Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

Sitting at the interface between crime, greed and desire, conspicuous consumption is at the heart of noir. More particularly, it is the driving factor behind the noir underworld, its macho gangster culture and resulting gender-relationships. The present chapter will use insights from economics, social and evolutionary science to shed new light on this key issue, notably investigating ways in which French gangster noir may perpetuate or interrogate gender norms.

Firstly, a study of the gangster in classic French noir as cipher of hyper-masculinity will reveal highly ambivalent, apparently contradictory attitudes towards the conspicuous consumption – of automobiles, gambling and other extravagant entertainments and, of course, beautiful women – that is the hallmark of the gangster lifestyle. Secondly, in terms of its sociohistorical context, the classic French noir period of the late 1940s and 1950s also happens to be the period during which the country was introduced to consumer culture, as both byproduct and driving force of American-led modernisation.¹ Ways of consuming (and being consumed) are therefore inextricably linked, not only with questions of gender, but also, of national identity. Love and money, gender roles and modes of consumption, all of which are undergoing rapid change in the postwar Marshall Plan driven era, are inextricably linked to questions of Frenchness.

I shall focus firstly on the three most critically acclaimed 1950s French gangster noir: Gabin’s comeback hit, Touchez pas au Grisbi [Hands off the Loot] (Becker, 1954), after and with dialogues by Albert Simonin; Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi Means Trouble] (Dassin, 1955), after and with dialogues by Auguste Le Breton; and Bob Le Flambeur [Bob The Gambler] (Melville, 1956), dialogues by Auguste Le Breton. Frequently bracketed together by critics and academic commentators alike, all three films involve popular French Série noire writers Simonin and Le Breton and a classic heist plot: an aging gangster is involved in one last caper, the ultimate heist that will enable him to retire and enjoy a life of ease and carefree consumption. In Grisbi, the heist has taken place before the film begins, so the problem lies in converting the loot into usable cash and, as the title suggests, keeping a rival gang’s hands off it. Rififi centres on the mechanics of the heist itself, which is successful, but the rival gang ensures the protagonists don’t live to enjoy the fruits of their ‘labour’. In Bob, the heist is meticulously prepared and imagined (via a long, hypothetical flash-forward) but never actually takes place. All three films end in true noir fashion, in the death of the hero’s friends and accomplices (Grisbi; Bob), and in the case of Rififi, of the hero himself. As a coda highly revealing of rapidly changing gender roles and of the resilience of the trope of the tragic romantic lovers, the final section will discuss Alex Joffé’s little known Du rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls] (1959), also after Le Breton.

I am using the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in Veblen’s classic sense of wealth as status display, spending to enhance status rather than ensure survival. In sociological terms, conspicuous consumption relates also to Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural capital.² In neo-Darwinian terms, this translates to a form of direct or indirect reproductive effort or sexual display: status seeking as a means to attract high-quality mates, which in turn, increases power and status.

It is no coincidence that all three films in my primary corpus share as central location Pigalle, the French capital’s most infamous space of conspicuous consumption. Its iconic nightclubs, strip clubs and gambling joints (as well as its restaurants and cafes) are clearly related to status seeking and/or reproductive effort – in a word, sex (Figure 10.1). And, since the Liberation and arrival of American troops and African-American civilians on French soil, these spaces are frequently overlaid with the sensuously exotic sounds of jazz.³ Pigalle’s nightclub district is first and foremost the space of the consumption of (mostly female) flesh. In Bob, Melville insists on this with multiple location shots, flashing neons and posters advertising saucy cabarets and floorshows. The fact that gangsters and their associates own these spaces (in all three films) underscores the role of the underworld in the transformation of the city into what American sociologist Terry Nichols-Clark (2004) would later describe as an ‘entertainment machine’.

Figure 10.1 Bob Le Flambeur.

In contrast to the red-light ambiance of Pigalle, more bourgeois sites of conspicuous consumption provide the backdrop for the heist: jeweller Mappin and Webb on the prestigious Rue de la Paix (Rififi) and the provincial Deauville casino (Bob). Nostalgic evocations of ‘clean’ rural spaces, putatively unburdened by the violent competition that conspicuous consumption inevitably involves, punctuate both films. In an early scene from Rififi, an associate advises the ailing hero to ‘[g]o to the countryside, get some air in your lungs’. But when he finally gets there, near the film’s apocalyptic close, he finds the Parisian countryside is already being taken over by corrupt capitalism, symbolised by rival gangsters’ half-built villa. Bob does include a glimpse of rural utopia in the form of a stud farm owned by an ex-convict turned gentleman farmer, the dream of many a fictional gangster, most notably the ill-fated Dix Handley of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (USA, 1950), to whom Melville’s film makes intertextual reference.

