A director’s highest duty is to reveal the actors to themselves; and to do that, he must know himself very well. Cinematographic failure generally occurs because there is too wide a disparity between a filmmaker’s temperament and his ambitions.
From Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh in the United States) to Marguerite de la Nuit, and in between—in L’Auberge Rouge, Le Blé en Herbe, and Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black)—I have consistently attacked Claude Autant-Lara and I have always deplored his tendency to simplify everything, make it bland. I disliked the coarseness with which he “condensed” Stendhal, Radiguet, Colette. It seemed to me he deformed and watered down the spirit of any work he adapted. Autant-Lara seemed to me like a butcher who insists on trying to make lace.
But I admire, without any real reservations, La Traversée de Paris. I think it’s a complete success because Autant-Lara has finally found the subject he’s been waiting for—a plot that is made in his own image, a story that his truculence, tendency toward exaggeration, roughness, vulgarity, and outrage, far from serving badly, elevates to an epic.
During the Occupation, two Frenchmen spend the night walking around a studio-set Paris in a wartime blackout, carrying a pig clandestinely to the black market. The film simply reproduces their journey and their conversation, a dialogue both banal and theatrical, and the best that’s been heard in a long time in a French film. French movies have been circling around La Traversée de Paris for ten years without finding it.
It’s more like a filmed play, artfully given some space by the happy idea of the long walk before a mobile backdrop. In film terms, it is a series of transparencies. La Traversée de Paris is adapted from a short story by Marcel Aymé. The audacious (for cinema) language wouldn’t be at all so on the stage, in a play like Waiting for Godot, but films rarely give us an opportunity to listen to the “average” Frenchman, a character who is ordinarily flattered in movies, since he’s the one who pays to see them.
The character of Bourvil, a little man crushed by life, a tiny fall guy, innocent and guilty at the same time, represents an absolute truth. As Jean Gabin plays him, he is a synthesis of the painter Gen Paul (in the spirit of Marcel Aymé), Jacques Prévert, and of the anarchical ambitions of Jean Aurenche and Claude Autant-Lara. The character remains somewhat literary and contrived, but nevertheless possesses great power.
The authors could have further deepened their portrait of wickedness, and probably wanted to, but we only think about that afterward, when our astonishment has worn off. A verve much like Céline’s and an insistent ferocity dominate the movie, but it is saved from meanness by a few emotional notes that overwhelm us, particularly those in the final scenes. If the whole gives the impression of more subtlety and more power than the combination of a film by Claude Autant-Lara, a play by Marcel Aymé, and dialogue by Aurenche and Bost would suggest, it is because these four personalities fuse in a particularly fortunate way in the service of a subject that becomes a common denominator. The situation the film describes tempers Autant-Lara’s leftist anarchism, Aymé’s rightism, and lets Aurenche and Bost set the tone. Thanks to them La Traversée de Paris is not trivialized by having political, social, or ideological labels attached to it.
Don’t laugh too loudly when you see La Traversée de Paris, first of all so your neighbors can hear the dialogue—but even more because Martin and Grandgil could be you and me.
—1956
En Cas de Malheur (In Case of Accident), one of Simenon’s best novels, is also one of Claude Autant-Lara’s best films. It’s not a new theme; it’s the same one as in Nana and La Chienne: a mature man’s love for a girl too young and frivolous for him who represents the eternal feminine. I’m reminded of La Chienne because of Renoir’s wonderful introduction to the film where he has marionettes sing: “It’s the eternal story: she, he, and the other. She is Lulu, a fine girl; she’s always sincere; she lies all the time.” It fits perfectly the character of Yvette as played by Brigitte Bardot.
Yvette has committed a holdup with the help of a friend. Before she is arrested, she gets the idea of asking a famous Paris trial lawyer (Jean Gabin) to take on her defense. The first time she visits his office she tries to seduce him, hiking up her dress to show him she’s not wearing anything underneath. He rebuffs her but agrees to defend her and, by his slick defense, gets her off. Then, having become her lover, he installs her in his apartment with the tacit agreement of his wife, who is responsible for his social success. Yvette has nothing to do so she sleeps around and in short order falls in love with a strange and passionate boy, “a worker by day, a student by night.” He tries to teach her the few absolute principles of morality before he kills her, which is what the attorney, Gobillot, would probably have done in the same situation thirty years earlier. I want to stress the daring of the plot. Yvette has recently discovered that she’s pregnant by the lawyer and she’s happy about it, even though she is carrying on a lesbian relationship at the same time with a young maid who is responsible for looking after her—in Gobillot’s presence, even with his cooperation.
Ordinarily, Aurenche and Bost adapt novels by turning them into theater pieces rather than screenplays, using standard dramatic procedures: cuts and summaries, ellipses, three acts, ingenious flashbacks, commentaries, etc. Compared to the quality of the original work, the director’s ambition and the producer’s desires can produce the worst kind of matinee theater (Le Blé en Herbe, Le Diable au Corps, Le Rouge et le Noir), or, on the other hand, left-bank avant-garde theater (La Traversié de Paris), or as in this case, something in between, a kind of Champs-Elysées comedy.
En Cas de Malheur has been turned into the sort of play that Jean Anouilh might have written. We come out of it with a mixture of disgust and admiration, a sense of satisfaction that is real enough but incomplete. It is 100 percent French, with all the virtues and vices that implies: an analysis that is at once subtle and narrow, a skill that is mixed with spitefulness, a spirit of unflinching observation directed at the sordid, and talented sleight-of-hand that delivers a liberal message in the end.
A number of years ago, when I was twenty and innocent, I would have condemned it angrily. I feel a bit bitter today when I find myself, somewhat to my own surprise, admiring, even moderately, a film that’s more intelligent than beautiful, more adroit than noble, more artful than sensitive. But if I have put some water in my wine, so have Aurenche and Bost and Autant-Lara added wine to their water and made it quite a bit stronger. If their names endure in the history of cinema, it will not be so much because they’ve done anything to move cinema forward as that they have moved the public forward. A filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman has for fifteen years been making films that are as daring and frank as En Cas de Malheur—films that make no concessions and do not sink to vulgarity. But it is because of films like En Cas de Malheur that the general public may come to understand Bergman.
Like Anouilh, Aurenche and Bost are clever at managing ingenious ellipses so that the director can shoot fifteen scenes of equal importance and interest without dead moments or laborious transitions and tedious connections. Their dialogue is like Anouilh’s, always facile and seductive, but at the same time familiar and very effective. In terms of simple spectacle, they have achieved a certain perfection.
In Autant-Lara they have found the ideal partner. Without a moment’s hesitation and without touching a single comma, he produces each of their brainstorms; he is as conscientious, hard-working, and upright as Pierre Bost, and as sharp, narrow, and vengeful as Jean Aurenche. He skirts nothing when he deals with his characters, emphasizing all their weaknesses and failings. A goodness that I believe I see in Simenon’s work, a compassion that softens the worst indecency, is nowhere to be found in the film; it is full of vengeance. If I like it anyhow and go to the trouble of defending it, it’s because I think it comes down on the right side of the battle against complacency.
Let me give you another example—another film of Bardot’s, Une Parisienne. It is precisely against the state of mind that inspired Une Parisienne, and against its fans, that Aurenche, Bost and Autant-Lara struggle. Let me see if I can make that more concrete. The film opens with a television commentary about a visit by the Queen of England. Taking advantage of the fact that the entire Paris police force is preoccupied with the royal visit, Bardot robs a jewelry shop. All the while we hear a bombastic TV commentary: the Queen goes here, does this and that…In the evening, Gobillot and Edwige Feuillère, his wife, are at a dinner in honor of the Queen at the Elysée Palace. Gobillot’s secretary, modeled closely on the one of Ornifle—which was also played by Madeleine Barbulée—stuffs an enormous sandwich in her mouth as she watches the Queen pass by on a sightseeing boat.
The idea is simple but strong: a crowned head moves around Paris under spotlights seeming to symbolize grace, beauty, woman, fortune, happiness, and at the same time a beautiful penniless girl knocks over an old man for a few watches. It’s the girl who interests us and preoccupies us, not an anachronistic queen. It is precisely because Bardot is a girl who represents her time absolutely faithfully that she is more famous than any queen or princess. That’s why it’s too bad she played Une Parisienne or Les Bijoutiers. And it’s why En Cas des Malheur is her best film since Et Dieu créa la Femme—an anti-Sabrina, anti-Roman Holiday, anti-Anastasia movie that is truly republican.
We could list a lot of things about the film that are bold, even though each foray is balanced by small concessions. But the essential thing is that in this film you hear talk about miscarriages, tiny holes in hotel bedroom doors, a complacent wife, “games” that are, if not four-sided, at least triangular, voyeurism—everything, in fact, that smacks of original sin (which I suppose Aurenche believes in, but not Lara).
The crucial things are said clearly, avoiding the confusions, sentimentality, and the sheer physical seduction that make nine out of ten films unbearable. What of its compromises? We notice them when we compare the movie with the novel. The character of the wife, for example, is too sentimental in the film; she was much earthier in the book. But the compromises are usually visual rather than verbal, Autant-Lara’s rather than the scenarists’. For example, it is scandalous that they did not dare to film Bardot and Cabin kissing each other on the mouth; both the situation and dialogue demand it. Did they try it out and then hesitate because they were afraid it would be shocking? If the answer is yes, that would be enough to condemn the film. And if not, why did they back off, what was the reason for a self-censorship which contradicts the film’s spirit?
Autant-Lara is making progress technically: his camera spins as he follows his constantly moving characters. His technique is less cluttered as he has become less theatrical. Accelerating on Bardot and Cabin, slowing down on Edwige Feuillère, it’s perfect. With La Traversée de Paris and this film, Autant-Lara has outclassed Henri-Georges Clouzot and René Clément. But like them he closes himself off to poetry and therefore to great cinema.
—1958
In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, a group of German officers pull at each other’s mustaches for several minutes in order to unmask the imposter in their midst. It would be pointless to subject the characters in Casque d’Or to such a test; each hair of Serge’s Reggiani’s mustache is guaranteed real in this celebration of authenticity.
Casque d’Or is the only film that Jacques Becker—who is ordinarily very finicky, absorbed by detail, obsessive, restless, and at times uncertain—ever made in one stroke, very quickly, straight through from beginning to end. He wrote the colloquial and absolutely natural-seeming dialogue so economically that we have the impression that Reggiani doesn’t say more than sixty words.
Those of us who love Casque d’Or are clear in our minds that Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani had their best roles ever in it, even if the French public (but not the English, decidedly more subtle) was cool to this paradoxical coupling, so beautiful precisely because of its contrasts—a little man and a large woman, the little alley cat who is made of nothing but nerves, and the gorgeous carnivorous plant who doesn’t turn her nose up at any morsel.
If you’re at all interested in how stories are constructed, you cannot fail to admire the ingenuity of the plot, particularly the strong, oblique, unexpected way it gets abruptly to Manda’s execution in a scene that is as beautiful as it is mysterious, as the Casque d’Or arrives in the middle of the night at a disreputable hotel. When I or any of my fellow scenarists are in trouble, we often say to each other, “How about a ‘Casque d’Or solution’?”
Casque d’Or is primarily a film of personalities, but it is also a visual tour de force: a dance, a brawl in the backyard, an awakening in the countryside, Manda’s arrival at the guillotine supported by a priest—these images are like magazine covers. This visual enchantment confirms me in my conviction that cinema is a popular art, and that it deceives itself when it tries to bring the paintings of the masters to life.
Casque d’Or, at times funny, at times tragic, proves that we can surpass parody; we can look at the picturesque and bloody past and evoke it with tenderness and violence by means of a refined use of tone changes.
—1965
There are no theories about Jacques Becker, no scientific analysis, no thesis. His work, like his personality, discourages it. Which is all to the good.
Becker doesn’t have any intention of mystifying or demystifying anyone; his films are neither statements nor indictments. He works outside all styles, and we shall place him therefore at the opposite pole from the major tendencies of French cinema.
Becker’s films are his own; that is only one point but it is an important one. While it is generally thought preferable to write the films one directs, the reasons that are usually given are banal; and anyhow we continue to admire teams and partnerships. The fact that Renoir, Bresson, Cocteau, and Becker participate in working out the script and write the dialogue not only gives them a greater self-assurance on the set, but, more importantly, it allows them to avoid the sorts of scenes and cues typical of scenarists, and to create scenes a typical scenarist wouldn’t think of. Do we need examples? To know that the scene in Edouard et Caroline where Elina Labourdette plays at making “doe’s eyes” could be possible, one first had actually to have witnessed it, and only then thought it out as director. I don’t know whether we owe the scene to Annette Wademant or to Becker, but I’m sure that another director would have cut it in editing. It doesn’t move the action forward one step. It is just there, it seems to add a touch not of realism but of reality; it is there also out of some love for the difficult.
This search for a more and more exact tone is particularly noticeable in the dialogue. In Casque d’Or, Raymond (Bussières) enters Manda’s carpentry shop (Reggiani) and says, “So, scrape, scrape, whittle, whittle, eh?” The remark could not possibly have been written—it had to have been invented on the set; that doesn’t prevent it from revealing an intelligence (in the sense of an understanding with a friend) that confounds me each time I hear it.
It is not so much his choice of subject that distinguishes Becker as it is his treatment, and the scenes he selects to illustrate it. He keeps only what is essential in the dialogue, even the essential part of the superfluous (he sometimes keeps even onomatopoeias). He will skimp what another director would treat most seriously in order to linger over the characters eating breakfast, buttering a roll, brushing their teeth. There is a convention that screen lovers never embrace except in a lap dissolve. In a French movie, if a couple is shown undressing and walking around the bedroom in nightclothes, the purpose is to make fun of them. We might gather that these tacit rules are dictated by a concern for elegance. What does Becker do with such situations? His taste for the difficult, which I have remarked on, makes him go counter to the rules. In Casque d’Or he shows us Reggiani and Simone Signoret in nightgowns, and in Grisbi we see Gabin in pajamas.
His work is a perpetual challenge to vulgarity, and it is a gamble Becker invariably wins, for his films are always elegant and dignified.
