Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

Romantic, or passionate, love refers to any intense attraction involving the intrusive thinking about one person within an erotic context with the expectation of the state enduring for some time into the future. It also involves the reordering of personal priorities that favor being with the loved one combined with feelings of dependency.¹

The French cultural obsession with romantic passion is legendary, as evidenced by the country’s rich literary history, from the Middle Ages on. Moreover, French approaches to love over the centuries have been wide and varied, alternating cyclically between extreme idealism (e.g. medieval star-crossed lovers Abelard and Héloise; the Arthurian troubadours’ unconsummated courtly love; the nineteenth-century Romantics) and extreme cynicism (e.g. Choderlos de Laclos’ Machiavellian Valmont and Mme de Merteuil in Les liaisons dangereuses; Flaubert’s brutally anti-romantic Mme Bovary). The tension between romanticism and realism is perhaps best captured in the great novels of Stendhal, an inveterate womaniser (like many of his nineteenth-century literary compatriots) who also wrote a treatise On Love.² But of course the French can claim no monopoly on the subject, and they certainly didn’t invent it.³

While its myriad manifestations are clearly culturally inflected, the concept of romantic love appears to be a human universal that no culture has been documented to lack. Ethnographic studies find evidence of romantic love across human time and space:

in Lahu love songs, an ethnic minority in Southwest China, in popular Tang dynasty (6th century) Fox Fairy tales, in the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, and in Kung Bushmen’s acknowledgement that being in love is an intensely satisfying experience.⁴

Many indigenous oral literatures feature Romeo-and-Juliet-like stories, as in Aotearoa, New Zealand, that of Māori star-crossed lovers Hinemoa and Tutanekai, still celebrated in popular song. And even in cultures possessing no linguistic signifier for romantic love, individuals can nonetheless recognise and feel its physical and emotional manifestations.⁵

Scientists from a broad range of disciplines (including the social sciences) investigating the once taboo subject of passionate love now agree it is ‘not a Western social construction but a universal emotion/motivation’.⁶ They draw on evolutionary theory, which proposes that the desire for passionate bonding in humans is as fundamental to successful reproduction as the biological sex drive. Evolutionary psychologists see romantic love as a suite of psychological adaptations, designed to focus reproductive effort on a single mate long enough to successfully produce and rear optimally endowed offspring.⁷ Moreover, recent research into the neural correlates of passionate love (brain scanning studies using functional magnetic resonance) support the evolutionary view. Leading biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and colleagues propose that the neural reward systems associated with feelings of intense attraction or romantic love (mediated by dopamine) and partner attachment (mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin) evolved by 4 million years ago in conjunction with the evolution of the human predisposition for monogamous pair-bonding.⁸ These systems serve to focus mate choice and motivate individuals to remain with the chosen mate long enough to breed and rear their offspring through infancy as a team. Romantic attraction is to be distinguished from pure sexual appetite or testosterone-driven lust, which motivates individuals to seek sexual gratification and can have multiple targets. The defining characteristic of romantic love is its dopamine-driven attraction to a single, idealised love object. The same neural reward systems involved in romantic attraction are also activated by the consumption of narcotics and by other forms of substance and behavioural addiction, supporting views of passionate love as a kind of mania or addiction.⁹

Even in ‘love restrictive societies’ that practise arranged marriage and therefore seek to minimise romantic love for its socially disruptive privileging of individual mate choice, romantic love survives.¹⁰ And the existence of the star-crossed lovers trope in film noir and literature in relatively permissive but still patriarchal mid-twentieth-century France (and in the USA to a lesser extent¹¹) is evidence of the power of the love drive: romantically attached individuals, including the French fatalitaire and her often ill-starred mate, are willing to defy social superiors, spouses and families, to transgress cultural taboos and legal systems in order to live their passion.

Before turning to a discussion of the films, it will be useful to define love more precisely. Of the dozens of tools devised by sociologists and psychologists since the 1960s to define and measure its different manifestations, I will refer to one of those currently most popular with researchers, which examines love as comprising six distinct attitudes or constructs and corresponding behaviours or styles.¹² The six love styles, which may be manifested in different combinations and to varying degrees by individuals, are:

It will be immediately obvious to readers that the romantic star-crossed lovers of film noir are defined by their high levels of eros, often accompanied by either mania, agape or both, while duplicitous garces and spider-woman fatales are characterised by ludus (which is closer to lust than love) and/or coldly calculating pragma.

In Chapters 2–4 we have seen a number of manifestations of the fatalitaire: the passionate ‘woman in love’, often unfairly maligned, unwitting agent or victim of oppressive social forces and/or malicious fate. In Voyage sans espoir and in Clouzot’s Manon we also saw how the fatalitaire can be an active agent, a pragmatic, modern girl using her wits and/or her sexual charm for the benefit of her couple, defending her man or risking all to remain by his side. Here I extend discussion of this iconic figure.

