…And God Created Woman (1956)

…And God Created Woman, released in 1956, was not Brigitte Bardot’s first film but it was the one that made her an international star, and a mega-star in France. It was Roger Vadim’s first film as a director.

Bardot and Vadim were married at the time. They divorced in 1957 but went on to make many more movies together, becoming one of the great director-star partnerships.

…And God Created Woman was a worldwide smash hit but like all of Vadim’s movies it has never been a favourite with critics. Vadim is perhaps the most consistently underrated of all French directors.

Juliette (Bardot) lives in a small seaside village. She was adopted from an orphanage by an ageing couple but now the wife wants to send her back. Juliette has been causing a scandal. In fact it’s not clear that her wickedness is much more than high-spiritedness but that is enough to have her branded as a hussy.

Wealthy middle-aged businessman Eric Carradine (Curd Jürgens) has become obsessed by Juliette. When we see her sunbathing naked in the opening scene we can understand why he’s obsessed.

Juliette is in love with Antoine (Christian Marquand), one of the three Tardieu brothers who own a failing boatyard. Her feelings for him start to cool one evening when she overhears him boasting to his friends that he is going to sleep with her before the night is out.

Another of the brothers, Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is hopelessly infatuated with Juliette.

There are complications. Eric wants to buy the Tardieu boatyard in order to build a casino.

And Eric decides that the only way to save from Juliette from the orphanage is for her to marry. He would marry her, but he doesn’t want officialdom enquiring into his past. His idea is that Michel will front for him. Michel’s marriage with Juliette will be a façade. Carradine intends that Juliette will be sharing his bed, not Michel’s. That’s Eric’s plan anyway. It was one of those plans that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Of course it gets complicated. It’s significant that most of the trouble arises from people misunderstanding Juliette. They assume she’s a slut and they expect her to act like a slut, but she isn’t a slut. She’s a woman and her emotions are in turmoil and she finds herself with three men in love with her but she did not create that situation deliberately.

The characters we expect to turn out to be wicked are in fact not wicked at all. They’re in love, and love cannot be controlled.

This is not a film noir, it’s a romantic melodrama, and Juliette is not a femme fatale. She is dangerous to men not because she’s scheming or evil but simply because she’s gorgeous.

It’s obvious that the hostility towards Juliette in the village comes from middle-aged women jealous of her youth and beauty. The mother of the Tardieu brothers is the most villainous character in the movie.

Bardot of course is breathtakingly beautiful and her star power is overwhelming. She’s in sex kitten mode here but Bardot had the knack of playing likeable adorable sex kittens who were usually sympathetic characters. She gives a subtle finely judged performance here. The reason Vadim kept casting her in his movies after their divorce is that he recognised that she was a terrific actress.

This was also the movie that established Jean-Louis Trintignant as a star and he’s very good. Curd Jürgens was always good. But this is Bardot’s movie.

…And God Created Woman is in many ways a precursor to the Nouvelle Vague, the difference being that Vadim actually knew how to make movies.

Most of the online reviews start from the assumption that Vadim was a bad director because everybody says so and Bardot was a talentless bimbo who just happened to be cute. Vadim is an example of the unfortunate fact that once the critics get together to trash a director’s reputation online reviewers will just keep parroting the same nonsense. They consistently misunderstand this particular movie. The whole point of this movie is that Juliette is most definitely not a schemer, and Vadim clearly intends the audience to be completely on her side.

This is a great star vehicle for Bardot and it’s stylish and it’s a great grown-up love story. Highly recommended.

I’m a huge Vadim fan and I’ve reviewed a bunch of his movies including The Night Heaven Fell (1958) and Love on a Pillow (1962), both with Bardot, plus La Ronde (Circle of Love, 1964), Les liaisons dangereuses 1960 (1959) and Blood and Roses (1960). They’re all excellent.

