44 One month after its release, the first (clandestine) issue of L’Écran français contained an article coauthored by Pierre Blanchar and Georges Adam asserting that Le Corbeau slandered the French people as degenerate, immoral, corrupt, and ripe for slavery, contrasting it with Jean Grémillon’s Le Ciel est à vous (#23), which, on the contrary, exalted the common people. Clouzot was characterized as promoting Nazi ideology, a camouflaged Hun churning out anti-French propaganda.45 This attack was seconded by the magazine Candide, which claimed that Clou zot had agreed to the film being screened in Germany as representing a typical French town. This claim was easily shown to be false; indeed, UFA had refused to distribute it outside of France, and the Gestapo had complained to Continental because its film decried anonymous letters, on which the Gestapo depended for denunciations of Jews and resistants. Moreover, somewhat ironically,

44. Régent, Cinéma de France, 194–199. 45. Pierre Blanchar and Georges Adams, “Le Corbeau est déplumé,” L’Écran français, which accompanied Les Lettres françaises, no. 14, 10 March 1944.

78

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

the film’s so-called unhealthy realism was as unwelcome to Vichy as to the Resistance, showing provincial family life (“La France profonde”) in an even worse light than did Goupi Mains-Rouges (#13). Nevertheless, five months later, when Paris was liberated and the Resistance purge of collaborators began, Clouzot and Chavance were banned from exercising their profession, not for life exactly, but for two years, indefinitely renewable. Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc were imprisoned, and most of the cast banned for varying periods, though admittedly several of them had engaged in unwise broadcasts supporting, if not the Germans, at least Marshal Pétain (whom Fresnay continued to honor). Despite its aggression, the film might not have caused such a stir if it had not been the work of such a talented director and crew. The camerawork and lighting are both brilliant and morally suggestive, while the austerity shown elsewhere in the use of technology is striking: there is no foregrounding of punctuation to interrupt the diegesis (almost all visual connectives being simple cross-dissolves), and untypically, there is no extra-diegetic music to coax the spectator’s emotions (the only such occurring over the introductory and concluding frames). This admirable austerity of means points up the few moments when virtuoso techniques do aspire to force the viewer’s feelings—Marie Corbin’s flight from the outraged townsfolk (a flurry of brief shots, hysterical rabble on the soundtrack, angled shots, fragmented face, etc.), the crisis in the schoolroom when Denise collapses, and the moment when the camera tracks in to extreme close-up, long held, on Denise’s tearful face. It is possible to find these all painfully incongruous in the context of such an austerely realistic film, especially the close-up on Denise’s face. As Jacques Siclier noted, posterity has rehabilitated the film, now generally considered a masterpiece: “Clouzot’s [abilities and worldview] burst on the scene in the face of the Pétainist moral order, which had no purchase on Continental’s decisions, bringing a disconcerting audacity and contributing mightily to the artistic vitality of the French cinema, which was evolving faster than, and in a different direction from, that usually claimed.”46 Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, who focus rather on the abortion theme deriving from Germain’s past and on the squalid connivings of the petty bourgeoisie as the prime target of the film, draw an entirely more scathing conclusion: “Paradoxically, this film, supposedly breaking with all that constituted the form and the substance of the Vichy cinema, reveals itself on analysis deeply affected by the principal tropes of the period: discrediting the patriarchy, condemning the ‘incestuous couple,’

46. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 238.

1940–1945

79

idealizing womanhood, even promoting natality.” And, they add, it does this in a style deriving from right-wing anarchism.47 Certainly pro-fascist critics such as Lucien Rebatet, Maurice Bardèche, and Robert Brasillach admired its virtuosity and force. The most aggressive recent defense of the film comes from Greg Sims who, taking his cue from one of Germain’s remarks to Vorzet (“This sort of crisis is not without its value—you come out of it stronger and more confident”), reads the film as a Nietzschean descent into hell that will strip Germain of his excessive belief in rationality (“You think too much, Rémy; stop thinking”) and lay the groundwork for a “healthy” instinctually driven future. Sims quotes Nietzsche (“To represent terrible and questionable things is in itself the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence in the artist”) as an aid to interpreting the film as a gigantic poison-pen letter to the French republic.48 It is precisely because of this fundamental interpretive ambivalence that Le Corbeau is still such a fascinating object of study.

20. L’Éternel Retour The Eternal Return Filming began 15 March 1943; released 13 October 1943 115 min, b&w Dir Jean Delannoy; Prod Discina; Scr Jean Cocteau; Cinematog Roger Hubert; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Georges Wahkévitch; Sound Jean Monchablon; Edit Suzanne Fauvel; Act Jean Marais (Patrice), Madeleine Sologne (Nathalie), Jean Murat (Marc), Yvonne de Bray (Gertrude), Junie Astor (Nathalie no. 2), Piéral (Achille), Jean d’Yd, Alexandre Rignault, Roland Toutain, and Jane Marken. Alhough directed by Jean Delannoy, this film is heavily determined by Jean Cocteau’s script and values. For Cocteau there were certain implacable eternal truths, and it was the privilege and responsibility of the artist to identify these, describe them, and interpret them for less perceptive mortals. His scripts, therefore, divide into two main groups—those that glorify the artist-philosopher and his genius, and those that identify, often in contemporary dress and life, the timeless traces of those eternal truths. L’Éternel Retour belongs to the latter group. It recapitulates the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, who, as a result of drinking a love potion, are bound 47. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 196. 48. Sims, “The Work of Art as Will to Power,” 743–779.

80

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

hopelessly and eternally to one another. Despite the persecutions of Isolde’s husband, Mark, King of Cornwall, and of Isolde’s homonym, Isolde aux Blanches Mains, whom Tristan marries in Brittany, nothing can separate the lovers, not even death. In Cocteau’s script, Tristan and Isolde become Patrice and Nathalie. Mark is now Marc, Tristan’s uncle, squire of a medieval castle in which he tolerates the presence of his sister-in-law, her husband (an arms collector), and their son—a malevolent dwarf whose stunted figure echoes his stunted mentality and who conspires constantly against the lovers in order to secure his and his family’s place in the chateau. Initially Patrice, worried that his uncle was being put upon by this parasitical family, had sought out Nathalie as a wife for Marc. From the beginning, however, she had believed and hoped that he had sought her for himself, and the love potion consecrates this Oedipal rivalry between Patrice and his quasi-father. Marc’s suspicions are aroused. He traps the lovers and banishes Patrice. Patrice, in turn, abducts Nathalie for a brief mountain idyll, but when Marc tracks them down to recover her, Patrice abandons hope—he takes a job as a mechanic in the garage of a friend whose sister is Nathalie’s homonym, but dark and vivacious where the original Nathalie is blonde and bloodless. Attempting to catch one final glimpse of his true Nathalie, Patrice is shot by the dwarf and fades away. Nathalie joins him in death on a bier in the cluttered garage, which in a cross-dissolve becomes a (far from cluttered) Greek temple. This final scene cannot help but recall the final image of Les Visiteurs du soir, in which the lovers are likewise immortalized in statue form, but there the beating hearts undermine any sense of tragedy. Indeed they suggest a vitality totally absent from Patrice and Nathalie, who become simply the timeless stone effigies of a tomb sculpture. All commentators note the common ground, however, seeing these two films as representative of the “poetic” tendency that characterized the occupation, and that involved myth, fantasy, fantasized history, dream, and the weird. The final cross-dissolve and the love potion are the sole concrete relics of the Celtic legend, though, despite its contemporary setting, the film’s sentimentally wan protagonists—an expressionless, sleepwalking Nathalie and a resigned, passive Patrice—are hard to like. The more generous critics attributed this to a Brechtian distancing that displaced the spectators’ attention from their individual drama to the mythic tragedy where the film’s true significance lay. At the other extreme, Cocteau and Delannoy were criticized for transforming a timeless legend into a trivial contemporary weepie, a sentimental tearjerker in which the central characters seem resigned to their destiny from the very beginning. As Alain Weber writes, “Under cover of a false romanticism, at once wild and cold, Cocteau resorts to an incongruous medievalism with cha1940–1945

81

teau as secondary residence, platinum blonde (Madeleine Sologne), a fair-haired young lead in knitted pullover (Jean Marais), a faithful dog, a malignant garden gnome, a magic love potion, and ultimately the guarantee of death for the young lovers.” 49 This blend of sentimentality and distance is only exacerbated by Delannoy’s fastidious direction, as calculated and bloodless as the characters. This was to become a characteristic of his prestige productions (e.g., La Symphonie pastorale, #35) and was to place him in the forefront of that “Quality Cinema” that Cahiers critics so despised. Within this efficient but cold-blooded filmmaking, one technical aspect nevertheless stands out: the extravagant use of long traveling shots. The sheer number of these is astonishing (there are 30, i.e., 60% more than the norm) and explains the slow edit rate. Several such shots within the chateau are singularly adventurous. One contemporary area of controversy was the blonde Germanic nature of the two leads. Was this, as the more generous claimed, merely a consequence of the Nordic origins of the legend, or perhaps even a sardonic gesture at the Aryan ideology imposed on the nation, or was it in fact (like Premier de cordée, #25) conceding too much to that Aryan ideology? Most likely, if Cocteau had, as he claimed, nurtured this project for many years, it was rather because he saw it as an appropriate vehicle for his favorite, Jean Marais. With Cocteau as scriptwriter, L’Éternel Retour was destined for a prestige release. It was presented at a gala premiere in Vichy, which, as Gilles and JeanRobert Ragache demonstrate in their wonderfully detailed book on the wartime cultural scene, was bustling not just with politicians, ambassadors, and journalists but with high society and the artistic community. Most of the leading film personnel were to be seen there when the films in which they starred were released: “In the course of the Summer of 1943 a splendid soirée was organised for L’Éternel Retour in the presence of the Japanese ambassador. Cocteau himself was present, along with Jean Marais and Madeleine Sologne.”50 Having previously been a simple subprefecture spa-town, Vichy had seen its population skyrocket. For a few years, it became a worldly focus of cultural activity comparable to Paris. This prestigious premiere foreshadowed the film’s astonishing success both in Paris and in the provinces. By my calculations, in Paris alone it attracted over half a million spectators in exclusive release—more than any other film in 1943 or 1944, exceeding even that other tearjerker (about a blinded war hero) L’Ange de la nuit. 49. Weber, La Bataille du film, 112–113. 50. Ragache and Ragache, La Vie quotidienne, 98.

82

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

21. Jeannou Jeannou Filming began 28 April 1943; released 10 November 1943 101 min, b&w Dir Léon Poirier; Prod SNEG; Scr Poirier; Cinematog Georges Million; Music Adolphe Borchard; Art dir Raymond Druart; Sound Jacques Carrère; Edit Raymonde Nevers; Act Michèle Alfa (Jeannou), Roger Duchesne (Pierre Levasseur), Saturnin Fabre (Frochard), Thomy Bourdelle (Marquis de Peyrac), Pierre Magnier (Marquis de Cantagril), Mireille Perrey (Conchita de Cantagril), Marcelle Géniat (Marceline), and Maurice Schutz (Éloi des Farges). Also Haut-le-Vent (Haut-le-Vent) Filming began 11 May 1942; released 23 December 1942 81 min, b&w Dir Jacques de Baroncelli; Prod Minerva; Scr José Germain and Paul Vialar, from a short story by Jean Vignaud; Cinematog Georges Million; Music Henri Goublier; Art dir Pierre Marquet; Sound Lucien Lacharmoise; Edit Yvonne Martin; Act Charles Vanel (François Ascarra), Gilbert Gil (Joachim), Mireille Balin (Gisèle), Marcelle Géniat (Aunt Anna), Francine Bessy (Héléna), and Marcel Vallée (Pélussin). Defending the occupation cinema as having resisted the temptation to pander to reactionary preferences, Roger Régent wrote off as insignificant those “few pitiful works of propaganda like Jeannou, Cap au large, Port d’attache, etc that preach with a great poverty of expression the Vichy government’s thematics of back-to-the-land, the centrality of the family, or some other such crusade.”51 While not a wonderful film, Jeannou is not as bad as Régent, for obvious reasons, wanted at the time to make it out to be. Both it and Haut-le-Vent are here included as representative of those films, more numerous than Régent implied, that incorporated major elements of Vichy ideology. Haut-le-Vent was in 1942 one of the first films to explore the possibilities of Vichy’s call to (moral) arms. Members of a landed Basque family flee to Argentina in 1906 because of a family feud and make good there. They have business dealings with French firms, and returning to further them in 1940, witness the country’s collapse and defeat. Their return to Argentina is delayed, so they visit 51. Régent, Cinéma de France, 9.

1940–1945

83

the old family property, only to find it is now theirs. François (!) wants to sell it, but his son Joachim would rather join with his attractive cousin Héléna and run it. François himself becomes attracted to a neighbor, Gisèle (Mireille Balin, attempting to redeem her 1930s dissolute roles). A fire lit by a vengeful financier triggers the denouement in which François rescues Héléna. Father and son decide to stay and do their duty by the family, and by the nation. The emphasis throughout is on family and land: stalwart old Aunt Anna, trying to convince François not to sell, says, horrified, “Sell the domain, but that’s family land. . . . It’s your homeland.” Selling it would be as great a desertion as his father’s departure for Argentina; it would be to betray France itself. So when he is insulted as a peasant by a sleazy businessman with his eye on the land, François muses, “A peasant . . . why not? . . . Here is land that needs to have the right thing done by it.” And having decided, he telegraphs to Argentina, saying that he wants all those of French birth to follow his example; they’re needed here. He will pay for all his employees to come over. The final images are of ship and train crowded with returning Frenchmen, then masses of them marching up the road to the Basque village, with a last, thoughtful pan up to the church tower. It is noteworthy that the French branch of the family consists solely of women (Gisèle, Héléna, Aunt Anna) while the Argentinian branch consist solely of men. Faced with pressure from the businessman, Gisèle murmurs, “What is needed here is a man.” It is also noteworthy that what had in the 1930s been a common narrative trope—the dream of escape abroad to a new life in a new land—is here redefined as desertion, but that other 1930s trope, the corrupt businessman, is retained in the person of a rival for Gisèle’s favors with designs on both properties. It is he who is ultimately responsible for petulantly lighting the fire that nearly kills Héléna. François himself in Argentina has become a businessman, and for the first half of the film is selfish, rational, and ruthless. Only as he becomes “a peasant” (reversing the trajectory of his own father) does he become humanized and acceptable to the local community. Written and directed a year later by that old trooper Léon Poirier, whose right-wing credentials had been apparent in Verdun and L’Appel du silence (1936), embodying militarism, colonialism, and religiosity, Jeannou is nevertheless a more complex film than Haut-le-Vent because it attempts to reconcile a conflict within the Vichy government between the land-and-family thesis and the need not entirely to reject technology and progress. So Jeannou, the daughter of the Marquis de Peyrac, is in love with Pierre, an engineer and geologist who has discovered coal strata on her family’s land. The marquis had known of the deposits but had not wanted them developed, and resists the suasions of a financier, Frochard (Saturnin Fabre). Jeannou quarrels with her father over an arranged 84

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

marriage and flees to Paris where Pierre is now secretary to Frochard. But soon she pines for her native Périgord and returns there pregnant. Her father reluctantly agrees to her marriage to Pierre on condition that they wait until after his own death to begin exploitation of the coal. The fundamental trope appealed to here is the opposition between Paris and the provinces, where the latter represent authenticity and timeless purity, while Paris, den of sly financiers, is a sink of iniquity characterized by nightclubs, gambling, courtesans, and sexual laxity. The patriarchal family’s inalienable roots in their Périgord domain are evoked by the marquis’s saying, “The land of France must not be bought and sold; it must be passed on.” He consults the locals, who agree: “The more progress, the more suffering.” The film takes visible pleasure in having a car break down and be towed to its destination by oxen. But the count and tradition do not have the final say: Jeannou (whose pregnancy, which seems to derive from no more than a kiss to the hand, recalls the virgin birth) rages against her father’s conservatism, asserting that his preoccupation with land and family, his cult of the past, has created a desert about him—he has forgotten how to love. Nevertheless, the extremes of progress, exemplified in the financial-industrial complex, are still denounced and punished here—the bankrupt Frochard is arrested for fraud, just as in Haut-le-Vent the financier is carted off by the police for his reckless arson. But the coal will ultimately be exploited when Jeannou and Pierre inherit the domain. “The door of the Peyrac chateau remains open on the future,” and the final images of it have angelic children’s voices over them. In both films (and in their contemporary, Monsieur des Lourdines, which shares many tropes with these two, including a setting in the Southwest), capitalism is pilloried; class is denied in favor of the landed gentry and their workers; family is central, with an emphasis on the next generation’s being free from the taints of the past that have caused the downfall of France; and regionalism is celebrated by accents, by quaint folkloric dances and costumes, and by loving pans over the landscape. And, as in the final image of Haut-le-Vent, an air of religiosity surrounds the nurse-governess who tends the heroine, while a statue of the Virgin Mary blesses her and Pierre’s union. Moreover, a mystical union seems to link members of these landed families, since when Jeannou collapses in her Paris flat, her father on the farm in Périgord “hears her fall” and starts up in alarm.

22. Voyage sans espoir (Desperate Voyage/No Way Out) Filming began 5 August 1943; released 15 December 1943 89 min, b&w 1940–1945

85

Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Films Roger Richebé; Scr Pierre MacOrlan, based on an idea of Maurice Kroll and George Klaren; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music Marius-Paul Guillot and Jean Marion; Art dir Robert Gys; Sound Jacques Lebreton and Jacques Carrière; Edit Jacques Desagneaux; Act Jean Marais (Alain Ginestier), Simone Renant (Marie-Ange), Paul Bernard (Pierre Gohelle), Lucien Coëdel (Philippe Dejanin), and Louis Salou (Inspector Sorbier). Given the criticism of prewar poetic realist films as Judeo-Marxist propaganda responsible for the French defeat, it is astonishing that Voyage sans espoir should ever have been produced, since it is a splendid, even archetypal, instance of poetic realism, comparable only in these years to Lumière d’été (#15). Roger Richebé had the rights to it but no time to direct it himself, so he passed it to Christian-Jaque. The narrative concerns the criminal Pierre who, on the run, attempts to board a steamer that will take him to a new life in a new land “over there.” He is helped in this by a good woman, Marie-Ange, who for reasons difficult to understand still loves him, and by the ship’s captain, Philippe, an old friend who has likewise always loved Marie-Ange, honorably but hopelessly. Indeed, he has called his ship the Marie-Ange in honor of her. The criminal on the run and seeking a new life in a new land is, of course, a well-known trope of 1930s films, where the role so often fell to Jean Gabin, but so is the character of Marie-Ange, who evokes the femmes fatales of those same films. Despite her well-intentioned efforts, both she and Philippe—the two honorable characters—are dead by the end of the film, Pierre shooting both himself and Marie-Ange before being captured by the police. Clearly this narrative recapitulates several well-known films, most notably Quai des brumes (1938), based, like this film, on a Pierre MacOrlan script, but also Les Amours de minuit (1930), of which it is a remake. The police inspector who relentlessly hounds Pierre recalls Javert and analogous figures of doom from the previous decade who embodied the fatality that dogs the footsteps of the central characters, though prewar examples number no more than half a dozen whereas their wartime successors were far more numerous.52 But this police inspector is represented very differently from his predecessors, and more like other wartime embodiments, such as the quaint little devil from La Main du diable (1942): he resembles a slightly eccentric Englishman, with bowler hat, furled umbrella, and pince-nez. Like the others, however, he seems omnipresent and omniscient, “happening” to be picked up by the camera innumerable times in the early scenes, before his role has been clearly established, and commenting knowingly if sardonically on the behavior

52. See Crisp, Genre, Myth, and Convention, 23.

86

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

of the central trio, on crime, and on life in general. His epigrammatic utterances contribute to the poetic realist atmosphere—“La vie, c’est une mauvaise plaisanterie” (Life is a bad joke), and so on—while his sardonic comments on the narrative’s coincidences serve to integrate them into a preordained pattern. But the most consistent reminders of the poetic realist tradition in this film are the settings within which the formulaic events are played out, and the manner in which those settings are evoked. All the events take place on a single stormy night, in a train, and in the port city that is the train’s destination. Typical locales, aside from the train itself, are the docks; the rain-swept streets; the storm-driven waves crashing against the Martello tower on the promontory, where the worst violence is carried out; the Fortuny Bar with its risqué acts, its nets, and its bead curtains straight from The Blue Angel; and the barred grill of the railway platform against which Marie-Ange collapses and dies, as Jean Gabin’s characters had so memorably died in Pépé le Moko (1936) and Quai des brumes (1938). All these settings are lit in ways inherited from the German expressionist films of the 1920s, as reinterpreted in classic French films of the 1930s: pools of light gleaming on wet night streets, circles and slots of light across the eyes, faces side-lit so as to be half in shadow, the Venetian blinds of the ship’s windows casting slatted shadows over the scenes within, while flickering lights play on the faces of characters in taxis and in trains, and vapor clouds from passing trains billow in and out of pools of light. Typical of expressionist films is the emphasis on the image rather than the editing: there are numerous long takes, with a mere 21 shots (each over 45 seconds) occupying 26 percent of the film. Within such shots, a mobile camera, zip pans, and Dutch tilts evoke an unstable psychology and an unstable world. Underlining the thematic drive to escape from this bleak existence, yet at the same time providing variation and balance, the film proposes a second fugitive criminal dreaming of a better life beyond the seas: Alain, a bank teller who has stolen from the bank where he works and must embark before his theft is discovered. But we only realize these parallels a few minutes before the end of the film. Until that point, he seems a fresh-faced, naive young man—both Jean Marais’s countenance and previous roles contribute to this effect—whom “accident” throws in the way of the fleeing Pierre and his helper Marie-Ange. Pierre chooses the train compartment where Alain is sleeping as the least threatening, and a series of carefully judged lighting contrasts imply a radical contrast between the sinister Pierre, fleeing the police, and the gullible Alain, supposedly ex-director of a bank traveling with a rather large sum of money to Argentina, but in fact attempting to escape “the prison of his bleak existence” to a new life over there, just like Pierre. 1940–1945

87

When Pierre escapes the police stakeout on the arrival platform, another coincidence has Marie-Ange burst in on Alain’s taxi, which in turn has an accident—a flat tire—that allows them a long moment of intimacy. “Je pars demain pour toujours” (I’m heading off tomorrow forever) he tells her. “On dit que c’est un beau pays” (They tell me it’s a great place), she replies as she rushes off. Yet another happy accident sees Alain in the Fortuny bar at the time of her performance, whence their intimacy is renewed and extended. She convinces him to return the money so they can begin life together, however humble, without fear or guilt, but as she bids him farewell, a final ironic/tragic incident, of the sort beloved of 1930s films, sees her shot by Pierre at the departure gates, just when happiness seems possible. Alain, unaware, waves gaily from the departing train as she too bravely waves and smiles, then collapses and dies by the platform grill. He seems to have escaped but yet another dream has been destroyed. The redemptive power of love is sufficiently asserted but always as a dream, destined to remain unfulfilled, just out of reach. So two train journeys frame the narrative. The film begins with a documentary-style series of shots from and of the train on which both Pierre and Alain are fleeing justice—undoubtedly a homage to La Bête humaine but reminiscent of dozens of images of trains that connote mobility, dynamism, and action—while the final images are of Pierre shooting Marie-Ange as Alain sets out on the return journey through which he naively hopes to clear his guilt.

23. Le Ciel est à vous The Sky Belongs to You Filming began 31 May 1943; released 2 February 1944 105 min, b&w Dir Jean Grémillon; Prod Raoul Ploquin; Scr Albert Valentin and Charles Spaak; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Roland Manuel; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Jean Putel; Edit Louisette Hautecœur; Act Madeleine Renaud (Thérèse Gauthier), Charles Vanel (Pierre Gauthier), Jean Debucourt (Monsieur Larcher, the piano teacher), Léonce Corne (Dr. Maulette), Raymonde Vernay (Madame Brissard), Raoul Marco (Noblet), Albert Rémy (Marcel), Anne Vandenne (Lucienne Ivry, the aviatrix), and Anne-Marie Labaye (Jacqueline Gauthier). It is perhaps not surprising that a film which, on its release, was universally acclaimed not just by Resistance but by pro-Vichy and profascist critics should have proved the most controversial film made during the war years. It was rapidly caught up in a debate about politically correct film practices that saw the Re88

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

sistance arm of the film industry praise it to the skies as glorifying the French people, yet during and even after the liberation, it was often praised in terms that made its proto-fascist potential apparent. More recently, it has been caught up in feminist debates, but again in ambivalent ways. Variously labeled a great political film, a great feminist film, one of the greatest films ever made, and the peak of Jean Grémillon’s career—but also one of the last gasps of a shameful French fascism—Le Ciel est à vous is worth watching if only to evaluate the competing claims made for and against it. The storyline is simple and was based on the recent (1937) exploits of Madame Dupeyron, the wife of a garage proprietor in Mont de Marsan. Called here Thérèse Gauthier, she comes to share the fascination with aviation of her husband, Pierre, who had formerly been French flying ace Georges Guynemer’s mechanic. Between them they prepare a plane for distance flight, and Thérèse succeeds in breaking the women’s record for a straight-line flight. The story is related in a curiously undramatic manner in unremarkable decors, appropriate to the matter-of-fact attitude of the couple. A perfunctory element of suspense, however, is introduced toward the end when her plane seems to disappear over the Mediterranean. Of course, the final images are of Thérèse triumphant. Within a few weeks of its release, this narrative was exploited by the Resistance as ammunition for an attack on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (#19): by contrast with that film, funded by the German production company and accused of slandering the people of France, this one was praised in a notorious clandestine article as showing “the true French spirit . . . , genuine courage and moral health . . . , embodying a national truth . . . ; it shows a young French mother who accomplishes her duties but whose heart is sufficiently vast to conceive a truly epic dream demonstrating traditional French daring, energy and generosity. [With] conviction and sobriety [it asserts that despite everything,] out national courage and dignity are intact.”53 The article ends by implying that Madame Gauthier’s final triumph presages the definitive triumph of France in the present conflict—not too rash a prediction in February 1944. This extraordinary eulogy derives in part from the fact that Pierre Blanchar, one of the article’s two authors, was well aware of Grémillon’s left-wing Resistance sympathies. President of the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français, Blanchar was in regular contact with Grémillon who, as president of the Film Technician’s Union, was also a member of that committee. Yet doubts about the final political position of the film can be read from Pierre Leprohon’s postwar account of the film: while acknowledging that the film asserted “a secret heroism

53. Blanchar and Adams, “Le Corbeau est déplumé.”

1940–1945

89

present at the heart of this provincial bourgeois couple,” and that it “glorified the spirit of adventure in a family of honest artisans,” he notes that what is most striking about the film is not the achievement itself but “the will to dare towards that end.”54 And, indeed, Thérèse does manifest a relentless will, “stronger than reason,” to achieve her dream, sacrifying all else before it. This evocation of a “triumph of the will” perhaps explains why both Vichy and fascist critics found it worthy of praise. Raymond Borde says that, “as someone who was at the time a militant communist, I can solemnly affirm that it was experienced as a propaganda act of our class enemies. Objectively it served the interests of the Marshal, and all the values of the ‘National Revolution’ could be found in it.”55 The same ambivalence is apparent in the feminist debate: for Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, it is the most feminist French film made before 1970.56 Charles Vanel, known for his pro-Vichy sympathies and regularly cast in overbearing patriarchal roles, is here given the role of anti-patriarch, while Madeleine Renaud is cast as a woman who, initially devoted to her duties as wife and mother, discovers in the course of them an epic dream that she strives successfully to realize. In Burch and Sellier’s terms, she evolves from a “dutiful woman” to a “desiring woman,” and it is the realization of female desire that places the film in their pantheon of great feminist films. Thérèse’s intoxication with aviation (certainly, one of the most intense of contemporary myths until, in postwar years, aviation became commercialized) is represented in sexual terms, as is her later flight preparation: she emerges from this first flight as from an orgasm, dazed and unsteady, her ecstatic face kissed by her husband. Nevertheless, it is possible to feel that Burch and Sellier go too far in seeing this as also a “family film par excellence.” Even they acknowledge that Le Ciel est à vous allows one to recognize the destructive potential of the feminist project, and Leprohon notes that it could be read as “monstrous selfishness.” The family suffers in a variety of ways, notably when, to finance her attempt on the record, Thérèse has to sell her talented daughter’s piano. The daughter’s aspirations are remarkably analogous to those of her mother but must be sacrificed to it: Thérèse’s (sexually charged) desire overrides her daughter’s undoubted musical ability (and this was no trivial matter for Grémillon the musician). Ultimately, the choice Thérèse makes is “Me first, now,” and the children can wait their turn. This and the possibility of her dying in the attempt generate the insistent “orphan” theme that frames and

54. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 147–150. 55. Quoted in Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 14. 56. Much of what follows draws on their comments, which are essential reading; see Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 57, 97, 146–147, 197–202.

90

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

pervades the film. Nothing in this reading could be more profoundly at odds with Vichy’s National Revolution, which gave primacy to family, children, and woman as mother. Moreover, the gender transformations that evolve as she takes over more of the traditionally male managerial and public roles are captured nicely in Pierre’s broken arm—a Freudian instance that relegates him to a more female role in the couple (and, again, this was no trivial matter for the reputedly bisexual Grémillon). Summarizing, Burch and Sellier praise the film not just because it foregrounds female desire and fulfillment but precisely because, in doing so, it does not overlook the contradictions inherent in the emergence of female desire in contemporary society. More particularly, they praise the film for advocating “a new partnership within the couple both at home and at work” as an ideal toward which all men and women should aspire. As a final debating point, it is worth considering whether the film’s unusually noncommittal style supports or undermines the effectiveness of its aims. Even for Grémillon, not given to foregrounding technique, Le Ciel est à vous is an extremely self-effacing film, its editing and camera movements conforming to an internal logic of gaze and of character movement that make them practically unnoticeable (though Jean Mitry makes a good case for the opening shot doing a lot of work, establishing the metaphorical connection between sheep and orphans, shepherd and priest).57 Nevertheless, in conjunction with the lack of plot strategies and identification techniques, this makes for a relatively uninvolving spectatorial experience, surprising in a film so highly praised.

24. Le Voyageur sans bagages (Traveling Light) Filming began 4 October 1943; released 23 February 1944 99 min, b&w Dir Jean Anouilh; Prod Éclair-Journal; Scr Anouilh and Jean Aurenche, from the play by Anouilh; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music François Poulenc; Art dir Jacques Krauss; Sound Jean Monchablon and Jacques Carrère; Edit Jean Feyte; Act Pierre Fresnay (Gaston), Pierre Renoir (Georges Renaud), Blanchette Brunoy (Valentine), Louis Salou (Me Uspard), Marguerite Deval (the Duchess of Dupont-Dufort), Louise Sylvie (Madame Renaud), Jean Brochard (Marcel Berthier), Henri Gaultier (the maître d’hôtel), and Pierre Brûlé (the lad).

57. Mitry, Histoire du cinéma, 5:247–248.

1940–1945

91

Jean Anouilh was of course one of the foremost dramatists of the age, but before this film, his contact with the cinema had been limited to providing the dialogue for five films between 1936 and 1939. Like Jean Cocteau, however, Anouilh seized the opportunity provided by the war to direct a script of his own. Le Voyageur sans bagages is set in 1931 and concerns a World War I soldier who has lost his memory. Events conspire to help him reconstruct his former identity, and to his horror, he discovers a self that he finds intolerable. This plot is so close to Kurt Bernhardt’s prewar Carrefour that it is likely the scriptwriter for that film borrowed heavily from Anouilh’s play: in Carrefour, a respectable industrialist who had lost his memory during World War I is prompted by a blackmailer’s insinuations to explore his past, only to discover he is not the person he believes himself to be but rather a criminal with a seedy past. He has unwittingly exchanged identities with that (dead) industrialist and become the honorable citizen he might originally have been if born into better circumstances. In Le Voyageur sans bagages, the amnesiac “Gaston” has been confined to an asylum for fifteen years, having been found wandering in railway yards without baggage, material or mental. His pension has mounted up, and five families seek to claim it and him. It becomes apparent that he is most likely Jacques Renaud, but his present decent, amiable, gentle self is diametrically opposed to that of Jacques, who had shot birds, crippled his friend in a squabble over a servant girl, seduced his brother’s betrothed (now wife), and not spoken to his mother for a year before enlisting because of a disagreement over an inheritance. Gaston is distraught, repeating over and over, “I’m not that brute, Jacques”—that monster whom no one loved. His past self was and is the better for being suppressed; he will reject it and his role in the unlovely Renaud family. The final image is of him walking off into the distance, in Chaplinesque fashion, with a young boy and a dog for company. Although the film was successful in 1944, it is difficult to estimate just how successful because its release was cut short by the liberation, whereupon records become fragmentary. Certainly the church condemned it on moral grounds “for systematic ridicule of the family,” and Roger Régent condemned it equally emphatically on aesthetic grounds, as a totally inadequate adaptation of the original staged version. The charm that worked so effectively in the theater was absent, he found, from the film version, and Pierre Fresnay in the lead role failed to capture the tragic interior desolation of Georges Pitoëff in the play. The result lacked depth, Régent wrote, and everyone was sorry for Anouilh.58 Yet viewed nowadays, divorced from its original theatrical staging, the film can seem a most strik-

58. Régent, Cinéma de France, 246–248.

92

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

ing exploration of a contradictory self—a reinvention of self—well made and well worth rediscovering. One nice touch comes as a consequence of Jacques’s amnesia: his silence and forgetfulness result in basic facts of social life and behavior having to be explained to him. The blank face he opposes to these explanations points up the ridiculous aspects of the norms and conventions that he is now supposed to remember and observe. Moreover, this alienation from self, family, and society is twice likened to that favorite 1930s trope, “orphanhood.” Valentine, the girl he stole from his brother and who married that brother just to be near him, was also an orphan— hence their understanding. The young boy he meets at the end, when the five families assemble to claim him, is also an orphan, cared for by a priest—hence their understanding. Finally, Le Voyageur sans bagages is a useful film for anyone tracking the rise in status of the art director. No less than three sets seem deliberately engineered to give full rein to this team member. Each of them—the summer-house where he and Valentine met for their clandestine assignations, the old woman’s shop in the flashback to those encounters, and the scene in his bedroom with the stuffed animals—all manifest a carefully aestheticized clutter. The last of them is particularly worth dwelling on: as Gaston sleeps, the family (in the hope of awakening memories of his past life with them) assemble around him the stuffed creatures that he had killed with gun and knife in his previous life. His reaction on awakening is not what they had hoped for. In fact, this oppressive clutter is symptomatic of all the things and people with which he now refuses to be encumbered. He will start anew, with a clean slate, defining himself independently of any previous self. As I have written elsewhere in discussing films about such narratives involving the suppression of the past, of which there are at least twenty-one from the late 1930s directed by Max Ophüls, Raymond Bernard, Victor Tourjansky, Roger Richebé, Jacques Feyder, Julier Duvivier, Georg-Wilhelm Pabst, and so on, as well as Bernhardt’s Carrefour, Most date from 1936 to 1939, and the increasing distress they embody can be measured by the increasing complexity of the narration, involving not just reminiscences and multiple flashbacks but [sometimes] a mix of past and pluperfect tenses. . . . [A crucial result of them] is to construct adolescence as a time of reckless inconsequence, engendering secrets which threaten to undermine and destroy any hope of happiness in later life . . . , a time of tragic errors when unacceptable realities of male violence and female licentiousness (not to mention family tyranny) most readily find regrettable 1940–1945

93

expression. . . . This set of propositions, which was to be taken to extremes during the war years, reinforces the decade’s global view of childhood as a time of innocence tested and readily corrupted by social pressures.59 In this sense, at least, the final image of a group including a young child abandoning past errors, wiping the slate clean, and starting anew was commensurate with Vichy ideology. It was what the nation as a whole had to do.

25. Premier de cordée (Lead Man) Filming began 15 June 1943; released 23 February 1944 106 min, b&w Dir Louis Daquin; Prod Pathé-Cinéma and Écran Français; Scr Paul Leclercq, Jacqueline Jacoupy, and Alexandre Arnoux, from the novel by Roger FrisonRoche; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Henri Sauguet; Art dir Lucien Aguettand; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Suzanne de Troyes; Act André Le Gall (Pierre Servettaz), Lucien Blondeau (Jean Servettaz), Irène Corday (Aline), Yves Furet (Georges), Mona Dol (Marie Servettaz), Andrée Clémant (Louise Servettaz), Geymond Vital (Maxime Vouilloz), Jean Davy (Hubert de Vallon), Marcel Delaître (Ravenat, aka Le Rouge), Guy Decomble (Warfield), Maurice Baquet (Boule), and Louis Seigner (the doctor). It was apparent from its first screening that Premier de cordée was ideologically ambiguous. Directed by a militant communist who was participating in the Resistance (and who necessarily didn’t care to let that be known), it was, on the contrary, immediately interpreted as embodying a Pétainist morale, perhaps even imbued with suspicions of Nazism. To some extent, this confusion can be explained by an improbable convergence of imagery at war’s end between the two political extremes. The film is remarkably faithful to Roger Frison-Roche’s novel, which had been published just two years before. Jean Servettaz is a famous mountain guide who in his old age is retiring to run a hotel. His son, Pierre, is in love with Aline, and both are as obsessed with mountain heights as Jean himself. Pierre will take over from his father as lead man on the rope, but in the course of a climb, Pierre

59. Crisp, Genre, Myth, and Convention, 160–164.

94

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

nearly loses his life, dangling from rope’s end. When he has recovered, he discovers he has developed vertigo and has to renounce his dream . . . in favor of becoming a hotel manager. Two years later, he returns to attempt a climb with Aline, who still loves and has faith in him. She gets stuck, and, in saving her, he overcomes his vertigo. Meanwhile, his father has been talked into one last climb with a Norwegian tourist. A storm closes in, and Jean Servettaz is killed by a lightning strike. Pierre and friends will fetch his body, with Pierre taking the final, toughest climb. His mate praises him: “What you just did was terrific; your father would have been proud.” The final images repeat the opening images, but this time it is Pierre, not his father, who is leading the party. It is not hard to see why this narrative might have attracted a fascist interpretation. The Germanic mountain film had become associated with Hitlerian aspirations to conquest, and with an elite capable of reaching physical and moral heights far above the rest of humanity. Pierre Servettaz, surveying the world from a summit, voices this very sentiment: “How distant it all is, the valley down there with its humans.” Pierre has inherited from his father the desire to live intensely and to achieve what others can only dream of achieving—or can achieve only under his guidance. Writing in praise of the film at war’s end, Roger Régent unselfconsciously—unaware, surely—borrowed directly from Leni Riefenstahl’s prewar film to describe Pierre’s feats: “This story consecrates in a realist style the triumph of the will.”60 Repeating this theme, the doctor advises Pierre that his vertigo can be overcome—all that’s needed is willpower. In his account of the film, Régent also spoke admiringly of the central episode where bulls lock horns in a grossly unsubtle (and far too extended) metaphor for the “natural” superiority and inevitable triumph of the lead bull, who dominates the herd. Pierre reminds himself that “I must conquer, I must overcome,” and his determination to do so is accompanied by unashamedly Wagnerian music. Even without these proto-fascist elements, Premier de cordée might well have been taken for an obligingly pro-Vichy work. Urban life (here, managing a hotel) is rejected as debilitating, the resort of the mediocre, in favor of the exhilarating purity of the mountains and their mountain folk. The folkloric aspects are played up—rural festivities and dancing to an accordion, the spring transhumance of the flocks—together with a reverence for youth—the next generation, who in Vichy mythology were to rectify the errors of the past and prove themselves worthy of their great predecessors in French history. The film was produced under the auspices of the commissariat for the Ministry of Education and Sport.

60. Régent, Cinéma de France, 248–249.

1940–1945

95

Retrospectively, Louis Daquin acknowledged that he had unwittingly allowed himself to be trapped into making an ambiguous film: “I admit some elements of Pétainist ideology sneaked into Premier de cordée. However one might struggle against it one is always subject to the dominant ideology.”61 His intention had been to pay his respects to Resistance fighters, many of whom were performing heroically in these more mountainous regions—Savoie, the Vercors, of course, and the Margeride. He had hoped that young Frenchmen would recognize in his film a call to arms, to risk death in a noble cause. But as Jean-Pierre Jeancolas notes, “There aren’t that many ways to film human effort: Westerner, Komsomol or Hitlerite adopt the same pose—face straining, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the distant horizon; or alternatively fixed on the blue silhouette of the Vosges, one hand solidly anchored to the rock. The range of available postures is not great.”62 In effect, the ideological projects of Vichy and of the Resistance had momentarily coincided to the extent of becoming indistinguishable. Nevertheless, as Jacques Siclier noted, the Pétainist aspects of Premier de cordée were then and remain now more evident than the Resistance aspects.63 Apart from its political ambiguity, however, Premier de cordée was admired for its rigorous realism, achieved under difficult circumstances. The introductory text asserts that “This film, which retraces the harsh and courageous life of mountain guides, was filmed in the high mountains, exactly as shown, without any faking.” Daquin and his crew spent several months clinging to the narrow shelfs of the Brévent, carrying out traveling shots along precipitous cliff edges several thousand feet high. Indeed, early in the shoot, the intended lead actor, Roger Pigaut, suffered a serious fall that put him out of action for some time. André Le Gall had to step in at short notice to take his place.

26. Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (The Center for Lost Children) Filming began 8 October 1943; released 26 April 1944 110 min, b&w Dir Léo Joannon; Prod MAIC; Scr Stéphane Pizella, Maurice Bessy, and Jean-George Auriol; Cinematog Nicholas Toporkoff; Music Louis Pasquier and Roger Roger; Art dir Robert Dumesnil; Sound Jacques Vacher; Edit Charlotte Guilbert; Act René

61. Daquin, On ne tait pas ses silences, 48. 62. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente, 331. 63. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 201–202.

96

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dary (Jean Victor), Serge Reggiani (Joris), Raymond Bussières (Marcel), Robert Demorget (La Puce), A. Julien (Mallory), Jean Mercanton (Émile Ferrand), Max Delban (boss of the bistro), and Janine Darcey (social worker). There are two main reasons for including this film in the filmography: first, it is one of the few to deal expressly with some aspects of contemporary social conditions, and, second, both it and its director expressly espoused certain aspects of Vichy ideology—arguably even a proto-fascist ideology. And in so doing, they opened up again the question of whether Vichy and the values it espoused constituted a new direction in French cinema or merely a selective continuity of prewar tendencies. The focus of the film is on adolescents whose lives have been disrupted by the defeat, the exodus, and the harsh social conditions that ensued. In 1940 Marseilles, police are checking papers, and Jean Victor saves two whose documents are not in order. All three are former inmates of correctional centers. Inspired by the plight of a child, La Puce, whom the three save from the police, they decide to set up a rehabilitation center for those children orphaned or driven to crime by wartime conditions. With the help of an enlightened civil servant, they set up the Carrefour (“Meeting place”) in a Paris suburb. As it grows, they receive permission to set up a larger establishment on a vacant factory lot in Courbevoie, which turns out, however, to belong to a dubious character, Marcel, known to Victor from his Belle Isle Correctional Center days. Marcel is a blackmarketeer and is using the lot to stash stolen goods, so he does his best to undermine the project. Failing in this, he sets his thugs to burn the Carrefour down. Led by the oldest boy, Joris, the boys overcome Marcel’s thugs and uncover the illegal cache, but La Puce (Joris’s young brother, believed dead) does in fact die in the fire. On the one hand, this plot opposes those who have emerged from an underprivileged childhood and a correctional center and have made good with those such as Marcel whose mentality is still Belle Isle and whose aim is exploitation and profiteering—the altruists versus the selfish—and there is an ongoing battle between Jean Victor and Marcel for the soul of Joris, tempted by the latter but finally (when Marcel’s fire kills his young brother) committed to the Carrefour. And parallel to this is another debate concerning whether such centers should be run on authoritative lines with iron discipline or on humane lines involving trust. Jean Victor opts for trust, leaves doors and gates unlocked, and to the horror of traditionalists, allows the inmates to circulate in town, canvassing funds for the center. This opposition came to the fore in those films of the late 1930s when correctional centers began to be topical, such as Le Coupable (1936), Prison sans barreaux (1937), and Prisons de femmes (1938). In them, criminality, especially in the 1940–1945

97

young, is seen not as inherent sinfulness to be punished but rather as sociologically generated and therefore to be dealt with through understanding and compassion.64 Jacques Prévert had tried to get a scenario published along these lines, about children escaping from Belle Isle (La Chasse aux enfants, later L’Île des enfants perdus). The censors had rejected it, and the Prévert-Carné team again failed to get it filmed in 1947 (due to weather, discord, nervous publishers, and lack of funding). A similar opposition structured La Cage aux rossignols, which was being filmed just as Carrefour was released: in it, the humane director forms a choir of the children and (again as a result of a fire) takes the boys off trustingly to a circus. None of them try to escape, of course. Yet this promotion of a humane regime for children scarred by the gritty contemporary social conditions evoked by the film is curiously at odds with a theme that emerges progressively in the course of the film and dominates the denouement: the need for a strong leader to bring this “rabble” of children into line. Initially Jean Victor is represented as a version of this, and Jacques Siclier made much of his resemblance to Jean Gabin, absent from France during the occupation. For Siclier, René Dary, who plays Victor, constituted a substitute Gabin more suited to Vichy’s needs—a Gabin “purged of the fatalistic miasma of his poetic realist days,” who can now “embody the spirit of the national revolution.” 65 Dary had already starred in a film (Port d’attache, 1942–1943) promoting a return to the land, where a demobbed sailor finds “in that eternal fecund earth a source of hope and confidence in the future.”66 Here, Dary’s character favors Joris precisely because he recognizes potential leadership material. The other adolescents, in this version, are just malleable rubbish in Joris’s hands, as he leads them first in a welter of destruction then, under Victor’s influence, in defense of the Carrefour. After Joris has led the lads to victory over Marcel’s thugs, Victor finds him grieving over his younger brother’s death and says (nicely encapsulating the opposition), “Don’t worry; you’re never all alone when you live for others. You’ll be a leader, a great one . . . a better leader than me, Joris.” What should Joris do, then? “It’s enough to love, as I’ve loved you all.” Joris has an empty heart without La Puce? “Then there’s room now for everyone else. Isn’t that so?” And Joris agrees. This emphasis on the need for a strong leader to mold (but humanely, of course) the malleable masses has led most French critics to see the film as “fascisant”—having fascist tendencies. Léo Joannon, the director, was one of a small group of directors (Abel Gance, Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol) to respond enthu-

64. See Crisp, Genre, Myth, and Convention, 156–157. 65. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 113–115. 66. Régent, Cinéma de France, 120–121. He is of course being sardonic.

98

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

siastically to Vichy’s call to arms. Here he is going a step further and tentatively exploring a potentially fascist theme, leading François Garçon to speculate that if the occupation had continued a little longer, this “new discourse” might well have prevailed: “France too might have produced its Juif Süss. . . . Three films, Mermoz, Coup de tête and Le Carrefour des enfants perdus, conceived in late 1942 or 1943, are symptomatic of this. They show that the radicalization of the political climate at the time of Laval’s return to government . . . [unquestionably] influenced certain individuals in our profession, which has no inherent marked political bent.”67 At the liberation, Joannon was temporarily banned from making films but returned to filmmaking in 1949 with a (very successful) military vaudeville.

27. Les Enfants du paradis Children of Paradise/Children of the Gods Filming began 17 August 1943; released 22 March 1945 182 (95 + 87) min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod Discina-Scalera, then Pathé-Cinéma; Scr Jacques Prévert; Cinematog Roger Hubert; Music Maurice Thiriet, Joseph Kosma, and Georges Mouqué; Art dir André Barsacq, Raymond Gabutti, and Alexandre Trauner; Sound Robert Teisseire and Jean Monchablon; Edit Henri Rust and Madeleine Bonin; Act Jean-Louis Barrault (Baptiste Deburau), Arletty (Garance), Maria Casarès (Nathalie), Pierre Brasseur (Frédérick Lemaître), Marcel Herrand (Lacenaire), Louis Salou (Count Édouard de Montray), Jane Marken (Madame Hermine), Pierre Renoir (Jericho), Fabien Lors (Avril), Marcel Pérès (director of the theater), Gaston Modot (the blind man), and Étienne Decroux (Anselme Deburau). Les Enfants du paradis is such a landmark in French film history, and has had so much written about it, that it is scarcely possible to do it justice here. First, some facts: early in the winter of 1942, Jean-Louis Barrault met Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert on the terrace of a Nice hotel and enthused about the mime Deburau. Prévert had long wanted to develop a filmscript about Lacenaire/Lemaire, a thief and occasional assassin who had lived at the same period. From the Provençal inn above Tourrettes-sur-Loup where he was installed, Carné did extensive research, and in conjunction with Prévert, Alexandre Trauner, and Joseph Kosma, who were holed up nearby, developed the general lines of the film.

67. Garçon, De Blum à Pétain, 200.

1940–1945

99

André Paulvé agreed to produce it in his Nice studio. The 650-foot-long main set was constructed in the courtyard (costing 5,000,000 francs), and filming began on 17 August 1943. The Allied landing in Calabria the following month prompted the Information Ministry to recall everyone to Paris (delaying production three months and costing another 10,000,000 francs), and motivated Arletty and Robert Le Vigan to depart the set hastily, the latter definitively, so one scene already shot with him had to be reshot later with Pierre Renoir. Production recommenced in November and shifted to Paris in February, funded now by Pathé because the Germans had shut down Paulvé’s company. The final film was 195 minutes long, in two “epochs,” each the length of a normal film; entry price was double the normal. After several months in exclusive release, the distributors (no doubt hoping to squeeze in more than three screenings per day) cut the film by 70 minutes, and only restored it when sued by Carné and Prévert. Its exclusive release lasted a cumulative 54 weeks in the Madeleine and Colisée cinemas, already earning 41 million francs, so despite its inordinate scale and cost, it returned its cost within two years, and ultimately proved a very profitable investment.68 Most obviously, the film is about the world of the theater, as signaled by the opening of the theatrical curtain at the beginning and its closing at the end. We are then treated once again to the rather wearisome theme of acting, roles, pretence, and disguises—the myth glorifying theater as a heightened reality where truths emerge more intensely than in real life, with constant echoes back and forth from play to reality. Deburau the mime and Frédérick Lemaître were both real actors in nineteenth-century Paris, and to them Prévert adds the fictional Garance to form the traditional trio of Pierrot, Arlequin, and Columbine. The film is clearly reflexive, distanced from immediate reality, and together with the historical setting, this assured it an easy path through Vichy’s approval process. The title of the first epoch, “Le Boulevard du Crime,” refers to the Boulevard du Temple, so-called because of the lurid melodramas performed there nightly. In the 1840s, “from one end to the other it was one vast parade, where from midday on anyone straying into the neighbourhood would be deafened by cymbals, drums and clarinets. Hardly had one performance ended than another would begin ten paces further on. Often at any one time a dozen comics would be entertaining the crowd with their jokes and puns, surrounded by as many groups of spectators, whose laughter echoed down the boulevard. Never did street theater ever have a vaster field of action or a wider following.” 69 Prévert drew on

68. For this and other material in this entry (unless otherwise noted), see Carné, La vie à belles dents, esp. 219–243. 69. Charensol, Renaissance du cinéma français, 72, citing an unidentified historian.

100

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

this image for the opening parade, with its cast of two thousand (bulked out by baskets of costumes), out of which the principal characters emerge, and for the final carnival, no less grandiose in conception, which absorbs them back at the end in a scene encapsulating that opposition of public gaiety and private grief so dear to scriptwriters of the time. Arletty as Garance is the focus of all the men’s attention: companion of the dandy-cum-murderer Lacenaire, she attracts the hopeless love of Baptiste the mime, to the dismay of Nathalie who loves him. Garance has an affair with Frédérick, the dramatic actor, and she is protected from prosecution (concerning a murder committed by Lacenaire) by the Count of Montray on condition she marry him. In the second epoch, set seven years later, she and the count return to Paris, triggering a number of crises: Baptiste abandons Nathalie and their child for Garance, Frédérick learns a jealousy that will allow him to better play Othello (!), and Lacenaire threatens to kill the count to get her—which he does, in a lovely Turkish Bath scene. Nathalie interrupts Baptiste’s and Garance’s night together, and Garance departs composedly through the carnival crowd with a distraught Baptiste in hopeless pursuit. Clearly the success of this plot depends on Arletty’s credibility as a universal object of lust, and she is surprisingly successful at this, distancing herself from her established persona as a populist, vulgar, slangy woman-of-the-people to become aloof, tranquil, and mysterious—a goddess on a pedestal, as in the mime where she joins Baptiste. Beside her, Maria Casarès as Nathalie cuts a pitiful figure, “a complaining, moralizing, boring wife,” and Baptiste himself is unimpressive—typical, in Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier’s terms, of the “gentle male” of the day (played not just by Barrault but variously by Bernard Blier, François Périer, Jean Desailly, Jean Marais, etc.), embodiment of the crisis of masculinity resulting from the defeat and the occupation.70 For its time, the film was a super-production, conceived on a scale possible to contemplate only because of the huge wartime audiences and the lack of international competition (and specific Vichy exemption from film-length regulations). Yet substantively it can seem empty, except for residual traces of prewar poetic realism. Jericho, the seller of clothes and identities, is a fate figure, but the “tragic end” over which he presides is less powerful than earlier, and less credibly embodied in Pierre Renoir than it might have been in the wayward insanity of Le Vigan—or indeed if Carné had felt able to retain Jericho’s cynical speech about contemporary existence: “What a world, what a stinking world— no morality, nothing—just depraved creatures, vicious and good-for-nothing.”

70. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 117, 156, 203.

1940–1945

101

But Prévert made Lacenaire the principal mouthpiece for this view of humanity as “lice . . . I’d like to eliminate as many of them as possible. . . . I long ago declared war on society.” Finally, Les Enfants du paradis offers an opportunity to consider the extraordinary conditions under which films were being produced at the time: here, in a Provence now occupied by the Germans and administered by a Vichy government committed to the moral regeneration of the French nation, a homosexual director and his outspoken socialist scriptwriter, collaborating with two Jews whose clandestine presence was an open secret (Alfred Greven dined with Arletty at a table near the group), working alongside and even developing key roles specifically for their friends, not least Arletty herself, soon to be imprisoned for horizontal collaboration with a German general, and Le Vigan, whose notorious profascist rants on the radio were to see him obliged to accompany the retreating Germans to Sigmaringen, later to be condemned to national shame in perpetuity. If he had stayed, he might have found the terms used to describe Jericho (“vend-la-mèche,” “treize-à-table,” suggesting a traitor and collaborator) distinctly discomforting.

28. Les Dames du bois de Boulogne The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne/Ladies of the Park Filmed 3 May 1944–10 February 1945; released 21 September 1945 84 min, b&w Dir Robert Bresson; Prod Les Films Raoul Ploquin; Scr Bresson and Jean Cocteau, from anecdotes in Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Jean-Jacques Grünewald; Art dir Max Douy; Sound René Louge; Edit Jean Feyte; Act Maria Casarès (Hélène), Élina Labourdette (Agnès), Paul Bernard (Jean), Lucienne Bogaert (Agnès’s mother), and Jean Marchat (Jacques). Robert Bresson’s second film is an altogether more controlled work than Les Anges du péché. It is a thoroughly malevolent little film or, more strictly, a beautifully made film recounting a particularly malevolent little anecdote: Hélène, a society woman, learns from Jacques that her lover, Jean, has ceased to love her. She plans her revenge—she will organize for Jean to meet, fall in love with, and marry Agnès, a “woman of easy virtue,” then whisper in his ear after their marriage some unpleasant truths about his new wife, all of whose previous lovers have been invited to the ceremony. In the opening scenes, Maria Casarès is magnificent as Hélène: the impassive face as she professes unconcern at Jacques’s revelation, the inexpressive calm 102

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

of her nonreaction to Jean’s “confession” that he indeed does not love her, the intense watchfulness as she evaluates Agnès’s dance routine and interaction with male admirers—all this is tremendous to the extent that the spectator is allowed, or rather compelled, to read intense emotion and elaborate calculations into her silences. It is something of a disappointment, then, to learn how reluctant Casarès was to impose these constraints on herself, when her theatrical training urged a more effusive set of reactions. Contemporary accounts all speak of extreme tension on the set, even of unrelieved hatred between her and Bresson. This was clearly a further incentive to him in future films to move away from professionally trained actors. Despite quite violent contemporary criticism of Paul Bernard as Jean, the former lover on whom Hélène exacts this baroque revenge, he now seems a perfectly logical choice of actor. Jean Cocteau, who provided some of the dialogues for Bresson was in favor (of course) of Jean Marais for that role, which is perhaps why the the character still bears the name “Jean.” But either, as some report, Marais was not available, or else the producer imposed Bernard as an established figure to head the cast-list and the credits. For contemporary audiences, he would certainly have fitted this role, since he had become typecast as a suave but weak bounder who gets his comeuppance, and critics’ disappointment that he could never generate the sympathy or compassion that Marais or Alain Cuny might have attracted is surely to misunderstand the film. Bresson was disinclined to construct sympathetic characters at any time, preferring to maintain a cold distance on the follies of humanity. If the plot of the film seems at first glance to be far removed from Bresson’s elsewhere prevalent thematics of confinement, liberation, and salvation, nevertheless any attentive viewing of the role of Agnès reveals a victim all too well aware of the traps closing in about her and desperate to escape them: she is trapped not just by her libertine past but by Hélène’s present machinations, and struggles to free herself from the relentless fatality that dogs her. Moreover, arguably both she and Jean find some form of salvation through love in the final images, where, as with the doomed heroine of La Traviata, she is fading away until a repentant Jean begs her to hold on to life, and (in a scene that Daniel Millar rightly criticizes as excessively melodramatic) she agrees to (try to) do so.71 While it is hard entirely to agree with critics Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier that “the three female characters have been relieved by Bresson of the

71. Millar, “Les Dames du bois de Boulogne,” 40, but see Michel Estève’s view in Robert Bresson, 20.

1940–1945

103

cynical and crapulous elements present in Diderot’s version,” let alone that the film as a whole is symptomatic of changes in gender power developing under the occupation, it is nevertheless worth consulting their splendid analysis of the contrasting social positioning in the film of Hélène and of Agnès—high and low, conventional and rebellious.72 Costumes, behavior, setting, and servants all conspire to position Hélène as wealthy and powerful, whereas Agnès, with her trashy gabardine raincoat, poorly furnished flat, and flashy dancing that speak of the barely disguised prostitution to which she is obliged to resort is clearly exploited and vulnerable. Where in Denis Diderot’s work Agnès barely figures as a narrative agent, here she is represented as an exuberant young woman who rejects conventional values and revels in the dance that she would like to live for rather than by, aspiring to a liberty that both her mother and Hélène contribute to destroying. As Burch and Sellier note, “Agnès is a resolutely modern type, her exuberant vitality opposed to the hieratic reserve of Maria Casarès. . . . Bresson’s film accentuates the tragedy lived out by these two women, one trapped in her craving for revenge, the other trapped in an impossible dream of emancipation and in a love corrupted by class differences.” Agnès sacrifices herself for a man “who becomes thereby the symbol of a humanity that is guilty, but redeemed by Agnès’s suffering.” The analogy with the female opponents in Bresson’s first film is striking. This diabolical little film benefits from an impeccable if conventional soundtrack and image, the lighting, camerawork, and art direction being well-nigh perfect. If there is any residue of Bresson’s earlier less-than-perfect control over the medium, it is in his surprisingly lax attitude toward the music, which is not so insistently dramatic as in Les Anges du péché (#16) but is nevertheless excessively present, backing over 50 percent of the film, the majority of it extradiegetic “filler” and “mood” music where total silence would have been enormously more effective. Neither public nor critics were kind to Les Dames on its release, perhaps because the characters’ motivations, transposed from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, were unconvincing. As Jean Mitry comments, “The way Hélène avenges herself seems appropriate in the context of 18th century aristocratic circles, but loses its meaning [when divorced from that context].”73 Georges Charensol, however, in his book on the state of the cinema at war’s end righted the balance, saying,

72. See, particularly, Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 209–214, for this and following quotations. 73. Mitry, Histoire du cinéma, 5:318.

104

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

only in France could such a film have been made, and even here its audacious classicism has not really been appreciated. Les Dames du bois de Boulogne presents us with a totally new style, just as Caligari once did. . . . Such a cinema up-ends all we had learned to love in film: for 50 years we have been told it is an art of movement, whereas Bresson affirms it is rather an art of immobility. We have been offered grotesquely elaborate sets, whereas here four walls suffice. We were assured that dialogue was essential, that actors should talk all the time, whereas these Ladies limit themselves to the bare necessary phrases. . . . We were told the cinema is action, and can only grip the spectator by a welter of events and constant revelations, whereas in this film nothing happens, or at least nothing that the public is accustomed to seeking in darkened cinemas. Bresson’s film “tends to express plastically those spiritual states that only the most audacious literature has hitherto attempted to translate into words.” It was, in Charensol’s view, the only French film of the year worthy to stand alongside those foreign revelations Brief Encounter, Dies Irae, and Citizen Kane.74

29. Boule de Suif (Fatso) Filmed 1945; released 17 October 1945 102 min, b&w Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Artes-Film; Scr Henri Jeanson and Louis d’Hée, from two short stories by Guy de Maupassant; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Marius-Paul Guillot; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Jacques Desagneaux; Act Micheline Presle (Elisabeth Roussel, aka Boule de Suif), Alfred Adam (Cornudet), Louis Salou (Lieutenant Fifi), Jean Brochard (Auguste Loiseau), Suzet Maïs (Madame Loiseau), Marcel Simon (Count Hubert de Bréville), Louise Conte (Countess de Bréville), Pierre Palau (Edmond Carré-Lamadon), Janine Viénot (Madame Carré-Lamadon), Roger Karl (the colonel), Jim Gerald (Captain von Kerfenstein), Michel Salina (the musical officer), Denis d’Inès (the priest d’Urville), Berthe Bovy (Madame Bonnet), and Sinoël (Follenvie). Boule de Suif is a particularly vicious satirical allegory of the occupation that had just ended, and a quite unsettling indication of the intensity of the hatreds 74. Charensol, Renaissance du cinéma français, 76–80.

1940–1945

105

circulating in postwar France—not just toward the Germans but also toward the grande bourgeoisie who had found it convenient to “come to an understanding” with the occupying forces. The script was hurriedly put together from two of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories dealing with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but the viewer is left in no doubt as to the intense contemporary relevance of every act and comment. It was adapted and dialogued by Henri Jeanson, always one of the most outspoken and provocative members of the French filmmaking community. A journalist and critic, he had no reason to feel any affection either for the German occupiers or for the French establishment. By his own (no doubt overdramatized) account, he had been imprisoned several times in the 1930s in the Santé or in Fresnes for incautiously expressed articles, and was subsequently imprisoned and interrogated no less than three times by the Germans during the war, at the urging of right-wing magazines Je suis partout, Le Pilori, and Le Cri du peuple.75 The bitterness of the satire can therefore in part be attributed to a simple desire for revenge. The two Maupassant stories (“Boule de Suif ” itself and “Mademoiselle Fifi”) are introduced separately in the film’s first two “acts.” In the first, a self-satisfied, arrogant group of the local high bourgeoisie are fleeing occupied Rouen for Le Havre, and are horrified to discover in their coach a notorious prostitute (namely Boule de Suif herself) and Cornudet, an anarchist and republican revolutionary. In the second act, the German officers who have taken over a French chateau as their headquarters are casually but ruthlessly destroying its treasures and sacking its cellar. The third act returns to the coach and its occupants’ sustenance, first provided by Boule de Suif ’s generously shared hamper (later they eat gluttonously without offering her anything), then at a wayside inn where the coach and its wealthy occupants are held hostage until Boule de Suif will have sex with the German officer in charge. In the fourth act, the German officers in the chateau are getting bored and want women: the coach and its occupants are again held hostage, but this time all four women are to satisfy the Germans’ lust. Boule de Suif stabs the (male) officer colloquially named Mademoiselle Fifi and escapes out a window. She takes refuge in a church and joyously tolls the bells as Fifi’s funeral passes. The first of the two melded stories focuses primarily on class, the second on patriotism. In the coach, the snobbish, hypocritical, and lascivious males and their prudish, supercilious wives are contrasted with the simple generosity and, indeed, superior morality of the prostitute. She and her friend the anarchist are patriots, and she resists the German officers’ demands, while her “betters” urge her to give in to them for their sake (“It’s your patriotic duty”), then giggle, make 75. Jeanson, 70 ans d’adolescence, notably 200–220.

106

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

snide remarks, and smirk lasciviously when she accedes to their persuasion. Yet when she returns, having saved them, they despise her. This is a vicious and unsubtle class opposition, but splendidly done. The portrayal of the German officers in the chateau is equally unsubtle, especially as portrayed in the lieutenant (Frederick/Mademoiselle Fifi), who is nothing short of a sadistic brute. There is a remarkably painful episode when the priest brings a woman to beg for her hostage husband’s release: Fifi steps aside to order his immediate execution, with the corpse to be taken straight home thereafter, then returns benignly to tell the grateful wife that her husband will be home that very evening. This sadistic and destructive representation of the Germans is curiously contrasted with fragments of great high-minded music by German composers, often played on the piano by the musical officer. The film had been introduced with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” but ends with the Marseillaise accompanying the joyful bells. The two main targets of the film—the grande bourgeoisie and the Germans—are linked in several ways by the film: In the coach, the former expect (wrongly, as it turns out) to have more in common with the German officers than with Boule de Suif and the anarchist, reminding us of the middle class’s low standing at war’s end because of widespread collaboration. This is nicely echoed when the French count and Mademoiselle Fifi in parallel “caged lion” scenes pace the room and count their steps in identical ways. As the anarchist says at the end when offered a lift in the departing coach, “No thanks, I don’t think I’ll ever be going in the same direction as you. I have a horror of unsavory company” (“mauvaises fréquentations”). In this context, it is a little surprising to find religion being treated with respect: not just the two nuns in the coach but the village priest who confronts the German officers and hides Boule de Suif at the end are shown as practical and quietly heroic. Even more surprising in a film put together hurriedly in difficult conditions, including rising discontent with the now-dilapidated state of the studios, this is a finely polished, quality product. When some were considering imitating the Italians by exploring a location-shot neorealism, Christian-Jaque shot this film in the studio. The sets are exquisitely designed, lit, and filmed by two of the classic cinema’s greatest professionals, Léon Barsacq and Christian Matras, and Christian-Jaque again demonstrates his love of technical virtuosity: numerous scenes are connected or divided by rapid slide-pans, Dutch tilts are exploited at key moments, and extended spiral crane-pans follow characters up several floors of winding stairs. Altogether this is a much more elegant and forceful allegory than that other allegorical costume film made in the aftermath of the occupation, Patrie (Louis Daquin, 1945), set in sixteenth-century Flanders and screened only ten days later. 1940–1945

107

Boule de Suif ’s great popularity indicated that it captured widespread attitudes in the film-going population at war’s end. It is not hard to see why “respectable people” might have despised it for promoting a Norman prostitute as Resistance heroine and an anarchist as political hero.76

30. Sortilèges (Magic Spells) Filming began 14 February 1944; released 5 December 1945 100 min, b&w Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Les Moulins d’Or; Scr Jacques Prévert and ChristianJaque, from the novel Le Cavalier de Riouclare by Claude Boncompain; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Henri Verdun; Art dir Robert Gys and Émile Alex; Sound René Lécuyer; Edit Jacques Desagneaux; Act Fernand Ledoux (Fabret, aka le Lièvre), Lucien Coëdel (Jean-Baptiste, aka le Campanier), Renée Faure (Catherine), Madeleine Robinson (Marthe), Roger Pigaut (Pierre), Sinoël (grandmother), Georges Tourrell (the brigadier), Jacques Butin (the police officer), and Léonce Corne (the shoemaker). Like the previous film, this one was directed by Christian-Jaque, who is not usually recognized as an auteurist director, partly because of his compulsive initial output of twenty-six films in seven years, many of them comedies featuring Fernandel. Yet at least from 1938 onward, his output took a more serious and coherent turn, dominated by the “fantastique social” (roughly, provincial gothic) of Pierre Véry, communicated with a technical virtuosity that might have been admired in any other director. Christian-Jacque regularly commissioned his scripts and adaptations from leading scriptwriters (Jacques Prévert, Charles Spaak, Henri Jeanson, Jacques Viot, Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon, Jacques Sigurd, and Véry himself). Prévert had adapted Les Disparus de St.-Agil for him in 1938, the first of five Véry novels, and Spaak had done L’Assassinat du père Noël (#3) in 1941. The provincial gothic was even more prevalent during the war years than the legendary and fantasy films that are better known, complementing them in darker tonalities, as did the nine adaptations of Georges Simenon’s dark thrillers. After the poetic realism of Voyage sans espoir (#22), Christian-Jaque directed Sortilèges, which is set, like L’Assassinat, in the high Auvergne (Boule de Suif, #29, was filmed later but released earlier). As with most provincial gothic films, it opts

76. See Siclier, La France de Pétain, 243.

108

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

for weirdness, remoteness, barbarity, and violence, and is more interested in constructing a sinister atmosphere than in coherence and narrative drive, for which reason it was roundly condemned by such eminent critics as Georges Charensol, Roger Régent, and Pierre Leprohon, who felt that Prévert should not have squandered his talents on so trivial a matter. Fabret, weak in the head since his wife died, is being manipulated by JeanBaptiste, aka le Campanier, who sees himself as having recondite magical knowledge, controlling people and events via charms and spells. Le Campanier covets Fabret’s beautiful daughter Catherine, who has however always loved the forester Pierre, and has, like her father, turned inexplicably sick since Pierre took up with Marthe. The remote alpine village is snowbound, and none of the central characters has ever been to a town. Le Campanier kills a traveler with his slingshot and robs him, forcing Fabret into complicity by sharing the loot with him. The traveler’s black horse leads the villagers to his dead master, and the police suspect Fabret, who is suddenly rich. Fabret, terrified, dares not tell the truth, and possibly doesn’t remember it. At the village dance, Pierre protects Fabret from a lynching by the villagers, and later saves Catherine from le Campanier’s lascivious embraces. In a violent confrontation, le Campanier dies; Pierre and Catherine depart in a sleigh. There is a neat circularity to the plot, with le Campanier getting killed at the end in the same way and in the same place as he had killed the traveler at the beginning, and this is yet another wartime film (like Lumière d’été, #15, and Les Enfants du paradis, #27) that ends with superficial public gaiety concealing deadly personal violence. The whole film is structured by a set of oppositions beloved of Prévert: There is an honest worker figure, whose inarticulate but sincere affections are contrasted with the twisted scheming of a villain who manipulates others and is too articulate for his own good. Like le Campanier, Marthe too is obsessed with “owning” Pierre, and is jealous of Catherine, whose simple, direct, unquestioning love is valorized by the film. Pierre tells Marthe (his boss’s daughter) that she seems to think you can buy a man like you buy a horse or a pig. Human values are repeatedly in conflict with a mercenary approach to existence, which leads to cruelty and murder. As Jacques Siclier noted, this plot is “remote from that view of an idyllic rural peasantry so dear to Vichy’s back-tothe-land project, and it is hard to understand how Vichy’s censors could have let pass this drama black with cupidity and sorcery. . . . We are far from the peasant Christmas story of 1941: here, anguish and evil prowl the woods.” His summary: “A happy end, but built on ruin and death.”77

77. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 159–161.

1940–1945

109

Yet Sortilèges is most interesting for its visuals and the associated technical virtuosity. Visually, the snowy alpine environment is inherently striking, but invested with storm and fire by night, with looming and flickering shadows, it becomes strangely eerie. This weirdness is underlined by the grotesque and/or violent backwoods characters who inhabit it (not least Sinoël playing a grandmother) and the weird rituals in which they indulge—a wax doll of Catherine, responsible for her illness; a slaughtered chicken with its blood dripping on the sleeping Catherine; the black, riderless horse careening through the snow as a recurrent reminder of its master’s murder. But this already unstable world is given an added instability by the steeply angled shots and the Dutch tilts that dominate interior shots, creating the impression that people are looming, dominating, or toppling toward one another. These techniques are already intensely present in the opening sequence between le Campanier and Fabret, and in this context, the murder can seem natural, even inevitable. Add to this the proliferation of camera movements—430 per 100 minutes, more than in any other film analyzed. Normally such a flurry of pans and tracks constitutes an alternative to rapid editing, but here it occurs in the context of an already rapid edit rate of 9.9 seconds, in which 57 percent of all shots are less than 5 seconds long. Moreover, picking up on a technique used in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), there are several rapid slide-pans replacing the normal punctuation between sequences, or even occurring between shots within a single sequence. This generates a disconcerting visual disorientation. In short, technique is foregrounded so as to be remarked, but nevertheless it is technique appropriate to the thematics of unstable mentalities in a weird world, and thus to an occupied country. Needless to say, the daytime scenes between Pierre and Catherine are free of such effects, romanticized by series of lyrical cross-dissolves. The production of Sortilèges was complicated by the disruptions of liberation and attendant lack of filmmaking material, which makes its quality even more remarkable. It was not nearly as unpopular as contemporary commentators thought, since it screened for nine weeks in a prestigious quartet of exclusiverelease cinemas, after which its progress is lost in the confusion of war’s end.

110

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

PART II

1946–1951

31. La Bataille du rail Battle of the Rail Filmed late 1944–1945; released 27 February 1946 85 min, b&w Dir René Clément; Prod Coopérative Générale du Cinéma Français; Scr Clément and Colette Audry; Cinematog Henri Alekan; Music Yves Baudrier; Sound Constantin Evangelou; Edit Lucien Desagneux; Act Jean Clarieux, Jean Durand, and Léon Pauléon (railway workers), Tony Laurent (Camargue), Lucien Desagneaux (Athos), and Robert Leray (stationmaster). In the three years following the liberation, a large number of scripts were elaborated evoking heroic French participation in the Resistance. This was the first of them to be released, and one of the best. Among those that followed, the most watchable are Les Démons de l’aube, Le Père tranquille (#36), La Bataille de l’eau lourde, Le Silence de la mer (#56), and Jeux interdits (#74), while the most successful by far were this one, Mission spéciale, La Bataille de l’eau lourde, Jéricho, and Le Bataillon du ciel. Most of those made immediately after the war benefited from the respect accorded by the government and the public to men of the left, and particularly to the communists who had formed the bulk of the resistants, but once Cold War sentiment shifted to the right, there was a noticeable retreat in the number of such scripts, followed by a surprising resurgence in the years 1959–1960. La Bataille du rail started life as a documentary—one of a number funded at war’s end by the CGCF, the production arm of the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français—but the material was judged so rich that it was expanded into a feature film. The original program for the “documentary” (actually reconstructed, though mostly from railway workers’ own reports and sometimes with the original participants) was an account of various strategies employed by railway workers to impede and undermine the German war effort, and the first 25 minutes of the film still bear the marks of this project. The last hour, however, focuses specifically on an attempt to prevent the Germans from reinforcing their

1946–1951

113

Normandy troops at the time of the Allied invasion. This latter part is more obviously an extensive fictional recreation of recent events, employing a number of well-known narrative and dramatic strategies (the wincing of the sixth hostage as his five predecessors are shot off-screen, the crucial match that refuses to ignite the fuse, the occasionally intrusive extra-diegetic music that underlines or foreshadows). As a result, as both Olivier Barrot and Georges Sadoul noted, there is a change of gear 30 minutes into the film, and the spectators can seem at the beginning to be watching a fragmentary documentary, but by the end, feel as if they have watched a fictional epic.1 As a first step in mythologizing the (statistically sparse) wartime Resistance, La Bataille du rail was extremely effective because it was extremely popular. Begun within months of the major events represented, it was seized on by those on the political left (wrongly, as it turned out) as an avant-garde film, harbinger of a new realist postwar style in France. It was widely, if dubiously, recognized as a film that captured the real and bore witness to contemporary reality, and as an invaluable document notable for its authenticity and fidelity because it was shot on location and refused all dramatic effects. As the first films of the Italian neorealists began to appear, La Bataille du rail was widely proclaimed as their precursor, drawing like them on the practice of the Soviet documentarists. Nevertheless, claims that it “systematically refuses to dramatise or take sides,” “has no recourse to artifice,” and so on, are impossible to defend.2 Aside from the fictional techniques outlined above, the film is visibly structured into three sections, each of which culminates in a highly dramatic sequence—the execution of the hostages, the sabotage and spectacular crash of the armored train, and the celebratory passage of the first “free” train. If the first two of these have been rightly praised, the third (undoubtedly highly significant in its day) soon came to seem anticlimatic. Moreover, like the music, other technical practices conspire to dramatize the narrative. The edit rate is rapid throughout—737 shots in 83 minutes, for an ASL of 6.75 seconds, which was far faster than the contemporary average, and beaten only by Jacques Becker’s notorious Antoine et Antoinette (#46).3 The early documentary sequences already average 8.5 seconds, but the edit rate speeds up significantly thereafter to provide a hectic 25-minute finale with an ASL of 5 sec-

1. Barrot, L’Écran français, 109–110; Sadoul, Histoire du cinéma mondial, 348. 2. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Jean-Pierre Barrot, quoted in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français. 3. Weber, La Bataille du film, 242–249, records 795 in 85 min (i.e., an ASL of 6.4 seconds).