I will open my case studies on the ill-fated fatalitaire and her lover with the film that was designed to relaunch the career of pre-war poetic realist hero, Jean Gabin, following his return to France after participating in the Liberation, and which starred his off-screen partner of five years, Marlene Dietrich. The film was Gabin’s first attempt to revive his own popularity while also launching Marlene in France, thereby inciting her to stay on and saving their relationship.¹⁴ Both stars were deeply disappointed by the film, which was deemed a box-office and critical failure, barely mentioned by Gabin’s major commentators.¹⁵

In Martin Roumagnac, Gabin’s young proletarian hero has gained in social status, in tune with his advancing towards middle age (the star was 44 at the time of shooting). And although he retained his trim athletic build, Gabin’s thick head of hair had turned grey as a result of his personal war effort and had to be dyed for the film. As Ginette Vincendeau has argued, Gabin’s accession to bourgeois respectability in his postwar roles is nonetheless marked by a strong underlying continuity, with all his postwar characters self-consciously foregrounding their self-made, proletarian roots.¹⁶ Here, the eponymous Roumagnac is a working-class man, a stonemason who has made it up the social ladder by a combination of astuteness and honest hard work. A much respected, entrepreneurial provincial building contractor, tough but fair as a boss, Gabin/Roumagnac is the town’s most eligible bachelor, much courted but resisting being ‘caught’.

His undoing will be precipitated by a disastrous love affair with Dietrich as an alluring vamp with a shady past: ‘Cherchez la femme!’ Her character is set up narratively and visually (in the film’s opening scenes) as a classic femme fatale, ‘entertaining’ one after another of the town’s notables, who practically queue for her favours. Not German (for obvious reasons) but improbably Australian-born French, her character, Blanche Legrand is immediately likened to the colourful exotic birds she and her shady uncle sell. This none too subtle metaphor provides the film’s structuring visual trope, with the exotic Blanche repeatedly refusing to be caged, despite a number of golden offers. In line with Dietrich’s highly sexualised persona, she is a young and very merry widow whose seduction of a string of wealthy married men is already the source of much scandal and jealous gossip. Desperate to escape the suffocating little town, her ticket out of it is her wealthiest suitor, a pompous absentee diplomat awaiting the death of his ailing wife, whose imminent passing will free him to make an honest and well-off woman of her. Blanche’s greedy, pimp-like uncle is determined to broker the deal.

The introduction of Dietrich is classic fatale but with more than a hint of romanticism underpinning her overpowering sensuality. The first we see of her, five minutes into the film, is a three second mid shot (MS) of her silk-stockinged legs descending a staircase into the bird shop, voyeuristically observed by an immediately love-struck handsome young teacher (Daniel Gélin). The scene introduces the visual trope of the fatale as object of desire but also and more importantly that of her enclosure: she is almost as trapped as her avian charges. Importantly, her romantic idealism is signalled immediately, through her favourite lovebirds: if separated, both die. The lovebirds counterbalance any reading of her as garce or spider woman, as well as anticipating the film’s tragic outcome.

The besotted young man buys the birds but, given the presence of Gabin in the opening credits (behind Dietrich), the spectator knows he stands not a chance with the femme, however handsome he may be. We thus await the meeting of the true lovebirds. This will take place at a boxing match, placing Blanche/Dietrich in a masculine space that her presence immediately disrupts, in true fatale style, suggesting also that she shares with Gabin/Roumagnac an independent, combative nature. The two soon become lovers. Roumagnac ominously neglects his construction business, manically focusing all his energies to build her a ‘love nest’, a country mansion that he selflessly transfers into her name. The consul’s wife conveniently dies and, though he is aware Blanche does not love him, the diplomat proposes marriage as an attractive business proposition, ‘much better than love’.¹⁷ Pragmatically, she accepts, on condition that their partnership be an open one: if the marriage is to be a golden cage, she is determined to retain the key. When the consul, played with superb cynicism and effete arrogance by Marcel Herrand (in a role reminiscent of his elegant murderer, Lacenaire, in Carné and Prévert’s masterpiece, Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] (1945)), predictably refuses to share her with an uncultured yokel like Roumagnac, Blanche ends the relationship, staunchly defending her lover: ‘Roumagnac’s a hundred times more of a man than you’ll ever be, you boor!’¹⁸

Meanwhile, Roumagnac’s business woes multiply, as do vicious rumours regarding his mistress. Duped into believing she is the gold-digging, two-timing whore that the town has branded her, he strangles her in a fit of jealous rage and leaves her magnificent house to burn down. Dialogues echo François/Gabin’s crazed murder of the evil Valentin of Carné/Prévert’s pre-war poetic realist classic, Le jour se lève, as he spits out the same line: ‘Shut up you filthy liar!’¹⁹ With bitter dramatic irony, the spectator knows she is innocent, and that public vindictiveness has fuelled his jealousy, blinding him to the truth. At the subsequent trial, Roumagnac pleads not guilty, using a cunning alibi devised by his spinster sister and surrogate mother. The outcome looks uncertain when the victim’s uncle suddenly reappears as a providential deus ex machina, and to the stupefaction of all, confirms her refusal of the consul’s offer of marriage and ‘undying love’ for the accused. Roumagnac is at once acquitted by the jury and stricken by guilt and remorse. The homecoming party organised by his sister only exacerbates his despair. A second explosion of Gabinesque anger ensues: ‘Foutez-moi la paix!’ [‘Get the hell out, all of you!’]. Alone in his room, he paces like a trapped prisoner, again echoing Le jour se lève. Outside, in the darkness, the love-struck young teacher lies in wait, armed. Seeing him, Roumagnac knowingly moves to stand in range against the window frame, back to the camera. Shots ring out. He falls, still clasping the ‘lucky charm’ four-leaf clover Blanche had given him when they first became lovers. The camera pans from his lifeless body to the front-page headline of the evening newspaper, ironically proclaiming his ‘release’: Martin Roumagnac Libéré. THE END