What happens to Becker’s characters matters less than the way it happens to them. His plots, scarcely more than pretexts, grow thinner from film to film: Edouard et Caroline is simply the story of one evening in the world, with a telephone and a dinner jacket as accessories; Touchez pas au Grisbi just recounts the transfer of ninety-six kilograms of gold. “What I find interesting is personalities,” Becker says; the real subjects of Grisbi are aging and friendship. This theme came through clearly in Simenon’s book but very few screenwriters would have known how to bring it out, pushing the violent and picturesque action to the background. Simenon is forty-nine and Becker forty-eight; Grisbi is a film about being fifty. At the end of the film, Mac, like Becker, puts on his glasses “to read.”
The beauty of the characters in Grisbi, even more than those in Casque d’Or, comes from their quietness, from the economy of their movements. They speak or act only to say or do what is necessary. Like Monsieur Teste, Becker halts the marionette in them. All that remains of the killers are two tomcats facing each other down. Grisbi is, in my eyes, a kind of settling of accounts between tired and defeated but still deluxe fat cats.
For those of us who are twenty or a little older, Becker’s example is both instructive and encouraging. Renoir we’ve known only as a genius, while Becker was making his debut at the same time we were discovering cinema. We were present at his first tries and experiments. We have watched as the body of his work was put together. Becker’s success is that of a young man who could see only one path, who chose it, and whose dedication to films has been repaid.
—1954
If Arsène Lupin had been made and shown in 1954, it would have been an “important” French film, one of those movies that has to be systematically praised, even if it meant pretending not to recognize its defects. But we are at a turning point of French cinema, and Nuit et Brouillard, Lola Montès, Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé, La Traversée de Paris, Courte Tête have made us more demanding about both the choice of subjects and their treatments. Arsène Lupin is a pleasant film, it will give you a pleasant evening, but there is indeed some question as to what is beyond the pleasantness.
The film’s weak point is certainly the script. Becker is an intimate and realistic filmmaker who is in love with verisimilitude and everyday realities. On pretexts as slight as a lottery ticket or a dinner jacket,he has given us Antoine et Antoinette, Edouard et Caroline and also Touchez pas au Grisbi, whose well-earned success focused on Max the Liar growing old, his weariness, his first pair of reading glasses, the little habits, the good restaurants, the pleasant absorption of a tired-out hooligan who dreams about retiring into middle-class respectability.
But Becker’s best film, the one in which he rises above his own limitations, is Casque d’Or, which has unfortunately never been understood in France—a rapid, tragic, powerful film, every instant filled with strength and intelligence.
The name Arsène Lupin evokes an untouchable personality. Becker certainly has the right to consider the original out of date and to remake him in his own way, but did he simply reconstruct the personality?
Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin is a strong, frantic individual. When he is in love, everything is possible. Incapable of vulgarity and meanness, Lupin was haughtier, more scornful and fiercely theatrical than the Master of Santiago himself. He was loved and admired, feared and respected.
For the Arsène Lupin of our childhood, Becker has substituted another who is only a variation on Max the Liar. But the style that defined Grisbi diminishes Leblanc’s hero to such a degree that the once strong personality has become weak, imprecise, nebulous, I might almost say nonexistent.
Arsène Lupin returns to his home, puts a record on the phonograph, undresses, looks at himself in the mirror, hums along perhaps, treats his servants with familiarity and kindness…all that was also in Grisbi but here it bores us. It’s clear that Becker, who had put much of himself into Max, has once again identified with his character, but this time it’s frustrating to watch. Because he only wanted to paint a little man, a petit français, a fifty-year-old who is all of a piece, an innocently eccentric, indulgent father, Becker has been victimized by his own gentleness, and runs the risk of being able to get through only to a fifty-year-old audience, and, indeed, only the one that patronizes the Champs-Elysées movie houses.
I shall come back to Robert Lamoureux, who plays Arsène Lupin admirably; here I am only criticizing the conception of the character. It seems to me that Manda in Casque d’Or and the dressmaker in Falbalas were closer to the Lupin we long to see.
Since the character he has invented is unfinished and insufficiently realized, Becker, whether consciously or not, constantly shifts our interest to the episodic characters, very few of whom “work.” Now that the gentleman burglar has become a sneak thief, a crafty accomplice, a little villain, more like “Arsène the Liar,” we can see the limitations of a style that rests on kindness, mischievousness, bantering, the conspiratorial wink, buddyism, and we can see how limited the overlabored humor is, humor like a sledgehammer, more in the English style.
The plot consists of three adventures, three “hits,” and leaves much to be desired in terms of originality. The first episode concerns the theft of some paintings and is irritatingly heavy-handed: 1. Lupin arrives at the chateau. 2. The master of the chateau tells him, “I am tremendously proud of my canvases.” 3. The lights go off; Lupin steals the paintings. 4. The master says, “My paintings have been stolen.” 5. Arsène Lupin pays off his accomplices. No ellipses, nothing to figure out. This sketch reminds us of those “funny” stories that are so boring because we are not spared a single detail. The second episode, the theft of the jewels through a hole in the wall, would have been original if Ernst Lubitsch (Désirs) and Sacha Guitry (Le Roman d’un Tricheur) had not already done it. The third episode, Lupin and the Kaiser, is the longest and best. It’s about the discovery of a hiding place—and here the film picks up. The sets, costumes, and colors are superb, the acting is improved, but even in this episode the plot’s flaws compromise the intelligence of the narrative. The film ends up as a very successful sketch set in Maxim’s. It is not until then that we realize that the whole business should have been conceived and carried out the way the finale is—with loud drumbeats from the very beginning.
This too-soothing plot hasn’t any more than six or eight good ideas, so clumsily introduced and developed that Becker and Albert Simonin had to invent forty peripheral scenes, which only confuse and weigh down the whole, already severely handicapped by a lack of ease and lightness.
Arsène Lupin consists of four or five hundred shots, each one more carefully photographed than the previous, all very pretty and well composed. The result nonetheless is a film that has no line, no rhythm, that doesn’t breathe. We spend our time looking at the rare books, the furniture, the bath, the gramophone, the clothing. The total effect is soft, lacking vigor and strength; the important things are too light; and what should be light is too heavy.
Arsène Lupin is a bottle of mineral water; it refreshes and sparkles, it’s true, but we’d have preferred champagne.
We should get to the positives. Liselotte Pulver is charming and Otto Hasse is very good. What saves the film, and justifies it absolutely, is Robert Lamoureux, who, seen here for the first time in color, is magnificent. Look at his nervous face, his lucid and profound expression. Lamoureux could have portrayed the real Lupin perfectly, with his anger and despair, energetic, alert and dynamic, ferocious, sentimental to the point of tears, vengeful and cruel, that admirable Lupin whose film remains to be made. Lamoureux is more than an entertainer. I am certain that he is a dramatic actor who would be able to fascinate and move us, who is capable of both violence and lyricism. He would be marvelous in the Bande à Bonnot or playing a tragic anarchist. He could have done Casque d’Or. He deserves good roles. It is to Becker’s credit that he chose him and gave him a chance to show his mettle.
—1957
Jacques Becker’s films always remind me of that phrase of Valery’s, “Taste is made up of a thousand distastes.” When Becker talks about the next films he’s going to make, the phrase that recurs most often is “Watch out.” He told me on the telephone not long ago, “I’m going to make The Three Musketeers, but watch out, the film will have to stop when the diamond studs are returned; that will already be two hours…” This statement sums up Becker: the “Watch out,” and the concern with length.
Le Trou is a superb film, superbly conceived, written, directed, edited, and mixed. Fortunately, it is the best of Becker’s films—fortunately, because the critics who are in this instance acting as if they are lawyers can read a propitious last will and testament.
It is indeed a testament, and there are few enough films in which we can sense to such a degree the artist’s reflections all through the process.
Becker was the most reflective filmmaker of his generation, and the most scrupulous; he asked himself the most questions. If criticism taught him nothing, it was because he had already assessed and reassessed all the problems in his own head. For a long time he was assistant-director to Jean Renoir, who liked to let him do cameos. In Boudu, Becker, young and thin, sits on a bench, puts his head in his hands, reflects, raises his arms toward heaven and declaims, “Poet, take thy lute and give me a kiss.” In La Grande Illusion, he is an English officer who crushes his watch in rage rather than have it confiscated by the Germans.
This is Becker as revealed by Renoir, the great revealer: restless, anguished, elegant, lyrical, nervous, tormented.
In conceiving, shooting, and editing Le Trou, Becker had to have been very much on his guard; we feel it in each shot. What was he on guard against, this man who regards making a film as a kind of “fighting expedition” in the middle of the jungle, an enterprise fraught with obstacles and full of traps every step of the way? First of all, he was on his guard against the “small, closed group of men,” a trap that has been fatal for not a few of his colleagues. The second trap: “the heavy-handedness of the tough” which might lead to exchanges of limpid looks and a reverse sentimentality. The third trap, one of the most difficult to avoid, is the “vocabulary of jail,” or “poetic gutter talk.”
Becker avoided all the traps, and Le Trou seems to be as above criticism in its details as it is in its overall conception. Some will perhaps deplore its limitations but the reproach is pointless. Becker was a limited filmmaker, deliberately so; he was a man who knew his own limits, he imposed them on himself; sometimes he tried to surpass them, often he respected them. But he always felt them and they gave us the best moments of his work (Goupi Tonkin in a tree, the suicide of Raymond Rouleau in Falbalas, the doe’s eyes in Edouard et Caroline, the guillotine in Casque d’Or, etc.).
A naïve filmmaker has almost no script problems to resolve since he is himself easily taken in by the story he is telling; he is the first sucker, the first audience. A philosophical filmmaker who’s trying to express general ideas obviously has to construct his own story so that it will be a vehicle for his ideas. Again in this case, there are few problems. But Becker was neither a naive nor a philosophical filmmaker; he was a filmmaker, pure and simple, preoccupied only by the problems of his art.
Essentially he wanted to achieve an exactitude of tone, refining it more and more until it became evident, clear. Like all filmmakers who question themselves intensively, he eventually knew much more about what he wanted to avoid than what he wanted to get at. He hated the kind of cinema that might be called abusive: bombastic, erotically exploitative, violent, a mechanical raising of the tone of voice.
Since he was on guard against the exceptional, he constantly imagined himself in the place of his characters, and quite naturally, he began to trace his own portrait from film to film. But here again, watch out: even if you have to know yourself pretty well in order to film only what you know well, it doesn’t make you infallible. Becker didn’t realize he was Max the Liar, and that’s what the power of Grisbi comes from; when he tried to solve the “Lupin problem” with the “Grisbi solution,” he got soft and transformed a strong personality into a weak one.
Lupin was the end of a road, the death of a character whose career had begun with Dernier Atout (with Raymond Rouleau’s features), continued with Goupi Monsieur, a mischievous offhand personality, nice, likable, a little too pleasant a Beckerian hero. Becker was obliged to start again from zero, to prospect other territory, and the result was Montparnasse 19, in which he freely accepted constraint in his portrait of a strong, even excessive, personality. Did the alcoholic genius Modigliani drink because he was a genius, or was he a genius because he drank?
The production problems of such a film were so numerous that Becker avoided them more than he resolved them. Montparnasse 19 is a slalom, a work so negative that Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “This is not a film, it’s a description of the fear of making a film.”
All of which doesn’t take away from the fact that the perfection of Le Trou owes much to Montparnasse 19, as if Becker’s last film was the positive side of the earlier one. From now on we should no longer speak of cautious talent, but of genius, the triumph of something unique and fully realized that other filmmakers have not achieved: a total simplicity joined to a precision of tone that never falters. In Le Trou there is nothing but the exact look, the alive movement, authentic faces against neutral walls, an utterly natural manner of speaking. “Divide and conquer” is the motto of Becker’s camera. It’s as agile as it is careful; one by one it pulls apart and separates the difficulties it faces throughout this wonderfully controlled movie.
The notion of control seems to me to be very important. A film should not necessarily be dominated by its director; it can even dominate him at times—but the work that goes into it, particularly its length, must be controlled. Le Trou revolves precisely around these well-known problems of length. What moments should one film? What ellipses should one allow? In all of his films, during the writing, the shooting, and the editing, Becker had to face the problem of cutting, summarizing, contracting.
Le Trou was his perfect subject because there were no ellipses to be made—everything counted equally, everything had the same importance, the same power. One forgets one has been sitting for two-and-a-half hours because the film moves forward without any pauses or digressions. Every movement, every picture moves the action onward. For the five characters in Le Trou, there is only one goal and only one way to reach it. They advance toward freedom as Becker advances toward the appearance of pure documentary.
This documentary pretense along with the overturning of its usual proportions—we are dealing again with the question of length—is the essential mark of the modern filmmaker who is also polemicist, whose work is at least partly critical. In Le Trou there is, as a consequence, as there is in the best recent films, an aspect of the experimental. Let’s be thankful that the experiment was conclusive and resulted in a perfect spectacle.
Becker was a film lover. You could feel, even after twenty years spent at his trade, how overwhelmed he was to have fulfilled his adolescent dream of making movies. At the end of Le Trou it is a moving experience to watch his son, Jean Becker, suddenly rise from the depths just as Edouard Dhermite-Cocteau emerges from the waves in Le Testament d’Orphée.
—1960
He invented his own tempo. He loved fast cars and long meals; he shot two-hour films on subjects that really needed only fifteen minutes; he talked on the telephone for hours.
He was scrupulous and reflective and infinitely delicate. He loved to make detailed films about ordinary things—a misplaced jacket, a lottery ticket. But he gladly and courageously moved beyond his limits several times—at the end of Casque d’Or, in Montparnasse 19, and in Le Trou.
He paid strict attention to all the new films and the new filmmakers; he was quick to show admiration and affection. He was a stranger to professional jealousy. He admitted readily that others could practice his craft. Yet, what worries haunted his last years!
Since he was a slow worker, given to reflection, he often went beyond his estimated budget. With his three last films, interruptions caused by illness aggravated the situation and affected his relationships with the producers.
In the final period, his wonderful face had grown as gray as steel, as the metallic color automobiles are painted.