114

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

onds, notably for the train scenes. And whereas in a rapidly edited film there is usually little camera movement (the two techniques often seen as alternative ways of reframing), there are no fewer than 254 significant camera movements in this film (318 per 100 minutes, where the contemporary average was 250). This is doubtless what Roy Armes was noticing when he referred to René Clément’s “fluid use of the camera” in this film.4 The dramatic effect of the ASL and camera movement is only heightened by the proliferation of punctuation, notably forty brief cross-dissolves that propel one shot into another. This is a form of technical realism, far removed from depth-of-field, long-take realism—that reverent observation of reality recommended by André Bazin—and closer to the Soviet model. Another aspect of the film that the left must have found admirable was the explicit rejection of any individual protagonist with whom the spectator might be seduced into identifying. Moments of identification do occur throughout the film, but there is no focus on a specific character and no use of known star talent to facilitate such identification. Although several lesser-known professionals were used, many of the key roles were taken by the railway workers themselves. But if the film does not always, in Armes’s words, “resist the temptation of heroics,” nevertheless, produced by a cooperative, it celebrates a collective resistance and presents the spectator with a collective “hero”—the railway workers of Résistance-Fer.5 If there is a weakness in this celebratory narrative, it is that the German troops and their officers are far too easily and far too frequently bamboozled. At every turn, their efforts are thwarted and trumped by the wily railwaymen, to the point where one wonders how such an incompetent army could so easily have conquered France in the first place! Clément was named director of the film when it was meant to be one short documentary among many. He had established a reputation as a reliable short filmmaker with about thirty to his name, including two concerning the railways—Le Triage and Ceux du rail. Screened at the inaugural Cannes festival, the resultant film won the Grand Prix for best film and Clément the prize for best direction. This established him as a major postwar feature-film director, and he went on to become the filmmaker most recognized in subsequent Cannes festivals—Grand Prix for Les Maudits (1947), best direction for Au-delà des grilles (1949, #60), special jury prize and best direction for Monsieur Ripois (1954). Abroad, however, his films were never as well known as in France, and La Bataille du rail was almost unknown—only the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries screened it at all widely.

4. Armes, French Cinema, 134. 5. Ibid.

1946–1951

115

32. Sérénade aux nuages (Serenading the Clouds) Filming began May 1945; released 6 March 1946 103 min, b&w Dir André Cayatte; Prod UDIF; Scr Richard Pottier, Cayatte, and Jacques Natanson; Cinematog Charles Bauer; Music Vincent Scotto; Art dir Georges Wakhévitch; Sound Privat; Edit Christian Gaudin; Act Tino Rossi (Sylvio), Jacqueline Gauthier (Gracieuse), Pierre Larquey (the gardener), Jacques Louvigny (the impresario), Noël Roquevert (the count), and Maximilienne (the governess). Napoleon may have been the most famous Corsican ever, but for some decades, Tino Rossi ran him a close second. Rossi became famous as a singer in 1932– 1934 and moved into film with four great successes in 1936–1938. Of some thirteen films that exploited his immense popularity during the 1940s, the best are Fièvres (Jean Delannoy, 1941–42), Sérénade aux nuages, and Destins (Richard Pottier, 1946). The scenarios of nearly all his films are centered around his undoubted singing ability, his popularity, and his Corsican origins. As noted in an earlier entry, his southern accent led to him being attributed Mediterranean names and roles— Tino the Corsican painter-decorator, Jeannot the Corsican fisherman, Tonio the Provençal fisherman, Carlo Ferrari the fashionable singer, Ramon the Basque singer, Mario the singing Neapolitan waiter, and Bicchi, yet another Corsican fisherman with a song in his heart. His two postwar films were directed by André Cayatte: in Le Chanteur inconnu (1946), Rossi is Julien, the Portuguese fishermansinger, while in Sérénade aux nuages, he is Sylvio, a singer plagued by a packed schedule and beseiged by masses of insistent fans. He is desperate to escape to anywhere sufficiently tranquil and remote, where no one will recognize him. All this is established very neatly in the opening sequences. We meet him apparently in the cliché role of street singer outside a Paris metro station, but in the next of many such clichés with which this delightful film is riddled, the camera draws further and further back to reveal cameras, crew, and subdued bustle. The song he is recording then continues over a number of locations where Sylvio is performing it, highbrow and lowbrow, then via a Gypsy fiddler in a restaurant where he is eating and a car radio. At stage doors milling fans demand his autograph. A radio crew interviews him, and his valet changes his clothes and shoes while he is singing for their microphone. He simply cannot escape his own omnipresent recognizability. With a dart thrown at a map, he chooses a remote village as a refuge, only to discover in the train that it embodies all he is trying to escape. Rapidly revising his plans, he joins a village gardener returning

116

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

to Rocamour, where he enters the inn, only to find hordes of locals crowded around the radio listening to “their” Sylvio sing his latest song. He rejoins the gardener, who turns out to be working for the local count. All this is amusingly presented and introduces yet another cliché of musical scripts—the famous singer traveling incognito who will finally have to prove his identity by singing a song in that famous honeyed voice. So successful was this ploy that Cayatte directed Rossi in a variant two years later—Le Chanteur inconnu—notable primarily for its subjective camera. In Sérénade, while incognito as the gardener’s assistant, he encounters and clashes with the count’s daughter, inappropriately named Gracieuse. They spontaneously develop that cliché antagonism which guarantees they will ultimately fall into each other’s arms. The count is bankrupt, and the estate must be sold if the family treasure cannot be found. The theme of a “treasure” hidden somewhere deep in the countryside had been a favorite trope of Vichy scenarists. Sometimes the treasure had taken the geological form of mineral resources or mineral springs, but always it acted as a metaphor for the wealth of tradition, inheritance, and provincial steadfastness threatened by “progress”—urban greed and corruption that will buy up and despoil the countryside. Like Sylvie et le fantôme (also 1945), Sérénade aux nuages continues this occupation theme, leading to another play on identity: The count hires a diviner to help with the treasure hunt. Sylvio’s impresario, desperately tracking down Sylvio, pretends to be the diviner, but since the count doesn’t want it known he has hired a diviner, the impresario agrees to pretend to be . . . say, an impresario . . . perhaps even Sylvio’s impresario. Again all this mishmash of clichés and coincidences is delightfully exploited, and the film ends happily as it started with another song sequence flowing from location to location and a reflexive joke about reality and recorded reality. Not least entertaining among the film’s offerings is the impresario’s discovery of a mimic who reproduces well-known scenes by Louis Jouvet, Saturnin Fabre, Jules Berry, Groucho Marx, and . . . Tino Rossi. Fortunately this scenario does not require of Rossi much acting ability, since he was notorious for his lack of it. Indeed, commentators often expressed amazement that someone with such an absence of personality—such a “néant” (nonentity)—should engender such idolatry among the masses. No actor, Rossi had never had music or voice lessons either, but there he was more fortunate; as he said, “I was simply born with this voice, it was all a matter of luck.” 6 This is no doubt one reason why he established such a good rapport with Vincent Scotto, a fellow southerner met via Marcel Pagnol. Scotto was to provide the music for forty-three 6. Sallée, Les Acteurs français, 43.

1946–1951

117

films during the 1940s, including this one and Destins, but he had never had any music lessons, let alone training in composition. It just came naturally, though he had to call on more formally trained friends to write down his compositions. One aspect of the film that now looks uncomfortably dated is the set of patriarchal assumptions underlying this and several other films starring Rossi. In Fièvres (1942), he had been seduced and betrayed by a woman, then, escaping to the coast where he took a job as a simple fisherman, seduced again by a more vulgar woman. But that’s what women are like, alas. The film had him ending his days in a monastery, where he could sing his devotion to the one pure woman, the virgin Mary. Sérénade aux nuages is not quite so gross, but the two scenes in which he puts Gracieuse across his knee and spanks her on the bottom do not play now as they may once have. Of course she loves him all the more for his masterful behavior. This patriarchal and hierarchical tendancy was not all Rossi shared with Marshal Pétain, and at war’s end he was briefly consigned to a camp d’épuration to purge his (relatively insignificant) guilt. It didn’t affect his popularity one wit —the four films starring Tino Rossi released between March 1946 and April 1947 all did well. Indeed, all three of those released during 1946 figured by my calculations among the top twelve French films of the year.

33. La Fille du diable (The Devil’s Daughter) Filming began 11 May 1945; released 17 April 1946 105 min, b&w Dir Henri Decoin; Prod SAFRA and Pathé; Scr Alex Joffé, Jean Le Vitte, and MarcGilbert Sauvajon; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Henri Dutilleux; Art dir Raymond Nègre; Sound Maurice Carrouet; Edit Charles Bretoneiche; Act Pierre Fresnay (Saget), Fernand Ledoux (the doctor), Andrée Clément (Isabelle), Thérèse Dorny (Aunt Hortense), François Patrice (Georges), Henry Charrett (Ludovic Mercier), Albert Rémy (Clément), and Serge Andréguy (N’a-qu’un-sou). Professionally speaking, Henri Decoin had had a good war: after the immense success of Battement de cœur, released in February 1940, he had directed five films from 1941 to 1943, at least three of which were winners (Premier Rendezvous, #2; Les Inconnus dans la maison, #5; and L’Homme de Londres, 1943). A good case can also be made for a fourth, Le Bienfaiteur (1942), concerning a respectable provincial bourgeois, benefactor of his community, who, as we gradually come to realize, is in his spare time the leader of a nefarious urban gang of thieves. 118

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Decoin’s first postwar film recapitulated certain aspects of Le Bienfaiteur but in reverse: Pierre Fresnay plays a crook who, almost despite himself, becomes absorbed into respectable provincial life and admired as the benefactor of the community. The main reasons for including La Fille du diable in the filmography are, first, that it is a very enjoyable viewing experience, and, second, that it announces that spate of fine films released in the postwar years that make of this period one of the summits of French film production. The plot is constantly interesting: it begins with a bang, as gunfire, milling crowds, police marksmen, and searchlights playing on nighttime apartment buildings reveal that a notorious gangster (Saget) is trapped in an upper room. Leaping from balcony to balcony, however, Saget escapes. We next meet him being given a lift on a country road by a drunken expatriate, Ludovic Mercier, returning after twenty-five years abroad, immensely wealthy, to the provincial town where he grew up—he has succeeded in making his fortune “là-bas” in America as all those prewar protagonists dreamed of doing. Inevitably Ludovic crashes the car and dies; Saget appropriates his money and identity, and throws the body in a nearby river, then collapses. The doctor who attends him takes him in, and Ludovic’s aunt “recognizes” her long absent nephew. Saget the criminal is now a respected member of the town. At this point, a different plot strategy takes over: We and Saget himself come gradually to realize that the doctor who tended him is not just some simple, good-hearted fellow. He “happens to mention,” for instance, that the bullet he extracted from Saget’s arm seems to be a police bullet, and is visibly amused when the townsfolk talk of a sudden proliferation of crustaceans in the river, suggesting dead meat. . . . Moreover, the doctor keeps trapping Saget into spending vast amounts of his (stolen) millions on good works—a new bell for the church, a new sanatorium, a new sports stadium. The townsfolk are overwhelmed by “Ludovic’s” philanthropy and name the stadium, the sanatorium, and a town square after him. Not interested in money for himself, the doctor assiduously extorts it for the good of the community, and the body of the film is held together by this developing battle of wits between Saget and the doctor who has “taken him in,” in both senses. While this is happening, the narrative strand that gives the film its title gradually evolves alongside it: Saget encounters Isabelle, an aggressively antisocial adolescent whose father went bankrupt and whose mother died soon after, leaving her abandoned to grow up wild, an outcast and poor, because the town councillors accused her father of embezzling their money and systematically destroy the family as revenge. This is the principal “social” moment of the film, picking up on the wartime (and indeed prewar) distrust of the wealthy and the powerful. To work out her grudge against the establishment, Isabelle has gath1946–1951

119

ered about her a gang of proto-thugs—orphans like herself—an anticommunity that harasses the self-righteous at every turn. This narrative strand meshes with the rest from the moment when Saget/ Ludovic, confronting her in the gang’s hideout, comes across her stash of newspaper clippings dealing with his own career as a gangster. Clearly she has come to idolize Saget, the antihero who disregards conventional morality, steals from the rich, and effortlessly evades police pursuit. She recounts to him his own life, and from his deliberate supplementary remarks, recognizes that he must be not the local-made-good, Ludovic Mercier, but Saget himself. Partly to disrupt his current (apparent) devotion to good works, but also for the satisfaction of watching her hero again evade the police trap, she betrays his identity to them. But Saget is no longer the brilliant, vicious, antisocial crook of the opening sequence; under the influence of his wryly antagonistic friendship with the doctor, he has become to some extent the benevolent Ludovic Mercier whose identity he stole and who the townsfolk believe him to be. The revelation is too much for Isabelle to bear, and in an excessively melodramatic final shot, she commits suicide as the police take him off to jail—a regrettable cliché in an otherwise tautly constructed scenario. In sociopolitical terms, then, the film is remarkable particularly for the ridicule and denigration heaped on the self-righteous provincial bourgeoisie. As the doctor pointedly remarks, faced with Saget’s suspicious wealth, “There are thieves among bankers, and bankers among thieves.” This sort of representation of provincial life would have been totally unacceptable to Vichy, and one can begin to appreciate the new liberation now being experienced by scriptwriters. Decoin is following in the footsteps of Henri-Georges Clouzot, who got away with similarly sardonic representations during the war solely because of Continental’s patronage. Decoin’s career continued to prosper in the following years, with Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1947), and then Entre 11h et minuit and Au grand balcon (both 1949), while many see his 1950s films La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952, #71) and Razzia sur le chnouf (1955) as his supreme achievements.

34. L’Idiot The Idiot Filming began November 1945; released 7 June 1946 92 min, b&w Dir Georges Lampin; Prod Sacha Gordine; Scr Charles Spaak, from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Maurice Thiriet and 120

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

V. de Butzow; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound Paul Boistelle; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Gérard Philipe (Prince Muychkine), Edwige Feuillère (Nastasia), Lucien Coëdel (Rogojine), Nathalie Nattier (Aglaé Épantchine), Mathilde Casadesus (Adélaïde Épantchine), Janine Viénot (Alexandra Épantchine), Maurice Chambreuil (General Épantchine), Marguerite Moreno (the general’s wife), Jean Debucourt (Totzky), Félicien Tramel (Ivolvine), Louise Sylvie (Madame Ivolvine), and Jane Marken (Naria). This was the first and the best film directed by Georges Lampin. Despite his name, he was Russian—born in Saint Petersburg and a member of the cohort that fled the revolution and dominated French film production in the 1920s and 1930s. Lampin was director of production (and occasionally assistant director) throughout this period and right up to the end of the war, notably for Marcel L’Herbier, so it is not surprising that his first opportunity to direct should be provided by a Russian producer, Sacha Gordine (prolific postwar producer for Yves Allégret, Marcel Carné, Max Ophüls, etc.) with a crew including Léon Barsacq and Léonide Azar, to adapt a famous Russian novel (Lampin was in 1956 to adapt Crime and Punishment also). Gordine provided funding for an astonishing team including Charles Spaak, Christian Matras, and Maurice Thiriet. If you want to see the “cinema of quality” that had been initiated during the war years as it was in the process of being transmitted to the postwar years, there is no better place to look than this exquisitely made film. Sets, camerawork, and lighting are exceptional. In addition, they hired to embody the idealistic young Prince Muychkine an actor fresh from the Conservatoire, Gérard Philipe, then living in penury with his roommate Jacques Sigurd. Philipe had recently got his first starring theatrical role as Caligula in Albert Camus’s play, and, if one excepts his neighbor Alain Resnais’s Schéma d’une identification (never screened), had only taken the lead in one film—Pierre Véry and Georges Lacombe’s Pays sans étoiles (1946). The Dostoyevsky novel has Prince Muychkine returning from Switzerland to Russia where his distinctly Christ-like idealism is confronted with situations that foreground the corruption, the hypocrisy, and the mercenary values of contemporary society. Throughout the narrative, Muychkine has inexplicable glimpses of what others are thinking and feeling, intuiting Nastasia’s despair despite her denials. His very presence and naive goodness bring a strange peace to those in strife. These qualities are also catalytic in causing others to reassess their lives and move toward brotherhood and reconciliation, but at great expense to himself, as witness the epileptic fits that mark his outsiderness. To establishment figures such as the Épantchines, this transfixing goodness comes across as grotesque naivety, and he is classed as simple-minded, “an idiot.” His own distress at 1946–1951

121

finding the world so devoid of humanity, of compassion, of justice, and of spiritual values culminates in a final image of his anguished face demanding of the spectator, “Why? Why? Why do human beings have to suffer so?” Central to this itinerary from hope to distress are two women and a man— Nastasia, Aglaé Épantchine, and Rogojine. We first see Muychkine making the acquaintance of the Épantchine family at a moment when Aglaé is becoming engaged to the (supposedly) wealthy Totzky, but in order for this to happen, Totzky’s mistress, the devastating Nastasia, must be paid off to marry someone else— General Épantchine’s secretary, as it happens. Just then the wealthy merchant Rogojine bursts in with several friends to assert his rival claim to Nastasia. There follows a spectacularly successful scene in which Nastasia sardonically offers herself to the highest bidder, provocatively underlining the dominance of financial values over humane and compassionate values in this society where marriage is a market and women are effectively bought and sold. Raped and abandoned, Nastasia delights in bringing these sordid machinations out into the light of day, not least by throwing her purchase money on the fire and watching the anguish of her “suitors,” torn between greed and shame as they finally grovel for the unburned notes. Overcome by compassion, Prince Muychkine himself offers to marry Nastasia, if only to save her from this sordid contest—an offer that will come back to haunt him. There is another lovely scene where Nastasia reveals that Totzky is not the wealthy suitor he was thought to be, but is heavily in debt, whereupon the general and his wife suddenly discover that they both disliked him from the start. Nastasia advises Aglaé to exploit to the full her resultant freedom. But when she does, and is about to marry the prince, Nastasia’s jealousy of Aglaé leads her to intervene in their idyll and assert that his offer to marry her takes precedence. In the confusion of the resultant wedding scene, the prince cannot help regretting Aglaé. Nastasia storms out to return to Rogojine . . . who has said he will win her or kill her. He kills her. The emotional violence of this film is very Russian: everyone but the prince is caught up in affective turmoil and confusion, seeking salvation where it can never be found, while the prince himself is the still center, all too aware of what is happening but impotent to affect the outcome. This is a beautifully made film, and almost as weird as the novel from which it was adapted.

35. La Symphonie pastorale The Pastoral Symphony Filming began mid-January 1946; released 26 September 1946 95 min, b&w 122

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dir Jean Delannoy; Prod Films Gibé; Scr Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, and Delannoy, based on the novel by André Gide; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Georges Auric; Art dir René Renoux; Sound Albert Leblond; Edit Suzanne Fauvel; Act Michèle Morgan (Gertrude), Pierre Blanchar (Jean Martin, the pastor), Line Noro (Amélie, the pastor’s wife), Jean Desailly (Jacques, the pastor’s son), Rosine Luguet (Charlotte), André Clément (Piette Casteran), and Jacques Louvigny (Monsieur Casteran). According to the film’s sleeve notes, “La Symphonie pastorale can stand as a symbol of the renaissance of the French cinema at war’s end.” In a number of ways, perhaps. Based on a short novel by André Gide, it won first prize in the French section of the first Cannes Film Festival (1946) and best actress for Michèle Morgan, who had just spent five years in America with little to show for it, but who was contracted to return to France for one film with Films Gibé. Édouard Gide, André Gide’s cousin, happened to be a director of Gibé, which may have smoothed the way when Jean Delannoy went to see André (who had already refused the rights to the novel to Marc Allégret and to Julien Duvivier). Indeed, initially Gide intended to adapt the novel for Delannoy himself but had to leave for Egypt. The narrative concerns, of course, a nameless, neglected young girl, blind from birth, who is rescued by a local protestant clergyman; he calls her Gertrude and brings her up with his own children. Moved in the early days by a mix of religious duty and paternal affection, the pastor, as the years go by and Gertrude develops into a beautiful young woman, insensibly develops a more sensual love for his ward. When his son Jacques admits that he also loves Gertrude, this protective attitude becomes an implicit jealousy. His wife, who recognizes more clearly than the pastor himself the true nature of his feelings, not least because she is all too aware of his neglect of her, becomes progressively more distressed and angry. When a cure for Gertrude’s blindness proves possible and she sees for the first time, the family drama explodes and Gertrude recognizes the distress she has caused. Believing the situation irretrievable, she drowns herself. Clearly the thematic material concerns two forms of blindness—physical and spiritual. The pastor is progressively more and more blind to the nature of his affections and to their effect on those around him. He is led to lie to his son in order to distance him from Gertrude, and is apprehensive that her cure might prove a threat to his “possession” of her. Unfortunately, this drama, where some are blind and others see all too clearly, initially acted out with discretion, becomes more and more melodramatic as the narrative evolves, culminating in a passionate series of confrontations between family members that Georges Auric’s far from subtle orchestral score underlines to excess. Where the original 1946–1951

123

novel focused on the drama internal to the pastor’s psychology, as confided to the diary he keeps, the film externalizes the drama in twisted faces and shouted exchanges—the situation is played for easy emotion. Pierre Leprohon saw this displacement of the narrative focus from the pastor’s scruples to the family’s degrading relationships—from the psychological to the familial—as an unforgivable oversimplification, a fundamental weakness in the adaptation by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who were “too eager to base their drama on material that would appeal to a wider public.”7 Nevertheless, there are many compensating virtues in the film. The setting is spectacular, especially the remote mountain village in the Swiss Alps, seemingly permanently enshrouded in snow. This world is locked in winter; there is no springtime here, any more than there will be for Gertrude, whose affections will never be allowed to express themselves. For Leprohon, this omnipresent cloak of snow “masks the true nature of things beneath a frigid purity. The [symbolic] intention is clear. . . . The apparent purity of [the pastor’s] feelings conceals a secret passion.”8 Interiors are filmed with the same meticulous precision as these exteriors. Camerawork, lighting, and sets are all exquisitely judged. This is an early classic of that “quality cinema” of which Delannoy, along with his scriptwriters, Aurenche and Bost, were to become principal proponents. This is the cinema that had been since the late 1930s garnering export returns and festival prizes, and that had been confirmed in the highly restrictive production conditions of the war years. Clearly, then, La Symphonie pastorale represents not so much “a renaissance” of the French cinema in the aftermath of the liberation as a confirmation of the progressive professionalization of that cinema under the watchful monitoring and regulation of the oversight body (postwar the OPC, then the CNC). Ten years later, François Truffaut was, in his notorious (and clumsy) Cahiers du cinéma article, to condemn this whole cinematic trend as heavily dependent on the literary texts on which it was always based, and therefore inherently uncinematic, though it could seem superficially attractive because it “offered the public their habitual dose of gloom, of non-conformism and of facile daring.” 9 It is a little ironic, therefore, that one of the central themes of the work is the socialization of an “enfant sauvage,” a wild child. Initially represented as little better than an animal, lapping from a bowl on all fours, Gertrude becomes fully

7. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 318. 8. Ibid. 9. François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31, January 1954.

124

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

human only as a result of the pastor’s care and affection, in a way not at all dissimilar (pace Truffaut) to Victor de l’Aveyron responding to the care and affection of Dr. Itard in L’Enfant sauvage (1970). La Symphonie pastorale is preoccupied by what it means to be human, but here the humanizing process is inextricably intertwined with the pastor’s religious calling. The wild child must come to know his creator. Delannoy is recognized as frequently returning to the problem of spirituality in the modern age (Dieu a besoin des hommes, 1949; Le Miracle de Jeanne d’Arc, 1953)—the need for a closeness to God and the many impediments to it. Delannoy himself was Protestant, while Bost was both Protestant and the son of a pastor, so the script team’s investment in the thematic material of the film was intense. The better to inform himself of the physical aspects of this spiritual project, Delannoy went to the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Blind Children’s Institute) to interview the director, Professor Henry, who had extensive experience with those problems and had written on the mentality of young people born blind. Delannoy reputedly used the resulting material to inform Morgan’s performance. One final matter worth clarifying is the title: in Gide’s novel, the pastor takes blind Gertrude to a concert where she hears Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and the pastor reflects on the lack of congruence between the tranquil perfection of the world there portrayed and the sad inadequacy of the real world. It is recognition of this incongruence that finally drives Gertrude to commit suicide.

36. Le Père tranquille The Orchid Man Filming began mid-February 1946; released 11 October 1946 95 min, b&w Dir Noël-Noël; Tech dir René Clément; Prod BCM; Scr Noël-Noël; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Lucien Carré; Sound René Louge; Edit Henriette Wurtzer; Act Noël-Noël (Monsieur Martin), Nadine Alari (Monique Martin), Jean Varas (Jean), Paul Frankeur (Simon), Marcel Dieudonné (Jourdan), José Arthur (Pierre Martin), Claire Olivier (Madame Martin), and Howard Vernon and Jo Dest (German officers). A cartoonist in the 1920s, then a pianist and popular songster with a wry turn of phrase, Noël-Noël saw his talents appreciated and exploited by sound cinema. Throughout the 1930s, he specialized in playing gormless but amiable rustic innocents who, against all odds, come out on top, nailing the criminal 1946–1951

125

and winning the heart of the pretty girl. Several such films featured him as Adémaï, and he himself scripted three of them. The success of La Cage aux rossignols in 1945 encouraged him to script and share direction of the present film. (René Clément, after the immense success of his quasi-documentary La Bataille du rail, #31, contented himself for some time simply with providing technical advice for other filmmakers—Jean Cocteau in the case of La Belle et la bête, #38, and NoëlNoël here.) Le Père tranquille breaks radically with the gormless persona the actor was accustomed to adopting. Indeed, all the drama of the narrative derives from the fact that he only seems to be this amiable and somewhat simple character—in reality, as we soon realize, as his affectionate daughter soon comes to realize, and as his angry, hot-headed son only realizes at the very end, he is head of the local Resistance. The film goes in then for quiet heroics, and by a number of generalizing moves, implies that all of France should be recognized as having shared in this quietly heroic Resistance. Not only is the lead character given a name— Martin—that is as typically French as Dupont, but his family circumstances and his behavior label him as a typical “Français moyen.” He has his insurance agent’s office, he plays cards with his mates in the local café, and he potters about his greenhouse tending his beloved orchids. The film’s subtitle foregrounds this typicality—what we are being shown is “the life of a French family under the occupation.” Consequently, as Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier point out, this film gives a quasi-formal benediction to those who constituted the silent majority under the occupation—don’t be too hasty to accuse your neighbors of collaboration, since they might well have been undercover Resistance leaders adopting this self-effacing behavior for strategic reasons. The apparent passivity of the prudent during that time is in fact presented as a cover behind which the traditional virility of the French nation was as active as ever. This line was, of course, extremely likely to be appreciated in the immediate postwar years, when French masculine self-respect had suffered such a blow from the abrupt collapse and defeat of 1940. In its (more acceptable) way, then, Le Père tranquille is as much a rehabilitation of French masculinity as the mass of more macho Resistance films that appeared in 1946–1947. But it is also of generational significance, since it constituted a rehabilitation of the older generation, so frequently blamed for their inglorious role in that defeat. Acknowledging the guilt of the older generation, the wartime cinema had often looked to the younger generation for a prospective national regeneration, in some future decade. Here, however, the Martin son is recklessly hotheaded. He and his mates are easily led astray by the collaborator Jourdan, who pretends to be a Resistance hero parachuted in from London, and several are captured as

126

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

a result. Even the actual Resistance finds the young Martin’s ignorant bravado a threat, and for safety’s sake shuts him up ignominiously in a pig-sty—much to the irritation of the pig. It is the older, wiser heads that are really taking the risks, who are really taking the war to the occupiers—those like Martin, mocked by Jourdan as “le père tranquille” and ridiculed by the Germans for his petty orchidbreeding interests as “typically French.” This is then a crucial film for evaluating the psychological needs of the nation in the aftermath of the liberation. It is technically unremarkable, though Clément’s documentary credentials are on display at times. What is admirable is the structure: the narrative line is organized into several neat and effective blocks: a The initial incidents involving Jourdan culminate in an execution scene in the woods in which the actual Resistance deals with him “as it had with others of his kind.” a Martin’s daughter, Monique, and his young aide, Jean, are clearly attracted to one another. Monique is played by the beginner Nadine Alari with exquisite discretion and conviction, and her gradual recognition that her father and Jean are involved in Resistance activities is beautifully done. It is hard to imagine why she never featured more prominently in the cinema of the following decade. a The unexpected arrival of two German officers chez Martin generates dramatic tension, partially dissipated when it is revealed they are only interested in his orchids—but only partially, since the orchid bench that they are examining could swing out at any moment to reveal Martin’s Resistance paraphernalia. a The film ends with a set piece in which, to draw locals away from the docks that, as a result of Martin’s intelligence work, are about to be bombed, Martin “manages to get Monique and Jean’s agreement” to a formal engagement, which they will all attend. With these two outstanding successes to his credit in 1945 and 1946, and the unbelievable triumph in 1948 of the now unwatchable Les Casse-Pieds, Noël-Noël was tempted into assembling fifteen of his repertoire of popular songs into a release entitled La Vie chantée (1951). Largely devoid of storyline, it nevertheless attracted a significant following.

1946–1951

127

37. Un revenant (The Homecoming) Filming began mid-February 1946; released 18 October 1946 100 min, b&w Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Cie Franco-Coloniale Cinématographique; Scr Henri Jeanson, Christian-Jaque, and Louis Chavance; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Arthur Honegger; Art dir Pierre Marquet; Sound Jean Rieul; Edit Jacques Desagneaux; Act Louis Jouvet (Jean-Jacques Sauvage), Gaby Morlay (Geneviève Gonin), Louis Seigner (Edmond Gonin), Jean Brochard (Jérôme Nisard), François Périer (François Nisard), Ludmilla Tchérina (Karina), and Marguerite Moreno (Tante Jeanne). Louis Jouvet and his troupe had spent the war years in South America. Their visas for North America had been canceled as a result of an indiscrete public remark by Jouvet critical of the United States. They returned to France in February 1945 to resume their activities at the Athénée. Henri Jeanson, whose collaboration with Jouvet dated from Entrée des artistes and Hôtel du Nord (both 1938), seized the opportunity to develop a quasi-biographical script about a man of the theater, Jean-Jacques, returning from exile but, in this fictional case, returning with dramatic intent—to exact revenge for attempted murder. Lyons was to be the setting, because a scandalous incident loosely inspiring the scenario had taken place there. We meet Jean-Jacques descending into Lyons after twenty years’ absence, and gradually learn why he had left—he had been gunned down by his best friend, Jérôme, because he was judged an unsuitable fiancé for Jérôme’s sister, Geneviève, and might divert some or all of the family inheritance. Geneviève has subsequently married a more suitable if duller man, Edmond. In the present tense, we witness Jean-Jacques’s revenge, first on Geneviève then on Jérôme’s son, driving the latter to attempt suicide. Finally, to complete his revenge, the family money is diverted after all. This is then, as is typical for Jeanson the cynical anarchist, a malevolent little scenario that leaves only Jean-Jacques unscathed. It is particularly vicious in its denunciation of women, who are condemned as treacherous and incapable of the finer sentiments. Although it was Jérôme and Edmond who had organized the attempted assassination, it is Geneviève’s treachery that is (on unspecified grounds) considered the more damnable, and the most elaborate revenge is reserved for her. Not only must she be destroyed for abandoning Jean-Jacques and disillusioning him about women, but her nephew François’s illusions about women must likewise be destroyed. Jean-Jacques causes François to be seduced by Karina, a

128

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

frivolous young ballet dancer who promptly returns to her previous (forty-yearold) lover. In despair, François hurls himself from the flies onto the stage where she is performing. He will live but is now aware that women are unworthy, useful merely for ephemeral sexual purposes. In the photo of the chorus-line that Jean-Jacques shows him at the end, he cannot even identify Karina—all women look the same. This is what Geneviève had taught Jean-Jacques twenty years before, and it is a constant theme in Jeanson’s misogynistic scenarios. Although the narrative here sets up a conventional structural opposition between love and money as a basis for relationships, and condemns Jérôme and Edmond for their mercenary, bourgeois outlook, it is careful to condemn love no less forcefully as just another pitiful illusion. This is irresistible material for Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier’s gender theories. They see Un revenant as typical of a move from incestuous narratives in the 1930s (where an older man displaces a younger in a young woman’s affections) toward a postwar alliance between all men, old and young, against all females, considered as inherently harmful. They cite Manèges (#62), Le Diable au corps (#44), and Dominique (Yvan Noé, 1950) as supporting evidence.10 But alongside the admirable scorn for class-based prejudice and the less than admirable scorn for women, this film explores a complex of themes relating to art and identity, acting and role-playing. Jeanson had offered Jouvet the role of theater director in Entrée des artistes (1938); he does so here again as director of a ballet troupe, and later in Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (1947), as a famous composer. These and nearly all of Jeanson’s postwar scripts focus on a crisis of identity—roles, doubles, and split personalities, acting and being. This is most apparent in Copie conforme (1947) where Jouvet plays a master thief who learns that he has a double—the insignificant Monsieur Dupon, whom he can use as an alibi while committing his crimes. There Jouvet plays not just the simpleton and the master thief, but in his role as the thief impersonates a fashion photographer, a doddery old duke, a removalist, and a diamond salesman. In Entre 11h et minuit (1949), as a police inspector he again discovers that he has a double, namely the criminal he is pursuing. This generates a Jekyll and Hyde theme since, in order to outwit the criminal, he attempts to think himself into and ultimately impersonate his prey, finally acquiring the criminal’s mistress, who turns out to be the murderer. She compliments him for acting the role of amorous policeman so well, but he assures her he was not acting. The finest instance of this “acting” theme, however, is to be found in the opening 10. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 231.

1946–1951

129

sequence of Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde, where Jouvet’s character appears to be picking up an interesting woman in a country inn, and only gradually do we as spectators become aware that the two are in fact sentimentally reenacting their original encounter in this very inn. Jeanson has never written a better scene, for Jouvet or anyone else. This theatricalization of life, this role-playing of character, is foregrounded when, in a final effort to win the woman, the Jouvet character says, looking out at the spectators as at a film-screen, “Say all this was happening in the cinema, what would we expect to happen now, how would we react? It’s obvious that these two will get together since they’re the lead roles, so let’s not waste time.” The factitious nature of this narrative is further marked by the availability of either a happy or sad ending (see also La Belle Équipe, 1936). In Un revenant, the acting/role-playing theme is less foregrounded but constantly present: Jean-Jacques’s past and present personas are repeatedly contrasted such that he seems to have indeed died in the (past) attempted murder. On his descent into Lyons, he speaks of his former self as “one who has disappeared.” Indeed, he half approves of Edmond for “killing the man I was.” The man he has become as a result—Sauvage, an outsider—is harder and more ruthless, intent on vengeance. Moreover, the theme of “acting” is constantly foregrounded in the presence of the stage where crucial scenes take place, and when, in the final sequence, he destroys Geneviève, he tells her “the show is over.” Lady Paname (1950), the script that Jeanson wrote for Jouvet and directed himself, should logically have constituted the culmination of this collaboration— Jouvet this time a photographer, with performance foregrounded now by a narrative set exclusively in the music halls and cabarets of the 1920s, but Jeanson’s directing lets it down. Un revenant provides the best introduction to this series of related films.

38. La Belle et la bête Beauty and the Beast Filmed late August–December 1945; released 29 October 1946 87 min, b&w Dir Jean Cocteau; Tech asst René Clément; Prod André Paulvé; Scr Jean Cocteau, based on the story told by Madame Leprince de Beaumont; Cinematog Henri Alekan; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Christian Bérard; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Claude Ibéria; Act Jean Marais (Avenant, the Beast and the Prince), Josette Day (Belle), Marcel André (the father), Mila Parély (Adélaïde) and Nane Germon (Félicie—Belle’s two sisters), and Michel Auclair (Ludovic, Belle’s brother). 130

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Jean Cocteau’s theatrical reputation was established in the 1930s, but his cinematic reputation peaked in the years 1943–1950 with the screening of five films for which he wrote the script and/or dialogues (Le Baron fantôme; L’Éternel Retour, #20; Ruy Blas; Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, #28; and his own play Les Enfants terribles) and three films that he directed himself (this one; Les Parents terribles, #52; and Orphée, #66). La Belle et la bête was the first for which he had taken “authorial” responsibility since Le Sang d’un poète (1930). Shot in the immediate aftermath of the war, it won the Prix Louis Delluc (most ambitious film of the year) and became by my calculations the third most popular film of the 1946–1947 season. It presents itself as a fairy story and asks the audience to suspend disbelief as a naive child might when hearing the phrase “Once upon a time. . . .” Like Cinderella, Belle has two “ugly” sisters, greedy and ambitious, who make ridiculous demands on their father. Belle asks him simply for a rose, but the rose he picks is from the Beast’s garden, and he must pay for it with his life, unless one of his daughters consents to take his place. Feeling responsible, Belle does so. During her time in the Beast’s chateau, the Beast repeatedly asks her to be his wife, and though she repeatedly refuses, she gradually softens to him. In her absence, her father fades away. She asks to be allowed to see him, and during her absence, the Beast fades away. She arrives back too late: the Beast dies, but in dying metamorphoses into a prince and carries her off to the heavens. The action alternates between her father’s house in town and the Beast’s chateau in the forest. Every effort is made to render this chateau in the forest a place of enchantment: doors open and close before and behind; disembodied hands hold lights, point, and serve at table; disembodied heads follow the action; drapes waft in the breeze; high-angle shots disorient and defamiliarize; and voiceless choirs intone, while subtly changing patterns of light and shade momentarily reveal and conceal. As he approaches this place, Belle’s father moves through night and fog in the thunderous forest; as Belle herself enters it, she floats effortlessly along (pulled on a trolley, actually). A mirror conveniently shows distant events. The Beast himself is thickly furred and regally draped, at once powerful and passionate, noble and bestial, drinking on all fours from a pool, his paws fuming from the blood of his prey, then later drinking from Belle’s cupped hands. All this is well done. Cocteau and his technical crew (notably Christian Bérard) deserved all the praise they received. Certainly most of the special effects are straightforward, but the translation of Belle from the chateau to her father’s house when she dons the magic glove is startling, original, and masterly. For Cocteau it was important to affirm “le réalisme de l’irréel,” the need to construct his fantastic world by way of precise and credible details. He reports 1946–1951

131

insisting on the utmost clarity of camera-work: “Fantasy worlds don’t tolerate vagueness . . . ; mystery derives only from absolute precision,” and for a surprising percentage of the film, these procedures are effective.11 Nevertheless, it is a little hard to endure Jean Marais’s ultimate transmutation into a winsome Prince Charming amid surging sentimentality, and equally hard to endure the stately pace of the film—though contemporary audiences accepted it without complaint as they had earlier accepted the no less stately pace of another fantasy, Les Visiteurs du soir (#11). Even more difficult to take, however, is the rancid representation of Jewishness in the grasping usurer to whom Belle’s brother becomes indebted, and who proceeds to ransack her father’s house in repayment. In the immediate aftermath of the war, such an image is astounding, though possibly the injustices done to Jews in the preceding years were not then fully appreciated, and Cocteau is here simply calling on a conventional stereotype. But then, all the material underlying this elaborate fantasy is quite commonplace: a ”Appearances can be deceptive.” As Belle says to the Beast, “There are many people more monstrous than you, but they hide it.” a The mind/body dualism extending to immortal soul/mortal animal. When the sinful animal body dies, the soul, released, ascends heavenward. a Love conquers Death. Belle acknowledges she has come to love the Beast, and the Beast’s death is annulled, their union eternalized. Incidentally there is a nice contrast/parallel between the goodlooking Avenant dying of greed, and the monstrous Beast dying of love, while out of their simultaneous deaths a new Prince Charming is born. That said, it is interesting to consider the relationship between Belle and her father, which is crucial to the plot, initially preventing her accepting Avenant’s offer of marriage and ultimately leading to the death of the Beast. She abandons her father, and he languishes mortally; she abandons the Beast to return to her father, and the Beast languishes mortally. Cocteau had regularly exploited “forbidden” incestuous plots to good effect, as in his plays, soon to be films, Les Parents terribles (#52, mother/son) and Les Enfants terribles (1950, brother/sister). This

11. Quoted in Gilson, Jean Cocteau, 48, 98.

132

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

father/daughter relationship is a pale echo of a similar obsession. More generally, the monster can be read as a representation of the Freudian id, those sexual urges that love “redeems.” But Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier deserve to be given the last word when considering gender relationships in this period: for them, the aesthetic qualities of this work have blinded critics to its contemporary relevance. It inaugurated a series of eight films in which Jean Marais embodies a “fragile masculinity” and must learn to take seriously “feelings,” traditionally seen as the domain of women. In this reading, the father represents manhood castrated as a result of wartime defeat and humiliation. With the liberation, women are called upon to sacrifice themselves so that masculine identity, rendered unrecognizable by the horrors of war, can be reconstructed. Belle represents the humanity of which the Beast is deprived, and she must renounce her own fulfillment to love the deformed creature who needs her—only thus will they both find “salvation.” For Burch and Sellier, the alternative and more common reaction to wartime castration was resentment leading in more patriarchally disposed films of the postwar period to an “accusatory delirium” against womanhood, as witness the recurrent figure of the trollop.12

39. Macadam (Macadam/The Street) Filmed 1946; released 27 November 1946 100 min, b&w Dir Marcel Blistène; Tech dir Jacques Feyder; Prod BUP Française and Eugène Tucherer; Scr Jacques Viot; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Jean Wiener and Marguerite Monnot; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound René Gorget; Edit Isabelle Elman; Act Françoise Rosay (Madame Rose), Paul Meurisse (Victor Menard), Andrée Clément (Simone, Rose’s daughter), Simone Signoret (Gisèle), Jacques Dacqmine (François), and Paul Demange (Marcel, the hairdresser). This undervalued film is fascinating for its place in postwar French film history: it illustrates the way in which ambitious writers and directors assumed that, with wartime constraints out of the way, the French cinema could and would pick up where it had left off in 1939. Jacques Viot, who had been scriptwriter for such prewar films as Sous les yeux d’Occident (Marc Allégret, 1936), Les Gens du

12. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 242–243.

1946–1951

133

voyage (Jacques Feyder, 1937), and Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939), proposed to Eugène Tucherer a script in the grand tradition of the poetic realist films of the late 1930s, with a title recalling the street films of expressionist days (and behind the titles, a grim night street-scene with rain swilling down gutters). It offered a bleak perspective on a small community of working-class people living on the margins of the underworld, including a good-hearted prostitute, an honorable worker, a fence, a blousy patroness of dubious morality, her naive daughter, and a criminal on the run. The script had no single strong narrative but a series of secondary, interlocking narratives linking the various characters who all come together in a small hotel, in a structure reminiscent of Hôtel du Nord (Carné, 1938). It offered, then, primarily the investigation of a milieu—the milieu—and depended on sets and acting for the creation of atmosphere. Tucherer hired a relative unknown to direct the film—Marcel Blistène— who had only directed one previous film, Étoile sans lumière (1946), but that film had been an outstanding success, largely because it had featured Édith Piaf (as an understudy who steps into the main singing role but tragically fails to make good). Tucherer was naturally anxious to attract some equivalent star to the main role here, and contacted Françoise Rosay, who had played just such a blousy madam’s role in several prewar films, notably Le Grand Jeu (Feyder, 1933) and Pension Mimosas (Feyder, 1934), not to mention Carné’s Jenny (1935). In her memoirs, Rosay gives an account of her doubts about both script and director.13 Her investigations into Blistène’s directorial abilities did not reassure her, so she made sure her husband (Feyder) was hired to supervise the production. Indeed, he alone reputedly oversaw the editing, and her account makes it likely he had a decisive hand in much of the filming as well, since if she is to be believed, both actors and technicians tended to mock and disregard Blistène. Consequently some reference works attribute to Feyder the role of at least codirector. Certainly this film is clearly heir to Feyder’s and Carné’s films of the 1930s and far superior to anything Blistène subsequently produced. The sets evoke a typical working-class suburb of Paris—a street crowded with small shops, market stalls and their customers (actual stalls and their owners imported from Montmartre for authenticity), and the corner hotel where all the narratives intersect. Madame Rose, who owns the hotel, bullies and steals from her customers, and furnishes the dining room with stolen cutlery, while her naive daughter, Simone, takes after her dead father, who as Madame Rose protests incredulously, insisted on paying for everything (“There are people who are just born honest, and it’s no use pointing out the error of their ways”). We soon

13. Rosay, La Traversée d’une vie, 293–296.

134

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

learn that, faced with a choice between him and commercial success, she had killed him herself. A wonderful role for Rosay—a thief and a murderess, hypocritically sentimental, totally self-righteous. The trigger for such action as eventuates is the arrival of Madame Rose’s old mate Victor Menard, who is looking to hole up for a few days with a satchel stuffed full of hot money until, like his poetic realist predecessors, he can head off to Chile where everything is set up for a better life. This also is a splendid role, which Paul Meurisse plays with his customary sinister, reptilian intelligence. The long central scene in which these two get steadily drunker as they reminisce to the point of becoming confessional (her about murdering her husband, him about murdering his accomplice so as not to share the loot—she dismisses this murder with a nice phrase: “just an impatient impulse”) is unforgettable, with Rosay in particular doing a spectacularly controlled representation of a woman progressively losing control. (Dutch tilts intrude here, as does rather too obvious dramatic music at times.) The daughter falls for a passing street-salesman, François, whom Victor mistakes for a police spy, triggering further complications, and there is a particularly well-choreographed fight scene between François and Victor. In a prewar film, the two innocents, François and Simone, would probably have survived the ultimate generalized slaughter, protected by their innocence, but here, as in Voyage sans espoir (#22), no happy end eventuates: François is distracted instead by a good-time girl, Gisèle, who works out of the hotel, played by Simone Signoret, for whom this was a key early role. The roles that Jacques Sigurd was soon to write for Yves Allégret’s films Dédée d’Anvers (1948, #50) and Manèges (1950, #62) were to make of her a star, but already here her sensuality, her unscrupulous disregard for morality, and her subtle intelligence identify her as a potential star in an already impressive cast. The unfortunate daughter Simone, honest, loyal, and virtuous, cannot compete in this unequal confrontation. All she is offered by the film is a trip to the zoo with François and a brief moment of reconciliation with her mother, who promises her that well-established but inaccessible dream of retirement in the country so common in prewar films—a dream that fosters only briefly the illusion that this world is something less than malevolent toward innocence. In the climactic moments, Victor’s sadistic nature comes to the fore. Having discovered by torturing the stool pigeon that it was Madame Rose who betrayed him to the cops, he delights in gunning her down, and is about to gun down François and Gisèle as well, only to be shot in turn by Simone, using her dead mother’s revolver. Simone’s outburst at this point captures some of the bitterness about “love” and its mythic sentimentality as she screams at François and Gisèle, “That’s how your great love stories finish. Are you happy now? I’ve killed 1946–1951

135

him.” Even the innocent cannot escape becoming murderers. Throughout, the dominant morality is of treachery, of using and betraying people. “Love” and “family” cannot be taken seriously in this world dominated by a pervasive criminality, where the only difference is between impulsive criminality and coldblooded criminality. The film is preceded by an inscription asserting that, “If the public could only see criminals as they really are, it would rapidly lose interest in these guttersnipes.” It would seem that, so soon after the departure of the austere Vichy regime, the producer was still a little anxious about the cynicism of the script he was producing, and thought it wise to append this hypocritical exhortation to ward off censure.

40. Les Portes de la nuit The Gates of Night Filming began mid-January 1946; released 3 December 1946 100 min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod Pathé Cinéma; Scr Jacques Prévert, from his ballet Le Rendez-vous; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Joseph Kosma; Art dir Alexandre Trauner; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Jean Feyte; Act Yves Montand (Diego), Nathalie Nattier (Malou), Pierre Brasseur (Georges), Serge Reggiani (Guy Sénéchal, Malou’s sister), Julien Carette (Quinquina), Mady Berry (Madame Quinquina), Saturnin Fabre (Monsieur Sénéchal, father of Guy), Raymond Bussières (Raymond Lécuyer), Jean Vilar (the tramp), Dany Robin (Étiennette), Sylvia Bataille (Claire Lécuyer), Jane Marken (Madame Germaine), and Fabien Loris (street singer). After ten years of collaboration culminating in the astoundingly popular wartime successes of Les Visiteurs du soir (#11) and Les Enfants du paradis (#27), it must have seemed as if the Marcel Carné/Jacques Prévert team could do no wrong, but their first postwar effort proved this assumption false: Les Portes de la nuit cost 120 million francs to produce but was outperformed by about ten other films that season and must have returned only a small fraction of its cost. One reason for its lack of appeal was its origins in a Joseph Kosma/Prévert ballet lasting a mere 20 minutes. Expanded to five times that length but still retaining traces of the “timeless” abstraction inherent in a wordless ballet, it failed to provide a focus for audience identification. Perhaps its intended stars—Jean Gabin and Marlène Dietrich (who were then an item)—might have provided that density of class and gender myths to carry off the roles, but Dietrich cried off when her suggested modifications to the text were rejected, and soon after136

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

ward Gabin also seized an opportunity to opt out of his contract.14 Unable to replace the couple with known actors, Carné fell back on newcomers—Yves Montand, pressed on him by Édith Piaf, whose partner he then was, and Nathalie Nattier, in whose mouths much of the dialogue written for others sounds false. Carné’s hope was that the popular quarter of Barbès-Rochechouart, as recreated by Alexandre Trauner, would become the star of the film, especially in the context of the grim winter following the liberation (the film takes place over one night in February 1945). In a sense he was right, because Trauner’s sets (and most particularly the gigantic reconstruction in studio of the Barbès overhead metro station) were the focus of more critical commentary than any of the actors or characters. The metro station and its surroundings occupied 650 feet of studio space. The only stages that could have held such decors were two connected Joinville stages that had burned down early in the war, so the set was constructed in the open courtyard area left vacant by them, but since the film took place entirely at night, the whole set had to be enclosed within a vast framework that cloaked it and permitted the desired night effects. Carné was frequently ridiculed for this “megalomania,” and though he had no trouble accounting for it, wryly noted his Cartesian reputation: “Je dépense, donc je suis” (I spend, therefore I am). Or, as Cocteau said of him, “If the scenario called for a wasteland, he would have bulldozed all of Paris.” This is an exaggeration—he might at most have bulldozed one suburb. In fact, the studio recreation of workers’ tenements is also extremely atmospheric, recalling the prewar poetic realist sets (designed also by Trauner) for Quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord, and Le Jour se lève. The set of Monsieur Sénéchal’s workyard, with its clutter of heterogeneous objects where Diego and Malou first get to know one another and speak of Easter Island (where, by a series of improbable coincidences, they are represented as having already effectively met), is likewise an atmospheric marvel. Here, and here alone in the whole film, we find long, meditative takes of over 1 minute in length, within an elsewhere rapidly edited film (ASL 9.3 seconds). The story is simple: Diego calls on his resistance mate Raymond. They had both thought one another dead, because they had been betrayed by a collaborator, who turns out to be young Guy Sénéchal. Diego has a brief night of romance with Malou, only to find that Malou is Guy’s sister. Malou’s sinister husband confronts them and shoots her. She dies, and Guy commits suicide. This narrative is packed with coincidences that are “rationalized” by being presided over by a tramp figure who too obviously embodies Destiny—the tragic

14. Carné, La Vie à belles dents, 256–280.

1946–1951

137

destiny of the poor but honest worker. Such figures had often, if not always, been present in Carné/Prévert films but never so portentously and insistently as here, where the Destiny figure constitutes a form of Prévertian self-parody. More than in his wartime scripts, then, Prévert here recapitulates the themes of his 1930s films, and notably the class theme of a worker protagonist harassed, betrayed, and destroyed by bourgeois greed (here, the Sénéchals and Georges, Malou’s sneering husband, played as so often by Pierre Brasseur). But now the worker/ bourgeois opposition is mapped onto an intensely contemporary opposition between resistance and collaboration. However justified this mapping might be by the fact that the Resistance was largely the work of the left, and particularly the communists, it is probable that some criticism was provoked by the fact that much of France wanted to put behind it and forget, in the interests of national reunification and reconciliation, the divisive hatreds of the recent war years. The nation as represented in Les Portes de la nuit is far from united: Diego and Raymond are typical Prévertian good-hearted men of the people (Raymond is a railwayman, and railwaymen were already being celebrated as a key element of the Resistance), while the Sénéchals and Georges are wealthy and vicious—they have profited from the war (and perhaps the peace, given the Great Britain plate on Georges’s car), through blackmarket activities and collaboration. Specifically, Guy has betrayed to the Germans Raymond’s Resistance activities and dies beneath the wheels of a train coincidentally manned by Raymond. Embarrassed that his film might seem too simplistic in its oppositions, Carné tried several times somewhat disingenuously to distance himself from the script’s references to Resistance heroics, but the protagonist’s name only underlines them by linking them to leftist resistance in the Spanish Civil War, while the surname Sénéchal has feudal and fascist implications. Altogether this is a film with a somber, even despairing message, and holds out little hope for national reconciliation. The tramp/Destiny figure predicts nothing but doom and death, appearing on cue to disillusion any who might naively believe in happiness. As Quinquina, a traveling salesman played gloomily by Julien Carette, says to the tramp as they stare moodily down at the river beneath them, “Not too hopeful, all that, eh?” “All what?” “Everything.” There is no disguising certain weaknesses in this film, but there is a lot more to like in it than was recognized at the time of its release.

41. Panique Panic Filming began early January 1946; released 15 January 1947 100 min, b&w 138

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dir Julien Duvivier; Asst dir Georges Régnier; Prod Filmsonor; Scr Charles Spaak and Duvivier, from Les Fiançailles de Monsieur Hire by Georges Simenon; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Music Jacques Ibert; Art dir Serge Pimenoff; Sound Joseph de Bretagne; Edit Marthe Poncin; Act Michel Simon (Monsieur Hire), Viviane Romance (Alice), and Paul Bernard (Alfred). Panique was the first film that Julien Duvivier directed after his return to France from Hollywood, where he had spent the war years making a series of successful films—Lydia, Tales of Manhattan, Flesh and Fantasy, and L’Imposteur. The first three of these were composite films consisting of up to six sketches within a loose framework, the second and third with Charles Boyer, while the fourth was an odd film with Jean Gabin as an assassin who becomes an unlikely Resistance hero. On his return to France, Duvivier contrasted the work practices he experienced in the United States with those prevailing in France: To direct a film in America is purely a matter of “staging” it—as in the theatre, you are given a text to be spoken by actors chosen by the producer and your sole task is to construct the atmosphere of that work. . . . Of about 350 directors working in the US very few have any say in the choice of cast or crew, . . . even less in the choice of subject matter. This conception of the director’s role is markedly different from that prevailing in France. In general the dominant role of the producer in a Hollywood film tends to undermine its quality—indeed, that is what is primarily responsible for the undeniable decadence of the American cinema.15 There is, of course, a certain irony in this critique of American practices, given that French critics tended to classify Duvivier himself as just such a “stager” of other people’s texts, and in making these statements, he was perhaps attempting to ward off such censure. Nevertheless, he had always had a hand in the choice of colleagues, and had always at least collaborated on the preparation of the script, frequently more. In the case of Panique, he worked with Charles Spaak, with whom he had previously collaborated on La Bandera (1935), L’Homme du jour and La Belle Équipe (both 1936), La Fin du jour (1939), and Untel père et fils (1940). This time their script was based on a Georges Simenon novel. Duvivier’s 1933 film, La Tête d’un homme, had also been derived from a Simenon novel, but in gen-

15. Quoted in Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 56.

1946–1951

139

eral, Simenon’s novels had not received appropriate attention to that point—Jean Renoir’s attempt to film La Nuit du Carrefour (1933) had been disastrous, as had several of the wartime adaptations, particularly those featuring Albert Préjean as a rather flip and insubstantial Inspector Maigret. Duvivier and Spaak gave Panique a necessary touch of cruel cynicism, which, as in various earlier Duvivier films, suggests an embittered view of humanity. Many viewers will know the storyline from a much later remake: Monsieur Hire is an outsider, an innocent but eccentric individual on whom a murderer and his girl manage to pin suspicion for the crime they have committed. Inflamed against Hire and believing him guilty of murder, a hysterical mob hounds him to death. This already indicates the connection between this film and the black realism that was soon to characterize much of the French output from 1946 to 1950, a trend that has been seen as either a projection of contemporary hardships or else guilt over the defeat, the occupation, and particularly the collaboration that had factionalized the French nation. The latter argument is given some cogency here by the fact that Monsieur Hire is a Jew, and the French crowd that hounds him to his death had recently been responsible, at least passively and sometimes actively, for hounding to their deaths many thousands of his fellow Jews. Perhaps only a Belgian scriptwriter and a French director who had been absent from France during those recent events could have dared to make a film so powerfully (if implicitly) critical of the French people’s role in them. Arguably the film is accusatory, outspoken, and extremely courageous. This could be one reason for the relative lack of success and rapid fading from view of such a forceful and effective film. The three central characters are all perfectly cast. Paul Bernard plays the slimy villain to perfection, as he had in Lumière d’été (#15) and Voyage sans espoir (#22), while Michel Simon is truly outstanding as the inarticulate, eccentric scapegoat and part-time astrologer whose obsession with photographing humanity betrays at once his desire to distance himself from it and his desire to bear witness to its all too sinister villainy. One of his photos will finally result in the real criminal being apprehended and prosecuted, but more generally, the photographs cumulatively constitute evidence for a global prosecution of the human species. But of course it is Viviane Romance, whose prewar roles as tart and gangster’s moll make of her the ideal seducer and betrayer of Monsieur Hire, who is the prime focus of Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier’s critique of the film. For them she is a prime instance of “that woman who, active and independent during the Occupation, reverts post-war to being represented as a diabolical creature, whose every act is directed against men.” Any man “however strong he may seem, has an Achilles heel—his vulnerability to women. [Alice] is decisive in bringing about Monsieur Hire’s death: he mistrusts all others, but not 140

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

her. . . . A longstanding expert in misogyny, Duvivier had already set up Viviane Romance in La Belle Équipe [as] a loose woman who could freely express sexual desire, so was morally reprehensible, but who at the same time was so brazen as to be irresistible.”16 Here, too, Alice gradually gets Hire to relax, open up, and reveal his true self to her and to us, breaking through the barrier he had erected between himself and the rest of humanity. Presented at first as rather weird and far from sympathetic, Hire is gradually revealed as an incurable romantic who, having once been betrayed by a woman, has been secretly preparing a magical boudoir against the time when he meets a woman worthy of his love—a moment he now believes has arrived, only to have her betray him as her predecessor had. The film can be thought of as in two halves: the first half leads up to the derisive victimization of Hire on the circus bumper cars, while the second half leads up to an entirely more sinister victimization in which he falls five floors to his death. If in many ways the film can be considered a recapitulation of some of Duvivier’s poetic realist successes, it can also seem rather expressionist with its fairgrounds, night silhouettes, and fortune tellers. Certainly it deserves to be better known.

42. Farrebique Farrebique Filmed December 1944–1946; released 11 February 1947 100 min, b&w Dir Georges Rouquier; Prod Écran Français and Films Lallier; Scr Rouquier, from an idea by Claude Blanchard; Cinematog André Dantan; Music Henri Sauguet; Sound René Lécuyer; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act A farming family of the Aveyron region (Massif Central). Farrebique is the only film for which Georges Rouquier is now remembered. A successful short filmmaker during the war, Rouquier aroused such controversy with this feature-length documentary that, despite widespread admiration from critics, he was unable to make the sequels he had planned. Farrebique is a semi-fictionalized autobiography inspired by his childhood memories of the farm of that name owned by his family. Colored by nostalgia for a rural lifestyle that was already beginning to look dated, it evokes the daily and yearly routines

16. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 18, 225–227.

1946–1951

141

of life on a Rouergue farm—a simple and almost hermetic life, barely touched by the outside world. Only the arrival of electricity speaks of that “modernizing” process at work in the wider world. Filmed between December 1944 and early 1946—during, that is, a time of agitation and change—it nevertheless (or therefore) strives to evoke a bucolic timelessness, representing the constricted lifestyle of Farrebique positively and optimistically, as sufficient in itself. Although nominally a documentary, it contains elements of fictional recreation that jar a little, such as the patently (and poorly) acted scene of the young boy falling flat on his face in a buttered slice of bread, or the fall from a haywain that results in a broken leg. The participants, clearly aware of being filmed, nevertheless strive too obviously to avoid acknowledging the presence of the camera. The presence of aggressive extra-diegetic music irritates, and André Bazin reported that much of the dialogue is spoken “off” because the farmhands couldn’t prevent themselves from giggling when they had a longish scripted dialogue to speak.17 In addition, special effects are used to evoke the arrival of spring: time-lapse photography and micro-photography speed up the burgeoning of blossoms, the lengthening of shadows, and the emergence of insect life. Above all, for a documentary the film is heavily and overtly structured—by the daily routines, by the seasonal cycle on the farm, and by the succession of generations: the grandfather looks back to life on the farm when he was a child; later he arranges to pass on the farm to his eldest son; the younger son is to marry, and a second house is built for him; the woman (like other animals on the farm!) is pregnant and soon gives birth; at the end, the grandfather dies, and the eldest son moves to the top of the table. Not coincidentally, as the grandfather fades away it is autumn, and one of the characteristics of the film that was criticized when it was first screened was the overt proliferation of such metaphors. Despite these structuring and fictionalizing elements, Farrebique rapidly became identified as the extreme documentary pole of that debate concerning realism that raged at war’s end. Bazin quoted it for its rejection of professional actors and for its recording of an authentic aspect of “human geography,” contrasting it with his other admired form of realism—the “esthetic realism” of Citizen Kane (visual continuity achieved through long takes and depth of field)—in order to promote Italian neorealism, which he saw as combining the best features of both, or at least achieving the best possible compromise.18 For Jean-Georges Auriol, re-

17. André Bazin, “Voleur de bicyclette,” Esprit, November 1949. 18. See Bazin’s articles on Italian neorealism in Esprit: “Le réalisme cinématrographique et l’école italienne de la liberation,” January 1948; “La Terra trema,” December 1948; and “Voleur de bicyclette,” November 1949.

142

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

viewing it in January 1947, this largely autobiographical evocation of a simple way of life constituted a form of “pastoral poetry”: “If an apocalyptic bomb eradicated all Western Europe, cinémathèques that had acquired Farrebique would have in their archives not just a bucolic symphony but an incomparable ethnographic document on rural French life.” Elsewhere he asserted that he knew no-one other than Georges Rouquier who could capture individuals, their way of life, their behaviour, even their thoughts, with the innocent eye of a child . . . , or of a traveller coming upon something strange and new. . . . Spectators throughout the world can now become their friends, for they have found a poet capable of singing their way of life—singing it indeed, for this film is no more a documentary (educational or fictionalized) than it is a slice of life. And to pull off this gamble of making a film without a plot, without a moral lesson and without artifice, a real poet was needed—a poet who not only loved his subject and his métier but also loved his public.19 Opinions alternated, then, between, on the one hand, a film bearing witness to contemporary life and thus a precursor of cinema vérité, and, on the other, a lyrical poetic film speaking to eternity. Both these schools of thought were, however, fundamentally favorable. Not everyone was so enthusiastic, and for reasons not entirely clear the film was, according to various sources, blackballed from screening at the first (1946) Cannes Festival. Despite this, it is on record as having received the International Critics’ Prize at that festival. Georges Sadoul speaks of the scandalous nature of its exclusion, because its importance is not just in renovating the documentary but in transcending it by participating in that avant-garde current recently apparent in The Last Shot [1945], La Bataille du rail [1946, #31] and above all Païsa [1946]. What characterizes this new European school, which you could describe as “realist,” is its reaction against the excesses that have precipitated the current decadence of Hollywood and which threaten a large sector of French cinema. . . . This film is a great work of art; for one can only attain timeless significance through the contemporary—one’s best chance of enduring is through being profoundly at one with one’s time.”20 19. Revue du cinéma, January 1947, 56; Auriol quoted in Barrot, L’Écran français, 157. 20. Les Lettres françaises, no. 148, 21 March 1947.

1946–1951

143

On the other hand, Jean Rougeul almost welcomed its exclusion from competition, saying “its appearance is a sensational event in the history of cinema: that’s why Farrebique has not been forwarded to the Cannes Festival, and quite right too: in one corner, the Academy, in the other, Rouquier; each to his own.”21 Alan Williams likewise mentions it as the subject of “the most divisive debate of the 1945–46 film season,” and speculates that the controversy was political in origin. As he noted, despite the hermetic and relatively apolitical nature of its film world, Farrebique was strongly defended by critics of the left (such as Sadoul) and had been largely funded by L’Ècran français, which had its origins in clandestine Resistance circles dominated by the Communist Party.22 But whether the controversy centered on the opposition of left and right or the opposition of realism and poetry, the “scandal” prevented Rouquier from making anything else of significance for the rest of his career, except perhaps the belated sequel Biquefarre (1983– 1984), on the occasion of the family’s selling the property. A final, unusually acute comment from Sacha Guitry, who saw it on television eight years later: “It has a singular quality, which I would not advise others to attempt to emulate: it is both fascinating and boring, and it is fascinating precisely because it is boring, just as it is affecting because pitiless; for it is boring like life, and pitiless like life.”23

43. Le Silence est d’or Silence Is Golden Filming began 14 October 1946; released 21 May 1947 90 min, b&w Dir René Clair; Asst dir Pierre Blondy; Prod Pathé and RKO; Scr Clair; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Georges van Parys; Art dir Léon Barsacq and Guy de Gastyne; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Louise Hautecœur and Henri Taverna; Act Maurice Chevalier (Monsieur Émile), Marcelle Derrien (Madeleine), François Périer (Jacques), Raymond Cordy (curly haired man), Dany Robin (Lucette), and Christiane Sertilange (Marinette). After ten years in Britain and America, this was the first film René Clair had made in France since Le Dernier Milliardaire (1934). It links with his prewar films

21. In La Rue, cited in Chirat, La IVe république et ses films, 135. 22. Williams, Republic of Images, 302–303. 23. L’Officiel des spectacles, 13 January 1954.

144

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

in being resolutely antipsychological, revealing little affection for the characters whose patterned acts and phrases are chronicled like moves in an elaborate game, which Clair records from an ironic distance. The game they play is “Seduction,” and the theme (of this and of his other great postwar film Les Grandes Manœuvres, #91) is “Sincerity.” Is one more successful at the game if one tells the woman what she wants to hear, however banal and insincere? If so, is sincerity on the contrary a guarantee of failure? How can one tell the difference between a hypocrite seducer and a sincere lover, if they both use the same phrases? Can the hypocrite himself tell the difference, if he begins to fall in love? Émile (Maurice Chevalier) is an aging silent-film director who is expert at seducing young women for the sheer pleasure of the game, but the one time he was sincerely in love, he lost the woman to his mate Célestin. Jacques, his colleague and quasi-son, is hopeless in affairs of the heart, so Émile shows him how it’s done. While Jacques is away on military service, Émile rescues and begins to fall in love with Madeleine, daughter of Célestin, and thus of his own lost love, and tries to warn her against people (like himself) who will say anything to seduce a pretty girl. He, and his crew, who have all become pseudo-fathers to her, protect her from a series of seducers, with the result that she feels no one finds her attractive. Then Jacques returns, and of course, not knowing Émile’s interest in her, falls for her and wins her affection using (sincerely) precisely the insincere professions of love that Émile had taught him. They determine to keep their relationship a secret. Émile tells Jacques about this wonderful young girl he has met, who would never fall for the crass ploys he had taught Jacques, and the film slows down as it enters a period of Oedipal anguish about father/son and daughter/girlfriend relations. The ending sees Émile recognize while directing the two of them in a grotesque love scene that they do indeed love one another, and he should resign himself to his fate: he rewrites their love scene to provide them and the film with a happy end, while he himself, as at the beginning, picks up yet another pretty young girl with his familiar ploys. Life is a game; love is a game; filmmaking itself becomes a delightful game, each of them patterned with repetitions of, and variations on, hoary old procedures. The crass conventionalism of these procedures is well illustrated in the hilarious film-within-a-film, Oriental Passions, a silent film melodrama in the exotic genre, with exuberant silent-film acting and extravagant sets. In contrast to most postwar films, then, Le Silence est d’or rejects routine forms of realism and foregrounds production in the playful patterns that make of it a constant delight—the weather that is always the exact contrary of that being filmed, the card-playing crew members who stolidly continue their game while chaos erupts all around them, the goat, the street musician, the recurrent irony of Émile’s advice—not least when he urges Jacques to complete the seduction process, not re1946–1951

145

alizing it is his own young girlfriend who is the object of it, or again when at the end, a crew member offers Émile his own advice on how to break off with a girl and reminds him there are plenty more fish in the sea. But one of the film’s trump cards is the music. The narrative as a whole reflects Clair’s nostalgia for the days of the silent film—it is perhaps loosely based on the career of Georges Méliès or Ferdinand Zecca—and a large percentage of the soundtrack consists of a collage of silent-film musical items of contrasting genres and styles that characterize or arise out of the narrative events, most notably the street-musician’s sentimental popular song that at once typifies the sentimental myth of love and counters wordlessly the film’s cynical disbelief in it. This attention to the soundtrack as an independent structural element picks up on Clair’s earlier gloom at the banal use of sound in talkies as a support for realism. His view was that the image was preeminent and would always be a more effective means of expression than would the dialogue: This slavery to dialogue is the principal danger threatened by the invention of the talkie, which, admirable in itself, could have disastrous consequences. . . . It is to be feared that too much verbal precision will dispel all trace of poetry from the screen, as it dispels any sense of dream. . . . It is not the invention of the talkie that frightens me, but the deplorable use that the industry will make of it. . . . The silent film was doubtless not always of high quality but on the whole it rarely sank to the depths of intellectual nullity that most talkies assume as the norm.24 This question of the proper use of sound was, of course, the focus of one of the most famed debates between filmmakers of the era, when Marcel Pagnol asserted that cinema was “the art of printing, recording and disseminating theatrical works.” Clair deliberately distorted and exaggerated Pagnol’s claim in order to make the opposite point, that any theatrical film was a bastardized work, “a degraded theater, the theater of the degraded,” and that sound and image tracks should both be treated in a contrapuntal manner.25 When he published the text of the film, Clair acknowledged that his film was in effect an updated version of Molière’s L’École des femmes, and noted that the opening sequences of the film now seemed to him (and to the public) heavy,

24. See, for instance, Clair Cinéma d’hier, cinema d’aujourd’hui, 212–213, 250, 264–265. 25. For an account of this debate, see Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 284–293.

146

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

slow to get going, even confusing.26 This is partly because of the similar appearance of many of the female characters, only one of whom, when finally introduced, turns out to be central. He also explains the title, which had been appropriate to an early version, written for Raimu, where the fact that the characters did not express their real feelings was central to the happy end, but with Raimu unavailable, that end was rewritten and the title no longer seems so relevant. Le Silence est d’or was by my calculations the most popular film of the 1946– 1947 season, with over 900,000 admissions in Paris alone. It won numerous prizes, including Grand Prix at the 1947 festivals both of Brussels and of Locarno, where it also won best script and best (male) actor. Most critics welcomed it as Clair’s triumphant return to his roots, though Maurice Bardèche saw this new René Clair merely as a talented director trying desperately to imitate the old René Clair.27

44. Le Diable au corps Devil in the Flesh Filmed 26 August–November 1946; released 12 September 1947 110 min, b&w Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Transcontinental Films; Scr Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, from the novel by Raymond Radiguet; Cinematog Michel Kelber; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Max Douy; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Gérard Philipe (François Jaubert), Micheline Presle (Marthe Grangier), Denise Grey (Madame Grangier), Jean Debucourt (Monsieur Jaubert), Jean Varas [as Lara] (Jacques Lacombe), Pierre Palau (Monsieur Marin), Jacques Tati, and Albert Rémy. Claude Autant-Lara’s 1945 film Sylvie et le fantôme had continued the team’s successful wartime series of delicate poetic romances, though with the addition of an amiable ghost, but the production team was disrupted by the marriage of Odette Joyeux to the cinematographer Philippe Agostini. Moreover, the postwar freedom from wartime constraints allowed Autant-Lara’s long-established anarchistic, antiestablishment tendencies to at last find more explicit expression, triggering a new, more incisive social critique. What resulted was a series of vi-

26. See Clair, Comédies et commentaires, 13–100, esp. 92–93. 27. Bardèche and Brasillach, Histoire du cinéma, 1935, quoted in Amengual, “René Clair,” 191.

