on 2/3/2023, 9:12 pm
Nitrate Diva's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR...
Posted by Don Malcolm on 12/9/2019, 7:39 am
Nora Fiore, discussed a bit further down for her image-rich take on THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE (her most recent blog post at The Nitrate Diva), has not be quite as prolific at her home base in 2019 as was the case previously, but her January 2019 essay on her favorite film discoveries in 2018 would be worthy reading even if it did not contain the following grafs on a film that is slowly but surely taking its place where it belongs--at the very front of the world film noir canon: LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR (1932). However, it's clear that NUIT captured her more completely than the other films on the list, as it inspires her to more extreme modes of description and analogy.
That said, she gets a bit too glib in her comparisons down around the fourth graf: the film does not have the dizzy tonality of LADY FROM SHANGHAI or the set-piece "noir comfort food" sequence/structure of the 1946 version of THE BIG SLEEP. What it does share with those films is a protagonist who is on the bubble between being a meta-sleuth (Big Mike is a good sleuth, but a bad chess player with the sharks he's consorting with; Marlowe as played by Bogie is just smart enough to see the forest for the trees but keeps trying to drive his car by bouncing it off every third tree trunk he encounters) and a total sap. Maigret remains oddly besotted with Elsa even when he knows better, and the crime's solution, which winds up making her out to be a second-to-none psychosexual athlete, only leaves him grappling with the notion of bedtime fantasies barely tempered by a semi-priapic paternalism.
It's really the first infantilization of the classic vamp, and it certainly bolsters Chris Fujiwara's notion that noir operates from an adolescent framework. The real point is that the besotted detectives manage to solve the case and survive despite themselves. This is more pronounced in LADY (weakest link in the narrative chain), is sentimentalized in THE BIG SLEEP (Bacall is rehabilitated into a "good bad girl", but at the end of CARREFOUR we're left with the prospect of a prurient, amoral Maigret, taking a gamble that his experience and skill can keep him from perversity, scandal and future ruin.
We trust that Maigret and Marlowe and, in his own way, Mike O'Hara have solved the case, even if we don't quite follow all the details of their solution. These solutions only lead to greater conundrums that exist outside the narrative field of each film, and it's actually important that noir begins in 1932 with this "meta" type of moment, drawing a circular line around the connective tissue of crime and perversity which will take many different (protean) forms as it evolves: first in France; then in the spy noirs that create new narrative contexts and further play out the templates for sexual betrayal; and, ultimately, in Hollywood.
I think Nora is right on the money with Winfried--though the vampirism thing is overstated: she's “merely” an accomplished, instinctive sexual predator who’s sized up Maigret and is using a particular combination of wiles upon him that don’t produce the most desired result—getting off scot-free—but seems to have created a kind of “post-hypnotic effect” that will reduce the penalty she’ll pay for being the sexual catalyst that escalated the scope and range of criminal activity buzzing around her hive.
Here's her take:
5. La Nuit du Carrefour (Jean Renoir, 1932)
What’s it about? In the wake of a big robbery and a murder, Inspector Maigret (Pierre Renoir) investigates among a cast of eccentrics at a garage in the country. And… well, I have no clue beyond that. There are double crosses and assumed identities and discarded husbands, but really the plot is clear as Nutella.
Why do I love it? Because it’s a shadow-cloaked, fog-shrouded film noir that somehow time-travelled to the 1930s. A film noir with the sleek lines of everyday deco and the hissing eeriness of early sound movies. Sounds like the dull thump of a car door take on an alien tonality, and voices seem less modulated for microphones. That’s not to say that La Nuit du Carrefour is primitive. Au contraire. From the opening credits, as a melancholy Italian song is punctuated by audiovisual snippets of a heist--a blowtorch opening a safe, the screech of a getaway car--you know you should brace yourself for brilliance.
Some blame La Nuit du Carrefour‘s unintelligible plot on a mythical missing reel, but I don’t quite buy that. The film would lose much of its enigmatic, trance-inducing luster if it were comprehensible. In any case, there’s a very special place in my heart for crime thrillers that make absolutely no sense and don’t give a damn about it. (Lady from Shanghai and The Big Sleep, I’m looking at you.) If you get the ambiance right--and La Nuit du Carrefour surely does--narrative logic is for suckers.