I met him after my first film had just come out and he was completing Le Trou. He told me, “Listen to me, be sure to put a little money aside.”
I’ve never had the courage to repeat my last conversation with him, on the telephone, two weeks before he died. Françoise Fabian picked up the phone. I asked her how he was and offered to do any errands or anything else. She said, “He is too sick to speak to you.” I heard him say, “What’s that?” and then he took the receiver. He had difficulty speaking: “Well, it’s true, I’m not very well, but don’t tell them. They won’t give me any more work.”
I have hesitated to tell that story but I decided to do so to show the cruelty of our profession and, indeed, the cruelty of all show business.
—1961
Not quite ten years ago, on an afternoon when I was dying to be at the movies rather than in school, our literature professor came into the classroom and said, “Last night I saw the stupidest film in the world, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. There’s a character in it who resolves his romantic problems by driving eighty miles an hour. I can’t think of anything more grotesque.” The critics were not any kinder. The public didn’t come, or if they did, it was only to smirk at every one of Cocteau’s lines. The producer, Raoul Ploquin, was ruined, and it took him seven years to recover.
The Cinéma d’Essai has just put Bresson’s film on the program as part of a retrospective, and I hear that the attendance is greater than for any other film, that the audiences are quiet, and sometimes even applaud. To quote Cocteau, the movie “has won its case in the appeals court.” After its spectacular commercial failure, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was shown in film clubs and almost all the critics made their amends. Today, now that Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest) has won over the last holdouts, Bresson is considered one of the three or four greatest French filmmakers.
His first film, Les Anges du Péché (The Angels of Sin), from a screenplay by Father Raymond Bruckberger, with dialogue by Jean Giraudoux, won universal approval when it appeared in 1943. In Les Dames, Bresson started from an episode in Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste—the adventure of Madame de la Pommeraye and the Marquis des Arcis. The adaptation is faithful and very restrained. It is faithful to the degree that entire sentences of Diderot remain unchanged. It is common to underestimate the importance of the role of Cocteau, who was on this occasion a rewriter of genius. One example: Diderot: “The history of your heart is word by word the history of mine.” Cocteau: “The history of your heart is word for word the sad story of mine.” If we read the two sentences aloud, it has to be admitted that Cocteau improved on Diderot; he added the music.
In Diderot’s story, all the characters are base. Madame de la Pommeraye is vengeance itself, a pure Racine character (pure in the sense that Phèdre is pure), and Madame Duquenoi and her daughter, the pious ladies, push duplicity to the point of going to confession assuming that the Marquis will corrupt their confessor and find out everything. When Diderot’s hostess finishes her tale, Jacques’ teacher says, “My dear hostess, you tell the story very well, but you still have a long way to go in dramatic art. If you want your young girl to be interesting, you must teach her simplicity, and show her to us as the innocent victim, against her will, of her mother and of Madame de la Pommeraye, and show us that the crudest things are done to her…When you introduce a character into a scene, his role must be singular. You have sinned against the rules of Aristides, Horace, Vida and Le Bossu.” What is most astonishing about Cocteau’s and Bresson’s adaptation, why it is at the same time faithful and unfaithful, is that they took the observations of Jacques’ teacher into account: in the film, Agnès is unequivocal, she is the innocent victim of Helene. The lion’s share of responsibility goes to Cocteau; from the very first exchange, his mark is everywhere: “Have I not succeeded in distracting you? Are you suffering?” And later: “There is no such thing as love, only its proofs.” And further: “I love gold, it is like you: hot, cold, clear, somber, incorruptible.” But if one doesn’t know Diderot’s text, this could easily be missed. Just as Giraudoux gave Les Anges du Péché its dynamism, Cocteau endows Les Dames with life. We cannot fail to be struck by the similarities between the films that Cocteau has himself made since 1945 and this one. The relationship between Paul Bernard and Elina Labourdette in Les Dames is exactly the same as between Josette Day and Jean Marais in La Belle et le Bête (Beauty and the Beast). There is between them a love that leads to total submission and devotion. Maria Casares reminds us inevitably of Nicole Stéphane in Les Enfants Terribles as she pronounces those sentences that are Cocteau’s trademark: “And above all, don’t thank me” or “Don’t pull down my supports.”
To get away from the monotony of the usual labels that are applied to Cocteau, we should think hard about his realism. It starts with the “spoken” side of his dialogues, which sometimes make us smile: “I can’t receive you, come in.” The sharp sense of realism, when it’s pushed to its limits, introduces the eccentric. Twenty years after Les Enfants Terribles, Cocteau can film it without changing a word of the dialogue and the actors can deliver it with extraordinary truth. An excellent example, which borders on the baroque but without being ridiculous, is a scene where Maria Casares walks down a staircase talking to Paul Bernard, who is escaping by the elevator: “Why are you leaving? I don’t like the piano…”
Bresson’s part is not negligible, however. Though it was begun before the Liberation, the film was abandoned, then taken up again and completed to all intents and purposes, then really started again, several months later. The direction remains, despite the intervening years, very abstract. Cocteau himself remarked; “This isn’t a film; it’s the skeleton of a film.” We are seduced by Bresson’s intentions rather than by his execution. Les Dames is an exercise in style, like the book Madame de…But if, with Louise de Vilmorin, our admiration is easily and facilely elicited, it is the opposite with Bresson, whose stubbornness and laborious work of refining finally commands our respect.
I think Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, in which every shot is as true as a handful of earth—the earth of Georges Bernanos, its author—is Bresson’s best film. We shall have to wait for La Princesse de Clèves,* which he’s going to make next year, to know Robert Bresson’s own real personality at last and assess his talent—on his own this time, without Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Bernanos.
—1954
The importance of this film will make it worth returning to more than once in the coming weeks. I do not expect to do justice to this major work with these notes written hastily after a first viewing.
In my opinion, Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped) is not only Robert Bresson’s most beautiful film but also the most important French film of the past ten years. (Before I wrote that sentence, I listed on a piece of paper all the films that have been made by Renoir, Ophuls, Cocteau, Tati, Gance, Astruc, Becker, Clouzot, Clément, and Clair since 1946.)
Now I regret that I wrote a few months ago, “Bresson’s theories are always fascinating but they are so personal that they fit only him. The future existence of a ‘Bresson school’ would shake even his most optimistic observers. A conception of cinema that is so theoretical, mathematical, musical, and above all ascetic could not give rise to a general insight.” Today I must disavow those sentences. Un Condamné à Mort seems to me to reduce to nothing a certain number of accepted ideas that governed filmmaking, all the way from script writing to direction.
In many films nowadays we find what is commonly called “a touch of bravura.” What that means is that the filmmaker was thought to be courageous, that he tried to surpass himself in one or two scenes. By this token, Un Condamné, which is a stubborn film about stubbornness, made by a stubborn native of the Auvergne, is the first movie of utter bravura. Let us try to see how it differs from all the others we’ve seen over the years.
Bresson’s remark, “Cinema is interior movement,” is frequently quoted. Did he make the statement, rather too hastily interpreted as his profession of faith, for the pleasure of leading the theoreticians down the garden path? The commentators have decided that it is his characters’ interior lives, their very souls, that preoccupy Bresson, while in fact it may be something more subtle: the movement of the film, its rhythm. Jean Renoir often says that cinema is an art more secret than painting, and that a film is made for three people. I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are not three people in the world who don’t find Bresson’s work mysterious. It took a complete lack of awareness on the part of the daily reviewers to talk about the weaknesses of the actors in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne. However, the actors’ work in a Bresson film is beyond notions of “correct” or “wrong.” Their work essentially suggests a timelessness, a certain posture, a “difficulty with the fact of existing,” a quality of suffering. Probably Bresson is an alchemist in reverse: he starts from movement in order to reach immobility, he screens out the gold to gather the sand.
For Bresson, films both past and present are only a skewed image of theater, and acting is exhibitionism. He thinks that in twenty years people will go to see movies to see how “the actors played in those days.” We know that Bresson directs his actors by holding them back from acting “dramatically,” from adding emphasis, forcing them to abstract from their “art.” He achieves this by killing their will, exhausting them with an endless number of repetitions and takes, by almost hypnotizing them.
With his third film, Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, Bresson realized that he’d prefer to do without professional actors, even beginners, in favor of amateurs chosen for their appearance—and also their “spirit”—new creatures who don’t bring any habits with them, or false spontaneity, bringing, in fact, no “art” at all. If all Bresson did was kill the life and the actor that’s inside every person in order to bring before his camera individuals who recite deliberately neutral words, his work would be an interesting experiment. But he goes further. With amateur interpreters who know nothing about theater, he creates the ultimately real character, whose every gesture, look, attitude, reaction and word—not one of which is louder than the other—is essential. The whole takes on a form that makes the film.
Psychology and poetry have no part in his work. It’s all about obtaining a certain harmony out of the various elements which act on each other, providing an infinity of relations: the acting and the sound, looks and noises, settings and lighting, commentary and music. It adds up to a Bresson film, a kind of miraculous success that defies analysis and, when it works perfectly, arouses a new and pure emotion.
It is clear that Bresson’s films, because he takes a direction that is radically different from that of his colleagues, have a harder time making contact with the public than those films that arouse emotion by less noble and more facile, more theatrical means. For Bresson, as well as Renoir, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, cinema is spectacle, certainly, but the author of Journal wants his spectacle to be very particular, to have its own laws, not follow borrowed rules.
Un Condamné à Mort is a minute-by-minute account of a condemned man’s getaway. Indeed, it is a fanatical reconstruction of an actual event, and Commander Devigny, the man who lived the adventure thirteen years ago, never left the set, since Bresson kept asking him to show the anonymous actor who portrayed him how you hold a spoon in a cell, how you write on the walls, how you fall asleep.
But it isn’t actually a story, or even an account or a drama. It is simply the minute description by scrupulous reconstruction of what went into the escape. The entire film consists of closeups of objects and closeups of the face of the man who moves the objects.
Bresson wanted to call it Le Vent souffle où il veut (The wind blows where it will), and it was a perilous experiment; but it became a successful and moving film, thanks to Bresson’s stubborn genius. He figured out how to buck all existing forms of filmmaking and reach for a new truth with a new realism.
The suspense—there is a certain suspense in the film—is created naturally, not by stretching out the passage of time, but by letting it evaporate. Because the shots are brief and the scenes rapid, we never have the feeling that we have been offered ninety privileged moments of Fontaine’s sentence. We live with him in his prison cell, not for ninety minutes but for two months, and it is a fascinating experience.
The laconic dialogue alternates with the hero’s interior monologue; the passages from one scene to another are carried out with Mozart’s assistance. The sounds have a hallucinatory quality: railroads, the bolting of doors, footsteps, etc.
In addition, Un Condamné is Bresson’s first perfectly homogeneous film. There is not a single spoiled shot; it conforms to the author’s intentions from beginning to end. The “Bresson acting style,” a false truthfulness that becomes truer than true, is practiced here even by the most minor characters. With this film, Bresson is acclaimed today by those who hissed Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne eleven years ago.
—1956
To the degree that Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé is radically opposed to all conventional directorial styles, it will, I believe, be better appreciated by audiences who go to the movies only occasionally, say once a month, than by the nonmovie-loving but more assiduous public whose sensibilities are often confused by the rhythm of American films.
What is striking when one sees the film for the first time is the constant contrast between what the work is and what it would be, or would have been, if it had been made by another filmmaker. At first all one sees are its deficiencies, and for a while one is tempted to redo the cutting and indicate additional shots so that the film would resemble “what a film is supposed to be.”
Indeed, everybody pointed out the lack of any establishing shots—one would never know what Fontaine saw through his tiny window or from the roof of the prison. Thus, at the end of a first viewing, surprise might win out over admiration. And André Bazin felt moved to explain that it was easier to describe what the film was not than what it was.
It really must be seen again to appreciate its beauty perfectly. On second viewing, nothing any longer gets in the way of our keeping up, second by second, with the film’s movement—it’s incredibly swift—and walking in Leterrier’s or Bresson’s still-fresh footprints, whichever of them left them.
Bresson’s film is pure music; its essential richness is in its rhythm. A film starts at one point and arrives ultimately at another. Some films make detours, others linger calmly for the satisfaction of drawing out a pleasant scene, some have noticeable gaps, but this particular film, once set on its perfectly straight path, rushes into the night with the same rhythm as a windshield wiper; its dissolves regularly wipe the rain of images at the end of each scene off the screen. It’s one of those films which can be said not to contain a single useless shot or a scene that could be cut or shortened. It’s the very opposite of those films that seem like a “montage,” a collection of images.
Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé is as free-style and nonsystematic as it is rigorous. Bresson has imposed only unities of place and action; it’s not only that he has not tried to make his public identify with Leterrier, he has made such identification impossible. We are with Leterrier, we are at his side; we do not see everything he sees (only what relates to his escape), but never do we see anything more than he does.
What this amounts to is that Bresson has pulverized classic cutting—where a shot of someone looking at something is valid only in relation to the next shot showing what he is looking at—a form of cutting that made cinema a dramatic art, a kind of photographed theater. Bresson explodes all that and, if in Un Condamné the closeups of hands and objects nonetheless lead to closeups of the face, the succession is no longer ordered in terms of stage dramaturgy. It is in the service of a preestablished harmony of subtle relations among visual and aural elements. Each shot of hands or of a look is autonomous.
Between traditional directing and Bresson’s there lies the same space as between dialogue and interior monologue.
Our admiration for Robert Bresson’s film is not limited to his wager—to rest the entire enterprise on a single character in a cell for ninety minutes. The tour de force is not all. Many filmmakers—Clouzot, Dassin, Becker, and others—might have made a film that was ten times more thrilling and “human” than Bresson’s. What is important is that the emotion, even if it is to be felt by only one viewer out of twenty, is rarer and purer and, as a result, far from altering the work’s nobility, it confers a grandeur on it that was not hinted at at the outset.
The high points of the film rival Mozart for a few seconds. Here, the first chords of the Mass in C Minor, far from symbolizing liberty, as has often been written, give a liturgical aspect to the daily flushing of the toilet buckets.
