Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

When Hitler’s army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in the allied declaration of war, there ensued a nine-month phoney war, termed la drôle de guerre or funny (bizarre) war by the French, as their army waited confidently behind the impregnable Maginot Line of fortifications built during the 1930s along the German border. This ‘funny’ phoney war turned deadly serious in May 1940, when the Nazis simply marched round the top of the Maginot Line and stormed into France via Belgium and Holland. In the ensuing debacle, French troops were mowed down, populations and politicians fled and on 14 June, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed, into Paris. The resulting armistice (22 June), signed by aging World War I war hero, Field Marshall Philippe Pétain, completed France’s emasculation, with most of the country (including Paris) under Nazi rule. Meanwhile, French politicians hastily set up a government under Pétain in the small unoccupied town of Vichy, seat of the southern ‘Zone Libre’ until May 1942, when the Germans occupied the entire country. At the same time, de Gaulle left for London to set up the Free French resistance.

In a series of tragic ironies, Petain’s initially popular Vichy regime fast revealed itself to be little more than a proto-fascist puppet state. In July 1940, the Third Republic literally voted itself out of existence, making Pétain Chef d’Etat, tellingly replacing the republican motto, liberté égalité fraternité by the paternalistic ‘travail, famille, patrie’/‘work, family, fatherland’. Catalysing existing anti-democratic, anti-Semitic French sentiment, Vichy represented the revenge of the Far Right. Defeat was blamed on ‘decadent’ pre-war elements, namely foreigners, Jews, Freemasons and the left: socialists, communists and left-wing radicals who had briefly united in the Popular Front (1936–8). Films and filmmakers were also scapegoated: poetic realist classics like Le Quai des brumes were banned for demoralising the nation and literally causing its military defeat! Having much in common with Nazi philosophy, many pro-Vichy French considered Hitler a preferable alternative to a Jewish-led French socialist coalition.¹ Unsurprisingly, Vichy became more overtly anti-Semitic and collaborationist as the Occupation progressed.

The shameful legacy of the period is due to France’s already humiliating military defeat being compounded by active collaboration with the Occupier, which included targeting members of the Resistance, passing a raft of anti-Semitic laws, setting up concentration camps on French soil and deporting 75,000 Jewish civilians (24,000 of whom were French citizens) and other undesirables to the Nazi death camps. France’s experience during World War II would haunt the national psyche and its cinema for more than a generation. As Susan Hayward notes, in her recent review of French noir (1947–79):

… most men were not fighting: they were either taken into forced labour in Germany or were at home having to cope with the occupying enemy (at worst collaborating, at best joining the Resistance or keeping a very low profile). Thus, masculine identity was crucially aligned with the nation and, in this instance, it was not an easy one to confront – weakened, submissive, emasculated identity with which, arguably, the nation has still yet to come to terms.²

During this sombre period, French cinema faced multiple challenges: physical threats and constraints (allied bombing, air-raids, blackouts, curfews), shortages (supplies and equipment, particularly electricity and film stock) and censorship, from both the Nazis and Vichy.³ Moreover, many leading figures, including Jewish ex-pats (Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder) and French filmmakers alike (most notably Renoir, Gabin and Duvivier), left for the USA rather than work under Nazi rule.⁴

And yet, the supreme paradox is that French cinema prospered, both commercially and artistically.⁵ Wartime greatly increased the desire for entertainment: in June 1940, even as German tanks were surging through France, more than 800,000 people found time to go to the movies. With the closure of dance halls, cinema became the sole form of popular wartime entertainment.⁶ More importantly, with no competition from banned American (or British) films and general distaste for German (and Italian) propaganda, there was a huge appetite for local productions. Cinema theatres provided much needed escapist entertainment and literal escape or refuge from Nazi officials, until later in the war when ID checks were commonly held at exits to round up recruits for French workers in Germany and when air raids became more and more frequent. The upshot was that French films were so popular that any film produced was virtually guaranteed to make a profit from domestic exhibition alone (a situation rarely reproduced since). The 220 films made during the Occupation (1940–4) reaped record revenues, more than doubling those of the pre-war years (rising from 452 million francs in 1938 to 915 million in 1943).

These combined factors also had a clear impact on the look and feel of French cinema, on its aesthetics and thematics.⁷ Poetic realist expressions of cinematic despair (produced at a time of great creative freedom) were replaced by messages of hope in the face of oppression and real danger. Social realism, contemporary settings and the central male figure of the working-class hero (Gabin) were diverted to more distanced genres of historical costume drama and fantasy, as many filmmakers, following Carné and Prévert, beat a tactical retreat into historical allegory and myth, where potentially subversive messages could more easily escape censorship.

