(Sarati the Terrible)
France, 1937, 89 min, b&w
Dir André Hugon; Prod Hugon; Scr Jacques Constant, from the novel by Jean Vignaud; Cinematog André Bayard; Music Vincent Scotto, Jacques Janin, and Mahieddine; Art dir Émile Duquesne; Act Harry Baur (César Sarati), Georges Rigaud (Gilbert de Kéradec), Jacqueline Laurent (Rose), Rika Radifé (Concetta), Marcel Dalio (dock worker), Jean Tissier (Sarati’s woman’s brother), Charles Granval (Hudelo), Jeanne Helbling, Nadine Picard, and Yvonne Hébert.
Sarati le terrible is a rich, weird, and fascinating film, noteworthy both as a colonial film and as a source of debate on traditional patriarchy. It is also a central film for any appreciation of the place of Harry Baur in the cinema of the 1930s. The role he plays as a brutal dock boss in Algiers, overtly interested in an incestuous relationship with his niece, has been well analyzed by Michèle Lagny and colleagues in Générique des années 30. Wielding his vicious club, Sarati is brutal with all of his workers but especially with Arabs, Africans, and his homosexual “brother-in-law,” systematically exploiting them as dock boss, landlord, and hash-house proprietor. In The Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, David Slavin sees the film’s invitation to us to identify with such a man as an attempt to justify “the rough work of conquest that prepares the civilising mission, [which] requires just such atavistic qualities as this sexually obsessed abusive colonist demonstrates.” Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier in La Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français focus rather on gender relations in the film, seeing it as key to understanding the whole period—an attempt by the patriarchal imagination to sketch a possible evolution from exploitative nineteenth-century capitalism toward a more benign form, and as a prefiguration of the cinema of the war years. These three books have more than adequately summarized the significance of Sarati le terrible, and what follows is based on their propositions.56
The novel on which it is based was written by Jean Vignaud in 1919. It won a literary prize, was a bestseller, and was first turned into a film in 1923. Vignaud was a right-wing novelist who took as his subject matter the French colonial experience in Algeria, of which he later wrote a history. He manages to make of the odious Sarati a tragic figure, his despicable characteristics elevated into tragic flaws. In a manner similar to the American Western, Sarati’s violence and ruthlessness are represented as an inevitable byproduct of the initial confrontation between Europeans and “the wilderness.” Such men, we are led to suppose, cannot be judged by European standards. Opposing him for his niece Rose’s affections is Gilbert, a typical ne’er-do-well younger son of the aristocracy whose reckless debauchery, gambling losses, and near murder of his brother have led to his exile in the colonies. We witness his gradual rehabilitation under Rose’s influence and his subsequent alliance with the more enlightened gang-boss, Hudelo, in a project to modernize the Algiers dockside and introduce a less exploitative brand of capitalism. Sarati’s double defeat, as a male and as a boss, leads him in the novel to slash his own throat, while in the early (silent) film he drowned himself. In this remake, entering Gilbert and Rose’s nuptial chamber while Gilbert is absent, wracked with jealousy, he flourishes a knife over his sleeping niece, then uses it on himself—in a gesture interpretable as either killing or castrating himself.
As Burch and Sellier note, “In the 1930s the Rule of the Father manifested itself first of all in the possession, symbolic or actual, of a young woman who is (actually or symbolically) his own daughter.”57 In these Oedipal narratives, it is normal for the father-figure to encounter a young rival whose aim is to oust the older man from his role as protector of the young woman, but most commonly, it is the older man who, through experience and social position, wins out. Sarati is a pivotal figure in that he foreshadows a generation of older men who in their defeat by their younger rivals signal the passing of the old order, “the collapse of a certain archaic form of the patriarchy.”58 Yet here the defeat is felt as tragic because the audience is invited to identify with Sarati. Even his incestuous craving is almost excused both in the book and in this film version by the provocative behavior of Rose: strolling in the grounds of Sarati’s country house, she suddenly (and uncharacteristically) flings herself to the ground in an attitude of abandon that leaves her blouse gaping. She could seem to invite the gesture that exposes her breast, only to recoil when it eventuates. While both Christianity and Islam reject such a desire as incestuous, Slavin notes that colonial attitudes might well see such “patrilineal endogamy” as preferable to mixed-race relationships, and that Mediterranean peoples have never been entirely averse to it since it serves to prevent the fragmentation of landholdings.
Michèle Lagny and her coauthors see Harry Baur as the ideal actor to embody Sarati, since of all the older male actors who dominated the cast-lists of the decade, Baur most convincingly and consistently portrays emblematic figures of brute power. Often his role requires him to manifest “an excessive masculinity,” “a dangerous animal force”; he is “a disturbingly solitary beast,” a male deprived of females, to whom his narratives systematically deny any marital or paternal relationship.59 Whether in North Africa or Russia, Baur’s characters seem not just foreign but alien, monstrous. He inevitably ends up excluded in some painful way from the forms of belonging he seeks, either through suicide or death, in deprivation and degradation. Often he is sacrificed either to cleanse or save society, but for whatever reason, he must die. “It is as if the cinema of the 1930s, unable to suppress or to assume this excess, could only destroy it.”60
Fascinating as it is, Sarati le terrible was not the success at the box-office that one might have expected. André Hugon, who directed it, was a journeyman director who had made twenty films since the coming of sound (he made what was arguably the first French sound feature, Les Trois Masques) without any significant success except two lighthearted films in 1930 and 1932. Perhaps his most inexplicable decision here was to mobilize a bewildering array of punctuation devices, which cumulatively disrupt the narrative tone of the film. Typically employed in riotous comedies as an aid to comic momentum, they are completely incongruous in this somber drama. Nevertheless, for its ideological significance, this is a film to be viewed.
56. Lagny et al., Générique des années 30, 195–200; Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 25–29; Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 40–43.
57. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 90.
58. Ibid., 41.
59. Lagny et al., Générique des années 30, 195–200.
60. Lagny et al., Générique des années 30, 200.