I don’t imagine that Fontaine is a very likable personality in Bresson’s mind. It isn’t courage that incites him to escape but simply boredom and idleness. A prison is made to escape from, besides which, our hero owes his success to luck. We are shown Lieutenant Fontaine, about whom we shall know nothing more, in a period of his life when he is particularly interesting and lucky. He talks about his act with a certain reserve, a bit like a lecturer telling us about his expedition as he comments on the silent movies he has brought back: “On the fourth, in the evening, we left the camp…”
Bresson’s great contribution clearly is the work of the actors. Certainly James Dean’s acting, which moves us so much today, or Anna Magnani’s, may risk our laughter in a few years, as Pierre-Richard Wilm’s does today, while the acting of Laydu in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne and of Leterrier in Un Condamné will grow more forceful with time. Time always works for Bresson.
In Un Condamné the Bresson style of directing achieves its finest results. We are no longer offered the quiet voice of the little parish priest of Ambricourt, or the gentle look of the “prisoner of the holy Agony,” but the clear, dry diction of Lieutenant Fontaine. With his gaze as direct as that of a bird of prey, he hurls himself on the sacrificial sentinel like a vulture. Leterrier’s acting owes nothing to Laydu’s. “Speak as if you were talking to yourself,” Bresson commanded him. He exerts all his effort to filming the face, or, more accurately, the seriousness of the human countenance.
“The artist owes a great debt to the countenance of man; if he cannot manage to evoke its natural dignity, he should at least attempt to conceal its superficiality and foolishness. Perhaps there’s not a single foolish or superficial person on this earth, but simply some who give that impression because they are ill at ease, who have not found a corner of the universe in which they feel well.” This marvelous reflection of Joseph von Sternberg’s is, to my mind, the most apt comment on Un Condamné.
To think that Bresson will be an influence on French and foreign contemporary filmmakers seems highly unlikely. Nonetheless, we clearly see the limitations of the other cinema to the advantage of this film. The risk is that it may make us too demanding of the cruelty of Clouzot, the wit of René Clair, the carefulness of René Clément. Much remains to be discovered about film art, and some of it can be found in Un Condamné.
—1956
It’s been some time since the public stopped being prejudiced against films made from famous novels. Today it accepts a lack of fidelity to the spirit of the original, as well as to the letter (Le Diable au Corps, La Symphonie Pastorale). It is taken for granted that there is no problem in adapting literary works. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if a filmmaker declares that he is inspired by a book to make “something quite distinct,” what he makes should be marked by the same degree of ambition displayed in the original work (as in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne). It is not permissible to diminish the work one adapts; but this is the only criterion I would suggest.
Raymond Queneau was the first to have the idea of basing a film on Louis Hémon’s Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis. René Clément read the book, didn’t like it very much, agreed to shoot it after much hesitation, and entrusted the adaptation to Jean Aurenche. Unfortunately I don’t know anything, nor will I ever, about Aurenche’s treatment. Clément didn’t like it and decided to do the treatment himself with Hugh Mills, an English scenarist, leaving the dialogue to be edited by Queneau. In the course of the work, the novel’s title was cut in half—the goddess of vengeance was relegated to the closet and Monsieur Ripois appeared sans Nemesis.
This is the scenario: Monsieur Ripois (Gérard Philipe) is a Frenchman who has moved to London and is on the point of getting a divorce. Taking advantage of his wife Catherine’s absence, he has persuaded a young woman, Patricia (Natasha Parry), and a friend of hers (Valerie Hobson) to come to his wife’s apartment. When Pat resists the idea of a flirtation, he starts a long confession of his love affairs. There was Anne (Margaret Johnston), his office manager, whom he seduced just to have peace during his working hours: all he did was create an office atmosphere in his private life. Next there was Mabel (Joan Greenwood), whom he promised to marry but then moved out on three days after their engagement. Next came a French prostitute, Marcelle, a good girl whom he lived off for a while until one day he took off with her savings. There was also Diana (Diana Decker), a neighbor, and then Catherine, whom he married for her money, and now finally there is Patricia, who is still resisting him. Just as she is about to give in, Ripois fakes a suicide and accidentally wounds himself. Catherine will be made to think that he only wanted to die because of her. For the rest of his life, she will push the wheelchair from which Ripois can do nothing but watch the women go by.
Hémon’s book is a kind of masterpiece. It makes us think of Queneau, the Queneau of the great days, of Odile. Who is Amédée Ripois? He is the opposite of Don Juan; women do not appeal to him, there is nothing of the seducer about him, yet he has had numerous affairs. Ripois is the opposite number of Drieu la Rochelle’s Gilles, a manic, obsessed, quintessential philanderer. Gilles’s behavior toward women is built on the mechanism of seduction; his sexual life operates as murder does with Landru-Verdoux. Instead of hearts, they have computers; strictly organized filing systems that keep track of their loves. Louis Hémon, on the other hand, had enough heart and soul for two. Behind all that is sordid, pitiless, and cruel in his book, there is something even greater than generosity: the goodness of a man who was also a great writer. This goodness, Hémon’s true and real feelings, and his vision are expressed by a marvelous character, a young girl named Ella, whose suicide leads Ripois to become aware of what a failure his life has been. Probably out of a snobbish fear of creating melodrama, Clément dropped this character, evidently thinking it more sophisticated to adopt the tone of ironic comedy à la Alec Guinness.
Just as the portrait of Dorian Gray grew uglier as its model lost his purity, so Ripois’ problems become more numerous and increasingly grave as the list of women he has humiliated grows longer. Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis is a book about intrinsic justice: Ripois could not bring himself to pity Winifred when she was poor and starving, so he in turn will know the pangs of hunger.
At the sight of all the luxury on display in London society, Ripois asks himself, “How come I haven’t got my share?” Later, “You’ve had more than your share of love. And what have you done with it?” I could give many examples to show that Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis, like The Red and the Black, is constructed in two parts: the themes in the first half are reexamined in the second. A careful reading shows convincingly that without its second part the novel would lack all meaning.
In remaining faithful only to the first half of the book, Clément has committed a fatal error, just as if he had cut one of its two verses out of a poem. He has torn off the fly’s wings and then is surprised that it can’t fly any more. His initial mistake was to change the first names. When Amédée Ripois becomes André Ripois, he loses the essence of his power and truth. Hémon’s Ripois was a monster, Clément’s is a cynical buffoon. (It brings to mind the pleasant film Kind Hearts and Coronets, by which Clément is a bit too obviously inspired.) Clément has confused cruelty and cynicism, mistaken the container for the content. Drawing the portrait of a man with no soul, he forgot to include any part of his own. Monsieur Ripois (Knave of Hearts in the United States) is a Ripois film; like its chief character it has no soul.
The dulling of the cutting edge of the story is matched by the film’s writing style. Whereas the style of the novel was graceful, incisive, rapid, the film’s is ponderous, plodding, sometimes heavy-handed. (I am thinking about how poverty in London is painted in an extraordinary passage in the book, and also the part about the prostitute, Marcelle.)
Clément’s talent is as an imitator. La Bataille du Rail was an imitation of sobriety (Malraux’s L’Espoir [Man’s Hope] multiplied by ten), just as Le Château de Verre was an imitation of rigor and elegance (a second Dames du Bois de Boulogne), Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) imitated the cruelties of childhood.
When in his adaptation he suppressed everything that was moving in Hémon’s book, Clément behaved like the pseudo-intellectuals with which French cinema is overpopulated, half-educated scholars for whom the height of genius is to remove from art anything that comes from the heart. The result is a vogue for grayish, thin soup on the order of Les Orgueilleux (The Godless), Jeux Interdits, Thérèse Raquin, Le Blé en Herbe—formless films in which the absence of any directive idea qualifies them to be called by our critics phenomenological, demystifying, indictments, merciless social investigations.
Faithful to the policy of the frog who wants to make himself bigger than the bull, René Clément didn’t try to set straight the journalists who saw in Louis Hémon a second-rank author whose famous folk tale Maria Chapdelaine had won him fame. Hémon’s Journal has not been published in France, although it appeared in England, but he wrote several books, including Battling Malone and Colin-Maillard. I believe Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis is the masterpiece of this melancholy, alcoholic Frenchman who killed himself by walking onto the railroad tracks before an oncoming train in the Canadian countryside.
Having betrayed Hémon, Clément betrayed Queneau. He included only a few of the exchanges of dialogue that Queneau wrote, notably a scene in which Ripois is giving a French lesson without noticing that his English pupil is quoting Mallarmé to him.
Audiences who haven’t read Hémon’s novel will find in Monsieur Ripois (sans Nemesis) a brilliant and enjoyable film, but they won’t be able to measure the contrast in subtlety, intelligence, and, above all, in sensitivity that separates the novel from its adaptation. They won’t know that the filmmaker was tinkering with a masterpiece.
—1954
Of the two or three French films presented at Cannes, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso is naturally the best.
Clouzot, whose avocation is painting, has wanted to make a film with his friend Pablo Picasso for a long time. They were held back as long as they were by a fear of having to respect the conventions of the “art film”—didacticism, dissection of canvases, the recounting of anecdotes, of being boring by having repeatedly to show first the artist at work and then his finished canvas.
A special ink made in America that was sent to Picasso by some friends settled this last problem. Clouzot was able to place the camera, not behind Picasso’s back or next to him, but behind the canvas. Instead of watching Picasso paint, as would a visitor to his studio, we are present during the pure creative act without the intrusion of any external or picturesque element. This purity, this respect for the artist and his material, is pushed so far that there is no commentary to “instruct” or distract us. Only the music of Georges Auric accompanies the canvases. Planned as a ten-minute short subject, the film finally expanded to an hour and a half. Le Mystère Picasso begins in black-and-white on a normal screen; then it uses color; and finally the screen is expanded to show us the large canvases in CinemaScope.
The film, unique both in conception and realization, was photographed by Claude Renoir. It is his most beautiful work since he filmed his uncle’s unforgettable Carrosse d’Or.
Clouzot has deliberately removed himself from this film, which will not be perceived by the general public as the tour de force it is. He has placed his cinematographic expertise at the service of one of today’s greatest painters, along with his painstakingly achieved and self-confident technique. All their substance is at the disposal of the artist’s achievements.
Le Mystère Picasso is a film that serves painting in general, and modern painting in particular. Once they’ve seen it, Picasso’s detractors will no longer be able to say, “I could do as well,” or, “A really fine draftsman, but no painter…”
The paper Picasso is going to draw or paint on becomes one with the rectangle of cloth we are seated in front of. Indeed, it all takes place as if the artist were working in the movie house, behind the screen, at the very moment that we are watching the film. The experience one has of being present not at the showing of a film, but at a creative act in process, is raised to that level by the fact that Clouzot, as he directed the camera shots, didn’t know what Picasso was going to draw or what place on the cloth he would touch with his brush.
When he discovered how to eliminate everything external to the work of art, to show nothing of Picasso, not even his arm or hand, Clouzot probably thought he was increasing the documentary value of his film. On the contrary, he was turning away from the neat sort of documentary, the “art film,” and showing us a grouping of images as abstract as Norman MacLaren’s drawings on film.
What is striking from the first image on is that we are precisely in the presence of an animated drawing, more beautiful than the ordinary, unusual and poetic but also unreal, and bearing no relation to what we expected, what had been announced, or anything we had known about the great painter. The Picasso mystery remains unsolved, which is why we are by turn amazed and left with a slight feeling of having been deceived. A work by Picasso created before our very eyes—that is a miracle which, if need be, would justify the greatness of cinema. What firmness in the drawing, what perpetual inventiveness, what verve, what a sense of humor; what a pleasure it is to see Picasso erase, begin over again, change, enrich. We imagine Jean Cocteau working on one of his poems doing something very like that: crossing out, substituting words, language pouring forth, images “arriving” as the colors do on the cloth. The film is about poetry and we feel overwhelmed by it.
Wouldn’t we be even more so if Clouzot, aware of this poetry, had treated his film as a documentary? Why didn’t he ask Georges Auric to write a score worthy of Sang d’un Poète (Blood of a Poet), instead of a mixture of comic opera tunes that deafen us?
Clouzot said that he rejected the idea of commentary because painting “cannot be explained in words.” All very well, but wouldn’t he have been wise to devote ten of the ninety minutes to show older or more recent canvases which had been more carefully worked out, were more successful, which would have contrasted with the drawings and canvases the painter had to execute in haste before the camera, in working conditions more like those of a music-hall caricaturist?
Along these lines, the scene where Clouzot is watching over Picasso, getting him to “beat the clock”—that is, complete a painting before the counter on the camera indicates that there is no more film in the chamber—is not in the best taste. It’s a circus act in the midst of a concert.
Despite these reservations, which come to mind only on reflection, not during the film, Le Mystère Picasso is a great work by reason of the calm genius of its character, by the beauty of the film’s material, and because of the filmmaker’s ingenuity.
Le Mystère Picasso was shown at the Festival at seven-thirty and at ten-thirty. At the first showing there were some hostile outbursts and whistling. For fear of widespread booing at the main showing, the publicity director telephoned Saint-Paul-de-Vence at nine o’clock and asked Picasso to come as a reinforcement. He was in his nightshirt getting ready to go to bed, but he agreed to come to Cannes, and he arrived wearing a melon-colored hat.
The reception at the second showing was courteous but reserved, though Picasso and Clouzot were applauded for a long while by the guests when they left.
—1956
Do we still have to prove how important a filmmaker Jean Cocteau is? I would first remind us of his attitude toward other people’s work and toward the public.
His willingness to sign petitions, manifestos, to write prefaces and forewords, even advertising slogans for any work of distinction, was amazing, sometimes shocking. Mainly, I see it as a sign of humility. A proud man is determined not to display himself often; he seldom goes out, he exposes himself very little, and wants to be in demand.
Cocteau, on the other hand, was everywhere, and everything interested him. He helped everyone and all kinds of work. Did that take away from the value of his judgments? I don’t think so. Whether written or spoken, his slogans had poetic precision; they were more than descriptive; they were true to the work or to the artist he supported.
Cocteau was well aware that most persons who came asking for his support were minor talents, but I imagine that what he thought to himself was, “The most mediocre artist is worth more than the best spectator.” He exposed himself constantly, he deliberately chose that role.