During these dark years of Occupation, French filmmakers and audiences sought messages of hope, constantly ‘looking for the light’. Thus, while crime dramas enjoyed renewed popularity (especially Simenon adaptations) in the absence of American films, these were mostly upbeat comedy-dramas, like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterful first feature, L’Assassin habite au 21 [The Murderer Lives at Number 21] (1942).

In terms of gendered representation, Burch and Sellier note the cross-genre idealisation of women in Occupation cinema.⁸ Bearers of the light, female figures are most often in traditional roles (wife, mother, virgin bride), i.e. keeping the home fires burning in the service of patriarchy. However, a number of key films (not necessarily noir) put women in roles that imply more positive agency, sometimes coupled with sexual assertiveness. This is doubtless linked to French women having to step into the breach created by the huge number of French men who were in Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camps: over a million, out of a total of 8.6 million men (aged between 15 and 44). Not just keeping the home fires burning then, French women (who now also constituted a greater percentage of film-going audiences) often had to be out chopping the wood. Occupation comedy and melodrama thus feature a number of femmes modernes, expressing their own desire, most notably Jean Grémillon’s Le ciel est à vous [The Woman Who Dared] (1944), in which a happily married mother of two becomes a record-breaking aviatrix.⁹ Moreover, even darker Occupation noir feature similarly idealised and/or assertive female characters, as we shall see.

Despite black humour and noir mise en scène at key dramatic points, Jean Delannoy’s 1942 crime drama, L’assassin a peur la nuit [The Murderer is Afraid at Night] is above all a story of fallible masculinity and redemption via true love. A professional burglar, on the run after a botched job, takes refuge in the countryside. He is befriended by a naive quarry worker, whose virginal sister he quickly seduces. Meanwhile, his venal femme fatale moll (poetic realist vamp Mireille Balin) wants him back. Following him to his country hideout, she attempts to shoot him dead but falls into a dungeon, whereupon she miraculously repents her ways before expiring. He is captured and handcuffed but reunited with his ever-faithful ingénue, who, we know, will be waiting once he has served his time and whose unconditional love redeems him. His final words speak of repentance and moral salvation (and could be read as a call to resist the Occupier): ‘Now I am free!’

The film’s apparently progressive gender values – the cool exterior of the tough gangster masks extreme sensitivity – are in fact ultra-conservative. Following an old misogynist cliché, dialogues state explicitly that men rob to impress and keep venal, beautiful women. Responsibility and guilt for male criminality are thus transferred entirely to the femme. The virginal good woman, on the other hand, is scrupulously honest and utterly self-sacrificing: refusing ill-gotten gains of any sort, she gives what she has, including her virginity, and asks the hero for nothing in return. But the film does not morally condemn the ingénue for allowing herself to be seduced. She has made an emotional commitment that absolves her and redeems her ex-criminal lover. However, they will have to wait until he (France?) is free before their union can be celebrated.

Poetic realism, officially banned under Vichy for its association with the populist, ‘Jewish-infiltrated’ left, is clearly referenced in one of the period’s darkest noirs, Voyage sans espoir [Voyage without Hope] (Jacque, 1943). The opening credits roll over a train hurtling through the countryside, reprising the opening sequence of La bête humaine (minus Gabin at the controls of the locomotive). The familiar poetic realist trope of the man on the run (Quai des brumes; Pépé le Moko) applies to both the male leads.

Moreover, the film constructs its central couple as star-crossed lovers, whom fate brings together before cruelly separating them. Cabaret singer and gangster’s moll, the femme’s essentially good-hearted nature is suggested by her name, Marie-Ange/Mary-Angel (Simone Renant). Classic good-bad girl Marie-Ange will desert her sociopathic fugitive gangster boyfriend (Paul Bernard) for the film’s hero, fresh-faced Jean Marais in the Gabin role, as an impulsive bank clerk who has foolishly run off with stolen funds to start a new life in Argentina. Convinced by her to return the money, the film’s final scene shows him jumping aboard a train, after a last passionate embrace with his courageous and angelic fatalitaire, who, unbeknownst to him, is dying from a fatal bullet wound. The film thus reverses the poetic realist insistence on tragic male agency: in Gabin’s pre-war films, it is he who is murdered or commits suicide at the end of the film. Despite Marais’ greater athleticism and displays of physical bravado,¹⁰ it is the femme whose tragic agency and redemptive self-sacrifice are foregrounded, in line with the feminisation of Occupation cinema.

