Friday, November 29

The beginning of the end.

The debut of “The French Had A Name For It” was at the Roxie in San Francisco on November 14, 2014, a mere decade ago. I came from Chicago to see it and repeated the journey through the lost continent of French film noir for the next four annual iterations. Then COVID and an uncooperative schedule interfered. But for the finale, I had to return. And what a post-Thanksgiving feast programmer extraordinaire Don Malcolm has prepared! As evidence, there was the line forming an hour before the start of the show.

And how better to begin the show than with an Erich von Stroheim double-feature, especially when the first feature has the cheery title LA DANSE DE MORT (Marcel Cravenne 1948). A marriage is on the rocks, figuratively and literally. Time has passed by the commander of a prison on a rock island. His wife has passed by him as well. The opening sequence of a grand ball where it appears nobody is happy could have come from Max Ophuls. This film, however, only gets sadder and bleaker than an Ophuls creation. Everyone on the rock, not just the prisoners, is imprisoned. Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the showing that cut about twenty minutes from the movie near the end. A jump cut in anticipation of Jean-Luc Godard? Or lessening the doom? We anxiously await a complete screening.

Stroheim reappears in LE MONDE TREMBLERA aka THE WORLD WILL SHAKE (Richard Pottier 1939), a science fiction film noir hybrid. A scientist – not Stroheim – invents a machine that accurately predicts the time of death of those who sit among its flickering cathode ray tubes. He sees this as a moneymaker as does the cynical father – Stroheim – of his fiancée. The father wants to use it in a nefarious way, but the machine’s dire prediction for him becomes reality too soon. The machine takes on a life of its own by altering the lives and behavior of seemingly everyone. A prediction of a long life leads one man, who feels he has miserable life, to attempt suicide repeatedly and comically, obviously without success. Another man, told that his life will soon end, summons the courage to murder his shrewish wife. On and on until a world-wide depression causes the populace to come after the scientist who now wants the destruction of the machine.

A nightmare tale that could have been concocted by Ray Bradbury and, in his “Night Has A Thousand Eyes” mode, Cornell Woolrich. I noticed as the opening credits scrolled by that one of the writers was listed as H.G. Clouzot. We would see more from Henri-Georges Clouzot as a writer and director shortly thereafter.