Cocteau had a genuine cynicism combined with a basic generosity. An artist through and through, right to the ends of his tucked-up jacket sleeves, he was determined unconditionally to support other artists. Where was the cynicism in that? It was in his extraordinary contempt (never articulated) for the public and the critics—really, for everyone in the theater, for all the spectators, for those who faced the stage or the screen and passed judgment without running any of the risks that those who face them run all the time.
He was kind to everyone and he expected everyone to be kind to him. The slightest criticism wounded him: “I don’t ask them to be sincere, I only ask them to be polite.”
As to Cocteau’s last film, Le Testament d’Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus), the critical notices—copiously worked out by Cocteau himself with his friends—were, most often out of simple kindness, unanimously favorable. They were no less unanimously insincere. The upshot commercially was just what would have happened if the film had been generally panned. It was as if the public could read between the lines. The rejection of Le Testament d’Orphée would appear to have been a collective and unconscious revenge on a man who, unlike the businessmen of show business, thought the public was always wrong. In this case, the public was wrong. Le Testament d’Orphée is worthy of admiration—it is an admirable film.
It is a remake, thirty years after, of Sang d’un Poète, the very same essay on poetic creation looked at afresh and revised. Indisputably, the most beautiful scene in Le Testament, and the most successful, is the meeting of the poet with Oedipus (Jean Marais). But I prefer to stick to three short scenes following one another in the last fifteen minutes of the film, which show that Cocteau, like all great filmmakers, practiced his art totally and worked to satisfy himself, which is the only way to make a good film. The direction is a critique of the scenario and the editing is a critique of the direction.
First Example: The Meeting with Myself
THE POET: I meet this character whom they have turned me into and the character only looks at me when I turn my back. I complain about him to my adopted son who makes fun of me a little.
CEGESTUS: You have been complaining everywhere that if you met him you wouldn’t even want to shake his hand.
THE POET: He hates me.
CEGESTUS: He has no reason to love you. He’s taken enough insults and beatings for you…
THE POET: I’ll kill him.
This beautiful scene, when the poet encounters his double, is, by Cocteau’s testimony, the film’s “hinge,” its spinal column. The first plan was to shoot it on the parapet of Villefranche. Because of the weather, it was switched to the Rue Obscure, under the arches.
Here is a perfect example of an invention that was probably intoxicating. The idea is strong and beautiful. Whether it occurs to the filmmaker a year or six months or a week before the camera’s first turn, it is an enormous satisfaction even before he’s begun production.
At last, though, when it comes down to the routine reality of shooting, an idea of this kind doesn’t turn out to be terribly enjoyable to shoot. Only the result counts. The scene has to be broken up enough so that the intention is clear, and you don’t get bogged down with constantly freezing your characters in motion, or with freezing the moving camera or the glances of the actors. Cocteau had to change clothes with his stand-in (a meteorologist named Belloeil). It is hard, unsatisfying work.
When shooting such a scene, there is no room for improvisation, nothing must be left to chance. It is simply a matter of filming the eight or ten shots that have been planned in the clearest and cleanest way possible.
Here we are dealing with the cinema of efficiency—Hitchcock cinema—the impeccable execution of visual ideas constructed in a succession of predetermined and virtually sketched-out images. It would be very easy, in fact, to imagine Hitchcock shooting this scene of the “encounter with the double” in a spy story that involved look-alikes.
The happy moment for Cocteau in this case didn’t come when the shooting began, but at the moment the idea was born…“Ah, I will shoot a scene showing the poet encountering himself.”
As a literary concept the idea is uninteresting. As a work of plastic art, yes, it makes us think of Dali’s canvases, but above all it is a great cinematic idea. Its effectiveness on the screen brings back the joy of the very moment when the invention was born, and its beauty is compensation enough for the laboriousness of the shooting.
Second Example: The Intellectual Lovers
A close shot of the poet and Cegestus. We see what they see: a young couple in a loving embrace. Each notes down his impressions in a notebook on the other’s back.
Here is another beautiful idea, whose interest isn’t evident when formulated merely in words. In contrast to the scene preceding it, this one is exciting to film because it can be improved a thousand percent during the shooting.
First, there is the choice of the couple, which can make the idea lovelier, then there is the setting, and finally, the small gestures and the mimicry that add humor. Once again, the clarity of the idea is essential, but this time it will be achieved less by the relations of the scenes to each other than by each individual construction. Clarity and exactness in this case can be verified on the spot, not just a week later on the editing table.
This is also a plastic idea but one which owes nothing to painting. It brings to mind a witty drawing because of the verve of the treatment and its satirical aspects. In his great days, Frank Tashlin made this kind of movie—which had first belonged to Jean Renoir—a cinema of jubilation. In this kind of filmmaking, the first rehearsal is always muddy and unclear; only with about the fifth does it begin to clarify, to become purer and at the same time acquire depth. The entire team around the director follows the work, participates in it, understands it; now improvisation is in the driver’s seat, and the undertaking moves toward the most alive expression possible.
Third Example: The Death of the Poet
Minerva has refused the resuscitated hibiscus that the poet offered her. He draws back: I’m sorry…I’m…I’m sorry. Scarcely has he begun to move away than Minerva brandishes her spear and throws it. A shot of the poet walking. The spear pierces him in the back, between the shoulders.
A frontal shot. The spear has passed through the poet’s body and protrudes from his chest. He brings his hands to it and falls on his knees, then lies on his side, groaning several times over: How horrible!…how horrible…how horrible…
There isn’t even any need to discuss the idea of this scene: it’s the underlying idea of the whole film. At the end of Le Testament d’Orphée, the poet’s blood must flow.
An unpleasant scene to shoot, the least enjoyable in the film. First of all, Minerva’s costume, which appears to be inspired by the rubberized suits of frogmen, was no simple matter. Then there was the matter of the special effects for the spear. It was made of rolled paper, weighing sixty grams, composed of two tubes, one inside the other and fixed so that it would contract by forty centimeters when it reached its target, that is, Cocteau’s back. He was protected by a piece of metal under his jacket. The spear was thrown by its inventor, M. Durin.
The shooting was endless, the workers went into overtime, and there was anxiety and emotional upheaval among the team. And, at the end of work like this, there may be satisfaction at the success of the planned shots, but no deeper satisfaction. At the end of this sort of scene, the special effects, impossible to forget for those who have watched the shooting, give the director pangs of conscience, or at least doubts: Does it work? Will it look foolish?
The stroke of genius that makes this scene work was, in the end, the addition of sound. The enormous roar of a jet taking off accompanies the spear-throwing. The poet will die in the inhuman noise that everybody is familiar with at airports.
I’m not suggesting that he got this idea after the shooting; on the contrary, Cocteau, like all great directors, knows that ideas by themselves are never sufficient, that they must be imposed—“led along,” always with the public in mind. That is why, just before the poet fails to enter Minerva’s hall, we hear the voice of a stewardess saying, “Please fasten your seat belts and put out your cigarettes.” The idea of planes is already present—already, one might say, in the air.
So, since we are discussing the satisfactions in shooting a film, in this scene of the death of the poet, the great moment of joy for the director took place, I’d think, in the editing room, when Cocteau was able to see the flying spear accompanied by the screech of the jet. The quality of this joining of sound and image should have set to rest any doubts he had about the emotional power of the scene. He should have been happy; he should have been, and I believe he was.
—1964
Le Rififi (Rififi in the United States), the first French film by the American filmmaker Jules Dassin, who came to cinema from directing in the theater, is structured like a classical tragedy. Act I: Preparation for a holdup; Act II: “Consummation” of the holdup; Act III: Punishment, vengeance, death.
It isn’t necessary to point out the modest production budget of Le Rififi before I say that I liked the film and intend to praise it, but it may serve some purpose, if only to demonstrate that a film’s success depends more on its director than on massive production resources or the participation of world-renowned actors.
Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I have ever seen. In fact, this is not a minor genre. Dassin shot the film on the street during high winds and rain, and he reveals Paris to us Frenchmen as he revealed London to the English (Night in the City) and New York to the Americans (Naked City). It would be unfair not to credit also the chief cameraman, Agostini, who truly worked miracles under very unusual conditions: the interior shots in actual dark bistros, nighttime exteriors without lights, the platform of the Port-Royal subway station, tiny details of decor, etcetera.
Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect. The two failures are the female casting and the specially written song, which is execrable.
The direction is a marvel of skill and inventiveness. Le Rififi is composed of three bits of rigorously developed bravura. Every shot answers the viewer’s question, “How?” Dassin remains faithful to his style of combining the documentary approach with lyricism. For the past week, the only thing being talked about in Paris was the silent holdup, splendidly soundtracked, in which objects, movements, and glances create an extraordinary ballet around an umbrella placed over a hole pierced through the ceiling of a jewelry store alive with security systems.
Beyond that, the real value of the film lies in its tone. The characters in Le Rififi are not despicable. The relative permissiveness of the French censors allowed Dassin to make a film without compromises, immoral perhaps, but profoundly noble, tragic, warm, human. Behind the smiles of the three actors—Jean Servais’ bitter, Robert Manuel’s sunny, and Jules Dassin’s sad though with bursts of gaiety—we divine the filmmaker, a tender, indulgent man, gentle and trusting, capable of telling us one of these days a more ennobling story of characters who have been better served by their destiny. That is what we must not forget and why we must thank Jules Dassin. It is this consideration that amply justifies the presence at the Cannes Festival of Le Rififi chez les Hommes.
—1954
Jules Dassin considers Celui qui doit mourir (He Who Must Die) the “film of his life,” the first film he really chose to make, and made with complete freedom, a film in which he succeeded in expressing himself totally. Its failure is all the more disturbing since Dassin, in Hollywood, London, and Paris, often earned our admiration by “saving” films that were made to order, little detective stories that he endowed with unusual nobility.
This time there is nothing but nobility, nobility, and more nobility—too much nobility for a film that displays an intellectual confusion seldom equaled in the history of cinema.
Let us take it all in order: at Lycovrissi, a Greek village ruled by the Turks, the villagers are preparing their annual reenactment of the Mystery of the Passion. The priest (Fernand Ledoux) assigns the roles: the local prostitute will be Mary Magdalene; the stuttering shepherd will be Christ; the blacksmith will be Judas; the son of the local landowner, the saddler and the café owner will be respectively Peter, James, and John.
The people of another village that was recently burned by the Turks arrive, led by their priest (Jean Servais). They are dying of weariness and hunger. Fernand Ledoux chases them away, saying that they have cholera. They settle nearby on the Sarakhina and try to build a village, assisted by some of the inhabitants of Lycovrissi who act in the spirit of the characters they have been chosen to personify in the Passion. Everything ends exactly as we had foreseen from the first reel, with Christ being stabbed by Judas. This awakens the population to the universality of human conscience and calls them to a better future of justice and peace.
I must admit that this kind of subject, in which everyday people must transcend themselves by identifying with characters they personify, irritates me because it is so theatrical and so obvious. Knowing in advance what is going to happen, that Judas is going to betray Christ, we pay attention only to how the blacksmith will betray the shepherd. Our inevitable disappointment is heightened since the trail is all the more obvious by being shown to us in closeups. A story interests me far more if I figure out for myself that a particular character is a Christ figure. The references are telegraphed ahead of time in this film that proves—what? That good faith is better than bad? That well-ordered charity begins with others?
The fact is that Dassin is a child. Since children are more spirited, have livelier fantasies, and are more intuitive than adults, Hollywood is a hundred times livelier than our cinema. But when children imitate adults, the result may be Mozart, but it may also be Minou Drouet!
Celui qui doit mourir, adapted from Nikos Kazantsakis’ The Greek Passion by Jules Dassin and Ben Barzman goes beyond the limits of naïveté, simplification and sentimentality. What a waste of energy, courage, and generosity! What a lack of discrimination in this film, influenced by Pudovkin, in which not a single frame attains the grandeur of any randomly chosen shot from Malraux’s L’Espoir.
This plaintive and sorrowful work drips with sentimentality to the point of indecency, as happens when someone tries to make a strong point but gets it backward. Jules Dassin says, “I think everyone should eat all he wants,” without realizing that thus stated this is an obscenity. I know exactly what Dassin would answer: “In today’s world, men and women and children die of hunger every day.” I also believe that it is crucial to make films which show that people still die of hunger, but it is my conviction that misery should be filmed without “ornaments,” filmed as it is, as brutally and cruelly as possible, without any Biblical pretext, without commentary and proof. Instead of filming misery directly, Dassin slaps us with a sermon so heavy that at certain moments the film becomes hateful because of its stupidities—for example, when Maurice Ronet, playing the son of a rich landowner, offers his comrades who are preparing to fight each other some pieces of cheese on a wooden tray. Marie-Chantal registering in the Communist party would do the same thing.
During the film, which I saw twice, I noted this sentence in the dialogue: “The human brain is a fragile machine; one turn too many and it breaks down.” Jules Dassin gave one turn too many to his film; he has mixed everything up, tangled it all together, preaching and plasticity, reflections in mirrors, the lack of bread, rejected lovers, and children who die of cold.
In Paris, yes, in Paris, men and women spend the entire winter sleeping on the sewer grates in the middle of the sidewalks; every year, old people kill themselves when faced with tax statements that they cannot even understand; families of six live in a single room; sick children die for lack of care. And Jules Dassin, an American filmmaker who has emigrated to Paris, Jules Dassin who is gentleness itself, who can burst into tears at a warm handshake, when he had 350 million francs to make the film of his life, went to Greece to make a film about misery there, taking with him a handful of former students of the Cours Simon. And he made a film full of symbols and folklore, a film that went beyond Manichaeism, a film in which the good people are thin and stutter or have tuberculosis and the wicked are fat, healthy, and laugh too loud.
The whole thing is slow-moving, solemn and heavy, complaining. André Obey’s dialogue is theatrical and often vulgar: “You give an account, St. James, of the post office,” or “Your speech was perfect on the spiritual level,” or again, “Cholera…a symbol.”