The film is also notable for its thinly veiled references to Vichy, via the highly ambiguous portrayal of French police as semi-competent and/or morally questionable snoops. When the hero is arrested for being unable to produce identity papers, already an oblique reference to the Occupation, the filmmakers have the chief police inspector declare: ‘c’est une enquête, ce n’est pas une rafle’ [‘this is an investigation, not a raid’]. The word ‘rafle’ takes on sinister connotations during this period, evoking the infamous raids of July 1942, in which French police actively aided the Nazis in rounding up some 13,000 Jewish families in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium in Paris, before sending them off to French concentration camps, thence to Auschwitz.

The film most emblematic of the dark Occupation years, condemned by both Vichy and the Resistance for its uncompromisingly bleak vision of bourgeois French society, is undoubtedly Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau [The Raven] (1943). Set in a typical French country town, Le corbeau’s mystery plot consists in discovering the author of a fatal epidemic of poison-pen letters, ‘signed’ by the eponymous Raven. Although the film project pre-dates the war (the real-life case on which it is based dates back to 1917), the phenomenon of anonymous letter writing, from which both the Nazi occupier and the collaborationist Vichy regime benefitted, is clearly meant to be read in terms of present realities. Vichy alone received between three and five million such letters denouncing neighbours and rivals.¹¹

As the film progresses, the town succumbs to suspicion and paranoia as one after another of its population is accused – often rightly, in the case of a clique of hypocritical notables – of various forms of fraud, theft and illicit sex. But the innocent are also targeted: a cancer patient slits his own throat on discovering the terminal nature of his illness and a little girl attempts suicide after the Raven’s intervention destroys her parents’ marriage. The principal target and the film’s hero, Dr Germain (Pierre Fresnay), is accused of being an abortionist and of having an affair with the local psychiatrist’s beautiful but prim young wife, Laura (with whom he shares a mutual attraction). Meanwhile he is somewhat reluctantly seduced by the sultry, manipulative Denise (Ginette Leclerc in her stock role), who feigns illness to lure him into her bed (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Le corbeau

In line with Occupation cinema’s rehabilitation of fallen women, the bad girl turns out to be a false garce, her promiscuousness revealed to be a masquerade, overcompensation for a physical handicap (a childhood accident has left her with a limp, disguised by orthopaedic shoes). By the time the spectator discovers she has fallen pregnant to Germain, it is also clear she has fallen in love. The bad girl’s redemption enables the film to effect a partially happy end when the cynical Germain finally recognises her feelings as genuine and reciprocates, accepting Denise as faithful mistress and mother of his unborn child.

Beyond its tightly crafted script, superb acting and austere mise en scène, the film’s enduring reputation as seminal noir masterpiece stems from its incisive brand of black realism and its insistence on the problematically blurred lines between good and evil. In its much quoted pivotal scene, the psychiatrist Vorzet, acting clearly as authorial stand-in, uses the central noir trope of light and shadow to make precisely this point. Having just confessed to Germain that he is a morphine addict, he challenges the latter’s somewhat self-righteous moral certainty: ‘You think people are all good or all bad. You think goodness is light and evil is darkness.’ Swinging a hanging light bulb, plunging the room and the two men into and out of darkness, Vorzet asks: ‘But where is good? Where is evil? Where is the border?’ When the ever-sceptical Germain retorts: ‘Just stop the lamp’, he burns his fingers, proving Vorzet’s point.

That the latter’s comments are doubly ironical, self-servingly shielding his own guilt – he turns out to be the Raven – simply reinforces the potency of their central noir message: in human affairs, goodness and evil are often inextricably entwined.

