THE GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

Jack Cardiff was the cinematographer for The Archers -- Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- for three of their greatest films: A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Cardiff won an Oscar for Narcissus and should have had another for Shoes. He went to Hollywood and continued to do impressive work. Just this weekend I saw his photography of The Master of Ballantrae for director William Keighley and it was spectacular. But I guess what he really wanted to do is direct. It's a common affectation of cinematographers once they get credited for the look of their directors' work. Of the many who took the step up in responsibility and prestige, arguably only Mario Bava and Nicolas Roeg transcended their cinematography as directors. But Cardiff got off to a good start and got an Oscar nomination for directing Sons and Lovers. Still, nothing he directed was on Michael Powell's level and at last, with this Anglo-French adaptation of an acclaimed French novel, it became clear that Cardiff wanted to be Powell. Here was the vehicle, for which he gets an adaptation credit, in which he would prove himself as much a visionary as his erstwhile mentor. He sure wasn't going to do that with his previous film, the badass mercenary drama Dark of the Sun, which was released the same year -- even though Dark is easily the better film of the two, and Girl is really a bit of a disaster.

Boasting direction and photography by the legendary Jack Cardiff, Girl opens with a horrid effects shot of birds hovering over a house that's only slightly redeemed once identified as part of the title character's dream. Rebecca (Marianne Faithful) is having a restless night: she also dreams of doing a bareback act in her motorcycle costume in a circus, with Alain Delon as the ringmaster. He patiently whips her suit to shreds. Later, looking contemptuously professorial -- it turns out he is a professor -- Delon laughs at Rebecca in an abstract background. And there's solarization. Very visionary, Cardiff.

Fortunately, our auteur is on surer ground when he goes on location with the girl and the motorcycle. Rebecca is unhappily married because she pines for Delon. Compared to the sadly-named actor Roger Mutton, who plays her hapless schoolteacher of a husband, who wouldn't pine for Delon. While Mutton can't control a classroom of small boys, Delon commandingly lectures college students on the Playboy Philosophy or something along those lines. Sporting a professorial pipe, he could be teaching them Slack for all I know. The intellectuality of it all no doubt appeals to Rebecca the bookseller's daughter -- and it may be no accident that Archers icon Marius Goring plays the bookseller. Delon is extravagant, giving Rebecca the motorcycle as a wedding present. Where she got her moto-catsuit I don't know, but it looks like the cartoonist Darwyn Cooke got at least some of his ideas for his 21st-century redesign of Catwoman from Rebecca's costume. Wearing the costume, with boots and helmet and nothing else (hence the alternate title Naked Under Leather), Rebecca rides from France to Germany to reunite with Delon while indulging in voiceover monologues and flashbacks that make Cardiff's work seem a little like a caveman version of Terrence Malick. Cardiff indugles in the illusion that Rebecca is riding a motorcycle. To me it looks suspiciously like she's being towed in some shots, though that may be only to make it easier for Cardiff to show off by doing a 360 degree spin around Rebecca's head while she's riding. In other scenes, those where she and Delon must share a bike and talk to each other, or close-ups in dangerous conditions, Cardiff resorts to process shots, though he strives, with mixed success, to make them more convincing than normal. And in some long shots, the stunt rider is clearly wearing a bulkier costume than Rebecca's.  You can't help noticing these things because this is a pretentiously visionary film by a legendary cinematographer. The inconsistencies can't help but distract the mind -- but from what?

The most dated thing about The Girl on a Motorcycle is that Rebecca's plight is considered a subject for a feature film. Nearly fifty years ago I suppose her adventures did seem daring, but it's hard to imagine anyone caring even then. So she's adulterous and worries about being a nymphomaniac. What of it? What of it, indeed, given this film's dull thud of an ending, which seems to reduce Rebecca's drama to a cruel joke. In short, she's ecstatically closing the kilometers between herself and Delon, bouncing on her seat and otherwise stimulating her libido, when she's killed in a traffic accident, in slapstick fashion. Bam! Her bike hits the side of a vehicle and she goes flying. Cardiff cuts to a flying shot and a brief close-up of Rebecca's shot. Then she goes head-first through a windshield, presumably killed instantly. A VW swerves to avoid this wreck, flips and explodes. In many of the shots Rebecca's dead legs are still visible sticking out of that windshield, our heroine reduced to no more an object than the cars on the road. I suppose it put Cardiff ahead of his time, since I was reminded partly of the gruesome finish of Daughters of Darkness and partly of the comedy accident scene in Jacques Tati's Trafic -- both films from a few years later. The really funny part is imagining that Cardiff thought this numb spectacle was akin to Moira Shearer's death scene in Red Shoes. But maybe there's a moral, too? Has transgression been punished? Or, more objectively, has liberation been proved transient at best? Or should Rebecca have been wearing her helmet, no matter how white and ugly it was?

 

Some people may give Cardiff a pass on style-over-substance grounds, but the film's tackiness makes that difficult. Sure, many shots are as brilliant as you'd demand from Cardiff, but some show horrendous bad taste. One scene I've snipped, with Delon's privates obscured by a flower vase, looks like something Benny Hill would have come up with. For every truly gorgeous moment there's a ghastly one, at least. And throughout, we have Marianne Faithful and the unresolved question of whether Rebecca is insane or simply an idiot. Faithful will leave you guessing, if not wondering about her real self.  As for Delon, his quest for English-language stardom had taken him to strange places already (Texas Across the River, anyone?), and at least he seems to enjoy himself here. That's more than I can say for the audience.