The film is notable for its ill-starred effect on the passionate liaison between its lead actors and for its negative effect on Gabin’s career. Indeed, its tragic narrative is an uncanny symbolic echo of the couple’s tumultuous off-screen relationship. Moreover, the attitude of the townspeople towards Blanche – a mixture of desire, envy and scorn – to a certain extent mirrors the French public’s response to Dietrich. Despite her public anti-Nazi stance (a fervent anti-Nazi campaigner, she joined the American army in 1943 soon after Gabin enlisted with the Free French), Dietrich was not universally liked or accepted in France. To many she was ‘that Bosch’, a foreign temptress who had stolen the heart of their national hero. Not long after the film’s release, Gabin effectively ‘strangled’ the relationship after Dietrich left for Hollywood, refusing to divorce her estranged husband of 20 years. The death of the off-screen couple was no doubt also hastened by the failure of the film. Although it attracted almost 2.5 million French spectators in total (2,491,431),²⁰ ranking 26th out of 64 French films released in 1946, Roumagnac failed to catapult Gabin back into the number one spot he had enjoyed in the pre-war years and instead ushered in a long, difficult ‘crossing of the desert’.²¹ Despite a number of critical successes, several of which would contribute to the classic French noir corpus,²² the now middle-aged actor would take another eight years to fight his way back to his pre-war position as top French male star.

More importantly for the present study than its commercial failure and doomed reflection of Gabin and Dietrich’s off-screen couple, the film’s strengths and weaknesses shed light on the extent to which key poetic realist tropes could be successfully translated into the postwar context, marked as it was by a more cynical dark realism, the returning repressed of the humiliating Nazi occupation and shameful Vichy collaboration. Gabin’s narrative trajectory, characterisation and dialogues borrow heavily from his tragic poetic realist persona, the honest man of the people hounded by cruel fate. But there is a notable departure from this figure: Roumagnac is less than heroic, displaying an uncharacteristic and somewhat shameful lack of integrity. During the protracted murder trial he produces lie after cool-faced lie, in order to save his own skin and avoid taking responsibility for his crime. A key aspect of the Gabin myth is his characters’ courage and integrity, their moral probity and selflessness in matters of love: eros and mania are accompanied by other-centred agape. In this respect, Gabin’s hero figures are constantly contrasted against the cowardly, cold-blooded deceit and hypocrisy of their male antagonists. Thus while audiences could accept murder-suicide as a tragic crimes of passion – viz. Lantier’s suicide immediately after he strangles Séverine in La bête humaine – Roumagnac’s cool-headed self-preservation signals a lack of moral courage that seriously undermines his hero-status. His delayed, mediated suicide only partly exonerates him.

To return to the fatale, played by the iconic figure of Dietrich, ultimate incarnation of the vamp, her iconic roles as Lola Lola, Shanghai Lily and Conchita Perez, necessarily inform her Blanche’s construction.²³ But as we have seen, Martin Roumagnac presents her as also a victim of this stereotyping, both by the jealous Roumagnac and the parochial, bourgeois townspeople, for whom a merry widow is necessarily a black widow, a sexually assertive woman is a threat that must be controlled or eliminated.

Lacombe’s mise en scène and costuming play into the provincial vamp stereotype: several scenes have Blanche preening before a jewel-encrusted hand-mirror and her vast array of dresses and gowns (she is never seen wearing the same costume twice) also suggests narcissistic self-absorption (Figure 5.1). These aspects are at odds with her emotional sincerity underlined by the screenplay (her association with the inseparable lovebirds) and dialogues, which insist on the importance of agency and passionate commitment: ‘the most important thing is not to be loved, but to love’.²⁴ Blanche uses her status as object of desire as a means to power but she uses that power to retain the freedom to follow her heart, rather than out of the material greed displayed by the garce and the attachment-free independence sought by the more formidable spider woman. A pragmatic modern girl, like Clouzot’s Manon, she is quite prepared to sleep with married men for material gain; indeed, she is economically dependent on their patronage. She is not primarily motivated by a love of money or property however, and (unlike Manon) ceases ‘playing the field’ once she embarks on the love affair with Roumagnac.

Figure 5.1 Martin Roumagnac

It is neither the duplicity of the fatale nor blind or malicious fate that causes the hero’s demise in this film but his obsessive sexual jealousy (the dark side of passion), which clouds his vision and leads him to code his lover as treacherous garce rather than the emotionally loyal and courageous (though pragmatic) partner that the film has revealed to its spectator.

Manic male sexual jealousy as prime driver in the visual construction (and punishment) of the fatale is of course a recurring feature of film noir and its less dark variants. In film gris, the confirmation of her fidelity generally enables positive closure, most notably in Clouzot’s ‘blockbuster’ murder mystery, Quai des Orfèvres (1947). After many dramatic twists and turns driven by a jealous husband’s fears (see Chapter 9), the female protagonist, a flirtatious cabaret singer turns out to be a faithful wife, enabling the film to end well and alleviating some of the film’s malaise. From potential fatale, she emerges as a monogamous, good-bad girl who, like Vidor’s Gilda, ‘didn’t do any of those things’ imagined by the insecure, embattled spouse.

