Betty Blue (1986)

Betty Blue (the original French title is 37°2 le matin), released in 1986, is one of the handful of feature films directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix.

Beineix was one of the directors spoken of at the time as an exponent of Cinéma du look, a movement supposedly emphasising style over substance. Like most movements in cinema the label doesn’t really mean all that much. Luc Besson also attracted this label. In fact while they did make stylish movies (which damned them in the eyes of French critics) there’s a lot more substance in their best movies than you’ll find in the films of the earlier Nouvelle Vague.

Zorg lives in a rundown shack in a strange seaside resort composed entirely of equally rundown shacks. He seems to be a kind of handyman.

He has met the most amazing girl, Betty. She’s nineteen and super-cute and super-hot and seems fun and bubbly and she’s great in bed.

Almost all the plot turns result from dramas manufactured by Betty. In this case it’s a pretty spectacular drama.

Zorg and Betty then decamp to Paris where they share a house with Betty’s friend Lisa, a young widow.

Lisa has a new rich boyfriend, Eddy. He gets Zorg and Betty jobs in his upscale pizza restaurant. It soon becomes clear that there is no-one in the world less suited to a career in hospitality than Betty.

They end up running a piano store previously run by Eddy’s late mother in a small town.

Betty has discovered Zorg’s shameful well-concealed secret. He has written a novel. He has never submitted it for publication. Betty reads it and decides that Zorg is a literary genius. There are two things that make her judgment suspect. Firstly, she loves Zorg so naturally she thinks he’s a genius. And it is desperately important to Betty that Zorg should be a success.

The problem is that Betty is very unstable, she has a hair-trigger temper and when she loses her temper she becomes uncontrollable and her capacity for indulgence in self-pity is colossal. A particularly extravagant self-pity episode is triggered by what is in truth a minor setback. Betty treats minor setbacks like full-scale disasters. Betty’s instability has the potential to destroy her and destroy Zorg. But they are madly in love. Can that love save her? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

This movie hits me a bit close to home since I actually had a long-term girlfriend very much like Betty. Just as cute, just as hot, just as unstable, just as crazy. By the 80s such women were being diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. Whether you buy such psychiatric diagnoses or not such women do exist and Betty certainly fits that mould.

It’s interesting given the movie’s 1986 release date is that any attempt to frame Betty as a feminist heroine is doomed to failure. Betty truly wants just one thing - to be a devoted wife (and she hopes one day to be a devoted mother). She is not a feminist rebel girl and she has zero interest in being a strong, fierce independent woman. For Betty nothing matters except her love for her man.

Betty is a monster, the kind of woman capable of destroying herself and everyone around her. She is a ticking time bomb. Poor Zorg is the kind of guy who meets a psycho chick like Betty and immediately thinks - I can fix her. I can save her. The sensible thing to do is to run away as fast as possible.

But Betty is not a mere monster. For very long stretches she really is sweet and adorable and lots of fun. She is fiercely loyal to Zorg. She has made her choice. He is her man. She would never even consider looking at another man. And while her belief in Zorg’s genius is motivated by her strong belief that she cannot truly love a man unless she can admire him and look up to him that’s not such a bad thing. She really does believe in him, she really will do everything in her power to make him a success, she really will inspire him to believe in himself. There are a lot of things to like about her.

There’s a lot of sex (and it’s reasonably explicit) but their relationship is not based entirely on sex. They have a very healthy very normal sex life. This is a movie that is entirely positive about sex. There’s a lot of nudity, both male and female. Oddly enough it’s the male nudity that is gratuitous!

There are some charming quirky moments and some very romantic moments. This is very much a love story.

Beineix insisted on having Betty played by an unknown and Béatrice Dalle delivers the goods for him.

The director’s cut is very long (a shade over three hours) but the length can be justified since we need to see that for very long stretches of time the relationship is successful and happy and Betty is likeable, cheerful and functional with her psychotic moments gradually having more serious consequences.

Betty Blue is a wonderful movie. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Beineix's Diva (1981).

…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.

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.

La Vérité (1960)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) was released in 1960. For many people this is the movie that established Brigitte Bardot as a serious actress but it’s interesting for a number of reasons.

This is a courtroom drama with most of the story told in a series of flashbacks but the French criminal justice system (and their entire legal system) is radically different from British or American systems. If you don’t know that then you will be extremely perplexed. A young woman, Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) is on trial for murder. She has a defence counsel but the victim’s mother is also represented in court by counsel. In this movie he is in practice acting as a second prosecutor.

And the fact that Dominique shot and killed her lover, Gilbert Tellier (Sami Frey) is not in dispute. Her defence is based on the claim that this was a crime of passion and in France until the 1970s that was a legitimate defence. It could make the difference between the guillotine or a very short prison term, or could even mean acquittal. What that means in this story is that it is the strength of her love that is on trial.

La Vérité is also interesting because of the social milieu in which Dominique moves. She is part of a group of what are essentially beatniks. 1960 was a time when juvenile delinquents and youth subcultures were causing much excitement and hysteria. And the Sexual Revolution was just starting to gather steam. The prosecution in this story is in practice putting Dominique on trial for flouting traditional morality. In her social circle sexual promiscuity is taken for granted.

Dominique is actually a bit wild but to the middle-aged members of the jury and the officers of the court she is a monster of depravity. They are shocked to learn that after leaving her parents’ home in the provinces and moving to Paris she has frequented coffee shops and cinemas.