Grisbi opens on an extreme long shot (ELS) of Pigalle by night, with the iconic Moulin Rouge dissolving into a medium close-up (MCU) of the film’s hero, Max, presiding over an opulent meal for which he ostentatiously foots the bill. As this first scene demonstrates, for the hyper-masculine gangster, money is more than a matter of somatic effort or means to physical survival in the banal, biological sense. Money is central because the gangster’s identity, his self-esteem, honour and status as patriarch and ability to attract high mate-value women, depend on two things: the ability to be on top of the game of conspicuous consumption (and its offshoot of conspicuous charity as in the scene above) and the ability to meet challenges to his status with the threat and use of violence.

In a sense, the gangster is like the pure capitalist, obtaining resources via high-risk investment, often paying others to do much of the work, whence the pervasive, conceptual metaphor of criminal enterprise as business, as ‘just another form of left-handed endeavour’ (Asphalt Jungle). For the gangster, making money generally means appropriating it from others, with or without their consent – either via illegal trades (drugs and prostitution) or via theft or robbery. All of this involves significant risk, further aggravated by the fact that the gangster generally has no recourse to the law. The high risk factor, with its adrenalin fix of sudden gain and constant spectre of total loss, means a high reliance on chance, whence the centrality of gambling. And in gambling as in business, one has to be in to win: ‘ya gotta have money to make money’, one might say. Both Rififi and Bob open on images of the hero gambling. And both lose. In the opening scene of Rififi, Tony’s loser status is underscored by his being ejected from a poker game for want of funds. His young sidekick, Jo, arrives to bail him out, reminding the hoodlums running the game that they should know Tony, aka Le Stéphanois, from his ‘rep’. In other words, no questions asked credit should be forthcoming. But the remark is brushed aside as passé. In postwar, Marshall Plan era France, only hard cash counts: ‘No money. No cards’, Tony is told. When he looks to respond to this affront to his honour with violence, Jo wisely bustles them both out of the room. There is no point in fighting when they are so hopelessly outnumbered and more importantly perhaps, there is no need. In honour culture, the willingness to fight is often sufficient, as Donald Black, drawing on renowned anthropologist, Julian Pitt-Rivers (1966), points out,

Honor is a form of social status based on force. A display of disrespect challenges a man of honor to defend himself in an appropriate fashion, or lose his honor … A defense of honor does not require victory, however, nor does it require physical power or skill. It requires only bravery: a willingness to risk injury or death.⁴

Rififi’s expository scene thus serves to introduce the character of Tony as a man of honour – brave enough to risk injury or death against all odds. Honour is also his central predicament: loss of face and the need to restore it. More importantly, the scene underlines a fundamental breech in the code of honour central to the gangster’s identity, which has become divorced from its central ‘moral’ foundation: bravery, loyalty, reciprocity and trust. In all three films, the protagonists nostalgically deplore the loss of these core values, the so-called ‘honour among thieves’ that in France, since the Nazi Occupation, Vichy Collaboration and American-led Liberation, has been fatally compromised. The honour economy has been replaced by a consumer-cash economy.

In films with gangster protagonists, in order to enlist audience sympathy, illegal and morally disreputable forms of production-consumption must be reconfigured to resemble more acceptable behaviours. The primary means of achieving spectator allegiance is by constructing protagonists with positively coded personal character traits: intelligence, professional know-how (all three protagonists mastermind and drive the heists and subsequent actions); or virile courage and pro-social agreeableness⁵ in the form of loyalty and self-sacrifice, as when the hero takes the rap and does prison time for the group (Tony in Rififi), or risks all to rescue a friend (Max in Grisbi; Tony in Rififi) or even helps a cop (Bob). Generosity, conspicuous consumption and/or charity are displayed by all three major protagonists (even the down-and-out Tony in Rififi ostentatiously pays for champagne in a nightclub). One likewise observes instances of chivalrous protectiveness of the weak and innocent. Bob, especially is a gentleman, the classic honest thief.

Moreover, since all drama is based on agonistic structure, gangster protagonists are made to look good by setting them against negatively coded antagonists: crooked or puritan law enforcers (as in Huston’s Jungle) or in the case of our three French noirs, cowardly pimps and drug dealers and unscrupulous, psychopathic rival gangsters.

Finally, perhaps the single most key factor in all heist films lies in constructing the left-handed endeavours of protagonists as highly skilled, collaborative work: these are not violent, unscrupulous crooks, they are chivalrous teams of master craftsmen. Dassin’s Rififi remains the uncontested king of the genre in this respect.

