ALPHAVILLE/ALPHAVILLE, UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION (1965)
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A NEW WAVE: The first significant collapsing of contemporary sci-fi into the film noir style appeared in this stylish pop art exercise from Jean-Luc Godard. Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine face off with the original men-in-suits as Kafka merges with genre conventions. Courtesy: Athos Film/Khaumiane.
CREDITS
Athos Films; Jean-Luc Godard, dir., scr.; André Michelin, pro.; Paul Misraki, mus.; Raoul Coutard, cin.; Agnès Guillemot, ed.; Pierre Guffroy, prod. design; René Levert, special sound effects; 99 min.; B&W; 1.37:1.
CAST
Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution); Anna Karina (Natacha von Braun); Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson); Christa Lang, Valérie Boisgel (Seductresses Third Class); Jean-André Fieschi, Jean-Louis Comolli (Heckell and Jeckell); Michel Delahaye (von Braun’s Assistant); Howard Vernon (Nosferatu/von Braun); Jean-Pierre Léaud (Waiter); László Szabó (Chief Engineer).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.
ALPHA 60, A COMPUTER SYSTEM DEVELOPED BY VON BRAUN
BACKGROUND
The first of Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution novels, This Man Is Dangerous, was published in Britain in 1936. The former police reporter and private investigator turned pulp fiction scribe borrowed from American tough guy private eyes like Sam Spade. At the same time, Cheyney added just a touch of off-the-cuff humor, suggesting that he might be spoofing, as well as celebrating, hardboiled aesthetics.
Following World War II, as a Humphrey Bogart cult developed and film noirs continuously played in cinemas along Paris boulevards, French producers began mounting their own low-budget imitations. American-born actor Eddie Constantine (1917–1993), who had been mentored by legendary chanteuse Édith Piaf and who bore a strong resemblance to her Gallic protégé Charles Aznavour, was recruited to play Caution. In the early Caution films, distributed in the mid-1950s, Lemmy appears to be a European equivalent to author Mickey Spillane’s mean-spirited gumshoe Mike Hammer. A decade later, Caution, as played by Constantine, had evolved from street tough to international man of adventure on the order of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, just then emerging as the centerpiece of a film franchise.
Even as the Caution cycle came to a close, the most daring of France’s New Wave directors, Jean-Luc Godard (1930–), transplanted this stock character into a futuristic world, commenting on our descent into dystopian anti-values. In interviews, Godard has suggested he might as easily have used Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, Ralph Byrd as Dick Tracy, Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, or Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. The key concept was to revive some pop culture icon, altering the context from lowbrow fun to highbrow consideration. An identifiable archetype would thrash about in a post-modern cinematic world. It’s hardly coincidental, then, that two wacky scientists are named for Heckle and Jeckle, the mad magpies of comic books and cartoons. Or that the villain is named “Nosferatu,” Dracula in F. W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent. All film characters inhabit a created world, those in genre movies most obviously so; conventional moviemakers attempt to render that truth invisible. Godard changed the shape and sensibility of cinema, in part by forcing viewers into a conscious awareness of the manner in which all (even “realistic”) movie worlds are, despite any sense of believability during the viewing process, the carefully considered creations of self-conscious artists.
THE PLOT
Agent 003 (Lemmy Caution) leaves the Outlands on a secret mission: drive his Ford (called a “Galaxie”) across time and space, arriving in Alphaville, also known as the “forbidden city.” As various beauties, most scantily clad, attempt to seduce Lemmy, he sets out to locate the man who created Alpha, the computer that controls society. Carrying and casually using a Colt Commander semiautomatic, Lemmy is licensed to kill Nosferatu/von Braun on sight. Here is a world in which the all-time greatest question—“why?”—has been outlawed. Verboten too is poetry, the conduit of sincere sentiment. Lemmy rehabilitates Natacha, his last and greatest object of seduction (what in a Bond film would be called “the final girl”), who is also the daughter of the Dr. No–like antagonist whom he must conquer.
THE FILM
Combining serious science fiction, entertaining space opera, elements of the film noir shadow world, and dark comedy featuring satire on prescient situations, Alphaville also contains an assortment of in-joke references to earlier films. Such an approach later came to be used by filmmakers as diverse as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. The crossing of once-sacrosanct genre boundaries began with Alphaville, which, like many New Wave films, celebrates the movies and what they mean to their international masses.
Godard introduced the then-radical idea of shooting a science-fiction film without any set design by pointing his camera only at the most modernist structures in an actual city. This suggestion that the near-future is already taking shape in our present times inspired young American filmmakers of the 1970s, including George Lucas (THX 1138, 1971).
The villain’s name, von Braun, is taken from Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who served the Nazis during World War II, then was supposedly rehabilitated and employed by NASA. Godard was among the first intellectuals who dared openly question the morality (or amorality) of such a convenient situation for the West.
However contemptuous some of his fans may believe Godard and other alternative filmmakers to be of traditional Hollywood hokum, this auteur embraced it wholeheartedly, if with tongue planted firmly in cheek. At the movie’s end, all turns out well as Natacha finally brings herself to say the most old-fashioned of movie lines to Lemmy: “I love you.” Such a defense of sentiment-as-our-salvation would reach an apex nearly a half-century later in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012).
TRIVIA
The first version of Godard’s script was titled Tarzan vs. IBM, expressing both the filmmaker’s love of individualism as well as popular culture and his hatred of computer-based corporate mentality.