A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Also known as "Doom Magnet" and "An Honorable Young Man," Jean-Pierre Melville's first color film is widely regarded as the weakest film of his great 1960s run, and that looks like a fair assessment. Something's off right from the start. Star Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a mediocre boxer entering the ring for a make-or-break fight. The crowd is entirely unresponsive as the fighters are introduced and while they fight during the opening credits. After Michel, Belmondo's character, loses on points, part of the crowd comes to life to heckle him as he leaves the arena. Perhaps we've learned something about Michel; to lose the way he did in an uneventful bout suggests that he lacks heart. He definitely lacks something. After two weeks he's reduced to abandoning his apartment to avoid paying rent and selling his and his girlfriend Lina's spare clothes, and the only reason he doesn't sell her heirloom necklace, regardless of what he tells her later, is that the thing is actually worthless. To be fair, Michel is looking for work and manages to land a promising gig as a "secretary" to Dieudonne Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), a banker who's fleeing France to avoid prosecution for murdering some Africans back in colonial days. The only catch is that Michel has to leave with Ferchaux immediately. That means sneaking out on Lina (Malvina Silberberg) as she sits at an outdoor cafe table without a sou to her name. Our protagonist has been established as just about as unlikable as possible.
Ferchaux is bound for the U.S., where he has funds stashed in a safe-deposit box. He can't get the bulk of his money out of his American bank accounts because of the extradition threat, however, and to keep one step ahead he heads south with Michel, toward the ultimate goal of Venezuela and another safe-deposit box. The second half of the film takes place around New Orleans and includes a nice little travelogue of the city's red-light district. Michel grows increasingly weary of Ferchaux as the older man, less lordly on the run, grows more emotionally needy -- almost like a girlfriend. He thinks of taking the money and running, but a group of unsavory locals led by Jeff (American character actor Todd Martin), a French-speaking veteran who runs a diner, is getting the same idea. By now Michel has an American girlfriend (Michele Mercier), which gives him extra motivation to grab the money. But once he does so, he has second thoughts that reach back a great distance. He reminds himself of what he did to Lina back home, and that seems to inspire him to return the money. When he goes back to Ferchaux's lair, he finds the old man fighting with Todd and his crew. Michel comes to the rescue, but Ferchaux is already mortally wounded. As a final act of generosity, the dying man offers Michel the key to the safe-deposit box in Caracas. "You and your money can go to hell," Michel answers as the film fades out. You get the impression that he did the right thing at the end not so much out of loyalty to Ferchaux but to make virtual amends to Lina, if not simply to do the right thing for once. While Melville based this film on a novel by Georges Simenon, France's 20th-century master of mystery and crime fiction, it comes across as an inflated anecdote, padded with second-unit American footage. Melville's protagonists are rarely good guys, but they often have some quality that earns some sympathy from the audience, but Michel is too much of a selfish mediocrity for most of the film to be worth caring about, while Vanel's Ferchaux is a monster who turns into a wretch. I get the impression that we were supposed to appreciate the color and the atmosphere more than anything else while waiting for Michel's moral awakening, but that wasn't enough. This wasn't a terrible film, only unengaging beyond its value as a travelogue for parts of 1960s America. Fortunately, Melville's best work was still ahead of him.
There's no point to judging Henri Verneuil's free adaptation of David Goodis' noir novel The Burglar by its fidelity to the source material. Goodis himself wrote a previous film adaptation which by definition must stand as definitive, so we may as well accept Le Casse for what it is: a vehicle for Jean-Paul Belmondo designed for the international-cast market. Goodis provides the bare bones of the story in which a slick safecracking gang goes to pieces while waiting to sell their plunder, but from there it's all Verneuil and co-writer Vahe Katcha. The action has been moved to Greece, where a crafty, somewhat corrupt police detective (Omar Sharif) picks the gang apart. The Belmondo character obviously proves the toughest nut to crack, so a local entertainer (Dyan Cannon) is called on to seduce and keep tabs on him. All of this is a framework on which to hang the action set pieces that audiences by now expected from Belmondo, who arguably qualifies as the missing link between Buster Keaton and Tom Cruise through his commitment to crazy stunt work. Keaton himself no doubt would have been proud of a then-unfakeable moment -- possibly inspired by Buster's own Seven Chances -- when Belmondo is dropped from a close-up position in the back of a truck down a steep gravel pit, with plenty of rocks following him down. Elsewhere, he clings from the outside to the window of a moving bus to avoid pursuers, only to transfer to another bus in the middle of a busy street. Beyond Belmondo's antics there's plenty here to suggest that Verneuil was a student of silent film. The picture opens with a fascinating, almost wordless sequence that shows how sophisticated a safecracker Belmondo is. The man basically carries a portable computer with him that allows him to program product specs and grind out a master key to order. If a film set around 1970 can qualify as steampunk, this scene should make La Casse eligible for that label. At the other end of the movie, the final fate of Sharif's character hearkens all the way back to D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat or maybe Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. Of course, a caper or crime film from this period wouldn't be complete without a proper car chase, and this one definitely delivers, even if it comes too early to be climactic. So much goes on in this picture that the car chase could almost be forgotten in the mix. Euro-stalwarts Robert Hossein and Renato Salvatori are along for the ride but this is clearly Belmondo's show, which means he doesn't have to do much with his character but live up to his pop persona. Some of his exploits wouldn't fly today -- it's meant as a gag when he slaps Cannon so hard and repeatedly that he sets off a room's light controls -- but for a good part of the world in his heyday he was the fantasy ideal of a man's man, and nothing about La Casse would change that. It's pretty much the opposite of the sort of noir one might expect from a Goodis adaptation, but on its own terms it's an often very entertaining action picture sure to appeal to Euro-Seventies fans.