Cardiff wouldn't work in movies again for another five years, and would direct only two more films before reverting to full-time cinematography. To this day cinematographers crash and burn when they turn into directors; Wally Pfister is the most recent victim. It's a shame that they don't get enough recognition -- or compensation? -- for their true talents. Fortunately, the very best like Cardiff are remembered for their real triumphs, while failures like Girl on a Motorcycle fade in time.

DVR Diary: THE SICILIAN CLAN (Le Clan des Siciliens, 1969)

Thanks to the Fox Movie Channel, which is still worth watching in the morning but turns to crap in prime time, I've just seen a French crime movie I've wanted to see for a long time. While dubbed in English, the Fox Movie edition is widescreen and apparently uncut. The dubbing is inevitably a disappointment; it sounds like Alain Delon may have done his own dubbing, but Lino Ventura definitely didn't, while Jean Gabin, at the time the grand old man of French movies, ends up sounding a little like the High Chaparral star Leif Erickson talking out of the side of his mouth. As you see, what we have here is an all-star picture, and with ex-con turned author Jose Giovanni co-writing the script just about all the ingredients are in place for a classic. But in the absence of a master like Jean-Pierre Melville behind the camera, Henri Verneuil directs a merely efficient caper picture without the mood or intensity worthy of his stars.

Despite the title, the film is not about the Mafia. The Sicilian clan in question is the Manalese family, led by patriarch Vittorio (Gabin), who helps jewel thief Roger Sartet (Delon) escape from prison -- Sartet is given a miniature circular saw to cut his way out of a paddy wagon during a transfer -- in return for the plans for the security system for an upcoming jewelry exhibition in Rome, which Sartet acquired from the designer, now a fellow convict. Sartet wants in on the prospective robbery but Vittorio doesn't trust him because Sartet is a killer -- and an outsider. After Sartet has to shoot his way out of a tryst with a prostitute, Vittorio keeps him under close wraps until he has a chance to case the Rome site himself, in the company of old criminal pal from America. They discover that the security system is more extensive than Sartet had indicated, and pretty much unbeatable. Here the film shifts direction. Instead of a Rififi-style caper, Sicilian Clan goes ultra-modern when Vittorio's American buddy gets the idea of the Manaleses hijacking a plane carrying the jewels from Europe to the U.S. The American can secure an impromptu landing strip for the captive plane by appropriating a stretch of highway outside New York City.  The caper becomes a matter of getting the clan (and Sartet) on board the plane without the police (led by Ventura playing like the French Walter Matthau) noticing the highly-wanted Sartet, then pulling off the hijacking without the U.S. Air Force blowing the plane out of the sky. All goes well until Vittorio learns about Sartet's beach affair with one of his daughters-in-law and decides that the randy Corsican should die. The old man's brutal assertion of patriarchal authority proves the undoing of the entire gang.

Sicilian Clan has some moments of intelligent suspense, particularly after Sartet boards the plane in the guise of a British security agent, when his cohorts have to deal with the sudden appearance of the real man's wife at the airport. After discovering that her husband is not on the plane, Vittorio tries to throw her off the trail by explaining (using an airport phone, he pretends to be a government offiical) that the man is still at his hotel. Now she wants to call him at the hotel, and it becomes a race against time to get the plane off the ground before she realizes she's been tricked. Verneuil is at least efficient, but to what purpose? It seems like some too-careful balance was struck between Gabin and Delon, with Ventura's flic the odd man out, so that Delon disappears from a large section of the film while Gabin visits Rome. Neither star dominates the film long enough for audiences to identify with one or really understand what they stand for. When Vittorio resolves to destroy Sartet, is this a vindication of old-school values or the self-destructive outburst of an obsolete old man? Is Sartet the wild beast Vittorio thinks he is? We don't see enough evidence to damn him so, nor does the film really make a case that Vittorio is dangerously old-fashioned or simply irrational. The plot ends up looking contrived to set up an intergenerational showdown, reducing the film to an overcooked potboiler. It can probably be enjoyed on its own undemanding terms, but the best French crime films have spoiled me. I expect more of an immersively existential experience along the lines of Melville's Le Samourai, or Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques -- but sometimes a caper is just a caper. Dial down your expectations and Sicilian Clan may still satisfy.