Le Désordre et la nuit (1958)

Le Désordre et la nuit (literal translation is The Disorder and the Night) is a French crime thriller directed by Gilles Grangier and released in 1958. It was released in the U.S. as The Night Affair. 

It's a crime thriller with a definite film noir vibe.

Inspecteur Georges Vallois (Jean Gabin) is a Paris Vice cop. A night club called L’Oef offers hot American jazz and other things as well. It’s definitely the centre of a drugs ring. It offers girls as well.

The owner of the club, Albert Simoni, gets bumped off. Simoni was suspected of being heavily involved in the drugs racket but there are quite a few shady characters who might have had motives for having him rubbed out. And several women with whom he was sleeping would have had strong motives as well.

We see the shooting of Simoni early on. We do not know who did the shooting, but we do know that one of the key characters who becomes a suspect definitely was not guilty.

Vallois thinks Lucky Fridel (Nadja Tiller) represents his most promising lead. Lucky is a cute 23-year-old German girl. She’s a poor little rich girl whose daddy is threatening to cut off her allowance to force her to return home to Munich. Daddy fears that she will be corrupted by the wickedness of Paris. And his fears are well founded. Lucky is a junkie, possibly at least a part-time whore and a gangster’s mistress. A girl can have so many adventures in a city like Paris!

Lucky is the kind of girl who could easily end up playing the femme fatale role but she may be just an innocent out of her depth.

Vallois hopes to persuade Lucky to tell him the name of her drugs supplier, which Vallois feels will get him a lot closer to solving the case. Vallois and Lucky soon end up in bed together.

Blasco (Robert Manuel) and Marquis (Robert Berri) are among the late Albert Simoni’s business associates and they’re certainly involved in Simoni’s criminal activities. There’s American jazz singer Valentine Horse (Hazel Scott) - in the 50s jazz musicians were notorious for their enthusiastic use of drugs. And there’s Thérèse Marken (Danielle Darrieux), a pharmacist and an unlikely friend of Lucky’s.

The plot is decent enough but the main interest in this movie is the relationship between Vallois and Lucky. Is Vallois just using her to help in breaking the case? Is he another middle-aged man tempted to try to rescue a damsel in distress? That’s possible, especially when the damsel is cute and sexy. Does he have genuine feelings for her? Lucky is the kind of girl who can be exasperating and adorable at the same time.

What about Lucky? Given her unhappy relationship with her father she might well be looking for a substitute father and it’s easy to imagine that she could see Vallois as ideal daddy material - he’s old enough to be her father and he exudes confident masculinity but without the obvious sleaziness of the other men in her life.

There’s certainly a genuine sexual attraction between Vallois and Lucky and whatever their original intentions they’re now in danger of getting seriously emotionally entangled.

Jean Gabin and Danielle Darrieux were established huge stars in France so it’s natural that they get top billing. Gabin is excellent, adding just enough ambiguity to his portrayal of Vallois to keep us uncertain of his motivations. Danielle Darrieux is superb as a woman with some very dark secrets.

But the movie really belongs to Nadja Tiller. She makes Lucky a very complicated girl. She’s self-destructive but only up to a point. She can be manipulative but perhaps she’s not truly aware when she’s being manipulative and when she’s being sincere. She’s a very confused young woman which makes her very dangerous. And she’s sexy in a fascinatingly ambivalent way.

This is a French film noir unconstrained by the Hollywood Production Code so it’s open about sex in a way that was impossible for American noir. And it’s willing to explore the dark primal side of female sexuality. Not being bound by the Production Code also meant that the writers had a lot more freedom - they were not obliged to give the story a morally uplifting ending.

Le Désordre et la nuit is a fine example of 50s French film noir and I like 50s French film noir very much indeed. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed another extremely good Gilles Grangier noir, Speaking of Murder (1957).

The Rhine Virgin (1953)

The Rhine Virgin (La vierge du Rhin), directed by Gilles Grangier and released in 1953, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir 2 Blu-Ray boxed set.