In Paris she meets Gilbert Tellier, a student of music. He was her sister Annie’s boyfriend. Gilbert soon decides that the free-spirited Dominique is much more exciting than the staid resectable Annie.

Gilbert and Dominique but from the start there’s trouble. And there are dramas and breakups and reconciliations and betrayals. It was always likely to end badly. And it does.

The title makes it clear that this movie is a search for the truth. But what exactly does that mean? This is not a conventional mystery. We know precisely what happened. We know that Dominique shot and killed Gilbert and then tried to kill herself. We need to know how exactly that came about. We need to know if Gilbert ever truly loved her, and if she ever truly loved him. And given that her defence relies on the claim that it was a crime of passion both the court and the audience have to find out exactly what was in Dominique’s mind when she pulled that trigger.

And when the court and the audience know what was in her mind they have to decide if her passions were so inflamed that she can be forgiven.

And of course this is a trial, with both the defence counsel and the rival counsel having their own versions of the truth which they hope they can persuade the court to accept. Lawyers know that the secret is to present and package the truth in just the right way.

And Clouzot feeds the truth to us slowly. One obvious truth quickly emerges. Gilbert and Dominique were terribly young, terribly in love and terribly and spectacularly mismatched. They were always going to hurt each other. They both realised it, and could do nothing about it. Dominique knows Gilbert is the wrong man for her but she cannot get him out of her mind and her heart.

They both behave badly. Dominique cheats on Gilbert repeatedly but that’s the inevitable result of their being so mismatched. He’s a very serious minded ambitious musician with no time for fun. Dominique is a high-spirited passionate 20-year-old girl who needs fun and excitement as much as she needs oxygen. That does not excuse her betrayals, but the betrayals were inevitable. Dominique cannot change who she is.

There is a girl who is perfect for Gilbert - Dominique’s sister Annie. Annie is serious minded and respectable and equally career-oriented. They are an ideal match. But Gilbert dumps her because Dominique is much hotter and is dynamite in bed.

And Clouzot is not going to make it easy for us. Do we ever learn the real truth? Will it satisfy us if we do? You’ll have to watch the movie and decide for yourself.

Bardot is absolutely superb. We like Dominique but sometimes we want to shake her and tell her, “Girl, you just can’t do that.” But we know that she will anyway. Bardot captures her elusive and contradictory personality perfectly, and her youthfulness. There’s no point in expecting Dominique to think anything through. She cannot. She is not evil, but she’s like a driverless runaway car. And she can be manipulative. Could she be lying about the shooting? Perhaps. But she could be telling the absolute truth. And she could be telling the truth as she sees it.

It’s a complex movie and it necessarily takes its time unravelling the story of this disastrous love. But it is enthralling and Bardot is mesmerising.

La Vérité is highly recommended.

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).

Speaking of Murder (1957)

Speaking of Murder (Le rouge est mis) is one of three movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. But it is most definitely not film noir. It does not possess a single film noir trademark. It’s a tough hardboiled crime thriller based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton.

It’s also a heist movie.

It starts very slowly but when the mayhem kicks in there’s quite a bit of it.

Louis Bertain (Jean Gabin) is an ageing small-time gangster who operates a garage as a front for bank jobs. There are five members in his gang and right from the start there is uneasiness about the possibility of a double-cross.

Frédo is very jumpy. Pepito (Lino Ventura) is very dangerous and very suspicious. The other two gang members are typical hoodlums and are not very bright.

Louis’ kid brother Pierre is a petty criminal just out of prison. Pierre has figured out that he’s not cut out for a life of crime.

Pierre has a girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot). For reasons that are not entirely clear Louis hates Hélène and is determined to break up the relationship.

The gang has a major armoured car robbery lined up but it goes wrong and the gang, thoroughly rattled, shoot a whole bunch of people.

Louis is not as smart as he thinks he is or maybe he’s just getting old. The police will soon be closing in. Suspicions and recriminations and nerves lead to more violence. These crooks are vicious and trigger-happy but inclined to make a lot of mistakes.

The plot hinges on the suspicions of betrayal and the growing paranoia verging on panic among the gang members.

There are ample plot twists but you can see them all coming a mile away. There are no surprises in this story.

The interest lies in the gradual disintegration of Louis’ world and the possibility that when things really fall apart he’ll lead others to destruction as well.

The major focus is on the uneasy relationship between the two brothers. That’s handled well. The relationship between Pierre and Hélène could perhaps have been developed a bit more.

Jean Gabin was more or less unknown in the English-speaking world but was a huge star in France. He’s very good here as a man who seems to be totally in control but isn’t.

Italian-born Lino Ventura became one of the great tough guys of French cinema. He’s quite chilling here.

Annie Girardot was another major star in French film and she’s fine as the slightly ambiguous Hélène. Hélène however is not in any sense a femme fatale.

Gilles Grangier was the director. There’s a nice visual set-piece at the end and the action scenes are handled well.

The cinematography by Louis Page is gritty without being noirish.

Speaking of Murder isn’t really anything particularly special. It’s a well-acted well-crafted fairly violent hard-edged crime thriller and it’s an interesting example of the long French tradition of crime cinema. Recommended.

The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and mercifully there are no extras.

Better Jean Gabin crimes movies (with genuine claims to being film noir) are Port of Shadows (1938) and La Bête Humaine (1938).

I’ve also reviewed the superb Back to the Wall (1958) from this set.