on 12/2/2024, 3:09 pm
Would I be prepared at 11:30am to watch six movies in one day? We would soon find out.
We pick up today with another directed by Pierre Chenal and two featuring Erich von Stroheim. L’ALIBI (Pierre Chenal 1937) has Stroheim portraying “the man you love to hate” who is a nightclub performer with a mental telepathy act. He kills a Chicago mobster who had crossed him. He pays a woman to tell the police that he had spent the night of the murder with her. The police commissioner (Louis Jouvet) is not buying the alibi. The commissioner has one of his officers seduce the woman to get the truth from her. The performances of Stroheim and Jouvet are the reasons to see this.
Stroheim reappears in LES DISPARUS DE ST.-AGIL (Christian-Jaque 1938), an odd movie in which he is a man one sometimes loves to hate and sometimes for whom one feels empathy. Walter (Stroheim) is a language teacher at a boys’ school. He frightens the students because of his demeanor and his fellow teachers dislike him for his temperament. Then there is the art teacher Lemel (the glorious Michel Simon), a drunkard par excellence. Three students have a secret club with the mission of escaping to the United States. One of the three students disappears. There is a blackout at a school party and a highly intoxicated Lemel falls over a railing to his death. Another of the three students disappears. A postcard arrives that is apparently from one of the missing students in the United States. Walter purloins it. And the third student investigates.
Stroheim and Simon are marvelous as one might expect. The performances of the child actors are noteworthy as well, creating scenes that switch from comical to eerie on a dime, but always in a naturalistic way. One in the chorus of schoolboys is an uncredited Charles Aznavour in his second screen appearance. An uncredited Serge Reggiani makes his screen debut as another of the schoolboys. And the uncredited writer of the dialogue…Jacques Prevert.
Now a jump cut to the ‘60s for two directed by Andre Cayette.
LE GLAIVE ET LA BALANCE aka TWO ARE GUILTY (Andre Cayatte 1962) displays Cayatte’s background as a lawyer and his deep concern for ethics and justice reform. A child is kidnapped. A ransom note is sent. The ransom is dropped off. Two men pick up the ransom at night. Police give chase. The two men, wearing white tops and dark pants, park their car and run down a cliff. A shot is heard. The police still giving chase, find the dead child. The two men, now in a speed boat, head toward a lighthouse. Still giving chase, the police see two men run from the boat and into the lighthouse. Police surround the lighthouse. Three men emerge surrendering, each wearing a white top and dark pants. And each professes his innocence, pointing at the other two as the guilty parties.
Police investigations yield nothing of value. The police cannot determine which two are guilty. Or, maybe three are guilty. The prosecutors decide to charge all three and let the system of justice determine who is guilty. The general populace is in an uproar. It just wants justice to be meted out for the dead child. The trial is held. The jury meets. The verdicts are announced. Each defendant is acquitted. The onlookers turn into a mob. In its frenzy, the Hall of Justice is vandalized. To save the three acquitted men, officials put them in a benign looking truck to be driven to a safe area. The mob – the people – are not fooled.
And the people hand out their horrific form of justice.
PIEGE POUR CENDRILLON aka TRAP FOR CINDERELLA (Andre Cayatte 1965) has two – or is it five? – performances for the ages: Dany Carrel as Michelle, Dominque (Michelle’s look-alike cousin), and Michelle (or is it Dominique?) as the scarred survivor of a horrendous fire who now has amnesia, and Madeleine Robinson as Jeanne Mureau, the godmother/caretaker of Michelle and Dominique.
We find Michelle in the hospital after her entire body was burned in a fire. She is sweet, passive, and suffering from amnesia. Her cousin Dominique is dead. While Michelle is trying to learn who she is and her past, there is a flashback to fill us in as well. Michelle is about to come into a fortune from her aunt. Michelle and Dominique are arch-rivals and both are nasty and conniving. But not nearly as nasty and conniving as Jeanne. Jeanne plays each against the other with the goal of having Dominique kill Michelle, then replacing her as the new Michelle and sharing the fortune with Jeanne. You know that was not quite going to work out. The plot line is intriguing enough, but watching the performances of the two leads – and, did I mention Dany Carrel? – was more than a worthwhile undertaking.
Now, to end the day with two starring Jeanne Moreau.
More than just Moreau, Jacques Demy directs LA BAIE DES ANGES aka BAY OF ANGELS (1963) and Michel Legrand provides the score. That would usually be enough for me, but the film provides much more. A young staid bank clerk, Jean (Claude Mann) catches the gambling bug from a friend whose luck and finances go up and down, but mostly the latter. While at a casino, Jean meets Jackie (Moreau), the wife of an industrialist. Soon they are sharing their compulsion for gambling and a bed. Compulsion and obsession are the movie. Jean is also obsessed with Jackie, and Jackie is obsessed with Jean, at least when he is on a hot streak and can give her money so that she can find her hot streak. Not that she doesn’t love Jean, but gambling just may be first in line. There is the Hollywood ending, however, with the two of them – after all the drama and trauma – walking out of a casino hand-in-hand. Or will the sequel reaffirm that they are noir characters and are doomed?
"Les plans les mieux conçus des souris et des hommes...." LE DOS AU MUR aka BACK TO THE WALL (Eduardo Molinaro 1958) opens with an extraordinarily long silence (one interruption for two lines) as a man drives at night from his mansion to an apartment, a shot is heard, he wraps a dead man in a rug, puts him into his trunk, drives to a construction site, dumps the body in an unfinished wall, and covers it with concrete. The killer is Jacques Decrey (Gerard Oury), a wealthy industrialist. The dead man is Yves Normand (Phillippe Nicaud), a poor stage actor and the lover of Decrey’s wife, Gloria (Jeanne Moreau). Jacques provides the voice-over narration and flashback to explain how he got to this point and why he now has his back to the wall.
When he discovers Gloria is having an affair with Yves, Jacques concocts an elaborate plan of blackmail – he will blackmail them under a pseudonym, establish a post office box under that name, and drive wedge between them. Blackmail is so easy when it’s your own money you’re receiving. But as Robert Burns had warned, best-laid plans can go astray…especially when Love is involved. Or, just as appropriate is Oscar Wilde’s observation that “each man kills the thing he loves,” which Jacques discovers on his journey back to the wall.
Probably best known as the director of LE CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978), this was Molinaro’s first feature-length film. A year later, he directed UN TEMOIN DANS LA VILLE, a favorite from the first “The French Had A Name For It” in 2014. Frederic Dard wrote the novel and co-wrote the adaptation and dialogue. For fans of the “look” of film noir, LE DOS AU MUR superbly satisfies that fix: urban, night, wet streets, shadows, and the disorienting camera angles. Sometimes you need a little of that.
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