We get voiceover narration by a guy named Pietr. He’s a crewman on a barge on the Rhine. A somewhat battered stranger (played by Jean Gabin) talks his way into a job as the second crewman. The skipper of the barge is Meister (Olivier Hussenot), Also aboard is Meister’s daughter Maria (Nadia Gray). 

The stranger claims to be a German named Martin Schmidt but oddly he has no trace of a German accent.

The barge belongs to a man named Labbé and his wife. When the founder of the company, Jacques Ledru, was killed in the war Labbé married his widow Geneviève (Elina Labourdette) and took over the business. Labbé seems to be mismanaging the company and selling off its assets.

Martin Schmidt is broody and taciturn and gives the impression of being a dangerous man haunted by a mysterious past. Naturally Maria falls madly in love with him. What girl wouldn’t?

Slowly we realise that Martin Schmidt has some very big secret which is the reason he was so anxious to secure a berth on the barge. Not just any barge, but this one. He has been away and he has returned because he has unfinished business to take care of. 

There is a reason he has bought a gun.

There is also a reason why someone tries to kill him.

It all connects with his past but obviously I can’t be more specific without risking spoilers. And there will be some major misdirection. And a murder.

This is a movie in which information is concealed not just from the audience but from the key characters.

A word about the movie’s title. The name of the barge is the Rhine Virgin but there is a deeper significance. There is a huge cliff jutting out into the Rhine known as the Lorelei and when the barge passes it our attention is drawn to it. There is a legend attached to this rock - a beautiful young maiden was betrayed by her lover, she drowned herself in the river and was transformed into a kind of siren, luring boatmen to their doom. This siren is known as the Lorelei. She is the Rhine maiden (or virgin if you prefer). This is clearly a sign that we should we should be on the alert for the appearance of a femme fatale.

And there is a femme fatale. Three women will play important roles in this story.

Jean Gabin was a huge star in France at this time. He made all kinds of movies but especially crime movies. He was a kind of French Bogart - weather-beaten and hardboiled with plenty of charisma. Like Bogart he was not an obvious sex symbol but women loved his air of brooding masculinity. He’s in fine form here.  

Elina Labourdette provides the glamour and feminine danger. She gets to wear some exquisite Jacques Fath gowns.

Nadia Gray is excellent, playing Maria as a woman who gets more and more interesting as the movie progresses.

The Rhine Virgin is not a film noir. It’s a murder mystery with some suspense thriller touches, but personally I’m not complaining because I love murder mysteries and this is a good one with a rather interesting structure. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray pesentation looks terrific and there’s an audio commentary featuring Max Allan Collins.

Gilles Grangier directed some superb noirs, including Speaking of Murder (1957) and Le Désordre et la nuit (The Night Affair, 1958), both of which I’ve reviewed. At this point I will watch any movie directed by Gilles Grangier that I can get my hands on.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Written on the Wind is my favourite of the 1950s Douglas Sirk melodramas and in this one the melodrama is as overcooked as any fan could desire.

Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) is a classy sophisticated glamorous woman who meets two men. One is Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), the son of oil tycoon Jasper Hadley. Kyle will one day be one of the world’s richest men. The other is Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson). Mitch is Kyle’s best friend and works for him. Mitch falls for Lucy but Kyle is determined to make her his. Mitch backs off - big mistake.

We quickly learn about these two men. Kyle is extremely rich but he’s a loser. He always has been. He’s never actually been any good at anything. That’s because he’s a lazy, irresponsible, self-indulgent drunk. Mitch is good at everything because he’s responsible, hard-working, smart and sober. Kyle is rich and Mitch is just an employee but Kyle has always been jealous of Mitch. And he knows that his father would have preferred to have Mitch as a son.

