From 2016: ChiO's posts for THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT 3 (Nights 1 and 2)
ChiO's writings on FRENCH 3, where the rediscovery of French noir got REALLY serious, are just about to roll off the board, so let's keep them in play. We will bundle them a bit as we recycle them back into view. If only ChiO would write his own book about noir...
THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT 3--Nuit 1 (Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016)
The near-capacity audience enthusiastically received a film noir history lesson well worth the admission price at the Roxie in San Francisco. Popular lore has it that film noir is an American creation named by the French upon seeing a string of early-‘40s Hollywood films after WWII that had German Expressionism as their nearest cinematic antecedent. Tonight’s offerings --two French films released in 1939, the year before the Nazi occupation--demonstrate a strong alternative vision of history.
A closed apartment door. A gun shot. A man opens the door. He falls down the stairway. Dead. LE JOUR SE LEVE aka DAYBREAK (Marcel Carne, 1939).
The man in the apartment (the magnificent, as always, Jean Gabin). Staring. And through a series of flashbacks we discover what brought him to this point. A working class man (Gabin), a clear thinking woman (Arletty), a slimy man (Jules Berry), and an innocent woman who really isn’t necessarily that innocent (Jacqueline Laurent). Doomed love.
With each time I see this, I care less about the plot points. Visual and aural mood is everything. Presented beautifully, often including what would become film noir tropes--repeated claustrophobic vertiginous overhead shots of the spiral staircase, the tilted camera during a fight sequence, both shockingly showing a disoriented world. Dialogue by Jacques Prevert (THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE (Jean Renoir, 1936); LE QUAI DES BRUMES (Marcel Carne, 1938); LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (Marcel Carne 1945)).
There were a number of ‘30s French films that French critics contemporaneously labeled film noir. At that time, however, it was a pejorative term for movies that were considered depressing. The final scene in LE JOUR SE LEVE is that and more as it echoes--visually and aurally--the opening scene. A masterpiece. Once this was one of my favorite French films. Then one of my favorites in film noir. Now one of my favorite films.
LE DERNIER TOURNANT aka THE LAST TURN (Pierre Chenal, 1939) was the first film adaptation of the James M. Cain novel, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934). It ranks with OSSESSIONE (Luchino Visconti 1943) as my favorite adaptation of the novel and its numerous variations on a theme.
The familiar tale of betrayal, real and perceived, benefits by the juxtaposition of the lovers’ looming doom (Fernand Gravey and Corinne Luchaire, in her penultimate year of acting due to being banned as a Nazi collaborator and dying in 1950 at the age of 28) with the often-amusing portrayal of the cuckold husband--the wonderful Michel Simon, who will be seen in a less amusing role in NON COUPABLE (Henri Decoin, 1947) on Sunday. The film’s visual beauty can be provided in two words: Christian Matras. His other films include LE GRAND ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, 1937), THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE… (Max Ophuls ,1953), LOLA MONTES (Max Ophuls, 1955), UNE MANCHE ET LA BELLE (Henri Verneuil, 1957), and THE MILKY WAY (Luis Bunuel ,1969). The assistant director, Henri Calef, directed the unrelenting film noir LES EAUX TROUBLES (1949), and Claude Renoir operated one of the cameras. A film noir history lesson collected in one marvelous movie.
Friday’s film noir will be two directed by Christian-Jaque: VOYAGE SANS ESPOIR (1943) and UN REVENANT (1946).
THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT 3--Nuit 2 (Friday, Nov. 4, 2016)
It appeared to my noirish friends and I that there was a significantly larger audience on Friday night than on Thursday night for both films--a Christian-Jaque mini-festival. They were not disappointed.
Don Malcolm, our Master of Ceremonies from the Gallic Shadows, introduced VOYAGE SANS ESPOIR aka JOURNEY WITHOUT HOPE (1943) as “film noir on steroids.” Yes, but without the acne. That loss, however, was compensated for in other areas.
Let’s see if I have this straight: Pierre (Paul Bernard) is a handsome prison escapee. He meets Alain (Jean Marais), a VERY handsome bank manager on vacation, or so he says, with a huge wad of money, on the train to a port city where he is catching a boat to Argentina. They make plans to meet in the city. Meanwhile, Marie-Ange (Simone Renant), a lovely young woman and Pierre’s lover, is on a docked ship with the ship’s captain, Philippe (Lucien Coedel), who has long yearned for her. She goes to the train station to bring Pierre to the ship so they can escape together. They miss each other at the station when the police try to capture Pierre. She runs to a cab--a cab that Alain also takes. There is a spark, but they part for separate rendezvouses, which are, unbeknownst to them, both with Pierre. When Pierre, Marie-Ange and Philippe meet on the boat, the ship’s crew wants a price to be paid for transporting a prison escapee. Pierre goes to meet Alain and steal his wad of dough in order to pay that price. And all the while, the police are tailing Marie-Ange and staking out the various likely points of her meeting Pierre. Marie-Ange is in perpetual angst.
Philippe: “You are in love.”
Marie-Ange: “Am I a monster?”
Philippe: “It is the same.”
My math abilities do not enable me to track all of the triangles going on amid the emotional fury, second thoughts, double-crosses, attempts at atonement, murder and (accidental, but unavoidable) death. With a final scene at the train station, the emotional impact of which David Lean could only dream of achieving.
All presented with every visual trick (said lovingly) in the Film Noir Handbook. Perpetual night. In the city. In the fog. On wet streets. In cramped quarters. Shadows in and from places that John Alton had not yet found. Acute angle camera shots. POV rolling camera shots. Upside down camera shots. Cinematographer: Robert Lefebvre (CASQUE D’OR (Jacques Becker, 1952)).
Overwhelming and beautiful. Film noir. In France. Before 1946 (i.e. the year that Nino Frank attached the label “film noir” to a group of Hollywood films then just recently available in France).
If VOYAGE SANS ESPOIR is film noir on steroids, then Christian-Jaque’s UN REVENANT aka A LOVER’S RETURN (1946) is film noir on nitrous oxide...laced with poison.
Jean-Jacques Sauvage (what a great noir name!), portrayed stunningly by Louis Jouvet (THE LOWER DEPTHS (Jean Renoir, 1936); HOTEL DU NORD (Marcel Carne, 1938); QUAI DES ORFEVRES (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947); BETWEEN ELEVEN AND MIDNIGHT (Henri Decoin, 1949)), returns to Lyon after an absence of twenty years. Now a successful ballet producer, he seems a man out of place and time. His cool and calm focus is simply to exact revenge on the family that destroyed the love he had for a woman…a woman who also loved him, but who married another for money. Because money is an obsession within that family, except for one young man, Sauvage manipulates things so as to use that obsession against them. The exception is the young man (François Perier) who becomes obsessed with one of Sauvage’s ballerinas (Ludmilla Tcherina: THE RED SHOES (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948); THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1951)). She leads him on to the great consternation of his parents who want him to marry, of course, for money (as is the family tradition!). The climax leads to betrayals, reversals of earlier betrayals, and the scent of revenge lingering in the air like an overripe perfume.
The noir theme and narrative are carried by dialogue by the family members that could be from a Screwball Comedy (including a memorable series of cameos from legendary monstre sacré Marguerite Moreno). The countenance, the actions and the words of Sauvage, however, provide a counter-balance that keeps it firmly in film noir territory. A critique of class and capitalism, with no pretense of sentimentality, it is a film noir with a knowing smirk.
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