In line with this key visual metaphor, the film’s voice speaks of a shifting, decentred moral space. Speaking polyphonically, through a series of characters with whom spectators are successively aligned, the authors ensure no single character can be simplistically associated with good or evil. This is of course a key feature of the murder mystery – a series of suspects are set up before being found innocent. But Le corbeau pushes this central trope to gendered extremes. It is emblematic of Occupation cinema’s idealisation of women and its plethora of castrated patriarchs¹² that the evil Raven is the film’s most respected older male, while the false culprits are all women, whether predatory false garce, voyeuristic teenage virgin, sexually repressed wife or bitter, equally repressed spinster. Moreover, all the main characters suffer from some kind of sexual repression or dysfunction – including Vorzet, whose impotence causes the anonymous letters, and Germain, whose self-imposed celibacy following the death of his wife (in childbirth) leads to lack of empathy and clouded judgement. He finds it difficult to read others’ emotions and erroneously suspects Denise because of her sexual assertiveness – which also attracts him.¹³

Even the resolution of the mystery and punishment of the culprit do not provide neat moral closure. In the final scene, Germain discovers the dead Vorzet, his throat slit by the mother of his first victim, his blood spilling over a half-written poisonous missive. As the camera follows Germain’s gaze on the avenging mother as she walks silently away from the scene of the crime, we sense he will not ‘inform’ on her. For this somewhat sanctimonious upholder of the law, his sense of right and wrong is shaken rather than consolidated. And so is ours. The absence of non-diegetic music serves to render the scene even more disturbing. Despite the fact that there is some hope for the film’s newly constituted odd couple of the empathic loose woman and the slightly autistic Cartesian man of science about to produce France’s next generation, Clouzot’s camera does not return to them. In step with the blackest of noir, even today, the film leaves its spectator with a sense of malaise. On its release, the film’s popular success was counterbalanced by critical condemnation from all sides, its bleak vision of French society seen as unpatriotic by both Vichy and the clandestine communist-dominated Resistance press.

The final paradoxes of Occupation cinema are evidenced by Le corbeau’s production context, which had grave repercussions on its reception and on several of its filmmakers’ futures. Le corbeau was produced by Continental Films, a German-owned production and distribution company, set up under Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, using studio and theatres ‘confiscated’ from Jewish owners. Under long-time German industry insider Alfred Greven, Continental produced 30 out of 220 Occupation films (twice the number made by French giant Pathé). But, luckily for France, Greven was a staunch personal enemy of Goebbels (who wanted frothy, vacuous French films suitable for the amusement of a decadent, inferior race) and a fervent admirer of French cinema, which he was determined to promote. His aim was to be the top producer in France, producing high quality films that would act as a spearhead for Franco-German cultural expansion, penetrating world markets (especially the USA) after the war ended. Thus the Germans were partly responsible for the paradoxical prosperity and quality of Occupation cinema.

As a businessman, Greven was not a fervent anti-Semite, even unofficially, turning a blind eye to the presence of Jean-Paul Le Chanois (his real name was Dreyfus), both men pretending to ignore the latter’s Jewish origins.¹⁴ Despite his flexibility, however, Greven was no Oskar Schindler. Not above coercion, he frequently blackmailed French companies and filmmakers into working for him, threatening, for example, to withhold film stock.

As the symbol of an alien presence, Greven was widely detested and many who worked for him were brutally punished in the infamous Liberation purges, Clouzot first and foremost. The latter’s role as Head of Scriptwriting for Continental, coupled with his authorship of the much maligned Le corbeau, saw him face a life ban for collaboration. Largely due to the interventions of numerous industry leaders (including Carné and Prévert), artists (Cocteau) and public intellectuals (Sartre), the ‘sentence’ was commuted to two years. The injustice of his treatment undoubtedly fuelled his natural cynicism, which he would later succeed in channelling into some of French noir’s most enduring classics, as we shall see.

The myth of the Resistance was ‘orchestrated very effectively, right from the moment of liberation’¹⁵ by the leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, when his troops marched into Paris on 25 August 1944. Designed to shift the focus from humiliation and shame to pride and unity crucial to the task of nation rebuilding, the Gaullist myth insisted that, despite the treachery of a few thousand Vichy leaders and collaborators (who would be swiftly and justly punished), France as a nation had massively and courageously resisted the Nazi occupier. In reality the Resistance was not only internally divided (de Gaulle’s Free French Army – many thousands of whom were colonial subjects from France’s Empire in Africa and the Pacific – and largely Jewish and/or communist-led internal Resistance groups were ideologically poles apart) but probably numbered no more than 600,000, or 1.5 per cent, of France’s metropolitan population in August 1944. Moreover, the vast majority did not join until that year, to avoid being sent to work in German factories and when the tide was turning against the Nazis (in January 1944, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) still numbered only 50,000).¹⁶