Kyle makes a crude attempt to buy Lucy. She is outraged and lets him know that she’s not that sort of girl. But she marries him anyway. She’s in love with him. Maybe she thinks she can fix him. Whether those oil billions helped her to fall in love with him is something that might occur to some viewers.

Mitch has been noble but he can’t stop loving Lucy.

There’s an extra complication and it’s a big one - Kyle’s kid sister Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone). She has always been in love with Mitch, but Mitch, Kyle and Marylee were all brought up together and Mitch still thinks of Marylee as a kid sister.

Marylee decided long ago that if she couldn’t have Mitch she would get her revenge by letting every man in the town have her. She’s the town tramp.

Then the marriage between Kyle and Lucy hits an unexpected snag and the emotional meltdowns begin. 

Rock Hudson is good but he has the most thankless role - Mitch is a more or less functional stable grown-up human being which doesn’t give Hudson much scope for bravura acting. 

Lauren Bacall has a tricky role. Lucy doesn’t have obvious characters flaws except that her decision to marry Kyle was a spectacular error of judgment. Lucy is perhaps just a bit underwritten - we’d like to know more about her motivations. Did she marry Kyle out of pity? Did she have visions of saving him? These things are at least hinted at.

You can if you want to see this movie as a critique of capitalism but if you do you’ll miss all the most interesting things about it. There are a few obvious swipes at obsessions with respectability but they’re not very interesting. What makes this movie great is the full-blown melodrama with all the emotions and interpersonal conflicts and character flaws exaggerated to an extreme degree.

Kyle’s self-pity is on an epic scale and clearly indicates a massive lack of confidence in his masculinity. Early on we see him provoke a fistfight and he loses and it’s obviously just the latest in a series of fights that he’s lost. His crude attempt to impress Lucy with his wealth is another sign of his insecurity about his masculinity. He doesn’t think he can win a glamorous sophisticated classy woman like Lucy without flaunting his wealth. After a year of marriage he finds out that Lucy hasn’t yet fallen pregnant because he has a low sperm count. He naturally assumes that this means he isn’t satisfying her sexually when in fact it’s obvious that she finds him a totally satisfying husband in every way. He wasn’t impotent but now he has undoubtedly talked himself into actually being impotent. His self-pity takes off into the stratosphere. This allows Robert Stack to overact outrageously and he does.

Marylee has a similar problem. She has spent years unsuccessfully trying to seduce Mitch  but it’s a no-go so she feels inadequate as a woman. Giving herself to countless losers she picks up in bars just makes her feel even more inadequate as a woman. Her nymphomania is on a scale that could keep a whole team of psychiatrists busy.

She is the catalyst for the major disasters. She’s a bad girl and a wild girl but as we discover at a crucial moment, not truly evil. She’s in her mid 30s but she’s still just a little girl. She wants Mitch and if she can’t have him she’s like a little girl whose daddy won’t buy her a pony. Her manipulativeness is childish and obvious. But she knows how to use sex as a weapon, and the family fear of scandal. Dorothy Malone dominates this movie. Malone overacts outrageously and deliciously. This is an actress who knows how to do melodrama.

I love melodrama for many of the same reasons I love film noir. They don’t depict reality but a heightened exaggerated version of reality. The shadows in film noir are deeper than the ones in real life, the nights are darker, the punks are lousier, the dames are more rotten and the greed and lust are more extreme and the sense of doom is more palpable. It’s an artificial world.


And melodrama exists in an artificial world. This is especially so of Sirkian melodrama. In Written on the Wind the rich are super-rich. They live in huge mansions. When Kyle wants to impress Lucy he turns her hotel room into what looks like a seraglio. Mitch is impossibly handsome. No real person could could collapse into a state of self-pitying hysteria to the extent that Kyle does. No real woman could be as much of a clichéd cheap tramp as Marylee. The characters’ emotional responses are insanely excessive. Everything is absurdly overheated. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone chew scenery the way you’ve never seen scenery chewed. Even the cars are ludicrously wild - Kyle’s 1953 Allard J2X and Marylee’s 1955 Woodill Wildfire look like cars that comic-book characters would drive. Sirk uses matte paintings and he wants them to look like matte paintings. We have left the real world and entered Melodrama World.