Whoever wrote the introduction for the recent Turner Classic Movies broadcast of Philippe de Broca's film was determined to categorize this and the director's previous team-up with Jean Paul Belmondo, That Man From Rio, as James Bond knockoffs or at least James Bond-inspired. But you can just as easily assign Up To His Ears to the international Jules Verne cycle dating back to 1954's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's adapted from an 1879 Verne story, "The Misadventures of a Chinaman in China," wherein the great Frenchman apparently invented the idea of a man contracting for his own death, only to change his mind. De Broca and writer Daniel Boulanger updated the story to their present day and made the title character a Hong Kong-based French businessman (Belmondo) who, believing his fortune lost, wants to end it all. He's convinced by his Chinese friend Mr. Goh (Valery Inkijinoff) to take out a policy to ensure that his fiancee (and her parasite parents) will be taken care of. Very quickly reconsidering, he and faithful servant Leon (Jean Rochefort) must trek through Asia to find Mr. Goh in order to cancel the hit. Along the way, he acquires two incompetent bodyguards and a more likely life partner in Alexandrine Pinardel (Ursula Andress), an aspiring writer earning her way as an exotic dancer. In one of the film's many surreal touches, she's introduced doing a striptease in reverse, and later in the picture I suppose the idea of having her wash ashore on a beach after a shipwreck could have been inspired by her iconic entrance in Dr. No. While Goh only meant to teach our hero to appreciate life, his prospective in-laws decide that they'd like to cash in that policy after all, and eventually an obese American gangster, "the Al Capone of the South Seas" (Joe Said) decides to kill him on general principles.
Up to His Ears is episodic and ultimately overlong, the sort of film that looks to be wrapping up at least half an hour before it actually ends. In that respect it might be inspired more by It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World than by any other picture, but let's remember that the French themselves invented sight-gag slapstick cinematic comedy and need no inspiration from elsewhere. Some of the gags here are truly inspired, none more so to me than the bit that finds our hero and his servant on a shaky rope bridge in the Himalayas. Inevitably they go over the side (or was it through) and descend dangling from a near-infinite rope of clothes disgorging from a suitcase. The thoughtful servant always makes a point of pinning his master's clothes together for trips like these, you see -- and one may assume that the clothes are all double stitched. Other moments are striking for their juxtaposition of silent-comedy style action in exotic Asian settings, as when our heroes struggle to escape a Nepalese village via a rope ladder dangling from a hot-air balloon, or when Belmondo in a stage-magician's costume gets into a fighting chase on the scaffolding of a tall building, as if Harold Lloyd were playing Fantomas. I don't think it's as good as That Man From Rio or my favorite from the Belmondo-de Broca team, the tragicomic swashbuckler Cartouche, but it's still terrifically entertaining just to look at. Belmondo is a kind of French Cary Grant, capable of being both the epitome of cool and, as here, playing an utter clown, while de Broca is more like a French Blake Edwards. I couldn't help thinking that the Mirisch Company should have hired them to do that Inspector Clouseau movie back when Edwards and Peter Sellers weren't interested. I can't guarantee that such a thing would have been good, but I would have liked to see them try. In any event, there are still more of their actual team-ups for me to see, those the three I have seen are just about enough to earn Belmondo and de Broca a place among the great comic actor-director teams.