Studies on differential feelings of jealousy in men and women propose that although both are troubled by infidelity with equal intensity, men are relatively more worried by sexual infidelity; women by emotional infidelity (their partner falling in love with another woman).²⁵ Current evidence supports the view that men harbour more deep-seated fears over paternity certainty and probably loss of status, women over withdrawal of resources and protection; though both fear emotional abandonment, betrayal and loss of status to some extent.²⁶

As good-bad girls, fatalitaires in French noir are often sexually assertive, even promiscuous, as we have seen. Like Manon and Blanche, they may be kept women, or even prostitutes. They are also modern girls in that they display a high degree of resourceful agency and independent action. The actress who personified the fatalitaire as good-hearted good-time girl or prostitute and resourceful fille moderne in classic French noir is Simone Signoret, who first played this type of role as Lilli, beloved barmaid of a legionnaire café, in Les démons de l’aube. She played similar, prostitute roles in three other major classic French noirs: Macadam (Blistène, 1946), Dédée d’Anvers (Allégret, 1948) and most famously, in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or (1952).²⁷

In all three films, Signoret’s heart of gold is revealed when she falls in love with a good man of whom she is the equal. In both Macadam and Casque d’or her primary female antagonist is a bitter, sexually repressed spinster with whom she vies for the hero’s affections. In both cases, the ‘false ingénue’ is no match for Signoret’s gutsy fatalitaire. The hero is not simply seduced by but falls emotionally for the passionately sensual, sexually open woman, abandoning the repressed, frigid, ‘good’ girl.

Signoret’s characters are marked by a powerful sensuality and personal agency that Susan Hayward aptly describes as an ‘erotics of power’.²⁸ Shared by Dietrich’s Blanche and other fatalitaires, this unruly erotics also involves a strongly ethical dimension: personal integrity and authenticity, courageous ‘resistance’ to corrupt power (refusing male control of her body as resource) and a commitment to truth. Signoret’s ethical erotics of power is most poignantly articulated in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or [Golden Marie] (1952), widely recognised as one of the most powerfully positive feminine portraits of postwar French cinema.²⁹

Loosely based on a true story, Casque d’Or is set in the Paris demi-monde of 1900. Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani) an honest carpenter with a criminal record and underworld connections, falls for Marie (Simone Signoret), the feisty but good-hearted prostitute ‘moll’ of minor crook Roland, himself under the thumb of evil gangster boss Leca, who also lusts after Marie. When Manda kills Roland in a duel over Marie, Leca has his closest friend arrested, knowing that Manda will surrender to save him, thus leaving Marie alone and unprotected.

Meticulously analysed by Susan Haywood³⁰ and Sarah Leahy,³¹ costume, hair and body language play a crucial role in constructing and reflecting Marie’s status as fatalitaire. In previous work, I have extended Hayward’s complex reading of Marie’s most significant costume (Figure 5.2): the black and white striped taffeta ball gown, trimmed with white lace ruffles and which she wears with a black feather boa and a black onyx choker.³²

Figure 5.2 Casque d'or

Hayward shows how this costume can be read variously, either marking Marie as a predatory black widow or as a sign of genuine mourning, since she wears it on the night of her lover Manda’s fateful shooting of Roland, just after discovering that she has lost Manda to another woman, and before consequently deciding to sell herself to the evil patriarch, gang boss Leca. I would add that this ambiguous layering of signification is part and parcel of the film’s construction of Marie as fatalitaire. The costume, which appears straight black in long shot, is revealed to be more complex on closer-framing: black and white stripes, indicating Marie’s potential for both good and evil and emphasising the uncertainty for the spectator as to which side she will choose. Moreover, the white lace at the throat softens and offsets the cutting jaggedness of the onyx necklace. The costume is therefore a question mark: will Marie reveal herself to be black widow or loyal mistress? Is she garce or fatalitaire? Is she driven by self-interested ludus or passionate agape? The question will be answered by the progression of the narrative, which will expose the spider-woman costume as a masquerade. Marie’s tough exterior is a survival mechanism, concealing a heart that is not ruthlessly treacherous but fiercely loyal, as revealed by her sexual sacrifice to the evil Leca, her daring rescue of her wrongly imprisoned lover and her refusal to abandon him, even at the moment of his execution. Signoret’s Marie thus displays the selfless altruism or agape that is an integral part of passionate love as ‘pure’ emotional commitment.

In this sense, as a romantic, misunderstood figure, set up as false appearance or falsely accused, classic French fatale as fatalitaire resembles the good-bad girl false fatales of American noirs like Gene Tierney as Laura (Preminger, 1944), Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat (Lang, 1953); Jean Peters in Pick up on South Street (Fuller, 1953), and especially Rita Hayworth as Gilda (Vidor, 1946). Signoret’s prostitute characters, like Dietrich’s Blanche, use their sexual allure as a survival strategy and a front, as does Vidor’s eponymous heroine. All are victims of the patriarchal tendency to ‘Look for the Woman’, or ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, as Rita Hayworth sings. All are revealed as loyal, courageous mistresses whose ethical integrity is vindicated, thus they are ultimately positive figures. So it is inexact to see noir as always already complicit with patriarchal repression of female sexual assertiveness, particularly given cases where the sensual good-bad girl or fatalitaire is pitted against a sexually repressed female antagonist (as in the Signoret films noted above).

Nor, I shall now argue, is the performance of femininity by these kinds of noir women evidence of the groundlessness of gender as masquerade.