If you’re looking for messages here you’re missing the point. Any messages in this movie are embarrassingly trite. It’s the style and the overblown quality and the sheer glorious excessiveness that matter. They are the content. They’re all the content it needs to make it a masterpiece.

Written on the Wind is very highly recommended.

La Femme et Le Pantin (1958)

Julien Duvivier’s La femme et le pantin was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by Pierre Louÿs (translated into English as The Woman and the Puppet). The novel is one of the masterpieces of decadent fiction. Duvivier’s film has had several English titles including The Female and A Woman Like Satan.

The novel was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 as The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich starring. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made (I’d put it in the top five) so attempting another adaptation was extraordinarily bold. And while Brigitte Bardot is an excellent actress there’s no way anyone could ever surpass Dietrich’s performance. The von Sternberg movie, like all his important movies, is a flamboyant and brilliant exercise in style.

In passing it’s worth noting that The Devil is a Woman was released in France as La femme et le pantin.

Eva Marchand (Brigitte Bardot) is a young French girl living in Seville in Spain with her father. He is a once-famous novelist with a slightly shameful past and he is now more or less in exile.

Eva is a dancer and a good one. She could earn good money if she accepted the offer to work in the nightclub owned by Arabadjian (Darío Moreno), especially if she worked upstairs where the girls do the erotic dancing. The problem is that Eva is a virgin and Arabadjian doesn’t employ virgins.

Eva has a boyfriend, Albert. Or at least that’s what Albert imagines, and he assumes that she will marry him, but it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Then she meets Don Matteo Diaz (Antonio Vilar). He is very aristocratic and very rich. He’s also married. That’s no obstacle - Don Matteo’s wife Maria Teresa (Espanita Cortez) allows him to have affairs. Her only concern in this case is that Eva might hurt him.

Eva is, as I have said, a virgin. He has indicated to Albert that she will lo him to take her virginity, but only if he’s a very very good boy. She makes the same offer to Don Mateo. Albert allows her to toy with him because he’s a nonentity. Don Mateo is however a proud caballero and it’s surprising that he allows her to string him along but he is obsessed and he is prepared to allow her to humiliate him.

Of course sooner or later the crisis will come.

We have to decide if Eva has any actual feelings for either man or whether she’s just enjoying playing them both for fools. The title obviously suggests that we’re supposed to see her as a scheming puppeteer.

My problem was that having seen von Sternberg’s movie multiple times it was almost impossible not to make comparisons. While I have a great admiration for Bardot (and anyone who thinks she wasn’t a fine serious actress hasn’t seen her in La Vérité) it has to be admitted that Dietrich had the ability to project feminine cruelty, and feminine pleasure in cruelty, in a way that Bardot can’t quite match.

Bardot was a different kind of actress and she’s playing the role her way. She’s enjoyable to watch but she fails to nail the character the way Dietrich did.

I think that the contemporary setting was a mistake. The proud caballero Don Mateo doesn’t feel quite at home in the late 1950s and the extent of his humiliation might have has more impact in an earlier time setting. And many of Eva’s games involve dangling the prospect of taking her virginity in front of both men as if it’s a treat for a well-behaved puppy. This doesn’t quite fly in 1958.

Duvivier can’t match von Sternberg’s visual tour-de-force but it is a gorgeous movie shot in sumptuous colour. And the brawl scene is superb, with the camera rocking back and forth as if it’s caught in the middle of the flying fists.

There are some unnecessary and distracting subplots that just go nowhere, especially the one concerning Eva’s father.

