(Marthe Richard, a Spy in the Service of France)
France, 1937, 95 min (now 80 min), b&w
Dir Raymond Bernard; Prod Paris Films; Scr Bernard Zimmer, from the memoirs of Commandant Ladoux; Cinematog Robert le Febvre; Music Arthur Honneger; Art dir Jean Perrier; Sound Antoine Archaimbaud; Edit Charlotte Guilbert; Act Edwige Feuillère (Marthe Richard), Délia Col (Mata Hari), Erich von Stroheim (von Ludow), Jean Galland (von Falken), Fernand Bercher (Marthe’s fiancé), Marcel André, René Bergeron, and Marcel Dalio.
Also Mademoiselle Docteur or Salonique, nid d’espions (Salonica, Nest of Spies), directed by Georg-Wilhelm Pabst, with Dita Parlo, Viviane Romance, Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Pierre Fresnay, Pierre Blanchar, and Jean-Louis Barrault.
Improbable as it may seem today, Marthe Richard was one of the most successful spy stories of the decade. It opened on the same day as another spy story, Georg-Wilhelm Pabst’s Mademoiselle Docteur, in a year when the proliferation of such stories was beginning to draw comment—no less than seven were released, of which six were outstanding commercial successes and two (including Marthe Richard itself) exceeded half a million entries for Paris alone. There had been a scattering of spy stories in the first half of the decade, but none had achieved this level of success. The first to signal the developing popularity of the genre had been Deuxième Bureau (1935) featuring Jean Murat as the French agent Captain Benoit. Such was its success that the novels by Charles-Robert Dumas relating the fictional exploits of this Captain Benoit of the Secret Service (Deuxième) Bureau during World War I experienced a merchandizing boom analogous to that of Ian Fleming’s James Bond thirty years later. Three more of them were adapted to film—Les Loups entre eux (1936), L’Homme à abattre (1937), and Capitaine Benoit (1938)—together with two by Pierre Nord—Double Crime sur la Ligne Maginot (1937) and Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur (1939). In addition, four spy films were made loosely based on the real-life exploits of Anne-Marie Lesser (Mademoiselle Docteur), Marthe Richard, Mata Hari (La Danseuse rouge, 1937), and the network run by Louise de Bettignies and Léonie Vanhoutte (Sœurs d’armes, 1937).47
As this list implies, a particular fascination surrounded female spies, partly because such narratives built on gender myths of the duplicitous nature of the female, but equally because of the potential for licentious scenes in which the spies used their sexuality to seduce and corrupt. Vera Korène and Viviane Romance became typecast in this role for some years, though Renée Saint-Cyr, Mireille Balin, and Edwige Feuillère also took it on at least once. Typically the plot of these films involved the need to procure the plans of some sinister enemy prototype—a revolutionary airplane engine, the formula of a deadly poison gas—or to steal documents. Here the main aim is to identify the whereabouts of a foreign submarine base. The seductive female temptress was most usually foreign, and determined to thwart the heroic French agent, but was often distracted from her devious designs by his male magnificence, perhaps ultimately sacrificing herself to save him. Sometimes, however, as in Marthe Richard, the seductive spy is French, and successfully deceives the Germans. But whether French or foreign, male or female, the central characters always at some crucial juncture find themselves torn between love and duty, obliged to sacrifice either their principles, their patriotism, or their partner. Spy and counter-spy, plot and counter-plot, regularly involved deception and treachery, disguise and alias, real and apparent turncoats, with the result that it is not always merely the enemy who are deceived and confused but often the spectator too—especially at a distance of seventy years. Contributing to this confusion of identity is the fact that the setting is often Alsace or Belgium, where history has created divided allegiances within and between families. And as befits such a theme, technical codes are often mobilized to reflect and heighten the confusion, with night-time shots, Dutch tilts, flickering searchlights, and rapid montage.48 In Marthe Richard, the use of mottled, barred, and shafted light, especially in moments of violence, is unquestionably expressionistic.
This film was directed by Raymond Bernard, whose Croix de bois (#15) had been a groundbreaking war film, and the montage of combat scenes has here a documentary credibility reminiscent of that earlier film, let down only by some crude submarine-base models late in the film. Marthe Richard, an Alsatian who speaks German fluently, has lost family and, she believes, her fiancé in the war, so applies to become a spy and infiltrate the German command (von Ludow, supported by Mata Hari) in Spain. She succeeds with the help of a colleague (both at this stage pretending to be German spies), and when they strip off their disguises, she finds her fellow-spy is her supposedly dead fiancé. In the final conflagration that she has initiated, she watches French warplanes bomb the German submarine base. But any simplistic nationalism is undercut by von Stroheim, who plays von Ludow: realizing he has been deceived by Marthe, he injects poison, strips off his insignia, and sits at the piano to play his own funeral dirge. “I believed,” he says, “that we were living a great adventure, but you are just another petty spy after all.” This show-stealing scene, which positions the audience solidly behind the German commander, is typical of a genre that does not belittle or condemn the former enemy but treats their national rivalry rather as a continuation of “the great game.” Perhaps to combat the implicitly unpatriotic mood thus established, however, the film ends with a flourish of crass triumphalism as U.S. troops (their ships saved by Marthe) disembark, the battle is won, and victory celebrations are held, complete with a parade on the Champs-Élysées.
Mademoiselle Docteur, released the same week, is even more resolutely understanding of the German cause, and not just because it was directed by Pabst or because all of the German agents and spymasters are played by famous French actors who invite identification. For the most part, Anne-Marie Lesser’s largely successful exploits are recounted by her German colleagues, whose narrative position the audience is invited to share. As a German spy infiltrating the French in Salonica, she seduces and lives a romantic idyll with the French Captain Carrère. This generates for both of them at different moments the conventional conflict between love and duty, which in her case momentarily inhibits her normal ruthless efficiency. Nevertheless, she steals crucial documents, gets messages through enemy (French) lines, and calls down (as her French rival did in the other film) a climactic German air attack on the French base. Amid the chaos of exploding bombs and sweeping searchlights, she escapes in a car, only to be killed by her lover, Captain Carrère, who grimly fires the fatal shot that causes her to crash.
At the time of the release of these two films, Émile Vuillermoz worried that they and their like “tended to establish a powerful war-time psychology and to arouse hatred and a desire for vengeance. They inflame passions that are all too ready to flare up everywhere in Europe today”—an odd attitude, he thought, for a nation to promote when it was currently holding a Universal Exhibition aimed precisely at bringing together those same peoples.49
47. See Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 165–166.
48. For the conventions of the genre, see Crisp, Genre, Myth and Convention, 52–54, 115, 192.
49. In Le Temps, 24 April 1937, cited by Courtade, Les Malédictions du cinéma français, 165.