1946–1951

147

cious, unapologetically ill-natured, and provocative films that achieved success through the scandal they provoked, through the quality of their production, and through the strategic use of popular stars—Le Diable au corps with Micheline Presle and Gérard Philipe, L’Auberge Rouge (#70) with Fernandel, Le Rouge et le noir (#88) with Philipe and Danielle Darrieux, and La Traversée de Paris (#95) with Jean Gabin and Bourvil. The first of them, Le Diable au corps, is of course based on Raymond Radiguet’s novel, published in 1922 and set in the last year of World War I. Coming out soon after the conclusion of World War II, the film of the novel was inevitably seen as a comment on the continuing relevance of the novelistic material. It is basically an account of an adulterous relationship: François, an adolescent of about sixteen, has an affaire with Marthe, a married woman whose husband is away at the front (but returns at inconvenient moments). She falls pregnant and dies in childbirth during the armistice celebrations. The plot relies heavily on ironic contrasts typical of the age: amid general euphoria at the prospect of war’s end, all François can think of is the separation that will result; their child’s birth is accompanied by Marthe’s death; and, more generally, the framing celebrations accompanying the victory are juxtaposed with shots of François watching from a necessary distance the funeral of the woman he had loved. Victory flags and a coffin, public joy and private grief. In some respects, this is an unremarkable tale of adultery, which is no more critical of bourgeois proprieties than any other adulterous tale. What sets it apart are, first, the extreme youth of the protagonists and, second, the calculated insult to patriotic feelings implicit in the fact that François “seduces” Marthe while her husband is away at war risking his life for France. This antimilitarism is central to the film. Autant-Lara had recently tried to make a film called L’Objecteur representing with some sympathy the problems of conscientious objectors, but had been thwarted by the censors. Filming this literary “classic” allowed him at least to attack, via Marthe’s experience as a nurse, the horrors of war, which, as François proclaims, should not be hushed up, and also to celebrate interpersonal loving encounters above national internecine encounters. Moreover, this film links up with the many war films of preceding decades that had condemned or at least disregarded the older generation, responsible for the deaths of millions, and had seen them as having betrayed a younger generation who are left to try to construct something of worth on the ashes. Not surprisingly, Le Diable au corps was widely reported as having been most popular with the young, while establishment figures regarded it as outrageous. The French ambassador to Belgium stormed out in midscreening at the Festival de Bruxelles, and Catholic circles in particular found the film unacceptable. Perhaps in order to avert censure, the film carries a prologue asserting that “The characters who appear in this cine148

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

matic work, with their impetuous and sometimes cynical youth, express the feelings of those young people swept up in the disruptions that from 1914 to 1918 shook the world to its foundations.” But if the film promotes aggressively a certain anarchist critique of the establishment, and particularly of the military, it is nevertheless intensely conventional in its defense of masculine values. There is a scene that Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier characterize as “énorme” (staggering), in which François prevents Marthe from informing her husband of their liaison, instead dictating a loving letter that will bolster his morale at the front. Here, masculine mateship overrides the links between young lovers. And then there is the later scene where François himself recognizes the returning husband and goes to speak to him, but instead in a typically matey encounter asks him for a light. This gender imbalance extends to the couple itself, since Marthe is manifestly more tentative and reticent than François. Moreover, her mother is one of those typical antifeminist shrews of whom Burch and Sellier trace the history through thirty years of French cinema, while François’s father is compassionate, sympathetic, and considerate. The unlovely old woman comes to embody the whole unlovely bourgeois morality, “an image of matriarchal authority far more lethal than traditional patriarchal authority.”28 If much of this was drawn from the book, the flashback form definitely was not. By introducing it, the scriptwriting team changed the thematic emphasis in several ways. Knowing from the opening images that the story ends grimly, with Marthe’s death, introduces a fatality to the unfolding events that did not exist in the novel. In the scriptwriters’ defense, it is possible to argue that the story was already well-known, notorious even; everyone already knew how it ended, and the flashback form merely concretizes this knowledge. Nevertheless, made explicit, this foreknowledge casts an ironic light on much of the protagonist’s early impetuosity. More importantly, the story thus becomes a series of events remembered from François’s point of view. His consciousness is the source of the story, which explains and exacerbates the gender imbalance. Finally, it is only by introducing the armistice celebrations, not present in the book, that the script team could construct the recurrent trope of public joy and private grief. The American producer did not want to include these sequences. AutantLara emerged from this production bitter at the producer’s attempt to introduce into France the Hollywood “preview” system in which a private screening allows the producer to see what works with the public, with a view to recut-

28. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 227–228.

1946–1951

149

ting the film to make it more commercial.29 Henri Fescourt noted Autant-Lara’s progressive discouragement during filming, believing he had failed to capture the essence of the story, until Jean Grémillon publicly declared to the Technicians’ Union his support and admiration for “this great film.”30 Fortunately, the public agreed.

45. Quai des Orfèvres Jenny l’Amour Filming began mid-February 1947; released 3 October 1947 105 min, b&w Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot; Prod Majestic Films; Scr Clouzot, based on the novel by Stanislas-André Steeman; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Francis Lopez and Albert Lasry; Art dir Max Douy; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Charles Bretoneiche; Act Louis Jouvet (Inspector Antoine), Suzy Delair (Jenny Lamour), Simone Renant (Dora), Bernard Blier (Maurice Martineau), Charles Dullin (Brignon), Pierre Larquey (Émile), Raymond Bussières (Albert), and Robert Dalban (Paulo, the murderer). The controversy surrounding Henri-Georges Clouzot’s previous film—Le Corbeau (#19)—exploded immediately after the liberation: the film was withdrawn from circulation and not screened again publicly for three years. Clouzot himself was banned for two years, indefinitely renewable (but in fact not renewed), and Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc were thrown into prison at the Drancy “camp d’épuration,” while other actors were banned for varying lengths of time (Micheline Francey for twelve months, Noël Roquevert for three, Jean Brochard for two). For Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, condemnation of the film as derogatory of the French nation was as unjustified as Jean Renoir’s labeling Quai des brumes in 1938 a fascist film, while Pierre Leprohon wryly remarks that the consequent clandestinity that such banned personnel were obliged to observe after the “Liberation” was uncomfortably analogous to the clandestinity of Jews such as Alexandre Trauner and Joseph Kosma under the fascist occupation.31

29. Jean-Pierre Vivet, “Le present et l’avenir du cinéma français,” Revue du cinéma, no. 6, Spring 1947, 59. 30. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 468. 31. Jeancolas, 15 ans d’années trente, 342; Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 268.

150

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

When the ban elapsed, Clouzot made Quai des Orfèvres, based like his first film (if tenuously) on a police procedural by Stanislas-André Steeman. One of the top-rating films of its season, it received the prize for best direction at the 1947 Venice Biennale. It is still impressive, but nevertheless now seems to fall into two disparate halves—a fascinating first half in which the music-hall setting for the crime is elaborated, and a more routine second half in which Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet) investigates the consequent murder. The policier genre was to prove a favorite of Clouzot, because it allowed him to give free rein to his jaundiced view of human nature as inherently criminal. Here the focus is on Brignon (Charles Dullin in his last role), a lascivious sexual pervert whose wealth allows him to indulge his sexual fantasies and whose twisted physique externalizes a twisted mentality. Opposite him, Bernard Blier is allocated the role of Martineau, “the common man,” which was soon to be regarded as his by nature. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier describe that role as “neither patriarch nor protagonist . . . but ‘your average Frenchman,’. . . embodying a certain middle-ofthe-road politics and an average intellect, but also common sense and a calm solidity.”32 One of Brignon’s targets is Martineau’s wife, Jenny Lamour, who gets a job as the singer in the music hall where Martineau is pianist. When Brignon is murdered, police suspicion naturally falls on Martineau, who in turn is afraid that his wife may have killed Brignon when pursued too insistently. Ultimately, both are cleared, and a character marginal to the plot confesses. But as with Le Corbeau, it is not the resolution that matters, but the dark mood of anguish and uncertainty that increases progressively throughout. The film opens magnificently, with a sequence establishing the central characters in their music-hall setting, as, with musical continuity behind, Jenny tries out, rehearses, then performs to an audience the song that gets her hired. Suzy Delair has a fine voice, so her sporadic performances thereafter provide some relief from the progressively more somber (and in narrative terms more routine) investigation. Denis Marion underlines the degree to which this sordid situation involving various sexual “perversions” was felt to break new ground at the time: “In a truly obsessive manner . . . the most inadmissible behaviour here invaded our screens. The protagonists made no attempt to conceal their perversions and vices, previously reserved for strictly private screenings. Only people ferociously in the grip of certain instinctual behaviours were here represented.”33 Alan Williams agrees with Marion about this black realism: “Clouzot became the unof-

32. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 281. 33. Denis Marion, “Réalisme noir et réalisme gris,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 43–43.

1946–1951

151

ficial community spokesman for the fear that trusting someone—anyone—can be a very dangerous thing to do. . . . Everyone is corrupt. Or simply stupid. And anyone who thinks otherwise will become a hapless victim of the evil inherent in the human condition.”34 For Burch and Sellier it is not humanity as a whole that is at stake here but specifically the perversions of the bourgeoisie, who constitute the prime target of all Clouzot’s best films. Likewise Burch and Sellier foreground the threat of the feminine in the person of Martineau’s frivolous, flighty, flirting wife, guilty as usual (in their view) of threatening the downfall of a kindly simple man. For them, it is Jenny, even though cleared at the end, not Brignon or the murderer, who is the one truly guilty character in the film. Perhaps they are less than just here to the film’s representation of womanhood, not least in their quotation out of context of Inspector Antoine’s supposed putdown to the lesbian photographer whom Brignon has used for his erotic assignments, and who herself loves Jenny enough to risk everything to tidy up the murder scene. To represent favorably an openly lesbian character was itself a daring move in 1947, for at no point are we asked to be anything but sympathetic toward her. For Burch and Sellier, however, she is psychologically male: “Men and lesbians are offered as victims of feminine seduction, and endure courageously their unhappy condition.”35 The main weakness of the film is the abrupt and clumsy introduction of new major characters halfway through the film, which dislocates the narrative painfully, since the film struggles to shift the spectator’s identification from Martineau to the police inspector. Jouvet does his impressive best to endow this character with some distinction, with his shambling indirectness and his show of affection for his North African son, but the film never really recovers. Regular filmgoers would have recognized certain well-established tropes of the cinema of the age in this film: the night streets with lamplight gleaming on wet cobbles; the desperate protagonist having to force his way against a stream of ebullient exiting theater-goers, analogous to the well-known images of Les Enfants du paradis (#27); and this and other ironically intercut contrasts between public gaiety and private grief, as when during Christmas festivities Martineau attemps to commit suicide. But I must mention one surprisingly moving moment when the lesbian photographer’s taxi-driver, having carefully failed to identify her in a lineup, is finally obliged to do so: “Please forgive me, lady; we’re not the strong ones here.” Marginals and “little people” are weak; it is money and its police that are strong in this Darwinian universe.

34. Williams, Republic of Images, 287. 35. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 194, 233–235.

152

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

46. Antoine et Antoinette Antoine and Antoinette Filming began early November 1946; released 31 October 1947 83 min, b&w Dir Jacques Becker; Prod SNEG (Gaumont); Scr Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe, and Françoise Giroud; Cinematog Pierre Montazel; Music Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; Art dir Robert-Jules Garnier; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Roger Pigaut (Antoine), Claire Mafféi (Antoinette), Noël Roquevert (Monsieur Roland), Annette Poivre (Juliette), Pierre Trabaud (Riton), Jacques Meyran (Monsieur Barbelot), and Gérard Oury (the insistent customer). Antoine et Antoinette was to prove so successful (approximately 600,000 admissions in Paris first release) that Jacques Becker returned to the format twice in subsequent years, resulting in a trilogy of films aiming to capture the experience of young married couples in the postwar years (Édouard et Caroline, 1951; Rue de l’Estrapade, 1952—four if you count Rendez-vous de juillet, 1949, #61). What they all have in common is a close focus on the daily lives, petty irritations, minor disputes, and tentative adulteries of an already married couple, always ending with a reconciliation. They depend for any interest they generate on a multitude of minute psychological observations that cumulatively construct a particular Parisian environment, a particular milieu, and, crucially, a relationship that the spectator does not want to see fail. This first film of the trilogy is perhaps the most interesting because it plays that typical postwar (and indeed prewar) card, the class opposition between, on the one hand, the “little people” who are honorable, deserving, and kindly, and who in their mutual supportiveness construct a local community of needy people who look after one another, and, on the other hand, the bosses—spiteful, intolerant, impatient, and selfish, preoccupied with getting their pound of flesh from their employees. Think of the rich butcher for whom winning a lottery means nothing yet who complains of his lot; or Antoine’s boss, who finds it intolerable that Antoine should have momentarily stopped work to fix a mate’s machine; or Antoinette’s boss, who finds it intolerable that she should have taken a minute off to speak to a friend outside and later fires her for leaving 15 minutes early because she is distressed about Antoine. This critique of local representatives of the monied class culminates in Monsieur Roland, the grocery store owner, whose repeated and progressively more insistent attentions distress Antoinette. Altogether this first half of the film has an admirable documentary feel, with (as Becker acknowledged) little or no narrative drive but a memorable evo1946–1951

153

cation of postwar existence with its shortages and hardships, its hopes and its aspirations, its intensely lived weekend pleasures at football or rowing on the park lake.36 One of Becker’s chief claims to fame is this “rediscovery of the everyday,” this reaffirmation of the joys of working-class life, this delight in the minutiae of the worker’s day.37 The film takes a real pleasure in documenting with handheld camera the technology of Antoine’s printery, the accents and gestures of his workmates and their interactions. In this and in his use of unknown or little known actors, Becker was close to Italian neorealism. Antoine and Antoinette both have upward aspirations—her to live a little better in a more spacious flat, him to own the gleaming motorbike that offers the possibility of a literal and metaphorical escape from his daily routines. Incidentally, the gender contrasts implicit in these aspirations are taken for granted as part of the ideology in the trilogy, possibly generated in part by Becker’s own love of automobiles and his mother’s management of a haute couture firm. Such gender oppositions are a principal source of those little incompatibilities that produce quarrels between husband and wife, and that thus, together with class, form the principal source of tension in the main part of the film. This first half of the film is well done, but the narrative collapses into tacky melodrama when it begins to foreground the lottery win. Antoinette has bought a lottery ticket, it is the winning number, their troubles are over . . . but Antoine loses the ticket, cannot face her, wanders glumly through the city streets, and slumps disconsolately on a park bench. Then, discovering his loss, Antoinette tries desperately to console him. The two lead actors, more than adequate in the first half, are simply not up to presenting this material convincingly. Fortunately, the two stories come together in the final 5 minutes with an extended class-based fistfight between Antoine and Monsieur Roland, at the end of which, in a subjective haze, the dazed Antoine remembers what happened to the ticket. Aside from the facile melodrama generated by the lost ticket, it’s easy to see the whole lottery theme as a cop-out with respect to “the class struggle” that opens the film. It is all too reminiscent of the 1930s’ fatalistic social cinema, which regularly fantasized about a glorious lottery win that would solve all problems, when the only really constructive course of action would have been sociopolitical commitment to change class structures. In this sense, it is disappointing to see Antoine et Antoinette recapitulating, in a period when social change was genuinely possible, the unproductive fatalism of prewar poetic realism. An explanation can be found in Becker’s account of the origins of the film—a sugges-

36. Quoted in Quéval, Jacques Becker, 73–75. 37. Robert Vas, “Le Trou,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1961.

154

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

tion by Louise de Vilmorin in which the lost lottery ticket was the central plot mechanism, resulting in the total break-up of the marriage: Antoine, unable to face Antoinette, was to abandon her, and she to marry a second time, only to re-meet Antoine decades later.38 Fortunately, Becker toned down this “Russian” melodrama somewhat, but its residue undermines the effectiveness of the documentary qualities of the resultant film. The technical characteristic for which Antoine et Antoinette became notorious was the intensity of the editing. Marguerite Renoir collaborated more closely on these three films than her role as editor would suggest. From his first feature film, Becker had edited intensely (Le Dernier Atout, 1942: ASL, 9.3 seconds), but in Becker’s own account, the script for this film already foreshadowed 850 shots, giving an ASL of about 6 to 7 seconds, then was further fragmented during editing to give about 1,250 shots (an average shot length of about 3.8 seconds)—extraordinary even by postwar standards, when the ASL had reduced to a norm of about 8–9 seconds. Becker acknowledged that this “fragmentation” relaxed in his later films, and indeed the ASL of Édouard et Caroline is 8.3 seconds (including a surprising number of shots longer than 30 seconds, especially in the opening sequence), while that of Casque d’Or (1952, #73) is 8.4 seconds. In all cases, this editing intensity is due to long series involving shot/reverse shot—due, that is, to the psychological editing of gestures, expressions, and reactions, rather than to narrative action.

47. Monsieur Vincent (St. Vincent de Paul) Filming began mid-March 1947; released 5 November 1947 110 min, b&w Dir Maurice Cloche; Prod EDIC and UGC; Scr Jean Benard-Luc, Jean Anouilh, and Cloche; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; Art dir René Renoux; Sound Jean Rieul; Edit Jean Feyte; Act Pierre Fresnay (Monsieur Vincent de Paul), Aimé Clariond (Richelieu), Jean Debucourt (Monsieur de Gondi), and Lise Delamare (Madame de Gondi). It is surprising, to say the least, to find a film with a religious theme figuring among the most popular of the postwar decade. Previously, as noted earlier, men of religion had appeared rarely in French films, and when they did, it

38. In a conversation with François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, Cahiers du cinéma, February 1954.

1946–1951

155

was often as figures of fun—ridiculed or patronized rather than admired. The rare cinematic attempts to take religion seriously had met with a systematic lack of interest from the viewing public. Only when they drew overtly on the techniques of gross melodrama had they succeeded (Les Musiciens du ciel, La Charrette fantôme, L’Appel du silence in 1938–1939), and the fact that Monsieur Vincent too exploited these techniques is no doubt a principal reason for its success. Reputedly it drew to cinemas hundreds of thousands of people who had never before set foot in one. Like all melodramas, it did better in general release than in exclusive release, and better in the provinces than in Paris. After three years, it had earned for its producer the best returns for any film of 1947–1951—325 million francs in France alone, from over 7 million admissions. But its success extended far beyond that, as its many international awards attest, while Pierre Fresnay’s performance was universally admired. This was perhaps fortunate, since his wartime work for Continental had attracted strong criticism. The ex-Resistance review L’Écran français in its foreshadowing of the film’s production noted sardonically that “During the Occupation this actor, of whom we were once so proud, was the star of the Nazi production company Continental, and this was a bitter pill to swallow. We will not easily forget it. . . . This son of Alsatian parentage submitted to German direction. . . . His very presence in German[-produced] films was a powerful weapon of enemy propaganda.”39 The review did not accuse him (because it could not) of outright collaboration, but such published slights in the post-liberation context make it easy to interpret his participation in this film as an attempt at public expiation and rehabilitation. Maurice Cloche had long harbored the desire to make the film, and the church supported him: the faithful contributed nearly 100 million francs to fund it, and the papal nuncio (later to become Pope John XXIII) attended the filming. It deals of course with key moments in the life of St. Vincent de Paul—his early ministry at Châtillon, where his commitment to the poor first came to the fore; his progressively wider and more influential ministry and appointment as almoner to the navy, where he is represented as feeling guilty that his increasing association with the rich and the powerful is causing him to lose touch with the poor; his dispossession of his own wealth and sources of income so as better to share the poor’s suffering; the project of a hospice for the poor, and the international expansion of this project; then finally his dying days as he passes on to a young novice his passion for the dispossessed.

39. See L’Écran français, no. 91, 25 March 1947, and nos. 127–128, December 1947. See also Ford, Histoire du cinéma français contemporain, 46–55, and Crisp, Genre, Myth and Convention, 191–195.

156

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

The degree of funding available allowed a fully professional team to be appointed, and the resources of the Buttes-Chaumont studio were devoted to creating an environment of highly aestheticized squalor for the seventeenth-century poor to live amid. The opening scenes, in which Vincent, himself the son of a peasant, arrives at Châtillon to find a deserted and impoverished parish whose inhabitants are living in fear of the plague, and in which he gradually wins his adversaries over to his ideology of self-sacrifice, are very well done. The film’s grossly sketched critique of the aristocracy’s selfishness would have acquired contemporary resonances from recent incidents in which the wartime bourgeoisie had attracted criticism for its tendency toward self-interested collaboration with the occupation forces. It comes as a revelation to the rich and powerful when Vincent’s ministry reveals to them that the poor are human too, and can be sensitive, even subtle. Nevertheless, it’s “Chacun pour soi” (every man for himself) he’s told by the rich, and he comes to realize that if he is to save the poor, it must be by working with and through the poor. As his life draws to a close, Vincent realizes that his mission is expanding from problems of class and wealth to problems of gender and race—“Niggers” and “illegitimate babies and their mothers.” The hungry and the weak will always be with us in one form or another, and his work will never be done. This is not a subtle film, and the message is pressed home again and again. But faced with the success of Cloche’s strategy, both as a business enterprise and as socio-spiritual propaganda, numerous other filmmakers strove to replicate it. Films appeared on the life of St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars (Sorcier du ciel, 1949); on the life of Doctor Louise Montivier (On ne triche pas avec la vie, 1949); on the rector of the Île de Sein by Jean Delannoy (Dieu a besoin des hommes, 1950, again with Fresnay), following his Symphonie pastorale of 1946 (#35); on the Curé d’Ambricourt by Robert Bresson (Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, #68); by Léo Joannon’s three films, beginning with Le Défroqué (1953, again with Fresnay) and two others; and by Robert Darène’s three, notably Les Chiffonniers d’Emmaüs (1955). Cloche himself made further films of this sort without attaining the same degree of success—Docteur Laënnec (1948); Un missionnaire (1955), shot in Guinea and the Cameroons; and much later Mais toi tu es Pierre (1971). In purely numerical terms, then, this was an age when films with a religious orientation proliferated, yet few critics, especially among committed Christians, were willing to recognize any spiritual value in the resultant products. For Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre in Le Cinéma et le sacré, the representation of religious topics ran three principal risks—sentimentality, anecdotal triviality, and didacticism; but in addition, this series of films was universally guilty of “an aesthetic and dramatic indecision as to what style should best be adopted for such topics, with a resultant hesitation between the documentary, the edifying melodrama and the ‘realist’ slice of 1946–1951

157

life.” 40 In the specific case of Monsieur Vincent, “if one wished to attain the sacred it would have been essential to take us to the very edge of horror and nausea.” But both authors agree that on the contrary, the style of Monsieur Vincent and of the two Delannoy films is too “slick,” too lovingly aestheticized, to convey any “living” spirituality. For all such critics, only the inspired performance of Fresnay saves Monsieur Vincent from the elsewhere prevalent failure.

48. Le Printemps de la liberté (The Springtime of Liberty) Intended release date 22 February 1948; script reading 13 March 1948; script published as a serial by Les Lettres françaises and broadcast on radio 11 July 1948; theatrical performance February 1949 Projected crew and cast: Dir Jean Grémillon; Prod UGC/Education Ministry; Scr Grémillon and Pierre Kast; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Grémillon; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Act Michel Bouquet (Jean), Arlette Thomas (Françoise), Fernand Ledoux (Le père Nivôse), Paul Bernard (Édouard Espivent-Vignoles), Pierre Larquey (Le père La Croque), and Jean Debucourt (Baron Étienne). This is surely one of the most fascinating films never made. It can stand here for the hundreds of such films commissioned, scripted, cast, sometimes even filmed, but that—whether for political, technical, personal, or (more commonly) financial reasons—never reached the public screen. Le Printemps de la liberté is, however, of additional interest because it sheds a bright light on the political turbulence that prevailed in the years immediately succeeding the liberation. At war’s end, Jean Grémillon’s future as a leading French director seemed assured. During the war, he had directed two immensely important films—Lumière d’été (#15) and Le Ciel est à vous (#23)—the latter of which had been promoted by left-wing critics as a worthy riposte to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s pessimistic Le Corbeau (#19). In their view, Grémillon spoke for the “little people” of France, whose capacity to triumph over adversity he had represented as limitless. Moreover, he had just celebrated the French people’s capacity to triumph (admittedly with a little help from friends) over the German invader, by way of his film on the Liberation, Le 6 juin à l’aube, and his patriotic credentials were unquestionable after his wartime work as a leading member of the Comité de Libération

40. Agel and Ayfre, Le Cinéma et le sacré, 66–67, 98, 131. See also Ludmann, Cinéma, foi et morale, 98.

158

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

du Cinéma Français (with Pierre Blanchar, Pierre Renoir, and Jean Painlevé). It was logical, therefore, as the centenary of the 1848 revolution approached that France’s Education Ministry should turn to him to script and direct a film commemorating it. The film would celebrate a popular political triumph, just as Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) had done: the founders of the Fourth Republic would commemorate the founders of the Second. Grémillon had never directed a film scripted by himself but had been hoping to exploit his postwar renown to write just such a film celebrating popular revolution. He had been unsuccessful in finding a backer for La Commune (scripted 1945), celebrating the lifting of the Prussian siege of Paris at the beginning of the Third Republic, and for Le Massacre des innocents (scripted 1946) linking the Spanish Civil War, Munich, the military collapse of 1940, and the concentration camps, so though he had to abandon another funded film to undertake it, this offer was too good to refuse. Collaborators undertook historical research, Grémillon himself wrote the script and composed the music for the film, and Léon Barsacq designed the sets. But delays in government funding created uncertainties, not least because costs had escalated. Severe cuts were required, which Grémillon reluctantly implemented. Then, after fifteen months’ work, the team learned by way of a newspaper report that the government funding which was to have underwritten their film had been diverted to a celebration of the centenary of the death of the writer Chateaubriand. Their project collapsed. The published script, however, allows a fairly clear idea as to the nature of the proposed film. Although Grémillon was attracted to the mass popular action of Soviet films, in which “the people” are the central agent, he accepted that for a Western audience, it was necessary to create characters with whom the spectator could identify. But rather than focusing on heroic figures central to the action, he made Jean and Françoise country folk, humble representatives of “the people” who witness, often indirectly, the dramatic events taking place in Paris, and who are ultimately caught up in them at the risk of their lives. They hear from a postillion news of the bloody uprising in Paris, the fall of the monarchy, and the declaration of the Republic. Jean in a sudden outburst of passion speaks out on behalf of the hungry and the oppressed—“The conditions of our existence are criminal, and our work is nothing less than forced labour. . . . Shit, we’ve had enough of suffering.” In the celebrations that follow, the king is burnt in effigy; Liberty, Fraternity, and Fidelity are proclaimed; and the Ateliers Nationaux guarantee work for the masses of unemployed. The great Springtime of Liberty has arrived, and promises to spread throughout Europe and the empire. But Grémillon was anxious to balance the optimism of this expansion of individual liberty with a sense of deterministic social pressures. Again the determinism was to be embodied in an individual, whom the spectator could learn to 1946–1951

159

hate—the wealthy Édouard Espivent-Vignoles, who is outraged at these events, vindictively fires his entourage (with hypocritical expressions of regret), and insists that Order Must Be Restored—precisely that Order which defends his privileged existence. Very soon, Jean and Françoise, who have come to Paris in hope of work, are puzzled to discover that the people’s defenders (Armand Barbès, François-Vincent Raspail, Louis Auguste Blanqui) are being rounded up and imprisoned by the police; the ateliers are being closed, and work will not be available after all; the government has failed the people; the Minister for War, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, working to the benefit of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, has assumed control and will ruthlessly wipe out the residue of popular suburban refuges in eastern Paris. The grand finale sees barricades built, the people arming themselves and resisting bravely with some prospect of success, until Cavaignac calls in the artillery and bombards the barricaded suburbs. A horrific massacre results, both there and in the quarry where the last refugees assemble. In the original scenario, Jean and Françoise were to have died in the communal massacre of the innocents, but as a concession to backers, Grémillon in his final rewriting allowed them to survive by chance and stumble off together at the end. Work had begun in March 1947, and the script was written and three times revised between 10 July 1947 and 12 March 1948. The ministries of Foreign Affairs, Commerce, and even Education were all still vocally supportive in May 1948, but the project was canceled in June. Pierre Kast, critical but cautious, notes simply that the government of the day seemed riven by contradictions, both economic and political. No explanation was ever put forward openly for the cancellation, though indirectly it was implied that Grémillon was proving uncooperative, costs had skyrocketed, and the project was out of control. The contrary case can, as Kast shows, just as easily be made. It is very probable that the government was becoming uneasy at being seen to fund a left-wing film director to make an outspokenly revolutionary film at a time when postwar ideological currents were moving strongly against the libertarian euphoria of war’s end and toward the Cold War antagonism between Russia and the United States. Better to celebrate the centenary of a conservative religion-oriented monarchist like Chateaubriand, whose Le Génie du christianisme consequently won out over Le Printemps de la liberté. As Kast comments, “M Espivent-Vignoles has many friends.” 41 Grémillon had become, and was to remain, a doomed filmmaker.

41. Pierre Kast, “Introduction,” in Le Printemps de la liberté (published script), 7–14.

160

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

49. Les Dernières Vacances (That Last Holiday) Filming began mid-April 1947; released 24 March 1948 95 min, b&w Dir Roger Leenhardt; Prod LPC; Scr Roger Leenhardt with Roger Breuil; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Guy Bernard; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound René Forget; Edit Myriam Borsoutzky; Act Odile Versois (Juliette), Michel François (Jacques), Pierre Dux (Valentin, Jacques’s father), Renée Devillers (Cécile, Jacques’s mother), Jean d’Yd (Walter), Frédéric Munie (Édouard), Christiane Barry (Odette), Berthe Bovy (Aunt Délie), Jean Varas (Pierre Gabard), and Raymond Farge (Augustin). At war’s end a number of filmmakers who had spent the war years directing documentary films contemplated the move to feature films. Cumulatively, had they all succeeded in establishing themselves, they might well have created a French documentary neorealism, but René Clément was alone in succeeding in this aim. Georges Rouquier (Farrebique, #42) and Georges Régnier (Les Paysans noirs, #58) were less successful in attracting audiences, and returned to directing short films. After making this single feature film, which likewise proved uncommercial, so did Roger Leenhardt, though long afterward he directed two other feature films. Between 1934 and 1946, Leenhardt had produced and/or directed fifteen documentaries. Over roughly the same period (1934–1938 and 1944–1947), he had been developing a set of filmmaking principles in his critical and theoretical articles for Esprit and La Revue du cinéma. One observation central to his writing was that the French cinema was suffering a “crise du sujet”: certain thematic areas had been thrashed, and a renewal of subject material was urgently needed. With his documentary background, not surprisingly he recognized that one possible source of this renewal was (auto-)biography. Les Dernières Vacances, which he made as soon as he was given the opportunity and which he wrote and directed with his brother-in-law and close friend Roger Breuil, was an intensely personal film—a “confessional” film—based on Leenhardt’s own adolescence in the Midi. This was to make of him a role model for the New Wave, acknowledged by François Truffaut, whose Les 400 Coups (1959) springs to mind as an analogous project. The plot is simple: each summer the members of a landed family gather at the family domain in the Gard, called “Torrigne” because of a Roman watchtower (or fire-tower) on the property. Central to the narrative is a romantic attachment that develops between Juliette (who lives at Torrigne with her father and her aunt Délie) and her cousin Jacques, who has come with his parents from

1946–1951

161

Paris. The older generation of family members is anxious about the cost of maintaining the property and decides to sell it, so this will be the family’s last summer at Torrigne. A young architect, Pierre Gabard, comes down from Paris to value the property with a view to buying it and turning it into a hotel, and it becomes apparent that he is a powerful rival for Juliette’s affections. Jacques, jealous, punctures the tires of Pierre’s motorbike, then persuades young Augustin to lure Pierre into the tower and set it alight. Fortunately, Pierre sees through the deceit and is unscathed. As the end of the holidays approaches, Jacques and Juliette make a last visit to the tower. Jacques attempts to embrace her, but she resists. We last see him back at school, nostalgically contemplating a photo of Torrigne taken by his uncle as a souvenir of their family reunions and being scolded by the teacher for not paying attention. The elegaic atmosphere of the film corresponds to its status as an evocation of a lost paradise—the lost paradise of a happy childhood as the children cross the frontier into a sexually charged adolescence, but also the lost paradise of a landed middle class obliged to renounce their domain. In André Bazin’s words, “the theme of the end of childhood [is linked] intimately to that of the end of a family and of a certain social class—that Protestant middle class which three generations of material security, and wealth laboriously acquired, have transformed into something like an aristocracy.” 42 This is material that has been endlessly explored in French literature, but Leenhardt remarked on the surprising fact that it had seldom if ever been explored in film. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) is one of the few “family domain” films, though significantly more structured and thematically distant. Many critics at the time felt that Les Dernières Vacances itself was effectively a novel written for the screen, or a film written to be experienced like a novel. For Leenhardt himself, it incorporated “that imagination and personal experience that I had not managed to capture in a novel.” 43 In his theoretical writing, he had questioned the cinema’s commitment to “spectacle” and proposed the novelistic virtues of psychological exploration as more appropriate. Les Dernières Vacances was his attempt to realize such a literary and psychological project. Consequently, it is somewhat lacking in moments of narrative intensity, and was considered by some to be too wordy. The fire in the fire-tower is the only truly dramatic incident, but it is nicely foreshadowed by the discussion of the tower’s Roman origins, and by other incidents such as the fire in the Chinese lantern or

42. André Bazin, “Le style, c’est l’homme même,” Revue du cinéma, no. 14, June 1948, 62–68. 43. Quoted in Chirat, La IVe république et ses films, 121.

162

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

when “jumping the fire” is used as a test of faith. Once the tower incident is over, the focus changes to the older generation, and any interest derives from direct and indirect hints as to future possibilities—Jacques’s parents are reunited by the tact of his young widowed aunt; she, in turn, will “teach him to tango” when he returns to Paris; and Aunt Délie has her big scene when forced to abandon her secretive artwork relating to the “paradise” theme. In line with Leenhardt’s documentary background, the use of film technology is restrained to the point of invisibility—series of brief shots are rare, as are long takes over 30 seconds. The ASL of 12 seconds is standard for the time. Camera movements are functional and unforegrounded, and most music is diegetic, with any extra-diegetic music being unobtrusive. Unfortunately, Les Dernières Vacances passed unnoticed on its release, both by the public and by critics, save for Leenhardt’s close friend Bazin (whose career as a critic had been largely inspired by Leenhardt’s writing and who had taken over the task of film critic at Esprit from Leenhardt). Consequently, Leenhardt was unable throughout the 1950s to find funding for the feature films he aspired to direct, and returned to short films and documentaries—notably La Fugue de Mahmoud and a series on famous writers and painters.

50. Dédée d’Anvers Dedee from Antwerp Filming began early October 1947; released 3 September 1948 100 min, b&w Dir Yves Allégret; Asst dir Pierre Léaud; Prod Sacha Gordine; Scr Jacques Sigurd and Allégret, from the novel by Ashelbé; Cinematog Jean Bourgoin; Music Jacques Besse; Art dir Georges Wakhévitch; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Simone Signoret (Dédée), Bernard Blier (Monsieur), Marcel Dalio (Marco), Marcel Pagliero (Francesco), and Jane Marken (Germaine). This was a landmark film for the postwar film noir (or “réalisme noir”; see L’École buissonnière, #55) inaugurating an astonishing series of seven films directed by Yves Allégret and scripted by Jacques Sigurd (1947–1954). Allégret’s then wife, Simone Signoret, starred in the first and third of them, and these films established both husband and wife as figures to be reckoned with in the postwar French cinema. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier contrast this French postwar film noir with the film noir that dominated American production at that same time: in their view, both French and American versions are resolutely misogynist, but in the latter, the male protagonist is always represented as no less re1946–1951

163

sponsible than the female. Although often under the influence of the female, he is acknowledged to be just as guilty, and both must be punished. French examples, on the contrary, derive rather from the great poetic realist films of the late 1930s in underlining the opposition between the male protagonist as innocent victim and the woman as whore or tramp, dragging him down to despair and death.44 As we see in those of the series included in this filmography, there is some validity in this accusation in all these films. Dédée, for instance, is the story of a small-time prostitute working out of a bar-restaurant owned by Monsieur (Bernard Blier), and she brings about the death of an innocent sea captain who hoped to “take her away from all that.” Signoret was to become typecast as an amoral good-time girl cum prostitute in the course of this decade, from Macadam (1946, #39) through Dédée, Manèges (1950, #62), and La Ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950, #65), to Casque d’Or (Jacques Becker, 1952, #73)—or at least as an adultress and murderess (Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954). But it is also true that these films draw on her developing public persona: she did not in fact have any time for conventional bourgeois morality, moving in the bohemian circles of Jacques Prévert’s band and the Café Flore from 1941, living with Daniel Gélin, pregnant at the liberation and moving to the Allégret brothers’ house in the country with them and Serge Reggiani, marrying Yves Allégret after working with him on Les Démons de l’aube (1945), and leaving him for Yves Montand in 1951. Arguably the preeminence she gave to sensuality and to left-wing libertarianism, even then but more so in her political campaigns with Montand, provoked the orientation of many contemporary scenarios in which she featured. Yves Allégret himself had endured twenty years of marginal cinematic activities before making good in this film—assistant from 1929 to his brother Marc, and later to Jean Renoir, Augusto Genina, Claude Autant-Lara, and Paul Fejos. A member of the left-wing Groupe Octobre, he directed a series of short films and cinema advertisements but saw his attempts to move into feature filmmaking thwarted or undermined each time (war intervened, a negative was lost in a fire, a film was banned by the Germans because Claude Dauphin figured in it, etc.). Only now in conjunction with Jacques Sigurd did his abilities begin to become recognized. Dédée, like Pépé le Moko (1937), is based on a novel by Ashelbé and finds unexpected depths in a somewhat trivial original. The plot has something in common with that film as well, though on a bleaker note. Dédée is set in the Antwerp docks and mostly at night, amid the grim routines of the dockworkers, the bistros, the prostitutes, and their cosmopolitan customers. Dédée’s brutal pimp is

44. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 279.

164

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Marco (Marcel Dalio in one of his most unsympathetic roles), who exploits her charms to the full while trying to supplement her income with black-market deals. Francesco, the sea captain who realizes she deserves something better and promises to take her away with him around the world, is played by Marcel Pagliero, a bulky Jean Gabin lookalike inheriting Gabin’s role of doomed dreamer. But rain-washed night streets and the glimpse of a departing steamer through a porthole signal the hopelessness of such dreams. All will end badly. Crazed by the thought of Dédée leaving, her pimp Marco guns down Francesco and is in turn hunted down, bashed and run over by Dédée and Monsieur. The film ends as it began with the mass of dockworkers arriving at dawn on their bicycles to begin the day’s work. Altogether a sordid environment, grim events, and a tragic end. As Pierre Leprohon notes, “[This film] picks up on that pre-war poetic realism that worked so well for Carné, for Renoir and for Duvivier: the same morbid taste for a grubby humanity that aspires to a little happiness but is doomed never to achieve it. But on this despairing theme, this realistic material, art does its work, transforming it, offering us human beings and settings seen through a sort of haze that transfigures them, wrenches them from their degraded state and makes them heroes of a new mythology.” 45 In his summary of the black realism of these postwar years, Denis Marion agrees: “[Sigurd and Allégret] express in as exemplary a fashion as Prévert and Carné had before the war a truly bleak view of the world. . . . At once by their choice of subjects, by the style in which those subjects are treated and by the inexorability of the unfortunate outcome that they impose on them these two seem to have reached the limits of what is tolerable on the screen.” 46 For Susan Hayward, on the contrary, these films go much further than the prewar poetic realist films: “The pessimism has a new bitterness. To the hopelessness that was collectively shared in the earlier cinema corresponds an individuated, bleak, noexit brutality. Each character experiences her/his misery (whether self-induced or not) alone. After the Liberation euphoria, what was there to celebrate after all? Acutely unpleasant economic stringencies and a lack of identity.” 47 On the basis of Dédée and his two subsequent films, Une si jolie petite plage (#54) and Manèges (#62), Allégret acquired something of a reputation as an absurdist and an existentialist—concepts that Jean-Paul Sartre had recently brought to cultural notice in literature. Certainly, Allégret was to make Les Orgueilleux

45. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 329. 46. Denis Marion, “Réalism noir et réalisme gris,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 46–47. 47. Hayward, French National Cinema, 183.

1946–1951

165

(#84) in 1953 based on Sartre’s short Typhus, but it seems more likely that it was Sigurd who was at the origins of these Sartrean preoccupations, given the scripts that he was to produce for Marcel Carné in the 1950s: L’Air de Paris (1954), which is full of existentialist references not previously found in Carné, and Les Tricheurs (1958, #101), which is overtly an exploration and condemnation of the supposedly existentialist lifestyle of Parisian youth.

51. Impasse des Deux Anges (Street of Two Angels—No Exit) Filming began early May 1948; released 3 November 1948 84 min, b&w Dir Maurice Tourneur; Prod BUP and Eugène Tucherer; Scr Jean-Paul Le Chanois; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music Yves Baudrier; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Georges Leblond; Edit Christian Gaudin; Act Simone Signoret (Marianne), Paul Meurisse (Jean), Marcel Herrand (Antoine des Fontaines), Jacques Baumer (Antoine’s butler), Paul Amiot (the chief), Marcelle Praince (the duchess), Jacques Castelot (the viscount), Danièle Delorme (Anne-Marie), and François Patrice (the lad who rescues then threatens them). This was the last film ever made by Maurice Tourneur, who was soon afterward the victim of a serious accident in which he lost both legs. This would in itself be sufficient to justify its inclusion here, but in addition, the film has the virtue of several fine performances and a key theme of the period—the disruptions caused when the past intrudes violently on present plans, causing all concerned to reevaluate their actions and allegiances. In the film’s present tense there are two interwoven narrative threads— first, the marriage of Antoine des Fontaines, a socially stiff aristocrat, to Marianne, an attractive actress (Simone Signoret), and, second, the attempt by a gang of thieves to steal the priceless historic necklace that is to be a wedding gift from Antoine to Marianne. The past intervenes when Jean, the professional thief imported from England to do the safe job, turns out to be a former lover of Marianne, whom he had abandoned abruptly without explanation. It rapidly becomes apparent to the spectator that he had “disappeared” because he had been nabbed by the police while doing a job to provide himself with funds to support Marianne’s expensive habits, and had spent the intervening years in jail and in exile. The central core of the film is to be found in the long sequence in which Marianne abandons the reception in Antoine’s chateau on her wedding eve to wander with Jean through the city where they had lived out their doomed ro166

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

mance seven years earlier. It is during this nostalgic stroll (interrupted repeatedly by the gang members who had hired Jean and think he has ratted on them) that Marianne learns the truth about Jean’s sudden disappearance and, finally freed of any residue of regret concerning their past relationship, can marry the marquis. A secondary theme had intervened in the marriage preparations: clearly from different class backgrounds, the marquis and the actress are by no means obviously well matched. His aristocratic pride and mask of cynically affected indifference jars (as his aunt forcefully points out to him during Marianne’s unexplained absence) with Marianne’s need for affection. A complex opposition emerges between his formality and her informality, his coldness and her openness, his aristocratic tendency toward patriarchal dominance and manipulation and her need for equality in affective relations (she addresses him as “vous” but addresses Jean as “tu”). For the film, that is, the need to pierce his crust of formality and “let the heart shine through” can only be achieved by someone from the more bohemian world and from the lower classes. Marianne’s absence causes the marquis to rethink his prejudices, to realize he is “un pauvre type, tout seul”—and become more the husband she might have been hoping for. This class-based opposition is only exacerbated when the marquis (and the film’s audience) discover that his butler is, in fact, Marianne’s godfather, who had, like the marquis’s aunt, been apprehensive about Antoine’s inappropriate personality traits. At this point, there are echoes of the marquis and servant in La Règle du jeu. The marquis duly reforms, and Marianne will marry him. When Jean learns of this, he allows himself to be gunned down by the vengeful gang members. This is fascinating material, but it is most particularly the manner of its telling that is memorable. The pace of the film is elegiac, unhurried, deliberate, and the postexpressionist visual effects link the film closely to those prewar poetic realist films in which the outcast hero likewise gets gunned down in the final scenes, though in this case, the film distances itself from what had become a narrative cliché by having Marianne and Antoine drive by the crowds peering down at Jean’s dead body and speculate that there must have been an accident. The opening credits unroll against the backdrop of a typical poetic realist set—a squalid Paris suburban scene, at night, with dilapidated buildings and a rain-soaked street. This turns out to be the depressed present state of the romanticized setting of their former relationship. A repeated shifting back and forth between past romance and present nostalgia is signaled by the emergence of ghostly presences of their earlier selves acting out their memories. When during this nocturnal stroll the thugs catch up with them in a rubble-strewn construction site, they take refuge high in a skeletal building—a stark, gaunt set1946–1951

167

ting used to sinister effect to provide heavily patterned images and much play with light and shadow. Above all, the acting is impressive in its austerity. There is a nice cameo from Danielle Darrieux as a young girl recapitulating Marianne’s early experiences, and from one of the pursuing thugs who radiates a really sinister violence. Along with the Yves Allégret films, this film provided one of Simone Signoret’s first lead roles, and she once again asserts what was to become a trademark—her credentials as a liberated woman, a cigarette constantly hanging out of the corner of her mouth. But the most impressive performance comes from Paul Meurisse as the hired safe-cracker, Jean: his slightly stiff bearing and walk, his height and his stolid, expressionless face were, in turn, to become his trademark and earn him the title of “the French Buster Keaton.” Here they make of him a particularly appropriate hitman, and give a perverse dignity to his final acceptance of his fate at the hands of the vengeful gang members.

52. Les Parents terribles The Storm Within Filmed late April–June 1948, released 1 December 1948 100 min, b&w Dir and scr Jean Cocteau, from his own play; Prod Les Films Ariane; Cinematog Michel Kelber; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Guy de Gastyne, advised by Christian Bérard; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Jacqueline Douarinou; Act Jean Marais (Michel), Yvonne de Bray (Sophie), Gabrielle Dorziat (Léo), Marcel André (Georges), and Josette Day (Madeleine). Les Parents terribles is an extreme instance of the filmed play. Ever since the development of sound cinema, the theater had been a ready source of prescripted and prerehearsed films, which provided for cheap production and a way of introducing well-known but otherwise inaccessible texts to new audiences. Hundreds were filmed, and Marcel Pagnol and Sacha Guitry were notorious for their promotion of such practices. André Bazin’s comparison of the 1930s with the postwar period in his 1952 essay concluded that only in the 1940s had a valid means been developed internationally to transcribe theatrical works, and that Les Parents terribles represented the masterpiece of this “renaissance.” 48 During

48. See André Bazin, “Le Théâtre filmé,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 73–86, and Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 286–291.

168

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

the war, Jean Cocteau had contemplated a radical redevelopment of his play along more cinematic lines, but when in 1946, after the success of La Belle et la bête (#38), he took up the task again, he decided instead to film the play exactly as it had been staged and with the same cast. The film even opens with the theatrical three blows, while a curtain opens and closes the work, and the original three acts are undisguised. The material of the play is difficult to summarize. Sophie treats her twentytwo-year-old son Michel as an infant, refusing to allow him to grow up and escape her clutches. But he has fallen in love with Madeleine and spent the night with her, which sends his mother into a jealous, screaming rage. To complicate matters, Michel’s father, Georges, has been having an affair with this same Madeleine, who is now trying to break up with him, not realizing her new lover is in fact his son. Georges, acting out of vindictive jealousy no less selfish than Sophie’s, invents yet another (third) lover for Madeleine, which drives Michel to despair, disillusioning him with “Love,” and driving him back into his mother’s eager arms. The first act, in the family’s somewhat chaotic “gypsy caravan” of a flat, is Sophie’s; the second, in Madeleine’s apartment, is Georges’s; the third, back in the caravan, is Léo’s. Léo is Sophie’s sister, who had loved Georges but been rejected by him for Sophie, and has been looking after him and her sister ever since. At one level she detests Sophie for stealing Georges and for then neglecting him in favor of Michel; now she destroys their hermetic world by convincing Michel that Madeleine’s love for him is genuine. Sophie, who watches this reconciliation with horror, fades away and dies—more out of childish petulance and to draw attention to the extent of her suffering than from real grief. Georges and Sophie are indeed “terrible” in their willingness to see others suffer (and especially their son Michel) in order to defend their magic circle. This representation of “parental love” is unforgiving, recalling Cocteau’s longstanding detestation of bourgeois families and conventions. It is also easy to recognize the classical archetypes being reenacted here (as they were in Cocteau’s L’Éternel Retour, #20, and the Orphée trilogy, #66). Most obviously, Michel’s Oedipal persona is doubly compromised, first by his quasi-incestuous relationship with his mother, then by his sexual encounter, unknowing, with his father’s mistress. Underlying all these obsessive relationships is a pattern of order and disorder. The script constantly draws our attention to a contrast between the chaotic disarray that characterizes the family’s “gypsy caravan” and the neatness of Madeleine’s flat. Within the caravan, Léo is the orderly counterpart of Madeleine, and in choosing Sophie rather than her sister, Georges has made his preference clear. Sophie has brought Michel up to appreciate an amiable slovenliness, but this disorder is paired with her malevolent selfishness and irrational rages. Léo’s rational malevolence, however, turns out to be no less ruthless. 1946–1951

169

Altogether the film, like the play on which it is based, nicely balances the truly tragic obsession of Sophie with the almost farcical anxieties of Georges and Madeleine as the public revelation of their affair becomes ever more inevitable. This material might well seem more typical of boulevard comedies, or even high camp opera, and Raymond Chirat speculates that the original play began life as a satire, ridiculing that hysterical theatrical tradition typified by Henri Bataille, with its tears, its hand-to-the-forehead fainting, its screams, and its rants, but that Cocteau subsequently found he was doing it a bit too well.49 Where the film departs from the play is in introducing the camera into the heart of the stage action. No longer remote from the characters, the spectator glances back and forth between them as they converse, closely inspecting their expressions of rage, anxiety, hysteria, or slyness. A justly famous close-up frames Michel and Sophie, both looking straight at the camera (“like merry-go-round horses momentarily at a halt”) as Michel tells her about his love for Madeleine: his exalted, ecstatic face above and behind hers, while the stillness grows to horror on hers. This technique ensures that knowledge of the characters and identification with them (or the reverse) is of a different order from any the theater could provide. The subsequent editing of these expressive close-ups and extreme close-ups fragments the three acts into some four hundred shots, while the fixed theatrical viewpoint becomes a constantly flexible viewpoint with a surprising amount of panning (even zip panning) and more camera mobility than is generally recognized. Cocteau noted that, aside from his general desire to record the acting of five incomparable artists, his principle aim was “to stroll amongst the characters and look at them full in the face, rather than see them from a distance, as on stage.”50 He also said that he liked the idea of “peeping through a keyhole with a telephoto lens to catch these wild beasts at play,” though, in fact, it is the three older characters who are the wild beasts, the two younger ones being blander and less interesting.51 (Indeed, Marais portrays once again, as he often did, a certain “fragile masculinity,” needing to learn how to be a man.) In effect, this imbalance of generations was merely rectifying a previous imbalance established by Les Enfants terribles, which had been written in 1929, ten years before the present play, and which dealt with an obsessive relationship between brother and sister. Jean-Pierre Melville was to bring Les Enfants terribles to the screen two years later, in 1950. 49. Chirat, La IVe république et ses films, 109. In fact, he asserts it as fact but without reference. 50. Cocteau, Entretiens autour du cinématographe, 54. 51. Quoted in Chirat, La IVe République et ses films, 109.

170

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

53. La Danse de mort (A Dance with Death) Filmed late 1946–early 1947; released 8 December 1948 88 min, b&w Dir Marcel Cravenne (with Erich von Stroheim); Prod Alcina; Scr von Stroheim and Michel Arnaud, from two plays by August Strindberg; Cinematog Robert le Febvre; Music Guy Bernard; Art dir Odet-James Allan, based on maquettes by Georges Wahkévitch; Edit Madeleine Bagiau; Act von Stroheim (Edgar von Schwartberg), Denise Vernac (Thea), Maria Denis (Rita), Jean Servais (Kurt), Massimo Serrato (Stéphane), Margo Lion (the servant), and Pierre Palau (the sergeant). This must rank with Les Paysans noirs (#58) and Macadam (#39) among the finest and least appreciated films of the immediate postwar years. Marcel Cravenne only directed one subsequent (and nondescript) film, which lends credence to the belief widely held at the time that the driving force behind this film was Erich von Stroheim, who aspired to act the lead role in this adaptation of August Strindberg’s plays. Most accounts name von Stroheim as principally responsible for the adaptation and perhaps also the direction and editing. Along with Portrait d’un assassin (1949), it was one of the first films he acted in on his return from America, where he had spent the war. One of the first coproductions approved under the still provisory Franco-Italian agreement between the two countries (29 October 1946), it was filmed in Italy. It provided von Stroheim with one of his classic roles: Edgar von Schwartberg is a ruthless, authoritarian, sadistic military figure who demands the servile submission of all those around him. Obsessed by a rigorous sense of propriety and of honor, he despises everyone else. We first meet him at his wedding to Thea, then taking his new wife to a posting on a remote island used as a political prison. He expects his stay there to be brief, but the bulk of the film takes place twenty-five years later, at which point it becomes clear that his arrogant, intolerant nature has effectively doomed his military career. When a prisoner attempts to escape, Edgar shoots him down in cold blood and harangues the remaining prisoners on their obligation to endure to the end the penalty legally imposed upon them. The focus of the film is on the relationship of this married couple. It becomes apparent that Thea is as strong-willed as Edgar himself, though in a different way—manipulative, treacherous, malevolent, determined not to be defeated by him, perhaps determined even to destroy him. When she disobeys him, he

1946–1951

171

chases her, whips her, and almost strangles her. But Edgar has embezzled 7,000 crowns from the prison funds for fireworks and champagne, and has to ask Thea to make good the shortfall. She ignores his request and secretly writes to the Inspectorate informing them of his crime. Yet this mutual antagonism is allied to a sort of vicious interdependence. As a portrait of two monsters locked together in a hateful embrace, this film is even more brutal that Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles (#52), which had been released just the week before. In the initial wedding sequence, we meet Thea’s former suitor Kurt (indeed Kurt could there momentarily have been mistaken for the husband)—a doctor who still loves her. He arrives on the island as the new prison doctor and becomes an innocent victim of the couple’s malevolence, a weapon in their mutual warring, exploited to destruction by both. When Kurt learns of Thea’s betrayal of her husband, he is horrified and reproaches her. In an astonishing scene, she slaps him and makes him kneel to beg forgiveness. Threatened with ruin by Edgar, whom he has risked all to help, Kurt staggers away, calling them both monsters. After a final confrontation, Edgar and Thea relax momentarily and engage in the following wry exchange: “Will we never be free of one another?” “Never.” “What now?” “Draw a line under it all, and start again.” “OK. Let’s do it.” And they walk away together. This revolting “parental” narrative is interleaved with a tentative romance between their daughter, Rita, and an anarchist prisoner, Stéphane, whom Edgar has taken as his servant. Thea helps Rita arrange the escape of Stéphane, and when Edgar learns of this further betrayal, he rages, collapses, and dies. The final image of him is in his coffin in the prison-cum-fortress. Any humanity in this film—any possibility of a sustained human relationship—lies with the younger generation, and the end sees Rita and Stéphane having escaped from their respective prisons, literal and metaphorical. If this plot seems baroque, the setting is no less so—a fortified prison island with the prison interiors heavily patterned with multiple textures, multiple levels with stairs, and geometric forms dominating the image. As a result of this splendid setting and acting, a certain grandeur pervades the whole film, and it has never received the recognition it deserves, either then or since. René Clair in a moving, posthumous homage regretted the brevity of von Stroheim’s directorial career and speculated about the films he might have made if the cinema had

172

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

not managed to exclude such geniuses and become, in Clair’s words, “the anonymous domain of producers, administrators and bankers.”52 This film at least gives him and us some oblique glimpse of what that lost oeuvre might have looked like. Clair was there at von Stroheim’s deathbed in 1957, when the Cross of the Légion d’Honneur was pinned to his black silk pajamas.

54. Une si jolie petite plage Riptide Filmed mid-May–July 1948; released 19 January 1949 86 min, b&w Dir Yves Allégret; Asst dir Paul Feyder; Prod CICC Émile Darbon and Dutch European; Scr Jacques Sigurd; Cinematog Henri Alekan; Music Maurice Thiriet; Art dir Maurice Colasson; Sound Pierre Calvet and Jacques Carrère; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Gérard Philipe (Pierre), Christian Ferry (the unnamed state ward), Madeleine Robinson (Marthe), Jean Servais (Fred), Jane Marken (Madame Mahieu), Julien Carette (the traveling salesman), and André Valmy (Georges). This film took the postwar exploration of black realism about as far as it could go. It is relentlessly and unforgettably bleak, and the worldview that it embodies is equally bleak: life is meaningless, society a source of constant suffering and oppression, and any attempt to deny or escape is a pitiful illusion. We meet the central protagonist (played by Jacques Sigurd’s roommate, Gérard Philipe), grimly silent and stonyfaced (aptly, if ironically, named Pierre—not a rock but a stone), being dropped off from a bus on a rainy, foggy winter’s night at what we discover (in one of the rare daylight moments that the film allows us) to be a remote, forsaken hotel-restaurant on the bleak coast of northern France. The countryside around it is flat and featureless, the beach in front of it is endless and featureless, shelving imperceptibly to an endless, featureless gray sea. At the inn we find a wheelchair-bound old man, dying slowly. He seems to recognize Pierre but is unable to speak, and his attempts to communicate only result in choking fits of hatred and rage. We also meet a traveling salesman, absent from his family on his son’s birthday, whose attempts to contact them by phone are constantly thwarted. Here, no one communicates with anyone else. Finally, we meet two wards of the state—Marthe, who gradually establishes a rudimentary friendship with Pierre, and a fifteen-year-old boy, never named.

52. Clair, Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui, 171.

1946–1951

173

Madame Mahieu, the inn-owner, exploits both of them ruthlessly in a form of oppressive labor little short of slavery, beating the boy for any imagined misdemeanor. His only escape is to a makeshift shelter on the dunes and to a nearby cabin where he occasionally provides sexual favors to the wealthy lady who, with her husband, is a regular diner in the inn’s restaurant. Gradually, indirectly, we come to realize that the protagonist, Pierre, had also once, like Marthe and the boy, been a state ward here and a “slave.” Equally desperate to escape, it was he who had shaped the secret shelter on the dunes. He too had provided sexual favors to a wealthy lady, a famous singer whom he had used to escape this oppressive servitude. But finally unable to bear the corrupt existence into which she had led him, he has murdered her and is currently being sought by the police. He attempts at one moment to warn his successor of what happened to him and will all too probably happen again. The present ward listens stonyfaced, and for a moment it seems he might have softened and understood, but as Pierre leaves, the ward’s voice from off-screen says flatly, “Tu l’as bien eue, la vieille” (You really fixed that old girl, eh!). No one understands, ever. Ultimately, Pierre commits suicide in the dune shelter, and we see his successor emerging with the revolver: the pattern of suffering and violence is destined to continue. In case this sounds even faintly dramatic as a plot, it is worth emphasizing that no dramatic or sensational element is ever actually shown. We are led indirectly to surmise that the ward and the wealthy lady have a sexual rendezvous, that Pierre and Marthe may have also had such an encounter one rainsoaked night, and that Pierre commits suicide. Likewise, there are no flashbacks or voiceovers to fill in explicitly any of Pierre’s past life; we are asked to hypothesize about it from indirect hints, until the final section of the film. Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing happens at all for the first 40 minutes of the film, which is almost exclusively devoted to constructing the appropriate grim atmosphere, and the film’s technical austerity is such that the first extra-diegetic music moves in at 50 minutes. Nevertheless, despite this general austerity of means and material, there are occasional outbursts of diegetic rage, such as when Pierre in a sudden fury destroys the gramophone and record of Édith Piaf singing an anguished song, which Madame Mahieu has been playing over and over again, recalling his past here and the singer he has just killed. These outbursts inevitably bring to mind Jean Gabin and poetic realism, and there are moments when the film pays homage to that epoch and to Jacques Prévert’s scripts. A sinister impresario for instance, played by Jean Servais, inherits from Jules Berry the role of mocking and harassing the protagonist, of whose guilt he is aware. He almost admires Pierre,

174

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

who has killed the singer as he himself would have liked to, but believes Pierre has taken her jewels and wants his share. In another moment of rage, Pierre pummels him to the ground, shouting “Tu vas te taire, tu vas te taire” (Will you shut up, will you shut up), just as Gabin’s character did to Jules Berry’s in Le Jour se lève (1939). Likewise, toward the end, a sympathetic mechanic/bus driver arranges for Pierre a lift across the border into Belgium, as he has for many others. This recalls Monsieur Lange’s escape across a bleak shelving beach in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). Unlike Lange, however (but like Gabin in his many incarnations), Pierre will never reach that happier land: the only escape he finds is in death. “Pas très gai,” as the bus driver says when dropping Pierre off at the beginning—not much fun—and the irony is intense when, in the final shot, the rich couple who are regulars at the inn stroll along the beach, pause, and say in close-up, recalling the film’s ironic title, “It really is such a pretty little beach.” A long reverse traveling shot rapidly distances the viewer from this naive statement, and the couple end up as a remote dot on a featureless expanse of sea, sand, and dune. At one level the film can be taken as making the case for the social origins of criminality: these state wards, little better than slaves, will inevitably do anything, however brutal, to escape their oppressors and the society that condones them. But rather than evoking a sick society, this desperate world speaks of a metaphysical meaninglessness that articulates concepts then being promoted by the existentialists. It is an absurd world, dominated by ennui, where no one belongs. You can’t change anything; you just have to go on; life is tough, etc. This metaphysical theme could scarcely be seen in itself as targeting state wards or the system that farms them out, but it is not hard to see why the producers felt obliged to append a lengthy disclaimer, both at beginning and end of the film, to avert such a reading. It was wise of Yves Allégret not to cast his partner, Simone Signoret, in the role of Marthe (he made her the central female character in the ones before and after): Madeleine Robinson provides a much more convincing work-worn, unkempt servant than Signoret, who would have risked introducing a trace, however remote, of glamor, aggression, and sensuality into the film, incompatible with the worldview here being promulgated. These postwar films of Allégret were like those of Max Ophüls in the length of shot—here the average shot length is 18.3 seconds—but unlike them in their refusal to use a mobile camera (here, only 68 movements per 100 min). Neither editing nor camera is foregrounded at any moment, whereas Ophüls revels in his excesses.

1946–1951

175

55. L’École buissonnière Passion for Life Filming began early September 1948; released 8 April 1949 115 min, b&w Dir Jean-Paul Dreyfus (Jean-Paul Le Chanois); Prod Coopérative Générale du Cinéma Français; Scr Dreyfus, based on the experience of one of his friends in an experimental school; Cinematog Marc Fossard, succeeding Maurice Pecqueux and André Dumaître; Music Joseph Kosma; Art dir Claude Bouxin; Sound Constantin Evangelou; Edit Emma Le Chanois; Act Bernard Blier (Pascal Laurent), Juliette Faber (Lise Arnaud), Édouard Delmont (Monsieur Arnaud), Dany Caron (Cécile), Jean Aquistapace, Henri Arius, Marcel Maupi, Gaston Modot, and Henri Poupon. Jean-Paul Dreyfus was a totally committed left-wing filmmaker. He had been a member in the 1930s of the Groupe Octobre, with Raymond Bussières, Paul Grimault, Jacques-Bernard Brunius, Yves Allégret, and the Prévert brothers, and at the time of the Popular Front a member of a left-wing alliance with Jean Renoir, Georges Sadoul, Gaston Modot, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Charles Spaak, and Louis Aragon. His semi-documentary for that group, Le Temps des cerises, was produced to promote the French Communist Party’s policies for old-age pensioners. For strategic reasons (related to anti-Semitism, and in particular to the Dreyfus Affair, which had divided the nation at the end of the nineteenth century) during the war, he changed his name to Le Chanois, his mother’s maiden name, and formed with Jacques Becker, Jean Painlevé, Louis Daquin, Pierre Blanchar, Jean Grémillon, and others the first (underground) resistance center of the French cinema, affiliated to the then-illegal CGT. This became in 1943 the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français (CLCF), which at war’s end, as the Germans retreated, besieged and occupied the Paris headquarters of the administrative center for the French film industry. For the CLCF he made in 1944 a documentary, Au cœur de l’orage, recording their Resistance activities.53 L’École buissonnière, which asserts somewhat aggressively in its credits that it was made by a crew “working as a cooperative,” is the first of a series of three films that Le Chanois directed between 1948 and 1951 on social and socialist themes (the others being Sans laisser d’adresse, 1950, and Agence matrimoniale, 1951). Like Macadam (#39) and Yves Allégret’s films, Le Chanois’s films are recognizably related to the poetic realist films of the 1930s and have been considered precursors of the New Wave (though François Truffaut attacked viciously 53. For details of his activities, see Renard, Un cinéaste des années 50.

176

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

all of Le Chanois’s films). All three feature Bernard Blier, who had likewise begun his film career in the late 1930s with Marc Allégret (Gribouille, Entrée des artistes) and Marcel Carné (Hôtel du Nord, Le Jour se lève). Alongside the marginally more optimistic films of Le Chanois, Blier was concurrently featuring with Simone Signoret in the bleaker, socially oriented, and more metaphysical films of Yves Allégret (Dédée d’Anvers, #50, and Manèges, #62) and of Henri-Georges Clouzot (Quai des Orfèvres, #45). In the chapter that Denis Marion contributed to Sept ans du cinéma français, an extremely useful survey of the years 1945 to 1951, he speaks of these two groups of films as “Réalisme noir et réalisme gris”—black realism and gray realism. The former “describe[s] life in its everyday reality, not excluding its more sordid aspects, and manifesting a fundamental pessimism,” while the latter, influenced by Italian neorealism, “follow[s] even more closely the rhythms of contemporary existence, but manifest[s] a qualified and perhaps reluctant optimism.”54 In L’École buissonnière, that tempered optimism is evidenced in the successful transformation of the education system in a small Provençal village from a traditional, authoritarian system based on discipline and rote learning to a more liberal, humane system where the children are encouraged to discover and understand aspects of the world around them. This very same paradigm shift had underpinned the narrative of several films of the previous decade dealing with education and the law (schools and prisons being seen as interchangeable institutions under the old order), notably Prison sans barreaux (Léonide Moguy, 1938) and La Cage aux rossignols (Jean Dréville, 1945). A principal preoccupation of the latter was the wartime theme of seeing to the needs of the younger generation: ensuring that lower-class kids would be given a future more hopeful than the grim reality of oppression and persecution that characterized their past and present. Here Blier plays Pascal Laurent, an idealistic young teacher arriving to teach the boys’ section of a remote Provençal village school. His predecessor reminds him that “discipline is all-important.” The school is dirty and dilapidated, and the boys glumly resigned to seeing out their time, except for Albert, an older rebellious boy who has failed his passing-out exams three years in succession, who despises the system, and who cannot be bothered attending classes. The narrative trajectory will of course see the school transformed, the boys opened to the delights of understanding, the parents progressively more involved in their children’s education, and Albert committed to passing his oral exams. A hardcore of

54. Denis Marion, “Réalisme noir et réalisme gris,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 38–51.

1946–1951

177

village old-guard disciplinarians including the mayor (as in the 1930s, authorities are always reluctant to see hierarchies dismantled) refuses to accept Pascal’s new, more democratic paradigm (to the horror of his predecessor, Pascal has Albert chop up the teacher’s dais for firewood, and he now sits amid his students). The old guard attempt to get rid of him, and he says he will go if he does not achieve a 100 percent pass rate in the end-of-year exams. The clique agrees since this aspiration seems to everyone impossible, given that the existing norm is 50 percent, and since Albert is a confirmed failure. Hence Albert’s anxiety to do Pascal justice, which provides some tenuous element of tension at the climax. Of course Albert succeeds, not least by his disquisition to the examining inspector on the “Droits de l’Homme”—the rights of man, but also of the child. All this could easily have become overly sentimental and self-righteous, but is saved by the quasi-documentary techniques exploited by the filmmakers: dispassionate voiceover presentations of the situation, location shooting, discrete music (except for two incongruously dramatic outbursts), and the wonderfully understated, matter-of-fact performance of Bernard Blier, who on the basis of this film alone would have to be considered one of the greatest French film actors ever. As Olivier Barrot and Raymond Chirat say in their book on 250 French film actors from 1930–1960, Blier is one of those rare actors who has never been known to put in a bad performance. Moreover, “he has come to embody for us the whole of that post-war period, with its freight of extravagant hopes and grim disenchantments.”55 Shot entirely on location, the film benefits, and acquires not a little of its feelgood humanity, from the Pagnolesque treatment of the Provençal countryside, the village and the villagers, their homes, their games of boules, their accents, and their idiosyncratic behavior.

56. Le Silence de la mer The Silence of the Sea Filming began late September 1947; released 22 April 1949 85 min, b&w Dir Jean-Pierre Melville; Prod Melville Productions Scr Melville, based on the novel by Vercors; Cinematog Henri Decae; Music Edgar Bischoff; Edit Melville and Decae; Act Howard Vernon (Werner von Ebrennac, the German officer), JeanMarie Robain (the uncle), and Nicole Stéphane (the niece). 55. Barrot and Chirat, Noir et blanc, 85.

178

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

This was Jean-Pierre Melville’s first feature film, and it was an extremely risky venture, both politically and technically.56 Based on a Vercors novel written in 1941 and published clandestinely in February 1942, it recounts the nine months during which a (Francophile) German officer is billeted with an elderly man and his niece in a provincial town. Making the film was a politically risky venture because, shot a bare year after the armistice, when anti-German feelings were still high, it portrays the German officer extremely sympathetically— indeed, he becomes the focus of identification of the spectator. One of the most astonishing technical risks is to have two of the three central characters in the film remain silent throughout. For the elderly man and his niece, obliged to host an officer of the army of occupation, silence is their form of passive resistance to the conquest and occupation of their country—it is their form of patriotism. They effectively refuse to acknowledge the existence of the occupier of their country and of their house. A further risk is to have 90 percent of the film take place in the cramped family living room, where, faced with their silence (which he perfectly understands and honors), the officer gradually opens up to them, at first haltingly, then in longer, understated monologues, talking of his home town, of his father from whom he inherited his love of France, of his one serious romantic entanglement, and, most centrally, of his hope that the occupation which he embodies can lead to a “marriage” between German “bullish” political force and French spirituality (he despises France’s recent past and present political leaders as cowardly, and the ruling class of the grande bourgeoisie as backward), between German music (he himself is a composer) and French literary culture. These nightly monologues from their “guest” are terminated each evening by his farewell to the silent couple—“Je vous souhaite une bonne nuit”—which becomes unbearably moving with repetition. As the days go by, it becomes apparent that his wish for a marriage of the two cultures is not entirely alien to his admiration for the young niece, and in the most understated way, it becomes apparent that she herself is not immune to such feelings. The fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast is used tellingly to link the two fantasized unions, of countries and of individuals. All this is told in retrospect by the old uncle, in a quiet voiceover that complements the quiet, halting, direct speech of the German officer. The implicit relationships thus developing are interrupted by the officer’s two-week leave in Paris—an introduction to the capital of the country he loves, to which he has

56. Melville’s real name was Grumbach. “Vercors” is also a pseudonym for Jean Bruller, an illustrator who took the name when founding the clandestine publishing firm Éditions de Minuit.

1946–1951

179

been looking forward intensely. Initial images of his time in Paris seem to fulfill his expectations, but a changed demeanor suggests that some incident has undermined his ideals. A second set of images of Paris shows why: his Francophilia has been mocked by his fellow officers, whose only aim is to destroy France’s industry and culture, which they see as a rival to German aspirations. Also, he learns of the death camps and of his leaders’ intentions to increase their “throughput.” He returns to the provincial town and tells the uncle and niece to forget his former meditations—he has reenrolled in active service, and is leaving for the Russian front (and, implicitly, certain death). It is at the beginning of this final encounter that the old uncle speaks for the first time, inviting him in: “Entrez Monsieur,” and as the officer leaves, the niece whispers “Adieu.” The film succeeds in rendering this slow, quiet, undramatic narrative both fascinating and engaging. The Paris leave sequences are edited quite differently from the rest of the film (where the average shot length is about 14 seconds, but the camera is very active): they race by at an ASL of 4.8 seconds, punctuated by two agonizingly long-held shots—where he learns the truth of the gas chambers from his fellow officers, and where their commander sings a charming if ironic little song about what a good bloke he is (each of these two shots is about 100 seconds). This is also the section where insistent forms of punctuation proliferate— discrete elsewhere, but complex wipes, grills, and irises here, as well as frequent focus-pulls. His subjective memories of a tank attack on Chartres are also treated very differently, with a zip pan and shrill extra-diegetic music. Indeed, if the obtrusive music might, as here, occasionally be justifiable, it has to be said that the one fundamental error of taste in the direction is the insistent (and totally superfluous) extra-diegetic music, which undercuts key scenes. The film opens with the director “Melville” receiving a mysterious, clandestine package, which proves to be a copy of the Vercors book, and his reading of it becomes the film. Something similar did in fact happen to Melville in London during the blitz, where a poet he knew dropped off the recently published book, and he immediately determined to film it, blocking Louis Jouvet’s attempt in South America to obtain the rights to it. Melville himself, however, finally filmed the book without obtaining the rights (Vercors having refused to sell them). Moreover, the Centre National du Cinéma refused to admit him as a member of the profession, and his venture to film it by establishing his own illicit production firm was opposed by both the producers’ union and the technicians’ union, so he was obliged to use unknown actors, a minimum of technicians, and blackmarket Agfa film-stock. Finally, unable to obtain official funding, he cut financial corners, making the film for 9 million francs when the contemporary average was then approaching 60 million. In sum, having joined the Resistance in London at Charles de Gaulle’s summons, Melville subsequently chose to film a 180

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Resistance novel by a clandestine publishing house, and filmed it against the author’s wishes and in flagrant disregard of official institutional structures.57 The film was finally approved for release in 1949, though only on payment of a substantial fine. The book itself had by then sold over a million copies, having been air-dropped into France by the Royal Air Force in 1943 and republished at the liberation. Most interpretations focus on the impossibility of any collaboration between Germany and France, but it is just as easy to interpret the German officer’s disillusioned ideals as foreshadowing the European Union. In general, the film is faithful to the book, transcribing to film the book’s monologues, but two scenes were added: the snow scene where the officer is returning one evening to the house and crosses paths with the niece, concretizing the awkward, unspoken relationship between them, and the final scene where the uncle passes on to the departing officer a quotation from Anatole France to the effect that “It is proper for a soldier to disobey orders that are criminal.”

57. Jour de fête Festival Day Filming began mid-May 1947; released 4 May 1949 70 min, Thompsoncolor/b&w Dir Jacques Tati; Prod Fred Orain and Cady Films; Scr Tati, Henri Marquet, and René Wheeler; Cinematog Jacques Mercanton; Music Jean Yatove; Art dir René Mou laert; Edit Marcel Moreau; Act Jacques Tati (François, the postman), Guy Decomble and Paul Frankeur (Roger and Marcel, circus folk), Santa Relli (Roger’s wife), Maine Vallée (the young woman), and the villagers of Sainte-Sévère sur Indre. Jour de fête caused enormous critical interest when it (finally) appeared on Paris screens, because, on the one hand, it was so novel, so radically different from everything else being made at the time, and, on the other hand, so old-fashioned, irresistibly recalling the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Max Linder. The humor consists almost entirely of visual gags depending on gesture and situation (the bell-ropes, the mobile phone, the bees, François outdistancing the Tour de France, the independent and homing bicycle). Nevertheless, the soundtrack is meticulously organized, an elaborate montage of various diegetic and extra-diegetic musics, of fairground noises, and of sound effects related to

57. For more on this, see Hayward, French National Cinema, 192.

1946–1951

181

the gags. Although there is at times a little dialogue, it is never central to understanding what is happening. This is one of the few French sound films immediately and almost entirely comprehensible to the non-French speaker. Reviewing the years 1945–1952 in an article entitled “Les Français n’ont-ils pas la tête comique?” (roughly, Don’t the French have a funny-bone?), Jean-Louis Tallenay regretted the absence of comic films in those years, identifying Jacques Tati and Noël-Noël as the sole innovators in this field since the war. Of course, there were still dozens of repeats of prewar comic films and genres—boulevard comedies, farces, military vaudevilles—but they seldom attracted the same audiences. Tallenay characterizes them as “a museum of horrors.”58 As distinct from those theatrically derived comedies, Tati was in Jour de fête drawing on his background in pantomime and music halls, but combining these basically nonrealist forms with an astonishing documentary quality. He became notorious for the long, patient, precise, solitary preparation of his films (three films in fifteen years) and the meticulous way he inserted them into a particular setting, or perhaps let them evolve out of a specific setting. Jour de fête began life as a short color film called L’École des facteurs (School for Posties, 1946–1947), which Fred Orain agreed to fund as a feature-length film. To extend it, Tati introduced the narrative frame of a village fair with its sideshows arriving in a country town, Sainte-Sévère-surIndre, and departing at the end. Sainte-Sévère is plumb in the center of France (“In the very heart of France,” so implicitly typical), and much of the film’s charm comes from the authentic village setting and its real inhabitants. The team spent not one “feast day” there, as the title suggests, but three solid months, gradually developing and shooting the script. For Claude Beylie, the gentle undramatic nature of the script, the affectionate view of village life, and most particularly the use of natural settings was a truly audacious move. For Armand Cauliez, this is what gives the film “the impression of real duration and fully-realized space.”59 Partly this impression is due to the almost offhand way in which the comic moments arise. They do not appear to be set up, prepared, but simply to happen. Nor do they follow one another in rapid succession, but in a casual relaxed way. For most comic writers and actors of the time, it was taken for granted that comedy relied on vivacity, on the quickfire succession of gags. Equally, for most writers and directors working in comedy, it was a given that the facial contortions of actors such as Fernandel were essential to cue and trigger the audience’s hilarity. But Tati abhorred the close-up: the whole film is shot in long-shot or mid-

58. Jean-Louis Tallenay, “Les Français n’ont-ils pas la tête comique?” in Agel et al., Sept ans du cinema français, 52–58. 59. Cauliez, Jacques Tati, 176, 31–32.