In a sense extending and improving on Asphalt Jungle, Rififi was a cinematic first that revolutionised the heist genre and earned the film an enduring place in the noir canon. The dramatic intensity of the heist sequence, still the quintessential reference in the genre, is wrought from an almost surgical attention to detail (the transformation of everyday objects into professional, precision tools), taut direction and camera work (cross-cutting between the closely framed action in the room, ticking clock on the wall, and the street below) and a minimalist, Bressonian sound-track, entirely without dialogue and music for 25 minutes. In fact Dassin eliminates dialogue for the entire duration of the heist and getaway: 31 minutes, over 200 of the film’s 832 shots. Moreover, in this sequence as elsewhere, the director uses egalitarian editing, framing and mise en scène to emphasise the collaborative nature of the heist and the complementary skills of its craftsmen.⁶

In Grisbi, released the previous year, the protagonists’ work, which consists centrally in retrieving their stolen loot, is also framed reasonably collaboratively, although the star status of Jean Gabin as Max means his character receives more screen time and close shots. Here, the key conceptual metaphor – which would also be taken up by Melville – is military, invoking the French Resistance (a rival thug is tortured by being strung up by his wrists, a method used by Nazi occupiers, Vichy collaborators and the Free French alike). And Melville’s Bob plans the casino operation as if it were a commando operation, hardly surprising given his and writer Le Breton’s Resistance connections.⁷

From a neo-Darwinian perspective, we might say that as sympathetic protagonists, these gangster figures display high adaptive individual fitness (intelligence, courage, skill) and cooperation⁸ to promote both group and individual survival and status in high-risk, unstable environments⁹ via the acquisition of dangerously hard-to-obtain resources. While not framed in evolutionary terms, this point has not been lost on commentators (journalistic and academic). As early as 1956, Yale professor Jacques Guicharnaud noted:

Jules Dassin has managed to evoke a fundamental and fundamentally moral theme, namely, the greatness, the dignity of man’s intelligence and labor … Those on whom its ‘evil influence’ might take effect are not the slothful who dream of ‘making an easy buck’ but the hard-workers, the connoisseurs of the job well done, the perfectionists, all who have the vocation of a skilled craftsman or precision engineer.¹⁰

If male protagonists are constructed as noble producers in gangster noir, female characters, particularly antagonists, are most often represented as insatiable consumers. In Bob, the sultry, greedy young temptress, Anne, casually demands of the hero’s lovestruck young protégé, ‘Donne-moi la lune’ [‘Get me the moon’]. Anne’s venal nature is also revealed by her reaction to Bob’s Cadillac, when she states her ambition to make it her own, though wisely not in his presence. The last time she is seen, after Bob has left her his key (he has resisted the temptation she represents but Melville intentionally leaves a question mark over the strength of his resolve), a brief conversation with a fellow working girl makes her intentions clear:

– What are you thinking about, your mink coat or your Cadillac?

– Both.

In a similarly venal fashion, the unattractive wife of minor character Jean, the croupier, is impressed when her husband buys her a bracelet as an advance on his participation in the heist, though also suspicious as to its provenance. The slightly distorting low angle and subtle chiaroscuro employed in this scene, together with the erasing of the husband’s face, suggest the ‘unnatural’ assumption of masculine power by the wife.¹¹ Moreover, in a later scene, she is casually dismissive of the modest 4 Chevaux her husband has (presumably) slaved to purchase. Predictably, since greed goes hand in hand with treachery, this character will also goad her cowardly ex-pimp of a husband into informing on the gang to the police.

Only women and weak (i.e. feminised) sociopaths succumb to uncontrolled consumption, which is thus always already coded as feminine. Represented in both Rififi and Grisbi by hard drugs, together with prostitution, these were the social evils of the day, already indelibly associated with the gangster underworld and providing the narrative focus for several other French noirs of the period (most notably Razzia sur la Chnouf and Le désordre et la nuit, starring Gabin in law enforcement roles, as we have seen). In Grisbi, Riton’s unreliable showgirl girlfriend, Josie (Jeanne Moreau), is a coke addict. The sociopath younger brother of the evil, rival gangster boss in Rififi is addicted to heroin.

Because masculinity equals power, real men must keep control, over objects of consumption, and above all, over their women – as consumer objects. In all three films, the good gangsters’ demise is precipitated by the uncontrolled desire of one of their number for an alluring but unreliable, often greedy female.¹² All these female characters are fatal in this sense however all are minor characters – none have the narrative power of the ‘true’ femme fatale.

As Mulvey (1975) argued, classic Hollywood cinema constructed women predominantly as fetishised objects of the (male) gaze. Without subscribing to the Freudian assumptions underpinning Mulvey’s analysis, one can agree that much film noir would appear to conform to this mode of spectatorship, with the femme fatale as the ultimate object of obsessive fascination. And yet, as I have argued, both men and women can derive power from being the adored object of another’s desiring gaze. The dangerous, often lethal allure of the fatale (in any of her various guises, in classic noir and melodrama and on both sides of the Atlantic) is highlighted by the way she uses her object status to her own power advantage, capturing the male gaze and – in the case of the spider woman – using it to spin the web of desire that will entrap him. In classic American gangster noir, Ava Gardner as Kitty in The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) is emblematic of this figure. Although French noir contains few powerful spider-women fatales, as we have seen, and though none are evident in our three test case gangster noirs, in Bob, we indeed see Anne attempt to use her charms as part of a fatale-like power play, with mixed results.