What we have here is a talented director, but he’s the wrong director for this movie. And a very talented lead actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this movie. I can’t help thinking that Roger Vadim might have had a better feel for the material. And maybe this is a crazy idea but it might have been been better done a few years later with Jane Fonda. Her French was sufficiently fluent to allow her to act in that language without any problems and she might have added just a bit more of an edge.

This movie doesn’t quite come off and watching it just convinced me even more of the genius of von Sternberg and Dietrich.

Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.

Les Diaboliques (1955)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) was based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus (translated into English as She Who Was No More).

The film was a huge hit in France and an international success and its critical reputation grew steadily.

In 1996 Jeremiah S. Chechik directed another adaptation, Diabolique. It has huge flaws and a trainwreck of an ending but a few interesting elements.

Hitchcock had been very keen to acquire the film rights to She Who Was No More but Clouzot beat him to the punch by a hair’s-breadth. A few years later Hitchcock adapted another Boileau-Narcejac novel, D'entre les morts, as Vertigo.

In his film Clouzot made major changes to the plot and further major changes were made in the 1996 film so if you’re familiar with any of the other versions do not assume that you knew exactly how the Clouzot film is going to end. I’m not going to talk about the plot at all since it does rely on a big twist and I don’t want to offer even the smallest hints.

Clouzot changed the setting to a private boys’ school. This works very well - a school has just the right hothouse atmosphere. Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is the headmaster. He’s a third-rate headmaster of a third-rate school. And the school belongs to his wife Christina (played by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot). She has all the money.

Michel is having an affair with one of the teachers, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).

Christina and Nicole are planning to murder Michel.

This is where the story starts to become strange and twisted. There’s a very odd relationship between the two women. They should hate each other. Instead there’s a weird bond between them. Modern critics and viewers will be tempted to assume they’re lesbians but they’re not and it’s nowhere near as simple as that. The bond is based on the fact that they are sharing a man. Both women love Michel and both women hate him.

There is a hint of sexual perversity. Michel bullies and humiliates both women but something has drawn both women to him.

This a story that deals with female sexuality and desire and emotion in ways that modern viewers might find disconcertingly grown-up, complex and subtle.

Véra Clouzot is extremely good as the neurotic Christina who is guilt-ridden before she’s even done anything. She’s probably been guilt-ridden her whole life.

The standout performer though is Simone Signoret as the ambiguous puzzling Nicole. Nicole thinks she has everything under control.

Les Diaboliques truly was a ground-breaking movie - a movie built entirely around a fiendish shock twist at the end. Since then countless crime and horror movies have employed this technique so a viewer watching this movie today is going to be on the lookout for such an ending. Even if you haven’t been told that this movie has a shock twist at the end you’ll be anticipating such a possibility because it’s become a tried and tested formula. But when Les Diaboliques came out in 1955 it knocked people’s socks off. They simply were not prepared for the possibility that the film had been playing games with them, leading them up the garden path. Sadly Les Diaboliques cannot possibly hit as hard today as it did then but that does not detract from its greatness and its originality or from its boldness.

The movie also benefits from some superbly atmospheric black and-white cinematography by Armand Thirard. This combines with the seedy setting that reeks of defeat and despair to create a superbly unsetting and uncomfortable air. There’s this all-pervasive feeling of wrongness.

The twist is the selling point but it’s the unhealthy emotional entanglements and the growing atmosphere of paranoia that really impresses.

Les Diaboliques is a crime thriller with some definite horror overtones and it’s a magnificent cinematic achievement. Very highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks great and the highlight of the extras is the interview with the always perceptive and entertaining Kim Newman.

I’ve also reviewed the Boileau-Narcejac novel She Who Was No More.

Witness in the City (1959)

Witness in the City (Un témoin dans la ville), directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set.

The screenplay was by the great French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I believe it was based on one of their novels. They’re best known as the authors of the source novels for two of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Witness in the City begins with a brutal murder of a woman on a train. We see the murderer, Pierre Verdier. There’s no ambiguity. We know it was murder. The case against him is however dismissed for lack of evidence.