182

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

shot, with total depth of field. Moreover, the protagonist’s face is impassive, as if unaware that anything comic might be happening around him. Tati’s justification for these practices was surprisingly close to André Bazin’s theoretical position: “I like general shots. It’s up to the spectator to discover what’s worth looking at in the image. The close-up underlines, insists: ‘Look, this is hilarious!’ On the contrary in a general shot you show numerous elements—characters, objects. Why cut out the relationships between them, by singling out what’s typical, [insisting on] what’s funny.” 60 Not surprisingly, Bazin did indeed admire the result: “Certainly the character created by Tati is droll, but almost incidentally, and anyway always relative to the universe. [Tati himself] can be absent from the comic moments, for [he] is the metaphysical embodiment of a disorder that perpetuates itself long after he has departed.” 61 The world he inhabits is resolutely French. Already we see in Jour de fête one of the characteristic themes of all Tati’s films, a sardonic and at least implicitly critical view of trendy modernity, of industrialization (with its emphasis on speed and efficiency, which is undermining traditional French ways), and hence of America. It is not by accident that Tati’s protagonist is called François (Françwais, in the local accent). Momentarily exhilarated by the possibilities illustrated in an American film on the modern training of postmen (daredevil postal deliverers dropping from planes and helicopters, speeding through blazing hoops on motorcycles), François sets about speeding up his own delivery rate, but of course with disastrous results, and he ends up careering into a canal. “Not everything American is admirable”—that is what the French must learn, and having accidentally destroyed a U.S. military police jeep, François abandons his ambitions of progressivism to lend a hand with haymaking by pitchfork in a nearby field. Shot as a cooperative venture and largely completed in 1947, the film languished, first, because no laboratory had yet been built to deal with the recently developed Thompsoncolor process (fortunately a backup black-and-white negative had been shot, which is what we now see), and, second, because the producer had difficulty in convincing a distributor that the film was even screenable, let alone potentially a profitable venture. As Cauliez wryly points out, it had none of the suspense, stars, or eroticism that were thought to pull the crowds, not even a plot or story worth mentioning. Yet once an impromptu trial-screening as second feature had proved the film’s viability, it was formally released and returned several times its cost, winning the prize for best scenario in Venice (1949) and the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français (1950).

60. Cinéma 55, January 1955. 61. Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 1:1.

1946–1951

183

58. Les Paysans noirs (Black Peasants) Filming began early August 1947; released 5 May 1949 99 min, b&w Dir Georges Régnier; Prod SDAC and UGC; Scr René Barjavel and Régnier, from the novel by Roger Delavignette; Cinematog Roger Arrignon; Sound André Didier; Edit Marthe Poncin; Act Louis Arbessier (Commandant Guilloux, administrator), Antoine Balpêtré (doctor), and Georges Hubert (engineer). This is a forgotten film that deserves to be better known, if only because its documentary integrity recalls Georges Rouquier’s much-admired Farrebique (#42). Georges Régnier’s only previous experience in feature-film production had been as assistant to Julien Duvivier on Panique (1947, #41)—and he was to assist Duvivier again in Sous le ciel de Paris (1950–1951). Les Paysans noirs was to be his only venture as director of a feature film, though he subsequently became recognized as a competent short-film director of documentaries and biographies (Tuberculosis, Albert Camus, etc.). This film is based on a novel by Roger Delavignette, which in turn was based on his service as colonial administrator in the Ivory Coast. One way of contextualizing the film is as part of an attempt at war’s end to reassert France’s colonial mission at the head of a worldwide empire—an attempt that was to founder in the Algerian and Vietnam wars. In a surprisingly understated way—and therefore less irritatingly than usual—it promotes the nation’s civilizing mission in one of the more underdeveloped parts of that empire. Commandant Guilloux arrives in the bleak, featureless interior of the Ivory Coast to replace an administrator, Commandant Lefèvre, who has been assassinated. He rapidly acquires the support of a doctor and of an engineer cum factory manager who is striving to develop a peanut oil industry and to build the canal that will assure it a regular supply of water. All three are represented as honorable, altruistic, idealistic individuals whose only aim is to bring European standards of hygiene, health, job security, and civil rights to a backward people. The problems they face are many—partly natural, due to irregular rainfall, and partly cultural, due to the locals’ lack of interest in regular work. The latter are subdued, passive, superstitious, and fearful of everything (“How can the sheep not fear the jackal?”), and the capitalist market system is in conflict with the traditional dowry system. But the main problem is tribal: intertribal conflict continues, if in new ways, and the high-caste natives, jealous of their power, are reluctant to see others favored or appointed without their approval 184

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

by the French administration. Bomba, whom Commandant Guilloux has urged to take a stand and who has consequently been elected, is attacked and his son killed, and Guilloux learns that his predecessor’s appointee had also been assassinated. Traditional hierarchical authorities in the form of the strong-man chief, Famoro, must be stared down, and a democratic regime instituted to replace the form of “slavery” he had exercised. At times depressed or seriously ill from their struggles, the three Frenchmen finally, with the help of providential rain and of a blood-trail that leads them to the guilty Famoro, get the better of these problems. Amid dancing and celebration, Commandant Guilloux’s native helper marries Bomba’s daughter. A native administration sympathetic to France is assured, and a European business cycle accommodated to the local cycle of the seasons. If the final images show Guilloux walking off despondently, wondering if they have really benefited their native charges in any way, the film is itself in no doubt. What saves this narrative from becoming just another national propaganda film or just another exotic adventure story is the rigorous set of documentary techniques that defuse any tendency to melodrama or exoticism. Most of the “actors” are local, and the three Europeans are not well-known actors. Moreover, their acting is matter-of-fact, devoid of any overwrought emotion—there is no sign of the twisted-face school of acting. The life of the natives is “recorded” with discreet documentary techniques and occasional voiceover. With few or no exceptions it was filmed on the spot, at a time when location shooting was rare, and when back in France, the studios were reasserting their position as the normal site of filmmaking—even in the case of exteriors. There is no use of punctuation between shots or between sequences, and there is no extra-diegetic music to coax the spectator’s emotions. At the Venice Biennale, critics were impressed by this determined austerity of means, but when the film was finally released, the public was not. It was a catastrophic commercial failure, and in desperation, the distributor rechristened it Famoro, le tyran. In vain: after the success of La Bataille du rail (#31), a general assumption had developed in the industry that the documentary techniques of neorealism would find a foothold in the postwar French cinema as it had in the Italian cinema—perhaps even become the dominant style, the norm, but Les Paysans noirs, along with René Clément’s Au-delà des grilles (#60), was to mark the last effort in this direction. This may have been because the French studios had not suffered as badly in the war as the Italian studios, but it was also related to the wartime restructuring of the French cinema by the German administration and the continuity of personnel and processes through into the 1950s. As a result of these factors, prewar studio-based practices reasserted themselves, and it was not until the end of the 1950s that the studios would fall into relative disuse. 1946–1951

185

59. Retour à la vie (Back to Reality) Filming began end of May 1948; released 14 September 1949 120 min, b&w Prod Jacques Roitfeld/Films Marceau; Music Paul Misraki #1 “Tante Emma”: Dir André Cayatte; Scr Charles Spaak; Cinematog René Gaveau; Art dir Émile Alex; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Madame de Revinsky (Emma), Bernard Blier (Gaston), Héléna Manson (Simone), Jane Marken (Aunt Berthe), Lucien Nat (Charles), and Nane Germon (Henriette). #2 “Antoine”: Dir Georges Lampin; Scr Charles Spaak; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Léonide Azar; Act François Périer (Antoine). #3 “Jean”: Dir and Scr Henri-Georges Clouzot; Cinematog Louis Page; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Roger Biard; Edit Monique Kirsanov; Act Louis Jouvet (Jean Girard), Léo Lapara (the doctor), and Jo Dest (the German). #4 “René”: Dir Jean Dréville; Scr Noël-Noël; Cinematog Louis Page; Art dir Émile Alex; Edit Boris Lewin; Cast Noël-Noël (René), Jean Croué (René’s uncle), François Patrice (the trafficker), and Madeleine Gérôme (the young widow). #5 “Louis”: Dir Jean Dréville; Scr Charles Spaak; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Art dir Émile Alex; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Claude Ibéria; Act Serge Reggiani (Louis), Cécile Didier (Louis’s mother), Anne Campion (Elsa), Paul Frankeur (mayor), Léonce Corne (Virolet), and Elisabeth Hardy (Louis’s sister). Retour à la vie is a sketch film comprising five 15- to 30-minute episodes on the common theme of prisoners of war returning to France in May 1945 from camps in Germany. As the introductory remarks announce, a recurrent theme of these narratives is the great hopes and expectations of those returning, and the process of disillusionment they go through as they discover a France they do not recognize and do not particularly want to know. There is one exception—sketch #2, which is vacuous and clumsy, a lighthearted farce only tenuously related to the notion of “return.” It was no doubt included in the (understandable) belief that a little relief was needed from the elsewhere pervasive grimness. It can henceforth be ignored. The other four might best be summarized, with apologies to Jean Renoir, as comprising La Grande Désillusion. The tone is set in #1: Aunt Emma has returned so weakened she is barely able to move or to respond to her family; she lies prostrate on the floor because she is unable to endure the softness of a bed. The first half of the episode involves the family assembling and discussing how to broach to Aunt Emma the fact that, to obtain an inheritance, they have during her absence (among other implicitly illegal activities) forged her signature and desperately need her to ratify retrospec186

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

tively their crime. In the process, they squabble and accuse one another (quite justifiably) of greed and selfishness. In the contrasting second half of the episode, various family members tiptoe into the sickroom and cajole the silent, prostrate woman into signing the required release, propping her up and guiding her hand. As they depart, she murmurs her only words, asking what has happened to her dog. It has died of grief at her absence. The contrast between this callous bourgeois family and the caring faithful dog is effective, and recurs in #4 in which René Martin had before the war trained performing dogs in a circus act. The episode opens with René being welcomed home as the 50,000th returnee. The politician’s address during this ceremony makes it all too clear that “the return” is being exploited for cynical, self-serving purposes, and that postwar triumphal patriotism has already congealed into meaningless rhetoric. His pompous discourse is nicely undercut by reference to “la France émue et compatissante,” when France is all too obviously anything but “moved and compassionate,” and also by the fact that, as soon becomes apparent, they have got hold of the wrong Monsieur Martin. During René’s absence, his wife has abandoned him and his home has been appropriated by a callous profiteer whose (unsubstantiated) claims to be a resistance hero mean he cannot be turned out. The only creatures glad to see René return are his performing dogs, more faithul than his wife. But by far the bleakest portrait of the postwar France to which the former prisoners are so hopefully returning (and more generally the bleakest portrait of humanity as a whole) comes in #3, scripted and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. This episode would by itself justify the inclusion of Retour à la vie in this filmography: it confronts the unthinkable horrors that happened to prisoners, and notably to Jews, in wartime Germany, and asks, “What sort of people would do this?” Jean (Louis Jouvet) has returned with a limp and lives in a pension. A badly wounded German prisoner on the run takes refuge in his room. At first sympathetic to the idea of “an escaping prisoner,” Jean protects him. But when Jean discovers that the German is one of those who interrogated and tortured prisoners such as himself, he talks a doctor friend into continuing to protect the German so that he can interrogate him, with a view to understanding this torturer’s mentality—understanding what sort of person could thus hack into and burn off the flesh of other human beings, of women. . . . The answer is “anyone”—not least because Jean himself, outraged by the German’s responses, grabs and shakes him, hurling him brutally to the floor, unconscious. “Brutality is contagious,” he notes wryly, as he prepares the lethal injection that will save the German from his fate at the hands of the authorities. The final episode (#5) also involves a Franco-German confrontation, but this time caused by the fact that Louis, the returning prisoner, has brought back with 1946–1951

187

him a German wife, Elsa. Patriotic hatreds lead to them and their family’s being ostracized by the local community—storekeepers refuse to serve them, Louis’s own sister screams at him that they fought to get rid of that lot, and in a climactic scene, three “patriotic” villagers process to their farm with trumpet and drum and read out a list of locals slaughtered by the Germans. As silent throughout this episode as Aunt Emma had been in the first, Elsa slips away and is found floating in the village pond. Again no doubt for strategic reasons, the production team decided to give this final episode an upbeat ending: Elsa is revived, and in rescuing and resuscitating her, the French villagers rediscover their humanity—discover, in fact, that humanity is more important than patriotism. This episode (indeed the film as a whole) would have been better served if the team had opted for the grimmer ending toward which it seemed to be heading. This was also a problem with episode #4, in which the evicted returnee finally discovers that the brutal “Resistance hero” is not the husband of the attractive woman who (with her two kids) is occupying his flat but rather her brother—and rushes back with a bouquet of flowers to be welcomed into “his” flat and the arms of a new “family.” Slightly cloying, these unprepared “happy ends” are at serious odds with the cynical but clearsighted critique of postwar French society and of humanity that pervades the rest of the film, where the returning prisoners are used, in the words of Antoine (#2), as “catalyzers” to bring to the surface unpleasant truths that a victorious nation would have been all too happy to suppress. In view of this predominantly bitter and politically incorrect worldview, it is perhaps surprising that Retour à la vie did well on release, both in Paris and the provinces, ending up among the top ten earners of 1948’s productions. Its producer, Jacques Roitfeld, had clearly developed a close relationship with Jouvet, Bernard Blier (and later Daniel Gélin), together with directors such as ChristianJaque, Jean Dréville, and Henri Decoin. Roitfeld’s fourteen ambitious productions from 1945 to 1954 were uniformly well-received by the public, after which other members of his family took over the production firm.

60. Au-delà des grilles The Walls of Malapaga Filmed 1948; released 16 November 1949 95 min, b&w Dir René Clément; Prod Alfredo Guarini; Scr Cesare Zavattini, Cerchio d’Amico, and Alfredo Guarini, with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost; Cinematog Louis Page;

188

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Music Renzo Rossellini; Art dir Piero Filippone; Act Jean Gabin (Pierre), Isa Miranda (Martha), Ave Ninchi (Maria), Robert Dalban (Bosco), Andrea Checci (Joseph), Vera Talchi (Cecchina), and Carlo Tamberlano (police chief). Also La Marie du Port (Marie from the Café du Port) Filmed 1949, released 25 February 1950 88 min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod Sacha Gordine; Scr Louis Chavance, Georges RibbemontDessaignes, and Carné, based on the novel by Georges Simenon; Cinematog Henri Alekan; Music Joseph Kosma; Art dir Alexandre Trauner; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Jean Gabin (Henri Chatelard), Nicole Courcel (Marie Le Flem), Blanchette Brunoy (Odile Le Flem), Claude Romain (Marcel Viau), Julien Carette (Thomas Viau), and Jane Marken (Madame Josselin). “Each of Jean Gabin’s films constituted a variation on two themes, always the same: a dream of escape, forever unsatisfied and subverted, and the unattainable hope of love betrayed by ill-fortune and death. But a myth, when embodied, undergoes the fate of all flesh, namely slow adulteration then definitive destruction.” It is impossible to avoid quoting and paraphrasing Claude Mauriac’s memorable review of these two films, which he saw as marking the decline and death of the Gabin myth.62 The substance of Mauriac’s review was borrowed (unacknowledged) from Pierre Duvillars’s book on cinema as myth, where Duvillars noted that Au-delà des grilles is the endpoint of a whole lineage of films. [It] takes Gabin to the extreme limit of his destiny where everything collapses, even that privileged area of which [hitherto] neither life nor man nor God could deprive him: his love had remained—or at least his belief in love, even when the woman he loved was directly or indirectly the cause of his tragic downfall. In this film however he loses even that faith and the camera cruelly strips him bare—a man alone, ageing and without hope, who accepts his fate and walks towards it with open eyes.63

62. Reprinted in Mauriac, L’Amour du cinéma, 229–233. 63. Duvillars, Cinéma, 73–74.

1946–1951

189

André Bazin commented in describing the Gabin myth that he was “the sole French actor—perhaps the only actor in the whole world barring Charlie Chaplin—whom the public expect to come to a sorry end.” 64 But in Au-delà des grilles, that sorry end is not so much tragic as despondent, because though recognizably the same character—on the wrong side of the law, fleeing the police, taken in by a woman who falls in love with him—this time, already at the beginning of the film, he has fled and is sought by the police because he has killed a woman, and he has killed her because she no longer loved him, finding him too old. He no longer believes in himself, in his mythic persona, so he can no longer himself take seriously the present narrative in which a new woman claims to love him. To put it another way, the standard Gabin narrative is already over when this film begins. It is hinted at sketchily as the reason for his character’s flight. The narrative to which we are witness is that of a disillusioned survivor. The film grants him a moment of grace (associated inevitably with the only brief glimpse of nature that we are allowed in the dilapidated shambles of the warshattered city of Genoa), then the humiliation of being arrested and marched off by the police. The title is, of course, ironic: every fan of French film remembers the final scene of Pépé le Moko (1937) where Gabin’s character dies grasping the grill that bars his way to the port and a new life “là-bas.” Here he is already beyond that grill, and seems on the way to that new life . . . until a toothache forces him ashore in Genoa and the grill closes behind him again. The gods work in banal ways, and beyond the grills there are always more grills. But if Genoa recalls all the other cities where Gabin had been trapped, its representation here is markedly different from that of the highly aestheticized stage-set cities of his earlier films. The great quality of this quietly undramatic film is that it bears faithful witness to the crumbling ruins of the poor quarters of Genoa. René Clément’s documentary experience, which in La Bataille du rail (#31) had seemed to foreshadow a French neorealism, is again apparent in this portrait of grimy walls and colonnades, of crumbling paint and plaster, of phones that don’t work, of washing hanging out to dry above sleazy streets. This is an extraordinary documentary representation of war-ravaged Genoa, inflected toward the noir by the nighttime sequences, the slick lights gleaming off railings and cobbles, and the frequent downward, near-vertical angling of the camera.

64. See Bazin’s review of Le Jour se lève in What Is Cinema? 2:177–178.

190

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Claude Mauriac felt that Au-delà des grilles ought by rights to have been Gabin’s last film, but that the somewhat analogous La Marie du Port, which came out the following year, based on a Georges Simenon novel, served in fact to confirm the death of his mythic persona. It repeats the lesson in a different register: here, Gabin plays Chatelard, a wealthy Cherbourg bourgeois who owns a brasserie and a cinema. He is “at anchor” but still obsessed by dreams of love and of escape. The latter are manifest in a boat he buys early in the film but never manages to get around to sailing away on, too mired in habit and convention, but manifest also in the film Tabu that plays in his cinema, evoking the call of the South Pacific. He has a mistress, Odile, and the crux of the narrative is the gradual displacement of Odile by her calculating sister Marie, who aims to take sole possession of Chatelard’s heart and wealth. All commentators rightly draw attention to the final close-up in which Chatelard, in a sign of abdication, proffers his keys to Marie, whom he is about to marry. Her hand “closes like a vice on the keys, symbol of his power and his possessions.” 65 Like Duvillars and Mauriac, in describing this scene Robert Chazal noted that “La Marie du Port marked the end-point of [Gabin’s] first career. This successful but aging bourgeois, a man who has no real needs or passions, is the more disappointing as he is the complete reverse of the figure we had so loved. . . . More perhaps than in its rejection of spectacle and cinematic ambition, it is in the renunciation of a powerful love interest, no matter how fleeting, that La Marie du Port stands apart in Carné’s output.” 66 For Bazin, “[Chatelard’s] dubious happiness—his material rather than moral success—is nothing more than a confession of failure, the paltry reward for an act of renunciation. The gods are merciful to those who no longer seek to be heroes.” 67 Incidentally, Marcel Carné and Louis Chavance softened the ending, eliminating the bitterness of the final scenes of Simenon’s novel. Ironically (or appropriately?), Carné reported that during the shooting of this film, Gabin was more benignly “manageable” than ever before, because he had just remarried—a much younger blonde, somewhat reminiscent of his earlier partner, Marlene Dietrich.68 Subsequently during the 1950s, the principal films of his “second career” were to involve not “love” but male partners—male rivalry and male bonding.

65. Mauriac, L’Amour du cinéma, 233. 66. Chazal, Marcel Carné, 55–57. 67. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 2:177–178. 68. Carné, La Vie à belles dents, 305.

1946–1951

191

61. Rendez-vous de juillet July Reunion Filmed 1949; released 6 December 1949 112 min, b&w Dir Jacques Becker; Asst Marcel Camus; Prod UGC and SNEG; Scr Becker and Maurice Griffe; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music Jean Wiener and Mezz Mezzrow; Art dir Robert-Jules Garnier; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Daniel Gélin (Lucien Bonnard), Nicole Courcel (Christine Courcel), Pierre Trabaut (Pierrot Rabut), Brigitte Auber (Thérèse Richard), Maurice Ronet (Roger Bonnard), Bernard La Jarrige (Guillaume Rousseau), and Philippe Mareuil (François Courcel). In the postwar period, Jacques Becker directed a series of four films (for the other three, see Antoine et Antoinette, #46) that early acquired a reputation as capturing the feel of the age. More specifically, as Pierre Leprohon notes, the “dominant” of these four films involved a focus on the younger generation.69 All four films take a couple or group of young people and explore “the way they live now”—their hopes, their fears, their sentimental attachments, and their minor domestic crises. Little or no dramatic incident or narrative drive is apparent in any of the four. They are put together as a mosaic of incidents and encounters that serve to build up a credible, almost documentary, representation of the characters’ milieux and daily existence. This accumulation of obsessively observed minute touches was a crucial, if apparently incongruous, element of that realism which mattered to Becker above all else. “In any true film everything must be convincing.” More than the subject matter or the story, “it’s the characters and the way they evolve that obsesses me. I hate leaving people up in the air; nothing is more false in my eyes. I cannot conceive a character without wondering how he lives, what are his social relationships.”70 For Becker, a film must have a documentary feel but must ultimately transcend its documentary nature. Nicole Courcel reports that the first thing Becker did when the cast was assembled was to take them to see Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, which had just been recently released.71 Antoine et Antoinette, the predecessor to this film, had been the closest of the series to those great prewar realist films on which Becker had been assistant to 69. See the section on Jacques Becker in Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 373–387. 70. Quoted in Quéval, Jacques Becker, 73–74. 71. Quoted in Renard, Un cinéaste des années 50, 84.

192

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Jean Renoir (Toni; Lange, which in some respects it resembles; Les Bas-Fonds; Une partie de campagne; La Grande Illusion; La Règle du jeu) in that it concerns a young working-class couple, their difficult lives, their hopes and dreams that seem to be within reach when they win a lottery, their anguish when the ticket is mislaid. In Rendez-vous de juillet, however, the focus shifts from class conflict to generational conflict, and specifically to the problems of “young students today.” Some of the students are hoping to become actors, one a playwright, one a jazz musician, one an ethnographer in the remoter reaches of empire. As a group they are represented as slightly wild, in touch with all the latest crazes and movements, dynamic, idealistic, sexually liberated. They careen around Paris (even across the Seine, in an amphibious troop-carrier), they sway and jive in exhibitionistic exuberance to dance bands and jazz bands in the trendy cellar-bars of Paris, they make and break relationships as the actors rehearse for their first public performance. Once such a milieu might have been labeled “Bohemian,” but in the postwar decade, it was (inaccurately) labeled “existentialist.” With few exceptions, their parents and the older generation are seen as remote, alien, incapable of understanding the new spirit of the age, trapped in a hierarchical past and trying to constrain the young within that same set of priorities, characterized notably by a craving for affective and financial security. When the ethnographer finally assembles the necessary support for his expedition, he discovers that all his intended companions are backing out, precisely for affective or financial reasons. This is the sole narrative crisis of the film, and the pretext for a rant in which he spells out the central message of the film: “If you opt out now, you’ll all end up like your parents, half-dead, living a sad, safe, quiet life, free of risk. Wake up and take control of your own life while you still have a chance.” He turns the tide, and the final images see the team heading off in a plane on their great adventure. For Susan Hayward, it is not just “youth” that is here being radically redefined but also “woman.” She sees Becker’s films as representing women as autonomous individuals in their own right, as independent entities characterized by strength and depth, confronting issues as important as those confronting the young men.72 And while there is certainly some truth in this—the clothing, behavior, and ideology that speak through Becker’s female characters are unmistakably different from, and more assertive than, any such in wartime and prewar films—nevertheless it is noteworthy that the ethnographic expedition consists solely of men, while the women are left glumly or tearily on the tarmac as the plane takes off. More convincing in their incisively feminist account, Noël

72. Hayward, French National Cinema, 179.

1946–1951

193

Burch and Geneviève Sellier see Becker here as sacrificing to the misogynist gods of old: “Rendez-vous de juillet, a chronicle of the state of mind of the post-war generation, begins as a description of the mutual incomprehension of parents and children, but finishes up pointing the finger at the ‘tart’ who is preventing her young man from becoming the great man he is destined to be.” They see the next film in the series, Édouard et Caroline (1951), as shifting even further away from left-wing, working-class liberalism toward this “bourgeois misogyny,” symptomatic of the regression that took place in these matters in the years following the liberation, and its great success at the box-office as bearing witness to a parallel society-wide trend.73 It is not hard to see why Rendez-vous de juillet was seen as a landmark in its day—Becker likens his representation of this postwar generation to that of Ferdinand Bruckner post–World War I in Le Mal de la jeunesse for its precocious and zany behavior—which then seemed novel and liberated but can now seem passé or simply banal. Nevertheless, it is precisely because youth culture is now so omnipresent that it is fascinating to see its early stirrings in these postwar films. But combined with the lack of narrative drive, this “quaintness” can make the film more difficult to access nowadays than it was for its original audiences. The sequences that have survived best are the astonishing jazz sessions. Becker was himself a jazz enthusiast, and has traced the origins of this film to an encounter in late 1943 with members of the younger generation who were then as excited about their discovery of jazz as he himself had been twenty to twenty-five years earlier.

62. Manèges The Cheat Filmed 1949; released 25 January 1950 92 min, b&w Dir Yves Allégret; Asst dir Paul Feyder; Prod Films Modernes and Discina; Scr Jacques Sigurd; Cinematog Jean-Serge Bourgoin; Art dir Auguste Capelier, based on maquettes by Alexandre Trauner; Sound Jean Calvet and Jacques Carrier; Edit Maurice Serein; Act Bernard Blier (Robert), Simone Signoret (Dora), Jane Marken (Dora’s mother), Frank Villard (François), Jacques Baumer (Louis), and Gabriel Gobin (Émile).

73. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 262–270.

194

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Manèges was the third and last of the trilogy of black realist films made by Jacques Sigurd and Yves Allégret between 1947 and 1949. The contrast with its wonderful predecessor, Une si jolie petite plage (#54) could scarcely be more pronounced. The only similarity is a depiction of humanity as stupid, depraved, and/ or corrupt. The protagonist, Robert, is a stable-owner mindlessly devoted to his wife, who we rapidly come to understand has, at the instigation of her disgusting mother, been systematically stripping her husband of his money and conducting adulterous affairs with whoever might further satisfy her desire for the high life. When Robert (finally) discovers her treachery, he walks out on his now permanently paralyzed wife and tells her mother abruptly that she can have the pleasure of wheeling her daughter about for the rest of their lives. Everyone here is spiteful and malicious, but it is primarily the two central women—Dora and her mother—who are portrayed (partly because of their lower-class origins, the film implies) as irredeemably selfish and are condemned for it both morally and physically. The film underlines by their recurrent cackling chuckles their self-satisfied glee each time they con Robert or do him down. This is one of the most misogynistic films you are ever likely to see, its hatred for womankind needlessly underlined by close-ups of their sneering faces and extreme close-ups of their lying lips. The title, of course, depends on a pun, “manèges” meaning both “stables” and “wiles.” But the men are almost as bad: Robert is stupid and finally vengeful, while Dora’s men callously use and abandon her. These men almost justify the mother’s forcefully expressed hatred of all men, though the film despises them less, as witness the more honorable aims occasionally attributed to them, her current lover François’s tentative affection for Robert and horror at the women’s callousness, and Robert’s reminiscences of his grim wartime experience, which the women impatiently dismiss. Nevertheless, as Pierre Leprohon says, “This is not a collection of men and women; it’s a gallery of monsters, devouring one another. . . . What results is an astonishing lack of emotional identification . . . ; this film is a sort of psychological autopsy.”74 Everyone is trying to use everyone else. “Hell is other people,” as Jean-Paul Sartre said, and existence is a constant selfish battleground in an absurd universe. The one character to escape this condemnation is Robert’s assistant, Louis, the stable-manager: sharp-eyed and perceptive, he sees the catastrophe developing but can do nothing to deflect it. In terms of acting as well, he alone emerges with honor, his sharp stoicism contrasting with the elsewhere omnipresent hysteria.

74. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 331.

1946–1951

195

Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, who understandably are revolted by this film, see it (somewhat improbably) not just as a misogynistic film but as pandering to the sick fantasies of returned servicemen, who, during their time away in the Resistance or in concentration camps, imagined the way their women must be betraying them back home. If so, in this film their suspicions are confirmed, and the women receive an appropriately vicious punishment. “Manèges is astonishingly revealing about all that was least admissible in the masculine mentality of the post-war period; it leaves a bad taste in the mouth; [you could see it as] a sort of masterpiece of ugliness.”75 Where Une si jolie petite plage was austere and subtle, Manèges is hysterical and overly explicit. Where the former retold the past obliquely, and all had to be deduced from silences and gaps in the text, here a series of insistent voiceovers, close-ups, and shouted insults leave the spectators in no doubt as to what has happened and how they should respond to it. But if there is one unusual and potentially interesting aspect to the film, it is its structure. The story is told mainly in flashback, the diegetic present (and starting point for the film) being Robert’s arrival at the hospital where his wife is about to undergo an operation—the consequence of an unspecified “accident” while out with one of her lovers. These opening images already, however, give cause for apprehension: Robert’s impassive face as he walks down the hospital corridors is belied by an embarrassingly tearful voiceover in which his anguish concerning his wife’s state is spelled out. Presumably, the filmmakers considered (wrongly, as in the case of Le Jour se lève, 1939) that any narrative told in flashback needed a voiceover and redundant cues to orient the spectator temporally. Thereafter we are presented with numerous flashbacks from a variety of points of view, the early ones representing Robert’s memories of their life together, some later ones seeming to represent Dora’s version when she momentarily comes to after the operation and urges her mother to tell Robert all, while the majority of them contain material from the mother’s account with her gloating voiceover. The flashbacks are, therefore, not in chronological order and occasionally return to key scenes, related by different participants, but the chronology is not difficult to mentally reassemble, given the painful redundancy of cues. The essence of the past narrative concerns the couple’s deteriorating relationship and the progressive bankruptcy of the stables: finally, it is rented out to a crass horse-and-girlie stage act.

75. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 279–283.

196

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

The flashbacks are linked to the narrative present, and subjective sections are linked to objective sections, by an astonishing proliferation of punctuation forms and superimpositions. The iris in or out, from one set of images to another, is particularly favored, but this alternates with cross-dissolves and hardedged or blurred wipes, not to mention focusing out of one image to indistinctness and into another. All this very soon comes to seem a display of irritatingly obtrusive virtuosity. Sigurd was to script four more films for Yves Allégret in the years 1950–1955, but the only other Allégret film to be discussed here is Les Orgueilleux (#84), scripted by Jean Aurenche from a Sartre story, Typhus.

63. La Beauté du diable Beauty and the Devil Filming began 20 July 1949; released 17 March 1950 92 min, b&w Dir René Clair; Prod Franco-London Films, ENIC, and Universalia; Scr Clair and Armand Salacrou; Cinematog Michel Kelber; Music Roman Vlad; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound Robert Biart; Edit James Cuenet; Act Gérard Philipe (Henri/Faust), Michel Simon (Mephistopheles), Simone Valère (the Princess), Raymond Cordy (Antoine), Gaston Modot (the Bohemian), Nicole Besnard (Marguerite), Tullio Carminati (the chamberlain), and Carlo Ninchi (the Prince). René Clair put on record his apprehension at exploring in 1949 a new variation on the Faust myth, which he thought did not lend itself to a Mediterranean treatment, being more appropriate to the brooding Nordic cultures. But he and his friend Armand Salacrou felt that the myth’s central theme of an irrepressible craving for knowledge and power deserved to be explored anew at a time when humanity’s scientific explorations, motivated by wartime pressures, had recently led to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this reading, Faust is the Renaissance man, driven by intellectual curiosity to achieve knowledge and power. Clair pointed up the analogy by noting “the strange spectacle of a humanity that, having sold its soul to science, then seeks to forestall that global damnation towards which its own efforts seem inexorably to be drawing it.” So while the generalized theme may have made the Faust myth of universal relevance (and time and place are unspecified in this film), it had particular application as the Cold War evolved into a nuclear arms race. Clair and Salacrou aimed to devise a scenario in which this apparently predestined damnation could

1946–1951

197

be forestalled—suggesting that the devil’s strategies were not infallible, that it is never too late to change course. Their script would ultimately see the devil’s agent “disappear, ridiculous and defeated, in a great jet of flame.”76 But it was equally important that the dangers of this diabolically endowed knowledge should be credibly evoked before being dismantled. This would be difficult, because Clair felt that for the Mediterranean mind, there was a fundamental flaw in the logic of the myth: if the devil is real, so is God, and no really intelligent individual such as Faust would sacrifice eternal bliss for the very temporary access to knowledge and power. So the plot has him refusing the offer of a blood pact, and when Mephistopheles offers him youth, even without a pact, that too fails. At his master’s command, Mephistopheles then offers Faust apparently gratuitous access to knowledge, power, youth, wealth, and glory (“total happiness”), only subsequently to withdraw it all (or seem to). Where the desire for it had not seduced Faust, the threatened loss of it does: to retain it, he signs the pact and goes on to devise ultimate machines that offer him and his patron, the Prince, power over matter and over humanity. We glimpse submarines, airplanes, medicines . . . and atomic energy. Faust outlines the positive benefits of each of these, while Mephistopheles gloats over their destructive potential. At Faust’s request, Mephistopheles reluctantly shows him “in a mirror” where all this inventiveness will lead—the murder of the Prince, Faust’s conquest of the Princess then betrayal of her with numerous other women, his necessarily ruthless rule over a servile populace, followed by his own death and damnation. Revolted, Faust refuses this “destiny,” and Mephistopheles’s overconfidence results in his loss of the crucial pact that had doomed Faust. The tempter is ridiculed and cornered, leaping to his death in a violent explosion of infernal forces. There are some obvious weaknesses in this plot, which required skillful acting to bring off. The film is basically a two-hander in which all characters are peripheral except Faust and Mephistopheles (Gérard Philipe and Michel Simon). One of the authors’ most ingenious devices is to have them swap roles, both of them at different times (or even at the same time) being Faust and both being the devil. (This had the incidental benefit of avoiding the potentially grotesque descent into conventional representations of the devil and his minions.) Mephistopheles appears first in the guise of one of Faust’s students (Philipe), then as Faust’s “double” (Simon), while Faust appears as an aging professor (Simon), then when granted the gift of youth as that earlier student (Philipe).Thus the scenario becomes a duel between the two characters (or two aspects of the one character) and between the two actors in which, despite antagonisms, the two finally ac76. Clair, Comédies et commentaires, 98.

198

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

quire something like affection and respect for one another. The device also concretely establishes that the voice of the tempter is effectively the whispering of Faust’s own inadequately suppressed desires—Faust is his own tempter. “L’enfer, c’est nous-mêmes” (Hell is in our own self), notes Clair, deliberately varying the famous existential observation of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose popularity was at its height at that time. So the script proposes a sort of morality play for the incipient atomic age, and René Clair’s antipsychological cinematic strategies had always lent themselves better to a wry, distanced commentary on ideas and situations rather than to psychodramas. Nevertheless, he is quite correct in noting retrospectively that the denouement is somewhat arbitrary and unprepared (Mephistopheles caught in his own trap), and does not offer a satisfactory resolution. The alternative that he outlined in a subsequent commentary would have been distinctly superior: “I imagine Faust, old once more and accused of being the Devil’s envoy at the very moment when he has rejected the satanic pact, burnt at the stake amidst the jeers of the people, dying in the flames but content in the knowledge of his victory over the Demon.”77 Technically the film is fairly conventional in its editing, camerawork, and usage of music. There are minor special effects for Mephistopheles’s appeals to Lucifer, and during the glimpse of the future, a conjunction of voiceover and “zippans” (indeed there are nearly twice as many punctuation links as in any other Clair film analyzed—107 per 100 minutes versus at most 70 in his postwar films and 15–35 in his 1930s films). Zip-pans were not exactly a novel device, having been used from time to time since the late 1920s, but they experienced a surprising vogue in the late 1940s (see, for example, Sortilèges, #30; Le Silence de la mer, #56; and all of Clair’s later films). The editing is rapid (average shot length: 8.9 seconds) as it always had been in Clair’s French films, but whereas in the early 1930s this had been a distinctive feature of his work, by 1949 it was nearer the national norm. Critics were severe toward the film, partly because its focus on contemporary events gave it an atypical sociological slant (the same had been true of À nous la liberté, 1931). They thought it constituted “un échec” (a setback) in Clair’s career, but audience figures do not support this. La Beauté du diable was popular both with first night audiences and in general release, recording the second highest exclusive release in Paris during 1950 and remaining third highest earner (about 350 million francs and 4.5 million admissions) after three years, by which time any film would have collected about 97 percent of its ultimate audience and the rank order would not change. 77. Ibid., 168.

1946–1951

199

64. Justice est faite (Let Justice Be Done) Filmed 10 March–10 July 1950; released 20 September 1950 105 min; b/w Dir André Cayatte; Prod Silver Films; Scr Cayatte and Charles Spaak; Cinematog Jean Bourgoin; Music Raymond Legrand; Art dir Jacques Colombier; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Christian Gaudin; Act Michel Auclair (Serge Krémer), Antoine Balpêtré (president of the court), Raymond Bussières (Félix Noblet), Jacques Castelot (Gilbert de Montesson), Jean Debucourt (Michel Caudron), JeanPierre Grenier (Jean-Luc Flavier), Claude Nollier (Elsa Lundestein), Marcel Pérès (Évariste Malingré), Noël Roquevert (Théodore Andrieux), Valentine Tessier (Marceline Micoulin), Jean d’Yd (Superior), Dita Parlo (Lisbeth), Léonce Corne, Marcel Mouloudji, Agnès Delahaie, Paul Frankeur, and Jean Vilar. Four law-related films of 1950–1955 constitute the peak of André Cayatte’s career as a director and of his popularity. His work prior to 1949 would have given little reason to expect much of this film and no reason to suspect that it might be voted best French film of the year both at home and abroad. The success in 1949, however, of Les Amants de Vérone, scripted by Jacques Prévert, gave him for the first time the freedom to pick his own subjects and to develop them in conjunction with his usual collaborator, Charles Spaak. Drawing on his training and experience as a lawyer, Cayatte aimed to produce a critique of the law-justice-morality nexus as it existed at the time in France with a view to changing people’s attitudes toward certain aspects of it, and over time changing the law itself. An optimist, accepting Jean-Paul Sartre’s attitude of “solidarity and responsibility, always, and for everything,” Cayatte said that, in his view, ideas presented in good faith were contagious, and that, though he did not think the cinema was obliged to plead specific causes, it was at least useful that in certain circumstances it should do so. Such a personal commitment to transforming society was unusual at the time, and not at all appreciated by most critics, who saw the resultant films as simplistic propaganda, “a minor art, if an art at all.”78 In fact, he had intended that this first film of what he then thought would be a legal trilogy would focus on a quite different legal case—the Seznec Affair of 1914 in which a patently innocent man was framed by the authorities. Cayatte had first become interested in 1934, when Seznec had been in prison for ten years. 78. André Bazin, “La Cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” Cahiers du cinéma, no 36, June 1954.

200

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

The script for it had been ready to film for some time, but first the state blocked production, then he could not get funding. When funding finally arrived and the film was about to be shot with Seznec playing his own role, Seznec was “accidentally” killed in a hit-and-run motor accident. This did nothing to diminish Cayatte’s view that the legal process in France was thoroughly fallible if not corrupt, and he proceeded with his other two films, focusing on the nature of trial by jury and on the morality of the death penalty. “What I wanted to establish,” he commented, “was that the legal process today is totally under the thumb of the police, who manipulate it at their will. My first film would have demonstrated how they can rig the case against the accused, while Justice est faite explored the interaction of the jury’s private life and their public/legal role—the trial system put on trial, so to speak.”79 The narrative structure is simple—a prologue in which the seven jury members are summoned to serve; the core of the film, which alternates between the case that they must judge and their private lives; and an epilogue detailing the resulting verdict and sentence. The prologue is fascinating for a number of reasons, notably the unforgettable opening shot behind the title that shows a vast, featurless plain with a road and a line of telephone posts disappearing into the distance; after a minute or so, a distant black dot becomes apparent; as it grows, it becomes two police officers cycling towards us. The camera finally pans with them to a farmhouse, isolated in the immensity of the plain—the farmer is the first of the seven jury members to be summoned. Between them, these seven (six men and a woman) are clearly selected by the filmmakers to provide a spread in class, wealth, and interests—a farmer, workers, bourgeois, a military man, and an aristocrat—hence the accusation of typecasting and oversimplification, not least because the actors—all well-known—are also well-known for acting these types. But the aim is clearly to constitute through them a cross-section of the nation, an overview of French attitudes toward the matter of the trial. That matter is euthanasia: Elsa Lundestein has, at her husband’s request, killed him, because he had been suffering from terminal cancer. She doesn’t attempt to deny the charge—indeed, she would not have been suspected had she not acknowledged her act to her sister-in-law. The jury is divided—those of a religious, legal, or military persuasion find her unequivocally guilty, while those of a more humane and liberal persuasion find her guilty according to law but with extenuating circumstances. Two dramatic revelations during the trial complicate the defense case: she has inherited from her husband a vast fortune, which generates cynical doubts about her motives, and she has taken a lover during the

79. Quoted in Braucourt André Cayatte, 13.

1946–1951

201

final months of her husband’s life, which generates cynical doubts about her supposed commitment to her husband and the promise she had made him to abbreviate his suffering. But important though this legal material is, the film centrally picks up on each jury member at the end of each day to explore the relationship between their external existence and this trial material. The printer is sympathetic but Catholic, and pressure is brought on him by the church hierarchy, though he and his wife have themselves contemplated ending their errant son’s life. The farmer’s wife has been flirting with the hired help, and, suspecting her of more, the farmer contemplates violence. The military man’s daughter has an inappropriate liaison, and when she doesn’t return one night, he lurks outside her boyfriend’s flat, contemplating . . . what? And so forth. The film is notable for using none of the available techniques of persuasion commonly used to influence the spectator, who is effectively asked to be another jury member, albeit one better informed than the others about their fellow members’ lives. The director has Elsa act in a totally deadpan, dispassionate way when stating what she did, when, and why—there is no psychological acting that might sway the viewer’s opinion. “I didn’t want to prove anything,” said Cayatte; “I just wanted to deprive my fellow-citizens of the feeling that they could sleep the sleep of the just each night.”80 Ultimately, the verdict is “guilty with extenuating circumstances,” and the sentence is five years of prison. But the central fact, as the film itself notes, is that it is impossible to say whether this is far too little or far too much: in the present state of the justice system, no jury could in good conscience bring down an unequivocally just verdict. The film constitutes an acknowledgment of the fragility of the jury system and a critique of the imperfection of human institutions. Moreover, had there not been “extenuating circumstances,” the verdict of guilty would automatically entail a sentence of death, whereupon both the jury and the French state would be guilty of a far worse crime than that of the accused. This was to be the subject of Cayatte’s next film, Nous sommes tous des assassins (#75).

65. La Ronde Rondelay Filmed 23 January–18 March 1950; released 27 September 1950 97 min, b&w

80. Ibid.

202

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dir Max Ophüls; Prod Sacha Gordine; Scr Jacques Natanson and Ophüls, from a play by Arthur Schnitzler, Der Reigen; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Oskar Straus; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Léonide Azar; Act (in order of appearance): Anton Walbrook (master of ceremonies), Simone Signoret (the prostitute), Serge Reggiani (the soldier), Simone Simon (the maid), Daniel Gélin (young bourgeois), Robert Vattier (Professor Schuller), Danielle Darrieux (genteel lady), Fernand Gravey (her husband), Odette Joyeux (his young mistress), Jean-Louis Barrault (the poet), Isa Miranda (the actress), and Gérard Philipe (the count). Louis Jouvet was initially intended for the role of master of ceremonies and Marlene Dietrich as “the actress.” Schnitzler specified that the play was to be read, not performed. Of Jewish extraction, Max Ophüls fled France in 1941 for Switzerland, then America, where he remained; this was the first of four tremendous films he made on his return to France—his four last films.81 Georges Sadoul’s summary of its sequences can scarcely be bettered: A prostitute (S.Sig.) encounters a young soldier (S.R.) who sleeps with a chamber maid (S.Sim.) who “educates” a young bourgeois (D.G.) who then seduces a genteel lady (D.D.) whose husband (F.G.) has a kept woman (O.J.) who adores a poet (J.-L.B.) who however prefers an actress (I.M.) who is kindly disposed towards an officer (G.P.) who frequents the prostitute of the opening sequence, thus beginning over again a circular process, all of which is overseen by a character introduced by Ophüls but not present in Schnitzler’s play, the master of ceremonies (A.W.).82 This merry-go-round is frequently and somewhat overgenerously labeled by critics (and by the film itself) a roundabout of love or of life (“la ronde de l’amour, la ronde de la vie”), but is more accurately described as a cycle of desire, though even this is slightly more socially acceptable (and marginally more romantic) than the linkage in the original Arthur Schnitzler play, which involved the passing on of venereal disease. The cyclical construction of the series of events, metaphorically present in the form of the roundabout, is likened by the film to the turning of the earth and the cycle of the seasons, but for the spectator, an inevitable correlative is the repeti81. Ophüls’s real name was Max Oppenheimer; some spell his pseudonym with a dieresis, some do not. 82. Sadoul, Dictionnaire des films, 219.

1946–1951

203

tive sameness of human relationships, as with unchanging gestures and phrases the various characters pass from one partner to another. The implication is that individual experience is no more than a reassuring illusion, that the same patterns of behavior and of thought recur regardless of time and place. The film supports this conclusion by steadfastly refusing to psychologize the characters, treating them as creatures without depth. They are puppets, manipulated by the master of ceremonies, who thus becomes a sort of puppeteer, stand-in for the distant and disdainful author. The film further encourages this theme of eternal, unchanging patterns by refusing to localize the settings for the various encounters. This is not, as it purports to be, Vienna 1900, since there are no identifiable locales. The setting for these encounters is “any street corner in the fog, any open-air dance, the edge of any spring, the bank of any river.”83 What results is not just a sense of timelessness but a sense of fatality: these people’s lives, whatever they themselves believe, are not in their own hands—beset by myth and stereotype, they are condemned to repeat endlessly the meaningless actions and phrases with which all such people delude themselves. The film can therefore be said to be making philosophical statements about the way things are, and this allows critics to claim that Ophüls is here “meditating in the most profound way possible on the eternal theme of desire and love,” that there is “profundity in his light touch.” Another critic writes, “I know no film more desperate and more tragic under its appearance of gaiety.”84 One of the defining characteristics of La Ronde (and indeed all four of Ophüls’s last films) is that it is a studio film (Ophüls had filmed one location scene but later cut it), and that it foregrounds itself as “performance” in an outrageously Brechtian way. This foregrounding is apparent in the presence of the ringmaster as presenter, “managing” the series of linked sketches, even “editing” them when necessary (he tactfully cuts the film short when the actress receives the count in her bedroom), then there are the titles and the filmmaking clapperboard (“Take One”), the gross metaphor of the roundabout breaking down when the young man is unable to achieve an erection, and not least the presence of an actress as a central character, providing the pretext for a routine disquisition on the cliché-strewn phases and phrases of courtship and seduction, and the consequent difficulty of acting “sincerity.” But then every element of dialogue in the film is, so to speak, only acted, merely conventional, in quotation marks: this is the sort of thing such people say in such situations. This foregrounding of performance carries over to the technical aspects of the film. The film was shot entirely in the Studio St. Maurice: everything is

83. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 170. 84. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 80–83; Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 170.

204

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

staged. The camera seems constantly on the move, “dancing, twisting and whirling unceasingly” as it follows the actors across this stage, its elaborate panning and tracking serving to avoid and substitute for any more normal montage procedures. Claude Beylie tries not too successfully to make a case for this visual agitation frequently negating itself (panning right, pause, panning left, etc.) as a way of promoting the virtues of stillness and silence. It is easier to see it as just another part of the elsewhere prevalent patterning of the image that Ophüls acknowledged as one of his chief delights. Even Beylie admits that the term “baroque” is justified to describe the hectic sets “stuffed with a proliferation of objects. In contrast to the classical virtues of balance and reason, Ophüls’s architecture substitutes a fundamental restlessness and ever more excessive imagination. On life we are offered simply a tumultuous vision of unsettling fantasy; on death not a serene meditation but a vertiginous anguish.”85 Again for Beylie, Ophüls is the supreme poet of womanhood, specializing in the representation of unhappy women, who, despite surrendering their bodies, preserve their integrity, their souls. Others see La Ronde as, on the contrary, just another sketch film purporting to chronicle derogatively the categories of womanhood.86 In fact, however, it could be argued that it does the same for men, and the film might best be summed up as demonstrating the derisory nature of sexual and affective relationships between men and women, the fragmentary aspect of the episodic encounters encouraging a cynical (and again, very conventional) view voiced several times in the course of the film, that “love” and happiness are incompatible. In the Unifrance information brochure accompanying the film, Ophüls noted that “In Schnitzler’s work everything flows by as in a river—birth, life, human relationships, love, and all to the rhythm of a waltz. . . . It’s this nostalgia that attracts me.” Marcel Ophüls said that, for his father, “a considered pessimism that could transcend itself and emerge as a sort of gaiety was the only valid attitude towards life for a thinking person.”87

66. Orphée Orpheus Filmed Autumn 1949; released 29 September 1950 112 min, b&w

85. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 99; for subsequent observations from Beylie, see pp. 105, 110, 113. 86. Notably Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 150, 165. 87. La Ronde, Unifrance film; Marcel Ophüls, quoted in Beylie, Max Ophüls, 113.

1946–1951

205

Dir and Scr Jean Cocteau; Prod André Paulvé and Les Films du Palais Royal; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Jacqueline Sadoul; Act Jean Marais (Orpheus), Maria Casarès (the princess), Marie Déa (Eurydice), François Périer (Heurtebise), Jacques Varenne, André Carnège, and René Worms (judges), Pierre Bertin (the commissioner), Juliette Greco (Aglaonice), Édouard Dhermitte (Cégeste), Henri Crémieux (the editor), Roger Blin (the poet), Jean-Pierre Melville (the hotel manager), Claude Mauriac, Jean-Pierre Mocky, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Orphée is undoubtedly the most visibly avant-garde film produced in the period covered by this filmography. With its slow motion, reverse motion, walking through mirrors, impossible gravity, and negative/positive shifts, it shuns all normal forms of realism in order to incite spectators to read the material metaphorically, allegorically. Since it constitutes an “updating” of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the Underworld, it insists that the resultant reading is as relevant now as ever—that the film is, in fact, dealing with eternal truths. Moreover, since Orpheus was the greatest of antiquity’s musicians, son of Calliope the muse of epic poetry, the film (scripted and directed by Jean Cocteau to whom no form of artistic creation was alien) and its “eternal truths” are intensely autobiographical. It picks up where his first film, Le Sang d’un poète (1930), left off (or, as he often said, orchestrated what he had there picked out with one finger) and looks forward to the final film of the trilogy, Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). Obsessed throughout his life by these orphic themes, Cocteau had drawn from them an extended poem, L’Ange Heurtebise (1925), and the following year a play, Orphée. In the play, a talking horse announces to Orphée that “Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers” (an acronym giving “merde,” shit). Indeed, Eurydice is poisoned by Aglaonice, leading light of the Bacchantes club. The angel Heurtebise, dealer in windows and mirrors, helps Orpheus to descend to hell by passing through a mirror, and the gods permit Eurydice’s return to Earth, on condition that Orpheus not look at her. Unfortunately, he trips and catches a glimpse of her, whereupon she returns to Hell. Aglaonice and the enraged Bacchantes besiege Orpheus’s home, and he allows himself to be killed to rejoin Eurydice. The film retains the general lines of the play and of the myth but modifies in particular the end: Orpheus the poet is married to Eurydice, who is killed by motorcyclists in a “road accident.” A princess, one of Death’s many servants, introduces Orpheus to a mirror world. When Eurydice dies, Heurtebise, the princess’s chauffeur, guides Orpheus to this Underworld, and they return with Eurydice on condition that he does not look at her. He accidentally sees her in a rearview mirror, and she is lost to him. Aglaonice and her Bacchantes besiege the house, and in the ensuing struggle, Orpheus gets shot. For a second time, Heurtebise and 206

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Orpheus struggle through to the Underworld, but this time the princess (in her role now as Orpheus’s death), who has become besotted by Orpheus, herself dies, thus endowing Orpheus with eternal life. She and her agents “rewind time” to the period when Orpheus and Eurydice were happy together, while the princess and Heurtebise, having defied the gods, are carried off to an unnameable fate. To try thus to summarize the narrative does violence to the far from rational logic of the events, but Cocteau was insistent that, when dealing with such nonrealist material, it was essential to ground the visuals in credible contemporary detail—to make of it “an unreal film acted out in realistic settings.”88 The princess is surrounded by leather-clad motorcyclists—agents of death—who carry out her orders in killing Eurydice. Heurtebise, the guide to the Underworld, becomes death’s chauffeur. The divinities of the underworld become a bench of civil service bureaucrats. The poet’s inspiration—his insight into eternal truths—becomes coded messages (reminiscent of wartime Resistance activities) to which Orpheus listens obsessively on a car radio, which allows for the inclusion in the script of some of Cocteau’s favorite “mots” (“Astonish me”; “knowing just how far too far you can go”; “mirrors would do well to reflect more”; “look in a mirror and you will see death working like bees in a glass hive”; etc.). Beneath this rather charmingly imaginative set of images, however, lies a grossly self-serving message: poets (such as Cocteau himself) share privileged insights into eternal verities; they are explorers “tracking down the unknown,” as a result of which they will overcome death and their fame will live forever. “Orphée c’est moi,” as Cocteau said, after Gustave Flaubert (while Heurtebise has often been read as Radiguet). So when stripped of its often charming and occasionally amusing contemporary (for 1950) paraphernalia, this sleight of mind conceals that well-known and very conventional (if unpleasantly pretentious) romantic myth of the artist—combined in this case with a tiny compensatory grain of humility: the artist is nothing wonderful, really, the whole universe revolves around him, yet there he is, just a humble, unself-conscious individual, giving of himself naturally, spontaneously. He is merely an artisan, like a carpenter, who creates a table—up to you whether you eat off it, ask it spiritualist questions, or use it for firewood. As Cocteau would say, “Poetry is indispensable, but I don’t know for what.” The film exudes a qualified pretentiousness, then. Nevertheless, there are moments to enjoy, notably some of the more inventive special effects. The negative sequence recalls Nosferatu, and the reverse-motion reassemblage of the broken mirror after they have passed through is a pleasant index of mastery over time, while Heurtebise’s apparently effortless forward progression (on a trolley)

88. Gilson, Jean Cocteau, 48, 98.

1946–1951

207

contrasts nicely with Orpheus’s effortful struggle to advance. Likewise, during their second entry into “the zone” (actually the bombed-out École de Saint-Cyr), their curious diagonal clamber, reminiscent of Le Sang d’un poète, and rapid sideways slide along a wall is a happy signifier of the radically different “gravity” that prevails in this other world. On the other hand, it is hard to take seriously Orpheus’s plight at having to avoid catching sight of his wife, directly or indirectly, and its potential for gentle comedy is either weakly realized or flunked. In general, the direction of actors is not good. Marie Déa, in particular, is as incompetent as in Les Visiteurs du soir (#11). Worst of all, the mythic material, fine when played straight by the actors, is all too often played as psychodrama, with shouts and squabbles, angry twisted faces, and occasional maudlin sentimentality. The two forms of acting are incompatible, and when the latter takes over, the mythic implications are lost in a welter of individual petulance. Looked at more positively, Orphée can be seen as a forerunner of the cinéma d’auteur for which the New Wave critics were already then beginning to call. As Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (who had a minor part in the film) said, “This is transposed autobiography; when was a film-maker more a film author than here? . . . This film is significant because it shows that nowadays films are no longer expected to recount impersonal stories—they can tell stories that cling to their author like a second skin.”89 Orphée may well have provided its producer with an artistic succès d’estime, but it cannot have been financially rewarding. It was significantly less successful in France than Cocteau’s other postwar films. Abroad, however, it was more widely praised and awarded, reputedly running in a German cinema each Saturday night for the next fifteen years.

67. Meurtres (Murders) Filmed 27 March–22 May 1950; released 10 October 1950 120 min, b&w Dir Richard Pottier; Prod Ciné Films and Cidès; Scr Charles Plisnier, Maurice Barry, and Henri Jeanson, from the book by Charles Plisnier; Cinematog André Germain; Music Raymond Legrand; Art dir Paul-Louis Boutié; Sound Constantin

89. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “De l’avant-garde,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 19–20.

208

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Evangélou; Edit Christian Gaudin; Act Fernandel (Noël Annequin), Raymond Souplex (Blaise Annequin), Jacques Varenne (Hervé Annequin), Mireille Perrey (Blanche Annequin), Colette Mareuil (Lola Annequin), Jeanne Moreau (Martine Annequin), Philippe Nicaud (José Annequin), Line Noro (Isabelle Annequin), Georges Chamarat (the judge), and André Carnège (the procureur général). As the cast-list amply indicates, the prime focus of this film is the Annequin family in a moment of crisis. An unjustly neglected film, it is noteworthy for at least two reasons: 1. It is directed by Richard Pottier, a “hack” director not mentioned in many histories of cinema, because he mainly directed light-hearted films—sentimental comedies and musicals with Tino Rossi or later Luis Mariano. His output was not disrupted by the occupation, perhaps because Pottier was a pseudonym for Ernst Deutsch. His total output consisted of thirty-six films between 1934 and 1958, the most successful being Si j’étais le patron (1934), Caroline chérie (1950), and Violettes impériales (1952). But in this and one earlier film (Vertiges, 1946), he dealt with crucial matters of life, death, and the law, and he dealt with them soberly and effectively. 2. The protagonist of this film is a loving husband who, at his ailing wife’s request, kills her to abbreviate her suffering (see also Justice est faite, #64). Euthanasia was a brave topic to tackle at the time, and no less relevant today. What is astonishing is that the “murderous” husband is played by Fernandel, better known for his grotesque facial grimaces and hysterical overacting (150 films in 40 years, including 5 others in 1950 alone). Here, as for Marcel Pagnol in Angèle (1934) and Regain (1937), he showed that when the occasion required, he could produce as sober and as powerful a performance as any actor of the day. Noël Annequin has recently married Isabelle, the love of his life, but she is wasting away in agony before his eyes with an incurable cancer and begs him for release. For once, Fernandel allows this situation to generate the emotion rather than forcing it by facial contortions. When Noël finally accedes to her request and informs his two brothers that, having killed his wife, he will hand himself in and pay his dues to the law, the brothers are horrified: Blaise, the medical brother, is in line for a professorial chair, while Hervé, the lawyer, is expecting the Légion d’Honneur. They see the looming scandal as blighting their chances. Their wives are even more aghast, obsessed with keeping up appearances, both cosmetic and social. The four of them strive to convince Noël of the need to conceal his deed for the family’s sake. They are happy when the blame seems about to fall on Isabelle’s nurse, because she’s of no importance—as a working-class woman, a few years in jail won’t hurt her; after all, conditions are not that bad there. . . . When Noël refuses, they have him consigned to an asylum as deranged, therefore unfit 1946–1951

209

to face justice. Finally, when his niece Martine, the only family member to support him, blackmails them into having him released, they buy him a ticket to Venezuela. So what had, in the previous generation, constituted a dream of escape to a new life “over there” has now transmogrified into a form of exile, with Noël, the black sheep, as a remittance man who is funded to travel overseas on condition that he never return home. The finale is unexpectedly upbeat: having seen through the two brothers’ machinations, Noël deliberately sets about provoking the maximum scandal possible, then departs with Martine to the promised new life—not necessarily in Venezuela, since, as he says, “France is a big enough country to get lost in, and to rediscover oneself.” No longer a niece, she has become a daughter, or even something closer, though the film only implies this obliquely. Values within the family are clearly apportioned according to a time-honored structure: Noël is a countryman, a farmer, a peasant, so retains a “natural” sense of honor and duty. Straightforward, he accepts that he has broken the law and must pay for it, but refuses to be judged—neither by the law itself nor (especially) by his hypocritical brothers and their cheating wives. Townsfolk, these latter members of the family, are corrupted by a craving for status and a desire for the respect of their social “inferiors,” and this overrides any family feeling or legal nicety. The film is very well cast and acted, and one of its many delights is watching as Noël’s “honorable” lawyer brother suavely manipulates colleagues, who of course fully understand and share his position, in order to subvert the law. Another is the feckless self-interest of Martine’s cousin José, who is to marry her, primarily for her inheritance. (“Is it a love marriage?” “Oh yes, José just loves money.”) And then there is the urbane psychiatrist who knows what’s expected of him and fakes a case for madness, and the honest judge who recognizes Noël’s fundamental honesty (to which Noël responds, “That’s scarcely a reason to consign me to an asylum”). This film also mobilizes that emblem (at least since La Règle du jeu) of middle-class folk obsessed by convention, the mechanical doll. This satire of a hypocritical, urban elite obsessed with appearances and standing is therefore unusually vicious, and the oppositions are both of upper class/ lower class and town/country. “You’d have to be mad to live in town,” says Noël, whom the urban mad have just classified as mad. There are some other splendid moments and even a little wry comedy. It is extraordinarily moving when his dying wife says to him sadly, “We could have been happy.” There is a wonderful scene in which Martine confronts and berates the family, and then there is the (perhaps gratuitous but nonetheless exquisitely inappropriate) community celebration, with a procession of cheering crowds through the village and with brass-band playing, lights flashing, and fireworks exploding, just at the moment when Noël is seen through an upper-floor 210

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

window injecting the lethal dose. On the negative side, on a relatively few occasions, close-ups of Fernandel’s face backed by soupy violin music strive too obviously (and quite unnecessarily) to generate emotions. This is a film in which a lot happens, but in a singularly undramatic way. Repeatedly a group of two to five family members find themselves faced with a very awkward situation, and clumsily, painfully, often hypocritically attempt to work through it. What results is a minor film, perhaps, but on a genuinely important topic and with a splendid ensemble cast, including Jeanne Moreau in her first major role (first film, 1948; married to director Jean-Louis Richard, 1948; sociétaire of the Comédie Française, 1948). Meurtres takes its place in a subgenre of films exploring questions of law, justice, morality, and conscience that appeared in these postwar years, notably those of André Cayatte and Charles Spaak ( Justice est faite, 1950, #64; Nous sommes tous des assassins, 1952, #75; and Le Dossier noir, 1954). Altogether, a film to be rescued from the oblivion into which it has unfortunately fallen.

68. Le Journal d’un curé de campagne Diary of a Country Priest Filmed 6 March–19 June 1950; released 7 February 1951 120 min, b&w Dir Robert Bresson; Prod UGC; Scr Bresson, based on the novel by Georges Bernanos; Cinematog Léonce-Henri Burel; Music Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; Art dir Pierre Charbonnier; Sound Jean Rieul; Edit Paulette Robert; Act Claude Laydu (the priest of Ambricourt), Jean Riveyre (the count), Armand Guibert (the priest of Torcy), Nicole Ladmiral (Chantal), Martine Lemaire (Seraphita), Nicole Maurrey (Mademoiselle Louise), Marie-Monique Arkell (the countess), Antoine Balpêtré (Dr. Delbende), Léon Arvel (Fabregard), and Jean Danet (Olivier). This was one of the most adventurous films of its day because of the way it relentlessly foregrounds conservative religious concepts such as grace and salvation, but does so in an experimental, avant-garde fashion. Religious themes were not uncommon in the postwar years—witness La Symphonie pastorale (Jean Delannoy, 1946, #35), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, 1947, #47), and Dieu a besoin des hommes (Delannoy, 1950)—but these films all explored religious concepts using standard narrative techniques, through the psychology and biography of an exceptional individual (embodied in a well-known actor or actress) who overcomes worldly problems to achieve a triumphant resolution. Journal, by contrast, rejecting conventional psychological camera and editing techniques, aimed to 1946–1951

211

bypass the protagonist’s consciousness, directing the spectator via behaviorist externals away from empathy with his suffering and toward the (implied) internal spiritual world of the soul. Georges Bernanos, who had written the novel on which Robert Bresson’s film was based, had refused previous proposals to adapt it for filming, notably by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, whose proposed adaptation radically distorted crucial ideological aspects of the novel, but also by Father Raymond Brückberger, who had scripted Bresson’s first film, Les Anges du péché (#16), because, in updating it to the occupation years, he had politicized it. Bresson’s adaptation was in many ways closely faithful to the original, and was filmed in the Pas de Calais region where Bernanos had grown up and had set his novel. But when shot, the film lasted three hours, and in cutting it down to two hours, Bresson excised much of the community context of interaction between the new curate and the villagers of Ambricourt, thus restricting its focus and underlining to an even greater extent than in the novel the spiritual nature of his trials and ultimate triumph. Those trials relate most immediately to the ills of the flesh: weak from some unspecified illness, he is unable to swallow anything but bread dipped in wine. Unsteady from the weakness that results, he collapses, has visions, leaves his parish to consult a doctor in Lille, and dies in the apartment of a lapsed former colleague, Dufréty. But it is not just the flesh that is weak—the priest is subject to self-doubt, and his faith is at times shaken, notably by the rejection or scorn of certain parishioners who think his physical debility results from alcoholism. The overall implication of this physical and social vulnerability and suffering is that we are witnessing the life of a modern-day saint: for men such as him, attempting to live the Christly life, this world can often seem a series of frustrations and failures. Yet in the end, with the aid and advice of his mentor, the bluff priest of Torcy, he will not only have “saved” the countess who had become embittered by her husband’s philandering but perhaps also Chantal, and may well have brought his former colleague back to the fold. As Keith Reader notes in his excellent commentary on the film, the curé d’Ambricourt can be read as the Church Suffering, his bluff friend the curé de Torcy as the Church Militant, and the combination of the two as the Church Triumphant.90 This is not inherently cinematic material, and Bresson deliberately (to many critics’ dismay) used what were considered inherently uncinematic techniques to tell it. As was his wont, he chose an unknown actor, Claude Laydu, to “play” the protagonist (or rather, chose a believer whom he encouraged to spend time

90. Keith A. Reader, “The Sacrament of Writing: Robert Bresson’s Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951),” in Hayward and Vincendeau, eds., French Film, 137–145.

212

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

in a monastery, and each weekend for a year fasting and meditating with him, precisely so that he would not have to “play” the part, but would live it—a technique reminiscent of Konstantin Stanislavski’s Actors’ Studio). But what most outraged the critics was Bresson’s decision to film Laydu actually writing the diary, then double this by having him tell it in voiceover, and frequently triple it by then showing the event about which the curate had just written and spoken. This slow, pedantic process of double or triple narration cumulatively acquires an oddly solemn intensity—a solemnity that is further intensified by the recurrent analogies between the curate’s trials and the life of Christ: the sacramental implications of bread and wine, the handkerchief with which the young Séraphita/Veronica wipes his face, and the image of the curate between two fellow priests on a hill, reminiscent of Calvary, and recalling his feeling that his biblical “place” was on the Mount of Olives. Cumulatively such incidents and images led André Bazin in his notable commentary on the film to talk of the curate’s suffering as paralleling the Stations of the Cross.91 Visually the film is uneventful and bleak. There is little or no external action, which forces the spectator to read the film in transcendental terms. At times the soundtrack displaces this “trivialized” image in the spectator’s awareness, recalling Bresson’s dictum that, “when a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralise it; the ear points towards the inner life, the eye towards the outer.” 92 The austerity of these techniques culminates in a final sequence when the curate dies, or rather when his death is reported by Dufréty in a letter to Torcy: the film cross-dissolves and holds for a full 5 minutes on an image of the cross, while we hear the voiceover describe the curate’s last minutes and his last words—“Tout est grâce.” The starkness of this final, long-held image is justified by the implication that, at this stage of the narrative and of the curate’s life, nothing matters except the cross and what it stands for. Bazin reports Bresson saying (provocatively) that the only visual he really cared about was the empty screen at the end! As Ado Kyrou said, somewhat sardonically, “his next film will consist of a spoken monologue, with the text repeated in subtitles, while the camera holds for two hours on a cross or other immobile object.” 93 For some viewers, this pitiless will to aesthetic austerity established at last a valid and revolutionary means to evoke true spirituality through the renunciation of this world, while for others, it spoke rather of sterility and a devitalized ex-

91. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31, June 1951, quoted in Bazin, What Is Cinema? 1:125–143. 92. Bresson, Notes of a Cinematographer, 15–16. 93. Quoted in Bernard Chardère, “Figurez-vous qu’un soir, en plein Sahara,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 106.

1946–1951

213

istence. In short, believers could find it intensely moving, nonbelievers intensely boring. At the very least, however, it is a film that needs to be seen, as one of the very few breaks with conventional narrative techniques in this decade, “a marvel of abstract cinema.” 94 It is hard to credit now that a film on such an austere topic, told in such a deliberately undramatic way, could have figured among the top ten films of the year in exclusive release, returning (no doubt to the delight of believers) greater receipts than the aggressively antireligious L’Auberge rouge (#70) in which Fernandel played a grotesquely parodic curate.

69. Juliette, ou la clé des songes Juliette; or, The Key to Dreams Filmed 3 July–12 October 1950; released 18 May 1951 100 min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod Sacha Gordine; Scr Jacques Viot and Carné, from a play by Georges Neveux; Cinematog Henri Alekan; Music Joseph Kosma; Art dir Alexandre Trauner; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Léonide Azar; Act Gérard Philipe (Michel Grandier), Suzanne Cloutier (Juliette), Jean-Roger Caussimon (the prince and Monsieur Bellanger), René Génin (Le Père la Jeunesse), Yves Robert (the accordionist), and Arthur Devère (the memory-merchant). After the financial catastrophe of Les Portes de la nuit (#40), Marcel Carné experienced the most difficult years of his professional career. His partnership with Jacques Prévert ended when his second attempt to realize La Fleur de l’âge collapsed. Producers no longer trusted him, and he failed to get funding for a film version of Voltaire’s Candide with Gérard Philipe or of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice or of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. So when after three years of inactivity he was offered by Sacha Gordine La Marie du port (see #60—Jean Gabin would not accept the role without Carné), he was willing to take even so “minor” a task, simply to reassert his professional competence. Finished on time and within budget, it made a significant profit. Carné reported that when a colleague mocked Gordine for getting a Carné “on the cheap,” Gordine responded by offering to fund a largerscale film, regardless of cost.95 This reckless offer was to bankrupt him. Carné seized the opportunity to realize a long-held dream—an adaptation of Georges

94. See Agel et al., Sept ans de cinéma français, 69–70, 94–97. 95. Quoted in Chazal, Marcel Carné, 60.

214

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Neveux’s 1930 imagist play Juliette, ou la clé des songes. He had tried to make it in 1942 with Jean Cocteau (who introduced magic mirrors, an enchanted forest, and living statues!), Christian Bérard for the decors, and Jean Marais as protagonist, but approval had been withheld because of (unspecified) apprehensions of the occupation authorities—perhaps simply its esoteric nature. The film Carné realized in 1950 was only remotely related to Neveux’s (deliberately) obscurantist play but was also far from Cocteau’s 1942 version. The play itself had had no “frame” to situate and explain the dreamworld, simply a first act in the port where all the inhabitants have lost their memory and where Michel meets Juliette, then a second act in the forest where they have agreed to meet and where with the aid of a memory-merchant, Michel tries to restore Juliette’s memory. To this Neveux had added a third act, “to make the rest intelligible,” which took place in the Dream Administrator’s Office, and where the spectator learns that “Juliette” is the name of the woman that each man is seeking. In the 1942 version, in order to ground this dreamworld a little more securely, there was to be an introductory section where Jean Marais, as a fisherman, was to net a female face-mask, hang it on the wall, and go to sleep . . . to dream of the amnesiac world. The final (1950) version is even more firmly grounded, since in the introductory segment we meet the protagonist in prison, and the dreamworld is “explained” as an escape from this unpleasant reality. He had been in love with a girl called Juliette, and to take her to the seaside for a day had “borrowed” from the boss’s till—hence his presence in prison. The principal characters in his dreamworld thus become inflated and distorted versions of the real-world characters responsible for his incarceration, mainly himself, Juliette, and the boss (Monsieur Bellanger). Juliette, like all the others in this world, has forgotten him and all else, and he attempts desperately to remind her of their past. The authority figure who corresponds to the boss (in the script, “le personnage historique”), the master of the dream region who wins Juliette and marries her, has also lost his memory, and comes to fear that he himself may be Bluebeard. This allows for play with a sinister seventh door, which Juliette insists that he open. This tentative “grounding” of the relationship between dream and reality is, however, for the most part reserved until the epilogue (in which the boss has Michel released at Juliette’s request, because the boss and Juliette are indeed about to get married), so our understanding of the relationship is partial and progressive. For much of the time, the spectator is expected to piece together the fragmentary clues provided within the dreamworld. This may be why a preliminary title was appended further clarifying the plot: “In a prison a man dreams of the woman he loves. His dream takes him to the land of Oblivion; awaking, disappointed, he takes refuge in his dream.” The disappointment on awakening comes 1946–1951

215

from discovering that his boss is indeed about to marry “his” Juliette. Michel is distraught. He opens a door marked “Danger. No Entry,” an intense flood of light pours from the world beyond, and he passes through, thus reentering the dreamworld deliberately, presumably with a view to forgetting the new disillusion provided by real life. Indeed, “forgetting” is the form that escape takes in this film, and in entering the light-flooded world, the protagonist is choosing death, choosing forgetting, and/or choosing release. For Joël Magny, critical of the postwar obsession with studio-made films, this “triumphal entry into dream and death” is an acknowledgment of the French cinema’s terror of location shooting—to burst out of the studio sets into “reality” is equivalent to dying!96 Juliette was by far the most “arty” film that Carné ever made, and he delighted in drawing attention to its abstract, quasi-symphonic form: “The film is in four sections—village, chateau, forest, chateau—corresponding exactly to the four movements of a symphony, if you will excuse the pretention—andante, scherzo, allegro and finale. . . . That at least is the form I was aiming at.” 97 For what it’s worth, one of the simpler measures of “movement,” namely the edit rate, doesn’t bear this out. All movements of the film, including the frame, have an average shot length of about 9–10 seconds except the fourth (the chateau finale in which the seventh door opens and Michel and the crowd storm the castle), where the ASL is dramatically faster, at 5.5 seconds. Pierre Leprohon takes this musical analogy even further, proposing that, “rather than any implacable unfolding of action [the film] illustrates its theme through juxtaposed motifs, freely interacting to construct an integrated whole. An unlikely conception, perhaps of dubious validity in a film, but worthy of interest all the same.” 98 To Carné’s dismay, despite his attempts to orient the audience, Juliette was received coldly at Cannes and failed with both critics and the general public. Possibly this was because it was still too obscure (the play itself had flopped in 1930) and possibly because the oniric dreamworld figures offered no point of identification—it was “too cold.” André Bazin’s suggestion was that Carné had been at his best with poetic realism, where the realism prevailed and any metaphoric level was merely implied. Undoubtedly, the war had forced him away from realism toward myth and history, where metaphors were more immediately legible. In Juliette, however, poetry and realism have become disjoined and the metaphoric level too foregrounded. Some friends saw an analogy with

96. Joël Magny, “La Chute des valeurs ou la fin des années trente,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 60. 97. Unifrance film, April 1950. See also Carné, La Vie à belles dents, 185–191, 308–320. 98. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 256.