Steven Spielberg reportedly acknowledges L'Homme de Rio as an inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the influence is obvious at times, most notably in a scene probably intended as a direct homage, in which sunlight striking an artifact points to the location of a treasure. In turn, director Philippe di Broca was clearly influenced by American silent comedy. Doing his own stunts like a slapstick trouper, Jean-Paul Belmondo takes a Harold Lloyd style walk on a skyscraper window ledge. In Rio, his character befriends a Brazilian boy who lives in a Buster Keaton style house in which pulleys move furniture into position or out of the way. Belmondo's action scenes combine legitimate derring-do and slapstick as Keaton's and Lloyd's did, and as some scenes in the Indiana Jones films do, particularly when Indy proves comically ineffective (at first) against bigger, stronger adversaries. Belmondo's hero is no Indiana Jones, however. Instead, Adrien is a soldier on leave who gets involved in a kidnapping while visiting his girlfriend Agnes (Francoise Dorleac), the assistant to Professor Catalan, a museum curator (Jean Servais). In a mad dash to save his girl, he tricks his way onto a plane bound for Brazil, only to see a drugged Agnes fail to recognize him. Her captors are South American Indians of some sort who apparently want to retrieve sacred statues taken by an expedition that included Catalan, Agnes' father and a Brazilian investor (Adolfo Celi). With that set up, the film is pretty much one long picturesque chase, shot on location, with more or less one joke. Though a soldier, Adrien is hardly a warrior and is terrified by the idea of not getting home before his leave expires. Yet for love of the girl he perseveres through ordeal after ordeal, including one big plot twist mid-film. I don't know whether Adolfo Celi has been typecast already in Europe as a heavy before his Bond villain Thunderball, but whether he had or not he proves an effective red herring here as an upper-class twit. To be honest, at almost two hours the film runs on a bit too long, mainly because di Broca never really manages to shift the tone of the film from goofball to anything more urgent. The silent clowns I take to be his models would have wrapped things up much more quickly before the fights and stunts grew monotonous, while Spielberg knew that audiences had to have more of an emotional stake in the action if they were to stick around longer. In that respect, That Man From Rio is inferior not only to silent precursors (e.g. Lloyd's Latin American fantasy Why Worry?) and to Raiders (except for those who require such stories to keep tongue locked in cheek) but also to the previous di Broca-Belmondo teamup Cartouche,a profoundly underrated swashbuckler that sticks a tearjerker landing. Rio probably never was meant to be as ambitious a picture, and on its own terms it clearly succeeds. Belmondo makes a fun frantic hero, Dorleac (Catherine Deneuve's doomed sister, dead at 25 in a car wreck) is even more fun as the often goofy ingenue, and the film is always great to look at. I've wanted to see this since before I saw Cartouche, and even if it's a disappointment by that film's standard I'm still glad I finally saw it.
In 1964, when Italians imagined frontier action and adventure they didn't think of their erstwhile empire in Libya but of America and Mexico, and the spaghetti western was born. France's frontier imagination ranged closer to home; the French had a bigger empire in modern times and got more adventure out of it. Deserts and dollars meant different things to different countries. Instead of westerns the French made films like this Henri Verneuil picture, a post-colonial romp through parts of Francophone Africa where Europeans still do much of the work. Rocco (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his buddy "Bumpkin" (Lino Ventura) drive trucks for Castagliano (Gert "Goldfinger" Froebe), but one day Rocco takes the initiative and drives off on his own with a mystery cargo believed to be worth $100,000, and the boss orders Bumpkin to track him down in another truck. Riding shotgun with Rocco is a femme fatale (Anne-Marie Coffinet) who tipped him off to the valuable cargo. Riding with "Bumpkin" is a suspicious mercenary type (Reginald Kernan)with whom he has issues from the recent past.
The cargo is a Macguffin: Rocco doesn't know what it is and only cares that it can be turned into money. With little sense of urgency in the chase the viewer basks (or burns) in the location atmosphere. Verneuil wasn't the first director, of course, to find a desert ideal for widescreen filming, and even in black-and-white the vistas are often impressive. Cent Mille Dollars is arguably overlong but over its length the impression of grit, heat and sweat sink in convincingly. If it has a handicap it's that Belmondo and Ventura don't share the screen through the big middle of the picture. Once Bumpkin finally catches up with Rocco, only to get his own truck commandeered, the screen crackles with the stars' macho chemistry. Bumpkin's promise of revenge gives the story some momentum it had lacked, and the payoff comes with a comic twist that defines the picture as a buddy movie above all.
It could have been a western. That could have been a stagecoach full of rifles for the Indians, and you would have had a desert either way. But the French still saw their modern world as full of adventure, even as they retreated from empire, in a way the Italians apparently didn't but the Americans still did. If Frenchmen driving trucks makes Greed In the Sun seem like a low-stakes comic riff on The Wages of Fear (recall also that film's exotic setting), it also reminded me of American adventure films from the same time set in far-flung locales, and of the whole "men's adventure" genre in American magazine publishing, down to the dancing girls at the chase's destination. Verneul and his stars give the film a swagger that retains its virile vitality after fifty years. Its modern setting doesn't make it superior to spaghetti westerns by any stretch of imagination, but for those interested in 1964 rather than 1864, or in frontiers other than the archetypal West -- not to mention fans of Belmondo and Ventura -- Cent Mille Dollars is definitely worth a look.