The woman was the murderer’s mistress. Her husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) is not going to take this lying down. Verdier had carried out a perfect murder. Now Ancelin plans a perfect murder of his own.

This all happens right at the beginning of the movie so I’m not giving away any spoilers. All this is just the setup.

The trouble with plans for perfect murders is that when put into practice some minor unforeseen circumstance always gums up the works. In this case it’s a witness. He didn’t see an actual murder, but he saw enough.

The movie is a hunt or rather it becomes a tale of two hunts.

Lino Ventura gives a nicely minimalist performance. It’s as if Ancelin is in some ways dead inside.

Henri Decaë provides some very fine very moody black-and-white cinematography.

There’s an enormous amount of night shooting. The movie really does have a noir city at night feel. There are a couple of scenes involving trains (alway a bonus) but a huge amount of the film takes place in cars, and cabs. The witness is a cab driver. Half the cab drivers in Paris end up being involved.

This is a movie in which characters are always in movement but not actually getting anywhere. They keep ending up driving down the same streets. The streets of Paris are like a gigantic spider web from which there is no escape. No matter how far and how fast you drive you can never leave that spider web. You always end up back where you started. The city will not allow you to escape. Noir cities are like that.

The driving scenes, some involving a dozen or more cars, are extremely well done. They have tension and energy but it’s a frustrated kind of energy. An energy that needs resolution but the resolution seems like it will never happen.

Overall I’m not sure that this ticks enough noir boxes to satisfy film noir purists (there is for example no femme fatale) but it’s definitely a movie that film noir fans will love. There’s as much pessimism as one could desire. There are also some existentialist touches.

Things are not full explained, and this is clearly deliberate. We know what happened on the train at the beginning but not why. Verdier gives his account of the events that led to the murder but Ancelin doesn’t believe him, and Verdier has a motive to lie. On the other hand Ancelin has a motive to lie to himself.

There are some touches that you wouldn’t get away with in a Hollywood movie of the 50s, such as Ancelin’s encounter with a prostitute.

We’re never quite sure if we should be sympathising with Ancelin or not.

Witness in the City is slightly offbeat noir. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (1958) which is also superb. It’s included in the Kino Lorber set, along with Speaking of Murder (1957) which is not as impressive as the other two movies but still very much worth watching. There are no extras included with any of the three movies.

Back to the Wall (1958)

Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) is one of three 1950s French crime movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s based on the novel Délivrez-nous du mal by Frédéric Dard.

It lays out its noir credentials right at the start. The opening scene is not just a night scene, but it’s that film noir kind of night. You know, those nights when you know that bad stuff is going to happen.

Then we see a sinister guy in a trench-coat and he’s clearly up to no good.

We’re not surprised that there’s a murder. At least we assume it’s a murder although we don’t see exactly what happened.

We then get some grisly scenes of the body being disposed of.

It then gets even more noir, with a flashback and voiceover narration.

There’s an adulterous wife, Gloria Decrey, played by Jeanne Moreau during the film noir icon phase of her career. The cuckolded husband knows about her betrayal but his reaction is not quite what we expect. He intends to do something about it but his plan is convoluted and indirect.

There’s a blackmail angle. There’s a sleazy private detective and he’s surprised that what he’s being asked to do is not quite what he anticipated.

It becomes a war of nerves.

What a director doesn’t tell you is just as important as what he does tell you, and being told things can be just as misleading as not being told if the director knows what he’s doing. You’re going to suspect from the start that there may be a bit of misdirection going on but suspecting such a thing does not necessarily help. This movie keeps leading up to obvious plot twists and then the plot twist turns out not to be the one we expected.

We understand part of the motivations of one of the key characters but we don’t know what that person’s actual intentions are.

And there’s plenty of suspicion, guilt and emotional ambiguity.