Because most female characters in gangster noir are involved in the sex and/or entertainment industries, obviously their status as consumer objects is emblematic of this fundamental gender dynamics, whereby women’s primary means to subjectivity under patriarchy is their paradoxical status as object of the desiring male gaze. If uncontrolled sexual desire is always the biggest threat to masculinity, it is largely because it affords woman a level of subjectivity and power.

Across the three films, we observe both sides of this somewhat perverse coin. In Rififi, nightclub singer Viviana’s sensual performance of the film’s theme song cuts to reverse shots of the riveted gaze of the male audience, in particular Italian safecracker, Césare (played by Dassin himself), who has been introduced as a master craftsman with a weakness for beautiful women (‘They say there’s no safe that can resist Césare; no beautiful woman that Césare can resist’). It is this uncontrolled desire that will prove the gang’s undoing.

Conversely, in Grisbi, a similar cabaret scene signals Max’s world-weariness by his utter lack of sexual interest in the already possessed objects of his desultory gaze. The numerous scantily clad dancers and strippers parading on and off stage, including his supposedly steady girl, Dora, appear somewhat cheap and devoid of erotic appeal despite the glitzy costumes. Knowledge and possession here signal the death of desire. And the death of desire on the part of the male consumer denies power, status and agency to the female. No longer a fetish object, she is also denied subjectivity.

Ironically, although female characters are most often constructed as insatiable consumers and/or objects of consumption, and although engaged in adult entertainment professions which are a thinly disguised code for prostitution (the principal means of subsistence for the underworld since being made illegal in 1946), they are the ones doing the most honest labour. As Tony’s ex-girlfriend, Mado (Rififi) retorts when he sneeringly assumes her expensive jewellery has all been gifted to her by his arch rival, also her current ‘protector’: ‘Not this piece. I earned it’. Although the film portrays her as a nightclub hostess, audiences would understand the reference to prostitution, explicit in the novel.

Novelists, insider commentators and historians all agree that the violent misogyny of the underworld stems from the fact that female flesh is its prime commodity, and that this commodity must be kept under strict control;¹³ in other words, not so much protected as ‘guarded’. Indeed, the violent relationship between the tough-guy gangster-pimp and his prostitute moll, in this film as elsewhere, can be read as a perverse iteration of the sexual dynamics arising from the bodyguard hypothesis, in which the double-edged protection provided by the pimp is designed to advance his commercial property (rather than simply genetic) interests. Rififi also critiques this dynamics, as I shall argue later in the chapter.

We have noted how the classic French noir period of the late 1940s and 1950s also sees the advent of consumer culture, as both by-product and driving force of American-led modernisation under the Marshall Plan. Given the centrality of consumption to noir, it is no surprise that our three test cases document the rapid move towards consumerism that would transform both workplaces and domestic spaces and ultimately impact on gender roles.

In gangster noir, most of the action takes place in public and professional spaces of conspicuous consumption. Interestingly, however, each of our three films also shows gangsters in domestic spaces that are more often than not marked by bourgeois elegance and conspicuously decorated with modern consumer objects.¹⁴ Bob’s eponymous hero inhabits a chic studio with a view of the Sacré Coeur; gangsters in Rififi (except momentarily down-and-out Tony) live in bourgeois comfort, displaying the iconic features of modern consumerism, including modern kitchens and appliances, baths, television sets, and the iconic white telephone. This was at a time of acute housing shortage, when France was just beginning to recover from the deprivations of World War II, when most French still used public baths and many houses had no running water, let alone inside toilets and their own bathrooms.¹⁵ And, as Marc Vernet argues, the spaces inhabited by Jean Gabin’s Max in Grisbi, and the objects he displays and consumes, can be read as a clever attempt to negotiate between tradition and renewal as a means of re-appropriating modernity for Frenchness.

Max’s second apartment is spacious, ultramodern, chicly appointed, complete with chrome furnishings, juke box, Frigidaire, electrical appliances and vast bathroom. Moreover, Becker’s camera takes the spectator on a long, leisurely tour of the space, as if it were a veritable show-home.¹⁶

Within the diegesis, Max’s apartment signals covert rather than conspicuous consumption. It is his clandestine safe house, lavishly furnished for his own comfort and (narcissistic) pleasure. However, in the famous scene where he acts as host to his troubled partner, Riton, the film certainly uses this space as status display, both in terms of reinforcing the hierarchical relationship between the two gangsters and allegorically, on a nationalistic level, proudly displaying both modern French decors and traditional food and wine, implicitly inviting its spectators to consume local, once they have the means.