Still, the main reason why I put La Nuit du Carrefour on this list is the obscure Danish-born actress Winna Winifried who continues to stalk my imagination, smirking coyly behind a cigarette. Her performance is such an off-putting cocktail of gamine charm and decadence that you’re never quite sure if she’s a little girl playing at being a femme fatale or a femme fatale playing at being a little girl. Her presence amps up the film’s surrealness. Certain shots of her lounging on a bed while caressing her pet tortoise, smoking, and gazing at herself in a silver hand mirror wouldn’t be out of place in an avant-garde film of the era. There’s something fetchingly macabre about her; if you found out in the third act that she was Dracula’s daughter, you wouldn’t be a bit surprised. And IMDb lists no death date for her, so perhaps she really is.
Re: Dan Hodges's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR...
Posted by Dan Hodges on 12/9/2019, 11:17 pm, in reply to "Nitrate Diva's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR..."
To engage in this ongoing disagreement between Don and me, you must watch La Nuit du Carrefour.
My post, which argues that Winna Winifried is not only a femme fatale, but contrary to Don's view, is also the first film noir with a femme fatale is here. It is presented in Addendum III.
https://http://www.filmnoirfile.com/under-secret-orders/
Re: Dan Hodges's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR...
Posted by Don Malcolm on 12/10/2019, 7:10 am, in reply to "Re: Dan Hodges's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR..."
Predictable response from you, Dan. You are consistent in a denial that is based on ignoring a lot of evidence about French noir from 1931-35; your only source that purportedly agrees with you, Ginette Vincendeau, is wildly inconsistent in her approach to LA NUIT DE CARREFOUR: she followed up from the passage quoted—one that many of those who’ve written about the film in addition to myself and ND find utterly astonishing in its misreading of the tone and (inter)action in the film--with her SIGHT & SOUND “highlights of French noir” overview where she singles out NUIT as the first French noir.
ND clearly has watched LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR, and she sees in Else what many others see: a femme fatale at the tail end of a process of manipulation, knowing even in her drug-addled state that the handwriting is on the wall, where she redirects her sexual decadence in a calculated attempt to cut her losses.
What’s more, there are additional fatal(e) characters in French noir during the early thirties. No one disputes your plot analysis of MADEMOISELLE DOCTEUR, but the claim for it as the first example of fatal(e) behavior is nothing if not spurious.
Re: Nitrate Diva's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR...
Posted by Solomon on 12/11/2019, 2:50 am, in reply to "Nitrate Diva's take on LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR..."
I watched La Nuit for the 2nd time yesterday, and I read the comments of both of you, including your review of the spy movies, Dan, which has observations about La Nuit as an addendum.
Is she or isn't she? Don's position seems to rest on the idea that Maigret has been taken in, even if partially, at some point; and what is more that the closing scene suggests his feeling for the woman. It's like Bogie at the end of The Maltese Falcon. However, it's all so tentative, and the plot details are so understated or not stated at all, that the description "marginal" as opposed to full-fledged does seem to apply -- but see below where I argue to the opposite conclusion.
My own opinion is that Pierre Renoir does a fair bit of smiling at her attentions and allows her to be seductive, but we cannot rule out that his wiliness is at work with her as with everyone else. He could be simply shaking his head about her at the conclusion. He's had an experience, for sure, but all the time he was still being detective. The closest we get to his real feeling is when he unmasks her and he's actually quite angry to have to do it, and he kind of rues what he has found out or surmised about her. He wishes it were not so. Taken with all his other interactions with her, it's clear that he is not objective to her. He rather was smitten at the outset when she first came on to him. She was touching him quite intimately. A woman's touch can be amazingly seductive.
Dan's view is agreement with the critic who calls the character too "marginal" as a femme fatale, or not full-fledged.