Surrealist-anarchist noir crime fiction author Leo Malet’s first Nestor Burma novel, 120 Rue de la gare (1941),¹⁷ was written and set during the Occupation. Filmed and released after the Liberation (Daniel-Norman, 1945–6), the big screen version is highly emblematic of its times. Both a popular and critical success (almost 3 million entries, in the top 25 per cent of French box office), its tone and thematics are very much in line with the macho hymns to the myth of the French Resistance that dominated French screens after the Liberation.¹⁸

Via Burma, France’s first fictional private investigator (PI), the film displays the spectacle of triumphant Gallic masculinity and a concomitant disavowal of the defeat and moral compromise that accompanied the Occupation and Vichy collaboration. The function of the convoluted plot (involving a shady inheritance, multiple murders, crooked lawyers, an untrustworthy dame and dumb cops) and of the secondary characters, male and female alike, is to boost the quasi-Resistance action-hero status of ‘Dynamite’ Burma, ‘the man who knocks out mystery’. Malet’s anarchistic noir sensibility is abandoned in favour of an adventure-comedy typical of Occupation crime dramas. Moreover, in the novel Burma is a freshly released POW. This inglorious detail, an unwelcome reminder of the situation of over a million French POWs incarcerated following Pétain’s armistice, is tellingly evacuated, along with the quasi-totality of the historical context. The sole direct reference to the Occupation is a scene in which the hero breaks effortlessly through a series of roadblocks every bit as easily as he slips out of police handcuffs.

The film’s most interesting addition is Burma’s plucky female sidekick, Hélène Parmentier (Sophie Desmarets), a would-be sleuth¹⁹ reminiscent of Kathryn Hepburn’s screwball comedy characters. Aspiring fille moderne, she makes multiple attempts at asserting crime-solving agency, yet the film is constantly putting her in her place, the ‘couple’s’ constant banter ensuring Burma retains masculine control. Always two steps ahead of the femme and the criminals (not to mention the law), he escapes the masochistic fate of the hard-boiled PI. Never once knocked senseless, the obligatory test of his manhood comes in the form of a stray bullet in the arm during the final sequence. The proverbial scratch is of course received with barely a grimace – the wound hidden then later proudly displayed to the female love-interest. The final scene has the newly formed couple still arguing and exchanging a series of playful slaps that morph into a final embrace and humorous nod to the camera.

Nonetheless, alongside this type of self-congratulatory contribution to the Resistance myth, a number of noir crime dramas of the postwar years present the other side of a tarnished coin, in which evidence of repressed male shame and anxiety seep through.²⁰ Thus, the immediate postwar in France, a time of briefly euphoric liberation during which French cinema glorified the Resistance, is also notable for a smaller number of popular film noirs that suggest collaborators often had the upper hand or which reveal underlying male anxieties around the nation’s less than heroic recent past.²¹ Moreover, the long shadow of war stretches across the decade of the 1950s, materialising in a small but significant body of popular films set during or immediately after the war and featuring various manifestations of damaged or toxic masculinity: sociopathic gangsters, failed patriarchs and flawed heroes.

The first of these postwar flawed-hero noirs, La Fille du diable [Devil’s Daughter] (Decoin,²² 1946) stars Pierre Fresnay (Le corbeau’s Dr Germain) as strangely reformed bank-robber, Saget. Wounded and on the run from police, Saget is picked up by a quiet businessman, Ludovic Mercier, returning to his hometown after making good in America. In a classic noir plot line, Mercier is killed in a car accident and Saget steals his identity – and fortune. The townsfolk are easily deceived, immediately taken in by this affable, wealthy prodigal son. All except the wily old doctor (Fernand Ledoux), who, having tended Saget’s gunshot wound, guesses his true identity and begins a highly unusual blackmail scheme. He cajoles Saget/Mercier into giving away more and more of his stash, not for the doctor’s own personal gain but to improve the lot of the less fortunate. ‘Mercier’ becomes a local hero, providing donations to various worthy causes, including a radiotherapy centre for tuberculosis victims and a brand new stadium. Among the recipients of this philanthropic blackmail is a consumptive young orphan, Isabelle (Andrée Clément). A social outcast, driven by hatred of the local bourgeois and aristocracy, she is the ‘devil’s daughter’. A passionate admirer of the notorious Saget, she ends up guessing Mercier’s true identity and wants to join him as a partner in crime, as part of her revenge plan against society.

The film displays the moral ambiguity so typical of French noir: its ethical compass is very much in the mode of Le corbeau’s swinging light bulb. So-called respectable townsfolk are reminiscent of Le corbeau’s mean, pompous hypocrites and the film sides with Isabelle in condemning them for her plight. As for the good doctor, spectatorial allegiance constantly shifts between him (he works tirelessly for his patients, including the poor) and Saget/Mercier, who is initially constructed as gangster-hero.