Almost all the actors are bad, overacting or taking the wrong tack, except for Teddy Bilis, René Lefêvre, and Lucien Raimbourg, who bring a bit of life to their roles. Jules Dassin did considerable work on Pierre Vaneck but I fear that this young actor is going to inherit all of Gérard Philipe’s terrible roles: melancholy consumptives with soft voices and misty eyes. Max Douy’s sets are very successful; Jacques Natteau’s photography very heavy. Apparently, nature—grass, stones, trees, clouds, and water—refused a part in this film, which suffers from a lack of carnality, sensuality, flesh and blood, and from being overly intellectual and theoretical.
Many artists who lack clarity surpass their limitations thanks to good instincts and temperament. But when one of their works is based precisely on clarity, it falls apart and its failure is total.
—1957
Assassins et Voleurs is firmly situated on the side of immorality: the immorality of a cynical plot and script that glorify adultery, theft, injustice, and murder; and, even more, the immorality of its double financial and artistic success, which defies all the rules of good sense and experience. Its success is paradoxical and almost scandalous, as we shall see.
In contrast to all the films that we defend in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Assassins et Voleurs is innocent of any esthetic ambitions. It possesses not the slightest indication of professional conscience: a boat scene supposed to be taking place in the open sea has obviously been shot on the sand; a hotel elevator does not ascend any more than the boat floats; the same setting is made to do for several locations; the long dialogue between Poiret and Serrault, which is divided into ten or twelve segments, was clearly filmed in a single afternoon with two cameras, and so sloppily, to boot, that if we strain a bit we can hear the buses passing by the studio-hangar and the stagehands on the next set chatting cheerfully over their lunch.
Written hastily by an old man confined to a wheelchair, directed in turn by the director, his assistant, and the film’s producer (in other words, not directed at all), Assassins et Voleurs was patched together in a few weeks and judged unshowable by the Parisian distributors. “We can’t put it out here, it’s absolutely unwatchable. Let’s hold the premiere in Vichy.” The Vichy theater operator, flattered at first, screened the film and then indignantly refused to show “that” to “his public,” which is the most indulgent in all France. The gentlemen from Paris raised their voices; the premiere was held, and the evening was a triumph. It broke box-office records everywhere in the provinces. It was decided to show it in Paris only at the end of its French run, so that the critics, who certainly would not fail to run the turkey down, could not sabotage the miraculous catch.
The rest is history. Scheduled for two weeks in six large first-run houses, Assassins et Voleurs got good reviews and ran for four weeks (even longer than its run on the Champs-Elysées), and, with more than 80 million francs in receipts, it is one of the ten winners among the year’s feature films, beating out Carol Reed’s Trapeze, Jean Negulesco’s The Rains of Ranchipur, Henri Decoin’s Folies-Bergères, Yves Ciampi’s Typhoon Over Nagasaki, and a number of international productions.
This is the end of the paradoxes. Sacha Guitry’s film may be a patchwork but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have verve, imagination, swiftness, and a rich inventiveness that we wouldn’t mind finding in more costly and more ambitious productions.
Because some films arrive at a certain moment of time, and may bring together certain relevant elements, they become for the critics—though their authors may not have intended any such thing—symbolic standard-bearing works. Arriving after about ten polished (overly polished), costly (overly costly), ambitious, and indulgent French films, Assassins et Voleurs, with all its imperfections, symbolizes the movie that has been sanely produced, conceived, and directed. Its charm makes up for its lack of means. It doesn’t depend on extravagance as do so many bad films of the time.
The production is very neat because out of necessity there could not be thirty-six ways of shooting any particular scene. Stubborn overcarefulness, too many hesitations, obsession with detail, too many rehearsals and reshots, and too many backup shots can kill any comic sense and freeze any smile. A casual and lighthearted film has to be made with a certain casualness and lightness. That’s why Assassins et Voleurs triumphs at a time when Marcel Carné’s Le Pays d’où je viens, Gérard Philipe’s Till l’espiègle, and Jacques Becker’s Arsène Lupin failed.
This curious film proves that success does not necessarily depend on complication. A really funny and insolent work without too much vulgarity, played by good actors who are not stars and who virtually direct themselves, a film shot almost without a director, which is economical to the point of austerity, is welcome in the midst of productions bogged down in timidity, cowardice, illusions of grandeur, snobbism, and ingrained distrust of the audience.
—1957
The “in” Parisians don’t like mixtures, role swapping, amateurs: Jean Renoir has written a play? It is declared cinematographic, anti-theater. Likewise, Jean Cocteau can only be an acrobat, a jack-of-all-trades, and, if I can believe the tale, the novelist Jean Giraudoux was threatened with being denied an opportunity to write for the theater. These taboos and prohibitions, these narrow labels are the work of mediocrities, fools who are jealous of their own little specialties. In the case of cinema, the fact that it requires complicated equipment is what is most frequently brought up to discourage artists who come from other disciplines.
Sacha Guitry had no such complexes, luckily for French cinema, which owes about a dozen good films to him, the best of which (among those I have managed to see) are: Ceux de chez nous, Le Roman d’un Tricheur, Faisons un Rêve, Désiré, Remontons les Champs-Elysées, Ils étaient neuf Célibataires, Deburau, Assassins et Voleurs, and the last of all, Les Trois font la Paire. Guitry was a quick, once-over-lightly worker; he disliked taking too much time fooling around with a film. He was content with his scripts and sure of his actors; he liked to shoot as quickly and conveniently as possible, sometimes with two cameras running at the same time, taking for granted that a spectacle had to be cinematographic, since it was recorded on film. The expression “filmed theater” was invented to stigmatize directors who dare film a play without inserting street scenes, a chase over rooftops, two speeding automobiles, and a bolting horse. Celui qui doit mourir, by Jules Dassin, adapted from a novel and filmed entirely outdoors, is more a piece of filmed theater than Faisons un Rêve, an absolutely perfect play that could not be improved even by transferring it to the screen.
“It’s either a movie or it isn’t” is the constant refrain. What foolishness! Hasn’t anyone noticed that Italian neorealism—dirty laundry washed in public in Neapolitan alleys—is a direct descendant, not of the films of Carné or Feyder—both “realistic” directors—but of the filmed theater pieces of Marcel Pagnol.
In 1936, Sacha Guitry made four films. Think of it—four films in a single year. Luckily I know all four. Le Nouveau Testament is a comedy of manners about a gigolo and a broken date, and we find out that there are three statues of Joan of Arc in Paris—the source of a whole flood of hilarious misunderstandings. Le Roman d’un Tricheur, rightly considered to be Guitry’s masterpiece, is a picaresque film, two-thirds commentary and full of unedited, or never reedited, brainstorms. Faisons un Rêve, which I have already referred to, is wonderfully acted by Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, and Raimu in a single setting. Le Mot de Cambronne is a medium-length film, remarkable for its inventiveness and humor.
Seeing these films again today and holding them up against the false masterpieces of the same period is an instructive lesson. Guitry was a true filmmaker, more gifted than Duvivier, Grémillon, and Feyder, funnier and certainly less solemn than René Clair.
Guitry weaved through the history of cinema making fun of various fads and proclivities; he never practiced poetic realism, psychological realism, or American-style comedy. He was always Sacha Guitry; that is, he embroidered on themes that were personal to him, and always with a droll sense of a discovery: the benefits of inconstancy in love, the social usefulness of the asocial…thieves, murderers, gigolos, whores…he always dealt with life’s paradoxes and, indeed, because life is paradoxical, Sacha Guitry was a realistic filmmaker.
Cinema survives and/or kills itself by depending upon a certain number of clichés that complicate the task of the scenarists, who are always boxed in in advance. Currently a thief cannot be a likable person unless he robs out of heroism and generosity like Mandrin, Cartouche, or Arsène Lupin. Likewise, an adulterous woman must necessarily be antipathetic unless her husband is a real shit or a cipher, or her lover is a prestigious leading man. If so many films are exasperatingly bad right from the start, it is because of a servile observance of rules that are supposedly dictated by the public’s habits. In the face of this, a viewer doesn’t have to be subversive, merely civilized, to react in reverse and sympathize with the characters the authors wanted us to find odious, so affected and labored are the so-called sympathetic characters.
With Guitry, as with Renoir (with whom he coincides on certain points, for example, a loving misogyny that grows from year to year—the idea that the only thing that counts is the soft skin of the woman you love), the whole notion of sympathetic or antipathetic personalities gives way before a more indulgent but also a clearer view of life as it is: a comedy with a hundred different acts, of which the screen is well suited to offer the most exact reflection.
Renoir’s secret is sympathy, Guitry’s is naughtiness. Their films have much in common in the originality and frankness with which they treat the primary universal subject, the relations between men and women, as well as the second great subject, the relations between masters and servants. Guitry and Renoir share a simplicity that justifies all their fantasies, a sense of realism that adds poetry to all their casualness, never abandoning either of them, a solid pessimism that is scarcely masked and without which a proclaimed love of life renders any work suspect.
The dialogue, love scenes, the emotional relationships in most films are unbelievably false. In Guitry’s films the truth leaps at us suddenly at the end of each scene with such power that we almost jump out of our seats. In Le Nouveau Testament the young gigolo who has been invited to dinner arrives early; the husband may appear at any moment but the gigolo suggests to the old woman, “Come on, let’s make love. Behind the door, very quickly; I swear we have time.” The same character, in Le Roman d’un Tricheur, is an elevator operator; in the elevator, Marguerite Moreno notices him. The elevator disappears from the frame on its way up; downstairs everybody awaits its return but it doesn’t come down. Finally, when it appears, the little operator is gazing at a beautiful new watch he has just been given. Guitry is Lubitsch’s French brother.
After two frankly mediocre films (Toa, Aux Deux Colombes) Guitry gave us a nice surprise, La Poison. The idea is based on an unusual news item: Having decided to kill his wife, a man (Michel Simon) consults a lawyer and leads him to believe that the murder has already been committed. Armed with the “sucker’s” many pieces of free advice, he stabs his wife after arranging all the false clues possible, and to our great joy he is acquitted.
Here is Sacha’s habitual theme: Commit in cold blood, cynically, what is generally done in drunkenness or anger, twist the law and set oneself right with society by playing its game. This time the central thing is the scenes of home life between two old married people,scenes so harsh and cruel that they make us think at certain moments of the best of realistic cinema: L’Atalante by Jean Vigo and Stroheim’s Foolish Wives. The wife, the “poison,” insults Michel Simon, treats him like a fool, like dirt; her churlishness is set off ten times more dramatically by his calm before the murder: here is an outcome whose crudity—literally—is stupefying.
In Les Trois font la Paire, which the dying Sacha Guitry did not even direct, there is no question that Sophie Desmarets, Darry Cowl, Philippe Nicaud, Clément Duhour, and Jean Rigaux gave their best. Why? Quite simply because the dialogue was so right, so true that it couldn’t be spoken badly, and the actors, left to themselves, found the correct tone quite naturally—it was the tone in which the text had been written. It is instructive to recollect the farcical scene in which Jean Rigaux is lying on his deathbed, dressed as a high army officer, in the costume of his favorite role. They called Sacha Guitry pretentious and foppish; yet he knew how to make fun of himself and even of death.
We have a quite recent proof of Sacha Guitry’s delicacy and humanity in the scene in Si Paris nous était conté, when the stand-in for Henry IV, who risked his life every day by “doubling” for his king, returns home after Ravaillac’s crime and is received by his wife in tears. As she kisses him, she says, “At last, we are delivered from this nightmare.”
Finally, as compensation for the immense derision of love that is present in all his work, there is an overwhelming reverence for friendship and admiration. Sacha Guitry’s first film, Ceux de chez nous, “silently” shows us the artists whom the young Sacha admired most: Mirbeau, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Rodin, Dégas, Saint-Saëns, Anatole France. In his final film he renders homage to Simenon, Alfred Jarry, and Michel Simon. The last cinematographic image we have of him is in the prologue of this film, when he telephones his old friend Albert Wilemetz and says goodbye to him, holding his face to one side so that its thinness will not move us too much.
Two years ago, during the shooting of Assassins et Voleurs, I wanted to interview Sacha Guitry. His secretary told me that it would be possible on condition that I prepare my questions and submit them to the master beforehand. Stupidly I refused. What an idiot I was!
—1957
I saw Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon) three times in the space of six months, so there’s nothing mysterious to me about the unfailing enthusiasm it arouses. I know that if I criticize it severely I risk offending my most faithful readers and singling myself out in the worst possible way. When a work is universally admired, one hesitates to run counter to popular opinion. One might be tempted to pretend so as not to stand all alone.
There’s no question that Le Ballon Rouge, a love story about a little boy and a balloon which follows him around everywhere like a puppy, is a carefully made film, and admirably photographed, if not well directed; also, the boy mugs as little as possible. Having said that, there is, in my opinion, neither poetry nor fantasy nor sensitivity nor truth in this film—not real poetry, fantasy, sensitivity, or truth.
When Walt Disney bestowed human speech and reactions on animals, he cheated the animals and the human beings as well. He betrayed La Fontaine by caricaturing him—but then no one takes Disney for a poet.
I believe firmly that nothing poetic can be born derivatively; we should despise modern artifacts which resemble something else: pens that are really cigarette lighters, leatherbound books that are cigarette boxes, etcetera.
Like Walt Disney’s animals, Lamorisse’s Crin Blanc is a counterfeit horse, his reactions are human. Le Ballon Rouge pushes transference to its ultimate. The red balloon that willingly follows the little boy acts like a puppy that acts like a human being. This is Walt Disney to the nth degree. What is wrong with this pretense is precisely that it is artificial, and it sinks deeper into the conceit as the film goes on.
Albert Lamorisse’s films have none of the emotional truth that make Perrault’s Contes or Beauty and the Beast what they are, works that are poetic and moral, both realistic and human. The fact that everything in Le Ballon Rouge is manufactured and phony isn’t so bad as long as it is a matter of being amusing; basically, anything that makes us laugh is all right, even the most facile and vulgar tricks. Where things go wrong is when the director undertakes to move us. Not only does Lamorisse have no respect for the basic rules of fairy tales, he flies in their face in an attempt to give his films a breadth their basic premises never pretend to.