In the 1960s there were two superpowers of slapstick: the U.S. and France. The Americans boasted Jerry Lewis, Blake Edwards, and the collective phenomenon of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The French had Jacquest Tati, Pierre Etaix and, among possible others unknown to me, Gerard Oury. In 1966, Oury's World War 2 comedy La Grande Vadrouille became the most popular film in French history. Three years later came The Brain, an all-star caper comedy on a colossal scale. The international production (Dino de Laurentis and Paramount Pictures were involved) teamed Vadrouille's Andre Bourvil with superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo, David Niven in Pink Panther mode as a master thief, and Eli Wallach (huge in Europe after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) as a Sicilian gangster. From the first notes of its would-be pop-hit theme song (sung in English), The Brain aspires to epic pop-art and quite nearly gets there.
Its early cartoonishness doesn't inspire confidence, however. We're introduced to Niven as he, with a crowd of Londoners, watches a TV in a store window announcing a clue to the identity of the mysterious master criminal, "The Brain." His brain is so big and heavy, we're told, that in moments of anxiety he can't hold it upright. Niven's distressed head promptly flops to one side -- but so do those of several other people. While he makes a quick escape to the continent, we discover Arthur (Belmondo) in prison setting up a guard to slip on a bar of soap. Naturally, the guard sails across the room and crashes into a wall. Arthur is sentenced to solitary, which is where he wanted to go. Sent there repeatedly, he's been working on a tunnel. Tonight, his accomplice Anatol (Bourvil) will dig under the prison to meet him halfway and make good his escape. In a cutaway shot, we see the two tunnelers approach each other as they dig with their absurd tools -- Belmondo's is a conveyor belt of metal coffee cups -- except that Belmondo's about three feet above Bourvil, who goes straight to someone else's cell while Belmondo emerges outside. Once they coordinate themselves, Arthur sacks out in a bedroom that's actually the back of Anatol truck. His bed careens back and forth as Anatol brakes or accelerates, climbs or descends. Finally, the bed bursts out the back door, leaving Arthur on the street to start a new day.
The Brain, aka Colonel Matthews, is in Europe to plan a major heist. In a reflection of current events, France's withdrawal from NATO (General de Gaulle wanted France to be a real superpower in its own right) compels the organization to relocate from Paris to Brussels, taking millions in funds along by train. Backed by the Mafia, Matthews draws up an elaborate plan to isolate the car carrying the money, disable the guards, and leave with the loot. Merely planning it is elaborate and expensive; Matthews has apparently sprung for a fully animated short subject illustrating what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Don Scannapieco (Wallach) plans to double-cross Matthews, resenting the Englishman's attraction to his sister (Silvia Monti). Arthur has managed to spy on some of the planning, escaping Matthews's pet tiger in the process, and convinces Anatol that they can horn in on the heist.
Some of the slapstick up to this point might seem stupid or merely silly, but the caper part of the picture actually plays out quite ingeniously. Matthews doesn't know about the two Frenchmen, and they don't know the full extent of his plan. They think they're taking the loot under the Brain's nose, but they end up actually facilitating his scheme, without his knowing it. The payoff is his moment of confusion when he triumphantly enters the captured car ("Now you'll see why they call me the Brain!") only to find it thoroughly looted. Arthur and Anatol feel the same when the sacks of money they thought they'd tossed to a safe place vanish. They've actually put them right into the hands of Matthews's assistants, who shock Matthews himself by informing him that they've got all the money he thought was gone. There are more twists to come, but all bets are off while the Frenchmen's ingenious stupidity makes them wild cards in the three-way game involving Matthews, Scannapieco and the police.
Oury is perhaps too obviously trying to top the scale of Mad Mad ... World in his big finale, which finds Belmondo trapped in a scale-model Statue of Liberty being hauled on board a ship bound for the U.S. as an American style marching band marks the occasion and a huge crowd sees the ship off. You can see symbolism in the Statue as both a womb of money (the bottom drops out with Arthur and the loot inside) and a force for destruction (the torch arm smashes its way into a store when the truck carrying the statue gets embroiled in a car chase), but the absurdity of the imagery transcends any potential political analysis. The Brain doesn't really have anything to say about NATO or international affairs. Oury and his game cast are simply out for laughs. To my ears, Niven performs his own French dialogue; I'm less sure about Wallach, but if it isn't him it's a plausible impersonation. Belmondo is in pure clown mode here, giving the sort of performance George Clooney gives in Coen Bros. movies. To my surprise, not even in the longer French version is there any hint that matinee-idol Belmondo might rival Niven, more than 20 years his senior, for the affections of the sultry Monti. It's all about the money for Arthur, as it is at the end for the mob scrambling for the bills falling from Lady Liberty's bottom. Once The Brain showed that it had a brain I found that I could tolerate its cruder comedy quite well. It may strike others as simply dumb, but it offers enough dumb fun and colorful spectacle for me to recommend it to international comedy fans and slapstick enthusiasts.
The Criterion Collection has done me a favor by releasing their latest acquisition from the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville during Barnes & Noble's semi-annual half-price sale on the elite line of DVDs. The film is going to be available as a Netflix stream, but a Criterion Melville is virtually a must-own for me. This latest release does not disappoint despite being quite different in content and tone from what I've seen previously from the French master of crime and suspense. Leon Morin adapts a prize-winning novel by Beatrix Beck set during the Axis occupation of France during the late war. Melville had been there already and would go there again, but on this occasion his subject is not the French Resistance, but the impact of war and a male depopulation on the women of a small town in the southern part of the country, where the Italians were actually first to arrive.