DVR Diary: HAVE I THE RIGHT TO KILL? (L'insoumis, 1964)

By 1964 Alain Delon was in his Hollywood period. His first English-language performance, in Rene Clement's Joy House, had just come out, and he would work primarily in English, or at least in English-language films, for the next two years. Hollywood showed its commitment to making Delon a star by dubbing Alain Cavalier's L'Insoumis into English. It appeared in some markets as The Unvanquished and in others with the cumbersome, irrelevant title under which Turner Classic Movies broadcast it last week. Have I the Right to Kill suggests a moral dilemma that never really arises, as Delon's character kills readily when he needs to. More often, the film seems to ask whether he has the right not to kill. He plays Thomas, a Foreign Legionnaire fighting to preserve French rule in Algeria in 1961. More than Vietnam itself, Algeria was France's Vietnam, and Delon's deserter stands in well for the troubled 'Nam vet of American movies from a decade later. After a brief bit of combat, with Thomas mainly concerned with rescuing a wounded buddy, he leaves the struggle against Algeria only to fall into the struggle of France against itself. The prospect of France giving up Algeria provoked a reactionary movement, the "Secret Army," that sought to overthrow the government of General de Gaulle. "Algerie Francaise!" was their rallying cry. Thomas witnesses one of their rallies indifferently, but soon falls in with another deserter involved in a plot to kidnap Dominique Servet, a French civil-liberties lawyer (Lea Massari) who defends Algerian nationalists. Thomas ends up feeling sorry for his pretty victim. He starts by sneaking her sips of soda through a straw stuck through a keyhole, and ends by shooting his partner and freeing Dominique and another prisoner, getting shot himself in the process. Thomas gets hastily patched up and sends Dominique on her way back to France.

Thomas returns to France on his way home to Luxembourg, but despite his need to get out of the country quickly, since the Secret Army carries a grudge, and complications from his mistreated wound he can't pass up an opportunity to look up Dominique. To no moviegoer's surprise they end up lovers. Few would be surprised to see Secret Army goons show up the next day, but Cavalier has set the scene so we know that Thomas has a gun nearby to shoot his way out. The shootings make him even more of a fugitive from the law, and now he's encumbered by an infatuated Dominique, but aided by her understanding husband. Too much has gone wrong, however, and the film winds down to a finish highly reminiscent of The Asphalt Jungle as Dominique and an increasingly feverish Thomas drive through the countryside to his family farm and an ultimate homecoming.

L'Insoumis feels like a mishmash of American noir and French crime motifs, and the English dubbing, however well-intended, underscores the generic nature of the proceedings. The Algerian context gives the story an initial immediacy that ebbs rapidly once the politics become irrelevant to the romance and the chase. Delon has some of the detachment that would be perfected in Le Samourai and subsequent films, but here it just seems like Thomas is in over his head. For Cavalier L'Insoumis is a follow-up to his first feature, the Algeria-oriented Le Combat dans L'Isle, and in neither case does he really animate the melodrama with political relevance as he clearly hoped to do. At most, these films may have had a relevant kick in their own time, but it's the kind of relevance that only dates an unsuccessful film.

Here's how M-G-M tried to sell it to American audiences. The trailer comes from TCM.com

FLIC STORY (1975)

The poster for Jacques Deray's police procedural spoils the story -- it shows fugitive Jean-Louis Trintignant in cuffs and in the custody of cop Alain Delon -- but French audiences were presumably quite familiar with the story, anyway. Flic Story (that's the actual French title) was adapted from the memoir of Roger Borniche (Delon), the still-living cop (flic) who took nearly a decade after World War II to track down robber and murderer Emile Buisson (Trintignant). Anyone interested in Borniche's story knew how it turned out, so the primary interest, apart from seeing the two stars in action against each other, had to be in some subtext. In fact, Flic Story feels like a film that requires you to know more about France's modern history in order to appreciate fully. As it is, Deray's film (a Delon co-production) is most likely to remind American viewers of films about the early days of the FBI and its pursuit of archetypal public enemies like John Dillinger. Borniche's pursuit of Buisson is complicated by jurisdictional jealousies between Borniche's "federal police" (known to fans of Inspector Clouseau as the Surete) and the national gendarmerie. The pursuit of Buisson is also an assertion of power, and sometimes an abuse of power. Borniche opposed his own colleagues' resort to beatings of prisoners for information; Delon is the "good cop" here, trusting to his powers of persuasion rather than brute force. The long manhunt also had a political context that Americans can't immediately comprehend. At one point someone reads aloud from L'Humanite, France's communist daily, which demands drastic action against Buisson and cites his continued freedom as proof of the authorities' indifference to working-class life. Later, on a perhaps unrelated note, Buisson explains that a copy of Le Figaro, a conservative daily, enhances one's disguise because no one expects a criminal to read such a "serious" newspaper. I get some of the subtext, but I suspect that there's more to it that I don't get, and that there's an inherent limit to Flic Story's accessibility for non-French audiences.

Delon

vs.

Trintignant

Context or subtext aside, how does Flic Story work as a period procedural or crime thriller? It's less a genre exercise than a showcase for the two stars. Trintignant, whose star career extends from Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman to the forthcoming Michael Haneke Palme d'Or winner Amour, seems to get the short end here, since Emile Buisson was, on this evidence, no Dillinger. He is simply mean, and Trintignant gets to do little besides glower and shoot people. He does this well and makes Buisson a convincing monster, but was someone of the actor's stature necessary for that? He was probably more necessary as a worthy antagonist for Delon, whose kind of film this was. Literally speaking, Delon has at least five flicks with flic in the title in his filmography. This one isn't one of his all-out action vehicles; it's in the same conscientious mode as his anti-death penalty picture Two Men in Town. His best scene here is his confrontation with a vicious fellow officer who tries to defend his brutal tactics by saying that Borniche would do likewise if Buisson had victimized one of his relatives. Borniche counters by recounting that his actual brother was tortured to death by the Gestapo, thus explaining his opinion of torture. Like Two Men in Town, Flic Story ends with an execution, but not before an odd epilogue narrated by Delon about the evolution of Borniche's relationship with his "pal" Buisson during months of interrogation. The point this time seems to be that a hardened criminal's humanization has its limits. Buisson can't repress his desire to torture and kill yet another informant. It isn't exactly a vindication of capital punishment, but it's probably true to the non-fiction source material. Flic Story's fidelity to its source probably limits its potential for genre sensation, though the true story does offer opportunities for plenty of car chases, shootouts and plain old murders. As a period piece it has a drab production design appropriate to a period of privation. Deray stages some scenes well but some have a monotonous soundstage look and nothing is especially memorable visually apart from Trintignant's dead-eyed glower. This film will most likely be memorable for those to whom the true story is most meaningful. The rest of us will find it competent at least, but probably disposable at the end.

