(1) Remade as Prison without Bars (1938); (2) (Women’s Prisons)
France, 1938, (1) 98 min, (2) 94 min, b&w
(1) Dir Léonide Moguy; Asst dir Alexis Danan; Prod CIPRA; Scr Moguy, Hans Wilhelm, and Henri Jeanson, from the play by Thomas B. Forster; Cinematog Christian Matras; Music Will Grosz and Paul Bertrand; Art dir Georges Wakhévitch; Edit Boris Lewin; Act Annie Ducaux (Yvonne), Corinne Luchaire (Nelly), Roger Duchesne (Dr. Guy Maréchal), Ginette Leclerc (Renée), Gisèle Préville (Alice), Marthe Mellot (Madame Renard), and Maximilienne (Madame Appel).
(2) Dir Roger Richebé; Asst dir Aboulker; Prod Soc des Films Roger Richebé; Scr Francis Carco and René Jolivet; Cinematog Jean Isnard; Music Jean Lenoir; Art dir Roland Quignon; Sound Roger Rampillon; Edit Madame Bely; Act Francis Carco (Carco the novelist), Renée Saint-Cyr (Juliette), Viviane Romance (Régine), Marguerite Deval (Madame Gaby), Jean Worms (Max Régent), and Georges Flamant (Dédé).
These two 1938 films position themselves as humane liberal interventions into the debate surrounding the French legal system and its treatment of women. Both were very successful at the box office, though not necessarily for politically correct reasons. Prison sans barreaux was released first and has the more straightforward story-line. The first half consists of a stark contrast between the rigorous punitive authoritarian administration of women’s prisons consecrated by tradition and a new, more tolerant system based on trust and understanding, that is introduced here when, as a result of press campaigns, the state intervenes and appoints a younger, enlightened director, Yvonne. This contrast in directors and systems is deliberately played for effect, with the sinister disciplinarians of the old school dressed in black and resembling vultures, in scenes reminiscent of Metropolis, as they regiment the sullen, oppressed female inmates in the prison yard. The new director, however, sees the inmates as “guests” rather than criminals, to be cared for rather than punished, not embittered, hardened offenders but open to rehabilitation. In a powerful attack on the existing system, she declares that their “criminality” is largely due to suffering, poverty, and disrupted family life rather than innate evil. Her methods (inevitably) bear fruit, resulting in the (instantaneous and somewhat miraculous) transformation of young Nelly, innocently imprisoned after her stepfather attempted to rape her.
After this impressive first section of “film à thèse,” the second half, which is less interesting, consists of melodramatic situations that result from the sexual rivalry between Yvonne and Nelly for the affections of the reformatory doctor. Yvonne, the director, is “forced to choose between being a woman or a saint,” and not entirely voluntarily opts for sainthood: she will devote her life to the reformation of the reformatories (!) and the salvation of the young. Seen from this angle, the film could be classified among those numerous films of the late 1930s that agonize over the failures of the parents’ generation and the threat that these failures constitute to the innocent young, and as one of the films that uses the prison as a metonym for contemporary France. If in narrative terms the story-line is straightforward, the lighting and acting verge at times on the expressionistic, and some wild punctuation effects are exploited.
The other film, Roger Richebé’s Prisons de femmes, is far from straightforward. Again it is set in a prison for women and narrates the unjust imprisonment of a particular woman, Juliette, but the focus is primarily on her life after release—she marries a wealthy businessman, reluctantly keeping from him the fact of her earlier incarceration, which leads to blackmail and marital misunderstandings. More importantly, these facts are not presented chronologically but mediated through a diegetic narrator, the (real-life Goncourt) novelist Francis Carco, who researched the material for the film. This reflexive intrusion of an author figure who “manages” the narrative to ensure a just outcome requires a complicated multiple flashback plot in which the audience gradually comes to realize along with Juliette’s husband the origins of her suspicious behavior. Carco thus plays “Carco the novelist,” a part written for him by Carco the playwright-novelist who, like his diegetic namesake, has been campaigning for a more humane treatment of adolescents who he feels are too often locked away for petty crimes, when in most cases, those crimes are due primarily to the unscrupulous, drunken behavior of the parents. The social nature of criminality that has seen Juliette imprisoned is clarified in the flashbacks: her family treated her as a slave and sold her off to the highest bidder. When desperate to escape her situation she tries to steal from the till, her husband discovers her and in the struggle is stabbed. We are taken through the rigors of the prison system and her efforts after her release to rehabilitate herself. At one point, in a slightly surprising “pluperfect” tense, Carco recounts within his existing flashback narrative how he recognized Juliette as the businessman’s wife because he had come across her in prison while researching his novel, which is to be called (of course) Prisons de femmes.
This second film is the more interesting technically as well as structurally, since the narrative provides ample opportunity to contrast the elegant lifestyle of the grande bourgeoisie to which her marriage has provided access both with prison life and with the louche night-club life of “the people”: smoke-filled bars, music halls, and thugs on the lookout for a fast buck. Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaud provides a useful summary of the actuality behind these films (and others, notably the abrupt outburst at the end of Richebé’s next film, La Tradition de minuit). She lists a series of journalistic reports in the preceding decade on reformatories (one by Léonide Moguy’s assistant here, Alexis Danan) that revealed their role in the “moral contamination” of the young, who during their imprisonment become confirmed in their criminality. She also summarizes the Popular Front government’s attempts to reform the system and right-wing condemnation of those attempts (such as Lucien Rebatet’s scorn for “the maudlin yids” who had initiated the reforms).102 Pierre Prévert and Marcel Carné had earlier prepared a scenario based on a young offenders’ revolt in 1934 at the Belle-Île reformatory but were prevented by censorship pressures from realizing it, and Charles Spaak mentions the authorities’ efforts to prevent Prison sans barreaux from being released as well. Richebé’s account of the evolution of Prisons de femmes from a bundle of Carco’s notes to a finished film, however, contains no hint of such censorship problems. Indeed, to facilitate his documentation, the director of prisons at the Justice Ministry appointed him temporary inspector of prisons, and vouched for the validity of the incident related in the film, an actual correlative of which he had himself encountered. Richebé was permitted to film his script in a disused prison at Montpellier.
The first of these films not only represented France in Venice and won an award but was filmed in an English version that came out soon afterward.
102. Guillaume-Grimaud, Le Cinéma du Front Populaire, 117–118.