The film’s authors underline the doctor’s morally dubious manipulations, having Saget confront him: ‘Devious old sod, you’re a bigger crook than I am!’ In a low angle close-up, the doctor replies, unperturbed: ‘I chose to let you walk around in the dead man’s shoes. Now I’m selling you the right to remain there.’²³ The cynical Saget is sure the doctor has ulterior motives, that his philanthropy is a front for self-serving ambition, thus instilling further doubts in the spectator’s mind.

On the other hand, the supposedly devilish wild child Isabelle is in many ways the ‘purest’ of the three, as her simple, schoolgirlish costuming, plaited black hair and unmade-up face suggest. Neither femme nor even jeune fille fatale, she is a tortured soul and would-be romantic fatalitaire, naively seeing herself as joining Saget as avenging outlaw, as a French Bonnie Parker one might say. But he refuses to play Clyde. She has a wild, romantic crush on the heroic gangster she imagines, yet his feelings for her hardly go beyond paternal(istic) solicitude. In fact, the main role of the femme here is to precipitate (not the hero’s fall but) the film’s deconstruction of the heroic outlaw persona of its male protagonist, and its concomitant vision of triumphant masculinity.

This deconstruction begins 75 minutes into the film, when Mercier/Saget has to defend himself against Isabelle’s ‘gang’, an 8-year-old and two adolescents. In a semi-comic fight, in which the kids come flying at him from all directions, he predictably bats them off, giving them a good lesson but clearly doing his best not to do them harm. When a disgusted Isabelle states the obvious: ‘It’s easy fighting kids !’, he retorts, ‘No actually it’s hard. A man doesn’t fight kids.’ Thus far the film has reinforced the image of the traditional hero: a real man does not use his physical superiority against the weak.

But then the reverse process occurs. About to leave, ‘Mercier’ stumbles across Isabelle’s scrap book, full of cuttings of none other than his former self, Saget and realises she is in love with the romantic hero she has constructed from the overblown journalistic accounts of his exploits. Oblivious to the fact that the Ludovic Mercier she despises is her hero, Isabelle launches into an impassioned defence of the gangster, while Saget counters every heroic claim:

Thus the scene (along with the remainder of the film) works to undo the same stereotypical images of the gangster-hero it has so painstakingly constructed. Moreover, given the liberation context, the figure of Saget as outlaw also begs to be read as a critique of the Resistance hero, fearlessly fighting off a foe superior in number and weaponry and representing official authority (both the Nazi occupier and Vichy militia). Actor Pierre Fresnay’s widely known right-wing political views and support of Pétain (for which he was briefly jailed after the Liberation) make an anti-Resistance reading all the more plausible. So-called heroism is nothing more than an inglorious scramble by men with nothing left to lose, employing less than heroic tactics in a desperate bid to survive. And when Saget wearily surrenders, rather than liberating redemption, his capitulation is framed as the end of heroism, the ultimate defeat. Parallels were not lost on the left-wing Resistance newspaper La Marseillaise, whose reviewer made similar remarks to those that had previously condemned Le corbeau: ‘Our ex-Occupiers would have been very satisfied with this film.’²⁴

Six years on, Les Amants Maudits [The Damned Lovers] (Rozier, 1952) truly is a post-Liberation French Bonnie and Clyde story, though with a sinister twist. Pierre, a humble café waiter with delusions of grandeur steals a car and becomes a real-life gangster to impress new girlfriend, Jacky, taking her along for the ride.

‘An overt pastiche’²⁵ of American 1930s gangster movies and 1940s film noir and far from a masterpiece, the film nonetheless deserves mention for two reasons. First, although the original title, Les amants maudits, evokes the trope of the tragic star-crossed lovers, the central couple’s dynamic is far darker and more cynical: based on lust, greed and betrayal rather than romantic devotion. Moreover, contrary to the stereotype of the fallible male led astray by a venal female, it is the male lover who is the more ruthless and perfidious of the two. After a shoot-up with police, Pierre and his gang callously leave Jacky for dead. The couple is eventually reunited but when he is dying of a gunshot wound following a botched robbery, he decides to take Jacky with him to the grave. She stoically accepts her fate. Rather than ill-fated, these lovers are truly damned – not by the femme’s duplicity but by the male’s sociopathically callous brutality. Second, the film evokes the dark moral underbelly of the Occupation and Liberation, the porous boundaries between collaboration and Resistance circles and the connection to both of criminal masculinity.