216

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Kafka’s The Castle, which, of course, pleased Carné, and nowadays it is possible to see the film as foreshadowing L’Année dernière à Marienbad, first because, as in that film, the protagonist here tries desperately to get the woman to acknowledge they have met before—yesterday, last week, last year—but also because of the existence of the threatening dark figure whose implacable contestation blocks the protagonist’s quest.

70. L’Auberge rouge The Red Inn Filmed 1 March–30 May 1951; released 24 October 1951 95 min, b&w Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Memnon Films; Scr Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, and Autant-Lara; Cinematog André Bac; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Fernandel (the monk), Françoise Rosay (Madame Martin), Julien Carette (Monsieur Martin), Marie-Claire Olivier (Mathilde Martin), Didier d’Yd (Jannou, the novice), Lud Germain (Fétiche, the black servant), and Jean-Roger Caussimon (Darwin, the English lord). In the sixty years since this film was made, there has surely never been a more thoroughly antireligious film to come out of France. It is loosely based on a renowned murderous melodrama, L’Auberge des Adrets, but the title was borrowed from a Balzac tale that Jean Epstein had filmed in 1923. That too was a black drama concerning a traveler killed in an inn for his diamonds by a supposedly respectable bourgeois. The general tenor of that story was to foreground the violence, deceit, and hypocrisy on which the bourgeois order is based—thematic material not so far removed from that of the present film, which molds various sources into a satiric farce lambasting not just the bourgeoisie but most particularly the church. The Martins and their black servant run a remote inn where they make their money by murdering their customers. A monk and his novice trainee arrive. Madame Martin has residual religious scruples—you don’t kill monks. Indeed, she confesses to him their 102 previous murders. Horrified, he tries to warn or usher away the coach-load of wealthy travelers who have just arrived, but without breaking his vow of confessional secrecy. By instigating a snowball fight, he reveals the Martins’ latest victim, an organ-grinder, hastily hidden in a snowman. The guilty are arrested, the travelers depart safely, and the monk thanks his God. But the black servant has sawn through the bridge supports, and the departing travelers crash to their doom. 1946–1951

217

The satire of religion is relentless. The monk is greedy and cowardly; the rituals, beliefs, and paraphernalia of religion are parodied and ridiculed. In the opening sequence, as the monk and novice approach the inn, the monk is mechanically intoning a ritual and the novice responding “Ora pro nobis.” The monk gets distracted by the thought of the food awaiting at the inn. “Ora pro nobis” responds the novice. “No, no. I’m talking about serious things now,” says the monk. He supposes God has directed them to this inn, which we, however, know is the lair of multiple murderers. And once there, in a wonderful confessional scene, the monk scavenges a chestnut-roasting grill as a makeshift confessional screen, and hears Madame Martin’s hair-raising confession still wearing the napkin from the meal he has so reluctantly left to hear her confession. The culmination of this satire of benevolent godly guidance comes when he believes that God and St. François Régis have through him saved the travelers, only to hear the coach topple into the crevasse. In a scene that the Catholic producer refused to permit, the monk organizes a processional to lead the potential victims out of and away from the inn, but they get lost in a snowstorm and find themselves back at the inn. This series of sacrilegious events constitutes an ironic contradiction of the high-minded Yves Montand chant that frames them. Critics at the time tried to play down the film’s ridiculing of the church by labeling it merely anticlericalism or anti-Catholicism, deriving perhaps from Pierre Bost’s Protestantism—it was, they claimed, only “false religion” that was being stigmatized. But surely the film suggests that all religion is false—even ridiculous. The amusing argument by Paule Sengisson that the organ-grinder’s monkey can be read as a deus ex machina guiding the narrative (however incompetently) toward a predestined moral “Happy End” only underlines the derisory attitude toward religion.99 This impatience with convention and with established power structures is extended by the film’s ridicule of the bourgeoisie, as represented by the coachload of travelers: effete, racist as well as classist, grotesque in their arrogant selfsatisfaction, it is hard not to feel that they deserve the destiny accorded them by the film, to be discarded in the rubbish-bin of the crevasse. By contrast, the film leads us almost to feel sorry for the multiple murderers, carted off by the police. As a sardonic review in the film magazine Positif noted, “So they’ve killed a hundred or so merchants of nick-nacks, got rid of a few aristos, massacred a number of people who don’t really exist, that’s all perfectly natural and proper; it’s a job like any other. Their sole real crime is to have killed gratuitously, for pure pleasure, the organ-grinder—an artist. That’s when their work turns vicious.”100

99. Téléciné, fiche no. 18. 100. Positif, no. 1, 1952.

218

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

The only characters to emerge unscathed from this literal and ideological bloodbath are the young lovers, Mathilde Martin and the novice. Complacently ignoring her complicity in her parents’ murderous activities, the film allows her to live happily ever after. She is at once monstrously guilty and charmingly innocent. Thus, Autant-Lara once again acknowledged his irrational sentimental core of sympathy for young love and young lovers. Jannou the novice is “saved” by being lost to the church: “If I go to hell with you, it won’t be hell.” This is daringly provocative material to build a film around in so committed a Catholic country. Autant-Lara’s postwar campaign to suborn established institutions and unmask hypocrisy in all its manifestations had already got him into trouble with Le Diable au corps (1946, #44), and he had been unable to find a producer for any of his subsequent projects—finally, after three years of inactivity, resigning himself to directing an anodyne vaudeville, Occupe-toi d’Amélie (as did Henri-Georges Clouzot at the same time, with Miquette et sa mére). His scorn for producers led him to say that “Directors are of no importance these days: the cinema is not ours to shape. It’s producers who will do that. . . . And what do they want? Above all, films that make money; that is, films that please the masses. Result? The cinema is on track towards total conformity.”101 For L’Auberge rouge, he was fortunate in finding a newcomer to production, Joseph Zielinski of Memnon Films, who was willing to fund it (Memnon funded only four further films in the decade). Zielinski was well-rewarded for his courage: the film was extremely successful, attracting over 50 million spectators in the following three years—barely a third of the Don Camillo films and less than a half of Fanfan, but still enough to place it fifth in the list of 1951 productions. The right-wing Cahiers critics showed their disgust by giving it 7 out of a possible 60! Undoubtedly the main reason for its public success was the presence of Fernandel in all his grimacing majesty: everything is (over)acted in Fernandel’s inimitable style, which the other actors were, however, inspired to imitate. But the anticonformist message was further sugarcoated by a constant supply of delightfully comic situations—not just the parodic confession but a parodic marriage, with a choice of rings from assassinated women’s fingers, in front of a loudly snoring assemblage of drugged witnesses; then again the capering of the (notional) monkey, the jocular organ-grinder’s music rollicking away in incongruously gruesome circumstances; and the frequent references to St. Francois Régis, the local saint whose preserved bones are so numerous he must have been a centipede.

101. Frédéric Laclos, “Les Voies du Seigneur,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 6, October– November 1951, 41.

1946–1951

219

PART III

1952–1958

71. La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth about Baby Donge) Filmed 1 October–1 December 1951; released 13 February 1952 104 min, b&w Dir Henri Decoin; Prod UGC; Scr Maurice Aubergé, based on the novel by Georges Simenon; Cinematog Léonce-Henri Burel; Music Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; Art dir Jean Douarinou; Sound Constantin Evangélou; Edit Annick Millet; Act Danielle Darrieux (Elisabeth “Bébé” Donge), Jean Gabin (François Donge), Gabrielle Dorziat (Madame d’Ortemont), Jacques Castelot (Dr. Jalabert), Daniel Lecourtois (Georges Donge), and Marcel André (Monsieur Drouin, the juge d’instruction). The poisoning, in this film, of François Donge (Jean Gabin) by his wife must surely be the event that marks the definitive end of Gabin’s previous career as a tragic but tender working-class protagonist, and which foreshadows that second career in which he will play substantial patriarchal and authoritarian figures more at home with men than with women. We first meet him close to death in a hospital clinic from which he tells, in a series of whispered flashbacks, how he came to be there. Essentially, he was poisoned by his wife Bébé because of an ireconcilable conflict of values: she, an idealistic, romantic young woman who believed love could conquer all, that it was a magical explosion of emotion that swept all before it—he, an assertive, self-confident capitalist entrepreneur, boss of a successful tannery and future candidate for president of the patronat, accustomed to attracting, using, and disposing of his many mistresses. For her, what matters is “l’amour”; for him, “l’amour se fabrique.” Both are aware from the start of this incompatibility, and it represents a sort of challenge for both of them. The greater part of the flashback story is benign, and despite their differences of ideology and age (this is yet another quasiincestuous narrative), it looks as if their “bet” to set up together has paid off. Ultimately, however, it becomes apparent that she has overestimated her ability to influence him; he continues on his bluff, patriarchal way, ignoring her naive questions (“What is love?” “What is a couple?” etc.), and casually acknowledges

1952–1958

223

that he still has innumerable mistresses. He considers that normal: it’s what men do. “You just have to accept them as they are,” as her female friends advise her. And when Bébé decides that her only remaining stratagem is to have a child by him, there is a frankly shocking scene in which he throws her angrily on the bed, slaps her about violently, then (implicitly) rapes her. This critique of patriarchal attitudes comes into focus with the painting of his father, whose glittering eyes look down on their nuptial bed. One of the most significant scenes has François waking one night and emerging to find his wife struggling on the stairs with this giant painting, which had been banished to his office, but which she is trying to bring back up—in implicit acknowledgment of its victory over her? We are left to assume that this recurrent defeat at the hands of the establishment, as embodied in her husband, is what leads her finally to poison him. The flashbacks stop short of this crucial incident, just as the final sequences stop short of showing her husband’s death. To show these scenes might have weighted the audience’s sympathies against her, and the film clearly “understands” her distress, unable to condemn her metaphorical rejection of capitalism and the patriarchy. She herself is incapable of explaining her act: we are “confronted by this impervious face that replies so politely without ever revealing anything.” But to her mother she replies, “Perhaps because I didn’t want to become like you, one day, mother dear.” As Pierre Murat says, “Bébé destroys all the values promoted by Elle, by husbands, brothers, lovers and husbands. She stands for the collapse of a masculine system resting on a gentle form of oppression, of an epoch devoted to comfort, of which the forced tranquillity masks a vacuum. Simply vertiginous.”1 And the film understands this: even the mercenary-minded family friend who has matched Bébé’s (wealthy) elder sister with François’s brother Georges cannot bring herself totally to condemn Bébé for her murderous deed, saying effectively that she will do what she can for her and the family. And having admired Bébé early because “happiness suits her,” she now wryly notes that unhappiness/misfortune suits her, too. Even more astonishingly, the film presents us with an embodiment of its compassion for the murderess in the person of the juge d’instruction, who from the start has never doubted her guilt but has been reluctant to indict her (not least because François refuses to accuse her) unless her husband actually dies. When in the final images the judge does act, we are left to assume that François has died, and that the judge is obliged to carry out what he still thinks of as “his horrific duty,” but his compassion has been further

1. Pierre Murat, “Les unes l’autre,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 48.

224

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

demonstrated by a truly astonishing chaste kiss that he bestows on the murderess’s forehead! He is, in Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier’s terms, “the good father,” and this film is so central to their concerns that it is not surprising to find them devoting to it a long and splendid analysis. They rightly see it as unusually radical in its forward-looking views on sexuality, contrasting it point by point with the viciously mysogynist Manèges (#62), where it is the woman who is struck down (by a vengeful fatality) and confined to a hospital bed, and the visiting husband who hears the story—thus “passing from an innocent dupe to an embittered male hardened against feminine perfidy.”2 In the present film, the far from innocent Donge comes to realize too late the error of his patriarchal ways, and tries to soften his visiting wife with speculation about a future where they might be reconciled—he has almost come to believe in love! But Danielle Darrieux’s Bébé is unyielding and unrepentant; unemotional, rigid, upright, and uptight, dressed in strict black, she embodies an inexorable fatality against which his tardy pleas can have no effect. Henri Decoin was fortunate in his lead actors (and indeed in his astonishing technical crew): Darrieux carries off well the startling contrast between her youthful naive impulsiveness and her embittered impassive vengeance, while Gabin proves yet again that he was never solely reliant on script and ideology for his great past successes but could do surprisingly subtle things with his unsubtle face. Yet despite these two stars, the film flopped. This is the more surprising because La Minute de vérité, a film bearing significant similarities to this one that came out later in the same year, and which also starred Gabin (this time with Michèle Morgan), was one of the leading money-earners of the season, attracting three times as many Parisian viewers and earning 286 million francs against this film’s 85 million. Could this have been due to French viewers’ ideological resistance to this proto-feminist film or (and?) to the humiliating “misuse” here of a star such as Gabin? Certainly, La Minute de vérité was not just a well-made film but a film with a more sensational dramatic underpinning (Gabin, a doctor, finds while attending an attempted suicide a photo of his wife in the arms of his patient, and while reproaching her has to listen to an account of his emotional inadequacy and his own “betrayals”). It is perhaps a little frivolous, but not entirely irrelevant, to note that director and star of La Vérité sur Bébé Donge, Decoin and Darrieux, had themselves experienced something similar to the quasi-incestuous couple in the film. They had been married in 1935—he then forty-one years old, she eighteen—and separated

2. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 297–302.

1952–1958

225

in 1941, at the time of their film Premier Rendez-vous (#2, likewise drawn from a Georges Simenon novel). La Vérité sur Bébé Donge was Decoin’s first film with his ex-wife since their divorce, so the “problems of the couple” that are here insistently foregrounded by the script were far from alien to them, and this may have contributed both to the choice of script and to a certain intensity in the production.

72. Le Plaisir House of Pleasure Filmed 7 June–18 August and 15 October–10 November 1951; released 29 February 1952 95 min, b&w Also made in English and German versions Dir Max Ophüls; Prod CCFC–Stéra Films (Harispuru); Scr Jacques Natanson and Ophüls, from three short stories of Guy de Maupassant; Cinematog Christian Matras (1 and 2), Philippe Agostini (3); Music Joe Hayos and Maurice Yvain, after Jacques Offenbach; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Pierre Calvet and Jean Rieul; Edit Léonide Azar; Act (1) “Le Masque”: Claude Dauphin (Doctor), Gaby Morlay (Denise), and Jean Galland (Le Masque); (2) “La Maison Tellier”: Madeleine Renaud (Madame Tellier), Ginette Leclerc (Madame Flora), Mila Parély (Madame Raphaële), Danielle Darrieux (Madame Rosa), Pierre Brasseur (Julien Ledentu), Jean Gabin (Joseph Rivet), Paulette Dubost (Madame Fernande), Mathilde Casadesus (Madame Louise), and Héléna Manson (Madame Rivet); (3) “Le Modèle”: Jean Servais (friend, and in the French version, the voice of Maupassant), Daniel Gélin (Jean, the painter), and Simone Simon (Joséphine, the model). This was to be, according to Max Ophüls, his French La Ronde (#65, notionally set in Austria), and as in La Ronde itself, Le Plaisir is composed of fragments and foregrounds its own performance.3 The voice of Jean Servais stands in for that of Guy de Maupassant, introducing and commenting on the three stories that constitute it. Indeed, reputedly in the original script, Ophüls and Servais were to be engaged in a running commentary on Ophüls’s search for a subject.4 Here, the stratagem of the off-screen voice is particularly useful in that it serves to unify and integrate the otherwise tenuously connected tales into a coherent

3. Ford, Histoire du cinéma français contemporain, 104. 4. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 135.

226

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

worldview—cynical, world-weary, disabused, but not without charm and a certain melancholy humor. All three tales are based on openly expressed sets of oppositions: the first, “Le Masque,” takes us from the hectic forced gaiety of a dance hall into which a masked “young” man erupts (dancing wildly but with an impassive masked face, then collapses from exhaustion) to his dingy apartment in a poor quarter where the doctor cuts off his mask to reveal a graying, aging man. His long-suffering wife and the doctor discuss his pitiful attempts to preserve the illusion of youth and vitality, concluding that humanity is inherently unable to face reality. The second and longest tale, “La Maison Tellier,” takes the madam and girls from an urban “house of ill fame” (in fact, quite the contrary) to the remote village where Madame Tellier’s niece is to be confirmed. Reinforcing the opposition between urban and rural, we therefore get sensuality and a libertarian lifestyle versus Catholic morality and the innocence of youth. The villagers, and especially the father of the girl, are fascinated by the seductive attractions of their urban visitors, and by the “parfum de la ville” that accompanies them, while they in turn speculate about the lyric idyll that they could have lived out in the flowery countryside, with its limitless silence and tranquility. This story is in ABA form, with the long introductory section presenting the jocular gaiety of the brothel, the central section the trip to the countryside, and the final section their return to the town. The final story, “Le Modèle,” is also in ABA form, the brief outer sections presenting a beachscape and a man wheeling his incapacitated partner, while the central section in flashback explains how she came to be incapacitated—a painter, he had lived with his model, but as the narrator sardonically remarks, “disgust inevitably follows possession.” He tired of her, and in despair, she hurled herself out an upstairs window. The search for pleasure is therefore a constant in all three stories. Each points up the ridicule inherent in the search and its desperate consequences. Those seeking pleasure are somewhere between foolish, deluded, and grotesque, while the consequences of their search range from disgust and cruelty to death. But if this sounds rather grim, the film itself is far from grim. The viewer is not asked to live out the anguished delusions of the characters but to view them from a distance, with the same amused detachment as the sardonic narrator. The startling virtuosity of the filmic presentation of this worldview serves further to distance the spectator, admiration replacing identification. This is a filmmaker in complete command of every aspect of the technology at his disposal, and intent on letting the spectator know it. Right from the opening images of the Palais de Danse, we encounter that baroque proliferation of intricate patternings of image for which Ophüls is well known. Here are a filmmaker and an art director (Jean d’Eaubonne) far removed from the pared down essentialism 1952–1958

227

of Lazare Meerson and his successors (Alexandre Trauner, Léon Barsacq, Max Douy) who had dominated art direction for the previous twenty years. The hectic music, the energetic action, and the Masque’s wild gestures further contribute to the atmosphere of forced gaiety, while the camera pans rapidly back and forth following the various players in their attempts to cope with the Masque’s collapse. Even the dark apartment offers an opportunity for virtuosity, as activity on the stairs is covered in steep angled shots and Dutch tilts. If the pace of invention drops a little thereafter, there is nevertheless in the church scenes an opportunity for elaborate camera movements, including a 360-degree pan, and for veiled lighting effects that isolate the purity of the innocent young communicants and the priest at the sacred end of the church. As in the first story, the framing sections in the Maison Tellier, with its bustling crowd and energetic dancing, offer an opportunity for elaborate camera movements with constant reframing, as the camera tracks around the exterior of the brothel, peering in through successive windows, while the countryside, with its limitless silence, is presented in no less religious a fashion than the church itself. Ophüls noted that the camera tracked around the brothel because it was a “maison close,” a closed house. Paul Willemen commented that “behind its doors and windows is locked away what a rigorous social morality excludes from its legal order. So the camera is on the side of the Law,” but obsessively fascinated by the forbidden, the repressed.5 As must be obvious, Le Plaisir is typical of Ophüls’s late style in depending on long, mobile takes of elaborately patterned sets rather than on editing—an average shot length of 19.7 seconds (only equaled in the 1950s by Yves Allégret) and containing no less than 17 shots longer than a minute, the longest 2.5 minutes. Altogether in this film, there are 205 camera movements per 100 minutes, many of them lengthy and spectacular, which is far in excess of any other that I have measured; 56 percent of all shots have a mobile camera. Nor is Ophüls interested in location shooting. This, like all his final films, is unmistakably a studio film. Yet the final shot of the final story, in which the painter is slowly wheeling his wife along the beach promenade, with boys flying kites against a somber, stormy sky, is unforgettably melancholy. As the narrator says, painter and model have found a sort of contentment, but “contentment is not much fun.” The craving for pleasure will always undermine any aspiration to true happiness, which is “the product of long patience, not of wild gaiety.” Pleasure is not the apogee of life but the precursor of death.

5. Paul Willemen, “The Ophuls Text: A Thesis,” in Willemen, ed., Max Ophuls, 70–71.

228

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Production had been very costly, with stages engaged at four major Parisian studios (Francœur, Joinville, St. Maurice, and Boulogne). Paris first-release audiences were good (12th most popular French film, 43.5 million francs from 162,135 spectators, in a year when the average cost per film was now 70 million francs, and the most expensive over twice that), but provincial and general release were less impressive. Even critics well-disposed toward Ophüls were disconcerted by the film. André Bazin felt he had “crushed de Maupassant under an inappropriate proliferation of detail, the elegance of the décor, the sumptuousness of the photography, the energy of the acting,”6 while for Jean-Pierre Barrot, “there was a certain formal satisfaction to be found in the film, nothing more.”7 For JeanPierre Touati, “In an Ophüls film the whole of reality, life in its entirety, is reduced simply to a spectacle.”8 For Claude Beylie on the contrary, “he cleansed de Maupassant of all his naturalistic garbage.” Ophüls may have “betrayed” de Maupassant in reworking these three stories to accord with his own worldview, but “he also outclasses his source, which is preferable to any sterile self-effacing respect.”9

73. Casque d’Or Golden Headpiece Filmed 24 September–22 November 1951; released 16 April 1952 96 min, b&w Dir Jacques Becker; Prod Robert and Raymond Hakim; Scr Becker, with assistance from Jacques Companeez; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music Georges van Parys; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Simone Signoret (Marie, aka Casque d’Or), Serge Reggiani (Manda), Claude Dauphin (Félix Leca), Raymond Bussières (Raymond), Gaston Modot (Danard, Manda’s boss), William Sabatier (Roland Dupuis, aka Belle-Gueule), Paul Azaïs (Ponsard), and Loleh Bellon (Danard’s daughter). At first sight, this film can seem like a radically new direction for Jacques Becker: after a series of studies of contemporary society, a historical setting; after a series of young married couples, a single, central, fascinating female; after po-

6. L’Observateur, no. 95. 7. Jean-Pierre Barrot, “Une tradition de la qualité,” in Agel et al., Sept ans de cinema français, 36. 8. Jean-Pierre Touati, “Le Celluloïd et le staff,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 34. 9. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 84–85.

1952–1958

229

lite society, the underworld. Yet it is also possible to see the film as analogous to several past and future films by Becker’s master, Jean Renoir, that luxuriate in the eddies of rivalry and desire that develop around strong, sensuous women (La Règle du jeu, 1939; Le Carrosse d’or, 1953, #80; Elena et les hommes, 1956). The narrative of all these is generated by surrounding such a woman with three men of different stations and qualities and noting the choices she makes. Becker had, of course, been Renoir’s assistant and disciple throughout the 1930s, up to and including La Règle du jeu, so it is not hard to see why Casque d’Or might have appealed to him when the Hakim brothers proposed it. It was based on real life figures—Manda and Leca had been notorious underworld figures in the early years of the century, and the script originated as a story of gang rivalry in which desire for Marie, the femme fatale, leads Manda to murder Leca and die for it on the scaffold. Julien Duvivier had been due to film it in 1939, but the war intervened. It was nearly made with Jean Gabin during the war, while in the postwar years, both Henri-Georges Clouzot and Yves Allégret showed an interest. According to Maurice Griffe, a collaborator on the project, “In an early version a principal role was that of the executioner, a fishing pal of Manda’s. The two men were unaware of one another’s station, and Manda only discovered the other’s when face to face with him on the scaffold.”10 Simone Signoret had wanted the role of Antoinette in Becker’s earlier film, and when she accepted this one, the script was radically reworked to center on her, while Manda became an ex-con attempting to go straight in his honest worker’s role of carpenter. In the role of Marie, Simone Signoret is nothing if not “fatale.” Of the three men who compete for her favors, Manda kills Roland in a fight over her and refuses Leca’s offer to take Roland’s place in the gang; then, when Leca shops Manda’s mate Raymond to the police in order to be able to bed Marie, Manda hunts him down in the heart of a police station where he has taken refuge and executes him. Finally Manda himself is executed by the law for the two murders, leaving Marie to reminisce sadly on their brief idyll in the country. All this was not so much a radically new direction, either for Becker or for the French cinema, as a recapitulation of numerous prewar poetic realist tropes. That Gaston Modot, Raymond Bussières, and Paul Azaïs are present, and that Gabin was at one stage foreshadowed for the role is already evidence for this. The “romantisme du pègre” (romanticizing of the underworld) is straight out of the 1930s, while the implacable fatality that hounds Manda and thwarts his dream of a new life is closely parallel to the plots of those prewar films—as is the fact that

10. Maurice Griffe, quoted in Quéval, Jacques Becker, 202, regarding a version on which he collaborated.

230

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

it should be a woman who wittingly or unwittingly is complicit in this fatality. The “idyll” sections—boating on the river or in guinguettes on its bank—that open the film and that briefly delay the fatal moment have often been likened to those of Une partie de campagne (1936), while Claude Dauphin as Félix Leca here recapitulates the role of Marcel Herrand as Lacenaire in Les Enfants du paradis (#27)—a distant descendant of Jules Berry in his role as Batala, whom Monsieur Lange had executed in an analogous courtyard scene fifteen years earlier. Originally conceived in 1938–1939, then, this film can better be seen as the last of the great 1930s poetic realist films, or at least a delightful reassemblage of their characters, incidents, and themes. And while it is not overtly acknowledged, some residue of the class-based oppositions that underlay those films survives in the tensions between Manda, the mild worker, and Leca, the suave gang boss cum wine merchant who, knowing it is false, dobs Manda’s mate in to the police as the murderer, confident that this will ensure that Manda himself surrenders to them and that Marie will therefore be his. If there is anything new in this film, it is, first, the loving period recreation; second, the strength of Marie, who takes all the initiative in her and Manda’s early encounters; and, third, the theme of male friendship that was to be foregrounded throughout the 1950s—notably in Becker’s 1954 film Touchez pas au grisbi (#86) and in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, #89). The pleasure that Becker and his team took in recreating the Belle Époque and the art nouveau style is evident. Moreover, Becker acknowledged that it was partly a nostalgic desire of his to evoke the pictural style of Le Petit Journal illustré, which he remembered from his childhood, that convinced him to accept the task of directing it. No doubt it is this autobiographical element that led Becker to declare it his favorite of all the films he directed. Not surprisingly, Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier seize on Simone Signoret’s strong female role to talk of a recalibration of male-female relationships within the couple. Certainly Manda is, as they point out, the antithesis of a macho hero. He is a man “who has no need to dominate (for instance women) in order to feel he’s alive,” while Casque d’Or “is an outstanding symbol of women who decide to stand on their own two feet whatever the cost.” Leca, as the patriarchal authority, “must destroy both this gentle man and this rebellious woman—two subversive instances of a non-sexist and non-exploitative society.”11 In this sense, at least, Casque d’Or constitutes an important advance on the “modern” couples in the films Becker had recently been making, and was indeed still to make the following year in Rue de l’Estrapade.

11. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 263.

1952–1958

231

Often considered Becker’s masterpiece, this film is seen on the contrary by Joël Magny as foreshadowing the weaknesses that were to beset his later films, as a result of accepting the theatrical conventions inherent in studio “facticity.”12

74. Jeux interdits Forbidden Games Filmed 10 September–21 October, then 17 March 1952–7 April 1952; released 9 May 1952 102 min, b&w Dir René Clément; Prod Silver Films; Scr Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Clément, and François Boyer, from the last’s novel; Cinematog Robert Juillard; Music Narciso Yepes; Art dir Paul Bertrand; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Roger Dwyre; Act Georges Poujouly (Michel Dollé), Brigitte Fossey (Paulette), Laurence Badie (Berthe Dollé), Lucien Hubert (old man Dollé), Jacques Marin (Georges Dollé), Suzanne Courtal (Mother Dollé), Amédée (Francis Gouard), Denise Perrone (Madame Gouard), André Wasley (Monsieur Gouard), and Louis Saintève (the priest). This is one of the last and finest of the postwar “message” films. André Cayatte’s series on law, justice, and morality were the most prominent of these films à thèse, while Meurtres (#67) supported his attack on the euthanasia laws. Together with Claude Autant-Lara’s films, these five films constituted a concerted attack on the hypocrisy of various social, political, and religious authorities. But even Autant-Lara had not been able to film his subversive antiwar film, L’Objecteur, which had to wait until 1961 when it could be filmed in Yugoslavia (and even then, because of the continuing war in Algeria, it was not screened in Paris till 1963). In the present film, René Clément managed to evade this informal ban on aggressive criticism of war by focusing on two young children’s experiences. Although superficially the title refers to the games of death the children play, implicitly it also refers to war itself as the forbidden game that humanity cannot resist playing. For obvious reasons, the vast majority of postwar films dealing with wartime experience had been euphoric, patriotic rants, epics concerning the heroic role played by the Resistance and the no less glorious role played by undercover

12. For details of his critique, see Joël Magny, “La Chute des valeurs ou la fin des années trente,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 68.

232

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Resistance chiefs posing as benign heads of families. Clément had directed the very first feature-length film on the war (La Bataille du rail #31), which because of its documentary origins is still one of the most watchable of the 123 films on the war made between 1945 and 1980.13 His next, Les Maudits (1947), was an eccentric but less successful take on the war, following German sympathizers fleeing to South America in a submarine. Jeux interdits, which was originally written by François Boyer while an IDHEC student in 1946, is no less eccentric, asking us to identify with two children attempting to come to terms with the idea of death. Young Paulette’s middle-class family is caught up in the exodus as the German Army approaches Paris. In a bombing and strafing raid, her father, mother, and pet dog are killed, and Paulette ends up being taken in by a local peasant family, the Dollés, whose younger son, Michel, takes her under his wing. Paulette’s obsession with death leads the two children to scavenge the paraphernalia of funerary rituals to create their own secret cemetery in the farm mill. Ultimately, police are alerted to her presence with the Dollés and take her away to be cared for by the Red Cross—thus separating her once again from “her family” and particularly from Michel on whose comradeship she had come to depend. The final shot, obliquely reminiscent of that of Les Enfants du paradis (#27), has Paulette thrusting through a milling crowd at the Red Cross center, calling plaintively for Michel. Here, as there, a distraught individual is represented as lost amid a seething, anonymous crowd. The success of the film depended on a credible performance from the children. That performance is astounding and a credit to the director, who has them underplay the progressively more extravagant demands of their games in a naive, “factual” way. The games themselves are fabricated and modified from fragments of the peasant family’s and the local priest’s remarks and rituals, notably when one of the Dollé sons falls from a cart and injures himself mortally. To decorate the graves of dead animals that they bury, the two children collect crosses from all available sources—the local hearse, the church, the cemetery—and the quiet pride of Michel as he sits contemplating the result of his labors is very moving. Told that he shouldn’t be playing with such things because “they’re not toys,” he quietly agrees—“No, they’re not toys.” The dismaying final scene, when the two children are separated, is startling because unexpected, preceded as it is by a series of incongruously comic moments—the satiric Romeo and Juliet romance between neighbors, the unfortunate accident as Michel tries to steal the church cross, and the feud between the

13. Thirty-six in the late 1940s, twenty-two in the 1950s, thirty-three in the 1960s, and thirty-two in the 1970s.

1952–1958

233

two families, exacerbated when the splendid cross dominating the neighbors’ family tomb disappears, and, in the ensuing struggle, the two fathers fall into a recently dug grave. Jeux interdits is technically interesting—on the one hand, it is highly edited (average shot length is 6.2 seconds, faster than any sound feature film I have checked except Antoine et Antoinette, #46, and Clément’s earlier La Bataille du rail, #31) with mobile camera and a delightful foregrounded music-track by Narciso Yepes. On the other hand, it aims for realism, with location shooting and little punctuation. Clément and his two young leads spent two months in La Foux (Basses-Alpes) to get the feel of local existence and behavior before shooting began. The much-admired opening sequence closely follows contemporary records of the exodus filmed by Charles Frend. On the whole, however, neither critics nor the public were impressed when the film was first released. The principal focus of critical commentary was the representation of the adult world and of religion, whose rituals were felt to be ridiculed by the film. Arguably, the film satirizes human stupidity and man’s inhumanity to man, linking the levels of international warfare, family rivalry, and brute animality through a series of verbal and visual echoes, and identifying childhood as a privileged moment before the growth into adult disillusion and casual cruelty. For Georges Charensol, this contrast was too gross—the world of filthy stupid peasants was unconvincing despite its pretence of realism—“a pamphlet attacking the family and religion.” For Pierre Leprohon, too, the discrepancy between the delicately observed world of the children and the crass, macabre farce of the adult peasantry who betray it is too extreme, but he also allows that it was precisely to redeem the stupidity, malice, and hypocrisy of the adult world that the world of the children—the future—needed to be so magically evoked.14 Pierre Kast in Cahiers du cinéma, however, saw it as an impressive attempt to evoke the world of children: “It’s a long time since we saw a French film so courageous in attacking the moral complacency of [the adult world], with its contradictions and mystifications.”15 More recently, Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier also see the adult world as consisting of monstrous egoists. For them, Clément is acting as spokesperson for modernists in attacking ex-Vichy traditionalists and their back-to-the-soil rural values.16 In fact, however, despite a few clichés from the provincial gothic genre, the Dollés are not presented in a particularly critical way but rather as quite kindly

14. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 411–414. 15. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 13, June 1952, 64. 16. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 270.

234

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

in their treatment of this “alien,” urban, middle-class waif, tucking her into bed and doing their best to make her feel part of the family. She, in turn, is appreciative of their care. Even the priest is represented without malice or cynicism. The initial criticism of French commentators and public was largely undeserved. The universal acclaim that greeted the film overseas, however, and the awards in numerous festivals, seems to have caused the French to reconsider their view of the film, because it was more successful in general release.

75. Nous sommes tous des assassins We Are All Murderers Filmed 7 January 1952–22 March 1952; released 21 May 1952 115 min, b&w Dir André Cayatte; Prod UGC/Jolly Film/Labor Film; Scr Cayatte and Charles Spaak; Cinematog Jean Bourgoin; Music Raymond Legrand; Art dir Jacques Colombier; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Paul Cayatte; Act Marcel Mouloudji (René Le Guen), Georges Poujouly (Michel Le Guen), Raymond Pellegrin (Gilbert Bollini), Antoine Balpêtré (Dr. Dutoit), Julien Verdier (Marcel Bauchet), Claude Laydu (Philppe Arnaud, Le Guen’s lawyer), Renée Gardès (Le Guen’s mother), Louis Seigner (Abbé Roussard), Léonce Corne (the captain),Yvonne de Bray, Paul Frankeur, and Line Noro. After the immense critical and popular success of Justice est faite (#64), André Cayatte and Charles Spaak felt justified in pursuing further their analysis/critique of the justice system. The title of this, their second film, accused all citizens of France of being murderers, because in their name, fellow citizens were regularly and legally being assassinated. The script that Cayatte and Spaak produced follows one particular individual—René Le Guen, played by Marcel Mouloudji—from 1943 to 1950, as he moves from slum dweller to Resistance fighter to murderer to the death cell awaiting execution. During his time in the death cell, he encounters three other condemned murderers, and cumulatively their cases are used to examine the morality and effectiveness of the death penalty as a way of dealing with crime. René Le Guen’s own case is used to consider the social conditions that many of the young of the day had had to endure, and the part those conditions may well have played in the murders that René committed. Son of an alcoholic mother abandoned by his father, growing up in a shanty town on the outskirts of Paris during the war, René has had to be ruthless to survive. Events conspire to make him a hit-man for the Resistance, when the murders he is encouraged 1952–1958

235

to commit are seen as heroic patriotic acts—but they are also represented as the acts of a marginally psychotic character who depends on his sten-gun to bolster his sense of self-belief. On the orders of his Resistance chief, he murders the (reputedly treacherous) contact who had initiated him into the Resistance, then in a flurry of drunken rage, turns the gun on the Resistance chief himself. Following the liberation, the weight of this past leads him to assassinate in another manic flurry of gunfire others who stand in his way, notably a policeman. Clearly the implicit argument in this narrative (borrowed from Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito, 1945) is that childhood poverty, lack of an acceptable family life, and his Resistance “training” are more to blame here than any inherent murderous nature. French society is as guilty as René, and is displacing onto him its own guilt. The other three cases are dealt with less systematically but conspire to further undermine the case for the death penalty. In the first, Dr. Dutoit has been convicted of poisoning his wife to facilitate an adulterous liaison, but quietly, firmly, continues to insist on his innocence. The French justice system is killing a man whose guilt we have serious reason to doubt. In the second, Gilbert is a young Corsican who has killed someone in a blood feud, and insists that such murders are a family matter and nothing to do with the state or its courts. In the third, Marcel Bauchet has killed his baby son for preventing him getting a proper night’s sleep. Here the evidence of mental instability that we witness would easily justify a plea on the grounds of insanity, yet Bauchet is dragged off to the guillotine screaming out “Help! Murder!” (and the preparations for each execution are presented with an unnerving documentary credibility), while the cry of “Assassins” is taken up by all the prisoners in their cells. The film does not try to excuse murderous acts, but it does urge viewers to try to understand them, and to consider whether execution is the appropriate answer. Social conditioning, social traditions and pressures, and the possibility that an innocent man might go to the guillotine are ignored in favor of the desire to “set an example.” Yet the film also undermines this already tenuous case by noting that the death penalty has never had any perceptible effect on the murder rate. As the prison doctor says, “You don’t cure TB by example—or crimes, either.” As a final point, the film presents a new prison confessor straight out of a Robert Bresson film—intense, passionate, compassionate, he refuses to accept that anyone has the right to judge definitively, let alone to kill, another human being. The death penalty is not just immoral and ineffective; it is irreligious. And, of course, ironically, the justice system is doing to these people exactly what it condemns them for doing. Moreover, in a further ironic move, the viewer is confronted with two incidents in which the prison medical services are mobilized in

236

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

a desperate attempt to save the life of a suicide (one of them is René), so that the “justice” system can then kill both of them legally. In the course of this powerful attack on the death sentence, the film constructs some moving moments—Dr. Dutoit’s quiet farewell to his death-row colleagues René and Gilbert as he is taken away to be excuted (“Adieu, vous autres”); the young priest’s intense stare as he addresses each of the condemned men in turn (“Tu es immortel et irremplaceable”); and René’s young brother, Michel, who has known nothing but stark want, wandering bemusedly around the wealthy bougeois lawyer’s laden dining-table. But most impressive of all is the opening half-hour in which René Le Guen’s home environment is evoked— the squalid shanty town, the vast bulk of a factory looming across a bleak wasteland, the desperate rag-pickers, the alcoholic mother and prostitute sister. And for anyone wanting to know what France was like at war’s end, or at the very least what just five years later it was remembered as having been like, these opening scenes are essential viewing. The end is also impressive: René has learned to write in order to be able to petition the president for clemency, and his lawyer has supported the appeal. The lawyer receives the phone call—life or death. We never find out. Instead, the camera picks up René’s young brother, taken in by the lawyer’s family, as he is trying to comprehend this unimaginable luxury. He comes toward the camera and stares blankly into it, much as Léaud does at the end of Les 400 coups. FIN. Both this and Cayatte’s and Spaak’s next film, Avant le déluge, were very successful, if not quite so successful as Justice est faite, and they served to foreground the importance of the film à thèse in these postwar years, linking justice, law, and morality (see also Meurtres, #67). Film could hope once again to be more than simple entertainment. Cayatte was consciously taking up JeanPaul Sartre’s challenge of solidarity and responsibility: “We are all linked to one another, and responsible for one another. We are responsible for the black student refused admission to the University, and for the Indian peasant dying of hunger.”17 Likewise, confronted with legal executions, each of us must say, “Je suis responsable.” Production of the pair’s earlier scenario, L’Affaire Seznec, concerning a World War I murder case in which an innocent man spent twentythree years in prison, was blocked by the Ministry of Justice (!). The same happened two year’s later to Claude Autant-Lara’s proposed film on conscientious objection to the Algerian War.18

17. In an interview with Régis Bergeron in Humanité, 31 March 1956. 18. For such instances of censorship, see Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 253–255.

1952–1958

237

André Bazin disapproved of this film, as he did of all Cayatte’s socially committed films, because he felt that they proposed a mechanistic juridical universe peopled by automatons; he demanded a margin of mystery and unpredictability in the representation of humanity and longed for “the revolt of the robots.”19

76. Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo The Little World of Don Camillo Filmed 3 September–24 November 1951; released 4 June 1952 107 min, b&w Dir Julien Duvivier; Prod Francinex/Rizzoli-Amato; Scr Duvivier and René Barjavel, from stories by Giovanni Guareschi; Cinematog Nicolas Hayer; Music Alessandro Cigognini; Art dir Virgilio Marchi; Sound Maurice Laroche and Jacques Carrère; Edit Maria Rosada Cast Fernandel (Don Camillo), Gino Cervi (Peppone), Sylvie (Madame Christina), Franco Interlenghi (Mariolino Brusco), Vera Talchi (Gina Filotti), Charles Vissières (the bishop), and Jean Debucourt (the voice of Christ). Any account of the French cinema in the early 1950s must include a reference to the Don Camillo films, if only because of their immense popularity. In first release in Paris, Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo amassed over half a million admissions (529,437), more even than any American film in that year, and some 90,000 more than the next French film (Fanfan la Tulipe). This success was repeated in the provinces, which often had quite different tastes from Paris. It became the most popular film in Marseilles (218,706), in Lyons (167,401), in Bordeaux (110,838), in Toulouse (114,211), and in Lille (101,684). These first-release admissions in the six major cities netted 260 million francs. After general release, the total admissions in France alone were 12.79 million, which proved the record for a French film in that decade (3 million more than the second placed Les Misérables in 1958); indeed, in the fifty-five years between 1945 and 2000, only two films were to surpass it—La Grande Vadrouille in 1966 and Les Visiteurs in 1993. And since it was a French-Italian coproduction, the Italian release would probably have been comparably successful. That success can seem astounding now: the narrative is disjointed, cobbled together from a collection of disparate stories; the acting (most notably that of Fernandel) is atrocious; and the attempts at comedy are painfully forced. Nor

19. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 36, August 1954, 25–27.

238

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

is there anything in the fabrication of the film to attract attention or admiration—it is pure hackwork on the part of the director, competent but bland. What therefore can explain its enormous success? Perhaps Fernandel’s hysterical overacting seemed funnier to the spectators of the day than it does now (though other films where he acted equally outrageously had nothing like the same success). But even taking this into account, the subject matter of the film, despite its clumsy presentation, must have registered with them as particularly affecting and relevant. That material consists of a number of variations on a single major opposition, between communist civil society (as embodied in the local mayor, Peppone, and his working-class supporters) and Catholic high society (as embodied in the local priest, Don Camillo, and his respectable parishioners). This opposition is foregrounded in the opening scenes when Don Camillo, hysterical at the intrusive hullabaloo of the mayor’s triumphant procession in the street outside, rushes about the church arguing with the crucified Christ (i.e., his Catholic conscience) as to what violence he should enact on the mayor and his lackeys. There is a flashback to past confrontations in which Christ had to likewise mitigate Don Camillo’s rages and bring him back to reason and humanity. The opposition between church and state is then embodied in young lovers who, as in Shakespeare, have been communicating since the age of five via a hole in the wall, since their families are not on speaking terms. then shown again by a competition for status in the community between the mayor’s desire to construct a Casa del Populo and the priest’s desire to establish a recreation ground and football field. This in turn leads inevitably to a game of football between rival teams of communists and parishioners, which rapidly deteriorates into fisticuffs. Finally, disagreements between workers and landowners culminate in a strike, which threatens to tear apart the community (unmilked cows, rotting produce, etc.). Clearly, at least on the surface, this is a community deeply divided, but at the same time, there is ample evidence of a fundamental goodness on both sides. The two principal protagonists had fought together during the war, and the priest is overcome with emotion when baptizing Peppone’s child. Both work together surreptitiously to overcome the potentially disastrous consequences of the strike, and then come to an agreement about celebrating the wedding of the lovers. The seemingly incompatible opposing political and religious principles are therefore characterized as little more than typically Italian histrionics, which cover an underlying affection. In other words, the film takes a genuine problem plaguing both France and Italy, where communists had formed the main body of resistants to fascist rule and to Vichy collaboration while Catholics had been largely supportive of it, and represents it as purely superficial. Basically, the communities that had supported 1952–1958

239

the regimes in power and the groups resisting those regimes can overcome their differences, work together for the common good, and happily intermarry. This was clearly a desirable message, the more so because in 1950–1951, communism, which had benefited from wide popular support in the aftermath of the liberation, was under increasing pressure from the right as the Cold War began to affect all aspects of Western society. Extremist left-wing views had to be excluded from power without alienating the vast masses of moderate left-wing citizens. The film sides with Don Camillo and the faithful (and notably with the bishop, who slyly works to reconcile the two sides) while recognizing the qualities of the civil society. As Pierre Leprohon notes, the film reminds spectators that, “over and above the social comedy, these are human beings, with their conscience and their faith.”20 Leprohon also indicates that the film’s success made Julien Duvivier a wealthy man because he had opted for a percentage of the profits—much to the annoyance of Fernandel, who had rejected a similar offer. Not surprisingly, a sequel was proposed and filmed by Duvivier, with Fernandel and a somewhat different cast, Le Retour de Don Camillo, which was even more financially rewarding. Three further sequels were made in Italy, and during the last one, Fernandel was discovered to have cancer. He died in 1971.

77. Les Belles de Nuit Beauties of the Night Filmed 1 April–6 June 1952; released 14 November 1952 90 min, b&w Dir René Clair; Prod Franco-London Films/Rizzoli Film; Scr Clair, with J.-P. Gredy and P. Barillet; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Georges van Parys; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Louisette Hautecœur; Act Gérard Philipe (Claude), Martine Carol (Edmée de Villebois), Gina Lollobrigida (Leila), Magali Vendeuil (Suzanne), Raymond Bussières (Roger), Raymond Cordy (Gaston), and Jean Parédès (Paul). This film is one of the delights of the decade, and as inventive as any that René Clair ever authored. Like all his best films, it is based on a genial technical structure that contains as little thematic density as possible. We are enchanted not so much by the material presented as by the ingenious linkages that inter-

20. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 61–62.

240

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

connect the sequences presenting it. The premise is simple: Claude, an unhappy, harassed musician in a provincial town, repulsed by the noisy vulgarity of contemporary society, escapes by fantasizing in his dreams about the women he meets every day—Edmée, a rich pupil’s mother, becomes a 1900 Belle Époque admirer; the cashier in the local café becomes Leila, a harem beauty in 1830s Algeria; while the nearby garagiste’s daughter, Suzanne, becomes a marquess’s daughter in the 1770s. Initially delightful, these dreams turn sour when, having made a rendez-vous with each of them, he is unable to get to sleep in time to meet them. The dreams become nightmares, and he is threatened variously with pistol, sword, and guillotine. Ultimately, he is relieved to be able to return to the present, where his opera has been accepted for performance and the garagiste’s daughter loves him. The dream-romances are contrasted with reality by their lack of threedimensional relief, and linked one to another by Claude’s musical vocation— most particularly by the opera he has composed, which features in each dream. But the main formal linkage is an old gentleman first met in the café who decries the present day and expresses nostalgia for “the good old days” of his Belle Époque youth. In Claude’s consequent Belle Époque fantasy, however, the same old man recurs, now disgusted by taxes and the threat of war and yearning for the good old days of 1830 and colonial adventure, but there again he recurs nostalgic for prerevolutionary days. In a final climactic leap backward, the film categorizes all this as nostalgia for a golden age, and Claude finds himself in a palaeolithic setting with dinosaurs. When this dream also turns sour, Claude’s mates help him escape it in a jeep that careens through the ages toward the present. Again this is a genial concept, but it is the one element of the film that doesn’t succeed on film as well as on paper—but then, Clair could never resist a chase scene. Another link between sequences is the phrase “C’est le règlement,” as Claude’s attempts to find happiness in past ages are thwarted by the contemporary versions of red tape. Again, technically, the various sequences are linked by a series of cunning aural and visual echoes, and by zip pans—a form of punctuation to which Clair became addicted in the 1950s as a necessary adjunct to the desired comic pace. And the summons back to the present from Claude’s escapist fantasies is always a peremptory sound, aggressively interrupting his sleep and thus his dreams. Surely no other film has so constantly inventive a soundtrack. Space does not allow me to do justice to it. Suffice it to say that, just as the garagiste’s revving of the cars that he is repairing interrupts Claude’s composition. so does the tinny horn on a child’s toy car, while various bits of modern machinery contribute to the harassment—a road drill, a vacuum cleaner, and a motorcycle. This conflict between modern machinery and Claude’s higher artistic aspirations culminates in a spectacular dream performance of one of his compositions 1952–1958

241

in which bits of machinery progressively displace orchestral instruments—all those mentioned plus metal saws on iron bars instead of stringed instruments, and empty petrol cans and wrenches instead of drums, until even this cacaphony is swamped by a screaming jet engine. This summary of the aural and visual complexity of the film does, despite its brevity, allow us to recognize that, despite the film’s determinedly playful “balletic” nature, certain thematic preoccupations are present. A first glance would pick up an apparent distaste for contemporary existence, but although the film exploits to the full this comic distaste, it ultimately distance itself from it: reality may be noisy and vulgar, but other ages prove scarcely preferable, and it is essential to learn to cope with the present. But in thus gently satirizing nostalgia for an earlier age, Clair is arguably satirizing an essential element of his own personality—mocking nostalgia for the good old days the better to evoke them. Many critics, and most persuasively Barthélémy Amengual, have seen Les Belles de Nuit as archetypical of Clair’s work precisely because of its tendency to regress in time. In all Clair’s films, there is evidence of a desire to defy time, “to recapture, prolong and eternalise his childhood.” Hence the “childish delight” that pervades his films, the playfulness.21 His films are “games,” and Les Belles de Nuit is one of the best games he ever played, recapitulating many of his previous films. A further index of the extent to which this film constitutes self-deprecating self-satire is the comment Clair made to Georges Sadoul just before its first screening: he admitted he was indeed nostalgic for a golden age, more precisely for the late eighteenth century. René Chomette, the agnostic, seems to have chosen his pseudonym “René Clair” based on Rivarol’s epigram, “Tout ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français” (if it’s not clear [clair] it’s not French). The enlightenment of the eighteenth century—Marivaux, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Laclos— was Clair’s spiritual base, and that incidentally is where, in this film, Claude (re) meets Suzanne and realizes he loves her. Moreover, the apparent reconciliation with present reality is scarcely convincing in this film. As represented there, the 1950s differs only in marginal respects from the “reality” represented in Clair’s 1930s films—a set-dependent urban working-class environment with cobbled streets, little shops, and a community of “mates” (shopkeepers, workers and bosses, cops and robbers, all basically good blokes; they may tease you, but they help out when needed). This idealized representation of daily life dispenses with the particularities that might lead the audience to identify or sympathize with the characters. As Antonio Pietrangeli notes, “Clair is more interested in classes than in individuals, perhaps

21. Amengual, “René Clair,” 1985, no. 2 (1998).

242

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

because they offer a better target for his satire than do individuals.”22 This is why Clair has so often been accused of peopling his world with puppets and marionettes—or more politely, archetypes—simple, clearly defined personae that interact balletically but don’t change at all in the course of the film. Perhaps it is also why he looked to Gérard Philipe for his big three films of the decade—Philipe was uniquely capable of animating and attracting the spectator’s allegiance to these puppets.

78. La Fête à Henriette (Henriette’s Big Day); remade as Paris when It Sizzles (1963) Filmed 4 August–17 October 1952; released 17 December 1952 118 min, b&w Dir Julien Duvivier; Prod Régina/Filmsonor; Scr Henri Jeanson and Duvivier; Cinematog Roger Hubert; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Julien Coutellier; Edit Marthe Poncin; Act Dany Robin (Henriette), Michel Roux (Robert), Hildegarde Neff (Rita Solar), Michel Auclair (Maurice), Henri Crémieux and Louis Seigner (the scriptwriter and director), Odette Laure and Jeannette Batti (their “petites amies”), Daniel Ivernel (the police inspector), Micheline Francey (Nicole, the secretary), with Julien Carette, Saturnin Fabre, and Paulette Dubost. This is surely one of the most inventive films that Julien Duvivier ever directed. It was made in 1952, between his two enormously successful Don Camillo films, but was (perhaps not surprisingly) shunned by the public and (perhaps more surprisingly) disregarded by the critics. It is hard to understand how Duvivier ever acquired the reputation of a hack director, given the radical structural experiments to which he contributed his talents over the decades. Un carnet de bal (1937), in which a rediscovered dance-card triggers a woman’s memories of and search for the men she had danced with, was to inaugurate the “sketch” genre, which Duvivier subsequently exploited with great success in Untel père et fils (1939) and in three films during his wartime sojourn in Hollywood. Even more adventurous was Sous le ciel de Paris (1950–1951), involving a series of fragmented stories interleaved and occasionally intersecting, which contribute cumulatively to a broader picture of a given time and place than could be provided by any single protagonist or narrative.

22. Quoted in ibid.

1952–1958

243

But La Fête à Henriette is the most engaging experiment of all: amusingly reflexive, it involves the slightly hysterical search by a scriptwriter and a director for a story on which to base their next film. Camped in a provincial inn room with their “petites amies” and a secretary, they throw ideas back and forth— bicker, shout, argue, and, on rare occasions, come across an idea they both think might work. As their debate progresses, the characters and storyline, at first fragmentary and tentative, begin to take shape on the screen, and as they do so, the “fictional” nature of this invented screenplay is marked off from the “real” events in the hotel bedroom by a series of technical extravagances—rapid editing, a nearly vertical camera, and Dutch tilts that are often extremely angled, with the camera at times swaying back and forth from left-up tilts to right-up tilts. This charmingly reflexive initial concept is given further dramatic interest by the fact that scriptwriter and director have totally incompatible aesthetic preferences—the one big, heavy, and slow, favoring modest and realistic characters and storyline; the other volatile, passionate, and impatient, favoring violence, adventure, and pornography. As one of the two’s ideas begin to take form, the other will shout “No No No!” and cancel the fragment in favor of his own ideological preferences. It would have been delightful if Henri Jeanson and Duvivier had implemented the original proposal to play their own roles as these two lead characters, but even with actors playing them, the concept works well. As the debate progresses, the fragments of their fictional film become more extended, and we live with their invented characters for longer periods. Needless to say, this inventiveness is primarily reserved for the framing structure, and there is little of real interest in the fictional film that results from their arguments. Basically, it is a love story that involves (“will involve,” since not yet made!) a modest, handsome, young photographer called Robert and a charming young midinette called Henriette, who meet and fall in love. Her name-day is of course St. Henriette, which falls on the French national day, 14 July, implicitly identifying her with the nation. They meet on the eve of her name-day and arrange to spend it together, but circumstances intervene and they each experience sexual adventures—her with Maurice, a crook with charm, and him with Rita Solar, a seductive circus-girl with an independent turn of mind. This allows for erotic interest in both these stories, as well as in the inn bedroom of the framing debate, where the petite amies are in and out of bed all the time in scanty dress. It also allows for an entertaining narrative set in the light-fingered Maurice’s underworld circles, where his heavy colleagues are planning a hit on a baron’s urban pad. There is a delightful interlude in which Maurice the crook, beginning to fall for Henriette, pretends to be the baron and (as he breaks into it) introduces her to “his” urban pad, turning her head with images of great wealth and limitless travel to exotic destinations. 244

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Ultimately, the need to find an adequate resolution to their fictional plot obsesses the authors: Henriette and Robert get together again and Maurice, dejected, allows himself to be arrested by the police. Essentially, however, this invented scenario is (self-mockingly) composed of clichés—the fictional scriptwriter and director, for all their supposed brilliance, produce nothing but the most conventional characters and situations, which thus compose a parodic critique of contemporary cinematic clichés. Some rapid montage sections recall Duvivier’s “impressionist” structure in surveying a series of alternative narrative outcomes for a given situation, evoking a range of alternative classes and cultures in a range of distinctive Paris quarters. Like Duvivier’s “sketch” and “impressionist” structures, this format allows for the introduction of famous actors in incidental roles, with useful spectator appeal. Here, Saturnin Fabre, Paulette Dubost, and Julien Carette take bit parts, adding to the already unavoidable sense that La Fête à Henriette has multiple connections to the 1930s—notably to the Marcel Carné/Jacques Prévert films, to the open-air popular festivities of René Clair’s Quatorze juillet (1933), and to Duvivier’s own La Belle Équipe and Pépé le Moko (1936 and 1937, the latter his first with Jeanson). It is not hard to imagine the glee that devising this scenario must have provided for Jeanson and for Duvivier, camped at the time in just such a provincial inn as are their fictional authors (with or without petites amies). Cahiers du cinéma condemned the film out of hand as “vulgar . . . a grammatical error” (but then they automatically condemned all Duvivier’s films). Every self-respecting film these days, they said, seems to have to have its nude scene, and “here you get all the resultant cheapskate paraphernalia.”23 Certainly the film’s success was limited, but the rights to it were bought by Columbia and made into a film entitled Paris when It Sizzles, with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden (1962–1963).

79. Manon des Sources (Manon des Sources); remade as Manon of the Spring (1985) Filmed 16 June–16 August 1952; released 16 January 1953 226 min (Part 1: “Manon des Sources,” 117 min; Part 2: “Ugolin,” 109 min), b&w Dir Marcel Pagnol; Prod Films Marcel Pagnol; Scr Pagnol, later published as L’Eau des collines; Cinematog Willy; Music Raymond Legrand; Art dir Robert Giordani

23. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 19, January 1953, 55; no. 22, April 1953.

1952–1958

245

and Eugène Delfau; Edit Raymonde and Jacques Bianchi; Act Jacqueline Pagnol (Manon), Raymond Pellegrin (the teacher), Rellys (Ugolin), Henri Vilbert (curate), Robert Vattier (Monsieur Belloiseau), Édouard Delmont (Anglade), Henri Poupon (Le Papet), Charles Blavette (Pamphile), and Milly Mathis (Amélie). Manon des Sources is one of the great triumphs of naive filmmaking, picking up on and continuing Marcel Pagnol’s great prewar films. Silent and untypically reclusive during the war, Pagnol (by this time a member of the Académie Française) had at best modest success with his postwar films. Finally, however, with Manon he produced, wrote, and directed, on his property at La Treille and in his own studio in Marseilles, another in that series of celebrations of the Provençal landscape, character, and accent for which he had been famous before the war. Manon des Sources resembles nothing else made in this period, and it is possible either to marvel at it as a masterpiece or be bored stiff by its endless succession of static, talkative scenes. Like all Pagnol’s films, it is built around a sentimental melodramatic narrative that would be almost embarrassing if told straight, but most of the melodrama happens off-screen, and what we witness is a series of 20–40 minute segments in which characters remember, speculate about, or pass judgment on that off-screen drama. Out of these debates we reconstruct the following: Ugolin has cheated Manon’s family out of their farm by blocking their stream, causing the death of her father, Jean de Florette, and of her brother. Manon gets revenge by blocking the village stream and forcing a crisis in which Ugolin’s villainy comes out. He hangs himself and leaves her the farm in his will. This easily summarized story takes four hours to tell, each segment taking its own good time to make its point. In Part I: a The village men discuss the police out hunting for Manon (40 min!). a The police bring her in, and the teacher organizes an informal trial (35 min). a Acquitted, she returns to the hills, where an old woman imparts the knowledge that will allow her to revenge herself, and Ugolin, besotted by her, tries to seduce her with offers of wealth, marriage, and the farm, which she thinks ought rightly to be hers anyway. a At the village ceremony organized to celebrate fifty years’ use of their life-giving spring, it suddenly stops flowing.

246

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

In Part II: a The town council discusses what to do about the dried-up stream (20 min). a The priest gives a sermon advising prayer and repentance (20 min). a The teacher again calls the villagers together in a debate that turns into a second trial, this time of Ugolin (20 min). a Ugolin acknowledges guilt and commits suicide; the villagers, no less guilty, bring offerings to Manon’s grotto (35 min). a The villagers repent in a ceremonial procession, and the spring flows again. The parallels between the two parts are apparent, in councils, trials, and public ceremonies. But no sane scriptwriter-director would open a film with 40 minutes of dialogue, let alone include an uninterrupted 20 minute sermon, even allowing for occasional brief cutaways to the attentive congregation. Several takes of the priest last between 1 and 2 minutes. Indeed, throughout the film, a single person talking will frequently be filmed uncut, whereas the town councils are intensely edited. Camera movement is minimal. It is unclear who would have been responsible for these technical decisions, since Pagnol was notoriously unconcerned by such matters, leaving them to the relevant technicians. There is, in fact, a lack of technique and little or no action, but an insane amount of talking. Torn between affection and outrage, commentators remark on the representation of Provençal character that emerges—obsessed by the word, eloquent, passionate, unstaunchable (“intarissable”), but also naturally theatrical, always “performing,” spontaneously staging all their daily interactions. For his admirers, Pagnol’s filmmaking practices placed him alongside his compatriot Jean Giono (source of many of his scenarios) as heir to Frédéric Mistral, to the epic poets, to the troubadors, to Homer himself. “If one day the Iliad and the Odyssey are to be brought to the screen, it will be done thus.”24 On the same lines, Jean-Louis Tallenay noted that the villagers relate the story only when it is all over, and “all we will actually see of it is the epilogue, and so to speak the moral. . . . Pagnol’s villagers constitute a communal teller-of-tales. His originality from the early 1930s was to liken the cinema to an oral form rather than a theatrical form. [Silent film can be likened to mime, but] it took the talkie

24. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 223.

1952–1958

247

to fix and conserve, to perpetuate the oral art of the teller-of-tales.”25 Or as André Bazin said, somewhat bemused, “Pagnol marks the renaissance of epic recital, of oral genius. His total subordination of the image to the verbal text is justified as soon as one realises that film here has become simply the most effective medium for a modern chanson de geste.” Pagnol’s “ignorance of technical norms and routines has led him unawares to discover radically different procedures that are nevertheless no less cinematographic.”26 Pagnol is often accused of an unacceptable gender bias because of his recurrent defense of “the incestuo-patriarchal order, seen as essential to the maintenance of social peace and unity.”27 In Manon, however, this accusation would be hard to sustain: the village council is exclusively male, and, amiable as those talkative males may be, they are, in both trials, obliged to recognize their complicity in Ugolin’s guilt, while it is the “sauvage” and silent female protagonist, and her “ancestress” who passes on the crucial secret knowledge, who have the active and determining roles. With them resides the key to society’s fertility and future prosperity. As always in Pagnol, the opposition town/countryside, the social versus the natural, is characterized as negative/positive, and here it is clearly mapped onto the gender opposition. The drought that has beset the region, outlined in the initial scenes, is due to the men’s active or passive “sins,” and will only be relieved when Manon restores the village’s source of life—in completion of which she will marry the teacher through whom, as an outsider and intermediary, we have experienced the whole drama. All this is beautifully patterned. The major weakness is Jacqueline (Bouvier) Pagnol as Manon. Too exquisitely made-up (combed hair, plucked eyebrows, lipstick) to convince as a rustic goatherd, let alone as a representative of nature, she is also a clumsy and unconvincing actor. Winsomely smiling up at the camera through a screen of fine hair, she prances incongruously off along hill tracks. The other actors, however, are drawn from Pagnol’s regular troupe, which included Henri Poupon, Maupi, Édouard Delmont, Panisse, Charles Blavette, Charpin, and Milly Mathis, and it is always a pleasure to spend a few hours in their company. Some critics have claimed that the film was so hacked about by distributors that it was an artistic and commercial flop, which is why Pagnol subsequently published it in chronological order in novel form (L’Eau des collines, the version later filmed by Claude Berri), but a glance at official records belies this—Manon des Sources earned the fourth best returns of the season. 25. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 20, February 1953, 51–54. 26. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 41, December 1954. 27. See Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 43, and Wilson, French Cinema since 1950, 107–113 (speaking of the remake).

248

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

80. Le Carrosse d’or The Golden Coach Filmed 4 February–April 1952; released 27 February 1953 100 min, Technicolor Dir Jean Renoir; Prod Delphinus/Panaria/Hoche Productions Scr Renoir, Jack Kirkland, Renzo Avanzo, Giulio Macchi, and Ginette Doynel, based on Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music Vivaldi, Corelli and Olivier Mettra; Art dir Mario Chiari; Sound Joseph de Bretagne; Edit Mario Serandrei and David Hawkins; Act Anna Magnani (Camilla), Jean Debucourt (the bishop), Duncan Lamont (the viceroy), Paul Campbell (Felipe), Riccardo Rioli (Ramon, the bullfighter), Odoardo Spadaro (Don Antonio, master of ceremonies), Ralph Truman (the Duke of Castro), George Higgins (Martinez), and Nada Fiorelli (Isabella). Le Carrosse d’or was a French-Italian coproduction filmed in Italy but in English to ensure widespread international release, then dubbed into French and Italian. It marked Jean Renoir’s return to Europe, if not yet to France, after ten years spent primarily in America. But what a different Renoir it reveals. Both in terms of ideology and in terms of technique, he had during his absence undergone a radical metamorphosis. As he himself said, “Before the war my personal form of participation in the universal concert consisted in trying to voice a protest. I don’t think my criticism was ever very bitter—I love humanity too much for that—and I dare hope that my sarcasm was ever blended with an element of compassion. [However] today the new creature that I am realizes that this is no time for sarcasm, and that the only thing I can usefully contribute to this cruel, irresponsible and irrational universe is my ‘love.’”28 This personal transformation had been all too apparent to left-wing critics on the release of his previous film, Le Fleuve (1950), made in India and suffused with a benign pantheism. Premier Plan said of it, In the course of his life Renoir has been esthete, patriot, anarchist, realist, sentimental, and americanised. He has at various times dallied with the left, the half-left, the cinema and Brie cheese. Now he sits there tranquilly digesting, and embraces resignation. In India he found a benign philosophy which could give him the illusion of thinking. He embodies a totally new person—the non-malevolent, 28. Quoted in Premier Plan, nos. 22–23–24, 336.

1952–1958

249

non-violent, happy conformist. He tells his friends he has found eternal wisdom. . . . No use counting on him: political reflection is too much for him. Overcome with emotion he feels an immense benevolence towards all humanity; and no doubt towards dogs, too. All his ideas have dissolved into a wan mysticism, involving words like “resignation,” “gentleness,” and “fatalism.” . . . The only possible reaction is despair.29 The more right-wing of his supporters, such as those at Cahiers du cinéma, were far from disconcerted by this transformation, reading it as an index of “his conversion to spiritual values, to something which if not faith in God is at least faith in man—and, in man, faith in that which transcends him.”30 But in trying to maintain he was still the realist filmmaker he had been in the 1930s, such critics were flying in the face of a technical evolution apparent in any analysis of his films. Le Carrosse d’or is no longer the long-take depth-of-field Renoir that they had so admired in earlier decades, but a director profoundly influenced by his work in America. The ASL of his prewar films (Toni to La Règle du jeu) had been 18.23, 23.96, 22.19, 18.78, 20.66, 18.88, and 18.39 seconds; his American films are edited twice as rapidly, with ASLs of 10.81, 9.56, 13.33, and 8.09 seconds. Le Carrosse d’or, at 11.09 seconds, is the “slowest” of his postwar films, the others recording 8.49, 8.88, and 8.84 seconds. He seems to have returned to his silent film practices (Tire au flanc, made in 1928, recorded 7.8 seconds). Moreover, it is not just accidental that he turned to color for his postwar films. The primary use of color film in France during this period was for escapist, nonrealist fare, with black and white film reserved for grittier, more realistic subjects. Color rapidly became identified with prestige historical reconstructions and fantasies, such as Un caprice de Caroline chérie, Lucrèce Borgia, Les Trois Mousquetaires, La Dame aux camélias, La Belle de Cadiz, Si Versailles m’était conté (1952– 1954) . . . and Le Carrosse d’or, where its use serves one of Renoir’s fundamental purposes, namely to underline the concept of “performance,” to foreground production as spectacle. This is so obvious a point that it is not worth elaborating, beyond noting the two sets of curtains opening at the beginning and closing at the end, together with the stage and concert-master presenting his troupe to the audience (and spectators), and (as Renoir himself admitted) the camera plonked down facing the stage. Each set is conceived as a stage-set, seen from the “audience” position; there is no fourth wall. Moreover, the film is overtly structured

29. Bernard Chardère, quoted in ibid., 336–337. 30. André Bazin on Le Fleuve, reprinted in Bazin, Jean Renoir, 112.

250

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

like a three-act play, and the acting is grossly overstated. As Renoir himself noted, “To create an intentional confusion between theatre and life I asked my actors, especially those playing ‘real-life’ characters, to act with a certain exaggeration.” Also, “The entire action takes place on an Italian stage. It will be theatrical action. External reality will play no part in it. . . . Its title could be The Actress, Theatre and Life.”31 Unfortunately, he forgot to include Life. In view of this ever-present theatricality, it is startling to find Positif saying, “the whole function of technique here is to make sure it passes unnoticed.”32 On the contrary, the whole purpose of technique here is to remind the spectators that they are enjoying a calculated performance staged for their pleasure. The actors are acting the role of actors in that most artificial of forms, the Commedia dell’arte (and often, at Renoir’s behest, acting them rather badly). Moreover, the moral of the play that they act out is that most conservative of themes, the virtue of renunciation, as Camilla restores calm and harmony to this painfully fictive South American society by renouncing the worldly values and personal vanity for which the golden coach has come to stand. Any hint of Renoir’s prewar egalitarianism has disappeared here, with the staircase that dominates the main set acting as a constant reminder of the “natural” stratification of society. Indeed, any hint of a preoccupation with sociopolitical activism of any kind has disappeared, with the pallid costumes of the “real” people fading into insignificance alongside the bright costumes of the Commedia dell’arte. “We alone are true,” says Don Antonio, “the others are false.” Reality is no longer worth bothering about—only Art matters. Well . . . Art, and Women, because there is one pattern underlying the narrative of Le Carrosse d’or that serves to link it back to La Règle du jeu (1939, which can thus seem to presage Renoir’s transformation) and also to link it forward to Elena et les hommes four years later: the plot has Camilla as the focus of the amorous attentions of three men—the viceroy, the captain, and the bullfighter (roughly, effortless aristocratic ease, macho physical action, and the brute charms of backto-nature)—as it has her maid-servant Isabella on stage the focus of three men, just as Christine had been in La Règle du jeu the focus of attention of the marquis, the aviator, and Octave, and Elena’s three suitors are the composer, the general, and the aristocrat. As Renoir said of the first of these films, “What I want you to take away from this film is my great love for women. For that I need to show men—men talking about women, men saying all there is to say about them.”33

31. Renoir, quoted in Cahiers du cinéma, nos 34–35, 1954; Renoir, Écrits, 358. 32. Hector Williams, quoted in Positif, no. 6, 1953. 33. Quoted in Pour vous, 25 January 1939.

1952–1958

251

As a theme, this preoccupation can easily come to seem self-indulgent or banal. Renoir has taken a play that was a contemporary scandal and has bowdlerized it to excise any trace of provocation. Les Lettres françaises was right to see this film as “technically brilliant . . . but emptied of all subversive content, all contemporary relevance—beautiful, but hollow.”34

81. Le Salaire de la peur The Wages of Fear; remade as The Sorcerer (1977) but later changed back to The Wages of Fear Filmed 27 August–October 1951, then 9 June–20 September 1952; released 22 April 1953 156 min, b&w Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot; Prod CICC/Filmsonor/Vera Film/Fonorama; Scr Clouzot, based loosely on the novel by Georges Arnaud; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Georges Auric; Art dir René Renoux; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Charles Vanel (Jo), Yves Montand (Mario), Folco Lulli (Luigi), Peter Van Eyck (Bimba), Véra Clouzot (Linda), William Tubbs (O’Brien), and Dario Moreno (Hernandez). Le Salaire de la peur won the Grand Prix at Cannes, with Charles Vanel voted best actor, and the Grand Prix des Directeurs de Cinéma. It also topped numerous international polls and referenda (notably in London and Berlin). But then, Henri-Georges Clouzot was the most consistently successful of all French filmmakers in these two decades. After the (scandalous) wartime success of Le Corbeau (#19) and (once Clouzot was considered “rehabilitated”) the postwar popular success of Quai des Orfèvres (#45), he produced four films and a sketch between 1948 and 1960, each of which figured among the top earners of its year and its decade. Moreover, all were successful both in exclusive release and general release, both in Paris and in the provinces. This is an astounding record. Le Salaire de la peur allows us to evaluate retrospectively what has endured of these amazing directorial abilities, but also to evaluate the criticism frequently made at the time by French critics that he was working outside the French tradition, in a style more akin to the Hollywood action movie. Le Salaire de la peur is based on a brief book that Clouzot expanded into what he expressly conceived as an epic, dealing (in his words) with courage and with

34. Les Lettres françaises, no. 455, 5 March 1953.

252

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

cowardice. It became notorious for its length—2 hours, 20 minutes, of which only the last 90 minutes retell the novel’s narrative. In the first hour, nothing happens: we are introduced to a squalid, impoverished Latin American township where a group of international layabouts are trapped, unable to find the money or the work that would allow them to escape. The opening image—a close-up of cockroaches—aptly captures the abjection of the locals but also of the adventurers forced to share the locals’ bleak existence. A fire in an American-owned oil well 300 miles away requires nitroglycerine to cap it, and four of the adventurers are selected to drive the two trucks of high explosives to the wells. All the tension and drama of the film is packed into the resultant journey. After some initial hare-brained recklessness, there are three episodes that, however cynically one may approach such action narratives, create genuine suspense: (1) A sharp bend, the navigation of which requires the trucks to back and forth onto a shaky wooden structure built out over a ravine. There is barely room, and the second truck snags a support that collapses the structure just as the truck is leaving it. (2) The road is blocked by a boulder. To destroy it, some of the nitroglycerine is trickled into a cavity in the rock and exploded. (3) The lead truck explodes, and the second truck, driven by the two main protagonists, Jo and Mario (Charles Vanel and Yves Montand) must navigate the resultant hole in the road, which is now filling with oil from a ruptured pipeline. All three of these episodes are handled expertly, with the characters of the four men emerging effectively from the stressful situations. It is hard to avoid the impression that a film of normal length confined to the voyage would have been preferable to the existing “epic” version: the hour-long prologue seems to have been devised by Clouzot primarily to give his film the desired epic weight, but perhaps also to elaborate in advance the psychology of the four protagonists so as to better permit spectatorial identification. Opinions differ on the result. I find the prologue not just superfluous but an outright failure. Clouzot has no talent for developing character, and systematically refuses the cinematic techniques customarily employed to construct it. He treats film as a behaviorist medium, so identification with the characters does not begin to happen until the narrative crises of the journey where we witness their various behaviors. If this is the main weakness of the film, there are nevertheless others that, in retrospect, diminish the film’s worth. First, the role played by Clouzot’s wife, Véra (a Brazilian divorcée whom he had recently married), as the female sexual interest: like Marcel Pagnol’s wife in his films, Clouzot’s wife is here far too 1952–1958

253

sleek and tidy to be a convincingly squalid local wench, and her acting is unconvincing. Second, the transport of the nitroglycerine inevitably involves recurrent shots of the trucks being driven; most of these, and especially those involving Montand, show the steering-wheel being manipulated randomly, with no regard for actual driving behavior or for the back-projected landscape seen through the window. Credibility suffers again. Third, the painfully ironic absurdist ending has Mario, who alone has survived the journey, die while returning home, to the graceful music of the Blue Danube waltz. This seems willfully sadistic rather than emerging from his character. Moreover, because, in celebration of his success, the local community, unaware of his death, dances to that same music, the film strains rather too obviously for that favorite French trope, personal tragedy parallel to communal joy. The swooping Dutch tilts that deform the waltzing truck’s progress toward catastrophe only exacerbate this willfulness. This was a Franco-Italian coproduction with a big budget—the Latin American township and oilfield were created from scratch in a barren region of the Camargue, and this is no doubt one justification for the mixture of French, Italian, and Spanish on the soundtrack, with fragments of English and German as well. Another justification is the implied critique of a globalizing American capitalism, seen as responsible both for assembling this heteroclite international group and for all their subsequent suffering and death. (The American remake was modified to make terrorists responsible for the oilfield fire and the resultant deaths.) For French viewers, however, Clouzot’s bitterly misanthropic view (typical adjectives were pitiless, sordid, unhealthy, and sadistic) leads to a revisionist representation of Latin America: hitherto the idealized land “over there” where a new and more humane life might be realized, it is now in the process of becoming an emblem of global injustice and suffering from which everyone dreams of escaping. Finally, at one level, this is an early instance of the male-bonding “band of brothers” movies that were to prolferate in the 1950s, yet on the other, it is also curiously ambivalent in its representation of that masculine bonding, with homoerotic suggestions and moments of overt feminization of one or another male. The narrative is readily interpretible as a series of seductions and petulant jealousies more typical of a romantic drama than of an all-male action movie.