ONCE A THIEF (1965)

In what country -- on what planet? -- are Alain Delon and Jack Palance brothers? The answer proposed by director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter Zekial Marko, who adapted his own novel, is long-disputed multicultural Trieste, where the presumably Slavic-heritaged Pedaks would speak fluent Italian. Walter (Palance) is a full-time criminal, but Eddie (Delon) has gone straight after a stay in stir for shooting a cop, also from the old country (Van Heflin) in mid-robbery. The cop still carries a grudge against Eddie, so when someone driving a car that matches the description of Eddie's vehicle, and wearing a coat that matches the description of Eddie's garment, robs a Chinatown corner store in San Francisco and kills the owner's wife, Inspector Vido's natural assumption is that Eddie is to blame. But the way the robbery was filmed automatically tells us differently. In any event, Vido's suspicions lead Eddie's arrest at his warehouse workplace and his losing his job. Without a job to support his wife (Ann-Margret) and daughter, and too proud to let his wife work as a scantily-clad waitress, Eddie's ready to listen when Walter proposes robbing the warehouse where millions in lightweight platinum are stored. A modest caper ensues, involving tapping the phone line from the warehouse and intercepting a call from purposefully spooked security guards so Delon and an accomplice can show up in cop costumes and get let in. By this time Vido is starting to realize that Eddie had been framed for the grocery job, but can he and Eddie trust each other to get Eddie and his family out alive as Walter's gang falls apart and one sinister accomplice (John David Chandler) decides he doesn't want to share the loot with anyone?...

Once a Thief marked Delon's first job in Hollywood. Studio publicity touted his Gallic rebellious streak, reporting that he'd scandalized M-G-M veterans by smuggling wine into the studio commissary. In a more peculiar bit of publicity, gossip columnists reported that Delon and Ann-Margret had briefly feuded after he had hit her too hard for one of several slapping scenes. The Frenchman reportedly resolved the situation by sending the actress flowers, but there followed an item reporting that A-M was vetoing cheesecake publicity shots for the film on the ground that those undercut the film's dramatic vibe. Seems like an unhappy experience for her, and probably not too happy for most involved in the picture.

Nelson's picture -- his follow-up to Lilies of the Field and Father Goose -- arguably qualifies as a late-noir or neo-noir picture. It boasts nice location cinematography (apart from the occasional process shot) by Robert Burks and obvious noir situations, from the ex-con victim of circumstance to the obsessed, misguided, bullying cop. It adds a sheen of Sixties sleaze with explicit references to lesbians and the aforementioned outbursts of Delon's macho brutality. The worst of those comes when Eddie invades the club where his wife is waitressing. He slams her into a wall, then tries to rip her costume off, saying: "Don't cheat your customers, show them everything!" before dragging her into the street. This comes with the territory of the story but there's something slightly gratuitous about it as well. It means to be a nasty movie -- Chandler's character comes across as a crypto child molester, for instance, -- but it also wants to play for pathos by putting a child in jeopardy and becomes merely pathetic in the mawkish sense at the end.

Apart from Chandler, who is effectively creepy, no one's really in top form here. Heflin's performance is by-the-book predictable. Palance has little to do and is so eclipsed as a villain by Chandler that you wonder finally which character actually framed Eddie. Ann-Margret's response to the rough circumstances of her role is to ramp up her performance to unmodulated hysteria for the final reels. As for Delon, his foreigner's English is adequate as usual, but the role seems wrong for him, especially in hindsight. Nelson clearly saw him as a stereotype fiery Mediterranean type and set him to work chewing scenery, whether when whaling on A-M or in a showoff scene at an unemployment office that seemed better suited for Jack Nicholson. You could have sent Once a Thief to Jean-Pierre Melville before he shot Le Samourai as a primer on how not to use Alain Delon in a crime movie. The cool that Melville did so much to make part of Delon's persona is simply not there. But I'm probably exaggerating my disappointments a little because this whole package clearly had the potential to be much better, and I think people who come across Once a Thief without the high expectations I had for Delon, Palance et al might find it not so bad. Crime film fans with an eye for the genre's evolution will probably get the most out of it, but most people should get at least a few good jolts out of it.