For constructivists, the gendered slate is originally blank. Constructivism assumes that if it were not for (Western Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, capitalist) culture, human males and females would behave and think identically. Moreover, according to the constructivist framework, romantic love, claimed to be a Western Judeo-Christian cultural construction designed to shore up heteronormative monogamy, is an ethically indefensible illusion. While writing (on Signoret and Casque d’or) from an ostensibly constructivist agenda, neither Susan Hayward nor Sarah Leahy in fact take this view. Both authors celebrate Signoret’s love relationships (on-screen and off) and appear to endorse passionate love as a fundamental human bond. Moreover, their texts repeatedly evoke notions of feminine and masculine beauty and desire, authenticity and agency beyond the putatively groundless masquerade of gender stereotypes.

While I do not disagree with either theorist’s conclusions, I wish to point out that they are more in line with a biocultural theoretical approach – which considers gender as constructed and performed on an evolved, biological substratum – than with a purely constructivist framework which sees gender (and beauty) as masquerade ‘all the way down’.³³ Hayward, in particular, argues that Signoret’s costumes signal the contrast between the superficial masquerade of conventional femininity and her characters’ authenticity and agency, their erotics of power:

As the masquerade of femininity drops off, so an erotics of power can emerge.… there is a gradual process of demasquerading – marked by her clothing and the framing of shots … In this process, we get to sense all her feelings and their authenticity.³⁴

Moreover, Hayward’s definition of the split self as a result of Western repression of the libidinal body in favour of the rational mind supposes the libidinal body as the basis of the authentic subject pre-existing cultural norms, and often operating in defiance of its dictates. On both counts, I could not agree more. A biocultural approach also points out that traditional, patriarchal gender stereotypes are indeed culturally constructed, exaggerating and distorting small evolved gender differences in order to privilege male reproductive interests. Thus I agree with Leahy’s analysis of Marie in Casque d’or, which insists on her authenticity and resistance to gender stereotypes: ‘Becker’s film both acknowledges and subverts traditional representations of masculinity as active and femininity as passive. Marie shows the necessary multiplicity of gender identity.’³⁵

These observations apply equally to Dietrich’s Blanche in Martin Roumagnac, even if Lacombe’s conventional mise en scène is not nearly as masterful as that of Allégret and Becker (in the Signoret films) in highlighting the falling away of the masquerade.

Nonetheless, one scene, in which Blanche is shown gardening, is particularly effective in using simple ‘natural’ costuming and decor to underline her sincerity (Figure 5.3). It is here that she declares (to the love-sick young teacher): ‘You love me. But I don’t love you … But that’s no reason to be sad. The most important thing is not to be loved, but to love’, before sending him on his way with a chaste kiss on the cheek. Far from abusing her erotics of power to seduce and deceive, Dietrich’s fatalitaire uses it to reinforce the central importance of emotional sincerity.

Figure 5.3 Martin Roumagnac.

The role of the pimp in postwar France was paradoxically strengthened by the Marthe Richard law’s closing of the brothels (which had generally been run by a madame) because hôtels de passe, out of which working girls now operated, depended on pimps to provide and ‘protect’ (i.e. control) a steady flow of ‘merchandise’. Thus it is hardly surprising to see the pimp looming large among the masculine others of the prostitute good-bad girl, almost always coded as evil antagonist. As arch exploiter of the female body, the pimp embodies degenerate masculinity, combining moral and/or physical cowardice with controlling manipulation and bullying tactics. In all three Signoret films, the male antagonists are her characters’ evil (ex-)lovers and/or pimps: ruthless sexual rivals who attempt to eliminate the lover/hero figure. In Dédée and Casque d’or, they succeed, precipitating the tragic noir outcome. Macadam, despite its noir dimension (seedy, petty gangster milieu and plot centring around crime, desire and betrayal) and dark visual style, is more a film gris in that it achieves positive closure with the death of the sociopathic, male antagonist (at the hands of the sexually repressed ingénue) enabling the lovers to be reunited.

In the figure of the pimp, physical weakness also combines with moral turpitude, generally in the form of treacherous denunciations, thus associating him with the Nazi collaborators of the Occupation (Dédée; Casque d’or). Interestingly, the often dandyish dress codes of the pimp reveal his fundamental narcissism. In Casque d’or, Marie’s pimp, Roland, and his successor, gang boss Leca, are contrasted with the hero, Manda, whose softer but simpler, more honest and more positively coded ‘virile’ personality are signalled by the simple lines of his working-class costuming.³⁶ In both cases there is a mixture of traits coded as masculine and feminine. In the pimp these play out negatively: masculine sadism combines with narcissism, physical cowardice and moral turpitude more often associated with monstrous garce or spider-woman figures. Conversely, in the hero there is a positive association of virile courage and honesty with softer, feminine nurturing qualities inherited from Gabin’s poetic realist persona. It is no coincidence that Gabin had wanted to play the tragic male protagonists in both Casque d’or and Dédée d’Anvers.