In Rififi, Dassin adds an unusual feature in making his young gangster, Jo, a pipe-smoking, family man, showing the potential of left-handed endeavour to serve as a vehicle for both social mobility and family values. Jo’s apartment, while not situated in an opulent quartier, is smart, luminous and comfortably well appointed. Housewife Louise first appears wielding an ultra modern vacuum cleaner as her husband lounges on the sofa (Figure 10.2). One is reminded of Sylvia Harvey’s comments on class-like divisions of labour within noir:

The value of women within exchange has been to a large extent determined by the position of women within the structure of the family. Women’s place within the home determines her position in society, but also serves as a reflection of oppressive social relationships generally. As Engels suggested, ‘within the family she is the proletarian, he the bourgeois’.¹⁷

Figure 10.2 Du Rififi chez les hommes.

Nonetheless, as Rififi reminds us, gangster husband Jo’s line of work is also proletarian in the sense that it demands real physical labour. Moreover, his high-risk endeavours are put firmly and explicitly in the service of providing for wife and son. Finally, while Louise appears to fully accept her role as ‘proletarian’ (house)wife and mother, she begins to question the violent competition underpinning her husband’s profession, as we shall see.

The gangster epitomises and renders visible the narcissistic commodity fetishism at the heart of modern consumer-capitalism. This is signalled firstly and most obviously via dress codes, whether elegant (for major protagonists) or dandyish (minor protagonists and antagonists) gangsters are typically more appearance conscious than cops. Gabin is visibly more elegant as Max than any of the other male characters in Grisbi (the only one to wear a white pocket handkerchief, even in the final shootout), and more so than his soberly attired inspector Valois in Désordre, not to mention the staid, middle-aged waistcoats, scarves and greatcoats of his Maigret films. Melville’s Bob, anticipating the director’s subsequent gangster figures of the 1960s, is obsessively preoccupied with his image and the rise and fall in his fortunes are signalled via costuming.¹⁸

But nowhere is the relationship between the gangster and commodity fetishism clearer than in the automobile: the ultimate icon of modernity, mobility and status.¹⁹ And, as with the conspicuous displays of modern decors and state-of-the-art appliances, the automobile will serve, allegorically, as a vehicle for the reaffirmation of national identity. The classic gangster car of the period is the black Citroen front-wheel drive Traction,²⁰ driven notably by Max’s old-school partner in crime, Pierrot (Grisbi). Also driven by cops, the Traction is highly evocative of Franco-French traditions, and particularly of the Resistance.²¹ But the most iconic automobile in our corpus is the (often white) oversize American-style sedan or convertible. The ultimate fetish object, it is all the more envied and prized for being emblematic of that loved and hated icon of modernity: America. This ambivalence is particularly evident in Grisbi.

Max’s car is the French response to the American luxury sedan: a limited edition, top-of-the-line Simca²² V8 Vedette Matford, originally a Ford design, but hot off the factory floor in Poissy, just outside of Paris. His car, and that of his sidekick, Riton,²³ ‘attest to three values: wealth, novelty, and Frenchness, reconquered from overseas sources’.²⁴

Americanophile Jean-Pierre Melville’s hero, Bob, drives an even more ostentatious, late model American Cadillac convertible similar to those driven by Melville himself. According to his collaborator, Françoise Bonnet, the director frequently used it to pick up girls. Among them was Isabelle Corey, whom he subsequently cast as Anne in the film, playfully including a mock pick-up scene in which Roger Duchesne/Bob utters Melville’s stock line ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, which way is the rue Pigalle?’²⁵ If I mention this somewhat salacious piece of paratextual gossip, it is to underline the role of the automobile in gender relationships. More than simply a Freudian phallic symbol, I read the luxury car via the evolutionary concepts of the handicap-principle and costly signalling, pioneered by Israeli biologists Amos and Avishag Zahavi (1997). Amos Zahavi (1975) first explained the existence of costly physiological ornaments, such as the peacock’s tail, in terms of sexual selection, by arguing that they are effective fitness indicators and key to (female) mate choice, precisely because they are so difficult to grow, maintain and carry around. Only the fittest animals can afford them, thus females are attracted to their owners. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller was quick to see the link to Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, citing the Hollywood example of the quintessential gold-digger, Lorelei Lee, played by Marilyn Munroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953). ‘Miss Lee was not the brightest button ever to baffle “Doctor Froyd in Vienna”, but she understood the principle of costly display.’²⁶ In his recent study of consumerism, Miller expands further on human status symbols as forms of sexual display, in particular the American luxury automobile:

Signalling theory applies equally to nature and culture. Nature produced peacock tails: large, symmetrical, colourful, costly, awkward, high-maintenance, hard-to-fake fitness indicators. Human culture produced … the Hummer H1, which is also large, symmetrical, colourful, costly, awkward and high-maintenance. These qualities make it hard to fake as a fitness indicator – even if you could steal an H1, you probably couldn’t afford its gas or insurance.²⁷

To return to the films, as mentioned above, Marc Vernet’s analysis of Grisbi reads it as a nationalistic re-appropriation of the gangster genre in the form of ostentatious advertising of locally produced French consumer goods, whether food, wine, furniture or cars. Such showcasing also serves to reclaim French cinema in the face of renewed postwar competition from Hollywood. Indeed, the French Série noire films often adapted and/or scripted by their literary authors, were themselves a commodified re-appropriation of American tropes, an attempt to wrest back market share of the postwar French film industry from the all-devouring Hollywood hydra.