I don’t know anything about director Édouard Molinaro but he does a confident assured job here, leading us up the garden path with considerable skill. He has a clever literate script from which to work which always helps.

I know almost nothing about Gérard Oury, whose acting career apparently petered out by the early 1960s, but he’s very good here. It’s a very noir performance as a man in control on the surface but in turmoil underneath.

This movie was in the same year that Elevator to the Gallows AKA Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) made Jeanne Moreau a huge star. She’s excellent here. Gloria is not exactly a femme fatale, or at least not in a straightforward way, but she has the same kind of disastrous effect on men.

This is a nicely shot and very atmospheric movie.

Back to the Wall is genuine film noir as well as being a clever mystery suspense thriller, and it’s very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers the movie in French with English subtitles. The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and thankfully there are no extras.

I’ve also reviewed Speaking of Murder (1957) from this set. It’s not quite as good but it’s well worth a watch. And another French noir very much worth seeing is Witness in the City (1959).

The Glass Web (1953)

The Glass Web was a product of that brief period when Hollywood actually believed that a ridiculous gimmick like 3D was going to win back the audiences that had deserted them when television appeared on the scene.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray includes both 2D and 3D versions and I watched it in 2D. The movie includes lots of the silly gimmick shots you expect from 3D.

Don Newell (John Forsythe) is a TV writer screenwriter on a true crime series called Crime of the Week, made by a production company named TVC. It’s a series that claims that it aims for absolute accuracy. Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson) is the chief researcher. He thinks that he’s the key member of the production team but he isn’t. He is obsessive about getting the details right. The series is up for renewal and everyone is nervous.

Henry comes up with the bright idea of basing their season finale on a case that is happening right now, a murder case in which a suspect has been picked up but has not yet been indicted. Viewers will in effect be watching the case on TV even as the actual court case will be happening. In reality of course the network’s lawyers would put the kibosh on such a risky idea.

The real-life case involves people actually involved with the production of Crime of the Week.

Both Don and Henry have been having dalliances with TV actress Paula Ranier (Kathleen Hughes). She’s a cheap blonde who is obviously ruthlessly using both men but Don and Henry are the kinds of guys who fall for tramps like Paula. She’s obviously a no-good dame but everything about her is ripe with the promise of steamy illicit bedroom thrills.

It’s no surprise when Paula’s manipulations and attempts at blackmail end in murder. There are several possible suspects, including both Don and Henry.

The key to the movie is when Paula tells Don that she picks her victims carefully - weak men who don’t have the guts to fight back.

As a whodunit this movie flops completely. The identity of the killer is embarrassingly obvious. Maybe the screenwriters didn’t care and maybe their intention was to focus on an innocent man caught in a trap, partly due to his own poor judgment and party due to the schemings of others.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for not trying to pretend that this is a film noir. Its affinities to noir are superficial. And it is entirely lacking in noir visual style. Visually it’s flat and uninteresting.

Playing a sad schmuck who gets taken for a ride by a cheap blonde is something Edward G. Robinson could do in his sleep. He’s OK here but he’s hampered by the overly obvious script. I like John Forsythe as an actor but he’s a bit on the dull side here, although in fairness he is playing a bit of chump.

Kathleen Hughes pulls out all the femme fatale stops. She’s a riot. Paula is a gal who could make doing the ironing seem like a sleazy come-on. There’s no subtlety to Hughes’ performance but the only time this movie comes to life is when she’s onscreen.

The use of a TV studio as a setting provides some interest - this is TV in its infancy when shows were extremely clunky and so it’s quite appropriate that we get the impression that Crime of the Week is a clunky show.

This is a movie that just doesn’t work. There’s no mystery and no effective suspense. It’s just lifeless. The script is feeble. I like Jack Arnold as a director but in this case it feel like something he just did for a pay cheque.

Overall rather disappointing. I cannot recommend it.

For a more favourable review of this movie check out the Riding the High Country blog entry.