Race, class and gender in J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I will Spit on your Graves] (Gast, 1959)

This final section looks at an unusual interethnic, interclass manifestation of the tragic dyad of the star-crossed lovers in Michel Gast’s screen adaptation of Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. As in Vian’s novel, the Joe Grant³⁷ of Gast’s film (played by Christian Marquand) is a mixed-race Black American from Memphis whose fair skin enables him to pass for White. When his dark-skinned younger brother is lynched for wanting to marry a White girl, Grant leaves town, moves north and starts a new life managing a small-town bookstore. Vowing to take revenge on White society for his brother’s death, Joe seduces several White girls, including beautiful heiress Lisbeth Shannon (Antonella Lualdi), engaged against her will to marry the unscrupulous town kingpin, the handsome and wealthy but sadistic Stan Walker. Joe intends to murder Lisbeth, but, in stark contrast with the novel (though in keeping with Vian’s screenplay), he falls in love with her and is incapable of carrying out the final act of his revenge-plan. When Lisbeth learns Joe is Black, instead of repudiating him as he expects, she suggests they run away together.

In previous work, I have analysed the film for the way its American setting serves to examine France’s own internal tensions, namely, French racism, colonial injustice and military torture in Algeria.³⁸ Here I will focus on how Gast draws on and modifies elements from Vian’s own screenplay to effect a quite different representation of gender, notably in terms of the novel’s central couple, with radical consequences for the film’s innovative (for its time) articulation of gender with issues of race and class. Whereas the male anti-hero of Vian’s novel is a sociopathically vengeful, homme fatal who seduces White women with the sole purpose of humiliating and/or murdering them, the film recasts the figure, drawing on the romantic, poetic realist trope of the tragic populist hero and star-crossed lovers. And whereas the novel’s female figures are empty stereotypes, the film’s representations of femininity, while not particularly progressive in many respects, are more varied and nuanced, pairing the hero with a number of female characters who vie for his attentions before he is (tragically) reunited with his fatalitaire ‘soul mate’.

The America of Michel Gast’s film is a stylised, mythologised America that bears little resemblance to its referent.³⁹ The most convincingly American element of the film, one of the few to meet with Vian’s approval, and perhaps its most impressive feature, is the soundtrack, provided by Alain Goraguer’s haunting jazz-blues score, whose different moods serve to articulate the film’s construction of gendered relationships, notably as these are inflected by inequalities of race and class. It is, first and foremost perhaps, a reminder of Joey Grant’s racial identity and an ironic statement of the ultimate futility of his revenge plan. Goraguer’s score employs four main musical themes: a tense, racy, masculine jazz theme signalling violence and danger, that plays as Joey races to save his brother and again, as he flees north after the latter’s death; a light, playful and sensually feminine xylophone theme associated primarily with Lisbeth; fast-tempo rock and roll that incorporates both sensuality and danger and is associated primarily with the gang. But the most memorable musical theme, introduced and often played diegetically, is Joe’s husky, melancholy blues tune, taken from his murdered brother, Johnny (we see the latter play it in the opening scene of the film’s prologue) along with his harmonica. Joe plays Johnny’s tune whenever he has a spare moment, as if to constantly remind himself of his mission to avenge his brother. But the sad, haunting melody serves as a poignant counterpoint to the violence of Joey’s crazed plan and cues the spectator to his inner struggle: between a violent desire for revenge and an instinctive capacity for compassion. He takes up his brother’s tune to spur himself on to fulfil the mission (and as a mark of his refusal of White supremacist injustice) but the tune itself – his brother’s voice – is one of sadness and sensuality, more a call to love and forgiveness than a Fanon-inspired call to arms. The music thus anticipates the ‘failure’ of the revenge plan, and signals the futility of responding to hate and injustice with more of the same.

That the revenge plan will fail is also signalled through contradictory aspects of Joey’s personality: his basic goodness is communicated through myriad plot details. He commits many small pro-social acts, his physical and moral superiority repeatedly demonstrated as he defends the weak against cowardly, bullying oppressors, most often Walker and his gang. Gast’s construction of his hero is aided by judicious casting, most notably in the case of Daniel Cauchey as Walker’s head thug, an actor whose slight build and nervous, high-pitched voice further emphasise the virile superiority of Marquand’s Joey Grant. Marquand’s costuming also sets his character apart: his unassuming, casual working-class clothes signalling honesty and imperviousness to status, in contrast to the faux machismo of the gang thug’s biker-style leather and cowboy boots or Stan Walker’s dandyish suits. On the other hand, Joey’s seduction/revenge plan marks him as would-be homme fatal. And indeed, his tall, muscular frame, rugged good looks and understated assurance act as an irresistible girl magnet: immediately he arrives in the White town, he is the sexualised object of multiple female gazes, and the focus of intense female intrasexual competition. Soon after he enters the bookshop, deep-focus camera draws our attention to a bevy of young girls in the background, peering admiringly through the window. This pattern is repeated whenever Joey encounters young White women, with the notable exception of Lisbeth, who plays hard to get. Sultry gang moll Sheila, when she first sets eyes on Joe, responds with an appreciative wolf whistle, which she later follows up with a full-scale seduction ‘attack’, declaring: ‘You’re handsome guy, Joe. You’ve got great shoulders – like a Black boxer.’⁴⁰ Undeterred by Joey’s initially violent response, she insists, dancing a sensual slow jive and whistling along to his harmonica tune. When she almost falls through a broken banister, Joey gives in, catching and carrying her almost tenderly to his bed. The next seduction scene, even more sexually explicit, is another failed revenge attempt, more sadomasochistically erotic than tender. Walking along the river, Joey chances on a half-naked blonde nymphet (gang member) swimming lazily downstream, clad only in a skimpy bikini bottom, her full breasts visible in the clear water. Our ‘hero’ immediately disrobes to his underwear, dives in and seemingly attempts to drown his victim before the attack (again) turns into an erotic encounter. Gast films the central action with an underwater camera, in close-framed two-shot, giving the scene an intimacy and erotic charge that are also ethically problematic, for the spectator’s allegiance to the hero and earlier alignment to his point of view are destabilised by his actions: sexual violence and/or predation against a helpless and innocent victim. The pattern is repeated as the young woman leads Joey out of the water to an abandoned shack, ‘the hanged man’s hut’ (an eerie reminder of Johnny’s lynching) and offers herself to him. Again Joey attempts to strangle her before renouncing both the violence and the sex: the inner struggle between his better nature and evil design resolves happily, renewing spectatorial allegiance.