Grisbi’s other key commodity is, of course, its star Jean Gabin, as symbol of Gallic virility, which had suffered ignominious defeat, four years of Nazi Occupation and shameful Vichy Collaboration during World War II. That Gabin had joined the Free French on his return from Hollywood in 1943 and was decorated for valour before participating in the Liberation of Paris cements the visual links to the Resistance made by the film in its mise en scène of gang warfare and final shoot out. But, surprisingly perhaps, Gabin/Max’s role in Grisbi focuses more on his personal relationships with friends and the central issue of women, tellingly linked to the icon of the automobile.

Among Max’s many feminine conquests (Pigalle showgirls and secretaries) his favourite is Betty, a beautiful, elegant, independently wealthy American. Moreover, and more importantly, Betty drives a Cadillac convertible, which the French dubbed La belle Américaine [The American Beauty],²⁸ and she drives Max to the final scene at his favourite Montmartre restaurant. Could this be a seminal case of a dame in the driver’s seat? Symbolically, I think not. For the film ensures Gabin/Max retains the upper hand. He may be getting on in years; in this film he is no doting sugar daddy, no aging fall guy. Ever the Latin lover, his character is cast as Betty’s ultimate object of desire. The film insists on this: after the previous afternoon’s lovemaking (in between shoot-ups) of marathon length, whose duration is signified by a long elliptical shadow slowly falling across Betty’s classy boudoir, she is utterly starry eyed.

Here, and in the final restaurant scene, the spectator is left in no doubt as to who is really in charge. Shot reverse shot camera emphasises the looks of envy from Max’s hangers-on as he shows off his own belle Américaine. ‘How do you do it?’, one asks, gawping. No response from Max, but Becker’s camera cuts to a low angle of Gabin standing ‘protectively’ over Betty, claiming her as she gazes adoringly up at her (French)man (Figure 10.3). Yet again, literally and figuratively, La belle Américaine has been re-appropriated for Frenchness. Max’s seduction of (rather than by) Betty, played by none other than ex Miss America, Marilyn Bufferd,²⁹ hugely reinforces Gabin’s status as Latin Lover and therefore that of Gallic masculinity, so badly bruised by the experience of the Occupation and its aftermath.³⁰ On the other hand – contra Vernet perhaps – this is hardly a case of consuming local.

Figure 10.3 Touchez pas au Grisbi.

In both Grisbi and Bob French gangster heroes are shown to obtain mastery over the iconic signifiers of American consumerist modernity. In doing so, both films also engage in an implicit glorification of gangster machismo, its dirty side largely hidden by the films’ somewhat romanticised vision of their affluent, agreeable, largely non-violent protagonists, who share a distinctly Parisian elegance, a certain world-weary charm and laconic chivalrousness.

Rififi however, directed by American blacklist exile Jules Dassin, is less nostalgic, and more critical, a point to which I now turn.

Like ex-Communist Jules Dassin’s 1940s American noir, which emerged out of a climate of disillusionment with the failure of the New Deal, and against a background of the HUAC hearings and Dassin’s subsequent exile in Europe, Rififi is underpinned by a leftist critique of consumerism, drawing clear parallels between gangsterism and capitalism, pointing out the violent macho ethos that underpins both.

Its critique hinges on the theme song, Rififi Means Trouble, presented diegetically as a cabaret act, sung by Fellini actress Magali Noël as Viviana, as part of the film’s expository sequences. The term Rififi is an underworld slang neologism (invented by author, Le Breton) signifying gangster-style violence and fighting, and which the film’s producers felt needed to be explained to audiences. But Dassin’s mise en scène lends the song thematic resonances that extend far beyond semantic explanation. The scene notably includes a highly stylised dance routine of unabashed phallic symbolism, showing a silhouetted gun-toting gangster, acting out the song’s sadomasochistic lyrics (Figure 10.4).³¹

Figure 10.4 Du rififi chez les hommes.