For despite an obligatory disclaimer and distancing narrative frame, the film’s story is very clearly based on France’s most notorious gangster of the Occupation and liberation, Pierre Loutrel, known as Pierrot Le Fou (Madman Pierre). Emblematic of the blurred moral boundaries of this period, Loutrel began as an arch collaborator, working for the Paris-based French gestapo from 1941–4, living the high life, dating leading actresses (including Ginette Leclerc), and committing multiple robberies and murders. When it became clear the Nazis were about to lose the war, he switched camps (as did many others), headed south and joined the Resistance, distinguishing himself by gunning down a Nazi officer in broad daylight, subsequently presiding over trials and executions of ex-collaborators. He also set up the Liberation years’ most infamous and legendary gang, dubbed ‘Le Gang des tractions avant’ (after their forward traction Citroens) and went on a two year rampage, managing to evade police until he died a somewhat ignominious death, after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach. He was buried secretly by gang members, who also shot his wife, their bodies not being discovered until 1949, just 18 months before the film project began.

But the film which most explicitly connects the Occupation-Resistance and flawed masculinity is Yves Ciampi’s popular hit, Les héros sont fatigués [Heroes and Sinners] (1955), a noir adventure-thriller starring Yves Montand as ex-Resistance fighter pilot Michel Rivière; Curd Jürgens as his ex Luftwaffe counterpart, Wolf Gerke. Opposite these two tired heroes, Jean Servais is a villainous, drunken coward, has-been top lawyer and ex-collaborator. Maria Félix is the femme, Manuela, daughter of an Argentinean diplomat, Servais’ ex-partner and new love interest for Montand (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Les héros sont fatigués

The steamy interactions and dramatic tensions between the characters are amplified by the film’s exotic, tropical setting: all are marooned in a newly independent Central African Republic.

The setting for Heroes was loosely based on Christine Garnier’s journalistic account of her visit to the African Republic of Liberia, founded by freed African-American slaves in 1847. Director, Yves Ciampi also visited briefly.²⁶ This partly explains the fact that the ex-colonisers in the film speak English with American accents and American cars and Coca Cola adverts adorn the sets (reconstructed in the Joinville Studios outside Paris). But the film is clearly ‘about’ France and its Cold War anxieties over empire: during the 1950s independence movements began to unsettle France’s colonies in West and North Africa and in Indochina. Heroes’ fictive capital city is named Free City, which evokes Libreville, capital of Gabon, then part of French Equatorial Africa until its independence in 1960.

Ethnic tensions are added to gender, class difference and nationalistic divisions: ex-enemies, ex-colonial masters and black ex-colonial subjects are thrown into a psychosocial and racial pressure cooker. The screenplay is surprisingly progressive in its treatment of interracial relationships between White women and African men: a sympathetic ex-pat Parisian hairdresser with her own business is happily married to an African; Manuela’s current lover is a member of the new African elite. Dialogues predictably underscore White male racism and miscegenation fears, which are presented as an even greater threat than African independence. Antagonists are all racists, including the shady French businessman who has opportunistically married the daughter of an African senator. As for the evil ex-collaborator Séverin, he used to ‘have it in for’ Jews, now it is Blacks. French critics were divided on the film’s merits, particularly those who were unconvinced by the sets; however, none were shocked by its interracial love relationships. But despite its sympathetic, apparently well-received portrayal of interracial marriage, the film is inevitably Eurocentric and clichéd: contemptuous of new African elites aping their Westernised ex-masters and somewhat patronising of their more authentic but ‘primitive’ people, who spend their time dancing half-naked.

The adventure-thriller plot turns on a stash of diamonds representing a ticket out of the tropical hell the European characters find themselves in. Tellingly, it is the all-male trio who fight to the death for their possession, while the femme is more interested in love than money.

In his analysis of the dysfunctional all male group in classic American film noir, Mike Chopra-Gant asks: ‘What happens when the (veteran’s) return to civilian life is not accompanied by a revitalised commitment to family life, when men’s conduct remains governed by the values of the all-male group?’²⁷ Les héros sont fatigués, whose title translates as ‘the heroes are tired’, provides an equally bleak, French response to this question. When men’s conduct in peacetime remains governed by the values of the all-male group, the consequence is the violent foreclosure of both romantic commitment and the creation of a family unit.²⁸ In Heroes, the lovers’ future is doomed and strange new pairings of ex-enemies emerge, battle-scarred, from the ruins.