82. La Môme vert-de-gris (The Vert-de-Gris Kid) Filmed 24 November 1952 – 14 February 1953; released 27 May 1953 97 min, b&w 254

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Dir Bernard Borderie; Prod Raymond Borderie; Scr Bernard Borderie, based on the novel by Peter Cheney; Cinematog Jacques Lemare; Music Guy Lafarge; “Seule dans la foule” by Jeff Davis and Michel Emer; Art dir René Moulaert; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Jean Feyte; Act Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution), Howard Vernon (Rudy Saltierra), Dominique Wilms (Carlotta de la Rue, aka La Môme vert-de-gris), Dario Moreno (Joe Madrigat), Jean-Marc Tennberg (the journalist), and Maurice Ronet (Carlotta’s brother). This film and its successors are worth including because, first, they are rare among popular 1950s genre films in that some are still watchable; second, they led to an American-born actor, Eddie Constantine, becoming (reputedly) the highest-paid star in France; and third, an acqaintance with them can better help us appreciate Jean-Luc Godard’s great film Alphaville (1965) in which that same Eddie Constantine is used for what he has come to represent in this hard-boiled detective series. Born in California of a Russian father named Constantinovitch, Eddie Constantine sang in operetta, studied opera in Vienna, married a dancer who joined the Monte Carlo ballet (hence the move to France), got to know Édith Piaf and become one of her lovers, toured Egypt as a crooner, and returned to France just when Bernard Borderie was looking for a French-speaking Anglo-Saxon to play Lemmy Caution in this French version of Peter Cheney’s novel. Marcel Duhamel had just recently popularized these novels in translation in his notorious Série noire, established in 1947. Constantine’s rugged face, which Raymond Borde memorably described as “that of a toad posing for a toothpaste advertisement,” was a useful qualification for the film version, but he had also had boxing lessons from Henry Coogan, which fitted the role and explains why the (all too numerous) punch-ups are relatively convincing.35 This first Lemmy Caution film was so successful that he played the same role in Cet homme est dangereux (1953), Les Femmes s’en balancent (1953–1954), Votre dévoué Blake (1954), Vous pigez (1955), Ces dames préfèrent le mambo (1957–1958), Lemmy pour les dames (1961), and À toi de faire, mignonne (1963), not to mention similar roles in Ça va barder (1954–1955), Je suis un sentimental (1955), and the Gorilla films (1957 and 1959). The best of these were directed by Borderie or by John Berry (who, like Jules Dassin, had quit the United States for Europe, harassed by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]). In all of them, Constantine plays the same sort of character—a tough American FBI man or private detective, with a love of whiskey, cigarettes, and a dame

35. Borde quoted in Sallée, Les Acteurs français, 38.

1952–1958

255

on the side. François Brigneau appreciated “his face ravaged by morally reprehensible activities, his implacable stare and his square chin, [his] uncommon strength and unmatched endurance in alcoholic consumption. He has a sardonic sense of humour and speaks in slang—a poetic and flowery language based on images rather than words.”36 Borderie and his scriptwriters transposed to European settings this typically American hard-boiled detective character and tale, but arguably in so doing, they deprived it of its life-blood, because it lacks conviction in a European context and comes across rather as an affectionate pastiche of the original. Fortunately, Constantine didn’t take seriously his role as action hero either—he didn’t seek credibility and (not least because of his odd French accent) tended to play it “at a distance.” Consequently, spectators also are unable to take the gunfights and punch-ups seriously: instead, these constitute a form of “play,” and the films are not so much action movies as pastiches of action movies. In this first one, Constantine is paired with Dominique Wilms, who plays Carlotta, a nightclub singer (with, incidentally, a rather fine voice) allied, as usual in such genres, to the gang boss (women are inherently flawed in this genre)— in this case, a wonderfully sinister Howard Vernon—who is out to steal a shipment of U.S. gold bars. But when she discovers he has killed her brother, she is won over to the law and Lemmy’s uncertain charms. Like all its successors, La Môme uses as its principal setting a nightclub with gaming tables run by the gang boss—a useful pretext for scantily clad dancers. Lemmy is notionally incognito, as he always is, the better to infiltrate the gun-runners/drug smugglers/gold thieves, and he proceeds to engage in verbal sparring with Carlotta and with the gang boss. At some stage in all these films, his taxi will be tailed by the gangster’s minions, whom he will foil by some simple trick, and sooner or later he will be trapped/tied up/thrown overboard to drown, but against the odds will survive and/or escape, aided by a convenient shard of glass. La Môme vert-de-gris is set in Casablanca and Tangiers (others on the French or Italian Riviera) and ends when the gang boss, hunting Lemmy and Carlotta across the roofs of a North African bazaar, is neatly knocked off a parapet by one of Carlotta’s thrown shoes. All this is great fun, and seems totally devoid of any profound significance. In fact, of course, these films recycle standard conservative clichés of nation, race, and particularly gender. Perhaps it is not just the recycling of these clichés but the playful, “unproblematic” way in which they are recycled that rendered them so popular, in an age of gender evolution and decolonization. Between 1953 and 1958, seven of Constantine’s hard-boiled films

36. See Semaine du monde, 10 September 1954, quoted in Cadars, ed., Les Séducteurs du cinéma français.

256

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

were recorded by the CNC as among the top earners of their respective years. In most cases, it was in general release and in the provinces that they attracted the crowds, but two were among the top twenty-five French films of the decade in Paris exclusive release (Les Femmes s’en balancent and Votre dévoué, Blake). A final reason for their success might be their resemblance to the James Bond films that were to convulse the Western world a decade later. Constantine’s films can indeed be read as inflecting their American noir origins in the direction of those playful Bond films, the books of which were appearing at this time. Of course, there is a difference in register between Constantine and Sean Connery—the difference between, say, a double scotch tossed off at a gulp and a martini, shaken, not stirred—but ideologically and generically, the two series have a lot in common.

83. Madame de . . . (Madame de . . . ) Filmed 8 April–12 June 1953; released 16 September 1953 100 min, b&w Dir Max Ophüls; Prod Franco-London Films/Indus Films/Rizzoli Films; Scr Marcel Achard, Ophüls, and Annette Wademant, from the novel by Louise de Vilmorin; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Georges van Parys, with a theme drawn from Oscar Straus; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Boris Lewin; Act Danielle Darrieux (Countess Louise de . . .), Charles Boyer (General André de . . .), Vittorio de Sica (Baron Fabrizio Donati), Jean Debucourt (the jeweler), Mireille Perrey (Louise’s attendant), and Lia de Leo (André’s mistress). I had not intended to include this film, having begun to watch it several times and given up, horrified at the thought of spending another 90 minutes in the company of these privileged but boring people. Then by a happy chance I read a comment by Max Ophüls that made it clear I had to some extent misread his film—the whole point was that these people were privileged idiots. His comment is so pertinent it deserves to be quoted at length: What use is this woman? And not only her, but everyone of that sort, that society: the women who chatter and flirt, the men who go to their club, hunt, play billiards? Do they serve any useful purpose? None. Surrounded by valets, they are born, they live, and they die, leaving no trace. This is not a life, this is a non-existence. And these people, who see themselves as the summit of humanity, with their 1952–1958

257

balls, their receptions, their idle chatter. So this film must indirectly be very bitter, and a thousand times more profound than the anecdote on which it is based. And to the star he said, Your job, my dear Danielle, is a tough one: armed with your charm, your beauty, your elegance, your intelligence, that we all admire, you must embody this vacuum, this non-existence. Not fill it, but be it. You will become on the screen the very symbol of ephemeral futility, deprived of interest. And you must do this in such a way that viewers will be fascinated, seduced and deeply moved by the image you propose. Without this paradox, we will end up with a bland little boulevard film—not at all the sort of film I am accustomed to making.37 Again, I cannot improve on Pierre Murat’s commentary on Louise’s sudden shattering discovery that she is in love—a discovery that undermines her superficial glittering life: Louise knows nothing but a semblance of life, and an illusory pretence of love. She skates across the surface of people, who in turn reflect an absolute vacuity that comforts and reassures her. . . . In the first sequence, Madame de . . . , whose face we only see in a mirror, fingers lovingly the things she values so much, but which will soon seem so derisory: the cross, which she adores, the furs which she just loves, the diamond necklace whose loss would be the death of her. [Yet later,] her face against the door which she clutches, unable to bring herself to close it on the baron, Louise murmurs as if to convince herself “I don’t love you, I don’t love you, I don’t love you, I don’t love you.” Then she closes the door. And for a few seconds is distraught; quite obviously, Madame de . . . has lost her bearings—adrift, lost, destroyed, finished, condemned. . . . She tries desperately to resist, to cheat again as she was once accustomed to cheating. But it’s no use. Nothing works any longer. Madame de . . . has been brought up against an unavoidable fact: she loves deeply. Or, as her husband says, “I pity you; you’re ill.”38 37. Annenkov, Max Ophuls. 38. Pierre Murat, “Les unes l’autre,” in Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 54.

258

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Ophüls has acknowledged that he found a peculiar beauty in the decadence of this brilliant but superficial fin-de-siècle world, a member of which is abruptly forced to face an unacceptable reality. He had initially been attracted to the novel by the trajectory of the jeweled earrings around which the characters circle, orchestrated by an invisible conductor: “I saw in those ear-rings a symbol of destiny, that groups, separates and re-unites human beings. Our every project can be subverted by destiny, or ‘chance’ as some would say.”39 Their trajectory is certainly complex: Madame de . . . pawns the earrings her husband gave her, and pretends to have lost them; the jeweler returns them to her husband, who in annoyance at his wife’s deception offers them to a foreign mistress. In Constantinople, they are bought by Baron Donati, who in Basle meets, then back in Paris falls in love with, Madame de . . . , and offers them to her. She pretends to her husband that she has found them again, but he of course knows more of their provenance than she suspects. He reveals their history to the baron. They fight a duel, the outcome of which is left to our imagination, as it is to hers. She collapses and possibly dies. The coincidences in the plot are those of a melodrama, but the film shifts from the vaudevillesque toward the tragic because of the scriptwriters’ modifications to the plot. In the novel, Madame de . . . dies peacefully in the presence of her husband and the baron, and gives to each of them one of the earrings. There is, therefore, no duel, and no anxious crisis of uncertainty at the end. The major delight of the film, as of all Ophüls’s late films, is the sheer exuberance of the glittering baroque decors, explored by the camera in elaborate pans and convoluted tracking shots. But there is also the delight of a highly patterned narrative—the three occasions on which she insists, over and over again, that she doesn’t love the baron; the general seeing off both his mistress and his wife in parallel actions; the four occasions on which the jeweler sells or tries to sell the earrings to the general; Louise’s two contrasting visits to the church; and the series of progressive collapses she suffers, the last of which will be (we presume) final. But as well as the spatial and temporal patterning, we can enjoy the terrific performances of the leading actors. Ophüls was always a fine director of actors, and here he coaxes wonderful performances from Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio de Sica. But despite all these delights, I am still not entirely convinced that the film transcends its origins, which is why this entry is so dependent on the advocacy of others.

39. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 172.

1952–1958

259

84. Les Orgueilleux (The Proud Ones) Filmed 20 April–13 July 1953; released 25 November 1953 103 min, b&w Dir Yves Allégret; Prod Columbia; Scr Jean Aurenche, Allégret, and Jean Clouzot, based on a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre; Cinematog Alex Philipps; Music Paul Misraki; Art dir Gunther Gerszo and A. Capelier; Sound William-Robert Sivel; Edit Claude Nicole; Act Gérard Philipe (Georges), Michèle Morgan (Nellie), Carlos Lopez Moctezuma, Victor Manuel Mendoza, André Toffel, Michèle Cordoue, and the inhabitants of Alvarado (Vera Cruz), Mexico. This improbable Mexican coproduction is of interest at least because of its origins: it is based on a scenario, Typhus, commissioned from Jean-Paul Sartre by Pathé in 1943, which dealt with a white doctor in Malaya who, upon the death of his wife from typhoid fever, has abandoned himself to drink and depression. Sartre had met Albert Camus in 1943 at the premiere of Les Mouches, and both this scenario and Camus’s La Peste may have arisen from their discussions. Like Camus’s plague, the typhoid epidemic that kills the doctor’s wife and terrorizes the community was probably intended as a metaphor not just for the Absurd— the inherent meaninglessness of existence—but specifically for the German occupation. It was originally intended for Jean Delannoy, with Pierre Blanchar in the lead role, but the producer renounced when Blanchar opted out. Apparently, when the present reworked scenario was shot, it did not conform to Sartre’s hopes since he withdrew his name from the titles. Certainly, drastic changes had to be made to his script, since filming in Malaya at the time was impractical, and when Mexico was chosen, it turned out that typhoid fever was not a credible epidemic there, so meningitis was substituted. Possibly, however, what motivated Sartre’s withdrawal was the filmmakers’ decision to graft on a cliché “happy end” in which the deregistered doctor is redeemed by the love of a good woman. The cross-cutting as they run toward each other at that point is embarrassing, but at least the director resisted slow motion. Yves Allégret’s postwar films had been notorious for the unredeemed bleakness of their worldview, figuring an existential absurdity mediated by the scriptwriter Jacques Sigurd (six scripts for him from 1948–1952), and the advent of scriptwriter Jean Aurenche for this film may well have been instrumental in moderating Allégret’s normal bleakness. The all-pervasive exotic music of this Franco-Spanish Western is also hard to take. The crucial moment in any existentialist script must be that when the protagonist acknowledges the meaninglessness of existence but decides neverthe-

260

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

less to assume responsibility for his acts—not to let events define him but rather to define himself by his choice of acts, to become what he has decided to be. This moment comes near the end of the film when, despite Nellie’s pleas—she has just acknowledged she loves him—Georges departs to be vaccinated so he can participate in the fight against “the epidemic.” So the happy end can be seen as a sort of reward for his assuming responsibility for his own self-definition. An even more likely reason for Sartre’s wish to disavow this screenplay is that, written largely in 1943, it predates his conversion to the idea that psychological dramas such as this are merely conforming to the standard liberal, individualist ideology promulgated by popular culture. In 1944, he published an article in the still-clandestine Écran français proclaiming that the cinema was uniquely suited to the representation of the masses; it could and should show them to themselves as central to any social action. He called for large-scale public subjects to complement, or rather to compensate for, the elsewhere-prevalent psychodramas.40 But if the “political correctness” of the script is debatable, there can be no doubt about the intense interest of the techniques used to bring the material to the screen. Yves Allégret’s films had in general tended toward longer takes than those of most contemporary directors, but this one outdoes them all: the average shot length is a fraction under 20 seconds, almost twice the norm of the time, largely because there are none of the series of short point-of-view shots that typically construct interchanges between individuals. In this, at least, the film conformed to Sartre’s distrust of individualism. The only series of brief takes in the whole film is used to evoke the hectic Easter celebrations with their fireworks and leering devil—a typical opposition of public boisterousness and private grief. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze noted with approval “this refusal of conventional links, of consecrated psychological techniques and of sacrosanct dramatic procedures, . . . this respect for a margin of indecision, where people and objects hesitate a fraction of a second on the verge of imminence before falling one way or the other.” 41 As a consequence of this refusal of psychological editing, there are many very long takes—17 shots over 1 minute long, the longest of them being 1 minute, 42 seconds. Moreover, several of the crucial dramatic scenes, which in other hands might have been broken up into series of rapid “expressive” takes, echoing the agitation of the characters involved, are here dealt with in one or a very few long-held takes. When Nellie’s husband collapses with meningitis and has to 40. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Un film pour l’après-guerre,” L’Écran français, no. 15, April 1944. 41. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31, January 1954, 58.

1952–1958

261

be carried home, the scene is constructed in five shots averaging almost a minute each. When Nellie, left with her dead husband, searches desperately for his wallet and comes to realize in dismay that she has been left penniless, the scene is constructed in 7 shots, 5 of which average 70 seconds. Most astonishingly, in the scene in which the bar-owner, Rodrigo, tries to rape Nellie, the whole violent action is captured in a single take of 1 minute, 25 seconds. By the standards of the day, this is willfully eccentric filmmaking. It was not for its extraordinary technical daring that the film was noted, however, but rather for its erotically daring images of Michèle Morgan in a slip and bra, trying desperately in the humidity of the Mexican climate to cool herself with a fan. Reputedly added to the script at Morgan’s own request, these images appeared in all the film’s publicity and all the critical reviews. Partly (but only partly), this was because they jarred with the established image of Morgan as a stereotypical prim bourgeoise, primly observing bourgeois proprieties. The other scene consistently remarked on by critics was the splendid scene in which Georges, in the depths of his abjection and willing to do anything for his next drink, is obliged by the bar-owner to perform a grotesque dance for his bottle of tequila. Nellie walks in on this, and when the bar-owner finally relents and hands him the bottle, Georges smashes it and walks out. The sense of redemption finally achieved allowed some critics to interpret this as a pseudo-Christian film,42 but Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier classify it with fifteen other films of the decade in which the protagonists (played by Gérard Philipe, Serge Reggiani, Daniel Gélin, Georges Marchal, Jean Marais, or Jean Desailly) are not at all like the tragic heros of prewar poetic realist films but are abject, victimized males for whom the spectator is expected to feel compassion. As mentioned earlier, these critics speculate that this postwar “loss of virility” may correspond to a devaluation of masculinity resulting from the defeat and occupation.43

85. Si Versailles m’était conté (The Story of Versailles) Filmed 6 July–18 September 1953; released 10 February 1954 168 min (88 + 80), Eastmancolor Dir Sacha Guitry; Prod CLM-Cocinor; Scr Guitry; Cinematog Pierre Montazel; Music Jean Françaix; Art dir René Renoux (and Mansart, with gardens by Le Nôtre!); 42. For instance, Geneviève Agel. 43. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 225.

262

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Sound Joseph de Bretagne; Edit Raymond Lamy; Act Guitry (Louis XIV), Jean Marais (Louis XV), Gilbert Bokanowski (Louis XVI), Claudette Colbert (Madame de Montespan), Gérard Philipe (D’Artagnan), Mary Marquet (Madame de Maintenon), Micheline Presle (Madame de Pompadour), with Michel Auclair, JeanPierre Aumont, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Louis Barrault, Bourvil, Pauline Carton, Jean Chevrier, Nicole Courcel, Danièle Delorme, Jean Desailly, Jeanne FusierGir, Daniel Gélin, Gilbert Gil, Fernand Gravey, Pierre Larquey, Georges Marchal, Gaby Morlay, Jean Murat, Claude Nollier, Giselle Pascal, Édith Piaf, Jean Richard, Tino Rossi, Louis Seigner, Raymond Souplex, Jean Tissier, Charles Vanel, Jacques Varenne, Howard Vernon, and Orson Welles. Viewed nowadays, especially by a non-French spectator, this would have to be the worst film included in this filmography. The primary justification for its inclusion is that it was staggeringly popular. It returned 274 million francs from 685,000 spectators in Paris first release alone (three times more than the year’s runner-up), and after four years had earned the most money not only for any 1953 production but for that whole decade. In a 1958 referendum, spectators chose it as the second-best film they had ever seen. Sacha Guitry’s other historical blockbuster, Napoleon, itself top of the 1954 production list, came sixth in the referendum, while Si Paris nous était conté did remarkably well in 1955 considering its more fragmentary, episodic nature. Clearly, Guitry was mining a vein of patriotic sentiment with these histories on film, which the filmed versions of his plays never equaled. Yet several of those now seem markedly superior— for instance, La Vie d’un honnête homme (1952–1953) and Assassins et voleurs (1956– 1957). The best film he ever directed was Le Roman d’un tricheur in 1936, scripted like these histories specifically for film, yet it was for his direct transcriptions to film of theatrical works that he was most notorious in critical circles. Guitry and Marcel Pagnol had both made incautious remarks to the effect that film was of little interest except as a means of recording great theatrical productions. “I am the first person,” Guitry boasted, “to have dared to film plays from beginning to end without changing a word, . . . the first to bring to the screen texts conceived, written and directed for the stage.” 44 So uninterested was he in the cinema as such that, having rehearsed the actors, he then (like Pagnol) reportedly left the menial task of recording the performance to his technical crew. It is therefore ironic that it should have been his nontheatrical works that pulled the spectators.

44. Guitry, Le Cinéma et moi. For the debate, see Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 286–291, 313–314.

1952–1958

263

But if the script of Versailles was written for film, the performance is still painfully theatrical. The actors stride forward, adopt poses for the camera, and deliver speeches (or monologues or whatever bons mots their historical embodiment was famous for). All movements and gestures are slow, stately, ceremonial; everyone speaks slowly and enunciates clearly. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would seem to have been a period of overacting. There is no action as such, only processions, marches past, and cavalry parades with brass accompaniment and fireworks. Cumulatively, this assemblage of private vignettes and public ceremonies, notionally integrated by voiceover commentary, purports to represent the history of France from the construction of the palace of Versailles through to the present day, but its principal focus is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. Part 1 is dominated by the figure of Louis XIV, while Part 2 deals with Louis XV and Louis XVI, with an abrupt tailpiece on Napoleon, Louis Philippe, and the conversion of the palace into a museum. Needless to say, this is trivialized history—history from above—in which a succession of famous names are dropped (and broken), the figures themselves stride on for their twenty seconds of glory, and are praised vociferously by all those around them for what they are now famous for doing or saying. Only Royalty, Great Men, and Winsome Women are considered to be of interest, and their every remark is treated with reverential attention. The court and its trivial intrigues are assumed to be infinitely fascinating. “The people,” of course, have their moment at the revolution, when we discover that they are cynical, raucous, and vulgar, intent only on ransacking and looting. Quite unnecessarily, because, as we have been informed, the kindly king had been about to grant all their dearest wishes. Alas, that was the end of a glorious period when everyone knew their place and revered those above them. A few much-anthologized events are given a lengthier treatment, such as the “affaire des poisons” and the “affaire du collier de la reine”—scandals involving murders in the reign of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette’s diamond neck lace, respectively—and there are numerous sly winks to the future as eighteenth-century personages speculate what will be thought of them in two or three hundred years. Alternatively, the script exploits a facile irony, since the audience knows all too well, and better than the characters themselves, what will happen next. The film culminates in a genuinely impressive grand procession down the 165-foot-wide external stone steps of Versailles of all the hundreds of characters the viewer has seen in the last three hours of filmed “history.” This is dire cinema, and the obligation to write about it has for the first time been sufficient motivation for me to watch it from beginning to end. What could possibly have made it so popular? Certainly the celebration of France’s national past must have appealed, as it had more poignantly during the occu264

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

pation, but the war had been over for nearly a decade, and France was increasingly prosperous. Perhaps it was sufficient for the spectators simply to be reminded about what they half-remembered from schooldays about these great men (Marivaux, Molière, Robespierre, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Montesquieu, André Chénier, and Racine all make an appearance, as well as the kings and queens). Or perhaps the real satisfaction came from recognizing in this seemingly endless procession of characters all the foremost actors of the age (Jean-Louis Barrault, Bourvil, Pierre Larquey, Jean Marais, Gaby Morlay, Gérard Philipe, Charles Vanel, and dozens of others, not least Orson Welles as Benjamin Franklin, Tino Rossi as a singing gondolier, Édith Piaf as a woman of the people belting out “Ça ira” at the barricades—or Brigitte Bardot, breasts barely contained within a recklessly plunging decolletage). As was only proper, Guitry did Louis XIV the honor of embodying him. It is surprising to discover that later in the decade, both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose scorn for this period of French “quality cinema” is well known, should have numbered Guitry films among their top ten of 1957. Altogether this period of heightened fame signaled a remarkable comeback for an author whose pro-Vichy stance and worldly consorting with German officers had earned him the detestation of the Resistance and two months in prison at the liberation (a fact he liked to point out sardonically). Like Le Corbeau (#19) and others, Guitry’s films were banned at the liberation, and the ban only rescinded in 1947.

86. Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands off the Loot) Filmed 21 September–18 December 1953; released 17 March 1954 94 min, b&w Dir Jacques Becker; Prod Del Duca Films (Paris) and Antarès Films (Rome); Scr Jacques Becker, Maurice Griffe, and Albert Simonin, from the novel by Simonin; Cinematog Pierre Montazel; Music Jean Wiener; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Jean Gabin (Max le Menteur), René Dary (Riton), Jeanne Moreau (Josy), Dora Doll (Lola), Paul Frankeur (Pierrot), Lino Ventura (Angelo), Michel Jourdan (Marco), and Gaby Basset (Marinette). This is a gangster film that, like Jacques Becker’s other recent film, Casque d’Or, deals with rival gangs within which mateship turns out to be so central that the protagonist will sacrifice for it . . . here, a load of gold, there his life. This similarity aside, Grisbi constitutes a radical break with both the values underlying most of Becker’s previous films and the conventions of the underworld genre. It 1952–1958

265

is a really astounding gangster film because it lacks all trace of action until the final few minutes. Becker freely acknowledged being totally uninterested in the underworld or in gangsters; instead, he capitalized on Albert Simonin’s novel to foreground in it what did interest him—the themes of mateship and of aging. This is the story, then, of an aging crook, Max le Menteur, whose last great coup has set him up for a comfortable retirement, but whose lifelong friendship with his “colleague” Riton proves a weakness that Angelo’s rival gang can exploit. Ultimately, Max loses both his mate, killed in a shoot-out with Angelo’s gang, and the loot, which explodes in flames to provide a memorable finale. It is this character study of an aging crook, admirably played by Jean Gabin, that makes the film worth watching. Max is respected by the milieu, no longer having to prove anything, deliberate in his actions, sparing of words, weary of this life, and looking forward to retirement. The pace of the film is therefore deliberately slow, and during the measured introductory half-hour when his character, milieu, and relationships are being established, the film resorts to the thoroughly reprehensible tactic of a nightclub setting with acres of naked female flesh to ensure spectator attention. A really wonderful sequence follows in which Max takes Riton to one of the flats he has bought with previous loot. The camera is ushered slowly around the apartment as Max shows Riton the facilities. He takes out cutlery, napkins, and pâté, toasts some bread, and the two men slowly crunch their way through a light meal, exchanging occasional information through the noise of their eating. Then they prepare for bed, and pajama-clad, clean their teeth. This steadfast refusal to cut the nonessential obliges the viewer to recognize that for Max, it is far from nonessential: this quiet, domestic routine is what he aspires to experience henceforth. A magnificently affecting moment comes near the end when to make a telephone call, Max takes out and puts on his spectacles to read the directory. However often one watches the film, these moments delight by their quietly provocative demythification of the genre. If the theme of friendship is less moving than the theme of aging, it is largely because Riton doesn’t at any stage appear to justify the extraordinary affection that Max is represented as feeling for him. But to some extent, that is the point: Max himself seems bemused by that affection, is constantly irritated by Riton, tells him his loose tongue will ruin them, and is outraged when, despite his explicit warning, Riton allows himself to be captured by Angelo’s gang. Max rescues him, but Riton is wounded in a final shoot-out and dies—as does Marco, the only young man in this aging gangster collective, Max’s quasi-son, whom he seems to be grooming to take over. At the melancholy end, Max is left without loot, friend, or son, having to appear in his regular café as if unaware of and unconcerned by the catastrophe then being reported in the newspaper. 266

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

This was François Truffaut’s favorite film of 1954: “What happens to Becker’s characters is less important than the way it happens to them. The plot, no more than a pretext, gets thinner with every film. Édouard et Caroline is just the account of an evening, with telephone and waistcoat as accessories. Grisbi is about nothing more than a demand to hand over 96kg of gold. [But] the real subject is growing old, and friendship. Simonin is 49, Becker 48. [Gabin, incidentally, was 50]. Grisbi is about reaching fifty.”45 Pierre Leprohon goes further, seeing it as a drama of solitude rather than of friendship: “The theme of Grisbi is lassitude. The lassitude of a man approaching 50, for whom it has all happened: he’s worn out and aspires to nothing so much as tranquillity. This theme of lassitude—perhaps unique in the cinema—is juxtaposed with that of solitude. They give to the film, over and above the sentimentality and the picturesqueness, a resonance that is profoundly bitter, desperate.”46 But if it is never difficult to relate Becker’s films to preoccupations and interests in his own life, it is nevertheless extremely difficult to identify any ideological consistency or continuity. Early thought of as a left-wing humanist, he seems, on the contrary, sporadically to be promoting arrogance, hierarchy, and the patriarchy. The feminist critics who found a lot to admire in Casque d’Or (#73) could find little to like in Grisbi, where women are nothing but mobile flesh, to be slapped about when they do something stupid. Male mateship and inheritance are what matter. Or perhaps not totally male—Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier have a lovely description of the Max-Riton couple “[in which] Jean Gabin unquestionably plays the role of husband, with a tranquil assurance and indulgent authority which constitutes a consecration of the patriarchy, while René Dary corresponds exactly to the misogynist stereotype of the married woman, kindly but irresponsible, simple-minded as much as affectionate; the sort of person you can’t really abandon because he’s incapable of looking after himself.” 47 Perhaps this inconsistency merely confirms Becker’s own claim not to be at all interested in “the subject matter,” in ideas. Certainly, the next films he made are noticeably devoid of ideas—Les Aventures d’Arsène Lupin and Ali Baba with Fernandel. Nevertheless, both these and Touchez pas au grisbi were immensely popular, the latter sparking a run of argotic gangster films—Du rififi chez les hommes (Jules Dassin, 1955, #89); Razzia sur la chnouf (Henri Decoin, 1955); Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1955); and Rafles sur la ville (Pierre Chenal, 1957).

45. “Les Truands sont fatigués,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 34, April 1954. 46. Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 384–385. 47. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 252.

1952–1958

267

87. L’Amour d’une femme (A Woman’s Love) Filmed 8 May–12 July 1953; released 28 April 1954 104 min, b&w Dir Jean Grémillon; Prod LPC (Paris)/Film Constellazione (Rome); Scr Grémillon, René Wheeler, and René Fallet; Cinematog Louis Page; Music Henry Dutilleux; Art dir Robert Clavel; Sound Jean Riel; Edit Louisette Hautecœur and/or Marguerite Renoir; Act Micheline Presle (Marie Prieur), Massimo Girotti (André Lorenz), Gaby Morlay (Germaine Leblanc), Julien Carette (Le Quellec, the beadle), and Paolo Stoppa (curate). This was to be Jean Grémillon’s last film. Both it and he deserve to be saved from the oblivion that has engulfed them. A fine man, a liberal humanist with communist sympathies and an uncompromising morality, he suffered postwar as a result of his refusal to make concessions to shifting ideologies. After the catastrophe of Le Printemps de la liberté (#48), his career languished: he took over the direction of Pattes blanches from Jean Anouilh (1949), and reputedly managed to rework a misogynist scenario to conform to his principles, but could do little with L’Étrange Madame X (1951). The present film was, therefore, the only one after Le Ciel est à vous (1944, #23) in which he had a determining role—not least because it was the only one of his films for which he himself outlined and developed the script. It is a resolutely feminist script. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier write passionately and for the most part convincingly about the crisis in gender relations and representations that resulted from the wartime disruption of gender roles. Women had acquired an expectation of greater independence and had shown themselves competent in a wide range of workplace tasks. Men returning from the front or from years in prison camps expected to be able to resume their prewar roles as wage-earners, and expected women to return to the home. This was not always possible. One consequence at the level of popular culture was the proliferation of scenarios featuring men as victims—often young and handsome but maltreated, and their persecutors were frequently diabolical females (e.g., Henri-Georges Clouzot’s films; Manèges, #62; Voici le temps des assassins, 1956). A minority of films, often scripted and directed by left-wing and/or resistance figures, held out against this trend by promoting favorable representations of capable, emancipated women. Grémillon’s L’Amour d’une femme was the most overtly committed of these feminist representations of capable women who refuse to return to their “allotted” role as housewives.48 48. Ibid., 9, 220–221, 237–238, 260–261.

268

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

We meet Marie preparing to take over from the old doctor in a village on the remote Breton island of Ouessant. Her experience there is neatly set out in three “acts.” In the first, we see her having to struggle against the villagers’ gender prejudices to become accepted as their doctor. Lonely and anxious, she is helped out by the local teacher (Gaby Morlay), herself about to retire. André, an Italian engineer working on renovating the docks, takes a fancy to Marie. In the second act, she and André are a couple, but a crisis erupts when it becomes clear that after marriage, he would expect her to renounce her career and follow him wherever his work took him. Not coincidentally, “a tempest is brewing,” and in the third act, Marie has to accompany lifeguards through stormy seas to the harbor lighthouse in order to operate on the lighthouse keeper. She returns triumphantly to the village, exultant and feted by the locals. André recognizes the exhilaration she experiences in thus demonstrating her professional competence, and acknowledges that if she were forced to renounce her career and leave with him, she would sooner or later hold it against him. He prevents her calling for a replacement and departs with his men. The narrative is rounded off by the arrival of a young woman as the new teacher, anxious and lonely in her remote new post as Marie herself had been. Marie will look after her as she herself had been looked after at the beginning of the film. Such an outline of the scenario makes it sound schematic, verging on propaganda for women’s rights, but it is better than that, if only because throughout the film it is made clear that the choices confronting the characters are not simple for any of those involved. André is no simple, macho, patriarchal tyrant, as his considerate actions at the end make clear, and Marie herself is torn between her desire to follow the career she loves and the man she loves. The teacher’s example at first inspires her—not having children of her own but nurturing hundreds of other people’s children—yet the villagers’ relative indifference to the teacher’s death convinces Marie to accept André’s proposal of marriage. The final images are of her distraught at his departure. If it promotes women’s rights, the film does not minimize the conflicts and suffering that inevitably result. One other aspect of the film that is quite remarkable for its time is its documentary feel: much of it was shot on location on the island of Ouessant (2.5 × 5 miles, 12 miles off the coast of Finisterre) and captures something of the local lifestyle. Indeed, Grémillon agreed to the local film-club’s request to screen the film in Brest (on 9 December 1953), some time before its Paris premiere, and the locals praised the accuracy of its representation of their lives. The area is renowned for its storms, and the rough sea action is well done. Even the operation on the lighthouse keeper, notionally carried out by Marie, has an agonizingly documentary feel, with flesh sliced open and retracted back. 1952–1958

269

Grémillon was inspired to develop the scenario by a series of sociological studies of the solitude of working women but also no doubt to counter the misogyny elsewhere prevalent in the French cinema. “In this context,” note Burch and Sellier, “Jean Grémillon’s film begins to look so daring as to be an actual threat to the existing order.”49 Sure enough, the appointed distributors refused to distribute the film, and the first screening was delayed for some months. Moreover, when the film was finally released, firsthand accounts speak of sniggering and disruptions. Coming on top of Grémillon’s earlier conflicts with the cinematic establishment, this crisis effectively put an end to his career. Therafter, he was able to make nothing more than short documentaries before his early death in 1959 (on the same day as Gérard Philipe, from cancer—25 November 1959). As Burch and Sellier sadly acknowledge, the push for women’s rights faded in the course of the 1950s, and many directors who at war’s end, with its celebration of the apparent triumph of liberal humanist values, had promoted those rights, subsequently rejoined the macho camp—Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Cocteau, Christian-Jaque, Henri Decoin, even Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir.

88. Le Rouge et le noir The Red and the Black Filmed 29 March–5 June 1954; released 29 October 1954 190 min (105 + 85), Eastmancolor. A Cinemascope version was made. Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Franco-London Film/Documento Film; Scr Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, based on the novel by Stendahl; Cinematog Michel Kelber; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Gérard Philipe (Julien Sorel), Danielle Darrieux (Louise de Rénal), Antonella Lualdi (Mathilde de la Mole), Antoine Balpêtré (Abbé Pirard), André Brunot (Abbé Chélan), Jean Martinelli (Monsieur de Rénal), Jean Mercure (Marquis de la Mole), and Anna-Maria Sandri (Élisa). Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost served Claude Autant-Lara well as scriptwriters. They provided sixteen scripts for him between 1943 and 1963, and Aurenche alone four more. The only two they did not provide during the 1940s and 1950s were relative failures. Their speciality was adapting well-known novels (Colette, Georges Simenon, Raymond Radiguet), short stories (Marcel Aymé), and plays (Georges Feydeau)—especially those that suited Autant-Lara’s acknowl-

49. Ibid., 261.

270

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

edged anarchist tendencies. A main reason why André Bazin (and therefore Cahiers du cinéma) detested these scriptwriters was their willingness to underline in those works any radical anti-establishment elements, so it is not surprising to find Aurenche and Bost turning to the more sardonic and satirical nineteenth-century writers such as Stendahl, who were critical of the Bourgeoisie Ascendant, the better to belabor the smug self-satisfaction of the 1950s Bourgeoisie Triumphant. Jean Collet notes the “coincidences between the team’s ideology and that of Stendahl—the recurrent presence of a a pitiless society, where conflict and struggle is inherent—a jungle, where you must assert yourself if you do not wish to be devoured a an ambitious and calculating young man in revolt against that society a women who are dominated by and victims of that young man

a the mockery of religious rites that are used by the powerful to maintain their position.”50 That these are precisely the factors that attracted them to Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le noir is made clear by their rearrangement of the narrative to open with one of the novel’s final chapters, in which Julien Sorel is being tried for attempted murder and proclaims aggressively, arrogantly, that the real motive for putting him on trial is not his attempt to kill Madame de Rénal but his refusal to accept the dictates and hierarchies of society—as the son of a worker, he has striven relentlessly to rise above his origins and become a force in society, and society is intent on getting revenge on him for his audacity. This opening orients the viewer toward the social aspects of what is to follow, minimizing the personal and psychological aspects present in the novel. It is in this light that we now read his seduction of the wife of that confirmed bully and monarchist Monsieur de Rénal, whose arrogant assumption of inherent class superiority is ridiculed. The seduction of his wife is a way of denying her social inaccessibility. It is in the same antihierarchical and therefore antimonarchist light that we are to understand Julien’s regret that Danton and the revolution came to nothing, and his idolizing of Napoleon, in whose army he can readily imagine himself having become an officer. As it is, he has to use Madame de Rénal’s influence to join her husband’s guard corps (much to the scandal of the townsfolk). 50. In his splendid Téléciné fiche, no. 227.

1952–1958

271

The “red and the black” of the title refers, of course, to the army and the church, the two means by which he conceives he might achieve his upward aspirations, and having in Part 1 explored the former, he proceeds (in effect, between Parts 1 and 2) to explore the latter. Here the production team’s disaffection for established religion comes to the fore: the film characterizes the church not at all as a religious body but rather as a pragmatic route to achieve supremacy in worldly affairs. God trumps the king, who must kneel before God’s representatives. And the monarchy must keep the church on its side—as Julian says later, “the most useful idea for a tyrant is the idea of God.” Moreover, the church as setting is played not for religious sentiment or symbolism but for spectacle: it is represented as the ultimate theatrical setting, designed to dazzle and to subjugate. There is a lovely scene in which Julien comes upon the bishop while the latter is practicing his “blessing” of the congregation in front of a mirror, the better to appear more imposing, and is totally absorbed in his own self-aggrandizement. A nice counterpart to this “rehearsal” scene comes later when Julien is trying on his lieutenant’s uniform, and likewise (half ironically) “performs” his lieutenant’s role in front of the mirror, just as the bishop had done. La France Catholique was, of course, outraged by this whole enterprise—“a most painful spectacle, on occasion odious,” in which the antireligious element has been disproportionately foregrounded. “Honorable members of the community could easily be misled by this dated caricature.”51 As those who have read the book know, Julien in Part 2 gets a post as secretary to the Marquis de la Mole, whose daughter, Mathilde, he likewise seduces. When Mathilde wishes to marry him (and thus provide precisely the elevated social status he always thought his due), the marquis is outraged and enquires about his life prior to the seminary. Madame de Rénal is forced by her confessor to inform the marquis of Julien’s “damnable” behavior toward her, and Julien, angry that his ambitions have come to nothing, fires his pistol at her in the middle of a church service. He is condemned to death, and she herself dies three days later, presumably of grief. The flashback form that makes of the trial a frame for the body of the film (180 min—originally 210 min) has the disadvantage of dispelling that uncertainty which in the novel attends Julien’s willful determination to better himself. There, the fate of the young lad whom we get to know little by little is unknown until the end. The flashback form predetermines that fate, though arguably, as I have noted of an earlier instance, the novel is so well known that this merely formalizes what any contemporary reader already knows. Another particular problem

51. Quoted in Positif, nos. 14–15, November 1955.

272

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

for the film is that the emphasis on social matters, together with Julien’s impassive demeanor before his betters and before his fate, means that the film has to resort to endless voiceovers to mark his inner torment and inner revolt, and thus evoke a psychology, elsewhere sidelined, which might attract identification. This can be wearing, as can the endless music called upon to perform a similar emotive function. Appropriate and pleasant though that music is (surgingly romantic nineteenth-century style for Julien, mildly mocking late eighteenth century for the old-fashioned), there is too much of it. Finally, it is surprising that Autant-Lara should have decided to use intertitles drawn from the book as “chapter headings.” Elsewhere, his aim for technique seems to have been self-effacement.

89. Du rififi chez les hommes Rififi Filmed 22 September–21 December 1954; released 13 April 1955 116 min, b&w Dir Jules Dassin; Prod Indus Films/Prima Films/Pathé Cinéma; Scr René Wheeler, Dassin, and Auguste Le Breton, from the novel by Le Breton; Cinematog Philippe Agostini; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Alexandre Trauner; Sound Jacques Lebreton; Edit Roger Dwyre; Act Jean Servais (Tony le Stéphanois), Carl Möhner (Jo le Suédois), Robert Manuel (Mario Farrati), Jules Dassin (Cesar le Milanais), Marie Sabouret (Mado), Claude Sylvain (Ida Farrati), Marcel Lupovici (Pierre Grutter), Pierre Grasset (Louis Grutter), Robert Hossein (Rémi Grutter), Magali Noël (Viviane), and Dominique Maurin (Tonio). His name sounds French but Jules Dassin was born in America. By 1950, he was an established Hollywood director known for tough urban crime films (Brute Force, 1947; Naked City, 1948; Thieves’ Highway, 1949; Night and the City, 1950). Strongly left-wing in his politics, he refused to testify against fellow left-wing colleagues before HUAC, and to make matters worse, was in April 1951 named as a communist before that committee by Edward Dmytryk. Blacklisted, he found it increasingly impossible to get work, so (like John Berry at the same time and for the same reason) moved to Europe. Even in France, Dassin had problems due to union anxieties about Americans taking over the French industry. The influx of thousands of American films at war’s end and the fear that the BlumByrnes accords would exacerbate this situation had led in 1948 to the formation of a committee for the defence of the French cinema and a call to limit the import of foreign films. Distrust of Americans had not abated in 1953, so when Dassin was offered Ennemi public No. 1, the unions went on strike. (Others say that 1952–1958

273

it was American pressure that led Fernandel and Zsa Zsa Gabor to threaten to renege on their contracts.) Dassin was forced to withdraw, and Henri Verneuil took over that film. Subsequently, when it was learned that Dassin had been “exiled” from America by HUAC for his left-wing views, the unions reversed their decision. Charles Ford recounts one confused technician saying, “I can’t understand this: first we strike to stop him making the film, now we’re striking because he can’t make it.”52 Rififi was Dassin’s first French film after five years without work. With Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (#86), it served to inaugurate a series of urban crime films based on a predominantly male cast in which the lead role usually featured an aging gangster on the verge of retirement who takes on one last job (Razzia sur le chnouf, Henri Decoin, 1954; Bob le flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1955; Rafles sur la ville, Pierre Chenal, 1957). Rififi, Razzia, Rafles, and Bob were all based on novels by Auguste Le Breton and, like Grisbi, establish their credentials by exploiting gangster argot not widely understood. Here the fact that “rififi” means “trouble” has to be explained in a nightclub song. Well-known but aging stars from the 1930s such as Jean Gabin and Jean Servais further established the appropriate atmosphere for “a last job.” The crucial features of this crime subgenre were identified by Susan Hayward (1993) and spelled out in wonderful detail by Graeme Hayes in an extended essay (2006) that established the essential core of the film. The principal trope is, as both critics agree, the centrality of all-male gangs and thus of “masculinity.” Rather than structuring the narratives around an opposition between criminality and law enforcement as in the standard policier, this subgenre structures it around the conflict between two male gangs—one good, the other bad. The film positions us to accept one gang as “good” by the simple fact, first, that the actors are stars, and, second, that the camera picks them up and follows them. In the course of following them, it informs us of their personalities, their affections, their aspirations . . . and specifically of their current plans to rob a jewelery shop. “The targets,” Hayes notes of this subgenre, “are institutions rather than individuals, institutions which represent the corruption of a society that has a vested interest in the exploitation of the common man: banks, casinos, jewellers, bookmakers.”53 Here, the plot, based on a real heist (in Marseilles in 1899), divides neatly into three “acts” of similar length. In the first, the gang, with its several profes-

52. Ford, Histoire du cinéma français contemporain, 249–250. 53. Hayward, French National Cinema, 170; Graeme Hayes, “Rififi,” in Powrie, ed., The Cinema of France, 71–79, 73 (quotation).

274

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

sional competences, assembles (Tony le Stéphanois, heavy-eyed, somber, worldweary, and just out of jail where he has spent the last five years; young Jo le Suédois, for whose sake he sacrificed his freedom; Mario Farrati, a boisterous former mate; and Cesare le Milanais, brought in to crack the safe). These four case the joint and come up against a rival gang (Pierre Grutter and his sons, Rémi and Louis). The second act is devoted to the successful heist, while in the third things fall apart, and all members of both gangs die. Cesare indirectly but carelessly lets slip to Grutter their involvement in the robbery; Grutter tortures and kills Mario, then kidnaps Jo’s son to get a hold over them and extort their loot; Tony executes Cesar, then kills Rémi and Louis. Finally, while he is rescuing Jo’s son from Grutter, Tony kills Grutter, but in the process is himself killed and Tony mortally wounded. There are moments of extreme violence in the film, several of which are due to Tony, but we as spectators remain with his gang, and not just because of our technical positioning by the film: we first meet Jo and Mario in what might best be described as affectionate domestic settings typical of the 1950s. Both Jo and Mario are seen in their flats with their women, chatting and cooking and engaging in domestic duties. Jo in particular is clearly established as a kindly husband and father, loved by wife and son, while Tony likewise treats him affectionately—more like a son than a fellow gang member (see also Grisbi). Indeed, Jo’s son is called Tonio, because Tony is his godfather. These affectionate relationships raise the stakes when things start to go wrong, and notably when young Tonio is kidnapped by Grutter. As Hayes notes, “Jo, Mario and Cesare all give voice to typically bourgeois aspirations—romance, marriage, parenthood. The portrayal of Tony’s gang is thus characterised by a further tension, between an idyllicised domesticity and the life of crime which enables it,” and the two contrasting spheres are filmed quite differently.54 A further internal tension is generated by the film’s focus on “what it means to be male.” Women are in their place in the domestic scenes but can safely be despised when stripping in nightclubs, and even brutalized when they step outside their allotted roles. There is a truly astonishing scene when Tony, just out of jail, learns that his former mistress, Mado, has profited from selling their former apartment and is now Grutter’s moll. He orders her to strip and whips her with his belt (partly off-screen, but it still comes across as malevolently vicious). Again to quote Hayes, “The French crime film depends on virile male friendships characterised not simply by the marginalisation of women, but by an eroticised brutalisation of the female body; . . . the masculinity projected by 54. Ibid., 75.

1952–1958

275

such films is as dependent on violence against women as it is on shoot-outs between men.”55 But interesting as the film is when viewed through these various creative (!) tensions, it has become notorious for precisely the opposite reason: the quiet purposefulness of the extraordinary heist scene itself, over half an hour long, filmed in documentary style, with no dialogue and no extra-diegetic music—four men working efficiently and silently, each an expert at his allotted task. Such tension as is generated here derives solely from the fact that the gang is working against the clock to break into the jewelery, subvert the alarm system, crack the safe, and escape before daylight. The heist scene, therefore, reinforces the sense of mateship, cooperation, mutual interdependence, and respect that had been established in the first section.

90. French Cancan French Cancan/Only the French Can Filmed 4 October–20 December 1954; released 27 April 1955 104 min, Technicolor Dir Jean Renoir; Prod Franco-London Films/Jolly Films; Scr Renoir, from an idea by André-Paul Antoine; Cinematog Michel Kelber; Music Georges Van Parys and music-hall songs; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Boris Lewin; Act Jean Gabin (Henri Danglard), Maria Felix (Lola de Castro/The Abbess), Françoise Arnoul (Nini), Jean-Roger Caussimon (Baron Adrien Walter), Gianni Esposito (Prince Alexandre), Philippe Clay (Casimir/Valentin le Désossé), Michel Piccoli (Captain Valorgueil), Jean Parédès (Coudrier), Albert Rémy (Barjolin), Dora Doll (La Génisse), Anna Amendola (Esther Georges), and Édith Piaf (Eugénie Buffet). This was Jean Renoir’s first film made in France after his return from America, India, and Italy. Interviewing Renoir at that time, André Bazin was more than a little relieved to discover that Renoir was no longer preoccupied by social questions. Not, as Renoir hastened to assert, that he had lost his taste for realism, but America had “broadened” his human perspective by “deepening” his moral preoccupations. Renoir had become a humanist, a moralist, and a convert to spiritual values, and had thereby gained in maturity and serenity.56

55. Ibid. 56. See Bazin’s review of Le Fleuve in Bazin, Jean Renoir, 99–113.

276

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

It is possible to doubt that this broadening and deepening was a positive move, but from Le Fleuve (1950) onward, it certainly inflected all his films away from the social. French Cancan takes its place alongside Le Carrosse d’or (1953, #80) in having no perceptible subject at all, except the pleasure of being an artist and making films. Acting and performance are glorified within a highly conventional tale of mounting a production—in this case, the production of the updated cancan within a renovated Montmartre nightclub to be called the Moulin Rouge— an occasion that is considered as marking the birth of the modern music hall. Pierre Leprohon suggests that the topic was proposed to Renoir by AndréPaul Antoine but was derived primarily from Renoir’s childhood visits to the music hall in company with his uncle and his cousin Charlotte, not to mention his memories of his father’s work and the painterly attachment to Montmartre of his father’s colleagues Degas, Van Gogh, and Pissaro. Renoir himself attributed the project and the title to his producer, Henri Deutschmeister, who nevertheless left him completely free to develop it as he saw fit. In line with his postwar preferences, what he saw fit to develop was a film centered on an attractive young woman, Nini. She was to be played by Leslie Caron, who at the last minute proved unavailable, so he opted for Françoise Arnoul. Unlike his previous film, however, of which the harshest feminists could approve, French Cancan is a throwback to prewar gender obsessions, with Nini a humble little blanchisseuse (laundry maid) masterfully commandeered by an aging theatrical entrepreneur, Danglard (Jean Gabin, moreover), who brushes aside her current young lover to make her his mistress and star of his music hall. And, of course, she must resign herself to likewise being brushed aside when his affections turn elsewhere, just as the beauteous Abbess had had to step aside when Nini herself turned up. Gabin is center stage, male desire and male drive are all-important, and petty jealousies smouldering in the wings are the principal “moral” focus of this celebration of the patriarchy. The studio recreation of the Butte and of Montmartre’s nightlife is lovingly done, or rather the mythic representation of Montmartre as it was constructed by impressionist painters is lovingly brought to life. Danglard’s assembling of his prospective troupe of dancers and their progressive fashioning into a technically competent and coordinated chorus line is well done, allowing for frequent demonstrations of nineteenth-century fashions in feminine underwear, and the focus on nightclubs allows for several items or fragments of items (notably Édith Piaf as Eugénie Buffet). So there is a lot to like in the film, not least the climactic performance of the reinvigorated cancan on the opening night of the Moulin Rouge, full of action, spectacle, and bounce. It is important to recognize this, since it explains why the film was so immensely popular when it was released. If, as Renoir rather complacently re1952–1958

277

marked, he had made French Cancan with a view to reestablishing contact with the French public “to whom he was sure he was still close” after his long absence, he had certainly succeeded.57 But the weaknesses of the film are now at least as apparent as its strengths. It is not a dramatic film, though that was deliberate. The only dramatic narrative effect is treated rather perfunctorily—Nini’s petulant sulk just before opening night, which momentarily threatens to derail the gala performance. In reprimanding her for her selfishness, however, Danglard is given the opportunity to make forcefully the one rather trivial point of the film—that the theater is more important than life, acting is a supreme privilege, and “the show must go on.” More generally, this lack of narrative drama and tension, combined with the slow pace of both the action and the editing, and the lengthy blocks of which the narrative is constructed can easily make the spectator impatient. The direction of actors is also rather poor: the jocular scenes of trainee dancers larking about in their underwear are no doubt supposed to be mildly erotic and mildly amusing, while the subsequent mass fight provoked by the Abbess is likewise played for laughs, but the whole sequence is so clumsily staged as to be embarrassing. Long blocks of film in which very little happens, filmed with a stationary camera, tend to be quite simply boring. As Bernard Chardère said in his scathing review, there are signs of professional weariness and aging apparent in this film: “It is a film without interest. . . . French Cancan marks the beginning of Renoir’s decline. . . . [The difference is] between a morale that says No and a morale that says Yes. I regret to say that between the world of the director of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (refusal, lucidity, attack) and the world of recent films signed ‘Renoir’ (acceptance, resignation, ‘all is grace’) certain crucial matters have been forgotten, indeed contradicted. . . . If I sound so bitter it is because I am profoundly disappointed.”58 Effectively, Chardère is registering Renoir’s move from sympathy with left-wing causes to an implied sympathy with moral and spiritual values— that shift of which Bazin was so eager to approve (though even he strained to find things to praise in Cancan). That Chardère sees Cancan as the tipping point is, however, surprising, since the move had been apparent since Le Carrosse d’or and Le Fleuve. All Renoir’s postwar films are less impressive than the three fine films he made in America (Swamp Water, The Southerner, and Diary of a Chambermaid) where the commissioning process served to conceal the sad fact that Renoir had nothing left worth saying.

57. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 78, December 1957. 58. Premier Plan, nos. 22–23–24, 350–358.

278

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

This became even more apparent in his next film, Elena et les hommes (1956), where he recapitulated his favorite narrative pattern—surrounding an attractive woman with three suitors from different walks of life—in order to say (yet again, patronizingly), “Ah! Women are such wonderful creatures! Don’t you just love them!” Moreover, Elena was in many obvious respects simply a pallid remake of his 1939 film La Règle du jeu—a comparison that made the director’s “collapse” all the more apparent. He had abandoned the political for the complacently patriarchal, and had abandoned life for Art.

91. Les Grandes Manœuvres The Grand Maneuvers Filmed 28 April–8 July 1955; released 26 October 1955 107 min, Eastmancolor Dir René Clair; Prod Filmsonor/SECA/Cinétel/Rizzoli Film; Scr Clair, with Jérôme Géronimi and Jean Marsan; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music Georges van Parys; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Louisette Hautecœur; Act Michèle Morgan (Marie-Louise Rivière), Gérard Philipe (Armand de la Verne), Jean Desailly (Victor Duverger), Yves Robert (Félix Leroy), Brigitte Bardot (Lucie), Lise Delamare (Juliette Duverger), Jacques Fabbri (orderly), and Pierre Dux (Colonel Olivier). René Clair’s run of extraordinary successes peaked with Les Grandes Manœuvres, which attracted even more spectators in Paris than Les Belles de Nuit (#77) and ended up returning the highest receipts of that year’s production. It is a typical Franco-Italian coproduction—in color, with Clair’s experienced team (notably Léon Barsacq and Georges van Parys) and two of the leading stars of the day—very expensive to produce but returning large profits. As in all Clair’s films, the narrative is beautifully structured but breaks with precedent in that (like its successor, Porte des Lilas, 1957, #98), it ends rather grimly. It is Clair’s Don Juan story. As he said when introducing it, “No doubt every writer has dreamed of writing a Don Juan story. [This] is just one of the innumerable variations you could devise on that famous theme, which is inexhaustible.”59 Gérard Philipe plays the Don Juan role, as Armand de la Verne, a dragoon in the French Army during the years preceding World War I. Notori-

59. Clair, Comédies et commentaires, 253, 337–340.

1952–1958

279

ously successful with the ladies, he allows himself one drunken evening to be lured into accepting a bet that he will be able, before the regiment leaves on maneuvers, to seduce any woman that chance should designate. Chance designates Marie-Louise, a divorced dressmaker recently arrived from Paris. In courting her with a view to seducing her, Armand falls in love with her, and she with him, but she comes to learn of the bet, distrusts his protestations of sincerity, and allows him to depart with his regiment, with their relationship implicitly at an end. This is perhaps the greatest role that Michèle Morgan ever had, and she brings more credible humanity to it than any actor ever infused into Clair’s wonderful but essentially cold and puppet-like roles. Her initial quiet reserve is totally atypical of a female role in Clair’s films, and the moment when she begins to relax under Armand’s charm to become once more a warm, responsive human being is overwhelming. Quite properly, the opposite is true of Philipe’s Armand: his arrogant self-sufficiency, his overweening assumption that women are to be exploited rather than understood or respected, gives his smug, effusive charm an appropriately threatening and unlikeable flavor. He gets his comeuppance, of course, but only when he has already, too late, learned humility and is beginning to deserve better. The ironic end is the more painful because it reverses the trope that the lead protagonists, their attraction concealed by an early antagonism, are meant to be together by the end. Whenever I watch the film, I (ridiculously) hope that things will turn out better this time. Interestingly, Clair’s intention had been to provide an even more ironic ending: Marie-Louise was to kill herself; the maid was to discover her and rush to the window for help; Armand, passing with his fellow dragoons, was to see the window open and think it the signal agreed between them that he has been pardoned. The action is organized around three processional parades through the town by Armand’s regiment in full military regalia, with regimental brass blaring. The maneuvers of the title are those on which the regiment departs at the end, but also of course the amorous strategies that these processions frame, and the last procession encapsulates that trope so beloved of classic French cinema, public pomp and circumstance contrasted with private anguish. Further narrative structure and tension is provided by the departure deadline, and in the leadup to that deadline, some beautifully calculated processes are worked out—the initial establishing of Armand as a successful womanizer, the repetitive confirmation of his routinized seduction techniques, that other favorite French trope concerning the impossibility of distinguishing between acting and sincerity, and Marie-Louise’s gradual acceptance of his love, while underneath all this lies the ticking time-bomb of his signed bet to seduce her waiting for its moment to explode and destroy their relationship. 280

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Clair liked to contrast the meticulous preparation of his scenarios with the potential for improvisation at the moment of performance, but the cost of this production must have precluded improvisation. There is a massive amount of panning and tracking that could not have been left to chance, and numerous rapid slide-pans, both motivated and unmotivated, that substitute for scene changes in a way typical of Clair’s later films. But it is in the use of color that careful premeditation is most apparent. It was a given of the day that, except in the case of musical comedies, color must be used with reserve rather than aggressively, carefully balancing and harmonizing the intensity of the different colors. True to his formalist youth, Clair chose to do the precise opposite: all colors were suppressed except red and gold, and all the neutral tones were treated to avoid the color-stock introducing accidental tonings. Consequently, the splashes of red and gold that do occur, relating primarily to the soldiers’ uniforms, serve to isolate and foreground certain objects in an aggressive manner—just as the slide-pans foreground scene changes more aggressively than normal wipes. Barsacq has describeds the lengths to which they went in order to obtain these effects: The dragoons’ tunics, normally sea-blue, were confected from a black material. The decors were treated in grey-beige tonalities; the furniture and chairs were chosen in black or white lacquer . . . and those that weren’t already so were ruthlessly re-painted. The women’s and civilians’ clothes were allowed only a limited colour range, from black to white via beige and red-brown. . . . It was thanks to this discipline that a single splash of colour sufficed to draw attention to an object, giving it a dramatic or comic value. . . . The main street, constructed on the studio lot, received the same grey-beige to white treatment. We even had to spray a yellowish mist on the (real!) leaves of the adjacent trees, to attenuate the excessively lurid green of their foliage.60 Clair reported having mined much of the material for this film from his childhood memories of life near Versailles, where he often saw cavalry officers exercising in the Viroflay woods and listened to tales of their activities— notably a duel that the papers spoke of at length in which two officers died. Les Grandes Manœuvres was first screened at the French film festival in Moscow and

60. Barsacq, Le Décor de film, 129–130. See also Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 134–146, and Radio-Cinéma-TV, no. 314, 22 January 1956.

1952–1958

281

subsequently won the Louis Delluc Prize—an unusual accolade for an extravagant international coproduction because it was usually reserved for small-scale ambitious art films. Its success, recalling thirty years of celebrated Clair films, was no doubt a factor in the Brussels conference of film historians in 1958 citing Clair, along with Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein, as the greatest directors of all time.

92. Lola Montès Lola Montès Filmed 28 February–23 July 1955; released 23 December 1955 140 min, Eastmancolor/Cinemascope Dir Max Ophüls; Prod Gamma Films/Florida Films/Union Film; Scr Ophüls, Annette Wademant, and Jacques Natanson, based on “La Vie extraordinaire de Lola Montès” by Cécil Saint-Laurent; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Georges Auric; Art dir Jean d’Eaubonne; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Martine Carol (Lola Montès), Peter Ustinov (ringmaster), Anton Walbrook (Louis II of Bavaria), Lise Delamare (Lola’s mother, Madame Craigie), Will Quadflieg (Franz Liszt), Yvan Desny (Lieutenant Thomas James, Lola’s first husband), Oskar Werner (the student), Henri Guisol (Maurice, the coachman), and Paulette Dubost (Joséphine, Maurice’s wife and Lola’s servant). Max Ophüls’s third postwar film, Madame de . . . (#83), can easily seem a decorative but empty film, but Lola Montès, his final film, is a masterpiece and arguably one of the three greatest French films ever made.61 In four series of (nonchronological) flashbacks, it covers the life of Lola Montès—her affair with Franz Liszt, her youth and marriage to a Scottish gentleman, her “scandalous” career as a courtisan, and her period as companion to Louis II of Bavaria—all framed in her present situation as a caged exhibit in a circus, where a public fascinated by her notoriety pays a dollar to stare at her and kiss her hand through the bars. The first thing to admire about this film is the stunning technique. This is a filmmaker in meticulous control of every aspect of his film. The image is constantly enchanting—an elaborate patterning of line, color, shadow, and shape. A variety of cages, nets, frames, and grills enclose the characters, and notably Lola. Understandably, Ophüls is often seen as “baroque” because of the complex orna-

61. The other two being, in my view, Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu and Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou.

282

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

mentality of this mise en scène, and Jean d’Eaubonne has testified to the exhilaration of trying as an art director to live up to his director’s totally unreasonable demands. Moreover, this was Ophüls’s first and only use of color and cinemascope, and each scene of Lola’s past is tinted in a color range appropriate to its mood and to its “season”: blue and gray for her youth, red and gold for the “autumnal” sequence with Liszt, silver and white for the Bavarian period, and a riot of color for the circus scenes. D’Eaubonne talks of the cistern of red wash that was sprayed on the roads and nearby bushes every day during filming of the autumnal scenes, and the miles of tulle specially flown in from Brussels to be draped over the mill (Marcel Pagnol’s Provençal mill) at the end of that sequence, when Pagnol refused to allow it to be repainted.62 Caches, hazes, and veils of various sorts mask parts of the image and repeatedly modify the horizontal oblong of the cinemascope screen, while the camera, constantly on the move, swirls and zooms from the circus ring up past endless ropes and trapezes to the heights of the tent, and back again. And on top of that, the Brechtian presence of the ringmaster, played by Peter Ustinov, stands in for the author, as Jean Servais had in Le Plaisir (#72), but now a dominant and commanding presence rather than a discrete voiceover. Despite or because of all this technical brilliance, many critics saw the film at the time as I tend to see its predecessor: just another brilliant but empty film without a story, presenting characters with whom one could not identify, while spectators, who had expected from the publicity a scandalous film along the lines of Martine Carol’s other film then screening (Nana, directed by her husband, Christian-Jaque), or that other current series of scripts drawing on Cécil SaintLaurent’s novels with her as lead (Caroline Chérie, etc.), were disappointed and outraged. Police had to be called in to control their anger. The film was a financial catastrophe, not covering in exclusive release one tenth of its 670 million francs cost, and Gamma Films was bankrupted. Ophüls, who felt that entertaining the public was a professional duty, was dismayed and spoke of a misunderstanding that time would correct. To his relief, the German release was a triumph. The Cahiers du cinéma critics defended the film, even the realists among them —Éric Rohmer listed it as one of the year’s best, while André Bazin praised Ophüls for having dared make such an avant-garde film—and a month after its disastrous release, a group of directors (Jean Cocteau, Roberto Rossellini, Jacques Becker, Christian-Jaque, Jacques Tati, Pierre Kast, Alexandre Astruc!) wrote an open letter to the press asserting that “to defend Lola Montès is to defend the cinema in general, since every serious attempt to renew the cinema is good for the cinema as it is for the public.” But it was not until Pierre Leprohon’s

62. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 158.

1952–1958

283

spirited defense in 1957 and Claude Beylie’s book in 1963 that critics began to explain in detail why this technically brilliant film was worth defending, why it was more than mere glitter. For Leprohon, it was “a revolutionary film for its revitalization of film language, the freshest richest most inventive film seen since the beginning of the talkie,” but he confines his discussion of subject matter to traditional Ophülsian themes—“the fragility of love, the bitter perfume of lost joys, a rejection of the contemporary in favour of the Eternal,” and so on.63 It was Beylie who first pointed out that the film can be read as a scathing indictment of contemporary culture, and particularly of the commercial imperatives that rule it. Quoting Ophüls on the “indecent” questions often posed by listeners phoning in to radio games (which had inspired his circus audience’s intrusive questions), and on the “circus” with which Hollywood surrounds and destroys its stars, Beylie wrote of “the theme of annihilation of the personality, the cruelty and indecency of spectacles founded on scandal.” 64 The clear implication is that Beylie saw Ophüls as satirizing precisely that voyeuristic whiff of scandal that was so commonly used to attract spectators, and which the producers here again had (mistakenly) used when trying to attract spectators to a film that derided it. This is also another Ophüls film focusing on a woman. Reputedly, one motive for adapting this “cheap and vulgar novel” was Ophüls’s awareness of the fate of Judy Garland. Paul Willemen brought together these themes of circus, spectacle, and woman by noting the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnavalesque: circus is a site/sight of oppositions—nature/culture, inside/outside, chaos/order, myth and history, clowning and seriousness, death and life. It is, therefore, a scene/seen that allows for the representation of cosmic contradictions. And in a patriarchal society where looking is phallic, the embodiment of any such obsessive look is inevitably a woman, so the embodiment is appropriately enough a woman in a circus spectacle, hence Ophüls’s willingness to film this “penny dreadful.”65 A particularly forceful and effective extension of Willemen’s argument is mounted by Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier for whom the film is a satire of precisely the sort of film and world represented by Christian-Jaque’s Nana. The metaphor of the circus evokes the wild beast, the monster to which woman is reduced in her role of femme fatale, exhibited to the public for their salacious pleasure, a puppet actioned by the uniformed, male puppet master. It is patriarchal 63. See Leprohon, Présences contemporaines, 173–180. 64. Beylie, Max Ophüls, 91–95. 65. Willemen, ed., Max Ophuls, 64–69.

284

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

power structures that are satirized here, which savage any woman who aims to live freely, but it also satirizes the mercantile demands of a capitalist consumer society that exploits for profit whatever it owns—and that includes women. Burch and Sellier acknowledge that Ophüls’s “violent denunciation” of these oppressive structures does not go far enough, since he resorts in Lola to the cliché of the shrewish mother, not to mention the elderly monarch who forms with Lola something approaching the traditional “incestuous couple.” But then, they say sadly, Ophüls is after all a male, so it is not surprising that he should “at once denounce the exploitation of that beauty at the centre of the star-system but yet lend his aura as auteur to the cynical ringmaster, should at once denounce all the oppressions to which women are subject in this patriarchal, mercantile society but yet let us enjoy the spectacle of a woman who lends herself to the display of her own degradation.”66 Lola Montès is an endlessly fascinating film, not least because of this ambivalence—staggeringly innovative and profoundly moving. Anyone who loves film should see it again and again.

93. Cela s’appelle l’aurore (It’s Called “The Dawn”) Filmed 18 August–14 October 1955; released 9 May 1956 102 min, b&w Dir Luis Buñuel; Prod Les Films Marceau/Laetitia; Scr Buñuel and Jean Ferry, based on the novel by Emmanuel Roblès; Cinematog Robert Lefebvre; Music Joseph Kosma; Art dir Max Douy; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Marguerite Renoir; Act Georges Marchal (Dr. Valerio), Lucia Bose (Clara), Giani Esposito (Sandro), Nelly Borgeaud (Angéla, Valerio’s wife), Jean-Jacques Delbo (Gorzone), Brigitte Elroy (Magda), Julien Bertheau (police commissioner), Henri Nassiet (Angéla’s father), and Gaston Modot (Sandro’s replacement). This was the first film that Luis Buñuel had made in France since L’Âge d’or (1930) and marked the start of what Raymond Durgnat styled Buñuel’s “revolutionary triptych” of three international coproductions, this one with Italy, the following two—La Mort en ce jardin (1956) and La Fièvre monte à El Pao (1959)— with Mexico.67 After his 1932 split with surrealism, signaling his preference for 66. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 303–306. 67. This phrase and following quotations are from Durgnat, Luis Buñuel, 100–104.