Our protagonist is Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), who corrects papers for a correspondence school that relocated its headquarters for the duration. Her husband is gone and she's sent her daughter to be taken care of in the country. With most of the young men gone and with the Italians more an object of curiosity than anything else, the atmosphere isn't exactly oppressive at first. In fact, it seems fraught with transgressive potential to the Barny, who struggles with an unanticipated infatuation with her supervisor Sabine, whom she describes as an amazon and a samurai (!!!). She wants her friends to know that she's attracted to Sabine to the extent that the tall, composed woman resembles a handsome young man -- and this caveat seems sincere, considering that she soon becomes infatuated with one of the few remaining handsome young men in town, our title character (Jean-Paul Belmondo).
The odd thing is, Barny is a self-professed Communist, and she makes contact with Leon Morin initially with the purpose of teasing a priest in his confession booth with the Marxism, "Religion is the opiate of the people." Our would be she-troll is surprised, however, when Morin proves a nimble-witted debater who doesn't take offense at cheap shots. He's soon inviting her to his quarters to borrow theology books so they can continue their debates at a more informed level. A kind of merry war goes on as the Germans arrive and the Resistance intensifies until Barny seems poised to capitulate, whether on the strength of Morin's polemics or on the strength of his good looks. For one reason or another, the spiritual-counselor business is booming for the young priest, and after a while, and especially as Barny edges toward conversion, Morin seems to grow increasingly uncomfortable with it. He grows more brusque with her as the fight goes out of her, but she sees his edgy behavior as sexual tension. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but he gets literally jumpy at any hint of romance, and his postwar transfer to an interior mission in the countryside is clearly a relief. And as you may have guessed, the war ends and the occupiers leave.
I'd call what Barny and Morin share a doomed relationship if I felt more certain that it was a relationship in any real sense. They may seem like the ultimate mismatched partners superficially, but they're really closer to two of a kind. The potentiality and liminality Barny experiences during the Occupation seems to be Morin's normal state. The war shakes Barny loose from complacency, but complacency seems utterly alien to Morin. That may be strange to say of a priest, but look at the evidence. He expresses frustration with the church hierarchy on many subjects and is most interested in Barny when she's most willing to contest his views. When she succumbs to his arguments, he almost seems to grow contemptuous toward her. The tension Barny perceives is as much Morin's disappointment in losing a worthy opponent as it is any anxiety about Barny's feelings toward him. For all his apologias for religion, Morin comes across as an alienated intellectual whose faith and vocation only enable his alienation rather than transcending it. For all Barny's alleged Communism, she's really after stability and security, while Morin seems happiest in an environment of struggle and argument -- an eternal debating society. The upheaval of Occupation gives him a moment to shine, but it only seems right that he hits the road when it's all over.
Father Morin prefers resisting temptation to resisting occupation for some reason.
Leon Morin, Pretre certainly has a different atmosphere from any Melville film I've seen to date. This tale of the Occupation has a perversely idyllic feel. Barny's community is a place where the girls gush over the Italians and their feathered hats, and where Barny's little girl France (where else can a child be named after her country?) befriends a gentle German soldier. Melville makes a point of never showing the Resistance in action, though they're often heard offscreen. We hardly see the bad guys do more than parade or drill; a German hassles Barny at a checkpoint once, but lets her go with little fuss. In fact, her greatest peril comes after the Americans liberate the town; a G.I. is persuaded only with great effort by his buddy not to rape our heroine. We're dealing with people out of the loop of history, who aren't part of the heroic national narrative of Resistance but aren't collaborators either -- for the most part. Life goes on, but not quite, and disruptions like Barny's successive crushes result.
Melville gives the film an erotic charge not just during Barny's dreams of Morin, but in Barny's workplace, where Sabine (Nicole Morel) appears to at least partially reciprocate Barny's crush. Sabine isn't the only amazon on the job; Barny also has to deal with the belligerent anti-semite Christine (Irene Tunc) in the nearest thing the film has to a fight scene.
Sexual harrassment or just plain harrassment? The office is Barny's battlefield in this war.
For his part, Morin has to fend off the formidable Marion (Monique Bertho), who's reputed to have five lovers and seems to be out for a sixth. Jean-Paul Belmondo, then red-hot off of Breathless, seems like ideal casting for Morin -- I know I can't imagine Alain Delon as a priest for a second. Belmondo isn't classically handsome by any stretch but has a sensual charisma that makes the women's craze for him plausible, as well as a certain narcissic smugness that limits his potential for real emotional intimacy with anyone. Against him Melville pits the star of Hiroshima Mon Amour in an early clash of New Wave titans, and Riva holds her own pretty well. It's her movie despite the title and the billing, and she never lets it slip from her hands.