… If another guy just gives me a nod,

Straight away he goes for his rod

He tips his hat and yessiree! It’s time for some Rififi

…

In love he can be kinda rough, he don’t go in for sentimental stuff

A chick he keeps telling me, Gets her kicks on Rififi

And when he really lets himself go, I get a cuff just for show

But when I’m lying by his side, I’m nothing, I got no pride

In paradise I wanna be, I’ll pay the price in Rififi.³²

The lyrics proclaim unambiguously that women are attracted to tough guys, who move from protection into attack mode at the slightest suggestion of interest from potential male rivals (If another guy gives me a nod … it’s time for some Rififi). Moreover, the masochistic, sexual pleasure women obtain by being objectified and beaten up (when I’m lying by his side … In paradise I wanna be) is glorified and reinforced by gangster ideology (A chick … gets her kicks on Rififi). The fact that the singer enters the diegetic screen halfway through the song, changing costume to participate in the dance routine, further underlines the porous border between representation and reality, performance and identity. Thus, the song begs to be read as a mise en abyme in terms of its exposition of the performativity and violent objectification underpinning gender relationships in gangster noir. The key question is of course: does the film critique or glorify the rififi ethos? When I last taught this film to an undergraduate group of 50 students, most read the song literally, describing it and the film as a whole, as deeply misogynistic. However, the more astute among them picked up on the ways in which Dassin disavows the gangster ethos of the Rififi song, inviting a more critical rereading.

Charges of misogyny are understandable, particularly when one considers that the film’s hero Tony has previously acted out the ‘bodyguard’ dynamics of the Rififi lyrics, giving his ex-girlfriend a brutal beating for leaving him for a rival while he was in prison. But far from coming back for more, Mado retains her dignity, by leaving her current ‘protector’ without ‘grassing’ on Tony and by refusing Tony’s subsequent attempts to rebuild the relationship. Denouncing the underworld’s violent, ultimately self-destructive, materialistic machismo, Mado predicts the film’s outcome: ‘The lot of you will die like dogs!’ Though a minor character (appearing in only five short scenes), Mado’s rejection of the rififi ethos and her adherence to ‘cleaner’ values (she later provides key information that enables Tony to save Jo’s kidnapped son from the rival gang) is pivotal to the film’s thematics.

The second challenge comes from Jo’s wife, Louise, who takes her husband to task for his responsibility in their son’s kidnapping by the rival gang, suggesting there is more courage in enduring the daily routine of honest work than in being a so-called, tough guy.

Finally, Rififi’s dark ending, as the fulfilment of Mado’s bleak prophecy, is the ultimate indictment of the gangster ethos. Here again, the automobile plays a key, symbolic role. In the final sequence, Tony Le Stephanois makes his getaway in yet another white convertible, stolen from the rival gangsters. Bleeding from gunshot wounds, Tony plays the wounded knight, on a desperate mission to return Tonio, his godson and son of his now dead partner, Jo, to his frantic mother. In a surreal sequence, breathtakingly filmed by Philippe Agostini as a wild ‘succession of impressionistic point-of-view shots of trees and sky demonstrating a visceral sense of movement’,³³ Tony races across Paris, while his uncomprehending godson, dressed in a cowboy costume, playfully aims a toy pistol at his dying godfather’s head. One cannot but read this detail of mise en scène as a poignant comment on the generational transmission of machismo and its link to American visual culture.

But clearly, machismo and honour culture are not confined to the USA. As nineteenth-century French writer and art critic Théophile Gautier put it, ‘la lessive d’honneur se lave dans le sang’ [‘the laundry of honour must be washed in blood’]. Even though the flawed hero redeems himself (after his sadistic treatment of Mado) by returning his godson, Dassin’s mise en scène questions how ‘clean’ the bloodwashing is. For Tony’s stolen convertible, his ‘white charger’ is noticeably sullied in the process of fulfilling his mission. And the film ends on a long shot of Louise running off with her son, leaving Tony in the background, an insignificant figure, dead and already forgotten.

Critics constantly note American and French noir’s misogynist tendency to vilify women or relegate them to the back seat.³⁴ And cultural anthropologists and historians confirm that real world gangsters were often more ruthless still.³⁵ In gangster noir film and literature, femmes fatales and other female antagonists are continuously scapegoated as the cause of the male drive for wealth and attendant status, while positively coded female protagonists are mostly minor characters, with little power and agency, even if several (like Rififi’s Mado) show considerable courage.

But the 1950s also saw the emergence of the first female noir action heroine: in the sadly under-rated Du rififi chez les femmes, a heist film set in Brussels, also closely adapted from and scripted by Le Breton. Although of German origin, nightclub owner, cabaret singer and gang boss Vicki de Berlin, played by ex-Miss Austria, Nadja Tiller (Gabin’s young mistress in Le désordre et la nuit), might be described as the first French-speaking noir ‘action babe’.³⁶ A tough but fair boss, Vicki will lead her ‘troops’ of nightclub hostesses into battle against a surprise attack from a rival female-led gang, and will refuse to give in to pressure from powerful, local and international gang lords. Demonstrating – for once, if not for all – that ‘when the going gets tough, a lot of women are worth more than men’, Vicki plays a key role in the heist itself. Forced to stand in for a captured associate, she totes heavy bags of money, saves the hero (fellow gangster, played by Robert Hossein) and descends a dizzying lift shaft on a rope, albeit wearing a Balmain outfit and stilettos.