LOST COMMAND (1966): The other Battle of Algiers

Of the two films released in 1966 about the "Battle of Algiers" -- the terrorist campaign aimed at driving France out of Algeria in the 1950s -- it is the colorful big-budget Hollywood production with an international cast of stars, not the monochrome semi-documentary with a cast of nobodies that has been almost completely forgotten. Yet Mark Robson's film had a head start on Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, being based on an international best-seller and prize-winning French novel, The Centurions, by Jean Larteguy. It starred Anthony Quinn, still fairly fresh from Zorba the Greek, alongside Alain Delon at the height of his stardom. So why has film history ignored Lost Command and exalted Battle of Algiers? For one thing, Pontecorvo's is the better film. It set a new standard for simulated realism and by siding with the insurgents it captured the radical zeitgeist of the late 1960s. By identifying with, if not siding with, the French occupiers, Robson's film could only appear reactionary, a Franco-American counterpart to The Green Berets, by comparison with Pontecorvo's Battle. Lost Command is innovative neither in narrative nor in visual style. But if it's indisputably inferior to Battle, does that make it an objectively bad movie?

Robson's movie probably is some kind of cinematic landmark, if only for being an early portrayal of the west's failure to subdue Vietnam. Lost Command opens during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, as paratroopers arrive to relieve an embattled unit commanded by Lt. Col. Raspeguy (Quinn). The colonel is irked to learn that his superiors have sent him a unit historian, Capt, Esclavier (Delon), but the academic proves a decent soldier -- not that that helps the unit much. They're forced to surrender (to Burt "Kato" Kwouk) and are imprisoned for some time, but under Raspeguy's leadership they largely retain cohesion and morale.

Freed at last, the men return to France, where Raspeguy courts an influential widow (Michele Morgan) who might help him secure a generalship. He can help his own cause with a good showing in Algeria, where the natives are restless. He regathers much of his old unit, including an initially reluctant Esclavier but not Lt. Mahidi (George Segal), who had returned to his native Algeria after their release. In Algeria, they gradually learn that Mahidi, who had been humiliated by racist French settlers and saw a relative killed during a protest, has taken his tactical expertise to the insurgents. While he concentrates on building a guerrila army, his sister (Claudia Cardinale) smuggles bomb-making materials to terrorists in the Casbah, eventually using an infatuated Esclavier -- who doesn't learn of her family ties until later -- as dupe to get her past checkpoints. The French forces, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm, resort to torture to break the terror network and learn the whereabouts of Mahidi's army-in-the-making. Raspeguy leads the attack to destroy Mahidi's army and earn his generalship, but will he keep his promise to Esclavier to take their old comrade alive?...

As the poster said, they lived and loved and fought:

Anthony Quinn and Michele Morgan (above),
and Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale (below)

What we have here is the age-old conflict between the man of action and the intellectual. Raspeguy is a "beautiful beast of war," so called by the widow because he furiously rejects her first description of him as a "beautiful animal of war." Raspeguy hates being called an "animal" with the passion of one who's been called that frequently. Maybe something didn't translate well from the French, but I'm not clear on why "beast" is any better. The colonel's sensitivity has something to do with his background as a Basque peasant -- and the character's standing as an ethnic outsider among Frenchmen presumably explains Anthony Quinn's casting alongside a mostly French ensemble who speak English in their own well-accented voices -- with the conspicuous exception of Jean Servais as a general who talks in the familiar voice of Paul Frees. One weakness of this picture is the buildup it gives Raspeguy's animus to "animal," which ends up having much less payoff than we might expect.

Alain Delon has more to work with as a more sensitive personality who struggles to avoid the coarsening effect of war. Literally dropped into Quinn's unit at the opening, he's the audience-identification character and the film's political conscience. He isn't unsympathetic to the cause of Algerian independence, and puts up the most resistance not just to the use of torture against the terrorists (novelist Larteguy is credited by Wikipedia with inventing the torture-justifying "ticking bomb" scenario), but also to the French reliance on masked informers. He cracks, however, when he learns how the Cardinale character had duped him. Fresh from his principled protests, he beats her up in a rage that he appears quickly to regret, extracting more gently from her the whereabouts of Mahidi in return for Raspeguy's promise to spare the miliant's life. Esclavier will later have cause to call Raspeguy the "A-word," but while the result finally convinces him to quit the military, the moment is still fairly underwhelming.

What isn't underwhelming at all is the spectacular location work of Robson and cinematographer Robert Surtees in Spain. All the military engagements are engagingly shot, none more so than the climactic raid on Mahidi. Robson establishes the insurgents' location at the ruins of a Roman temple in the hills, and uses that temple as a reference point to make the rival forces' positions perfectly clear in every shot. However retrograde Lost Command may be from a political standpoint, it succeeds quite nicely as a colorful military action film. It may still go down as a curiosity in the Quinn and Delon filmographies, but it certainly doesn't deserve an obscurity that persists despite an official DVD release from Sony some time ago.

I might have suggested that it should endure alongside Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers to represent the other point of view, but that's not really true -- Robson's film does not oppose Pontecorvo's. Lost Command ends with the implication that Algeria's demand for independence is irrepressible, and the film never claims that the Algerians were undeserving of freedom. But it suffers in comparison to Battle because Robson never makes Mahidi the equal antagonist that the character's backstory prepares him to be. Once he turns against the France, however just his cause may be, Mahidi himself becomes little more than a menace. The movie could have used some sort of confrontation, however contrived, between Mahidi and Raspeguy or Esclavier so the insurgent could explain more eloquently or convincingly what drove a soldier who refused preferential treatment, as a presumed victim of colonialism, from his Vietnamese captors, to make war on his erstwhile comrades-in-arms. But the filmmakers may have been playing it safe, since you can stretch the credibility of George Segal as an Algerian only so far. Nevertheless, history has judged Mahidi's real-life counterparts the true protagonists of the Algerian uprising, while cinema history has judged The Battle of Algiers the definitive film version of that event. Those judgments can stand, but Lost Command should retain historical interest for presenting, not the other, but just another point of view in dramatically forceful style.

