A RECENT French release called “Paris Frills” deals with a new topic for the movies—dress designing for the 16-cylinder-automobile class—and does an intimate, human portrait of an artist, Philippe, the second-best couturier in Paris (Raymond Rouleau). This full-bodied portrayal of a bouncing, effeminate, highly skillful woman’s darling, who is constantly breaking out in a rash of abused sensitivity, is the first case in my memory where an artist’s life is treated with as much savvy as has been given on occasion to other professions. The movie is another good job by Jacques Becker, whose films are a freakish mixture of unpretentious naturalism and Hollywood’s slick glamorizing.
The story opens on a moment of distress in Philippe’s dress mill—the seamstresses, who take as much pride as Philippe in his work, think his new designs are turkeys and he is screeching over the texture of some material. The fiancée (Micheline Presle) of a yard-goods tycoon bowls Philippe over with her beauty and he redesigns his collection to go with her personality and figure. His love affair with this girl goes somewhat too quickly over a course that is as full of sudden, shattering break-ups and reunions as a Winchell column; but it is reasonably convincing because the lovers are handled in the honest way of the best French films. The artist, who seems to catch fire only when he has to win the girl from another man, and then is able to get along without her, is driven to a dramatic, if inconsistent, suicide when she rejects him.
This is the only movie I have ever seen in which a posturing, narcissistic personality is shown in the full run of everyday situations and is handled with a matter-of-fact understanding that makes it into a sad, creative, extremely curious and complicated character. This hero’s actions in the love affair for once seem to jibe with the complex person that he is. You get a strong impression of the man’s incapability of being seriously in love, and one of the most revealing touches is his bouncy, carefree walk just after he has devastated his sweetheart by rejecting her—this after ardently pursuing her through three reels and finally winning her. Rouleau’s performance as Philippe is good on most counts. He gives the sense of a person whose nerve endings, by some anatomical quirk, have been exposed to the elements, and at the same time he makes you feel he’s truly an artist at his work. The one bad feature of the performance, which he shares with Micheline Presle, is a certain manikin-like facial immobility.
With the efficiency of a good documentary but in a charming, casual, off-hand manner, Becker acquaints you with the complicated, caste-ridden business of dress designing. He succeeds well enough to make you feel rewarded in the careful examination of such minor details as the lacquered, spindly chairs that are used at the opening and the tricky, two-way entrance made by the manikins. The nicest group of people I have seen in current movies are the friendly, loyal, unaffected seamstresses whose characters are so different from the dresses they make. Just as well cast is Philippe’s partner (Gabrielle Dorziat), a sullen, dignified woman so wrapped up in her loyalty to the business that she seems to be cut off from the people around her.
John Ford’s slow-poke cowboy epic, “My Darling Clementine,” is a dazzling example of how to ruin some wonderful Western history with pompous movie making. Made almost unrecognizable by this super-schmaltzing by 20th Century Fox, this is an account of how Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers rode herd on the badmen in Tombstone. Given almost equal billing with the Earps in this version of old Tombstone are cloudscapes which are as saccharine as postcard art. Typical of director Ford’s unimaginative, conforming tourist sensibility is the setting he uses—dead, flat country with Picassoesque rock formations jutting dramatically here and there—that has happened in Westerns ever since Art Acord was a baby. “Clementine” is in the new tradition of cowboy films: instead of hell-for-leather action there is concentration on civic-mindedness, gags, folk art. This one goes in for slow, heavy, character-defining shots. There are entertaining, vital performances by Fonda, as the courtly, slow-motion, dead-pan marshal, and by Victor Mature as a tuberculous killer. Secondary roles are filled by good players that you don’t see very often—Tim Holt, Grant Withers and Ben Hall.
December 16, 1946