Presented initially as a cynical bachelor girl who substitutes money and power for love (having been raped by Russian troops after the fall of Berlin), she will eventually fall for the hero, although their romantic affair is of course, cut tragically short. In true French noir style, Vicki and her newfound love will die together at the end of the film. But the spectator’s allegiance remains with her and she will be remembered for her courage and loyalty, which are shown not to be exclusively masculine domains.

While a modest commercial success,³⁷ the film was not remembered fondly by critics.³⁸ One can only speculate as to whether its unfavourable reception relates partly to a level of misogyny on their part. Although none found – or admitted to finding – the central premise of a female gang boss to be preposterous, most considered the Série noire formula old hat, were unimpressed by the resemblance of the heist to Dassin’s Rififi and understandably put off by instances of clumsy mise-en-scène, most notably a voyeuristic girl-on-girl fight scene. One could indeed criticise the film further on feminist grounds, for having the female protagonist (and her ‘troops’) engage in masculine-coded violence, mimicking and glorifying antisocial male behaviours. But in the noir universe, without the capacity for violence, there can be no real human agency. I would argue therefore, that despite its shortcomings, the film is worthy of note, if only for its creation of a physically and morally courageous, active and independent female protagonist, femme moderne and classic fatalitaire.

This chapter has examined three iconic French gangster noirs to argue that the milieu’s hyper-masculine honour culture, and the conspicuous consumption that fuels it, are ciphers for French masculinity coming to terms with rapid sociocultural change, seeking mastery over the iconic signifiers of modernity and reclaiming American-driven modernisation for Frenchness. Grisbi and Bob are also notable for their traditionalist attitudes towards issues of gender, although its gentleman-thief protagonists present hegemonic masculinity as a benign force. By contrast, even while it constructs its protagonists as honourable craftsmen and family men, Dassin’s Rififi nonetheless critiques the dark side of honour culture, its senseless violence and subjection of women.

In Du rififi chez les femmes, whatever the film’s shortcomings its action-heroine protagonist is progressively revealing of changing gender roles. The film also mounts a critique of conspicuous consumerism: money and status reveal themselves a poor substitute for love. Its theme song, a bittersweet musing on the power of money, sung by the protagonist herself, aligns the film with Dassin’s and will bring us back to evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller.

Money! It’s the heart of the world. Money is King.

What Money says goes. It can turn a loser into a star.

If you want furs, diamonds, elegance, intelligence …

If you want to hide ugliness, stupidity; to win a heart … or just respect …

Ya gotta have money!

Nothing but notes and coins, it holds the world under its thumb …

Money, I adore you, money I deplore you … (Du rififi chez les femmes, my transl.)³⁹

Read with the intended irony, ‘L’argent’/‘Money’ could almost be the theme song for Miller’s (2010) study of consumerism. For, while his thinking is firmly grounded in evolutionary theory, seeing the links between Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and costly signalling, Miller’s conclusions are a vehement denunciation of status-seeking consumerism as an ultimately destructive and ineffective form of self-advertisement. It is no coincidence that the genetically transmissible traits listed as the most desirable are precisely those that attract star-crossed lovers to one another.

… the most desirable traits are not wealth, status, and taste – these are just vague pseudo-traits … Rather, the most desirable traits are universal, stable, heritable traits closely related to biological fitness – traits like physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, intelligence, and personality … Consumerism’s dirty little secret is that we do a rather good job of assessing such traits through ordinary human conversation, such that the trait-displaying goods and services we work so hard to buy are largely redundant, and sometimes counterproductive.⁴⁰

All well and good, but … are wealth and status truly nothing more than redundant pseudo-markers? Consumerism (particularly as costly signalling) would hardly operate to the extent it does if this were entirely the case. Nonetheless, its counter productiveness is almost axiomatic. As gangster noir serves so vividly to remind us, the trait-displaying goods that intelligent, independent risk-takers strive so hard (protagonists) or so ruthlessly (antagonists) to obtain involve them in violent competition that is dangerously counterproductive, if not deadly. Moreover, as I have argued, some gangster noirs, like Rififi, are also ‘resistant’⁴¹ rather than complicit with the dominant macho ideology of the genre.

On another level, noir tends not to moralise in conventional ways: the death or demise of criminal protagonists is more a driver of sympathy than the somewhat sanctimonious injunction that ‘crime doesn’t pay’.⁴² Nonetheless, and at the very least, by its association of conspicuous consumption and death, noir in general, gangster noir in particular, reminds us that consumption is a zero-sum game. One man’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. And in terms of gender, both Rififi adaptations underline the fact that men’s violent gain or endeavour is both proximately and ultimately, every woman’s loss.