1952–1958

285

politics over aesthetics, Buñuel “disappeared” for eighteen years, working as a dubbing controler for Paramount, a Latin American producer for Warner Brothers, then an executive producer for the Mexican firm Filmofono. During the war, he made documentaries for the U.S. Army, and at war’s end returned to dubbing with Warner Brothers. His career as a director only resumed in 1947, and for the next decade, he made cheap comedies and melodramas (most notably Los Olvidados in 1950), mainly for Oscar Dancigers in Mexico, until the international celebrity triggered in 1958 by Nazarin, according to Durgnat, “liberated him from the concessions, ambiguities and camouflages which had rendered so many of his previous films obscure.” Cela s’appelle l’aurore is, then, one of the “obscure works” from that middle period when he saw his task as trying simply to rework whatever scripts were on offer in such a way that they did not jar too obviously with his left-wing political principles. Like the other two films, this one is not openly political but exploits a schematic narrative that can readily be interpreted in political terms. Gorzone is a classic capitalist: the boss of a company whose workers have been injured in a boiler explosion, he is nevertheless indifferent to their suffering. His gardener Sandro’s wife is tubercular, but this does not prevent him from firing Sandro for supposed slacking. On their resultant journey to find new quarters, Sandro’s wife, Magda, dies. In a rage, Sandro assassinates Gorzone. The film’s protagonist, Valerio, is a doctor who has been unable to save Magda but who is now willing (at the risk of destroying his career) to hide Sandro from the police. When the latter seem about to track him down, Sandro slips out of Valerio’s house and flees through the streets. When cornered, he commits suicide. The crucial evolution in the course of the narrative is that undergone by Valerio, from his initial humanitarian position of caring professionally for everyone, to his later left-wing position as a politically committed activist working to protect the impoverished and the suffering from the established authorities and their minions, the police. He has learned solidarity with those oppressed by a society that claims to be civilized—he has progressed, in effect, from solitude to solidarity. These oppositions between the old and the young, the powerful and the weak, the selfish and the caring are overdetermined: Valerio is called out to care for a young girl who has been raped by her grandfather, and Valerio’s own father-in-law is another malevolent authoritarian figure who, realizing Valerio is engaged in something of which he disapproves, departs, taking his daughter with him. While caring for the rape victim, however, Valerio has met an attractive widow, Clara (played by Lucia Bose, Miss Italy of 1947), who by her unhes-

286

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

itating understanding contrasts with his fastidious wife, and the final image of the film is of these two together with two friends of the dead Sandro strolling somewhat aimlessly along the shore at night. The refusal of the film to provide an unequivocally upbeat ending is typical of the generally low-key tone of the work. It is neither triumphalist nor emphatic, leaving any political conclusion to be deduced by the viewer rather than spelled out by the dialogue or acting. There is something of the prewar poetic realist tradition to be seen in the plot, especially when the social implications are underlined as in the above narrative summary, but not in the film’s downbeat tonality. The ending is “elegaic and tentative” rather than assertive, which Durgnat thought appropriate to “the bewilderment and passivity of the non-Stalinist left in the 1950s and onwards.” The title is borrowed from Jean Giraudoux’s Électre, and has the same opaque obliqueness: Is there a name for that moment when the day breaks, as today, when everything is ruined, ravaged, yet the air is still breathable, when you have lost everything and the city is burning, and the innocent are slaughtering one another, but the guilty lie dying in a corner of the new day? It has a beautiful name. It is called: the dawn. Conservative critics (Claude Mauriac, Éric Rohmer, Jean Dutourd, etc.) were quick to dismiss the film as idiotic, as facile anticlericalism—an incompetent, clumsy melodrama. Durgnat, on the contrary, from whom several arguments in this commentary are borrowed, sees both this and the succeeding films of the trilogy as “openly or by implication a study in the morality and tactics of armed revolution against a right-wing dictatorship. They obviously paraphrase the political circumstances of several Latin-American countries, and, as Freddy Buache suggests, of Franco’s last days in Spain.” Buache was a friend of the director and defended him aggressively: Once again Buñuel adopts a subversive role and puts forward some ideas one seldom hears in the cinema—that in contemporary Western society an individual’s honour no longer coincides with the duties of a citizen, that the moral system is as gangrenous as the social system, that the police represent the concrete expression of that system, that you must never come to terms with the institutions that form the base and the summit of that society. Oppose totally

1952–1958

287

its taboos and its laws, feel yourself permanently in a situation of insurrection. Dignity requires that you hide a proletarian who has just assassinated his boss; and never shake a cop’s hand.68 Buñuel himself said, “Even if he doesn’t draw any conclusions, even if he doesn’t openly take sides, the [filmmaker] discharges his duty honorably when, through a faithful portrait of authentic social relationships, he destroys the conventional ideas of those relationships, undermines the optimism of the bourgeois world, and compels the [viewer] to doubt the enduring nature of the existing order.”69

94. Le Mystère Picasso (How Does Picasso Do It?) Filmed July–September 1955; released 18 May 1956 78 min, b&w Dir and Scr Henri-Georges Clouzot; Prod Filmsonor; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music Georges Auric; Edit Henri Colpi; Act Pablo Picasso. Many documentaries shot during the 1950s have become notorious, either because of their content (Nuit et brouillard, Alain Resnais, 1955), or because they foreshadowed the later work of directors who were to become known as the New Wave (François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, etc.), but all were short films. The only feature-length documentary comparable to this one is Jacques Cousteau’s Le Monde du silence (1955), which at 72 minutes was also released as a main film and which made the director and his crew public figures. But this latter film horrifies nowadays because of the callous and cynical way that the sea creatures and their habitat are treated—notably dynamiting the reef as a convenient means to obtain samples of coral and of (very dead) fish. Le Mystère Picasso was no less groundbreaking but in a way that can still excite interest and admiration. Henri-Georges Clouzot was himself a painter, and had been a close friend of Picasso for twenty years. This film started life as a short documentary to “explain” Picasso’s genius, but as Clouzot accumulated more and more material, he decided to divide it into several short films, then finally to make of it one feature-length film. Numerous biographers had produced documentaries on artist-painters, but Clouzot’s friendship with Picasso allowed him

68. Quoted in Chirat, La IVe république et ses films, 106–107. 69. Durgnat, Luis Buñuel, 14.

288

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

to film the painter over several months in the actual act of painting works that evolved even as he painted them. The better to present the painting process to the spectator, Clouzot used a new transparent material as “canvas,” with inks that passed through it, filmed from the reverse so that Picasso’s brushstrokes appear on the screen as if by magic. And such is Picasso’s fluidity that he produces twenty works in their entirety in the 78 minutes of the film. All of these works fall within the recognized fields of interest of the painter, notably naked women, often gloated over by elderly satyrs such as the painter himself, or Spanish motifs such as bull-fighting, with toreadors, with matadors being gored, and with spectators attentive to the spectacle. Indeed, the act of representation and of spectating is frequently present or implied. The final image, developed at greater length, is however a beach scene. Technically, Clouzot shows great restraint—there are no editing techniques of interest, no pans, travelings, or angle changes. Nevertheless, variation of pace is introduced by the fact that some of the twenty images produced are line drawings in black and white of simple scenes, apparently produced in a single burst of activity lasting less than a minute, while others are complex representations of elaborate scenes involving both line and color that evolve through several stages and phases, over perhaps hours or days. The effect is, say, that of a scherzo-like flourish followed by a slow movement of theme and variations. Moreover, a certain dramatic structure is accorded the production of the images by the progressive introduction of a range of technical variants: the series begins with a line drawing of a girl’s head (with dove emerging!), the second complicates this by adding secondary characters, the third begins with line but adds music and color, the fourth begins with flourishes of color brushed on to produce a sleeping girl’s head, the sixth adds successive colors in a series of time-lapse “jumps,” the ninth introduces the concept of evolution as a fish evolves into a hen, which in turn evolves into a baroque face. Later episodes use different combinations of these techniques, with numbers 15, 16, and 20 introducing collaged rectangles of wallpaper. As well as this change of pace and of technique, there is an inherent drama within each image, since we do not know in advance what the image will show, and Picasso, deliberately provocative, begins with enigmatic and often misleading strokes. This combines with the evolutionary principle to produce an overall effect of comic playfulness. In addition, the suite of images is broken into larger “movements” by the camera drawing back at intervals to survey the scene and remind the spectator of the studio context—showing, say, the painter himself in his singlet, pausing to discuss with the director how to proceed. This complex format is easily capable of mantaining interest and occasional delight for an hour and a quarter. The extent of one’s delight obviously depends 1952–1958

289

on one’s attitude toward Picasso’s material and style. The conditions under which filming took place—time and space—constrained what could be shown and how—the material and the style—but on the evidence of this series of evolving images, it would be hard not to be impressed by the rapidity and “inevitability” of Picasso’s line drawings. They are exquisite, showing an astounding control and confidence. As soon as color intervenes, however, doubts arise. The mix of raw colors laid on in spots and stripes often confuses and undermines an initially exquisite line image, while the juxtaposition of colors is garish to say the least. This may be due solely to the available technology, but perhaps not, since similar objections might be made to Picasso’s work in glazed media. Of the resultant images, the most impressive are number 7 (geometric lines constructing a girl’s head, with color limited to dark green), number 16 (a brushoutlined reclining nude, refashioned several times in line and in attitude, with blocks of wallpaper added), and number 20 (the last and longest, which took eight days to film, of a beach scene that evolves and darkens as variants multiply— characters are added, modified, and deleted, and the whole is finally dismissed and redone in a definitive form that Picasso is willing to acknowledge. He signs, and strolls away through a studio cluttered by his productions in various media). If there is one weakness to the film, it is the recurrent bursts of music (solo piano, Spanish guitar, jazz trumpet, full orchestra) that break in to accompany several of the images—the music is always appropriate to the image, of course, but sometimes too obviously so, and the result irritates by its dependence on cliché and convention. Another criticism: despite Clouzot’s initial claims about his desire to “explain” creativity, actually seeing Picasso producing these images explains nothing about the nature of art (or of “genius”). But despite occasional criticisms one might make of this sort, the whole is never less than interesting—if occasionally frustrating, as apparently perfect images are erased or over-painted, almost as if perfection were too easy for Picasso.

95. La Traversée de Paris Pig across Paris/Four Bags Full Filmed 7 April–9 June 1956; released 26 October 1956 82 min, b&w Dir Claude Autant-Lara; Prod Franco London Film; Scr Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, from the short story by Marcel Aymé; Cinematog Jacques Natteau; Music René Cloérec; Art dir Max Douy; Sound René Forget; Edit Madeleine Gug; Act Jean Gabin (Grandgil), Bourvil (Martin), Jeannette Batti (Mariette, wife of Martin), Louis de Funès (Jambier), and Monette Dinay (Madame Jambier). 290

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

The films that Claude Autant-Lara directed between 1942 and 1960 were consistently successful, often ranking in the top five of their seasons, but La Traversée de Paris was by far the most successful, attracting over 360,000 admissions in Paris exclusive release (163 million francs) and over 650,000 in all France. This degree of success can seem surprising, given that it is a rather malevolent little film. Although set during the occupation, it does not pander to any of the stock myths of the Resistance or of the heroic “little people” of Paris—quite the contrary. It is based on a Marcel Aymé short story published in 1947 concerning the transport of black-market pork across Paris at night, at risk of discovery by the police or the German military.70 This unheroic anti-Odyssey is framed within stock shots of the arrival of the army of occupation (regimentation, martial music) and, four years later, the arrival of the army of liberation (cheering crowds, unmartial music characterizing the diverse allied nations), which play strangely against the bleak worldview of the core of the film. A number of factors must have contributed to its success, and notably the presence and performance of the two leads. It is a two-hander, depending for its entire length on the presence of Jean Gabin as Grandgil and Bourvil as Martin. All other characters are episodic, encountered more or less briefly in the course of the trajectory across Paris. Martin is the journeyman black marketeer, ex-taximan now earning a crust as best he illegally can. Grandgil is a painter encountered by accident when Martin’s routine partner is picked up by the police, and whom Martin talks into accompanying him because he mistakenly thinks his own wife, Mariette, has arranged an assignation with Grandgil. The two form a stock incongruous couple: Martin a humble, bumbling, working-class man, a victim of life doubly oppressed by the stressful wartime conditions, and Grandgil—not as it turns out a house-painter but an internationally renowned artist— one of the intelligentsia, sure of himself, aggressive, cynical, patronizing. One sort of pleasure to be derived from the film is the progressive reversal of roles as Grandgil, hired as a simple porter, gradually takes control of the operation. To Martin’s horror, he does this by verbally abusing, threatening, and bullying the various characters they encounter, not least the grocer–black marketeer whose shop cellar houses masses of valuable goods, and the café proprietor who is using a Jewish girl as a slave. So another part of the pleasure provided by the film is in seeing those devious, conniving, exploitative individuals getting their comeuppance. Gabin’s famous onscreen rages are here channeled toward unveiling the sheer nastiness of those they encounter—their greed, selfishness, and coward-

70. “Le Vin de Paris.” For the radical modifications between story and script, see A. J. Cauliez, Téléciné fiche, no. 293.

1952–1958

291

ice. “In a world where all values have collapsed, only the basest instincts survive: treachery, fear, underhand maneuvers, and the rule of the strongest, who can do what they want.”71 Grandgil proves adept at this game, insulting, intimidating, and humiliating the grocer and conning him out of 5,000 francs, then forcing the café proprietor to publicly confess his shameful ploys. “What the fuck are you doing on this earth?” he shouts at them, “Aren’t you ashamed to exist?” Middle-class proprieties, in particular, are repeatedly ridiculed. When Martin complains that he hasn’t been able to get a job, Grandgil points out to him the benefits of entrepreneurship. Martin could steal the pork and sell it on, then he would be rich, he could be a boss too. “See where dishonesty can get you!” Throughout, Grandgil acts as the provocateur, unmasking the pettiness, malice, greed, and hypocrisy of those they meet, forcing people to acknowledge unpleasant truths. When Grandgil reveals himself as an artist and wealthy, he returns the 5,000 francs to Martin saying he had just been playing a game, enjoying the sight of the petty and the weak groveling in terror, and (paraphrasing Jean Cocteau) “seeing just how far beyond the bounds it is possible to go under the Occupation. And you saw how far. You saw what I could get away with, with those scum.” As he is leaving the café (which, with Martin’s timorous but excited help, he has partially demolished), he turns to shout back at the proprietor, “You’re disgusting, I refuse to know you, I wipe you from my memory, I rub you out.” And it is clearly not just the café proprietors and their customers (“the crapulous poor”) that he is referring to here, but all French people under the occupation, all French people, all people. This is the purest expression in French cinema of an absolute scorn for humanity as a whole. As Jacques Doniol-Valcroze noted, “Everyone is nasty, cowardly or stupid; or all three at once. If the tale has a moral it is anarchistic: the strong con the weak, and the intelligent con the stupid; but the strong are not courageous, the intelligent are cynical and the feeble despicable.”72 But rather than a pessimistic and bitter film, La Traversée de Paris is mildly comical. Not only is much of the ranting and vituperation entertaining, but comic incidents and phrases punctuate the narrative—the accordion played loudly to cover the squeals of the slaughtered pig; the dogs who repeatedly trail the two men across Paris scenting the pork in their suitcases; the comic friction between the two; Martin’s attempt to win over the policeman interrupted by Grandgil’s abruptly flattening him; Grandgil’s encouraging the timid Martin to help him destroy the café stock of liquor; the wry humor of the attractive young girl mistaking the two black marketeers for Resistance heroes; the racket they create

71. Prédal, La Société française à travers le cinéma, 299. 72. Cahiers du cinéma, no. 65, November 1956, 45.

292

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

when the wealthy butcher to whom they are to deliver the pork is too terrified to let them in, so that the Germans arrest them, then the German commanding officer’s wry observation when he discovers that the well-known artist’s suitcase contains a pig’s head (“I see you’re going in for still life now”73); Grandgil’s pretending fancifully to the same officer that Martin is his latest model, and showing him Bourvil’s profile (“You see this splendid face . . . and so French”); and not least the final scene postwar when Grandgil’s station porter turns out to be Martin (“Still carrying other people’s suitcases, I see”). It is no accident that this postwar Martin is no less oppressed and alienated than he had been under the occupation. So there are various forms of pleasure offered by the film. And perhaps not least, for those who remembered the occupation years, the relatively faithful recreation of the pressures, routines, and constraints of the time—the curfew, of course, and empty night streets but also the shortages of food, of coal, of soap; the consequent black marketeering and queuing outside grocery stores; the Jews and the implication of French connivance in the Holocaust; the gas lamps and lack of electricity; the lack of gasoline; the pedal taxis; the alerts, shelters, and alcohol-free days. This is the occupation represented by people whose main aim is to demystify it, after ten years of persistent mystification (still at that time continuing, and still popular—Les Évadés in 1954, La Chatte in 1958, etc.). Jacques Siclier is vicious in contrasting this film with the standard heroic myths of a resistant France: “For the first time a French film showed in a social microcosm the consequences of the lost war and German presence on French territory—degradation and baseness, shopkeepers enriched by the black market, police sweeps and hostages all subject to the whims of Chance.”74 This makes the film’s resounding success even more astonishing.

96. Un condamné à mort s’est échappé A Man Escaped Filmed 15 May–2 August 1956; released 11 November 1956 100 min, b&w Dir Robert Bresson; Prod Gaumont and Nouvelles Éditions du Film; Scr Bresson, based on the account by André Devigny; Cinematog Léonce-Henri Burel; Music The Kyrie from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor; Art dir Pierre Charbonnier; Sound

73. Still life, “nature morte.” 74. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 246–247.

1952–1958

293

Pierre-André Bertrand; Edit Raymond Lamy; Act “Students” (François Leterrier [Fontaine/Devigny], Charles Le Clainche [Jost], Maurice Beerblock [Blanchet], Roland Monod [the pastor], Jacques Ertaud [Orsini], and Roger Tréherne [Terry]). This is surely Robert Bresson’s finest film. After Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951, #68), he had devoted time and energy to a script on the Grail legend of Lancelot (which he was finally to make in 1974), then tried to obtain the rights to La Princesse de Clèves, in competition with Jean Delannoy, who subsequently filmed it in 1960. Finally, in the Figaro Littéraire (of 20 November 1954), he read Commandant André Devigny’s account of his 1943 escape from Montluc Castle Prison in Lyons and recognized the story’s cinematic and thematic potential. Bresson had himself spent eighteen months in a German prison camp. In his adaptation, the protagonist becomes “Fontaine.” He initially proposed the title Aide-toi . . . (Help yourself and . . .), or, when the producer objected, Le Vent souffle où il veut (implying “God works in mysterious ways”), but the producer imposed Un condamné à mort s’est échappé. Bresson accepted but kept his second preference as a subtitle. Of course, the producer’s title defuses any suspense by foreshadowing the success of the escape, but then so does Fontaine’s retrospective voiceover, and it is hard to see how Bresson would have objected to this foreshadowing given his systematic avoidance of all suspense mechanisms, and indeed of all foregrounded dramatic effects. Of several rigorously antidramatic works to have been produced in the postwar years, this and his earlier Journal must surely be the most austere. There are few moments of violence in the narrative (Fontaine’s initial attempted escape, his beating in the cell, his murder of the German sentinel), but these all happen off-screen—behind a closed door, around a corner— while the camera waits impassively for the action to return to its field of view. The narrative focus is not so much on “events” as on the meticulous preparation of those events—the month-long prising free of the door planks, the painstaking fashioning of the cord and the hooks to scale the prison walls. And since all this takes place in a 7- by 10-foot cell, the detailed work is shot in close-ups of hands, faces, objects. François Leterrier, who took the role of Devigny/Fontaine, reckoned that it was the objects that deserved star billing, so central were they to the narrative. Certainly the actors themselves got no such recognition. In line with Bresson’s evolving theories about the disastrous effect of theatrical acting in the cinema, he chose unknowns, mostly students—specifically, German students to play the guards. Leterrier himself was a philosophy student, reputedly required by contract to refrain from any future acting role (though he later directed a number of films, notably the wonderful Un roi sans divertissement). The titles 294

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

name no names, saying simply “students.” Bresson wanted the freedom to mold the cast to his needs, which involved ridding them of any trace of expressiveness. Or, as Leterrier said, “Bresson wanted us to become part of the composition of the image,” a formal element rather than an expressive participant. To obtain this, he refilmed scenes over and over again, until those involved were simply repeating phrases, exhausted (200,000 feet of film for 10,000 used). Many critics saw this as reducing the cast to puppets, whose every gesture and inflection was predetermined. The result is “a sort of automatism, undertaken in the belief that we reveal who we truly are when our gestures are automatic,” or, as Bresson said, “What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realised they contained. The camera watches it; neither they nor I really know it before it happens.”75 The effect is exacerbated by close-ups of faces without the usual cut away to what they are seeing that would happen in standard psychodramas seeking to attract the spectator’s identification with the character. Rather than identify, spectators are invited to watch—to watch the characters as they themselves watch, tensely, expressionlessly. This is a radically distinctive, even eccentric filmmaking style, which few have adopted before or since. Some of its most distinctive effects are to be found on the soundtrack. Diegetic speech is limited to fragments of barked orders or whispered phrases, and the only extended dialogue occurs when Fontaine is testing his new roommate’s character to identify whether it will be necessary to kill him. The overwhelming majority of spoken language is provided by Fontaine’s retrospective voiceover—as neutral and dispassionate as his on-screen presence. What impresses most is the attention to noises—the intensity of awareness that the actors were forbidden to express is evoked indirectly by the intensity of attention paid by the microphone to every least sound. Noises evoke the world outside the prison, which we never otherwise see except in a few framing shots. More importantly, they betray the presence, the activities, and the intentions of the German guards. Finally, the slightest sound may betray Fontaine’s own preparations and intentions, especially when the actual escape is in progress. Where the camera and visuals record the inexpressive exterior, the microphone evokes a passionately attentive interior world. Bresson emphasized that this film is not about the Resistance, and indeed the wartime context of capture and escape is barely sketched in. So what is it about? Most critics, perfectly reasonably given Bresson’s known Jansenist values, opt for a spiritual/metaphysical theme. This interpretation is tenable because of (1) the subtitle, which refers to the apparently arbitrary grace of God; (2) the posi-

75. Cunneen, Robert Bresson, 60, 68.

1952–1958

295

tive representation of the clergyman, who moreover passes to Fontaine this biblical quotation; (3) the sole instance of extra-diegetic music—the Kyrie of Mozart’s C Minor Mass—that bursts in aggressively seven times, usually on the occasion of the morning slops, and tends to ritualize these moments of communion, of community. A reasonable interpretation of these and other filmic elements is that the grace of God, arbitrarily bestowed on Fontaine but withheld from others, provides for liberation and for victory over death. As Bresson said, “I would like to show this miracle: an invisible hand directing events, such that certain things work for some but not for others.”76 Because of his success, Fontaine comes within the prison to be regarded as a catalyst for hope, for peace, and for resignation to the will of God. Fortunately, this spiritual message is only obliquely implied, so that people for whom religion is a relatively unimportant sociological phenomenon can still find the resultant film enthralling. Fontaine’s escape is equally readable as due to chance, or to meticulous planning, as to the mysterious workings of a god. Devigny attended the shooting to ensure factual accuracy. His actual escape was short-lived: recaptured the next day, he again escaped and spent the day hiding in a Rhône reed-bed. If Bresson did not include these subsequent incidents, it was no doubt primarily to preserve the unity of action, of place, and of tone.

97. Et Dieu . . . créa la femme Remade as And God Created Woman (1987) Filmed 3 May–7 July 1956; released 28 November 1956 93 min, Cinemascope/Eastmancolor Dir Roger Vadim; Prod Raoul Lévy for Iéna-Film UCIL Cocinor; Scr Vadim and Raoul Lévy; Cinematog Armand Thirard; Music Paul Misraki; Art dir Jean André; Sound Pierre Calvet; Edit Victoria Mercanton; Act Brigitte Bardot (Juliette), Christian Marquand (Antoine Tardieu), Curd Jurgens (Eric Carradine), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Michel Tardieu), Marie Glory (Madame Tardieu), Jeanne Marken (Madame Morin), and Jean Tissier. This must be the clumsiest film ever to have been characterized (and rightly characterized) as a landmark in cinematic production. Extremely controversial from its first screening, it was early seen as sociologically significant, proposing a radically new view of youth, of women, and of gender relationships, symp76. Ibid., 62.

296

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

tomatic of a rebellion against patriarchal imperatives and against conventional bourgeois morality. It was immediately seized upon as defining the postwar generation. It was also, of course, the film in which Brigitte Bardot first came to prominence, and she was to become the focus and embodiment of this sensual ideological “revolution.” Roger Vadim, the director, had met her while working as assistant director, co-scriptwriter, and errand boy for Marc Allégret (from 1947 to 1956), and scripted her appearance in Futures Vedettes and En effeuillant la marguerite (Allégret, 1955 and 1956), as well as Cette sacrée gamine (Michel Boisrond, 1955). They had recently married, and he reputedly constructed Et Dieu . . . créa la femme around her as a form of wedding present. It was her fifteenth film, but the only previous one of note had been René Clair’s Les Grandes Manœuvres (1955, #91), where she appeared alongside Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan. It was the present film, however, that made of her a star and defined the mythic persona she was thereafter to embody. Reputedly the storyline was sketched out in a couple of hours in Paris by Vadim and the producer, Raoul Lévy, then modified in a Munich bar to expand the role of Curd Jurgens, who was invited to participate in order to reassure distributors about the film’s commercial potential.77 The resultant film certainly looks casually constructed, ad hoc, as even its defenders acknowledged. Exploiting a conventional format, it surrounds Bardot with three contrasting male characters (Jurgens, Christian Marquand, Jean-Louis Trintignant) all fascinated by her casual physical display and unreflective animality. Her actions are unpredictable because her motives are obscure, or, rather like a child or an animal, she has no motives. She does what she does because she feels like doing it. Barefoot, barely clothed, she is all body and no mind, all surface and no depth. This discourse of the body had been developing in contemporary film journals since at least 1952, where the cult of the splendid physique had attached itself to numerous actors, both male (beefcake) and female (exuberant mammary development). Most of the female stars had been foreign (Diana Dors, Jayne Mansfield, Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg) and toward the end of 1955, a positive frenzy of such articles appeared on Marilyn Monroe. French pride required a French exemplar. Already in March 1956, a lengthy article entitled “Brigitte Bardot, ou l’école des femmes” identified fairly clearly the key constituents of what was to become her mythic persona, and these were progressively refined in an eight-part series of articles in Cinémonde, where for the first time her name was shortened to BB (bébé, baby), followed a year later by 77. See Frydland, Roger Vadim, 85–87.

1952–1958

297

a lengthy analysis in Cinéma 58.78 The terms “sex appeal” and “a healthy eroticism” recur in these articles (presumably in opposition to the unhealthy eroticism exhibited by yesterday’s vamps). Of central importance is a lack of intellection: she is “un bel animal charnel,” blithely unaware of the centuries of moral strictures weighing on earlier generations. A principal element of her fascination is captured by the incessant oxymorons that appear in articles about her: she is at once woman and child, naive and knowing, daring and candid, naked and pure, amoral and generous, attractive but inaccessible, angel and devil, an upper-class girl who comes across as common, if not vulgar, and it is this paradoxical complexity constituted of incompatible elements that the uneasy phrase “a healthy eroticism” so appropriately captures.79 By 1958, Cinéma 58 could agree that she seemed to define the state of mind of postwar youth, an assertion that a series of analogous youth films seemed to support—not just Futures Vedettes, but Les Tricheurs (1958, #101), Chiens perdus sans collier, Les Collégiennes, and Club de femmes (1955–1956). Other commentators saw her as inaugurating a totally new genre that was to be typical of the late 1950s— the erotic film. A series of articles (“Sensuality on the Screen”) explored the techniques of visual eroticization in recent films, an area that Lo Duca’s L’Érotisme et le cinéma had recently begun to explore. As Cinémonde said, revelling in “this flowering of lovely plants,” “without our having noticed it, eroticism is in the process of acquiring its letters patent and becoming a recognizable cinematographic style.”80 But if BB served to define contemporary, amoral youth in general, it was particularly amoral womanhood that she came to stand for, and feminists were quick to see her as illustrating the newly liberated female of the 1950s, no longer inhibited and repressed by a hypocritical, patriarchal morality but rather rectifying the age-old imbalance of the sexes.81

78. See “Brigitte Bardot ou l’école des femmes,” Cinémonde, 22 March 1956; “BB vous confie ses secrets,” Cinémonde, 9 August; “Voici les troupes fraîches du sex-appeal,” Cinémonde, 11 October 1956; “Aujourd’hui les stars ont aussi . . . un corps,” Cinémonde, 20 December. See also Cinémonde, 4 April 1957, and André-Paul Antoine, “Brigitte Bardot . . . la femme enfant,” Cinéma 58, no. 25. 79. See Chirat, La IVe république et ses films, 87–89, and particularly Ducout, Séductrices du cinéma français, 189–195, who notes the affair she had with Trintignant during shooting. 80. See review of Lo Duca, Cinémonde, 14 March 1957, and a three-part series on the genre, Vietti, “L’Érotisme et la sensualité au cinéma,” 6–20 June 1957. 81. For a discussion of this and of Bardot’s reception by critics, see Sellier, Masculine Singular, 44–46.

298

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Equally importantly, Bardot was here seen as breaking totally with the affected acting style of the classic French cinema by introducing a certain realism into her performance. “Ultimately Brigitte Bardot like all true artists, shattered the framework of existing realism,” writes André Sallée, or as François Truffaut notoriously said in a 1957 forecast concerning her next film (“Le cinéma crève sous les fausses légendes”), I’m quite certain that La Parisienne will bring nothing new to the French cinema, no truths of any sort, only beautiful costumes, uniforms and evening gowns, probably a sumptuous ball scene and glittering decors. I would be delighted if, thanks to the impermeability of Brigitte Bardot, her lack of pretension and of convention, a few false notes might slip into the concert, a few words of dialogue be stripped bare, a few intonations raucous, the unity of tone destroyed, the homogeneity of the work undermined. The film might [then] bring me some surprises, and from time to time a moment of truth.82 In fact, nowadays watching Et Dieu . . . créa la femme and her subsequent films, what one is most conscious of is not realism or truth but the affected nature of her acting style. Here is no “natural” or “spontaneous” behavior but a carefully calibrated walk involving the placing of each foot toe first and diagonally in front of the other in a parody of balletic movement—any trace of naturalness has long since been displaced and corrupted by the years of ballet training that was her first real love. She readily acknowledged that acting was too much trouble— she preferred to capitalize on her flesh, and the present film can best be seen not as fiction but as a documentary, in which the camera simply circles her and observes her, salaciously. Reviewing New Wave directors in 1962, Raymond Durgnat said of Et Dieu . . . créa la femme that “everything which in 1956 was so tonic in its outrageousness seems in retrospect comparatively staid and déjà vu.”83 But he went on to acknowledge the vast number of subsequent films that plundered this one for their effects—in style, in tone, in setting, in theme. He also might have added, as Sallée notes, that Brigitte became a model for all those young girls who, for the next twenty years, and not only in France, “dressed like her, did their hair like her,

82. Arts, no. 619, May 1957; Sallée, Les Acteurs français, 30. See also Pierre Murat, “Les unes l’autre,” Passek, ed., D’un cinéma l’autre, 50. 83. Durgnat, French Cinema, 79–81.

1952–1958

299

walked like her, sulked like her.”84 Alongside its articles on German BBs, Italian BBs, and Scandinavian BBs, Cinémonde provided advice to its female readers on how to make themselves over into their own versions of BB.85

98. Porte des Lilas Gates of Paris Filmed 3 December 1956–8 February 1957; released 25 September 1957 96 min, b&w Dir René Clair; Prod Filmsonor/Cinetel/SECA/Rizzoli; Scr Clair and Jean Aurel, based on the novel La Grande Ceinture by René Fallet; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music Georges Brassens; Art dir Léon Barsacq; Sound Antoine Petitjean; Edit Louisette Hautecœur; Act Pierre Brasseur (Juju), Brassens (the Artist), Henri Vidal (Pierrot Barbier), Dany Carrel (Maria), and Raymond Bussières (Alphonse, the bar owner). As I note in the introduction, this is one of that group of films that mark the winding down of the careers of a whole generation of directors—not just of René Clair but of Marcel Carné (Les Tricheurs, 1958, #101), of Jean Cocteau (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1959), and of Jean Renoir (Le Testament du Dr Cordelier, 1959), not to mention Jacques Becker (Le Trou, 1959) and others of the “wartime” generation. What died with them, as usage figures show, was the centrality of the studio as a focus of filmmaking activities. Porte des Lilas was entirely filmed in studio—a whole working-class environment recreated according to the tenets of the great art directors of the age, Alexandre Trauner, Léon Barsacq, and Georges Wahkévitch, whose aim was always to simplify and stylize by selecting the “typical,” the “characteristic,” and the “representative” elements of a locale in order to create the required mood or atmosphere. As Barsacq (who designed the sets for all Clair’s films from Le Silence est d’or in 1947 to Porte des Lilas) said, “A transposition is necessary to obtain on the screen the equivalent of reality. . . . That transposition is only possible if one designs a decor which recreates what is most essential in a particular locale. . . . [We aim] to bring out the rich or the sordid, the cluttered or the bare, the light or heavy aspect of a setting by exaggerating the dominant character of the elements that go to make it up while suppressing the useless

84. Sallée, Les Acteurs français, 29–30; Ducout, Séductrices du cinéma français, 194. 85. 22 November 1956.

300

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

details.” By so doing, as Trauner noted, one could hope to “awaken memories inscribed in the spectator’s subconscious.”86 Porte des Lilas is “dated” in that it exploits this studio-based stratagem to appeal to audience knowledges of outer Parisian working-class suburbs, but also in seeing the poeticized and overtly picturesque squalor of these suburbs as a central mythic preoccupation of the age. After twelve years of economic expansion at 6 percent per annum, France was leaving behind its obsession with the underprivileged and their suffering to focus on neoconsumerist myths of youth and of self-indulgence. This film could therefore be seen as trapped within the mythology of the past, rehearsing topics more central to the 1930s than to the late 1950s. But in one respect, at least, it captures contemporary thematic preoccupations—in its focus on male friendship, rather than on male protagonists whose dreams are undermined by unwise relationships with women (and notably femmes fatales). The classic instance of this evolution had been Jean Gabin, whose 1950s films promote the bond of mateship between a male couple. Here that bond, which as with Gabin we do not see being established but which is simply “given,” links Juju and “the Artist.” Juju, an amiable drunkard, spends most of his time in his mate’s rudimentary shack or in Antoine’s nearby bar, but their life is disrupted by the arrival of a hunted criminal, Barbier, who holes up in the Artist’s cellar. Juju rather admires him, but loves Maria, Antoine’s daughter, so is disconcerted when she falls for Barbier. She believes Barbier will take her with him to that mythic better life across the sea in South America, and she provides money (stolen from her father’s bar) to fund the passage. When Juju discovers that Barbier has just been using him, and worse, just using Maria, he (accidentally or deliberately) shoots him dead—an unusually violent end for a Clair film. So it is not just the mateship theme that recalls Gabin’s 1950s evolution but the systematic demystification of that 1930s persona that Gabin often inhabited, of an outcast, a wronged marginal like Barbier, dreaming of escape with his woman to a new life “là-bas.” Barbier is initially presented in just such a sympathetic light, seemingly appreciative of Juju’s help and admiration, so the revelation in the last five minutes that he had just been cynically exploiting both Juju and Maria is as much a shock to the audience as to Juju. One’s evaluation of the film depends very much on one’s response to Pierre Brasseur’s performance as Juju, who is central to the whole narrative. The pres-

86. For these and other comments on the techniques of art directors and set decorators, see Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 370–374.

1952–1958

301

ence of Georges Brassens as his amiable tolerant mate, the Artist, comes across as little more than a stratagem to exploit Brassens’s popularity as a musical icon of the age (though his singing voice is awful), and to underline through the songs he sings the principal themes of the film—mateship, conviviality, and the ephemeral nature of love. He observes and comments on the narrative, whereas Juju embodies it, yet Brasseur’s performance in that central role is eccentric in the extreme, forcing the comedy at every opportunity through his rapid, short-paced, waddling walk. It is hard to understand the admiration he attracted at the time (“The triumph of the interpretation is Pierre Brasseur’s Juju.” “The character of Juju would alone be enough to induce us to love this film”87), though, of course, by 1956 Brasseur had achieved that typically French mythic persona, the “monstre sacré,” and the only appropriate response to such creatures is unqualified reverence. There are some nice comic moments in the film: the play with the bottles in the opening sequence; Barbier’s fastidious dislike of cats, which is justified when he trips over the house cat and dives head-first through the trapdoor into the cellar; the kids we see through the window acting out in comic mode the crimes committed by Barbier as Antoine reads them out; the shoddy wooden fence that collapses under Juju’s weight, on top of the Artist; and Juju’s relief when he realizes it’s only his relatively minor theft of the foie gras that the cops have discovered. But basically this is a somber film with a bitter taste. As Clair said in his introduction to the published text, “Nothing condemns this age more powerfully than all this industrial junk, these sinister alleys, these flimsy shacks, in this immense dumping-ground we grimly name the outer suburbs. From Joinville to Charenton, from Grenelle to Épinay what a sombre commentary on the species to which we belong. It seems that here mankind cannot create anything that is not ugly; wherever our foot falls, beauty withers forever.”88 Perhaps it is this personal investment that led him to include Porte des Lilas in the list of his favorite films, along with À nous la liberté (1931), 14 juillet (1933), and I Married a Witch (1942). Critics were less kind, both on the left and on the right—Positif saying, “you can pass an agreeable enough evening with this film; let’s be content with that,” and Éric Rohmer decreeing that Clair had “fashioned a masterpiece that couldn’t really be categorised as a useful object, perhaps not even an ornamental one.”89

87. Jean Quéval and Gilbert Salachas; see Téléciné fiche, no. 317. 88. Clair, Comédies et commentaires, 343–344. 89. Positif, no. 76, February 1958; Cahiers du cinéma, no. 76, November 1957.

302

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

99. Mon oncle My Uncle Filmed 10 September 1956–25 February 1957; released 10 May 1958 120 min, Eastmancolor Also made in an Italian version Dir and Scr Jacques Tati; Prod Specta-Films/Gray-Film/Alter-Film/Film del Centauro (Italy); Cinematog Jean Bourgoin; Music F. Barcellini, Norbert Glanzberg, and A. Romans; Art dir Henri Schmitt; Sound Jacques Carrère; Edit Suzanne Baron; Act Tati (Monsieur Hulot), Jean-Pierre Zola (Monsieur Arpel), Alain Bécourt (young Gérard), and Adrienne Servantie (Madame Arpel). Despite the popular success of Jour de fête (#57) in 1949, Jacques Tati had some difficulty funding his next film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1951–1953). Fortunately, the American triumph of that film facilitated the production of his third film, Mon oncle, which in turn won him the Oscar for best foreign film and the New York Film Critics’ Prize. His previous film, Les Vacances, can now seem a little innocuous with its gentle satire of the postwar trend for a week’s holiday at the beach. Certainly, there are some residual traces of Jour de fête’s targets, such as an affectionate view of traditional French life and a distrust of the modern (as when Hulot’s antique car farts petulantly along in the dust of bulbous American imports), and there are a few genuinely funny moments (as when the canoe collapses and acquires the appearance of a giant sea monster’s mouth that terrifies the bathers, or when the car tire tube gathers leaves and is interpreted as a wreath by the adjacent funeral), but the main source of gentle fun is the personality of Hulot himself—gangling, too many arms and legs, eager to please but socially inept, a disruptive reminder of an alternative set of values in a modern world obsessed by money and pleasure. Or as Gilbert Salachas put it, “He is a loner who is paradoxically sociable. His untiring attempts to integrate with the community remain fruitless; his natural but gauche politeness, his spontaneous generosity make him suspect.”90 Like that second film, Mon oncle is held together by Hulot’s distinctive personality, and held together technically by a similar use of a single piece of bland music recurring in different guises. Here, though, Tati recovers something of the pointedness of his first film in his detestation of all things modern and his nostalgia for the old quarters of town and the old ways of life, seen as more human, 90. Téléciné, May–June 1953.

1952–1958

303

allowing for a more affectionate interaction among members of the community. This opposition is embodied in a series of encounters between “Uncle” Hulot and the Arpels—his sister, brother-in-law, and their son, Gérard, who live in an aggressively modernist house with all the futurist 1950s mod-cons of an evolving consumer society, and with stark, functionalist furniture. The house is part of a new development that is steadily shouldering aside the old quarter where Hulot lives. As a satire of “progress,” the film recalls À nous la liberté (1931) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). As Armand Cauliez says, “Mon oncle is to progress what radically pacifist films are to total war.”91 The first twenty minutes of this (rather over-long) film are masterly. The scenes with the raffish dogs that open and close the film are bewilderingly good— it was the dogs that deserved the Oscar, for their unself-consciously brilliant performance. In the opening sequence, they connect the neglected old quarter, with its rubbish, horse and cart, broken walls and railings, to the new development and the modernist house of the Arpels, with its ludicrous fish sculpture, its geometric discomforts, and its stark, inhuman interiors. Here, even the garden has been ruthlessly tamed by cement paths and random paving slabs, with no more than a small residue of spherical and cubic plants. Fred Arpel is managing director of a plastics factory (Plastac!) that features a similarly stark architecture, while the juxtaposed old quarter of the town is characterized by a market square and bistro where traditional French values hold sway, and frequent mildly comic pantomimed interactions testify to a fundamentally wholesome community. Again in this film dialogue is minimal or obscured, so largely incomprehensible, with little but the intonations of speech patterns to signal relationships. The quaint apartment building in which Hulot lives, with its eccentric, makeshift design and disparate materials contrasts delightfully with the elsewhereprevalent modernist architecture, and the long-held static shot of its facade as we watch Hulot enter, mount, and disappear, only to reappear sporadically at upstairs windows and walkways, is a thorough delight. Hulot has an ally in the Arpel’s house, namely their son Gérard, who is unutterably bored by his imprisonment in this bleak “cité radieuse,” and is delighted when his uncle introduces him to the old town and the waste ground where kids can kick a football around, play antisocial games, and eat improper foods. But thereafter, the film rather loses its impetus as various wealthy, middle-class friends and relations visit the Arpels and exclaim over their trendy design. With repetition, any gentle pleasure one might initially have felt in these interactions is dissipated. Fortunately, the film picks up again toward the end of this section as

91. Cauliez, Jacques Tati, 24.

304

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Hulot inadvertently destroys various elements of the house and garden, and the wealthy guests finally traipse away, no longer elegant but dirty and bedraggled. He also manages to disrupt the efficient production of plastic hose at the Plastac factory, generating some novel and not particularly functional forms. The end foregrounds once again the central opposition, as Fred Arpel dispatches Hulot to the provinces as a factory rep: in his plush new American car, Arpel maneuvers through the old quarter and delivers Hulot to the station, where bustling crowds and frantic music (the first departure from the gently ironic tune that in its various guises has dominated the rest of the film) remind us of the unacceptable aspects of modernity. Then the dogs return to explore the rubbish bins of the old quarter. In sum, if not aggressively political, this is nevertheless an implicitly ideological film, conservative and nostalgic, critical of consumerism and of “progress.” Yet this reactionary ideology is unusual in leading to a profound sympathy for the common people, the working classes, their lifestyle and environment, seen as “typically French.” Again the film juxtaposes and opposes these two peoples and classes and quarters without any sense of class struggle. Even as he manifests his preference for the weak and the underprivileged rather than the wealthy and the powerful, Hulot serves as a “neutral” link between the two, and there is no outward manifestation of rancor.92 Mon oncle was a more expensive film to make than either of Tati’s previous films, with its color technology and expanded crew, so was more minutely scripted and depended less on improvization. His cinematographer noted his anxieties that the color might prove a distraction for the spectator, and his dislike of the larger crew—he preferred to work “with mates.” Tati himself merely acknowledged that the mounting costs caused some anxiety when he and forty highly paid technicians were obliged to wait patiently for a dog—at last—to relieve itself on the appropriate lamppost.

100. L’Eau vive (A River Running Free)/The Girl of the River Filmed 11 June–May 1957; released 13 June 1958 92 minutes, Eastmancolor/Franscope Dir François Villiers; Prod Films Caravelle; Scr Jean Giono and Allain Alloux; Cinematog Paul Soulignac; Music Guy Béart; Edit Édouard Berne; Act Pascale Audret

92. See the comments by Alfred Sauvy in ibid., 195–210.

1952–1958

305

(Hortense), Charles Blavette (Simon), Germaine Kerjean (the Rochebrune aunt), Maurice Sarfati (the Cavaillon cousin), Milly Mathis (the Cavaillon aunt), and Andrée Debar and Robert Lombard (the Rochebrune cousins). “I detest this film,” declared André Bazin; but he had to admit that most of his colleagues at Cahiers du cinéma loved it. Indeed, for Jean-Luc Godard it was “the most impressively fresh film that the French cinema has produced since the Liberation,” while Claude Mauriac saw it as “a rush of new blood that will rejuvenate the bloodless cinema of France.”93 Its originality derives in no small part from its unusual beginnings: it was initially commissioned by Électricité de France (EDF), who had in mind a short propaganda documentary promoting its grandiose hydroelectric project on the Durance River in Provence. Because it was happening in Jean Giono’s backyard, the producers thought the project’s status would be enhanced by a literary commentary from him, so they introduced him to their agents, Les Films du Caravelle, and to François Villiers who was to direct the film. He had already directed an analogous short documentary on the Rhône (L’Or du Rhône), not to mention one other feature—Hans le marin (1949) starring his brother, Jean-Pierre Aumont. The EDF project was certainly impressive—its centerpiece was the construction of a barrier of Durance gravel 400 feet high and 2,000 feet thick at the base, forming a lake of 7,500 acres and 35 billion cubic feet of water. The canals channeling the Durance waters, and ultimately diverting it into the Étang de Berre, were to feed 19 hydroelectric stations generating 6.5 billion kwh per year. On the negative side, two villages and their surrounding farmland would be drowned, but all other farmers in the area would be guaranteed a year-round supply of water. This amounted in effect to the industrialization of a wild river, and given that Giono had long campaigned against so-called progress, seeing contemporary society as mechanistic and inimical to nature and the individual, he was by no means in total sympathy with the EDF project or with the proposed documentary. “They can’t bear,” he said, “to let the river run free. The personality it has built up over the millennia, they want to dismantle. . . . They’re going to rip it apart with their frightful machines born of an era without pity, and feed the bits to factories—canalize it, turbinize it, ask of it not beauty, but work.”94 Nevertheless, he was won over when, in conjunction with the Caravelle scriptwriter, he saw how to expand, fictionalize, and appropriate the narrative to his ends: the Durance would become the protagonist, embodied in the person of a

93. Quoted in Mény, Jean Giono et le cinéma, 167–168. 94. Voiceover by Giono himself at the beginning of the film. See ibid., 81–107.

306

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

seductive but wild young woman (Hortense), herself threatened with imprisonment and rape, but transcending these trials to triumph over her adversaries in the end. What EDF thought of this distortion of their project is not recorded, but they agreed to continue funding it. Their funding, however, put pressure on Giono to find a mechanism for integrating into the plot the whole of the valley, all of which was after all to be affected by the dam. He did it by having the four branches of Hortense’s family distributed around the valley in four different communities. Her father, who lives in Ubaye, one of the villages to be drowned, dies, and she inherits the multimillion franc compensation package that EDF had granted him when it appropriated his land. The other three branches of the family (butchers, fundamental religious, and dump-truck driving!) are jealous of this wealth. Each has a son, and each puts pressure on her to marry into their branch of the family (by rape if necessary), but all she wants to do is to roam free with her Uncle Simon, a rootless herdsman, as he accompanies his flock of sheep through the high mountains. Her identification with the river is rather clumsily handled at the outset, but more neatly evoked later on as she dams the trickle of its headwaters with her feet, then—accompanying her uncle and the sheep returning from summer’s alpine pastures— descends like the river itself progressively into the valley. In the course of this descent, the patterns of nature and settlement, nature and industry are captured in some unforgettable images: the flock of three thousand sheep flooding through town streets, as the floodwaters themselves will rise through those same streets; the giant earth-moving machines edging their way slowly through this relentless sea of sheep; from high and far away the giant machines weaving and circling as if dancing on their vast dam-site dance-floor; while the flock of sheep negotiating a bed of gravel on a river-bend become a geometric pattern moving through a landscape itself rendered geometrically anonymous by distance. The three rival branches of her family are ruthless in their pursuit of Hortense, evoking that favorite theme of Giono, the financial greed that drives backward peasant communities and that pits family members one against another. The Rochebrune branch is the most vicious, ultimately locking Hortense in the cellar of her father’s house as the floods rise to engulf it. Needless to say, she is released—by the Durance itself, which breaks open the wall of her prison—and she bursts in, a figure of vengeance, on the family meeting at the lawyer’s office. She will use the compensation money to fund land and a house for her Uncle Simon in the high plains. Bazin was not alone in finding the resultant film unsatisfactory. Max Favalelli labeled it “one of the most disappointing films of the season. . . . Villiers has pagnolised Giono.” (Although why “pagnolising” should necessarily be a bad thing is not clear.) Louis Marcorelles also condemned the film, feeling that Giono 1952–1958

307

had demonstrated his total lack of understanding of the cinema and its techniques. Others, such as Robert Chazal, felt this was a good thing—it was a film “that you couldn’t help liking, outside all norms, all conventions and all the standard tricks of the trade.”95 In retrospect, the choice of Pascale Audret in the role of Hortense is open to criticism: Charles Blavette, who had since Jean Renoir’s Toni embodied so many Provençal characters, plays the benign Uncle Simon with his usual effortless authenticity, but Audret comes across as affected and far too sophisticated to be credible as a wild, free lass. Giono and Villiers had searched long and hard for a suitable actress without success, and finally found Audret in a dramatic arts course in Paris. Her two weeks of training as a shepherdess proved inadequate. In her affected weeping, walking, and capering about, she still shows signs of her dramatic training. Proposed in 1950, the EDF project was approved in 1954 and begun the following year. Filming of the fictional elements took place in 1956 and 1957, but the hydroelectric project was not due for completion until 1960. Unwilling to wait so long, the filmmakers faked the shots of the completed dam and lake using transposed shots of the Lac du Bourget.

101. Les Tricheurs The Cheaters Filmed 24 March–12 July 1958; released 10 October 1958 120 min, b&w Dir Marcel Carné; Prod Cinétel and Silver Films; Scr Carné, Charles Spaak, and Jacques Sigurd; Cinematog Claude Renoir; Music jazz recordings by Norman Grantz, Maxime Saury, Ray Brown, Roy Eldridge, Herb Hellis, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Gus Johnson, Oscar Petterson, and Sonny Spitt; Art dir Paul Bertrand; Sound Antoine Archimbaud; Edit Albert Jurgenson; Act Pascale Petit (Mic’/Michèle), Jacques Charrier (Bob), Laurent Terzieff (Alain), Andréa Parisy (Clo/Clotilde), Roland Lesaffre (Roger, Mic’s sister), Jean-Paul Belmondo, Dany Saval, Alfonso Mathis, and Pierre Brice. Les Tricheurs neatly rounds off the present filmography because it signals both the winding down of one generation’s careers and also that generation’s determination to write off in advance the attitudes and values of the generation that was bidding fair to replace it. Its condemnation of that nascent youth culture, increasing traces of which we have seen in the years 1954–1958, was to 95. Ibid., 167–168.

308

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

be echoed in Claude Autant-Lara’s En cas de malheur (also 1958), René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1959), and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (1960), while the drawing to a close of the preceding generation’s careers was to be echoed in those same years by Jacques Becker’s Le Trou, Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée, and Jean Renoir’s Le Testament du docteur Cordelier. Over these same years (1958–1960), we see the production and/or screening of the first features of the “young Turks”— first Claude Chabrol, then Jean Rouch, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Resnais. Les Tricheurs confronts us immediately with the threatening spread of a hectic youth culture, portrayed as rowdy, vital, yet destructive—the café-bars with jukeboxes where they assemble and listen to black jazz bands to which they sway and jive, as later in student apartments and parents’ pads. The first half of the film consists of an effective if somewhat repetitive initiation into this ambience and its underlying ideology, of which the film implicitly disapproves. Among the students and their hangers-on we meet two wealthier students (Bob and Clo) and two poorer, reputedly based on Marcel Carné’s and Charles Spaak’s experiences in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Mic and Alain, the latter a manipulative sponger but also a powerfully sinister figure of fate with a demonic, glittering gaze that drives the others to fatal excesses).The narrative focuses on the relationship between Mic and Bob, whose refusal to acknowledge their feelings for one another ultimately lead to her death and to his grim awakening to the inadequacy of the values on which their life is currently based. Fundamental to these values is a rejection of all their parents stand for—family values, work ethic, and bourgeois morality in general. The young regard the older generation as of a completely other era, a completely other species, and claim not themselves to believe in anything (“On se fout de tout”), certainly not in love, fidelity, or commitment. In place of these they aspire to all forms of liberty and of immediacy (drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, rave parties, and sex). The film is surprisingly frank in its account of the extent to which they all, male and female alike, sleep around, and this was to divide critics and audiences. For Mic, the craving for sensation takes the form of an obsession with a white Jaguar, and it is in this car that she dies. The film makes it apparent that Bob and Mic would in any other circumstances (and any other film) fall in love and marry, but that for them to acknowledge any remote possibility of this would be to betray their group’s values. Mic has sex with Alain to refute the “accusation” that she might be falling for Bob (“Sex is of no importance for us”), and Bob refuses to answer the phone when she calls to apologize and admit her love for him. Mic’s friend Clo falls pregnant and needs to find a husband within a week. Disgusted by Mic’s public disparagement of him, Bob agrees to marry Clo. Thus through a series of painful misunderstandings and mistimings, any potential for happiness collapses. As Carné com1952–1958

309

mented, “What I was after was a sort of Romeo and Juliet in Saint-Germain-desPrés. I had been struck by a new phenomenon: whereas once upon a time young lovers saw their passion thwarted by family, religion, etc., the young these days create their own taboos.” Also, “Nothing was preventing them being happy: they were not victims of clan rivalry, nothing. . . . They themselves, as a result of the set they mixed with, destroyed their own possibility of happiness.”96 The ingenious centerpiece of the last half of the film involves “the truth game,” where, standing in the center of their massed fellow students, each in turn must answer truthfully a series of intimate questions. Spurred on by Alain’s diabolically delighted gaze, both Bob and Mic deny publicly their feelings for one another, for fear of admitting too sentimental a truth. Mic rushes off in her Jaguar, and the car chase and crash that follows is something of an anticlimax, as is the hospital scene that concludes the film. Told in flashback by a “sadder and wiser” Bob, this story labels the youth culture it so lovingly evokes, with its emphasis on “freedom” to do what you want with whoever you want, as cowardice, and asserts that in transcending it, Bob has “matured,” has acquired “courage.” He has recognized that Roger, Mic’s brother, was in the right in advocating responsibility, hard work, and monogamy. But the honorable Roger is a marginal figure; the greater emphasis is on female experience. Mic’s death and Clo’s unresolved pregnancy illustrate what such films see as the dangers of women’s liberation and the desirability of preserving virginity until marriage. The middle 1950s had, as we have noted, seen a crisis of gender and of generations. It was in 1954 that Françoise Sagan published Bonjour Tristesse, in 1956 that Roger Vadim launched the raunchy BB phenomenon with Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (#97), in 1958 that Christiane Rochefort published Le Repos du guerrier. Key signposts in the formation of the new female, “they describe in lucid and often raw manner the contradictions of sexual and amorous emancipation for ‘modern’ young women. . . . They also make clear through heroines completely free of any feelings of guilt the unbridgeable divide that separates the generations.”97 As Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier write, “this search for liberty by the younger generation was at best marked by ambiguity,” and in Les Tricheurs, for the older generation of scriptwriters and directors, the representation of “this fascination on the part of the young for new forms of liberty is inextricably mixed with a desire to punish them—to humiliate them, to represent them as laughable or despicable.”98

96. Chazal, Marcel Carné, 98–99; Carné, La Vie à belles dents, 353. 97. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 14–15. 98. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 271.

310

French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Despite (or because of) the inevitable and widespread criticism on moral grounds that it attracted, Les Tricheurs was Carné’s last great popular success— top in exclusive release in Paris (556,203 spectators), it remained after three years the top earner of its year, well above even Les 400 coups. Awarded, therefore, the Grand Prix du Cinéma, with a Best Actor award for Jacques Charrier and Best Actress for Pascale Petit, it was more tellingly crowned best film of the year in a referendum conducted by Cinémonde and Le Figaro. A crowd of young people (including many of the actors involved) carried Carné shoulder-high from the cinema where it premiered—as he said, a little smugly, “Like a Sports Star!”

1952–1958

311

APPENDIX: FESTIVALS AND PRIZES FOR FRENCH PERSONNEL AND PRODUCTIONS

National Recognition Cannes Film Festival 1946

1947

1948 1949

1950 1951 1952

1953 1954

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

Grand Prix (one of eleven, by nation): La Symphonie pastorale; Best Actress: Michèle Morgan; Prix Spécial du Jury and Prix de la Mise en Scène: René Clément, for La Bataille du rail; Grand Prix de la Critique: Farrebique; Music: Georges Auric, for La Symphonie pastorale and La Belle et la bête Grand Prix (two of five, by genre): Antoine et Antoinette (best “film psychologique et d’amour”) and Les Maudits (best “film d’aventure et policier”) None awarded because of a date change for the festival Prix de la Mise en Scène: René Clément, for Au-delà des grilles; Best Actress: Isa Miranda, for Au-delà des grilles; Best Decors: Occupe-toi d’Amélie No festival Music: Joseph Kosma, for Juliette, ou la clef des songes Prix Spécial du Jury: Nous sommes tous des assassins; Prix de la Mise en Scène: Christian-Jaque, for Fanfan la Tulipe; Grand Prix “Indépendant”: Jeux interdits (after it was excluded from competition) Grand Prix: Le Salaire de la peur; Best Actor: Charles Vanel, for Le Salaire de la peur Prix Spécial du Jury: Monsieur Ripois; Prix de la Mise en Scène: René Clément, for Monsieur Ripois; Prix International (one of three): André Cayatte, for Avant le déluge Prix de la Mise en Scène (tied): Jules Dassin, for Du rififi chez les hommes Palme d’Or: Le Monde du silence; Prix Spécial du Jury: Le Mystère Picasso Prix de la Mise en Scène: Robert Bresson, for Un condamné à mort s’est échappé Prix Spécial du Jury: Mon oncle Palme d’Or: Orfeu negro; Prix International: Nazarin; homage to Luis Buñuel for his œuvre; Prix de la Mise en Scène: François Truffaut, for Les Quatre Cents Coups; Best Actress: Simone Signoret, for Room at the Top

Grand Prix du Cinéma Français Instituted in 1934, but the conditions, name, and date changed several times. In 1937, the government took it over and it became the Grand Prix National du Cinéma Français. It was not awarded during the war, but in 1942–1943, a substitute was created called by some the Grand Prix du Film d’Art Français, awarded by a jury consisting of three state representatives and three critics elected by their colleagues (Lucien Rebatet, Alexandre Arnoux, and Roger Régent). It recognized the following (the first two years retrospectively): 1941 1942

1943

Nous les gosses and L’Assassinat du père Noël Grand Prix: Les Visiteurs du soir; Honorable Mention: La Nuit fantastique; Grand Prix de la Critique de Cinéma: La Nuit fantastique; Best Actress: Micheline Presle, for La Nuit fantastique Grand Prix: Les Anges du péché; Honorable Mention: Le Baron fantôme

In 1944, the Société des Auteurs awarded an equivalent, which they called the Grand Prix du Cinéma. to Goupi Mains-Rouges with an honorable mention to Douce. After the war, it was reinstituted as the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français. 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

Farrebique and La Bataille du rail Monsieur Vincent Les Casse-Pieds None awarded because of a date change for the festival Jour de fête Le Journal d’un curé de campagne Nous sommes tous des assassins; Prix de la Mise en Scène: ChristianJaque, for Fanfan la Tulipe Not awarded Le Blé en herbe Les Évadés Not awarded, but gold medals to two short films—Le Ballon rouge and Nuit et brouillard Porte des Lilas Les Tricheurs

Prix Louis Delluc Instituted in 1937 by the Jeune Critique Indépendant (twenty-three critics, including Marcel Achard, Georges Altman, Maurice Bessy, Pierre Bost, Georges

314

Appendix

Charensol, Nino Frank, René Gilson, Henri Jeanson, Roger Régent, all then under forty) for the best French film made according to “l’esprit français.” Generally considered as being awarded to the most ambitious film of the year, and usually filmed by a young director. 1940–1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

Not awarded L’Espoir La Belle et la bête Paris 1900 Les Casse-Pieds Rendez-vous de juillet Le Journal d’un curé de campagne Not awarded Le Rideau cramoisi Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot Les Diaboliques Les Grandes Manœuvres Le Ballon rouge Ascenseur pour l’échafaud Moi, un noir On n’enterre pas le dimanche

Prix Suzanne Bianchetti For the best young actress. 1947

Sylvia Bataille and Simone Signoret

Prix Jean Vigo Recognizing a courageous French film on a social theme. 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

La Montagne est verte La Grande Vie Crin-blanc Les Statues meurent aussi Zola Nuit et brouillard Léon la lune Les Femmes de Stermetz Le Beau Serge

Appendix

315

Grand Prix des Directeurs de Cinéma (GPDC ) Instituted in 1947 as a referendum of cinema proprietors conducted by Le Film français (but later also, if sporadically, by Cinémonde of its readers, Le Figaro of film personnel, and Radio Luxembourg of its listeners). Inevitably there were sometimes contradictory results, between those influenced by financial returns and those by popularity. The “with” below is the popular vote where it contradicted cinema directors. Where Le Figaro, Cinémonde, and Radio Luxembourg were all polled, the results were always the same. 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

La Symphonie pastorale and La Cage aux rossignols Monsieur Vincent (with Le Diable au corps) Aux yeux du souvenir (with Les Parents terribles) Barry (with Gigi and Fabiola, which was, however, a majority Italian coproduction) Justice est faite Un grand patron Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo Le Salaire de la peur (with Les Orgueilleux) Si Versailles m’était conté (with Le Rouge et le noir) Les Grandes Manœuvres La Traversée de Paris (with Un condamné à mort s’est échappée) Porte des Lilas Les Grandes Familles (with Les Tricheurs)

Victoires du Cinéma Français Awarded in conjunction with the GPDC, through the same referendum conducted by Le Film français, to recognize the best actors. 1947 1948 1949 1950

Edwige Feuillère and Michèle Morgan Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle Jennifer Jones and Michèle Morgan Bernard Blier and Danielle Delorme

From 1951, Le Film français’s poll of cinema directors was often in conflict with Cinémonde and the other news outlets, leading to two sets of awards. 1951 1952 1953

316

Jean Gabin and Madeleine Robinson; Daniel Gélin and Madeleine Robinson Fernandel and Martine Carol; Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan Gérard Philipe and Martine Carol; Jean-Claude Pascal and Michèle Morgan

Appendix

1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

Jean Gabin and Danielle Darrieux; Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan; Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan Gérard Philipe and Martine Carol Gérard Philipe and Danielle Darrieux Gérard Philipe and Michèle Morgan

In 1956, Le Figaro had reasserted its rights, electing François Perier and Danielle Darrieux and/or Bourvil (depending on the source). 1957 1958

Pierre Brasseur Jacques Charrier and Pascale Petit

Foreign Recognition Venice Biennale (French films and personnel only) 1947 1948 1949 1950

1951

1952 1954 1956 1958 1959

Best Direction: Quai des Orfèvres; Best Actor: Pierre Fresnay, for Monsieur Vincent ENIC Medal: Les Paysans noirs Grand Prix (Lion de St. Marc): Manon; Best Script: Jour de fête Grand Prix: Justice est faite; International Critics’ Prize: Orphée; Grand Prix International (one of three): Dieu a besoin des hommes (which also received the Prix de l’Office International Catholique du Cinéma); Scenario and Art Direction: La Ronde Grand Prix: Au-delà des grilles (and two other prizes); Coupe Volpi (for best actor): Jean Gabin, for La Nuit est mon royaume; three different prizes to Le Journal d’un curé de campagne Lion d’Or: Jeux interdits; Critics’ Prize: Les Belles de Nuit Coupe Volpi: Jean Gabin, for Touchez pas au grisbi and L’Air de Paris Coupe Volpi: Maria Schell, for Gervaise, and Bourvil, for La Traversée de Paris; Critics’ Prize: Gervaise (tied) Grand Prix: Les Amants Coupe Volpi: Madeleine Robinson, for À double tour

United States: Oscar for Best Foreign Film 1948 1950 1951 1957 1958

Monsieur Vincent Au-delà des grilles Jeux interdits; New York Critics: Une partie de campagne and Jofroi Mon oncle; special Oscar to Maurice Chevalier for overall contribution to acting Orfeu negro; Best Actress: Simone Signoret

Appendix

317

England: British Film Academy 1953 1954

Best Foreign Actress: Simone Signoret, for Casque d’Or Best Film: Jeux interdits

Denmark: Copenhagen Festival 1958

Best European Film: Porte des Lilas

Berlin 1950 1959

Golden Bear: Justice est faite Golden Bear: Les Cousins

Locarno, Switzerland 1947 1949

Grand Prix: Le Silence est d’or; Best Script: Le Silence est d’or; Best Actor: Maurice Chevalier, for Le Silence est d’or Grand Prix: La Ferme des sept péchés; Camerawork and Editing: Pattes blanches

Brussels 1947

Grand Prix: Le Silence est d’or; Prix de la Mise en Scène and Critics’ Prize: Claude Autant-Lara, for Le Diable au corps; Best Actor: Gérard Philipe, for Le Diable au corps

Knokke le Zoute, Belgium 1947 1948

Best Scenario: Noël-Noël, for Les Casse-Pieds Best Actor: Bernard Blier, for L’École buissonnière

Most Popular Films Bestsellers in Paris Exclusive Release (PXR ), 1950–1960 By order of numbers of admissions. Foreign films have been omitted from the list, which originally numbered sixty. Note the number of films in color © and/or Cinemascope (Sc), and of coproductions—especially with Italy (ItCo). Not all these films succeeded in the provinces or in general release. 1 2 3 4 5 6

318

685,079 © 639,955 573,496 © ItCo 550,203 548,587 ItCo 532,983 © ItCo

Si Versailles m’était conté Les Liaisons dangereuses Orfeu negro Les Tricheurs Le Retour de Don Camillo Mon oncle

Appendix

1953 1959 1958 1958 1952 1957

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo La Vérité Les Grandes Familles Notre Dame de Paris Les Diaboliques Les Amants Fanfan la Tulipe Le Salaire de la peur La Vache et le prisonnier Gervaise Lucrèce Borgia Le Baron de l’écluse La Traversée de Paris La Française et l’amour Un grand patron Les Femmes s’en balancent Les Grandes Manœuvres Austerlitz Les Belles de Nuit Votre dévoué Blake Napoléon Justice est faite Le Passage du Rhin La Jument verte Le Triporteur Michel Strogoff Du rififi chez les hommes French Cancan Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot

529,436 ItCo 527,020 ItCo 499,877 495,071 © (Sc) ItCo 466,542 451,473 (Sc) 441,478 ItCo 427,209 ItCo 401,345 ItCo 371,385 368,417 © ItCo 366,108 ItCo 363,033 ItCo 356,511 346,470 343,030 342,230 © ItCo 334,199 © (Sc) It/YuCo 330,601 ItCo 329,485 327,156 © 325,704 324,806 It/GerCo 320,887 © (Sc) ItCo 309,430 © 309,098 © (Sc) ItCo 303,711 303,459 © ItCo 301,606

1951 1960 1958 1956 1954 1958 1951 1951 1959 1955 1952 1959 1956 1960 1951 1953 1955 1959 1952 1954 1954 1950 1960 1959 1957 1956 1954 1954 1951

© Color; (Sc) Cinemascope; GerCo Coproduction with Germany; ItCo Coproduction with Italy; YuCo Coproduction with Yugoslavia

Bestsellers, 1945–1959, after 3–4 Years of Release, Where Known In order of success for each year, calculated by admissions for 1945–1947 and 1957–1959, elsewhere by receipts. Commercial pressures forced the suppression of this information at various times. After three years, any film would have attracted 97 percent of its final audience, and the relevant positions would not change thereafter.

Appendix

319

1945 1946 1947 1948

1949

1950

1951 1952 1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

320

Mission spéciale La Bataillon du ciel, La Symphonie pastorale Monsieur Vincent, Jour de fête Les Casse-Pieds, Aux yeux du souvenir, Barry, Manon, Gigi, D’hommes à hommes, Le Cœur sur la main, Retour à la vie, Le Secret de Mayerling, L’École buissonnière Nous irons à Paris, La Belle que voilà, La Beauté du diable, Le Roi Pandore, La Cage aux filles, Le 84 part en vacances, La Marie du port, Au grand balcon, Le Grand Cirque, Prélude à la gloire Andalousie, Caroline chérie, Justice est faite, Le Roi des camelots, Meurtres, Le Rosier de Mme Husson, Topaze, Dieu a besoin des hommes, Pigalle–St. Germain des Prés, Uniformes et grandes manœuvres Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo, Le Salaire de la peur, Fanfan la Tulipe, Un grand patron, Chacun son tour, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot Le Retour de Don Camillo, Violettes impériales, Le Boulanger de Valorgue, Manon des Sources, Lucrèce Borgia, Le Fruit défendu, Les Belles de Nuit Si Versailles m’était conté, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Touchez pas au grisbi, Les Trois Mousquetaires, La Belle de Cadix, Les Femmes s’en balancent, L’Ennemi public no. 1, Le Grand Jeu, Mam’zelle Nitouche, Le Défroqué Napoléon; Le Rouge et le noir; Papa, maman, la bonne et moi; French Cancan; Les Diaboliques; Le Mouton à cinq pattes; Ali-Baba et les 40 voleurs; Cadet Rousselle; Du rififi chez les hommes; Obsession; Les Évadés; Votre dévoué Blake Les Grandes Manœuvres; Gervaise; La Belle des belles; Si tous les gars du monde; Les Hommes en blanc; Si Paris nous était conté; Chiens perdus sans collier; Cette sacrée gamine; Don Juan; Papa, maman, ma femme et moi; Les Héros sont fatigués; Les Aristocrates; La Madelon; Je suis un sentimental; Gas-Oil Michel Strogoff, Notre Dame de Paris, Mon oncle, Le Monde du silence, La Traversée de Paris, Porte des Lilas, L’Eau vive, Le Chanteur du Mexico, Folies-Bergère, Les Aventures d’Arsène Lupin, Le Couturier de ces dames, Honoré de Marseille, Les Nuits de Cabiria, Typhon sur Nagasaki, Et Dieu . . . créa la femme, En effeuillant la marguerite, Le Pays d’où je viens Les Misérables; Le Triporteur; Le Chômeur de Clochemerle; Une parisienne; En cas de malheur; La Loi, c’est la loi; À pied, à cheval et en voiture; Maigret tend un piège; Le Gorille vous salue bien; Pot-Bouille; Casino de Paris; Nathalie; Sans famille; Les Lavandières du Portugal; Une vie

Appendix

1958

1959

Les Tricheurs, Orfeu negro, Les Grandes Familles, Archimède le clochard, Les 400 coups, Les Amants, Le Miroir à deux faces, La Tempête, Marie Octobre, Les Bateliers du Volga, La Chatte, Les Motards, La Vie à deux, La Loi, Christine, La Femme et le pantin, Anna de Brooklyn, Faibles Femmes, Les Vignes du Seigneur La Vache et le prisonnier, Le Bossu, Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960, Babette s’en va’t’en guerre, Austerlitz, La Jument verte, Dialogue des Carmélites, La Douceur de vivre, Le Baron de l’écluse, Rue des prairies, NormandieNiemen, Voulez-vous dansez avec moi, Maigret et l’affaire St.-Fiacre, Katia, Le Chemin des écoliers, Plein Soleil, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes

Sources: Centre National du Cinéma bulletins and Le Film français

Appendix

321

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books Agel, H., and A. Ayfre. Le Cinéma et le sacré. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1953. ———. Les Grands Cinéastes que je propose. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967. ———. Jean Grémillon. Paris: Seghers, 1969. Agel, H., et al. Sept ans de cinéma français. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1953. Aguettand, L., et al. Rapport concernant la décoration de film en France. Cannes: 2e Congrès International des Écoles de Cinéma et de TV, 1955. Alekan, H. Des Lumières et des ombres. Paris: La Cinémathèque Française, 1984. Amengual, B. “René Clair.” 1985, no. 2 (1998). Andrews, D. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Annenkov, G. Max Ophuls. Paris: Éditions du Terrain Vague, 1962. Arlaud, R. Cinéma bouffe. Paris: Jacques Melot, 1945. Armes, R. French Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Arnoux, A. Du muet au parlant: Souvenirs d’un témoin. Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1946. Aumont, J.-P. Le Soleil et les ombres. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976. Ayfre, A., et al. The Films of Robert Bresson. New York: Praeger, 1979. Bardèche, M., and R. Brasillach. Histoire du cinéma. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935. Barjavel, R. Cinéma total. Paris: Denoël, 1944. Barrot, O. L’Écran français, 1943–1953: Histoire d’un journal et d’une époque. Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1979. ———. Inoubliables: Visages du cinéma français, 1930–1950. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1986. Barrot, O., and R. Chirat. Noir et blanc. Paris: Flammarion, 2000. Barsacq, L. Le Décor de film. Paris: Seghers, 1970. Baudrier, Y. Les Signes du visible et de l’audible. Paris: Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, 1964. Bazin, A. Le Cinéma français de l’occupation et de la résistance. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975. ———. Jean Renoir. Paris: Champs Libre, 1971. ———. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958–1962. ———. What Is Cinema? 2 vols. Transl. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Bellanger, C. Presse clandestine 1940–44. Paris: Armand Colin, 1961.

Bertin-Maghit, J.-P. Le Cinéma français sous Vichy. Paris: Revue du Cinéma/Albatros, 1980. Bessy, M. Les Passagers du souvenir. Paris: Albin Michel, 1977. Beylie, C. Marcel Pagnol. Paris: Seghers, 1974. ———. Max Ophüls. Paris: Seghers, 1963. Bonnell, R. Le Cinéma exploité. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Borde, R. Les Cinémathèques. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1983. Borde, R., and E. Chaumeton. Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Bordwell, D., J. Staiger, and K. Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1985. Braucourt, G. André Cayatte. Paris: Seghers, 1959. Braunberger, P. Cinémamémoires. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987. Bresson, R. Notes of a Cinematographer. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1988. Brunius, J. En marge du cinéma français. Paris: Arcanes, 1954. Burch, N., and G. Sellier. La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français. Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1996. Cadars, P. Les Séducteurs du cinéma français (1928–1958). Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1982. Carné, M. La Vie à belles dents. Paris: Jean-Pierre Olivier, 1975. Catelain, J. Marcel L’Herbier. Paris: Jacques Vautrain, 1950. Cauliez, A. Jacques Tati. Paris: Seghers, 1962. Charensol, G. Renaissance du cinéma français. Paris: Sagittaire, n.d. Charensol, G., and R. Régent. Un maître de cinéma: René Clair. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1952. Chartier, J., and R. Desplanques. Derrière l’écran: Initiation au cinéma. Paris: Spes, 1950. Chazal, R. Marcel Carné. Paris: Seghers, 1965. Chirat, R. Catalogue des films français de long métrage: Films de fiction 1940–1950. Luxembourg: Éditions de l’Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1981. ———. Le Cinéma français des années de guerre. Renens, Switzerland: Hatier, 1983. ———. La IVe république et ses films. Renens, Switzerland: Hatier, 1985. Clair, R. Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. Comédies et commentaires. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ———. Réflexion faite. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Cocteau, J. Entretiens autour du cinématographe. Ed. André Fraigneau. Paris: André Bonne, 1951. Conway, K. Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Courtade, F. Les Malédictions du cinéma français. Paris: Éditions Alain Moreau, 1978. Crisp, C. The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ———. Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Cunneen, J. Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film. New York: Continuum, 2003. Dalio, M. Mes années folles. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1976.

324

Bibliography

Daquin, L. Le Cinéma, notre métier. Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1960. ———. On ne tait pas ses silences. Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1980. Degand, C. Le Cinéma . . . cette industrie. Paris: Éditions Techniques et Économiques, 1972. Derycke, G. Destin du cinéma. Brussels: La Rose Solaire, 1943. Diamant-Berger, H. Il était une fois le cinéma. Paris: J.-C. Simoën, 1977. Dubost, P. C’est court la vie. Paris: Flammarion, 1992. Ducout, F. Séductrices du cinéma français 1936–1956. Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1978. Durand, J. Le Cinéma et son public. Paris: Sirey, 1958. Durgnat, R. French Cinema: The A–Z Guide to the “New Wave.” Loughton, England: Motion Publications, 1963. ———. Luis Buñuel. London: Studio Vista, 1967. Duvillars, P. Cinéma: Mythologie du XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions de l’Ermite, 1950. Ehrlich, E. Cinema of Paradox: French Film-Making under the German Occupation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Estève, M. Robert Bresson. Paris: Seghers, 1962. Fabre, S. Douche écossaise. Paris: Fournier Valdès, 1948. Fescourt, H. La Foi et les montagnes. Paris: Paul Montel, 1959. Feyder, J., and F. Rosay. Le Cinéma: Notre métier. Geneva: Skira, 1946. Flitterman-Lewis, S. To Desire Differently: Feminism and French Cinema. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Ford, C. Breviaire du cinéma. Paris: Jacques Melot, 1946. ———. Histoire du cinéma français contemporain, 1945–1977. Paris: France-Empire, 1977. ———. On tourne . . . lundi. Paris: Vigneau. ———. Pierre Fresnay. Paris: France-Empire, 1981. Frank, N. Henri Jeanson en verve. Paris: Pierre Henri, 1971. ———. Petit Cinéma sentimental. Paris: La Nouvelle Édition, 1950. Frydland, M. Roger Vadim. Paris: Seghers, 1963. Garçon, F. De Blum à Pétain. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984. Gili, J. La Vie cinématographique à Nice, 1939–1945. Nice: Faculté des Lettres, 1973. Gilson, R. Jean Cocteau. Paris: Seghers, 1964. Guback, T. The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America since 1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Guillot, G. Les Prévert. Paris: Seghers, 1966. Guitry, S. Le Cinéma et moi. Paris: Jean-Pierre Ramsay, 1977. ———. Quatre ans d’occupation. Paris: L’Élan, 1947. Hayward, S. French National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hayward, S., and G. Vincendeau, eds. French Film: Texts and Contexts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989. Icart, R. La Révolution du parlant. Perpignan, France: Institut Jean Vigo, 1988. Jeancolas, J.-P. 15 ans d’années trente. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1983. Jeanne, R., and C. Ford. Le Cinéma et la presse. Paris: Armand Colin, 1961. Jeanson, H. 70 ans d’adolescence. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1971. Jouvet, L. Le Comédien désincarné. Paris: Flammarion, 1954.