Leon Morin is proof that Melville wasn't a creature of genre but had visual and narrative gifts to bring to any story material. He makes Barny's flirtation with Morin nearly as intriguing as any of his capers or chases in his classic crime stories. I'm not ready to rank this one above his later crime epics -- except perhaps for Un Flic -- but Morin is still an impressive achievement, and one that has me impatient for Criterion to haul in the rest of the Melvilles I haven't seen. How about this time next year?
For now, how about a trailer? This one, with English subtitles, was uploaded to YouTube by ClassicMovieTrailers.
Jean-Paul Belmondo is an icon of French New Wave cinema, a kind of charismatic front man for the movement as the star of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Arthouse audiences in America and around the world probably gazed at his face on a movie poster the same way his character in Breathless dotes on a poster of Humphrey Bogart. In his homeland, however, Belmondo has never represented arthouse cinema exclusively. As I saw when I watched Le Professionnellast year, Belmondo was just as comfortable, if not more so, playing uncomplicated men of action in action movies. But while I can accustom myself to seeing Belmondo in junk, it was still jarring to see such a man of his era in period costume in Philippe de Broca's swashbuckling comedy.
Belmondo and de Broaca worked together most prominently in a later film, The Man From Rio, which historically marked the actor's emergence as a pop movie star. I know of that film but haven't seen it, but Cartouche seems to be a similar sort of movie, a genre pastiche that mocks its conventions while embracing them at the same time. Belmondo is the title character, the name being a literal nom de guerre adopted when Dominique Bourguignon enlists in the 18th century French army. Dominique is a thief by profession -- rogue might be more appropriate -- who needs an easy exit after he revolts against the bullying, extortionate ways of Malichot (Marcel Dalio), the reigning king of thieves. His co-enlistees are La Taupe ("Mole," Jean Rochefort), who looks the part, and La Doucer ("Gentle," Jess Hahn), a good-natured brute. They become heroes when they're the only survivors of a battle. The battle is the film's most cartoonish episode, climaxing as Frenchies and Redcoats shoot each other two by two until there's literally no one left but our trio, who have wisely hidden from the shooting. Honor is nice but it doesn't fill the pockets or the belly. With a senile general planning fresh slaughter, and telling his subalterns to withhold pay until after the fight, Cartouche and friends come up with a plan to hijack the payroll wagon and make off with the money.
Dominique (Jean-Paul Belmondo) doesn't bow easily or for long, whether to an off-frame aristocrat (above) or to thief-king Malichot (Marcel Dalio, below left)
Stopping at a tavern, the trio terrorizes some aristocratic diners and Cartouche himself liberates a pretty thief, Venus (Claudia Cardinale) from her military captors. After the 18th century French equivalent of a barroom brawl, everyone ends up back in the big city and Cartouche settles accounts with Malichot. As the new king of thieves, with Venus as his queen, Cartouche rules fairly, enriching everyone with a reign of rapine and leaving a big C as his Zorro-esque signature. Life is good, but Cartouche has an itch he needs to scratch. Early in the picture Dominique been made to bow before the haughty aristocrat Gaston de Ferrusac (Philippe Lemaire), the sort of lordly creep who enjoys presiding over public executions. Gaston's wife Isabelle is at least less bloodthirsty, a more delicate character and a looker as well. Cartouche wants to avenge his honor at Gaston's expense by scoring with Isabelle. He still loves Venus, but this is simply something he's got to do, and Venus respects that. She proves enviably loyal and a true leader of men in Cartouche's absence, utterly selfless in her devotion in more ways than one -- and at least one way too many.
The women in Cartouche's life: Venus (Claudia Cardinale) in peril, above; Isabelle (Odile Versois) in thought, below.
The more I look at older movies, the more they seem inconsistent in tone by today's standards. What I mean is that many older films seem capable of sweeping shifts in mood that might seem jarring to modern audiences. If we see a comedy now, we expect it to maintain a consistent level of wit or goofiness, while comedy might seem disruptive in some of the more self-consciously profound projects. I worry that a contemporary audience might watch Cartouche and end up irked by such a boisterous, often blatantly comic film having such a downer ending. Won't that seem wrong somehow?
Maybe our grandparents were open to a greater diversity of emotional experience at the movies than we've been for a while. One proof that they were was the popularity of the concept of pathos back in the day. If the term means anything to anyone it's probably identified with a tendency of silent slapstick comedy to turn tearjerker on us. If you went to a Charlie Chaplin feature, for instance, you expected to laugh but you might also feel challenged to shed a tear or two as the Tramp again renounced a hopeless love for the solace of the road. It was his aspiration to pathos that raised Chaplin to the dignity of an artist in the eyes of his early intellectual admirers. On the other hand, you knew that something had changed in the culture when critics began to exalt Buster Keaton, the "Great Stone Face," who largely eschewed pathos in favor of coolly choreographed mayhem, at Chaplin's expense. Keaton didn't threaten our growing mistrust of "emotional manipulation." I say that not to criticize Keaton, who I happen to like better than Chaplin, but to explain that a growing preference for him over Chaplin reflected a cultural change in what we wanted, or didn't want, to see in movies.