In a fairy tale everything is resolved humanly, things are returned to an earthly order in accord with proven dramatic law. With Lamorisse it’s a different matter. At the end of Crin Blanc, the horse sinks into the sea with the little boy. In Le Ballon Rouge, the balloons carry the child off into the air. These endings are simply means of getting rid of unwieldy premises while trying to give the impression that the idea has been pushed to the ultimate.
Lamorisse believes he is showing us a balloon that is behaving like a friend to the little boy; in fact, it is shown as a servant; it travels three paces behind.
The intervention of the “villains” in both Crin Blanc and Le Ballon Rouge is consummate bad taste. In most of his films, out of fear of being dismissed simply as an “enchanter,” Lamorisse shifts the focus and pretends to raise his fantasy to the level of tragedy. I find the mixture of these genres unacceptable. To make us love his poetic hero more, he has him persecuted by psychological bullies. It is all too simple.
This abuse of power, this overdoing of the pathetic, is causing havoc in every area nowadays. Edith Piaf may be supported by choruses and may force her voice through an echo chamber, but she will never be able to make us believe that a song about a boy and girl who have just committed suicide in a bistro is a Greek tragedy. She sings, “I dry the glasses in the back of the café,” but it isn’t Sarah Bernhardt singing Bach to Racine’s words. I would remind you of Jack Palance’s remark to the producer in The Big Knife: “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that your bombastic statements are out of proportion to what you have to say?”
Yes, Lamorisse, everybody knows that it’s better to tell a serious story lightly than to relate light matters gravely.
In dramatic art, a “telegraphed” effect is the one that comes from a distance and can be seen coming a long way off. The poetry in Le Ballon Rouge is consistently telegraphed, as is the effect of the tearing of Folco’s pants in Crin Blanc. “Anything that isn’t raw is merely decoration,” Cocteau wrote. Lamorisse, who avoids anything raw, never moves beyond decorative art.
Once you understand the formula, it’s quite easy to “make a Lamorisse.” All it takes is to oppose a nice little boy against a few villains, with, as the object of conflict, an appealing little animal or a pretty little “something.”
The child must have something of the animal about him, and the animal something of the child. I suggest the following: A little Laplander loses his white reindeer and, after he has found it again despite the wicked polar explorers, he disappears into the snow on the neck of his animal. Or: The little Brazilian whose sack of coffee has been ripped open by villainous soldiers. The coffee rolls into the sea and the child disappears forever when he jumps into the sea to recover his little treasure. How about the little Chinese who loses his paganism? The little street urchin who loses his breeches?…! But this is already too much fantasy for Lamorisse.
We know Cocteau’s cruel but accurate remark: “Every child is a poet except Minou Drouet.” Le Ballon Rouge is like a film of Minou Drouet made for Marie-Chantal
I would be remiss if I failed to point out that Le Ballon Rouge is one of the most beautiful color films ever made, thanks to the extraordinary work of Edmond Sechan.
—1956
When this Cocteau-Melville film appeared in 1950, it wasn’t like anything else being done in French cinema at the time. But Les Enfants Tenibles brought back the profound, powerful, bewitching charm of the novel, interpreted faithfully, a novel in which all those who were young in the 1930s had recognized themselves.
It’s smart to reissue Les Enfants Terribles now when young audiences are attuned to the poetic cinema of the “children” of those “children,” Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel, Carmelo Bene and others.
Over the years I continue to admire Nicole Stéphane, who spills rather than speaks the role of Elizabeth from her incredibly generous mouth. I also like the wan gravity of Edouard Dhermit as her brother Paul. His acting, as controversial at the time as Nora Gregor’s in La Règle du Jeu, still moves me.
“To love and be loved, that is the ideal…provided, that is, that both involve the same person. The opposite often happens.” In Le Grand Ecart, Jean Cocteau announced six years before the fact the profound subject matter of Les Enfants Terribles.
There is no need to carefully distinguish what is Melville’s and what is Cocteau’s in this four-handed concerto; the former’s calm strength is well served by the latter’s spirited writing. These two artists worked together like Bach and Vivaldi. Jean Cocteau’s best novel became Jean-Pierre Melville’s best film.
The drama of Les Enfants Terribles, one of the few truly olfactory films in the history of cinema (its odor is of children’s sickrooms), progresses and rises in bursts, like a disturbing broken line on a temperature chart. This hospital poetry will never grow out of date, not so long as young and old alike remain capable of being struck by love sickness.
—1974
The cinematographic year now ending has been the richest and most stimulating since 1946. It opened with Fellini’s La Strada, and its apotheosis is Max Ophuls’ Lola Montès.
Like the heroine of its title, the film may provoke a scandal and arouse passions. If we must fight, we shall; if we must polemicize, so be it.
It is whole cinema that must be defended today, a cinema of auteurs which is also a visual pleasure, a cinema of ideas where inventiveness informs each image, a cinema that does not borrow from the prewar period, a cinema that breaks new paths too long forbidden.
Let’s put a brake on our enthusiasm and proceed in orderly fashion, trying to stay objective no matter how little we want to.
The way the narrative is constructed, the way it hurries the chronology, reminds us of Citizen Kane, though now we have the benefits of CinemaScope, a process here used to the maximum of its potential for the first time. Instead of simply leaving his actors to the inhuman framework of the large screen, Ophuls tames the image, divides it, multiplies it, contracts or dilates it according to the needs of his amazing conception. The structure is new as well as daring; it could well confuse the viewer who lets himself become distracted or who comes in the middle. Too bad. There are films that demand undivided attention. Lola Montès is one of them.
At the end of her dramatic life, Lola Montès acts and mimes her Passion, a few episodes of an unusual love life. The atmosphere of the circus is nightmarish and hallucinatory. Three episodes take us away from this scene: the end of an affair with Franz Liszt; her youth; and a royal love affair in Bavaria just before she joins the circus. The fourth episode shows us Montès in the circus. Peter Ustinov plays the roles of ringmaster, tormentor, and final lover.
In fact, at the end of her life, the real Lola Montez (an Irish adventuress and courtesan despite her Spanish pseudonym) was engaged by an American circus as the star of a spectacle based on her life. Rather than condense into two hours film material that would justify a sixteen-part serial, Ophuls opted to recreate the spectacle of a circus and interject scenes from Lola’s past. Peter Ustinov, the ringmaster-biographer, manages his show with the same bad taste, vulgarity, and unconscious cruelty that govern television broadcasts. If important actors have more prestige than the TV stars, it is because art imitates life—and embellishes it not a little.
Max Ophuls’ film is about the underbelly of success, about turbulent careers and the ways scandal is exploited. Montès, it is often pointed out, cannot sing or dance; she simply knows how to please, she provokes, she causes scandal. The ringmaster tells us that she is a femme fatale and, if she has moved around a great deal, it is because “femmes fatales cannot stay put.” But the flashbacks into Lola’s past that show us her girlhood, her marriage to a drunken brute (Ivan Desny), her adventure with a solemn and foolish Franz Liszt, and her artistic disappointments belie his condescending statements. Lola was a woman like all the others, vulnerable and unsatisfied, only she did “all the things that women in the street dream about doing but don’t dare.” But she lived at an accelerated pace, and following a marvelous last interlude with an anachronistic king in Bavaria (Anton Walbrook), she must die every evening in an American circus, mimicking her own passions.
Ophuls doesn’t forget that it took several weeks to cross a country a hundred years ago, so a central part of the film is set in coaches as they crisscross Europe. By the end of her breakneck life, Lola is wasted, used up prematurely: “I have examined her,” the physician says. “Her heart is giving out and the disease in her throat is perhaps even more serious.” The physical, earthy remarks tell the story: “For me, life is movement.” The king of Bavaria asks her one evening, “Don’t you want to stop, to rest, to be still for a bit?”
The film is constructed rigorously; if it throws some viewers off, it’s because for fifty years most films have been narrated in an infantile way. From this point of view, Lola Montès is not only like Citizen Kane but also The Barefoot Contessa, Les Mauvaises Rencontres, and all those films that turn chronology around for poetic effect.
The result is less a matter of following a story than contemplating a portrait of a woman. The image is too full and too rich to see it all at once. The author clearly intends it that way, going so far as to allow us to listen to several conversations at once. Clearly, Ophuls is interested less in the strong moments of intrigue than in what occurs in between them. The story that we grasp in scraps—what we perceive of it helps us to reconstitute the rest, as in real life—is brilliantly laconic. The characters do not sum up situations with elegant formulas; when they suffer, it is seen, not articulated. Surely this is the most intelligent and precise dialogue heard in a French film since Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite—strictly empirical dialogue: Pass me the salt…Here…Thank you. And yet, what spirit he manages to get into each exchange. The only character who is careful to fashion his phrases and make a stab at eloquence is Peter Ustinov, but he searches for the right words, stammers, repeats himself, just as in real life. If Ophuls were an Italian filmmaker, he might say, “I have made a neorealist film.” He has indeed given us a new kind of realism here, even if it is the poetry, above all else, that draws our attention.
Lola Montès, made in three languages, is played by actors of many nationalities including Peter Ustinov (Russian-English), Anton Walbrook (Austrian-English), and Oskar Werner (Austrian). For the French version, the one that interests us here, these actors speak French with a more or less pronounced accent. Add to this that the dialogue sometimes offers us two or three conversations simultaneously, as well as whispers and dropped phrases, and you end up with a sound track that is about 20 percent unintelligible on first hearing.
Because I was fascinated and intrigued by the dialogue, I obtained a script in order to compare it to the final sound track. The dialogue in the written continuity is good, but that of the film is extraordinary because the actors were not able to deliver it according to the text, and because of changes on the sound stage. This sentence from the script, “A wild beast a hundred times more deadly than those you have just applauded in our menagerie,” is declaimed by the scatterbrained genius Peter Ustinov as “A wild beast a hundred times more deadly than those in our menagerie.” All the dancing master’s lines were replaced during shooting by little cries and murmurs that are extremely effective. Ophuls deliberately retained shots that were flawed by accidents in preference to others that were perfect in his final edited version—for example, a scene where Ustinov’s whip gets tangled in the fringe of a prop. Also, the king of Bavaria at the theater: “I was going to your home, Madame…no, that’s not right—” he moves a piece of the scenery and picks up again—“I was going to your home, Madame, so as to spare you the inconvenience.” The marvelous “No, that’s not right” undoubtedly came when Walbrook lost his place during the shooting. With this kind of ongoing improvisation, all of it geared to improve the film, all directed toward a more authentic truth, Ophuls joins the Jean Renoir who made Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.
The two-and even threefold slippage that constantly crops up in Lola Montès between the characters and their remarks, and between their delivery and the text, creates an enchantment similar to the hesitations of Margaritis in L’Atalante. Lola Montès is the first film that stutters, a film in which the beauty of a word (the velvety voluptuousness with which Walbrook adorns the word “audience”) consistently gives the cue for the meaning of a sentence. Jean Vigo again comes to mind, with his taste for versified text which he shares with Ophuls. My heart is split between this tiny poem from L’Atalante:
|
Ces couteaux de table Aux reflets changeants Sont inoxydables |
These table knives With their shifting reflections Are unoxydizable |
and this one declaimed by Ustinov:
A Raguse
Robe exquiseQu’on refuse
A l’église.At Ragusa
An exquisite gownWe refused to donate
To the church fair.
Lola Montès is a film that breaks all the records: the best French film of the year, the best CinemaScope to date; Max Ophuls is declared the best French technician of the day as well as the best director; for the first time, Martine Carol, as Lola, is really satisfactory, Peter Ustinov is sensational, and so is Oskar Werner; Anton Walbrook and Ivan Desny are excellent.
Max Ophuls is markedly a nineteenth-century filmmaker. We never have the impression that we are watching an historical film, but rather that we are 1850 spectators, as if we were reading Balzac. The portrait of the woman in this work is a synthesis of all his previous women: Lola Montès has all the emotional mishaps of the heroines of Sans Lendemain, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Madame de…
I’m well aware that it’s probably not a good idea to attack films I don’t like in order to defend a film I love, but in the end I am frankly obliged to think that if the public was cool to Lola Montès, it is because it has been scarcely educated to see really original and poetic works. The “best” French films (I am thinking of Le Rouge et le Noir of Claude Autant-Lara, and of Diabolique by Clouzot, and of Les Grandes Manoeuvres by René Clair) were made to order to please, to flatter, and to stroke the public.
A rave for a film one has reveled in five times in one week could go on forever. Let me end it by describing the beauty of the last scene: In the menagerie, Lola offers her hand to be kissed through the bars of a cage; as the camera moves backward, the circus spectators move forward at the bottom of the screen and we mingle with them. For the first time, the exit from a movie theater happens on screen. The entire film is thus put under the patronage of Pirandello, as is all of Ophuls’ work.
Lola Montès is presented like a box of chocolates given to us as a Christmas present; but when the cover is removed, it comes out as a poem worth an untold fortune.
—1955
We had thought he was cured of the rheumatic heart disease he developed while directing The Marriage of Figaro, which he translated and adapted himself, at the Schauspiel Theater in Hamburg. A German critic wrote that, through Beaumarchais, Ophuls resurrected the spirit of Mozart and the Commedia dell’Arte in this production. His habitual frantic drive stamped a breakneck rhythm on it. This Marriage of Figaro is composed of some thirty dizzying tableaus. The premiere was held January 6, but Ophuls, confined to his hospital bed on the other side of the city, could not be present at his triumph. The crowd went wild, forcing the actors to return for forty-three curtain calls.
He died on the morning of March 26, 1957.
He was born in Saarbrücken on May 6, 1902. After the 1914-18 war, at the time of the plebiscite in the Saar, Ophuls opted for French citizenship. This detail is not widely known and he was often described as a “Viennese working in our midst.” In fact, Ophuls lived in Vienna for only ten months in 1926.