How can this ever be settled when we have no measure of marginal vs. full-fledged? We have that critic seeing merely an echo of the man's anxiety and failure, and we have Don seeing Maigret waiting for 2 years, hoping for some rehab and an eventual tryst. What I see in him is that he's rueful. He'd like to have her, it's something of a shame he feels that she's such a whor* and has been so deceptive, but I think he actually is amazed that she as a woman in particular or women in general can behave as she has. He's learned something about her or maybe female nature. Actually, as a cop, he already seen all sorts of characters, so that what he learns is more about himself and his vulnerability plus about her as a unique person. She's not at all who she seems to be. That take on what he communicates in the end tends to support the femme fatale notion.
I would not rest a positive case for her being a femme fatale on having taken Maigret in. I'd rest it on her having tried to do so, as Mary Astor does, on combining qualities that are both attractive and repulsive. I would rest the case on who she is, what kind of person she is and has been. He's affected, but we're all affected by people we meet and have some doings with. I think the debate hinges on what sort of person she is or has been. I think she's more than an echo of men's anxiety and failure, as that critic argues. She's a certain kind of character in her own right, and that character is one who uses wiles and deception, including seduction.
Add it all up, and she's a femme fatale. Not simply marginal but the movie we have before us leaves so much out about the case's solution that her role is tarred with the same "marginal" brush, and that's not 100% fair. She is marginal in that sense of not being a character who's fully fleshed out. Her back story is dumped on us without preparation. I therefore see the merit in both sides of the debate.
I should look to the place of this character and that of the femme fatale in Under Secret Orders in film history, i.e., their influence.
I can't speak for the French end of it. The American end should be clear by now. Is it? Is there a full-fledged femme fatale prior to Brigit in The Maltese Falcon? I think John Huston is a major, major figure in the development. His hand and work make a quantum leap. Was he influenced by La Nuit or by figures in the spy noirs? I have no idea, but I do see some resemblance of Brigit and Bogie to Maigret and Else Andersen. I can't comment on Under Secret Orders, not having seen it.
--A few final comments/answers for Mike, ones which he apparently will never see. When we don't allow for gradations in the potency of a character function in noir, we remove shades of grey in the quest for a simple black/white judgment. Mike wants to get to gradation, but he wasn't quite willing to use the tools made available to him. Dan seized upon a dualism (hard/soft) to work around the fact that "treacherous women" in spy films/spy noirs are given a pass for their treachery by the added function they perform in such films.
The fact that there is a seductive function in LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR that is tied to a criminal enterprise is, to my mind at least, sufficient to consider the individual performing that function to be a "femme fatale." The level of intensity or impact on the action in the film can be muted by screen time, or by other mitigating factors, but the function can't be explained away or dismissed unless there is another agenda present--which was the case both for Dan and for Ginette Vincendeau (another French critic who writes what someone wants to read).
The "vamp" or "treacherous woman" is not something new that comes into existence in noir--what is new is that the "fatale" is more central to the criminal enterprise in noir than was the case previously. I think we have a much more difficult time determining when female spies are operating in a deviant way when their function in the films in which they appear is geared to be deceptive. The only exceptions in such films are the ones that would be deemed "soft" due to conflicted feelings. Huston didn't borrow anything from those films or from LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR: he simply used Hammett's dialogue and guided Astor and Bogart to let the unfolding action permit them to temporarily forget that they were in a cat-and-mouse game, one that snaps back into place when Spade realizes that Brigid was cold-blooded enough to kill Archer.
Else is a desperate, drug-addled, but still overtly sexual and predatory fatale who'll go as far as she needs to in order to create misdirection and deflect from her complicity: that's one level of fatale-dom. Brigid is something else entirely--her "conversion" and "love" for Spade can only be temporary, despite her tears and pleading during the film's conclusion. But apparently for her to really be "hard" (at least in the eyes of some), she needs to receive the ultimate punishment--not prison, but death. That's much too black-and-white for any nuanced approach to the idea of the femme fatale. The Nitrate Diva takes all this to the opposite extreme, seeing Else as a kind of vampire, which is also too stark a formulation. Renoir's choice of a sexy young maiden instead of a more cynical, experienced seductress is his way of reminding us that prurience comes in many forms and guises, including ones that may be murky and deceptive in ways that vary from that which we've become familiar.
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