Cartouche certainly has plenty of slapstick.
The point of this digression, in case you were wondering, is that Cartouche, while it sometimes looks like a genre parody, is also an exercise in pathos that hearkens back to an older era of film. Its ending reveals the film as a tragicomic romance, and it's actually a great example of the type. To spoil things,...
Cartouche didn't reach the U.S. until July 1964, but was considered enough of an event to open a new New York arthouse.
Venus leads the army of thieves to rescue Cartouche from his captors, he having been captured while attempting a romantic tryst with Isabelle. In the course of a general melee, Venus takes a bullet in the back, shielding her beloved. The battle won, the thief army marches on the Ferussac estate, not to take revenge, but to take the jewelry of the Ferussacs and all their lordly guests. These jewels aren't prizes for the thieves, but a funerary tribute for Venus, whom Cartouche crowns with a tiara while heaping the rest upon her stilled chest. Thus bejeweled, Venus is lovingly loaded into a coach which is itself loaded into a lake, all the plunder going to the bottom, hers for all time. Fin.
A Viking funeral, without the fire.
I think it'd be hard not to be moved by the ending, but modern viewers might resent feeling moved. They'd probably prefer a happy ending, or they might feel that, if anyone should pay at the end of the picture, it should be the reckless, rather caddish Cartouche himself. That he learns a lesson too late is probably not punishment enough for him for some people. But such feelings, if I guess them right, may tell us more about a modern audience that is actually more judgmental about such things than their presumably more moralistic predecessors than it tells us about any failings of de Broca's movie.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and my peers would enjoy Cartouche as much as I did. It works when it's funny and it works when it's sad. Belmondo does not look out of place in a period picture and makes an engaging swashbuckling hero. Cardinale is gorgeous and a true heroine. Rochefort and Hahn are enjoyable comic relief. The cinematography, sets and location work are superb and the score by Georges Delerue matches the movie's moods moment by moment. The film is great fun, and that fun isn't compromised by the ending. I think there is a kind of fun that covers the widest range of emotions, and consists of feeling those emotions. As a New Wave icon, Belmondo embodies a kind of coolness for which the emotional manipulations of something like Cartouche are probably abhorrent. Belmondo himself probably knows better, and with his help Cartouche is a rich viewing experience with ass-kicking action, anti-war satire and, yes, perhaps a tear or two. Don't hold those against it.
Here's a French trailer that gives the name Cartouche Shazam-like significance, as long as you know French. It gives everyone some idea of the film's visual virtues, and it was uploaded to YouTube by manuel 19771
There was a time, perhaps, when Jean-Paul Belmondo was the poster boy of global art-house cinema. He was a major star for about forty years, and is still semi-active today after recovering from a stroke, but he'll probably be remembered most when he passes for a handful of films from early in his career. In all likelihood the headlines will identify him as the star of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a reminder that he was specifically the poster boy for the French New Wave of fifty years or so ago. Before long, however, Belmondo was eclipsed as the global face (male division) of French cinema by his occasional co-star Alain Delon. In the United States there are Delon box sets and collections; I've never seen a Belmondo collection in a local video store. Delon did more international work and remains an icon of cool for movie buffs thanks to his work for Jean-Pierre Melville and others. Like Delon, Belmondo could move easily enough from pop cinema to art-house fare, but his star vehicles don't seem to have traveled or endured as well as Delon's. He definitely doesn't seem to have the same following in America that Delon does. I've wondered about that for a while and was curious to see some of Belmondo's later work to see if I could figure out an explanation.
Lionsgate has done me a service by issuing a very affordable DVD of this action thriller starring a 48 year old Belmondo. The DVD uses an English title (and includes an English dub along with the subtitled original) but I'll stick with the French tag to avoid confusion with another French film, Luc Besson's Leon, that's already known here as The Professional. Director Georges Lautner co-wrote this adaptation of a novel with the father-son team of Michel and Jacques Audiard. It's one of the first writing credits for the junior Audiard, who went on to direct last year's instant-classic prison film, Un Prophete, and nearly the end of the line for his father, a frequent collaborator with Lautner.
Le Professionnel is definitely a film of its time, bridging the Seventies' suspicion of the state and the Eighties' emphasis on completing the mission (see Rambo, etc.) with a revenge storyline. Belmondo is Joss Beaumont, whom we first see on trial in an African court for attempting to overthrow the government of Malagawi by killing its President. He's been doped up in an effort to make him a compliant witness, but that (along with torture, one suspects) leaves him barely able to stand in the dock to hear his sentence. When he faints, he's dragged to an antechamber for more drugs; he puts up a fight but is overwhelmed and sedated anew. President Njala shows his mercy by sparing Beaumont's life and sentencing him to prison.