A stage actor and then a director, he came to films after he’d fallen in love with an actress whom he followed to Berlin. When talking pictures were first being developed, new filmmakers were sought from among theater people. Between 1930 and 1932, Ophuls directed four German-language films about which we know almost nothing. In 1932, he made La Fiancée Vendue, based on Smetana’s opera, and more importantly, Liebelei, from Arthur Schnitzler’s play, his most famous film and the one he himself preferred. When Madame de…, which he made four years ago, came out in Paris, no one noticed that Max Ophuls had adapted Louise de Vilmorin’s short story to make it Liebelei’s mate. The last half hour, the duel and the finale, is a remake pure and simple. When Ophuls fled Germany at the advent of Nazism, his name disappeared from the credits of Liebelei. When he went back a year and a half ago, he had the opportunity to see the film again, after twenty-five years. Before the showing, a local celebrity rose to explain that there was nothing to be proud of in the doctored list of credits. There was a moment of silence, then the film was shown and applauded at length.
Once in a while the Cinémathèque Française shows us the very lovely film which followed Liebelei, La Signora di Tutti, shot in 1934 in Italy, and based on a serial novel that oddly anticipates Lola Montès. It is a drama about an aging star, who after a suicide attempt, under the influence of anesthesia administered in a hospital, reviews the saddest episodes of her love life. Isa Miranda, twenty years before Martine Carol, was the pathetic heroine of this admirable work.
Of the half dozen films that Ophuls made in France before the war, Divine is perhaps the best. Starting with a situation straight out of Colette—a good country girl comes to Paris where she is caught up in the life of the music hall—he offers us his first inside portrait of the backstage world. If we are already made to think about Lola Montès, it’s because Ophuls, forced to use Simone Berriau as his star, juggles her to play up all the secondary roles and to accumulate a mass of details, both whimsical and realistic. Along with Le Plaisir, Divine is the film in which Ophuls is closest to Jean Renoir.
Less successful was La Tendre ennemie (The Tender Enemy), again with Simone Berriau. It is a ghost story full of René Clair special effects, but there is a good deal of tenderness as well in this fable.
Next Ophuls made Yoshiwara, which he didn’t much like, Le Roman de Werther (Werther) which he thought OK, Sans Lendemain (Without Tomorrow) which he liked a little more, and in 1939, De Mayerling à Sarajevo (Mayerling), which he finished in uniform, having been mobilized into the Algerian infantry.
After he was mustered out, he began shooting L’Ecole des femmes with Louis Jouvet and Madeleine Ozeray in Geneva. After three days the producer was tearing his hair. The first scene opens in a theater with the curtain still lowered. Jouvet comes down from the ceiling, lands on the stage, and the show begins. Ophuls’ camera follows the actors when they leave the stage, it goes behind the scenes, into the wings. We will meet this Pirandello-likeness again in La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and most particularly in Lola Montès.
As unwilling in 1940 in Paris as in 1932 in Germany to meet the Nazis, Ophuls, accompanied by his wife and son, departed for New York. He bought a car to save train fare and arrived in Hollywood broke. For four years he hoped each day to begin work the next. Finally, in 1948, he made an excellent film, produced and starred in by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., The Exile. Then came Letter from an Unknown Woman, an incredibly beautiful adaptation of a story by Stefan Zweig, and Caught, which has never been distributed in France.
In 1950, Ophuls returned to France to make La Ronde. Though it was booed at its premiere, it became one of the greatest successes of the post-war world. Then came Le Plaisir, based on three stories of Maupassant, the most misunderstood of his films; Madame de…; and finally Lola Montès, about which all has been said and written. These four films demonstrate Max Ophuls’ success in safeguarding his freedom of expression within that most difficult of categories—major European productions aimed at a world market.
Max Ophuls’ taste for luxury really masked great modesty. What he sought—tempo and sweep—was so fragile and yet so precise that it had to be sheltered in a disproportionately huge wrapping, like a precious jewel enclosed in fifteen cases, each one large enough to contain the preceding one.
In his inside pocket, Ophuls carefully kept a small scrap of cardboard on which he’d written the titles of the films he dreamed of making. He showed it to me one day. Egmont by Goethe, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, La Belle Hélène, to be adapted from Offenbach, The Love of Four Colonels by Peter Ustinov, a life of Catherine the Great for Ingrid Bergman, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and some others that I cannot remember.
In his contracts he always reserved the right to stop work on a film right up to the eve of the shooting if he wasn’t allowed to proceed according to his own ideas. This happened, for example, with Mam’zelle Nitouche, which was passed on to Yves Allégret a week before the shooting was scheduled.
The main problem he encountered concerned the treatment of scripts. Ophuls was less interested in real things than in their reflections; he liked to film life indirectly, by “ricochet.” For example, the first treatment of Madame de…, rejected by the producers, planned that the story, which we all know, be seen entirely in mirrors on the walls and ceiling.
That is why, since with Lola Montès he was dealing with feckless producers who only cared about the validity of the checks they wrote, he had carte blanche for the first time in a long while to fulfill his old dreams—the play within the play, Lola’s life in nonchronological flashbacks, in fragments of the three-ring circus act.
Ophuls had lived so closely with these ideas for such a long time that it did not cross his mind that Lola Montès would explode like a bomb, make him the standard-bearer of the profession, and bring him new, unsuspected admirers—Jean Genêt, Audiberti, Rossellini.
Ophuls’ bursts of laughter, joyful and contagious, were famous; his conversation was extraordinary, generous, enthusiastic, rich in musical allusions. Rhythm was his predominant preoccupation—the rhythm of a film, of a novel, the novelty of someone’s walk, of a performer’s acting, the rhythm of a life—Lola’s…breathless. He dreamed pauses, stops, rests. After Lola Montès came out, to escape his telephone which bombarded him incessantly with both insults and praise, he went to Baden-Baden to “think.”
Before his departure he had categorically refused to modify his editing of the film. I wired him in Baden that, taking advantage of his absence, they were cutting Lola in a Paris lab. He answered immediately: “I cannot imagine that French technicians would do such work behind a filmmaker’s back. There must be a misunderstanding. I am attempting, all too unsuccessfully, to escape from this Lola, which is going through the same storms in Germany as in France, panic, despair, enthusiasm, hope…” We know the rest.
There are two kinds of directors: those who say that “making a film is very difficult,” and those who claim that “it’s very easy; all you have to do is whatever comes into your head, and have a good time doing it.” Max Ophuls belonged to the second group. But since he preferred to discuss Goethe and Mozart rather than himself, his intentions remain a mystery and his style is poorly understood.
He was not the virtuoso, or the esthete or the decorative filmmaker he has been called. He didn’t make ten or eleven shots with a single sweep of the camera merely to “look good,” nor did he run his camera up and down stairs, along façades, over railroad platforms, and through bushes. Like his friend Jean Renoir, Ophuls always sacrificed technique to the actor. Ophuls thought actors were at their best and least theatrical when forced to some physical effort—climbing stairs, running through the countryside or dancing throughout a long single take. When an actor in one of Ophuls’ films is still, just standing or sitting—rare enough—you can be sure that something, a stove or a transparent curtain or a chair will be between the face and the camera. It’s not at all that Ophuls did not recognize the expressiveness of the human face, but that he wanted the actor, knowing his face was partially hidden from the lens, to force himself to instinctively compensate for it, and to affirm himself by his tone. The actor then has to be more accurate, more exact. Ophuls was obsessed with verity and exactness. He was a filmmaker of realism; in the case of Lola Montès, even a neorealist.
We don’t register all sounds or all conversations equally. This is why Ophuls’ films annoyed the sound engineers so much; only about a third of the sound track could be heard distinctly; the rest was meant to come through only vaguely, as in real life. Dialogue was often merely sound.
Women are the principals in Ophuls’ work: the hyper-feminine woman, victim of every kind of man—inflexible soldiers, charming diplomats, tyrannical artists, idealistic young boys, etcetera. Because Ophuls treated only this eternal subject, he was accused of being out-of-date, anachronistic. He showed the cruelty of pleasure, the trials of love, the traps of desire in his films; he was the director of “the sad tomorrow that follows the sprightly ball” (Victor Hugo).
If he received so many letters from young filmmakers after Lola Montès, and if the cinema clubs discovered him, it’s because, for the first time, he superimposed contemporary preoccupations onto his perennial theme of the woman burned out prematurely: the cruelty of modern forms of entertainment, the abusive exploitation of romanticized biography, indiscretions, quiz games, a constant succession of lovers, gossip columns, overwork, nervous depression. He confided to me that he had systematically put into the plot of Lola Montès everything that had troubled or disturbed him in the newspapers for the preceding three months: Hollywood divorces, Judy Garland’s suicide attempt, Rita Hayworth’s adventure, American three-ring circuses, the advent of CinemaScope and Cinerama, the overemphasis on publicity, the exaggerations of modern life.
Lola Montès is the greatest satirical film ever made, but rather than coming out like a laboratory test case, like Ionesco’s The Chairs, for example, it is a superproduction within everyone’s grasp. Peter Ustinov wrote an article about its phenomenal disproportion: “[Ophuls] was the most introspective of directors, a watchmaker who had no other ambition than to make the smallest watch in the world and who then, in a sudden burst of perversity, proceeded to place it on the tower of a cathedral.”
Disturbed by the financial failure of Lola Montès, the producer, who was preparing a film on Modigliani, forced on Ophuls as collaborator a blasé, formerly prestigious scenarist, Henri Jeanson, a man of consummate skill. His role was to restrain Ophuls’ enthusiasm and channel it. The extraordinary and moving thing about the affair is that, once he had come in contact with Ophuls’ effervescence, Jeanson recaptured his own former verve. The beautiful script of Modigliani is the result of an unexpected but effective collaboration, the combination of two enthusiasms that turned out to be less contradictory than had been expected.
Max Ophuls was counting on the success of Modigliani to enable him to start an independent production company with Danielle Darrieux. Their first film was to have been L’Histoire d’Aimer, based on the novel by Louise de Vilmorin.
For some of us, Max Ophuls was the best French filmmaker, along with Jean Renoir. Our loss is immense, the loss of a Balzacian artist who was an advocate of his heroines, an accomplice of women, our bedside filmmaker.
—1957
Movies are accused so consistently of being enslaved by money interests that there must be some truth to it. The one thing money can’t buy, however, is time. Stars are the darlings of the moment, and so are the more numerous technicians. Even the fabulous movie studios don’t last. This is why chance is so important in creating cinema—on the side of the gifted and against the rest.
Some filmmakers will not allow chance to play any part in their work; they want control over every detail; they reshoot a spoiled shot or a bad scene twenty times. For them, the key to success is time, all the time it takes. The only way they can afford such time is by reducing shooting costs twenty or thirty times by doing without both stars and studio.
Only two filmmakers follow this policy of absolute control: Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. The point is that nowadays, given the haphazard, confused, and sloppy way films are made, a film by Bresson or Tati is necessarily a work of genius a priori, simply because a single, absolute authority has been imposed from the opening to “The End.” In theory, of course, such authority ought to control any work of artistic pretensions.
This is why Mon Oncle can only be judged in terms of Tati’s other films. Let us admit that Mon Oncle didn’t live up to our hopes at Cannes; before it was shown, everyone accorded it a probable Grand Prix; afterward, only a possible Grand Prix.
Tati’s humor is extremely restricted, first of all because he limits himself to comedy based on observation and rejects all the recent so-called discoveries that only amount to burlesque. Even within the restrictions of this comedy of observation, Tati rejects anything that is not believable. In addition, he refuses to use observations fitted to the personalities of his characters, since he rejects editing in the classic sense, the dramatic construction of scenes, and the psychology of characters. His comedy bears only on a slightly twisted picture of current life, but always within believable situations.
At the beginning of his career this was probably unconscious and intuitive. Of three gags, Tati preferred the most probable, the least fabricated, but he filmed all three. Now, his repugnance for pure fantasy, his taste for the true—the truly believable—has become systematic, analyzable, and criticizable like all systems. One may have loved or hated Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), but it was impossible to be neutral about this logical, dense film, this beautiful, integrated whole. With Mon Oncle, on the other hand, this harmony has not been achieved, and the charm is not total. We admire one sequence and suffer through another; the repetitions grate; we are impatient to leave the Arpel factory to get back to Saint-Maur. In the darkness of the movie house our attention wanders.
Like Chaplin with Modern Times, and René Clair with A nous la Liberté, Tati presents his ideas in a film that concerns our time, but without saying so. The two worlds it sets in opposition are the world of twenty years ago and the world of twenty years hence. The whole Saint-Maur part, the life of the little people on the street, the market, the children, is completely charming, pretty, pleasant to watch, truly successful. The modern part, the Arpel family’s house, the factory, is sometimes annoyingly overinsistent, undoubtedly because Tati was determined to press things to their ultimate conclusions. The plot is bare pretext; sometimes it even gets in the way: the ultra-modern kitchen is funny the first time, somewhat less so the second, not at all the third. Tati cannot stand ellipsis, which leads to an excess of details that spoil the thrust of the film. Thus, the metal fish that automatically spits out water whenever anyone but Mr. Arpel comes by is superfluous during the two-thirds of the film that comes after we have grasped the principle and what it means. Nevertheless, Tati cannot remove the fish from the scene or stop using it: that would be logical. It could just quietly disappear, but this is impossible within Tati’s style, which uses only large, still shots corresponding to the vision of the visitor; no closeups because “in real life we don’t stand on top of people’s noses.”
Likewise, the squeaking of Mme. Arpel’s shoes is amusing at first, and almost maddening by the end. It’s not just that Tati uses gags and keeps striking the same chord. His esthetic position and insane logic lead to a totally deformed and obsessive world view. The closer he seeks to get to life, the farther away he moves, because life is not logical (in real life we get so used to noises we don’t hear them). In the end he creates a mad, nightmarish, overly concentrated universe which paralyzes laughter rather than engendering it.
I would be heartsick if anyone saw any malice in what I have written; my strictness is a measure of my admiration for Tati and Mon Oncle. His art is so great that we would like to be with him 100 percent. His film is basically so successful that we are struck with consternation before this documentary about tomorrow.
Tati, like Bresson, invents cinema as he makes a film; he rejects anyone else’s structures.
—1958
* This article, written in 1965, is not a review of Casque d’Or (which came out in 1952), but an introduction to the publication of the script in the collection L’Avant-Scène.
* Bresson never made La Princesse de Clèves; it was directed in 1961 by Jean Delannoy, adapted and with dialogue by Cocteau.
* This second article was written three weeks after the preceding one.