While the film is progressive in its denunciation of racism and class inequality, its representation of gendered relationships is less so. In both seduction scenes, the response of the female characters to the hero’s violent sexuality is disturbing: they seem to assume that the violence is part and parcel of sexual foreplay and it is not clear whether they are repulsed or stimulated. Moreover, Joey’s violence aside, his status as hero, with whom the spectator is aligned and who represents the film’s moral centre, however shaky, displays culturally typical, ambivalent and contradictory attitudes to female sexuality. When Lisbeth complains that he seems to prefer the company of easy, common girls, Joey retorts with an unconscious reiteration of the sexual double standard, berating her for withholding sex, for not ‘giving herself’⁴¹ while simultaneously displaying contempt or disinterest for those girls who do. This prevalent sexist attitude is precisely the reason why smart girls like Lisbeth learn to ‘save themselves’ but it often means that they are ‘damned if they do …’. Finally, Lisbeth is contrasted with her deceitful promiscuous and racist sister, Sylvia, who has been having a clandestine affair with Lisbeth’s fiancé and who also sleeps with Joey. In aligning female pro-sexuality with duplicity, diminished long-term mate value and/or consenting victim status, and in keeping the pure virgin as the hero’s choice of long-term mate, the film is somewhat reactionary. We have noted, in relation to Dietrich’s Blanche (in Martin Roumagnac) and Signoret’s prostitute heroines, that this attitude, although emblematic of its times, is by no means universal in French noir.

We have also noted the influence of French poetic realism on both French and American noir. In its tragic plot structure and sombre atmosphere, in its expressive, often symbolic use of decor, music and lighting, in its social analysis and construction of gender, J’irai cracher is very much in the poetic realist, proto-noir mode. Director Michel Gast, while strenuously rejecting the notion that he might have been attempting to emulate films from the recently consecrated classic American noir canon, cites poetic realism as his major aesthetic frame of reference, in particular Carné’s Le jour se lève.⁴² And indeed, Christian Marquand’s portrayal of Joey Grant invites parallels with Gabin’s tragic populist heroes of the late 1930s. Though much taller and more muscular than Gabin, Marquand’s body language and diction are similarly evocative of Bourdieu’s corps proletarien or working-class male body:⁴³ his movements are lithe and precise but restrained, his speech direct, minimalist. More importantly, Gast’s recasting of Vian’s twisted protagonist draws heavily on the pre-war Gabin persona, the quiet man of the people, the tragic hero driven to violence and death through a combination of social injustice, desire and unhappy fate. Like Gabin’s deserter in Quai des brumes [Port of Shadows] (Carné, 1938), Joe is fleeing from his past. Like Pépé (Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937)), he is trapped in exile and dies attempting to escape. Like the eponymous hero of Gueule d’Amour [Lady Killer] (Gremillon, 1937) he is the coveted object of multiple female gazes. Like François of Le jour se lève, he kills an evil adversary and is hunted down by police.

Figure 5.4 J'irai cracher sur vos tombes.

His desire for revenge is reminiscent of Jacques Lantier’s mental illness in La bête humaine but, unlike the latter, it is based on lived experience and choice not genetic fate. And unlike Lantier, Joey falls for a ‘good woman’ who eschews the racism of her milieu and thwarts his murderous project, convincing him that if they are happy together, his brother will be avenged.

Most significantly, in line with Gabin’s enduring persona, the Joey Grant of Gast’s film reacts violently against race and class prejudice, hypocrisy, injustice and exploitation. In a notable departure from Vian’s novel and screenplay, Joey responds to Stan Walker/Dexter’s offer of sex with an underage Black girl with a Gabinesque outburst. Punching and slapping the cowardly Walker, Joe runs him outdoors through a crowded bar, beating him with a length of rope before pushing him, half conscious, into the murky waters of the port. The scene ends with the hero’s departure foreground, while in the background Gast’s mise en scene positions a solitary Black musician, dressed in white, silhouetted against the night skyline, playing (on trombone) Johnny’s melancholy theme. Complicating the visual and moral symbolism of black and white, Gast thus signals to the viewer both visually and acoustically that the enemy to be singled out, if the initial injustice is to be righted, is (not White woman, often herself a victim, but) the perverse and sadistically dominant, narcissistic White male embodied by the character of Walker.