Rather than the heterosexual love story, the film centres on the homosocial bond between ex-enemies Montand/Rivière and Jürgens/Gerke. The latter has been sent to recover the stash of diamonds that Rivière has ‘found’ and is attempting to sell. Both are out of work ex-pilots and disillusioned patriots who have risked their lives for their respective fatherlands only to find that their country has little use for them in peacetime. Rivière persuades Gerke to join forces, steal the diamonds and use the proceeds to set up their own commercial airline. Privileging the male ‘couple’, Ciampi gives Montand and Jürgens more than twice as much screen time together (over 18 minutes) as Montand and Felix (approximately eight minutes), including three long scenes of over four minutes each. In the first, in which they meet as adversaries, the mise en scène and framing borders on homoerotic: a reverse shot from Gerke’s point of view (POV) of Rivière’s lower torso, as he extracts the ‘treasure’ from inside his trousers, is held for a dizzying 17 seconds. On Christmas Eve the two men share a candlelit dinner, reminiscing about their shared battles while the sidelined femme waits on tables (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 Les héros sont fatigués

Eclipsed by the male couple, visually coded as a Carmen-like vamp, Maria Felix’s character is a misunderstood fatalitaire, genuinely falling for the ‘hero’ and going to great lengths to help and defend him. But their relationship appears largely engineered to serve voyeuristic audience expectations for steamy sex scenes and a desire to emulate American models.²⁹ Misconstruing his lover’s attempts to help him escape with the diamonds as self-interest, the hero’s mistrustful projection onto her of his own greed hampers the construction of the couple as romantic star-crossed lovers.

The film’s dramatic climax and dénouement begins when the evil Séverin steals the diamonds (ostensibly to keep Manuela) and heads for the sea. Rivière and Gerke go after him, ignoring Manuela’s plea to just let him go. She joins them and is shot by Séverin, who will end up drowning, still holding her dead body, having almost managed to best the two heroes. In the final 40-second shot, the latter emerge from the water, Montand supporting a wounded Jürgens. The ‘couple’ slowly approaches the camera as a drumbeat announces the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, ending on a low angle MCU as they look off-screen, towards an uncertain future.

Heroes begs to be read allegorically on two levels: soldiers’ difficult return to civilian society and consequent loss of faith in patriotism and the new French alliance with its ex-occupier, West Germany. The Nazi invader, subsequently defeated, had since become an economic partner, with the 1951 creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), between France and West Germany, which was subsequently expanded to form the basis of the Common Market (1957). Thus the film’s male protagonists can be seen as embodying the fledgling alliance that would found the New Europe.

On the other hand, the femme has been sacrificed. The hero’s mistrust and subsequent privileging of male relationships clearly seek to perpetuate a state of bachelorhood: the setting up of the airline that will enable financial security, endless physical and emotional mobility and detachment from family bonds. The tragedy of the love story is less the consequence of cruel fate than a direct result of his projected greed and greater homosocial investment.

Among the many paradoxes of Occupation cinema, the sympathetic treatment of women extends to the darkest of noir, most markedly in Le corbeau, notable for its central femme fatale, who turns out to be a false garce, a misunderstood, good-bad girl. Moreover, the film’s cynical brand of black realism, its insistence on the problematically blurred lines between good and evil ‘colour’ classic French noir of the Liberation and postwar Fourth Republic. Current critical discourse follows Burch and Sellier in arguing for liberation cinema’s reinstatement of patriarchal power as part and parcel of the construction of the Gaullist myth of the Resistance – with its concomitant demonisation of women,³⁰ as we shall see (Chapter 4). But this chapter has demonstrated that le réalisme noir also points out the cracks in the Resistance myth, targeting flawed masculinity, sometimes going as far as to make explicit links between the scars of war, difficult social reinsertion and male flight from romantic attachment.

Isabelle:	Nothing can stop him. No one can catch him. He’s strong, brave, daring, he broke into the biggest bank. No one knows how.
Mercier/Saget:	Via the sewer. All he had to do was block his nose.
Isabelle:	He had to fight his way past three guards.
Mercier/Saget:	Two actually. The third was in on it.
Isabelle:	He shot them dead.
Mercier/Saget:	In the back.
Isabelle:	He’s not afraid.
Mercier/Saget:	Yes he is. That’s why he killed them. Out of fear.