Joss adapts well enough but can't stand seeing other prisoners beaten up. Finally he and another con contrive a bloody escape on an isolated patch of road. They flee through a small village, warning the villagers that the army is hot on their heels. This is the right thing to do, since Njala's forces will destroy anything in their path to smoke out the fugitives. While Joss's comrade can't resist the temptation to fight it out with the army, Joss himself makes good his escape and makes his way back to France. Revenge is on his mind. He informs important people that he's returned, because he wants them to come after him. That's the easiest way for him to get at them.
Here's where we begin to learn the real story of Joss's misadventure in Africa. The French government had sent him to Malagawi with orders to kill a vicious despot, but a change in policy or personnel caused a change in plans. Rather than recall Joss, the government ratted him out. Now he's out to settle scores, not just with his superiors but with Njala, who is coming to France for a state visit. He still intends to see Njala dead; what he intends for his erstwhile bosses is unclear. Having all of this explained long after the fact hinted at something wrong with the movie. It seems to me that if we're watching a revenge story and we're supposed to empathize with the revenger, we should see his betrayal up front so we can appreciate his grievance. There's little sense of outrage in Le Professionnel, compared to what we might see in an American version of the same story, and I couldn't shake a feeling that director, writers and star didn't really take the situation very seriously.
Belmondo: Le Roi des Winos
That brings us to Belmondo. We're on his side from the start because of the kangaroo-court treatment he receives in Malagawi, but once he reaches France the revenge story becomes something of a lark or a romp, with action on a comic book level. One of the first things Joss Beaumont does is befriend a bunch of hobos so he can dress up as one, create a scene with them to distract the cops staking out his wife's apartment, and sneak inside. It's the sort of scene you'd expect to see in a silent comedy and it plays like an excuse for Belmondo to act goofy. Maybe I'm being humorless as a critic, but Belmondo often seems too humorous for his subject. Later, he invades the hotel room of an ice-cream soda magnate in order to meet Njala's European wife, with whom the magnate is having an affair. Belmondo asks if the man facing him is in the ice-cream soda trade, then identifies his own trade as "espionage and brawling" in the subtitled version, "espionage and knuckles" in the dub. Here the star tips his hand and exposes the entire story as no more than an excuse to show Jean-Paul Belmondo beating people up, or occasionally killing them. The fights are more like gags than important points in the plot, though his showdown with a particularly nasty official (Robert Hossein) is more like a spaghetti-western showdown in the middle of Paris.
Hossein's character, Inspector Rosen, is built up as Joss's arch-enemy, but the most vicious thing he does in the picture, as far as I could tell, was to bring a lesbian policewoman with him to interrogate Joss's wife. Rosen plays the good cop while his sidekick strips Mme. Beaumont and promises to show her what she can do with a bar of soap. The payoff is when Joss saves his wife from bathroom rape by choking out the evil woman in the bathtub. It struck me as the most unpleasant scene in the film for its flaming homophobia, but I can't help suspecting that it was one of the most crowd-pleasing scenes for its original audience. It highlights the crass nature of the entire project, a trashiness that comes through despite Ennio Morricone's effort to give the film some musical gravitas.
Belmondo's treatment of a lesbian antagonist may not seem politically correct, but rest assured that he believes in keeping people closeted regardless of their sexual orientation.
I don't mind crass and I don't mind trash, but they somewhat undermine Lautner's attempt to sustain tragic suspense at the end. For a seeming eternity after he's settled scores with Njala, Joss strolls toward a helicopter he's arranged for to take him to freedom while bureaucrats dither over whether or not to kill him. It should be tragic if they do, but if Beaumont dies, it won't be like when Belmondo's character gets it in Breathless. I had a feeling that it would be more like when a cartoon character dies, but you know he'll be back in the next picture. Le Professionnel is such a star vehicle (you should see the worshipful opening credits: nothing but Belmondo iconography) that any pretensions to any deeper purpose look silly.
As a mindless action film, Le Professionnel is fairly entertaining. I do not mind seeing Jean-Paul Belmondo beat people up, and Lautner films a nice car chase in the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower. But I did expect something more from the star. Breathless and Pierrot le Fou, Le Doulos and Classes Tous Risques, to mention some of his early films that I've seen, set a standard that Belmondo apparently didn't try to maintain. He remained a star on the strength of his raw charisma, I assume, while sticking to crowd-pleasing action films. I ought to go easy on the assumptions after seeing a single film, but I can't deny my disappointment with what I saw. Maybe I should write it off as a mismatch of star and subject matter. I'd definitely be willing to give Belmondo another try (and I'll accept recommendations, please), but if my original question was why he doesn't have the reputation or the legacy Alain Delon enjoys, Le Professionnel does look like the beginning of an answer.
You may be able to figure something out for yourselves from this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AmberChiaCasting:
I
I