And here's the US trailer, uploaded to YouTube by SupportingActor.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960)

After the neorealist movement won a foothold in America by providing reliably scandalous product for the nation's growing numbers of arthouses, the Italian film industry started firing the big guns. The movies, once noted for an ascetic modesty in their attention to ordinary folk, grew epic in length, and sometimes in scope, as acclaim fueled directors' ambition. Along with Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti was one of the biggest guns, matching Fellini's three-hour blockbuster La Dolce Vita with his own 176-minute monster while joining forces with his peer for the colossal portmanteau piece Boccaccio '70. Unlike Fellini, Visconti appeared with Rocco e i suoi fratelli to remain true to neorealism's ideal focus on common people, though he'd follow Rocco with a still-more stupendous historical epic about an aristocrat, The Leopard. However, Visconti had preceded Rocco with a modernization of Dostoevsky, White Nights, and Rocco itself retains a lot of the "loose, baggy monster" quality of 19th century Russian novels. In fact, Rocco and His Brothers reminds me most of another master's questionable attempt to modernize and relocate Dostoevsky, Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot. Besides length, both films share an arguably Dostoevskian obsession with the depths of human abjection and self-destructive passion.

There goes the neighborhood; the Parondis in Milan. A neighbor's one-word description? "Africa!"

Long film, simple story: Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon in one of his breakthrough roles) and his three brothers, along with their mother (Oscar-winner Katina Paxinou) quit their southern hardscrabble farm to move to Milan, where eldest son Vincenzo already has a job and a fiancee. They immediately create a scene at Vincenzo's engagement party when the matriarch expects to move in with her full brood. Instead, they get thrown out into the street, and Vincenzo has to scramble to get them temporary housing. Starting with odd jobs like shoveling snow to earn their way, each brother ventures forth to seek his fortune. Rocco takes a variety of jobs and serves a stint in the army before following brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) into a boxing career. While Simone proved a gutless tomato can as a fighter, Rocco rises to contention.

Alain Delon and Annie Girardot in good times and bad.

Rocco also outdoes Simone as a suitor for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a prostitute who works the projects, but Simone isn't going to take that humiliation lying down. He and his lowlife droogs beat Rocco up while Simone rapes Nadia in front of him. While Mama Parondi bemoans how the wicked woman is ruining her boys, Rocco effectively surrenders Nadia to Simone out of some misplaced sense of family responsibility. This solves nothing. Simone seeks deeper and deeper into gambling debt while a contemptuous Nadia flounces around the house making life miserable for Mama. Things get so bad that the other brothers are willing to raise funds for Simone to get him out of town, but the offer only goads the lousy layabout to ask for more money. He also gets dangerously antsy about his future with Nadia. The film builds to a double climax, cutting from Rocco's big fight to Simone's shocking showdown with his girl, before resolving itself into one more family conflict as responsible Alfa Romeo worker Ciro (Max Cartier) tries to make sure Simone gets what he deserves while his mother and brothers still desperately try to protect their kin....

Who's crucifying who?

Rocco's length is debatably justified by Visconti's novelistic ambition, but I couldn't help thinking that Warner Bros. could have told the same story just as well in half the time. It seems to be regarded as socially conscious in some essential way, as if "the city" or "modernity" is to blame for the Parondis' plight, but I'm not sure that Visconti himself actually felt that way about it. I detect no more innate social consciousness, much less any political consciousness, than I would in some American counterpart film like A Streetcar Named Desire or God's Little Acre -- I thought it safe to cover a lot of territory. As with many a "white trash" saga, the portrayal of human wretchedness and depravity seems to be an end unto itself. The climax of the Simone-Nadia storyline certainly seems designed to set a new standard for violence in an otherwise-respectable production, and that scene helped sell Rocco as a scandalous yet pretentious shocker when it invaded the U.S. in the summer of 1962.

All this being said, Rocco is a pictorially solid and generally well-acted film that satisfies my virtual-tourist urge with its trip through the landscape of 1960 Milan. While the title identifies the film as an early showcase for Delon, Renato Salvatori actually makes the strongest acting impression. The script obliges him to go over the top, especially when he bawls at the end like a big guilty baby, but he is absolutely convincing as the bum of the brothers. Given how much Rocco has to react to Simone's troubles, Salvatori really is the center of a movie that should have been called Simone and his Brothers, if not Simone and his Enablers -- or, to be more fair to all the actors and more Dostoevskian yet, The Brothers Parondi. The film's faults are those of excess, along with a sense that there's more there than there actually is. But there is a lot of indisputably strong stuff here, and despite my complaints (unusual for me) about the length the film did not bore me. It only leaves you with the nagging question of whether it had to be as long as it was, but you might still go away thinking it a great film.