The fatale function is distributed between the two Shannon sisters, who might easily have been constructed according to the classic dyad of ingénue vs garce, in deadly intrasexual competition for the ‘affections’ of the hero. Where Gast complicates this structure is in transforming the good sister Lisbeth from submissive ingénue into active fatalitaire. Rather than presenting her as submissive waif or sexual spectacle, the film’s introduction of her signals agency and independence. Out riding near the lake, with her Black servant, whose surveillance she has mischievously ‘escaped’, she appears first in extreme long shot (ELS), accompanied on the extra-diegetic soundtrack, by the playfully sensual xylophone theme. The camera moves in closer as she gallops down the lakeside towards Joey (on a fishing excursion with his boss, the town librarian and local oracle), obliging him to take hold of the horse’s reins to avoid being knocked over. A series of mid-shots and full-shots reveal her costuming: riding breeches, boots and crop signal masculine power, anticipating her romantic rebellion against her family’s desire that she marry Stan Walker, while a wide belt also accentuates her slim-waisted, feminine figure. Also significant in this scene, the hero’s physical strength enables him to effortlessly arrest her movement and their first exchange is a sparring match in which they are relatively evenly matched (a pattern that will be repeated). When Lisbeth brandishes her riding crop as symbol of her social authority, Joey simply ignores the intended gesture, refusing to recognise dominant cultural rules of class (and race). Gender is another matter. Subsequent scenes between them repeat this fundamental courtship pattern of feigned antagonism.

The introduction of the bad sister, Sylvia, sets up a set of contrasts between the two. While Lisbeth is active, her costuming elegant but often androgynous, Sylvia is presented as a lazy, alluring siren: her first scene has her lounging in the sumptuous garden of the Shannon mansion, sipping iced tea and engaging in idle gossip, Lolita-like in a strapless swimsuit, sunglasses and boater hat. In short, Sylvia is immediately framed as duplicitous visual spectacle. The evils of treachery, sexual perversity – and racism – are indeed subsequently confirmed as located in the bad sister: she is a classic garce whose sexual and material jealousy (as younger sister she will inherit little, the family’s wealth and status being reserved for the elder sibling) leads her into perverse, mate-poaching affairs with her sister’s men, first Walker, then Joey. It is the duplicitous garce (in tandem with the evil White male antagonist) who precipitates the hero’s downfall. During the final act, when Sylvia learns she has slept with ‘a nigger’, her disgust and servile attachment to Walker make her the willing instrument of Walker’s plan to eliminate Joey. Sylvia’s brief sexual liaison with our hero is hastily ‘rewritten’ as the classic rape narrative, allowing Walker to round up a lynch mob to avenge and ‘cleanse’ the innocent but ‘sullied’ White girl, in a grotesque semi-repetition of the film’s opening drama. In the penultimate sequence, a hysterical Sylvia shoots and wounds Joey before the latter manages to escape and thwart Walker’s crazed attempts to gun him down. Lisbeth arrives (after a high speed pursuit in which she runs two police motorcycles off the road) and takes over the driver’s seat, attempting to carry them both to the safety of the Canadian border. But of course, it is too late, once again Lisbeth’s attempts at agency are thwarted and the ill-fated lovers will die together at dawn, metres away from freedom.

Despite its somewhat traditionalist representations of gender and female pro-sexuality, Gast’s film is quite remarkably progressive in its portrayal of a love affair between an upper-class White woman and working-class ‘Black’ man. And although the character of Lisbeth cannot be described in terms of an erotics of power, her thwarted agency and agapic attachment to the doomed hero, transcending the twin divide of class and race, align her with Signoret’s courageous fatalitaire figures of Macadam, Dédée d’Anvers and Casque d’Or, prepared to risk all to save their man.

This chapter has used biocultural definitions of romantic love as evolved human universal in order to examine diverse manifestations of French fatale as romantic fatalitaire.

As good-bad girl or prostitute, the fatalitaire demonstrates unequivocally that female pro-sexuality, sexual assertiveness and agency are not always associated with duplicity in French (or American) noir. I am therefore less convinced by the suggestion that Casque d’or’s initially disappointing box office (and mixed critical reception) was due to French male audiences’ inability to accept the challenge to conventional morality posed by an assertive prostitute as heroine.⁴⁴ The success of Signoret’s previous prostitute roles renders such a conclusion problematic.⁴⁵ Popular French audiences of the period had no problem accepting assertive, sexually active female characters, provided they were emotionally honest.⁴⁶ Indeed, the good-hearted prostitute figure demonstrates audience willingness to entertain the notion that emotional fidelity is separate from and ethically more important than physical monogamy.⁴⁷ Of course, countless other films display varying degrees of misogyny, explicitly or implicitly demonising female sociosexuality and agency. Nonetheless, in the films noirs examined in this chapter, the sexually assertive fatalitaire, primarily driven by eros and agape, even to the point of self-endangerment, can serve to counterbalance and critique misogynous patriarchal norms.

Finally, despite the failure of Gabin’s attempts to revive his mythic pre-war stature as tragic lover, traces of the poetic realist legacy appear in each of the films, both in the symbolic use of decor and mise en scène and in the doomed narrative trajectories of the embattled, often criminalised, romantic hero and his loyal fatalitaire.

Eros:	strong physical attraction, emotional intensity, preferred physical appearance and sense of inevitability or fate.
Mania:	‘symptom love’ or love as an addiction; alternates between agony and ecstasy. When strongly felt, usually does not end well.
Agape:	idealising, sacrificial love, placing the loved one’s welfare above the self.
Storge:	love as friendship; quiet, companionate love.
Ludus:	love is a game to be played with a diverse set of partners. Dishonesty and deception are frequently employed in the interest of winning the game.
Pragma:	pragmatic ‘shopping list’ love, gives priority to practical considerations such as financial security and status; parenting skills; common interests.¹³