Bibliography

325

Lebrun, D. Paris-Hollywood: Les Français dans le cinéma américain. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Leenhardt, R. Chroniques de cinéma. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1986. Léglise, P. Histoire de la politique du cinéma français, vol. 2, 1940–1946. Paris: Pierre Lherminier, 1977. Leprohon, P. 50 ans de cinéma français. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1954. ———. Présences contemporaines: Cinéma. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Debresse, 1957. L’Herbier, M., ed. Intelligence du cinématographe. Paris: Correa, 1946. ———. La Tête qui tourne. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1979. Lods, J. La Formation professionnelle des techniciens de film. Paris: UNESCO, 1951. Lorcey, J. Marcel Achard. Paris: France-Empire, 1977. Louvrier, P. Brasillach: L’Illusion fasciste. Paris: Perrin, 1989. Ludmann, R. Cinéma, foi et morale. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1956. Marais, J. Histoires de ma vie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1975. Marie, M. La Nouvelle Vague: Une école artistique. Paris: Nathan, 1997. Marion, D. Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1949. Mauriac, C. L’Amour du cinéma. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1954. Mayne, J. Le Corbeau. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Mény, J. Jean Giono et le cinéma. Paris: Ramsay Poche, 1990. Mitry, J. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1963. ———. Histoire du cinéma. 5 vols. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1967–1980. Morin, E. Les Stars. Paris: Le Seuil, 1957. Moussinac, L. L’Âge ingrat du cinéma. Paris: Sagittaire, 1946. Neale, S. Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Neupert, R. A History of the French New Wave. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Pagnol, M. Confidences. Paris: Julliard, 1981. Passek, J.-L., ed. D’un cinéma l’autre. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988. Pellissier, P. Brasillach . . . le maudit. Paris: Denoël, 1989. Pinel, V. Filmographie des longs métrages sonores du cinéma français. Paris: La Cinémathèque Française, 1985. Poiré, A. Gaumont: 90 ans de cinéma. Paris: Ramsay, 1986. Porcile, F. La Musique à l’écran. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969. Powrie, P., ed. The Cinema of France. New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. Prédal, R. 80 ans de cinéma: Nice et le 7e art. Nice: Serre, 1980. ———. La Société française à travers le cinéma, 1914–1945. Paris: Armand Colin, 1972. Quéval, J. Jacques Becker. Paris: Seghers, 1962. ———. Marcel Carné. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952. Ragache, G., and J.-R. Ragache. La Vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l’occupation, 1940–1944. Paris: Hachette, 1988. Rebatet, L. Les Juifs en France, vol. 4, Les Tribus du cinéma et du théâtre. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, 1941. Régent, R. Cinéma de France. Paris: Éditions Bellefaye, 1948.

326

Bibliography

———. Raimu. Paris: Chavane, 1957. Renard, P. Un cinéaste des années 50: J-P Le Chanois. Paris: Dreamland, 2000. Renoir, J. Écrits 1926–1971. Paris: Belfond, 1974. Richard-Wilm, P. Loin des étoiles. Paris: Belfond, 1975. Richebé, R. Au-delà de l’écran: 70 ans de la vie d’un cinéaste. Monaco: Pastorelly, 1977. Rivers, F. 50 ans chez les fous. Paris: G. Girard, 1945. Rosay, F. La Traversée d’une vie. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1974. Sabria, J.-C. Cinéma français: Les années 50—Les longs métrages réalisés de 1950 à 1959. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987. Sadoul, G. Le Cinéma français 1890–1962. Paris: Flammarion, 1962. ———. Dictionnaire des films. Paris: Seuil, 1965. ———. Histoire du cinéma mondial des origines à nos jours. Rev. ed. Paris: Flammarion, 1961. ———. Les Merveilles du cinéma. Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1957. Sallée, A. Les Acteurs français. Paris: Bordas, 1988. Salt, B. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. London: Starword, 1983. Sellier, G. Masculine Singular. Transl. Kristin Ross. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Siclier, J. Le Cinéma français 1945–1985. Paris: Ramsay, 1989. ———. La France de Pétain et son cinéma. Bourges, France: Henri Veyrier, 1981. Sims, Greg. “The Work of Art as Will to Power” Modern Language Notes 114 (1999): 743–779. Thiher, A. The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Trauner, A. Décors de cinéma. Paris: Jad-Flammarion, 1988. Tual, D. Au cœur du temps. Paris: Carrère, 1987. Turk, E. B. Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Van Parys, G. Les Jours comme ils viennent. Paris: Plon, 1969. Wahkevitch, G. L’Envers des décors. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977. Weber, A. La Bataille du film 1933–1945. Paris: Ramsay, 2007. Weil-Lorac, R. 50 ans de cinéma actif. Paris: Éditions Dujarric, 1977. Willemen, P., ed. Max Ophuls. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Williams, A. Republic of Images. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Wilson, E. French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999.

Magazines, Journals, and Program Guides Arts Cahiers du cinéma Ciné digest Cinéma 55 (and other years) Cinématographe Cinémonde

Bibliography

327

CNC Bulletin

L’Écran français/Les Lettres françaises Esprit Humanité L’Observateur L’Officiel des spectacles Positif Pour vous Premier Plan, No. 14, 1960 (Jacques Prévert) Premier Plan, Nos. 22–23–24, 1962 (Jean Renoir) Radio-Cinéma-TV La Revue du cinéma Sight and Sound Technique et matériel Téléciné fiches Unifrance film (production company brochures)

328

Bibliography

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by t indicate a table. Page numbers in bold refer to the main entry for a film. À bout de souffle (Godard), 1 À double tour, 317 À nous la liberté (Clair), 199, 302, 304 À toi de faire, mignonne (Borderie), 255 Abus de confiance (Decoin), 28 ace, 7 Achard, Marcel, 21n2, 314–315 action parodies, 21 Adam, Georges, 78 Adieu Léonard (P. Prévert), 71–74 aesthetic realism, 142–143 L’Affaire est dans le sac (P. Prévert), 73 Les Affaires publiques (Bresson), 68 L’Âge d’or (Buñuel), 285 Agel, Henri, 20, 157 Agence matrimoniale (Dreyfus), 176–177 Agostini, Philippe, 46, 117 Aguettand, Lucien, 33 Aid Law of 1948, 14–16 Les Ailes blanches (Péguy), 52 L’Air de Paris (Carné), 166, 317 Alari, Nadine, 127 Alcover, Pierre, 56 Algerian War, 12, 184, 232, 237 Ali Baba (Becker), 267 Allégret, Marc, 1, 10, 123, 164, 297–298 Allégret, Yves, 1, 39, 73, 176–177, 230; Dédée d’Anvers, 135, 163–166, 177; Les Démons de l’aube, 113, 164; Entrée des artistes, 129; Manèges, 129, 135, 164, 165, 177, 194– 197, 225, 268; Les Orgueilleux, 165–166, 197, 260–262, 316; prewar films of, 128, 133, 164, 177; Une si jolie petite plage, 165, 173–175, 195 Alphaville (Godard), 255

Altman, Georges, 314–315 Les Amants, 317 Les Amants de Vérone (Cayatte), 200 Amengual, Barthélémy, 242 American film industry, 19, 254; adaptations of French films by, 45; competition from, 13–14; Dassin’s work for, 273; directors’ roles in, 139; film noir of, 163–164; honors and awards of, 303; McCarthyist blacklisting in, 255, 273– 274; preview system of, 149–150 L’Amour d’une femme (Grémillon), 268–270 Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde (Decoin), 120, 128–130 Les Amours de minuit, 86 L’Ange Heurtebise (Cocteau), 206 Les Anges du péché (Bresson), 39, 68–71, 102, 104, 212, 314 angled shots. See camera angles L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 44, 217 Annette et la dame blonde (Dréville), 36 Anouilh, Jean, 214; Le Voyageur sans bagages, 91–94 anti-Semitism, 4, 7–8, 26–27, 37–38, 62, 140, 176 “Antoine” (Lampin), 186, 188 Antoine, André-Paul, 277 Antoine et Antoinette (Becker), 114, 153–155, 192–193, 234, 313 L’Appel du silence (Poirier), 156 Aragon, Louis, 73, 176 aristocracy. See class oppositions Arletty, 10, 55–56, 100–102 Armes, Roy, 115 Arnoul, Françoise, 277

Arnoux, Alexandre, 10 art directors, 93 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 315 Ashelbé, Roger, 164 L’Assassin a peur la nuit, 30, 60–62 L’Assassin habite au 21 (Clouzot), 47–50 L’Assassinat du père Noël (Christian-Jaque), 30–33, 60, 108, 314 Assassins et voleurs (Guitry), 263 Astruc, Alexandre, 20, 283 L’Atalante (Vigo), 42 Au cœur de l’orage (Dreyfus), 176 Au grand balcon (Decoin), 120 L’Auberge rouge (Autant-Lara), 148, 217–219 Au-delà des grilles (Clément), 115, 185, 188– 191, 313, 317 audiences. See spectatorship Audret, Pascale, 308 Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 306 Aurenche, Jean, 45–47, 123, 197, 212, 260, 270–271 Auric, Georges, 123 Auriol, Jean-Georges, 142–143 Austerlitz (Gance and Richebé), 1 Autant-Lara, Claude, 164, 232; antiestablishment themes of, 147–150, 219, 232; L’Auberge rouge, 148, 217–219; Le Diable au corps, 129, 147–150, 219, 316, 318; Douce, 45–47; En cas de malheur, 309; La Jument verte, 1, 19; Lettres d’amour, 46; Le Mariage de Chiffon, 44– 47; L’Objecteur, 232, 237; Occupe-toi d’Amélie, 219, 313; poetic romances of, 117, 147; prewar films of, 45; Le Rouge et le noir, 148, 270–273, 316; La Traversée de Paris, 148, 290–293, 316, 317 auteur movement, 19–20, 48, 108, 208. See also New Wave period Aux yeux du souvenir, 316 Avant le déluge (Cayatte), 236, 313 avant-garde film, 206–208, 211–213 Les Aventures d’Arsène Lupin (Becker), 267 average shot length (asl): fast sequences and, 35, 114–115, 155, 180, 199, 216, 234, 244, 250; long takes and, 87, 115, 137, 142, 155, 163, 180, 213, 228, 261–262; postwar norms of, 155, 163, 175, 199

330

Ayfre, Amédée, 157 Aymé, Marcel, 270, 291 Azaïs, Paul, 230 Azar, Léonide, 121 Bachelet, Jean, 21n2, 33 Bacquet, Maurice, 39 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 284 Le Ballon rouge, 314, 315 Balzac, Honoré de, 217 La Bandera (Duvivier), 139 Bardèche, Maurice, 80, 147 Bardot, Brigitte, 265, 297–299, 310 Le Baron fantôme, 42, 131, 314 Baroncelli, Jacques de, 48; Haut-le-Vent, 83–85 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 99–101, 176, 265 Barrot, Olivier, 20, 114, 178 Barry, 316 Barsacq, André, 66 Barsacq, Léon, 107, 121, 159, 228, 281, 300 Les Bas-Fonds (Renoir), 193 Bataille, Sylvia, 315 La Bataille de l’eau lourde, 113 La Bataille du rail (Clément), 113–115, 126, 185, 190, 233, 234, 313, 314 Le Bataillon du ciel, 113 Battement de cœur (Decoin), 28, 118 Bauche, Freddy, 287–288 Baur, Harry, 56 Bazin, André, 20; on Aurenche and Bost, 271; on Bresson’s aesthetic austerity, 213; on Cayatte’s socially committed films, 238; on close-ups, 183; on Les Dernières Vacances (Leenhardt), 162– 163; on L’Eau vive (Villiers), 306; on Farrebique (Rouquier), 142; on Jean Gabin, 190–191; on Juliette, ou la clé des songes (Carné), 216; on Lola Montès (Ophüls), 283; on Manon des Sources (Pagnol), 248; on Les Parents terribles (Cocteau), 168; on Le Plaisir (Ophüls), 229; on Renoir’s postwar films, 276, 278; on technical realism, 115 Le Beau Serge (Chabrol), 1, 315 La Beauté du diable (Clair), 197–199 Becker, Jacques, 176, 270, 283, 300; Ali Baba,

Index

267; Antoine et Antoinette, 114, 153–155, 192–193, 234, 313; Les Aventures d’Arsène Lupin, 267; Casque d’Or, 155, 164, 229– 232, 265, 318; Dernier Atout, 60; Édouard et Caroline, 153, 155, 194, 267; Falbalas, 62; Goupi Mains-Rouges, 30, 60– 62, 79, 314; neorealist style of, 153–155, 192–194; L’Or du Cristobal, 60; Rendezvous de juillet, 153, 192–194, 315; Rue de l’Estrapade, 153, 232; Touchez pas au grisbi, 231, 265–267, 274, 317; Le Trou, 1, 309 Le Bel Âge (Kast), 1 La Belle de Cadiz, 250 La Belle Équipe (Duvivier), 130, 139, 141, 245 La Belle et la bête (Cocteau), 130–133, 169, 313, 315 Les Belles de Nuit (Clair), 240–243, 279, 317 Bérard, Christian, 131, 215 Berlin Golden Bear, 318 Bernanos, Georges, 212 Bernard, Paul, 103, 140 Bernard, Raymond, 93 Bernhardt, Kurt, 92–94 Berri, Claude, 248 Berry, John, 255 Berry, Jules, 54, 174–175 Bessy, Maurice, 314–315 La Bête humaine (Renoir), 39, 88 Beylie, Claude, 182, 205, 284 Bicycle Thieves (de Sica), 192 Le Bienfaiteur (Decoin), 118–119 Billon, Pierre: L’Inévitable Monsieur Dubois, 74–77 black realism (réalisme noir), 140, 151–152, 163–166, 173–175, 177, 195–197 Blanchar, Pierre, 10, 58, 78, 89–90, 159, 176 Blavette, Charles, 248, 308 Le Blé en herbe, 314 Blier, Bernard, 101, 151, 177–178, 188, 316, 318 blindness, 123–124 Blistène, Marcel: Macadam, 20, 133–136, 164, 171 The Blue Angel, 87 Blum, Léon, 11–12, 14 Blum-Byrnes agreement, 12–14 Bob le flambeur (Melville), 267, 274

Boisrond, Michel, 297 Bonjour Tristesse (Sagan), 310 Borde, Raymond, 9, 58, 68, 90, 255 Borderie, Bernard: Lemmy Caution films, 255; La Môme vert-de-gris, 21, 254–257 Bose, Lucia, 286–287 Bost, Pierre, 10, 123, 125, 212, 218, 270–271, 314–315 Boule de Suif (Christian-Jaque), 105–108 bourgeois culture. See class oppositions Bourvil, 148, 265, 291, 317 Boyer, Charles, 139, 259 Boyer, François, 233 Brasillach, Robert, 80 Brassens, Georges, 302 Brasseur, Pierre, 66–67, 301–302, 317 Bresson, Robert, 39; Les Anges du péché, 68–71, 102, 104, 212, 314; Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, 68, 293–296, 313, 316; Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, 68, 102–105; Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, 20, 68, 157, 211–214, 294, 314, 315, 317; Pickpocket, 69; religious themes of, 69–70, 295–296; use of austerity by, 70–71 Breton, André, 73 Breuil, Roger, 142 Brief Encounter, 14, 105 British Film Academy, 318 Brochard, Jean, 150 Brückberger, Raymond, 212 Bruckner, Ferdinand, 194 Brunius, Jacques-Bernard, 20, 176 Brussels Grand Prix, 318 Buñuel, Luis: Cela s’appelle l’aurore, 285– 288; La Fièvre monte à El Pao, 285; La Mort en ce jardin, 285; Nazarin, 286, 313; Los Olvidados, 286; prewar films of, 285 Burch, Noël and Sellier, Geneviève, 29, 47, 53; on L’Amour d’une femme (Grémillon), 270; on Becker’s female characters, 193–194; on Casque d’Or (Becker), 231; on Le Ciel est à vous (Grémillon), 90–91; on Le Corbeau (Clouzot), 79–80; on Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (Bresson), 103–104; on Le Diable au corps (Autant-Lara), 149; on emancipated

Index

331

women of wartime, 268–270; on female sexuality, 76; on film noir, 163– 164; on Jeux interdits (Clément), 234; on Lola Montès (Ophüls), 284–285; on Marie-Martine (Valentin), 64; on misogyny and violence towards women, 59, 140–141; on Les Orgueilleux (Allégret), 262; on Panique (Duvivier), 140– 141; on Le Père tranquille (Noël-Noël), 126; on Quai des Orfèvres (Clouzot), 151–152; on Un revenant (ChristianJaque), 129; on sympathetic male figures, 101, 133, 262; on Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker), 267; on Les Tricheurs (Carné), 310; on La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (Decoin), 225; on Vichy’s progressive Catholicism, 69 Bussières, Raymond, 34, 49, 176, 230 Ça va barder (Borderie), 255 La Cage aux rossignols (Dréville), 98, 126, 177, 316 Cahiers du cinéma, 19–20, 234; on Aurenche and Bost, 271; on Duvivier’s films, 219, 245; on L’Eau vive (Villiers), 306; on Lola Montès (Ophüls), 283; on Quality Cinema, 82, 124; on Renoir’s postwar films, 250, 276, 278 Caligari, 44, 105 Caligula (Camus), 121 camera angles, 35, 87, 107, 110, 190, 228; Dutch tilts, 35, 87, 107, 110, 228, 244, 254; vertical cameras, 244 camera movements. See pans and tracking shots Camus, Albert, 121, 260 Candide (Voltaire), 214 Cannes Film Festival awards, 313 capitalism. See class oppositions Un caprice de Caroline chérie, 250 car ownership, 2, 17 Carette, Julien, 138, 245 Carmoy, Guy de, 6–7, 68 Carné, Marcel, 98, 165, 166, 300; L’Air de Paris, 317; Les Enfants du paradis, 7, 27, 66, 99–102, 109, 135, 152, 231, 233; Juliette, ou la clé des songes, 44, 214–217, 313; La

332

Marie du Port, 189–191, 214; Les Portes de la nuit, 136–138, 214; prewar films of, 63, 64, 73, 86–87, 128, 134, 137, 175, 177, 245; Les Tricheurs, 1, 19, 166, 298, 308– 311, 314, 316; Les Visiteurs du soir, 7, 8, 53–56, 64, 65, 66, 81, 135, 208, 314 Un carnet de bal (Duvivier), 243 the carnivalesque, 284–285 Carol, Martine, 283, 316–317 Caroline chérie (Pottier), 209 Caron, Leslie, 277 Carrefour (Bernhardt), 92–94 Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (Joannon), 96–99 Le Carrosse d’or (Renoir), 230, 249–252, 277, 278 Casarès, Maria, 101, 102–103 Casque d’Or (Becker), 155, 164, 229–232, 265, 318 Les Casse-Pieds (Noël-Noël), 127, 314, 315, 318 The Castle (Kafka), 214, 217 Cauliez, Armand, 182, 183, 304 Les caves du Majestic (Pottier), 36 Cayatte, André, 211; Les Amants de Vérone, 200; Avant le déluge, 236, 313; Le Chanteur inconnu, 116–117; Le Dossier noir, 211; Justice est faite, 200–202, 209, 211, 235, 316, 317, 318; Nous sommes tous des assassins, 202, 211, 235–238, 313, 314; Sérénade aux nuages, 116–118; “Tante Emma,” 186–187 Cécile est morte (Tourneur), 36 Cela s’appelle l’aurore (Buñuel), 285–288 Céline, 62, 78 censorship: of the postwar era, 38, 265; during World War II, 5, 8–9, 27, 47, 67– 68, 164 Centre National de la Cinématographie (cnc), 12–13 Ces dames préfèrent le mambo (Borderie), 255 Cet homme est dangereux (Borderie), 255 Cette sacrée gamine (Boisrond), 297 Chabrol, Claude, 309; Le Beau Serge, 1, 315; Les Cousins, 1, 318 Chambre Syndicale Française de la Cinématographie, 13

Index

Le Chant d l’exilé, 30 Le Chanteur inconnu (Cayatte), 116–117 Chaplin, Charlie, 181, 190, 282, 304 Chardère, Bernard, 20, 278 Charensol, Georges, 104–105, 234, 314–315 Charpin, 248 La Charrette fantôme, 69, 156 Charrier, Jacques, 311, 317 Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 20 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 160 La Chatte, 293 Chavance, Louis, 42–43, 77, 79, 191 Chazal, Robert, 308 Chenal, Pierre: Rafles sur la ville, 267, 274 Cheney, Peter, 255 Chevalier, Maurice, 10, 145, 317–318 Chiens perdus sans collier, 298 Les Chiffoniers d’Emmaüs (Darène), 157 Chirat, Raymond, 59, 170, 178 Christian-Jaque, 10, 188, 270, 283; L’Assassinat du père Noël, 30–33, 60, 108, 314; Boule de Suif, 105–108; Fanfan la Tulipe, 219, 238, 313, 314; Nana, 283, 284; prewar films of, 108; Un revenant, 128– 130; Sortilèges, 30–31, 108–110, 199; Voyage sans espoir, 85–88, 108, 135, 140 Ciboulette (Autant-Lara), 45 Le Ciel est à vous (Grémillon), 8–9, 78, 88– 91, 158, 268 cimex, 66 ciné club movement, 19–20 Ciné Mondial, 7 Cinéma 55, 19 Cinéma 58, 298 Le Cinéma et le sacré (Agel and Ayfre), 157–158 cinéma vérité, 143 cinemascope, 283 Cinémonde, 19–20, 297–300, 311, 316 Citizen Kane, 14, 105, 142 city/country opposition, 25–26, 210, 227; melodramatic portrayals of, 51–53; in Vichy ideology, 26–27, 37–38, 84–85, 95 Clair, René, 8, 45, 147, 172–173; La Beauté du diable, 197–199; Les Belles de Nuit, 240– 243, 279, 317; Les Grandes Manœuvres,

145, 279–282, 297, 315, 316; Porte des Lilas, 19, 279, 300–302, 314, 316, 318; prewar films of, 144–145, 199, 242–243, 245, 302, 304; pseudonym of, 242; Le Silence est d’or, 144–147, 300, 318 class oppositions: on bourgeois and capitalist values, 72, 73–74, 119–120, 169– 170, 223–224, 257–259, 271–273, 286– 288, 297; on city/country life, 25–26, 37–38, 51–53, 84–85, 95–96, 210, 227; comedic portrayals of, 73–74; French collaborators and, 105–107; of French revolutions, 159–160; mythologizing of workers and the poor and, 34, 109, 134– 136, 138, 153–155, 301; on upper classes and the old order, 28–29, 46–47, 57–59, 156, 157, 167 Clément, René, 115, 127, 161, 313; Au-delà des grilles, 115, 185, 188–191, 313, 317; La Bataille du rail, 113–115, 126, 185, 190, 233, 234, 313, 314; fluid camera techniques of, 115; Gervaise, 317; Jeux interdits, 113, 232–235, 313, 317, 318; Les Maudits, 115, 233, 313; Monsieur Ripois, 313; Plein Soleil, 309 Cloche, Maurice: Monsieur Vincent, 155– 158, 211, 314, 316, 317 close-ups, 170, 182–183 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 50, 120, 230, 268; adaptations by, 36–38, 48; L’Assassin habite au 21, 47–50; charges of pro-Nazi sympathies against, 78–79, 89, 150; Le Corbeau, 10, 38, 42, 77–80, 89, 150, 151, 158, 252, 265; Les Diaboliques, 164, 315; “Jean,” 186–187; Miquette et sa mère, 219; Le Mystère Picasso, 288–290, 313; prewar films of, 48; Quai des Orfèvres, 150–152, 177, 252, 317; Le Salaire de la peur, 252–254, 313, 316; La Vérité, 1, 309 Clouzot, Véra, 253–254 Club des femmes, 298 Cocteau, Jean, 137, 270, 283, 292, 300; La Belle et la bête, 130–133, 169, 313, 315; L’Éternel Retour, 80–82, 131; Orphée, 131, 205–208, 317; Les Parents terribles, 131, 132, 168–170, 172, 316; plays of, 41, 215; prewar films of, 131, 206, 208; screen-

Index

333

writing by, 39, 71, 92, 103; Le Testament d’Orphée, 1, 206, 309 Cold War, 113, 160, 197–199, 240 Colette, 270 Les Collégiennes, 298 Collet, Jean, 271 colonialism, 5–6, 11–12, 184–187, 232, 237 color technology, 2, 3t, 250–251, 283, 305 comedies, 302; by Autant-Lara, 219; female mishaps and, 74–77; by Noël-Noël, 20, 125–126, 182; by the Prévert brothers, 71–74; prewar genres of, 182; by Tati, 181–183 coming-of-age films, 46 Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français (clcf), 10, 58, 89, 113, 158–159, 176 Comité d’Organisation de l’Industrie Cinématographique (coic), 6, 8, 10, 12, 21n2 Committee for the Defense of French Cinema, 14 Common Market, 1 La Commune (Grémillon), 159 communism/Communist Party: Cold War and, 240; film productions by, 176; opposition to the church of, 239– 240; Resistance movement and, 113, 138, 144; union movement and, 17 Companeez, Jacques, 74–75 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (Bresson), 68, 293–296, 313, 316 Confédération Générale des Travailleurs (cgt), 17, 176 Connery, Sean, 257 Constantine, Eddie, 21, 255–257 Continental Films, 7–8, 10–11, 28, 30, 37, 48, 156 Coogan, Henry, 255 Copenhagen Festival, 318 Copie conforme, 129 Le Corbeau (Clouzot), 10, 38, 42, 77–80, 89, 150, 151, 158, 252, 265 Les Corrupteurs, 38 costume dramas, 54 country life. See city/country opposition Coup de tête, 99 Le Coupable, 97–98

334

Courcel, Nicole, 192 Courtade, Francis, 42, 59, 68 Les Cousins (Chabrol), 1, 318 Cousteau, Jacques, 288, 313 crane-pans, 107 Cravenne, Marcel: La Danse de mort, 20, 171–173 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 120–122 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir), 110, 175, 193, 278 criminality and the underworld, 97–99, 119–120, 134, 230, 244, 265–267, 274–276 Crin-blanc, 315 cross-dissolves, 115, 197, 213 Cuny, Alain, 41, 103 Dalio, Marcel, 165 La Dame aux camélias (Rivers and Gance), 35, 250 Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (Bresson), 68, 102–105 La Danse de mort (Cravenne), 20, 171–173 Daquin, Louis, 10, 21n2, 176; Nous les gosses, 33–35, 314; Patrie, 107–108; Premier de cordée, 94–96 Darène, Robert, 157 Darlan, François, 6 Darrieux, Danielle, 28, 30, 148, 168, 225– 226, 259, 317 Dary, René, 98 Dassin, Jules, 255; Du rififi chez les hommes, 231, 267, 273–276, 313 Dauphin, Claude, 164, 231 de Gaulle, Charles, 6, 11–12, 180–181 de Sica, Vittorio, 192, 259 Déa, Marie, 208 Debrie, André, 21n2 Deburau, 99–100, 100–101 Decoin, Henri, 118, 120, 188, 270; Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde, 128–130; Battement de cœur, 118; Le Bienfaiteur, 118– 119; Entre 11h et minuit, 129–130; La Fille du diable, 118–120; L’Homme de Londres, 36, 38, 118; honors and awards, 118–119; Les Inconnus dans la maison, 10, 36–38, 48, 52, 118; Premier Rendez-vous, 10, 27–

Index

30, 118, 226; prewar films of, 28; Razzia sur la chnouf, 267, 274; La Vérité sur Bébé Donge, 120, 223–226 Dédée d’Anvers (Allégret), 135, 163–166, 177 Le Défroqué (Joannon), 157 Delair, Suzy, 48, 49, 151 Delannoy, Jean, 10; Dieu a besoin des hommes, 125, 157–158, 211, 317; L’Éternel Retour, 7, 20, 66, 80–82, 131, 169; Fièvres, 116, 118; Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire, 8, 51, 56–59; La Princesse de Clèves, 1, 294; Quality Cinema work of, 82, 124; La Symphonie pastorale, 20, 122–125, 157– 158, 211, 313, 316 Delavignette, Roger, 184 Delmont, Édouard, 248 Delorme, Danielle, 316 Les Démons de l’aube (Allégret), 113, 164 Dernier Atout (Becker), 60 Le Dernier des six (Lacombe), 48 Le Dernier Milliardaire (Clair), 144 Les Dernières Vacances (Leenhardt), 161–163 Desailly, Jean, 101, 262 Desnos, Robert, 73 Destins (Pottier), 116 Deutschmeister, Henri, 277 Devigny, André, 294, 296 Le Diable au corps (Autant-Lara), 129, 147–150, 148, 219, 316, 318 Les Diaboliques (Clouzot), 164, 315 Diderot, Denis, 104 Dies Irae, 105 Dietrich, Marlène, 136–137, 191 Dieu a besoin des hommes (Delannoy), 125, 157–158, 211, 317 Les Disparus de St.-Agil (ChristianJaque), 108 Dmytryk, Edward, 255 Docteur Laënnec (Cloche), 157 documentaries/documentary techniques: austere film techniques of, 185; Farrebique (Rouquier), 141–144; French documentary neorealism and, 161, 185, 190, 276; for industrial propaganda, 306–307; Jour de fête (Tati), 182–183; Le Mystère Picasso (Clouzot), 288–290;

New Wave and, 288; on the Resistance movement, 113–114, 233 Dominique (Noé), 129 Don Camillo films, 219, 238–240, 243 Don Juan stories, 279–281 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 208, 261, 292; L’Eau à la bouche, 1 Dors, Diana, 297 Le Dossier noir (Cayatte), 211 doubling, 198–199 Douce (Autant-Laura), 45–47 Douy, Max, 66, 228 Dréville, Jean, 186–188; Annette et la dame blonde, 36; La Cage aux rossignols, 316 Dreyfus, Jean-Paul (Le Chanois): L’École buissonnière, 163, 176–178, 318 Dreyfus Affair, 176 Drôle de drame (Carné), 73 Du rififi chez les hommes (Dassin), 231, 267, 273–276, 313 Dubost, Paulette, 11, 245 Ducaux, Annie, 75 Duhamel, Marcel, 73, 255 Dullin, Charles, 151 Durgnat, Raymond, 285–288, 299 Dutch tilts, 35, 87, 107, 110, 228, 244, 254 Dutourd, Jean, 287 Duvillars, Pierre, 189 Duvivier, Julien, 8, 20, 93, 165, 230; La Femme et le pantin, 1; La Fête à Henriette, 20, 243–245; Hollywood films of, 139; Marie Octobre, 1; Panique, 138– 141, 184; Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo, 238–240, 316; prewar films of, 87, 130, 139, 141, 164, 190, 243, 245; Le Retour de Don Camillo, 240; Sous le ciel de Paris, 184, 243 L’Eau à la bouche (Doniol-Valcroze), 1 L’Eau vive (Villiers), 20, 305–308 Eaubonne, Jean d’, 227–228, 283 L’École buissonnière (Dreyfus/Le Chanois), 163, 176–178, 318 L’École des femmes (Molière), 146 L’Écran français, 19, 75, 78, 144, 156, 261 edit rate speeds. See average shot length (asl)

Index

335

Édouard et Caroline (Becker), 153, 155, 194, 267 Eisenstein, Sergei, 282 Ekberg, Anita, 297 Électre (Giraudoux), 287 Électricté de France (edf), 306–308 Elena et les hommes (Renoir), 230, 279 Emil and the Detectives (Kästner), 35 En cas de malheur (Autant-Lara), 309 En effeuillant la marguerite (M. Allégret), 297 enfant sauvage, 122–125 Les Enfants du paradis (Carné), 7, 27, 66, 99– 102, 109, 135, 152, 231, 233 Les Enfants terribles (Melville), 132, 170 Ennemi public No. 1 (Verneuil), 273–274 Entre 11h et minuit (Decoin), 120, 129–130 Entrée des artistes (Allégret), 128, 129, 177 Epstein, Jean, 217 erotic film, 297–300 L’Érotisme et le cinéma (Lo Duca), 298 L’Espoir, 39, 315 Esprit, 161, 163 Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (Vadim), 296– 300, 310 État Français. See Vichy L’Éternel Retour (Delannoy), 7, 20, 66, 80– 82, 131, 169 Étoile sans lumière (Blistène), 134 L’Étrange Madame X (Grémillon), 268 Eurydice (Anouilh), 214 Les Évadés, 293, 314 existentialism: on meaninglessness, 67, 165–166; on personal responsibility and morality, 195, 199–200, 237, 261–262 expressionism, 44, 87, 134 extra-diegetic music, 35, 69, 79, 104, 114, 142, 180, 296 Fabiola, 316 Fabre, Saturnin, 43, 245 fades. See punctuation Falbalas (Becker), 62 family domain films, 161–163 Fanfan la Tulipe (Christian-Jaque), 219, 238, 313, 314 fantasy films, 41, 250

336

Farrebique (Rouquier), 141–144, 161, 184, 314 Faust myth, 197–198 Favalelli, Max, 307 Fejos, Paul, 164 feminism, 47, 64, 90–91. See also women feminist critics. See Burch, Noël and Sellier, Geneviève La Femme et le pantin (Duvivier), 1 Les Femmes de Stermetz, 315 Les Femmes s’en balancent (Borderie), 255, 257 La Ferme des sept péchés, 318 Fernandel, 21, 26, 148, 182, 209, 219, 238– 240, 267, 274, 316 Fescourt, Henri, 150 Festival du Film Maudit, 19 La Fête à Henriette (Duvivier), 20, 243–245 Feuillère, Edwige, 316 Feydeau, Georges, 270 Feyder, Jacques, 36, 93, 133–134 Fidelio (Beethoven), 39–40 La Fièvre monte à El Pao (Buñuel), 285 Fièvres (Delannoy), 116, 118 Fifth Republic, 12 La Fille du diable (Decoin), 118–120 La Fille du puisatier (Pagnol), 25–27 Les Filles du Rhône (Paulin), 35 Le Film newspaper, 7, 316 film techniques: austere uses of, 70–71, 91, 185; average shot length (asl), 155, 163, 175, 199; camera angles, 35, 87, 107, 110, 190, 228, 244; close-ups, 170, 182– 183; Dutch tilts, 35, 87, 107, 110, 228, 244, 254; extra-diegetic music, 35, 69, 79, 104, 114, 142, 180; fast sequences, 35, 114–115, 155, 163, 180, 199, 216, 234, 244, 250; long depth-of-field shots, 115, 142, 182–183, 201, 250; long takes, 87, 115, 137, 142, 155, 163, 180, 213, 228, 261–262; micro-photography, 142; Ophüls’s reliance on, 227–228, 259, 282–283; pans and tracking shots, 38, 107, 110, 115, 163, 175, 205, 228, 259, 281; punctuation, 30, 32, 35, 79, 110, 115, 180, 199, 213, 241; special effects, 43, 131, 199, 206–208, 228, 283; time-lapse photography, 142, 289; zip panning, 99, 180, 199, 241. See also technology

Index

film themes. See postwar film themes; wartime film themes Films Gibé, 20 film-within-a-film, 145 La Fin du jour (Duvivier), 139 flashbacks, 149, 196–197 Flaubert, Gustave, 207 Le Fleuve (Renoir), 249–250, 277, 278 Florence est folle (Lacombe), 74–77 Ford, Charles, 20, 274 foregrounding of performance, 204–205 foreign films, 13–14, 19. See also American film industry Fourth Republic, 1, 10–12. See also postwar period “Les Français n’ont-ils pas la tête comique?” (Tallenay), 182 Francey, Micheline, 150 Frank, Nino, 10, 12, 315 Franstudio, 18 French Cancan (Renoir), 19, 276–279 French film industry: foreign competition of, 13–15; international coproductions of, 2, 3t, 15–16, 238–239, 249, 254, 279, 285–286; postwar Quality Cinema of, 59, 82, 119, 121, 123–124, 265; postwar reconstruction of, 12–20, 123; production numbers for, 2, 3t, 18; profitability of, 9, 13–14, 16; protectionist policies of, 14–16, 273–274; state control of, 6–8, 21n2; studio system of, 12–20; studio vs. location shooting in, 216, 228–229; during World War II, 6–10 French neorealism, 153–155, 161, 185, 190, 192–194, 276 Frend, Charles, 234 Fresnay, Pierre, 10, 48, 79, 92, 150, 156, 317 Freudian themes, 76 Frison-Roche, Roger, 94 La Fugue de Mahmoud (Leenhardt), 163 Futures Vedettes (M. Allégret), 297–298 Gabin, Jean, 136–137, 148, 214, 230, 267; honors and awards of, 316–317; iconic working-class roles of, 86–87, 165, 189– 191, 266–267, 291–293; mateship bonding roles of, 301; mature patrician roles

of, 56, 223, 225, 274, 277; poetic realism and, 98, 174–175; prewar films of, 63, 64, 134; as Resistance hero, 139 Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 274 Gabrio, Gabriel, 56 Galey, Louis-Émile, 68 Galland, Jean, 21n2 Gallimard, Gaston, 39 Gallone, Carmine, 48 Gamma Films, 283 Gance, Abel, 98–99; Austerlitz, 1 gangster films, 119–120, 265–267, 274–276, 291–293 Garçon, François, 37, 99 Garland, Judy, 284 Gaumont Studios, 8, 18 Gazette du cinéma, 19 Gélin, Daniel, 164, 262, 316 gender oppositions, 55–56, 268–269. See also male characters; women Le Génie du christianisme (Chateaubriand), 160 Génin, René, 49 Genina, Augusto, 164 Les Gens du voyage (Feyder), 133–134 German occupation, 4–11, 293; censorship under, 8–9; crisis of masculinity and, 101–102; film production under, 7–8, 28; French collaboration with, 10– 11, 37–38, 53, 62, 107, 140; French sympathizers with, 78–79, 89, 102, 106– 107, 150, 156, 157, 265; liberation from, 79, 92, 110; outdoor themes and, 81– 82, 95–96; propaganda initiatives of, 6–7, 10. See also Resistance movement; wartime film themes; World War II Gervaise (Clément), 317 Gide, André, 123–125 Gide, Édouard, 20 Gigi, 316 Gilson, René, 20, 315 Giono, Jean, 247, 306–308 Giraud, Henri, 59 Giraudoux, Jean, 69, 71, 287 globalization, 254 Godard, Jean-Luc, 20, 265, 288, 306, 309; À bout de souffle, 1; Alphaville, 255

Index

337

Goebbels, Joseph, 6, 10, 28 Gordine, Sacha, 121, 214 Gorilla films, 255 gothic films. See provincial gothic films Goupi Mains-Rouges (Becker), 30, 60–62, 79, 314 Le Grand Jeu (Feyder), 134 Un grand patron, 316 Grand Prix des Directeurs de Cinéma (gpdc), 316 Grand Prix du Cinéma Français, 9–10, 183, 314 La Grande Illusion (Renoir), 193 La Grande Vadrouille, 238 La Grande Vie, 315 Les Grandes Familles, 316 Les Grandes Manœuvres (Clair), 145, 279– 282, 297, 315, 316 Great Depression, 62 Grémillon, Jean, 10, 150, 176; abandoned films of, 158–160; L’Amour d’une femme, 268–270; Le Ciel est à vous, 8–9, 78, 88–91, 158, 268; L’Étrange Madame X, 268; Lumière d’été, 7, 9, 65–68, 86, 109, 140, 158; Pattes blanches, 268, 318; Le Printemps de la liberté, 158–160, 268; Remorques, 39, 65; Le 6 juin à l’aube, 158 Greven, Alfred, 6–7, 10, 48, 102 grey realism (réalisme gris), 177 Gribouille (Allégret), 177 Griffe, Maurice, 230 grills. See punctuation Grimault, Paul, 176 Groupe Octobre, 34, 73, 164, 176 Groupe Prémice, 73 Guitry, Sacha, 10, 56, 98–99, 168; Assassins et voleurs, 263; Napoleon, 263; prewar films of, 263; Si Versailles m’était conté, 20, 250, 262–265, 316; La Vie d’un honnête homme, 263 Hakim brothers, 230 Hans le marin (Villiers), 306 Harispiru, Edouard, 8 Haut-le-Vent (Baroncelli), 83–85 Hayer, Nicolas, 10 Hayes, Graeme, 274–276

338

Hayward, Susan, 193, 274 Heinrich, André, 73 Hilero, Maurice, 10, 33–34 Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais), 1 holes. See punctuation Hollywood. See American film industry L’Homme de Londres (Decoin), 36, 38, 118 L’Homme du jour (Duvivier), 139 honors and awards, 2, 9–10, 123, 313–318; for Allégret’s film, 316; for AutantLara’s films, 313, 316, 317, 318; for Becker’s films, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318; for Bresson’s films, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317; for Buñuel’s film, 313; for Carné’s films, 311, 313, 314, 316, 317; for Cayatte’s films, 313, 314, 316, 317, 318; for Chabrol’s films, 315, 318; for ChristianJaque’s films, 313, 314; for Clair’s films, 147, 282, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318; for Clément’s films, 115, 313, 314, 317, 318; for Cloche’s films, 314, 316, 317; for Clouzot’s films, 151, 252, 313, 315, 316, 317; for Cocteau’s films, 131, 313, 315, 316, 317; for Cousteau’s film, 313; for Daquin’s film, 314; for Dassin’s film, 313; for Decoin’s films, 118; for Delannoy’s films, 20, 313, 316, 317; for Dréville’s film, 316; for Dreyfus’s film, 318; for Duvivier’s film, 316; for Grémillon’s film, 318; for Guitry’s film, 316; for L’Herbier’s film, 314; for Noël-Noël’s films, 314, 315, 318; for Ophüls’s films, 317; for Pagnol’s films, 317; for Régnier’s films, 317; for Renoir’s films, 317; for Resnais’s films, 314, 315; for Rouquier’s film, 143–144, 314; for Tati’s films, 183, 303, 313, 314, 315, 317; for Truffaut’s film, 313 horror films, 56 Hôtel du Nord (Carné), 128, 134, 137, 177 I Married a Witch (Clair), 302 L’Idiot (Lampin), 120–122 L’Île des enfants perdus (Carné), 98 image distortions, 43 Image et son, 19 Impasse des Deux Anges (Tourneur), 166–168

Index

Les Inconnus dans la maison (Decoin), 10, 36–38, 48, 52, 118 L’Inévitable Monsieur Dubois (Billon), 74–77 Inspector Maigret films, 36, 140 Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (idhec), 9–10, 17, 233 intergenerational conflict, 36–37; antimilitarism and, 148–149; in Becker’s family series, 193–194; failures of parents in, 52, 61–62, 64, 161–163, 177–178, 234, 236; malevolent authority figures in, 286– 287; Oedipal relationships in, 132–133, 169–170; parental cruelty and, 169–170, 172; Resistance movement and, 126– 127. See also youth culture irises, 197 Italian coproductions, 2, 3t, 15–16, 66, 238, 249, 254, 279, 285–286 Italian film industry, 19 Italian neorealism, 114, 142, 177, 185, 192 James Bond films, 257 Je suis un sentimental (Borderie), 255 “Jean” (Clouzot), 186–187 Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre, 13, 18, 58–59, 96, 150 Jeannou (Poirier), 83–85 Jeanson, Henri, 7, 106, 128–130, 244, 315 Jenny (Carné), 134 Jéricho, 113 Jeune Critique Indépendant, 314–315 Jeux interdits (Clément), 113, 232–235, 313, 317, 318 Jews: anti-Semitism towards, 7–8, 26–27, 62, 140, 176; film representations of, 36–37 Joannon, Léo, 21n2, 157; Le Carrefour des enfants perdus, 96–99 Jofroi (Pagnol), 27, 317 Joinville studio complex, 18, 33, 137 Jones, Jennifer, 316 Jour de fête (Tati), 181–183, 303, 314, 317 Le Jour se lève (Carné), 63, 64, 134, 137, 175, 177 Le Journal d’un curé de campagne (Bresson), 20, 68, 157, 211–214, 294, 314, 315, 317 Jouvet, Louis, 128–130, 151, 152, 176, 180, 187–188

Joyeux, Odette, 46, 117 Juliette, ou la clé des songes (Carné), 44, 214– 217, 313 La Jument verte (Autant-Lara), 1, 19 Jurgens, Curd, 297 Justice est faite (Cayatte), 200–202, 209, 211, 235, 316, 317, 318 Kafka, Franz, 214, 217 Kast, Pierre, 20, 160, 234, 283; Le Bel Âge, 1 Kästner, Erich, 35 Keaton, Buster, 181 Knokke le Zoute, 318 Kosma, Joseph, 66, 99, 136, 150, 313 Krauss, Jacques, 45–46 Kyrou, Ado, 213 Lacombe, Georges, 48, 121; Florence est folle, 74–77; Monsieur la Souris, 36 Lady Paname (Jeanson), 130 Lallier, Jean, 21n2 Lampin, Georges, 121; “Antoine,” 186, 188; L’Idiot, 120–122 Langlois, Henri, 10, 20 Laroche, Pierre, 65 Larquey, Pierre, 34, 35, 40, 265 Laubreaux, Alain, 41 laundresses, 277–278 Laval, Pierre, 6, 55, 99 Laydu, Claude, 212–213 Le Breton, Auguste, 274 Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 10 Le Gall, André, 96 Le Vigan, Robert, 62, 100, 101–102 Leclerc, Ginette, 79, 150 Ledoux, Fernand, 29, 41 Leenhardt, Roger: Les Dernières Vacances, 161–163; short films and documentaries of, 163 leftist politics, 6, 65, 94–95; on emancipated women, 268; of Groupe Octobre, 34, 164, 176; of the Popular Front, 4, 67–68, 176; Resistance movement and, 113–115, 138, 144, 176, 180–181; surrealism and, 73. See also communism/ Communist Party Lehmann, Maurice, 45

Index

339

Lemaître, Frédérick, 100–101 Lemmy Caution films, 254–257 Léon la lune, 315 Leprohon, Pierre: on Les Anges du péché (Bresson), 70; on Becker’s postwar series, 192; on Le Ciel est à vous (Grémillon), 89–90; on Dédée d’Anvers (Allégret), 165; on Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale, 123–124; on French Cancan (Renoir), 277; on Jeux interdits (Clément), 234; on Juliette, ou la clé des songes (Carné), 216; on Lola Montès (Ophüls), 283–284; on Manèges (Allégret), 195; on La Nuit fantastique (L’Herbier), 42; on Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (Duvivier), 240; on postwar banned personnel, 150; on Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker), 267 Leterrier, François, 294–295 Lettres d’amour (Autant-Lara), 46 Lévy, Raoul, 297 L’Herbier, Marcel, 121; La Nuit fantastique, 42–44, 314 Linder, Max, 181 Liszt, Franz, 282–283 Le Lit à colonnes (Tual), 39–41 Litvak, Anatole, 48 Lo Duca, Joseph-Marie, 20, 298 Locarno Grand Prix, 318 Lola Montès (Ophüls), 282–285 Lollobrigida, Gina, 297 long depth-of-field shots, 115, 142, 182–183, 201, 250 long takes, 87, 115, 137, 142, 155, 163, 180, 213, 228, 261–262 Loren, Sophia, 297 “Louis” (Dréville), 186–188 Lucrèce Borgia, 250 Luguet, André, 75 Lumière d’été (Grémillon), 7, 9, 65–68, 86, 109, 140, 158 Macadam (Blistène), 20, 133–136, 164, 171 MacOrlan, Pierre, 86 Madam de . . . (Ophüls), 257–259, 282 Madame et le mort, 30, 60 Mademoiselle ma mère (Decoin), 28

340

Magny, Joël, 18–19, 216, 232 La Main du diable, 86 Mais toi tu es Pierre (Cloche), 157 La Maison des sept jeunes filles (Valentin), 36 Le Mal de la jeunesse (Bruckner), 194 male characters: conventional portrayals of, 55–56, 149, 223–224; crisis in masculinity of, 101–102, 133; Don Juan seduction tropes of, 279–281; in gangster films, 119–120, 265–267, 274–276; mateship and bonding of, 149, 191, 223, 254, 265–267, 275–276, 301–302; patriarchal oppression by, 47, 64, 90–91, 223–225; postwar misogyny of, 129, 133, 140– 141, 152, 163–164, 194, 195–196, 225, 268– 269; Resistance movement and, 126; as sympathetic figures, 101, 103, 133, 225, 262 Manèges (Allégret), 129, 135, 164, 165, 177, 194–197, 225, 268 Manon des Sources (Pagnol), 245–248, 317 Mansfield, Jayne, 297 Marais, Jean, 41, 82, 87, 101, 103, 132–133, 215, 262, 265 Marchal, Georges, 262 Marcorelles, Louis, 307–308 Le Mariage de Chiffon (Autant-Lara), 44–47 Marianne, La Semeuse, 42–44 Mariano, Luis, 20–21, 209 La Marie du Port (Carné), 189–191, 214 Marie-Martine (Valentin), 62–65 Marion, Denis, 151, 165, 177 Marion, Jean, 75 Marquand, Christian, 297 La Marseillaise (Renoir), 159 Marshall Plan, 12 Mass in C Minor (Mozart), 296 Le Massacre des innocents (Grémillon), 159 mateship, 149, 191, 223, 254, 265–267, 275– 276, 301–302 Mathis, Milly, 248 Mathot, Léon, 48 Matras, Christian, 107, 121 Les Maudits (Clément), 115, 233, 313 Maupassant, Guy de, 106, 226, 229 Mauriac, Claude, 189, 191, 287, 306

Index

McCarthyism, 255, 273–274 Meerson, Lazare, 228 Méliès, Georges, 44 melodrama, 69; Pagnol’s style of, 246–247; religious themes and, 156, 158–159; Vichy’s moral ideology and, 51–52 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 270; Bob le flambeur, 267, 274; Les Enfants terribles, 132, 170; Le Silence de la mer, 113, 178–181, 199 Memnon Films, 219 men. See male characters Mermoz, 99 Meurisse, Paul, 135, 168 Meurtres (Pottier), 20, 208–211, 232 mgm, 45 micro-photography, 142 Millar, Daniel, 103 mime, 117 La Minute de vérité, 225 Miquette et sa mère (Clouzot), 219 Le Miracle de Jeanne d’Arc (Delannoy), 125 Miranda, Isa, 313 Les Misérables, 219, 238 Mission spéciale, 113 Une missionnaire (Cloche), 157 Mitry, Jean, 91, 104 Modern Times (Chaplin), 304 Modot, Gaston, 34, 176, 230 Moi, un noir, 315 Molière, 146 Mollenard, 39 La Môme vert-de-gris (Borderie), 21, 254–257 Mon film, 19–20 Mon oncle (Tati), 302–305, 313, 317 Le Monde du silence (Cousteau), 288, 313 Monroe, Marilyn, 297 Monsieur des Lourdines, 85 Monsieur la Souris (Lacombe), 36 Monsieur Ripois (Clément), 115, 313 Monsieur Vincent (Cloche), 155–158, 211, 314, 316, 317 La Montagne est verte, 315 Montand, Yves, 137, 164, 218 Montès, Lola, 282–283 Morand, Paul, 67–68

Moreau, Jeanne, 211 Morgan, Michèle, 20, 65, 125, 225, 262, 280, 297, 313, 316–317 Morlay, Gaby, 52, 265 La Mort en ce jardin (Buñuel), 285 Les Mouches (Sartre), 260 Mouloudji, Marcel, 235 mountain films, 95 Murat, Pierre, 224, 258 musicals, 20–21, 116–118 Les Musiciens du ciel, 69, 156 My Partner Master Davis (Autant-Lara), 45 Le Mystère Picasso (Clouzot), 288–290, 313 mysteries: Borderie’s Lemmy Caution detective films, 255–257; police procedural form of, 48, 150–152; provincial gothic form of, 30–33, 60–62, 108–110, 234–235; Simenon’s thrillers, 36, 108, 139–141 Naïs (Pagnol), 27 Nana (Christian-Jaque), 283, 284 Napoleon (Guitry), 263 National Revolution. See Vichy Nattier, Nathalie, 137 Nazarin (Buñuel), 286, 313 Nazism. See German occupation; World War II neo-capitalist (consumer capitalist) period, 1 neorealism, 107; French documentary form of, 161, 185, 190, 192–194, 276; Italian forms of, 114, 142, 177, 185, 192 Neveux, Georges, 214–215 New Wave period, 1, 2–4, 15, 19–20; apprenticeship works of, 1; directors of, 19–20, 288, 299–300, 309; precursors of, 48, 108, 142, 176–177, 208 New York Film Critics Prize, 303 newsreels, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80 Noël-Noël, 20, 125–126, 182; Les CassePieds, 314, 315, 318; Le Père tranquille, 113, 125–127 noir. See black realism (réalisme noir); provincial gothic films Nous les gosses (Daquin), 33–35, 314

Index

341

Nous sommes tous des assassins (Cayatte), 202, 211, 235–238, 313, 314 nuclear weapons, 197–199 La Nuit du carrefour (Renoir), 140 La Nuit est mon royaume, 317 Nuit et brouillard (Resnais), 288, 314, 315 La Nuit fantastique (L’Herbier), 42–44, 314 L’Objecteur (Autant-Lara), 232, 237 Objectif 49, 19 Occupe-toi d’Amélie (Autant-Lara), 219, 313 O’Connell, Pierre, 8 Oedipal relationships: Cocteau’s exploration of, 132–133, 169–170; of older men and younger women, 56, 64, 223–226, 277–278; orphan girls and, 28–30 Office Professionel du Cinéma (opc), 12 off-screen voices, 226–227 Los Olvidados (Buñuel), 286 On ne triche pas avec la vie, 157 On n’enterre pas le dimanche, 315 Ophüls, Max, 8, 30, 93, 175; Lola Montès, 282–285; Madam de . . . , 257–259, 282; Le Plaisir, 226–229, 283; La Ronde, 164, 202–205, 226, 317 L’Or du Cristobal (Becker), 60 L’Or du Rhône (Villiers), 306 Orain, Fred, 182 Orfeu negro, 313, 317 Les Orgueilleux (Allégret), 165–166, 197, 260–262, 316 orphans, 63–64; amnesiac alienation and, 93; criminality and, 97–99; in Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale, 123–125; in Grémillon’s Le Ciel est à vous, 90–91; Oedipal relationships and, 28–30 Orphée (Cocteau), 131, 205–208, 317 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 303, 317 Osso, Adolphe, 48 Pabst, Georg-Wilhelm, 93 Pagliero, Marcel, 165 Pagnol, Jacqueline, 248, 253 Pagnol, Marcel, 8, 21n2, 98–99, 146, 168, 263, 283; La Fille du puisatier, 25–27; Jofroi, 27, 317; Manon des Sources, 245– 248, 317; prewar films of, 27, 209, 246

342

Painlevé, Jean, 10, 21n2, 159, 176 Panique (Duvivier), 138–141, 184 Panisse, 248 pans and tracking shots, 38, 115, 163, 175, 259, 281; crane pans, 107; foregrounding of performance with, 205; slide pans, 107, 110, 208, 281; 360-degree pans, 228; zip pans, 87, 170, 180, 199, 241 Les Parents terribles (Cocteau), 131, 132, 168–170, 172, 316 Paris 1900, 315 Paris nous appartient (Rivette), 1 Une partie de campagne (Renoir), 193, 231, 317 Pascal, Blaise, 43 Pascal, Jean-Claude, 316 Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven), 125 Pathé-Cinéma, 18, 33–34, 100 Patrie (Daquin), 107–108 Pattes blanches (Grémillon), 268, 318 Paulvé, André, 8, 66, 100 Le Pays sans étoiles (Véry and Lacombe), 30, 60, 121 Les Paysans noirs (Régnier), 20, 161, 171, 184–185, 317 Péguy, Robert: Les Ailes blanches, 52 Pensions Mimosas (Feyder), 134 Pépé le Moko (Duvivier), 87, 164, 190, 245 Le Père tranquille (Noël-Noël), 113, 125–127 Périer, François, 101, 317 La Peste (Camus), 260 Pétain, Philippe, 4–6, 9–11, 26–27, 58–59, 79 Petit, Pascale, 311, 317 Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (Duvivier), 238–240, 316 Philipe, Gérard, 121, 148, 173, 198–199, 214, 243, 262, 265, 270, 279–280, 297, 316–318 Piaf, Édith, 134, 137, 174, 255, 265, 277 Picasso, Pablo, 288–290 Pickpocket (Bresson), 69 Picpus (Pottier), 36 Pietrangeli, Antonio, 242–243 Pigaut, Roger, 47, 96 La Piste du Nord (Feyder), 39 Le Plaisir (Ophüls), 226–229, 283 Plein Soleil (Clément), 309

Index

Ploquin, Raoul, 7, 8, 48 poetic realism, 67–68, 86–88, 101, 134–136, 176–177; evocative settings in, 87, 167– 168; fatalism of, 154–155, 165, 287–288; female influence in, 164; Gabin’s portrayals of, 98, 174–175; long depth-offield shots in, 115, 142, 182–183, 201, 250; underworld and, 230–231 Poirier, Léon: Jeannou, 83–85; prewar films of, 84 Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (Delannoy), 8, 51, 56–59 Popular Front, 4, 67–68, 176 Porte des Lilas (Clair), 19, 279, 300–302, 314, 316, 318 Les Portes de la nuit (Carné), 136–138, 214 Portrait d’un assassin, 171 Positif, 19, 218, 251, 302 postwar film themes: antiestablishment focus in, 138, 147–150, 183, 219; antimilitarism in, 148–149; colonialism in, 184–187; crisis of identity in, 129–130; French history in, 263–265; intrusion of the past into the present in, 166– 168; justice and morality in, 200–202, 209–210, 232–235, 235–238; male scorn towards women in, 129, 140–141, 152, 163–164, 194, 195–196, 268–269; public joy and private grief in, 149–150, 152, 227; religious focus in, 155–158, 160, 211–213; Resistance movement in, 113– 115, 126–127, 232–233, 235–236, 291; returning prisoners in, 186–188; satire of nostalgia in, 242–243; urban destruction in, 137–138. See also class oppositions; youth culture postwar period, 1, 2, 3t, 11–20, 119; BlumByrnes agreement of, 12–14; censorship of, 38, 265; colonial retreat of, 11–12, 184–187, 232, 237; international coproductions of, 2, 3t, 15–16, 238–239, 249, 279, 285–286; most popular films, 318–321; New Wave of, 1, 2–4, 15, 19– 20, 288, 299–300, 309; professionalization of film in, 17; punishment of German sympathizers in, 79, 102, 150, 156, 265; Quality Cinema of, 59, 82, 119, 121,

123–124, 265; spectatorship of, 2, 3t, 17, 153, 156, 219, 238, 257, 263, 291; studio system of, 12–20; technological updates of, 15 Pottier, Richard: Les caves du Majestic, 36; Destins, 116; Meurtres, 20, 208–211, 232; Picpus, 36; prewar films of, 209 Poupon, Henri, 248 Préjean, Albert, 36, 140 Premier de cordée (Daquin), 94–96 Premier Rendez-vous (Decoin), 10, 27–30, 118, 226 Presle, Micheline, 148, 314, 316 Prévert, Jacques, 34, 39, 98, 164, 165, 176, 214; Adieu Léonard, 71–74; Les Amants de Vérone, 200; antiestablishment themes of, 109–110, 138; Les Enfants du paradis, 99–102, 109; Lumière d’été, 65– 68, 109; Les Portes de la nuit, 136–138; prewar films of, 39, 65, 73, 245; Sortilèges, 30–31, 108–110 Prévert, Pierre, 39, 176; Adieu Léonard, 71– 74; comedic farces of, 72–73 La Prière aux étoiles (Pagnol), 27 La Princesse de Clèves (Delannoy), 1, 294 Le Printemps de la liberté (Grémillon), 158– 160, 268 Prison sans barreaux (Moguy), 97–98, 177 Prisons de femmes (Richebé), 97–98 Prix Jean Vigo, 315 Prix Louis Delluc, 2, 131, 282, 314–315 Prix Suzanne Bianchetti, 315 prizes. See honors and awards propaganda films, 6–7, 10, 83–85 provincial gothic films, 30–33, 60–62, 108– 110, 234–235 psychological realism, 71 punctuation, 30, 32, 35, 180, 197, 241; aggressive use of, 199; aural forms of, 241–242; austere use of, 79, 91; crossdissolves, 115, 197; slide-pans, 110 Quai des brumes (Carné), 86–87, 137 Quai des Orfèvres (Clouzot), 150–152, 177, 252, 317 Quality Cinema, 59, 82, 119, 121, 123– 124, 265

Index

343

Quatorze juillet (Clair), 245, 302 Les 400 Coups (Truffaut), 1, 161, 237, 311, 313 Queneau, Raymond, 73 quota films, 13–14 Radiguet, Raymond, 148, 270 Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, 19 Rafles sur la ville (Chenal), 267, 274 Ragache, Gilles, 82 Ragache, Jean-Robert, 82 Raimu, 26, 36, 38, 56 Razzia sur la chnouf (Decoin), 267, 274 Reader, Keith, 212 realism, 96, 114; aesthetic form of, 142–143; of Bardot’s eroticism, 299; black forms (réalisme noir) of, 140, 151–152, 163–166, 173–175, 177, 195–197; black-and-white film and, 250–251; of Cocteau’s fantasy worlds, 131–132; documentary techniques in, 142–143, 185, 190; Farrebique and, 142–144; French documentary neorealism, 153–155, 161, 185, 190, 192–194, 276; grey forms (réalisme gris) of, 177; Italian neorealism, 114, 142, 177, 185, 192; of location-shot neorealism, 107; of long depth-of-field shots, 115, 142, 182–183, 201, 250; of long takes, 87, 115, 137, 142, 155, 163, 180, 213, 228; in portrayals of childhood, 35; psychological forms of, 71; Vichy’s dislike of, 79. See also poetic realism Rebatet, Lucien, 37–38, 53, 80 reconstruction. See postwar period reflexive content: in Clair’s self-satire, 242–243; on film-making and the theater, 35, 100–101, 117, 130, 244–245, 250– 251, 263–264; foregrounding of performance in, 204–205; on Montmartre nightlife, 277–278 Regain (Pagnol), 27 Régent, Roger, 315; on Le Corbeau (Clouzot), 78; on Douce (Autant-Laura), 45; on Le Lit à colonnes (Tual), 41; on Nous les gosses (Daquin), 34–35; on La Nuit fantastique (L’Herbier), 42; on police procedurals, 50; on Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (Delannoy), 58; on Premier de

344

cordée (Daquin), 95; on Vichy’s propaganda films, 83; on Les Visiteurs du soir (Carné), 54–55; on Le Voile bleu (Stelli), 51; on Le Voyageur sans bagages (Anouilh), 92 Reggiani, Serge, 164, 262 La Règle du jeu (Renoir), 67, 162, 193, 210, 230, 251, 279 Régnier, Georges: Les Paysans noirs, 20, 161, 171, 184–185, 317 religious and spiritual themes, 155–158, 160; antireligious satire of, 217–220; in Bresson’s films, 211–214, 295–296; in Delannoy’s films, 122–125; women and, 69–70, 85, 118 Remaugé, André, 21n2 Remorques (Grémillon), 39, 65 Renaud, Madeleine, 90, 300 Rendez-vous de juillet (Becker), 153, 192– 194, 315 “René” (Dréville), 186–187 Renoir, Jean, 8, 60, 67, 150, 164, 165, 176, 230–232, 270; American films of, 249– 250, 278; Le Carrosse d’or, 230, 249–252, 277, 278; Elena et les hommes, 230, 279; Le Fleuve, 249–250, 277, 278; French Cancan, 19, 276–279; Une partie de campagne, 317; prewar films of, 39, 88, 110, 140, 159, 162, 175, 193, 210, 251, 278, 279, 308; Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier, 1, 309 Renoir, Marguerite, 155 Renoir, Pierre, 56, 100, 101–102, 159 Le Repos du guerrier (Vadim), 310 resistance films: La Bataille du rail (Clément), 113–115; Le Ciel est à vous (Grémillon), 88–91; Lumière d’été (Grémillon), 68; Le Père tranquille (Noël-Noël), 126–127; Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (Delannoy), 58–59; Premier de cordée (Daquin), 95–96 Resistance movement, 5–6, 180; communist activism in, 113, 138, 144; films made by, 113–115, 176, 180–181; postwar mythologizing of, 113–115, 126–127, 138, 232–233, 235–236, 291; in wartime films, 58–59, 94–96

Index

Resnais, Alain, 121, 309; Hiroshima mon amour, 1; Nuit et brouillard, 288, 314, 315 Retour à la vie (prod. Roitfeld), 186–188 Le Retour de Don Camillo (Duvivier), 240 Un revenant (Christian-Jaque), 128–130 La Revue du cinéma, 19, 142 Richebé, Roger, 8, 21n2, 86, 93; Austerlitz, 1 Le Rideau cramoisi, 315 Riefenstahl, Leni, 95 ringmaster figures, 204 Rivette, Jacques, 20, 288, 309; Paris nous appartient, 1 Robinson, Madeleine, 65, 175, 316, 317 Rochefort, Christiane, 310 Rohmer, Éric, 20, 283, 287, 288, 309; Le Signe du lion, 1 Roitfeld, Jacques, 188; Retour à la vie, 186–188 Le Roman d’un tricheur (Guitry), 263 Romance, Viviane, 140–141 La Ronde (Ophüls), 164, 202–205, 226, 317 Roquevert, Noël, 150 Rosay, Françoise, 134–135 Rossellini, Roberto, 283 Rossi, Tino, 116–118, 209, 265 Rouch, Jean, 309 Le Rouge et le noir (Autant-Lara), 148, 270– 273, 316 Rougeul, Jean, 144 Rouquier, Georges: Farrebique, 141–144, 161, 184, 314 Rue de l’Estrapade (Becker), 153, 232 Sadoul, Georges, 20, 54, 68, 114, 143, 176, 203, 242 Sagan, Françoise, 310 Saint-Laurent, Cécil, 283 Saint-Laurent-Du-Var studios, 66 Salachas, Gilbert, 303 Salacrou, Armand, 197–198 Le Salaire de la peur (Clouzot), 252–254, 313, 316 Sallée, André, 299–300 Le Sang d’un poète (Cocteau), 131, 206, 208 Sans laisser d’adresse (Dreyfus), 176–177 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 67, 165–166, 195, 197, 199, 200, 237, 260

Schell, Maria, 317 Schéma d’une identification (Resnais), 121 Schnitzler, Arthur, 203, 205 Scotto, Vincent, 117–118 self-censorship, 8–9 self-referencing. See reflexive content Sellier, Geneviève. See Burch, Noël and Sellier, Geneviève Sengisson, Paule, 218 Sept ans du cinéma français, 177 Sérénade aux nuages (Cayatte), 116–118 Série noire (Duhamel), 255 Servais, Jean, 174, 226–227, 274, 283 Service du Cinéma, 6–7, 9–10 sexuality, 55–56 Seznec Affair, 200–202, 237 Si j’étais le patron (Pottier), 209 Une si jolie petite plage (Allégret), 165, 173– 175, 195 Si Versailles m’était conté (Guitry), 20, 250, 262–265, 316 Siclier, Jacques, 35; on Le Corbeau (Clouzot), 79; on Douce (Autant-Lara), 45; on Jean Gabin, 98; on liberation themes, 40; on La Nuit fantastique (L’Herbier), 42; on Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (Delannoy), 58–59; on Premier de cordée (Daquin), 96; on Sortilèges (Christian-Jaque), 109; on La Traversée de Paris (Autant-Lara), 293; on Les Visiteurs du soir (Carné), 54–55; on Le Voile bleu (Stelli), 51–53 Le Signe du lion (Rohmer), 1 Signoret, Simone, 135, 163–164, 166, 168, 175, 177, 230–231, 313, 315, 317–318 Sigurd, Jacques, 121, 135, 163–166, 195, 260 Le Silence de la mer (Melville), 113, 178– 181, 199 Le Silence est d’or (Clair), 144–147, 300, 318 silent film music, 145–146 Simenon, Georges, 36, 108, 139–140, 191, 226, 270 Simon, Michel, 140, 198–199 Simonin, Albert, 266, 267 Sims, Greg, 80 Six hommes morts (Steeman), 48 Le 6 juin à l’aube (Grémillon), 158

Index

345

slide-pans, 107, 110, 208, 281 social class. See class oppositions Société des Auteurs, 314 Société d’Études des Questions Juives, 38 Sologne, Madeleine, 82 Sorcier du ciel, 157 Sortilèges (Christian-Jaque), 30–31, 108– 110, 199 sound distortions, 43 soundtracks: as aural punctuation, 241– 242; displacement of visual image by, 213–214; extra-diegetic music in, 35, 69, 79, 104, 114, 142, 180, 296; foregrounding of music in, 234; of Le Mystère Picasso (Clouzot), 290; from silent films, 146; special effects in, 181–182; voiceovers and off-screen voices in, 199, 226–227, 294, 295 Sous le ciel de Paris (Duvivier), 184, 243 Sous les yeux d’Occident (Allégret), 133 Spaak, Charles, 39, 121, 139–140, 176, 200, 211, 235, 236, 309 special effects, 43, 131, 199, 206–208, 228, 283 spectatorship: most popular films, 318– 321; of the postwar period, 2, 3t, 17, 147, 153, 156, 219, 238, 257, 263, 291; of World War II, 9, 56, 82 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 213 Les Statues meurent aussi, 315 Steeman, Stanislas-André, 48–50, 151 Stelli, Jean: Le Voile bleu, 30, 50–53 Stendahl, 271 Strindberg, August, 171 superimpositions. See punctuation suppression of the past, 93–94 surrealism, 35, 39, 42–44, 73, 285–286 Swoboda, André, 10 Sylvie et le fantôme (Autant-Lara), 117, 147 La Symphonie pastorale (Delannoy), 20, 122–125, 157–158, 211, 313, 316 Synops Films, 39 Tabu (Murnau), 191 Tallenay, Jean-Louis, 182, 247–248 Tanguy, Yves, 73 “Tante Emma” (Cayatte), 186–187

346

Tati, Jacques, 283; Jour de fête, 181–183, 303, 314, 317; Mon oncle, 302–305, 313, 317; Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 303, 315 technical realism, 115 techniques. See film techniques technology, 2; anamorphic lens, 45; color, 2, 3t, 183, 250–251, 283, 305; postwar updates of, 15 Téléciné, 19 television industry, 18 television ownership, 2, 17 Le Temps des cerises (Dreyfus/Le Chanois), 176 La Terre qui meurt (Pagnol), 27 Le Testament d’Orphée (Cocteau), 1, 206, 309 Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier (Renoir), 1, 309 La Tête d’un homme (Duvivier), 139–140 theatrical film, 146–147, 168–170, 204–205 Third Republic, 52 Thiriet, Maurice, 121 Thompsoncolor process, 183 time-lapse photography, 142, 289 Tobis, 7 Toni (Renoir), 193, 308 Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker), 231, 265– 267, 274, 317 Tourjansky, Victor, 48, 93 Tourneur, Maurice: Cécile est morte, 36; Impasse des Deux Anges, 166–168 tracking shots. See pans and tracking shots train images, 88 Trauner, Alexandre, 39, 66, 99, 137, 150, 228, 300 La Traversée de Paris (Autant-Lara), 148, 290–293, 316, 317 Trénet, Charles, 42, 72 Les Tricheurs (Carné), 1, 19, 166, 298, 308– 311, 314, 316 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 297 Les Trois Mousquetaires, 250 Le Trou (Becker), 1, 309 Truffaut, François, 20, 288, 299, 309; on L’École buissonnière (Dreyfus), 176–177; on Quality Cinema, 82, 124, 265; Les 400 Coups, 1, 161, 237, 311, 313; on Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker), 267

Index

Tual, Roland, 8, 65, 69; Les Anges du péché, 39; La Bête humaine, 88; L’Espoir, 315; Le Lit à colonnes, 39–41; prewar films of, 39, 65 Tucherer, Eugène, 134 Typhus (Sartre), 165–166, 197, 260 ufa studios, 7, 48, 78 Union Général du Cinéma (ugc), 13 Untel père et fils (Duvivier), 139, 243 U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (huac), 255, 273–274 Ustinov, Peter, 283 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Tati), 303, 315 Vadim, Roger: Et Dieu . . . créa la femme, 296–300, 310; Le Repos du guerrier, 310 Valentin, Albert: La Maison des sept jeunes filles, 36; Marie-Martine, 62–65 Vanel, Charles, 10, 56, 90, 252, 265 Venice Biennale, 317 Vercors (Jean Marcel Bruller), 179–181 La Vérité (Clouzot), 1, 309 La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (Decoin), 120, 223–226 Verneuil, Henri, 273–274 Vertiges (Pottier), 209 Véry, Pierre, 30–33, 60, 108, 121 Vichy, 4–11, 25, 101; anti-Semitism of, 37– 38; censorship by, 8–9, 27, 47, 67–68; city/country opposition in, 26–27, 37–38, 84–85, 95–96; colonial empire of, 5–6; cultural scene of, 82; moral ideology of, 4, 8, 34–35, 51–53, 61–62, 67–68, 79–80, 83–85, 90–91; political climate of, 98–99; progressive Catholicism of, 69; propaganda arm of, 6–7, 10; suppression of the past and, 93–94 Victoires du Cinéma Français, 316–317 Victor, Jean, 97–98 La Victorine studios, 66 La Vie de Plaisir, 10 La Vie d’un honnête homme (Guitry), 263 La Vie enchantée (Noël-Noël), 127 Vietnam War, 184

Vigo, Jean: L’Atalante, 42; Zéro de conduite, 35, 43 Villiers, François: L’Eau vive, 20, 305–308; Hans le marin, 306 Vilmorin, Louise de, 39, 41, 155 Violettes impériales (Pottier), 209 Viot, Jacques, 63, 133–134 Les Visiteurs, 238 Les Visiteurs du soir (Carné), 7, 8, 53–56, 64, 65, 66, 81, 135, 208, 314 voiceovers, 199, 294, 295 Voici le temps des assassins, 268 Le Voile bleu (Stelli), 30, 50–53 von Stroheim, Erich, 171–173 Votre dévoué Blake (Borderie), 255, 257 Vous pigez (Borderie), 255 Voyage sans espoir (Christian-Jaque), 85–88, 108, 135, 140 Voyage-surprise (P. Prévert), 72–73 Le Voyageur de la Toussaint, 36 Le Voyageur sans bagages (Anouilh), 91–94 Wahkévitch, Georges, 300 wartime film themes: claustrophobic gothic mysteries as, 32–33, 234–235; the future as, 177–178; metaphors of liberation in, 39–41, 44, 54–56, 57, 105–108; pessimism and, 50; romantic heroes in, 26, 46; surrealist dream and hallucination in, 42–44; on value of ignorance, 64–65; Vichy’s National Revolution as, 4, 8, 26–27, 34–35, 37–38, 51–53, 61–62, 67–68, 79–80, 83–85, 90– 91; youth correctional institutions as, 97–99 Weber, Alain, 81–82 Weil-Lorac, Roger, 13 Welles, Orson, 265 widescreen film, 2 Willemen, Paul, 228, 284 Williams, Alan, 144, 151–152 Wilms, Dominique, 256 wipes. See punctuation women: abortion themes and, 79–80; comedic representations of, 75–77; conventional portrayals of, 55–56, 284– 285; Don Juan seduction tropes of,

Index

347

279–281; emancipated portrayals of, 47, 64, 90–91, 104, 164, 168, 223–225, 268–270; ideological preferences of, 67; lesbianism and, 152; misogyny and violence towards, 59, 128–129, 140– 141, 152, 163–164, 194, 195–196, 223–225; moral devotion of, 51; Ophüls’s representation of, 205, 284–285; postwar male scorn towards, 129, 140–141, 152, 163–164, 194, 195–196, 268–269; religious themes and, 69–71, 85, 118; sensuous and erotic portrayals of, 230– 232, 297–299, 310; suppression of the past among, 64–65; as sympathetic laundresses, 277–278; as war widows, 51–53 World War II, 1, 4–12; economic challenges of, 5, 7, 11, 42; French film industry of, 6–10; prisoners of war of, 186–188, 294–296; propaganda films of, 6–7, 10; Service de Travail Obligatoire (sto), 5; spectatorship during, 9,

348

56, 82. See also German occupation; Resistance movement; Vichy; wartime film themes Yepes, Narciso, 234 youth culture, 28–30; in Becker’s postwar series, 192–194; in coming-of-age films, 46; condemnation of, 97–99, 308–311; existentialism and, 165–166; intergenerational conflict and, 36–37, 61–62, 64; rosy views of childhood and, 34; on sex appeal and eroticism, 297–300; Vichy ideology and, 34. See also intergenerational conflict Zéro de conduite (Vigo), 35, 43 Zielinsky, Joseph, 219 zip panning, 99, 170, 180, 199, 241 zl (Zone Libre). See Vichy zo (Zone Occupé). See German occupation Zola, 315

Index

COLIN CRISP is a leading scholar in French film history and author of The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (IUP, 1993), and Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (IUP, 2002).