LES FELINS (Joy House, 1964)

Blame the hard-boiled author Day Keene for the American title of Rene Clement's proto-erotic thriller: that's what he called the book it's based on. It pretty convincingly fails to convey the sinister mood of the piece; despite the hothouse hype M-G-M applied to selling the picture, that title can't help but make you expect something happy, or perhaps something musical. And with Lalo Schifrin composing the score it is a pretty musical picture, but that telltale harpsichord should tell all but the most obtuse that something decadent is going on here.

Alain Delon plays Marc, a crook caught sleeping with the wrong woman, the property of a big man in the Mob. Taken out to the Mediterranean coast of France to be whacked, Marc manages to escape by commandeering a car and driving it over a cliff, then hopping across some railroad tracks just before a train roars by. Ragged and bruised, he hitchhikes into the nearest city and hides among the homeless in a mission shelter. Meals are provided by a glamorous pair of American women: Barbara (Lola Albright), a widow who owns a mysterious mansion, and her cousin Melinda (Jane Fonda). They just happen to be looking for a new chauffeur, too, ideally a guy who looks good in a Kato uniform.

Delon: from frying pan to fire

It's a good deal for Marc since it keeps him out of town, where the mobsters are still looking for him. He doesn't want to stay for long, though; once he earns enough money he wants to reunite with the girlfriend with whom he started all the trouble. That doesn't fit with Barbara's plans or Melinda's -- it develops that they are not the same. Both women want to keep Marc on the estate, but Melinda's motivated by possessive lust, while Barbara has an ulterior motive. It's up to Marc to figure that out -- it may have to do with the secret wing of the "neo-gothic" mansion -- before it's too late for him. That means playing the women against each other if necessary, with sex as a weapon, but Marc is not the only player on the premises, and his isn't the only game. It may have been too late for him the moment he took the job....

Jane Fonda as Melinda

Lola Albright as Barbara

"Neo-gothic" is right, right down to the gimmick of the secret room and its possible occupant. It's only fitting, too, since film noir is arguably crime cinema with a gothic tinge, while Clement's film of Keene's story is a "neo-gothic" way station from noir to something else, something closer to the "swinging gothic" style of the giallo. It puts Delon in an extreme noir situation, caught between two rival femmes fatales, on top of an ultimately familiar noir plot. It ends up feeling like a cross between His Kind of Woman and The Beguiled, and in cocky gigolo mode Delon makes the perfect mark for the story, confident of his manly power to master the situation while someone is almost always a step ahead of him. As the femmes (the felins tag extends to Delon's character, described as a "wildcat"), Albright (best known as Peter Gunn's love interest) and Fonda control the tension between them quite nicely, letting it build gradually as you wonder which will backstab the other first. Also worthy of note is Sorrell "Boss Hogg" Brooke as a picturesque mobster shutterbug stalking Delon.

The prisoner of "Joy House"

Les Felins is slick and sleek throughout, thanks to Schifrin's moody music and Henri Decae's sharp cinematography. Clement keeps things moving with the occasional burst of action while slowly building the tension in the main triangle. There's nothing profound here but it'll keep you entertained and perhaps a little chilled by the end. I recommend it most for fans of Fonda and Delon and Euro-thriller enthusiasts in general.



Here's a French "Les Felins" trailer with English subtitles, uploaded to YouTube by icsprks.

MR. KLEIN (1976)

Here's a satirical thriller set in Occupied France, written by Franco Solinas (Battle of Algiers, A Bullet for the General, Burn! etc), directed by expatriate American blacklistee Joseph Losey and starring Alain Delon, who co-produced the film. He agreed to the project on the condition that Losey, who directed him in The Assassination of Trotsky, do the honors here as well. Delon seemed able to shift with ease from action films like Tony Arzenta or Le Gitan to more arty fare like Losey's film. He must have seen the script as an acting challenge, and it certainly is in some respects.

Delon is the title character, Robert Klein the art dealer. He's making a killing off the plight of French Jews. They have to liquidate their assets, and he takes advantage of their necessity, offering them take-it-or-leave-it low prices that assure him of huge profits later. Klein is a Catholic of Dutch descent, so naturally when he escorts a Jewish seller out the door and finds a copy of a Jewish newspaper on his doorstep, he assumes that his client must have dropped it coming in. But the client has his own copy in his pocket, and the paper on the doorstep is addressed to Robert Klein.

The rest of the film follows Klein from the newspaper office to police headquarters and onto the trail of a second Robert Klein who seems to have taken steps to throw investigators onto our Robert's trail. While Robert follows the trail, we're reminded with increasing urgency that some big roundup of French Jews is in the works. That establishes Robert's peril as his efforts to clear his name only put him in deeper trouble. But I doubt whether audiences feel the normal sort of anxiety for our antihero. That opening scene primes us to accept the worst case scenario as Robert's just desserts. That's why I regard Mr. Klein as a satire rather than any other genre. Its subject is Robert's representative failure to recognize a larger injustice while worrying about himself. His failing is the failing of most French under the Occupation, Solinas and Losey suggest, for as the worm turns on him, his friends increasingly treat him as he treated Jews. Nor does he really learn his lesson; arrested and thrown onto a bus to the train station where Jews will be transported eastward, he snaps at a fellow prisoner who wonders what will happen: "It's none of my affair!"

A larger point is made in a prelude to Klein's story, in which a woman is subject to a ridiculous examination, including walking in the nude, in order to determine whether she might have Jewish characteristics. The doctor's determinations seem to be completely arbitrary, based on pseudo-science -- or science that seems pseudo by modern standards. Following this with Klein's hard bargaining invites us to see Klein's conduct as "Jewish," -- or to assume that it would look so to an anti-semite. Yet when we see his lawyer try the same kind of bargaining with the imperiled Klein, should we see him, presumably an impeccable Frenchman, as another "Jew?" You're left with the feeling that Klein isn't so much a victim of mistaken or confused identity (though some critics make much of the doppelganger aspect of the story) as he is a victim of a mania to label certain people as "Jews" for no good reason. Mr. Klein is less about anti-semitism than it is about the logic of a witch hunt, a subject with which Losey had some sympathetic experience.

Klein is a cold film, as satires often are. It has sharp cinematography by Gerry Fisher and excellent art direction throughout. Alain Delon's challenge playing Klein is to remain a basically unsympathetic character yet keep us interested in his quest and his jeopardy. In my opinion he solves the problem quite well, never playing for pathos or becoming a hero but projecting charismatic determination all the way to the end. I'd recommend Mr. Klein for Delon's fans first, and then for people interested in the Occupation subgenre that encompasses everything from Army of Shadows to Inglourious Basterds. It's not going to be to everyone's taste because of its cool approach to a tragic subject, but it should reward attentive viewing by people who share its mood.

The DVD comes with an English-dubbed trailer, but we'll have to settle for one in the original French, uploaded to YouTube by jorjones2222.

DIABOLICALLY YOURS (Diaboliquement Votre, 1967)

You wake up in a hospital one morning and learn that you've been in a coma following a car accident. You discover that you are Alain Delon, at least in physical terms. Your name, the doctors tell you, is Georges Campos, and your lovely wife, who in physical terms is Senta Berger, is waiting to bring you home. And what a home! Apparently you are a millionaire, at least in francs. You own a mansion and a Buick. You have a vaguely Asiatic looking servant, and it looks like you made your fortune in Hong Kong. You don't remember? That's too be expected; you had a very bad accident. But it's not like that. True, you don't remember your name or if you're married or not, but you do remember some people like your pal Freddie, the doctor who's prescribed a strict regiment of plenty of sleep, plenty of pills, and no sex with the wife until your memory's back. And the more you remember, the more you still don't remember being Georges Campos or being married to the beautiful Christiane. That is, you wouldn't if not for the voices you hear in the night that sound pretty certain that you are, indeed, Georges Campos the corrupt businessman and all-around meanie. After a while, they also seem pretty certain that you ought to kill yourself. Maybe that would be the right thing to do, given what you've learned about yourself, and the fact that your dog hates you, except for those other flashbacks to another life altogether and the echo of another name: Pierre Lagrange....

That's the predicament Delon finds himself facing in the final film directed by Julien Duvivier. He's probably best known for Pepe le Moko, a big early hit for Jean Gabin that was remade in the U.S. as Algiers, a big early hit for Charles Boyer. Duvivier fled to the U.S. during WW2 and most prominently made the portmanteau films Tales of Manhattan and Flesh and Fantasy. In the last year of his life the 70 year old director made a vivid and sometimes campy psychological thriller that has strong film noir elements and touches of expressionism. It gets a bit clunky toward the end when we finally have to have the plot explained, but what carries us through is Alain Delon's performance and the sexual tension between him and Berger, who together may form part of a triangle or quadrilateral.

Duh, how do you say femme fatale in French? Senta Berger enjoys the attentions of the actually-German Peter Mosbacher as Kim.

Delon is likably irreverent here. You can tell very early that despite whatever real amnesia the character suffers, he isn't buying the scenario for a second. The character comes off rather like a wisecracking American noir hero, repeatedly calling Kim the vaguely Asian servant "Chairman Mao." The situation may just be too good for him to believe, but "Georges" isn't quite a tabula rasa, and some subconscious cynicism or survival instinct may be warning him about the truth. Delon's irreverence or insolence sets up a contrast for his later uncertainty about his sanity as the mansion starts seeming more like a haunted house and his flashbacks become more stylistically jarring.

Expressionist and other touches from director Duvivier and cinematographer Henri Decae

The plot, once revealed, seems a little over-elaborate, and some details probably would have been better off left mysterious. It can't help but be a clunker of a moment when Delon discovers that the voices in the night are coming from a good-sized tape recorder stuck between his mattresses. But the sexual tension among the four main characters transcends the sometimes creaky plot mechanics, and the payoff when Delon defies doctor's orders and does it with Berger is undiluted by the implausibility of the core conspiracy. Duvivier exits on a minor but graceful note, ably assisted by Delon and Berger. It's no great ultimate statement, and I doubt that Duvivier had anything like that in him. It's just a last modest confirmation (on top of the few other films I've seen from him) of his skill at making entertaining films.

A cinematic pun? Diaboliquement Votre was Delon's first film after Le Samourai, but unlike in Jean-Pierre Melville's crime masterpiece the actor sort of dresses like a samurai here.

Here's a jazzy French trailer with plenty of male chauvanist mayhem, uploaded to YouTube by Annie7676: