Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Her: Deceased Artiste Bernadette Lafont (part two of 2)

In this part of my tribute to Bernadette Lafont I turn to the traces of her films that can be found "hidden in plain sight" online. As noted in the first part of this piece, I found out in my interview with Mme. Lafont that she didn’t particularly enjoy working on the Truffaut short Les mistons (1957) because it didn’t fit in with her idea of “Hollywood” moviemaking (and also because her husband, the actor Gerard Blain, was opposed to her having an acting career). Here is the short, which is very enjoyable (and Lafont is a vision, at the tender age of 18):

The Truffaut short was far from the world of movies that she enjoyed, so the next obvious step was starring in a feature. When I asked Lafont about her first meeting with Chabrol, I was interested to hear that she had a different story than is told in the French TV documentary that is on the Le Beau Serge (1958) Criterion disc.

There it is noted by Chabrol that his wife (whose inheritance allowed her to finance Serge) loved Bernadette in Mistons and suggested her for the female lead in Serge. Lafont herself said she had met Chabrol when she went to Cannes with her husband, and so she and Blain were cast in both the Truffaut short and the Chabrol film at the same time.

Whatever the case may be, she’s gives a great performance in Serge, blending a sex-kittenish presence with true acting talent. Here is a good example of her work in the film.

The YT poster was turned on the “femdom” aspect, but for the minute let’s set the fetish aspect aside (in researching the clips with Lafont online I also discovered that various YT posters have uploaded clips of European actresses strictly because their armpit hair is briefly visible in the scenes in question).

Serge is considered the first true New Wave feature film (unless you want to count Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), which wasn’t a hit). It impresses to this day, thanks to strong acting by the three leads (Blain, Lafont, and New wave mainstay Jean-Claude Brialy) and its harsh but authentic portrait of a small working-class town.

The next landmark in her career is another film by Chabrol, the ensemble piece Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), which is not only one of its director’s finest, but one of the best French films ever made (I wrote about it in my obit for Chabrol). The whole film can be found here with English subtitles:

Watching the film is an incredibly emotional experience, as it moves back and forth between extremely light moments and very dark ones. This is an in-between one, and one of the best-ever depictions of boredom at work on film:

I also asked Mme. Lafont about Chabrol’s strange and wonderful failure Les Godelureaux (1961), in which she plays a seductress summoned by a dandy (Brialy again) to destroy a young man who has pissed him off.

The film is now available in its entirety on YT with English subs, and it is quite a “discovery” from this period of Chabrol’s work: Lafont is red hot as the seductress, but the fact that her character is a fantasy figure (a red-hot female Tyler Durden, without the brawling) was something she emphasized to me in my interview; this of course (as with Fight Club) begs the question of all the times she is seen in public by people other than the lead character and Brialy. Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating Sixties pic.

There were a number of films I would’ve liked to ask Lafont about, including the comedy L’amour c’est gai, l’amour c’est triste (1971), a charming effort by the director Jean-Daniel Pollet. Pollet’s work is split into two categories: gorgeously non-linear film “poems” and narrative comedies and drama (L’amour fits in the latter category).

Claude Melki (a favorite of Pollet) plays a schlemiel who doesn’t quite understand that his sister (Lafont) is a hooker. He finally finds a girlfriend — the adorable Chantal Goya from Masculin-Feminin — and the farce gets cuter and siller. This clip has no English subs, unfortunately.

One of the most intricate and important films Lafont was involved in was Rivette’s 13-hour masterpiece Out 1 (1971). You can see her response to my question about improvisation in the creation of the film below, in the first part of this blog entry, but I thought at least one clip from the film featuring Bernadette should be included online.

Thus, this excerpt of a scene where Michael Lonsdale tries to get her to return to Paris to join his theater troupe (and reveals that she is one of the mysterious "Thirteen" that Jean-Pierre Leaud has stumbled onto):

Lafont was constantly working during her 56-year film career. So while she was making deadly serious countercultural masterpieces, she also was appearing in charming farces like Trop Jolies Pour Etre Honnetes (1972), an all-female comedy caper that also featured Funhouse interview subject Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. The trailer is here.
 
My final question to her concerned her reunion with Truffaut, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like (1972), based on a novel by Henry Farrell (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?). The film is a rather odd item for Truffaut, a broad farce about an amoral woman that has some wonderful moments. Lafont couldn’t sing but turned that into a comedic advantage, as when she belts the film’s title song. Here is the trailer:

One of Lafont’s “greatest hits” as an actress was her starring role in Jean Eustache’s minimalist masterwork The Mother and the Whore (1973), which qualifies as perhaps the last great French New Wave film (although Eustache was younger than the original crew and the film was made a decade after they stopped making films like this).

Lafont plays the “mother” part of the equation, the woman who lives with Jean-Pierre Leaud and tolerates his affair with a young nurse. Eustache’s film needs to be out on DVD in America (when it was last heard of, it was on VHS from New Yorker Films, the firm that had very erratic VHS/DVD release practices). 

At the moment this is being written, the film can only be obtained in America with English subs via the old New Yorker 2-VHS set and the UK DVD (or off of the infamous Torrents). The film can be found in its entirety with Spanish subs here and in French with no English subs. 

Here is a quiet, contemplative sequence in which Lafont listens to a Piaf song. The brilliance of Eustache's film lies in his dialogue and also in interludes like this one:

Jumping ahead to the Eighties, one see Bernadette turning into a character person, camping it up in pictures like Just Jaeckin's The Perils of Gwendoline (1984) and winning a Cesar as Best Supporting Actress (she also received a Lifetime Achievement Cesar in 2003) for playing a nanny to the very sassy Charlotte Gainsbourg in L’Effrontee (1985), directed by Funhouse guest Claude Miller. Here is the trailer for the film.

Bernadette worked with Chabrol again in the late Seventies and Eighties (appearing in Violette, Inspecteur Lavardin, and Masques). Her daughter Pauline also became a popular movie star in the Eighties, appearing in Chabrol's Poulet Au Vinegre (the sequel to Lavardin) and Godard's Keep Your Right Up. Pauline sadly died in 1988 (at the age of 25) while on a camping trip. A tribute to her can be seen here.

A film I have not seen, but which some helpful poster has put up in several shards (Bernadette's scenes only), is Olivier Peyon's Les Petites Vacances (2006). In the film Lafont plays a grandmother who takes her grandkids on a road trip without telling their parents. There is a wonderful scene with Claude Brasseur and a very taut scene toward the end of the film, but this particular sequence explains the dilemma that is behind the film.

One of Lafont's final starring roles was in the comedy-drama Paulette (2012), where she played an old woman who becomes a pot dealer to earn money. (The trailer is here.) A very affectionate TV documentary about her can be found here (no English subtitles).

*****

Lafont was fearless as a performer, and nowhere was this more apparent than when she sang. She was off-key, but amiable and sexy enough to still please the viewer. The first musical clip I found is from Les Idoles (1968), a broad comedy in which she appears as “Soeur Hilarite” (a play on the name of the Singing Nun, Soeur Sourire [Sister Smile]). The rock band accompanying her definitely tag this as the late Sixties:

Truffaut said he felt that the character in the book Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me was just like Bernadette (this becomes a rather odd observation when you consider that the character is not just a clever sexpot, she's also a liar and a crook....). To promote the film, she sang the theme song on a French TV show. Again, waaaay out of key, but still adorable:

Here she is in a duet with singer Serge Lama. Cute, but not as provocative as this duet with Catherine Deneuve in the film Zig Zig (1975). The full number can be seen here, but this interview clip contains pieces of it and is much clearer:

And for the piece de resistance, an incredibly silly musical number that seems to have first appeared in a children's TV show, "La sieste de papa." Listen to that synthesizer, and remember that the Eighties truly were a “lost” decade for everyone.

Digging the discs: my latest DVD reviews

I present "consumer guide" round-ups (thanks to Christgau for that handy phrase) on the Funhouse TV show on a regular basis. Here are the latest DVD reviews I've done for the DiscDish site.

Jerry Lewis as the Jazz Singer

Beat Takeshi's Outrage: Way of the Yakuza

Isabelle Huppert stars in Special Treatment

The original — and only version worth watching — U.K. seriesThe Office

Godard's masterwork Histoire(s) du Cinema

Darren McGavin stars in Mike Hammer: the Complete Series

Claude Chabrol’s brilliant Les Cousins

Bergman’s Face to Face

The indispensableThe Complete Jean Vigo

David Holzman's Diary, a perfect NYC indie

A cynic among the dreamers: Deceased Artiste Claude Chabrol

In the last few years, I’ve spoken on the Funhouse TV show about the sustained brilliance of the eight or so filmmakers who comprised the “French New Wave.” They have continued to make exquisite films well into their 70s and 80s, and remind us that artists can remain vital and inventive as they grow older. 

With the death of Eric Rohmer, the “eldest brother” of the Cahiers quintet who are considered the core of la nouvelle vague, the group finally began to diminish (to that point, only Truffaut had died). And now the most commercial filmmaker of the group, Claude Chabrol, has died at 80. 

Chabrol was the most remarkably prolific member of the group (as relates to full-length theatrical features) and was also by far the most uneven in terms of quality. His meager project-for-hire films are without question the most unabashedly “commercial” movies ever made by an New Waver (although, true to form for this group, even these were mighty strange and slower-paced affairs), but his masterpieces are far more despairing in tone than anything produced by even the resolutely serious Alain Resnais and the masterfully paranoid Jacques Rivette. 

Chabrol’s two heroes were Hitchcock (about whom he wrote Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films with Rohmer) and Lang, and, like those masters, he doted on the cruel side of human nature. In his best films, Chabrol showed how random violence can be, and how it is cruelest when it comes with a betrayal of trust. One article that can be found online clearly defines the five “periods” of his work, the weirdest being the time in the Sixties when he made colorful but low-budget spy thrillers for a few years to keep his hand in as a studio-backed craftsman.

Thankfully that and his other oddest period, which found him making a slew of mediocre international coproductions, were “broken” by brilliantly conceived features — Les Biches (1968) in the former case and Violette (1978) in the latter. Chabrol was thus akin to Dylan and Brando — every few years (usually following absolutely dreadful work), the artist emerges with a masterwork, as if to say, “I bet you thought I had lost it, didn’t ya…?” 

The most analyzed period of Chabrol’s career is 1968-’73, when he made a brilliant series of thrillers that critiqued bourgeois society, showing us the comforts and rituals of that strata of society, as well as (you guessed it) their petty cruelties. 

I have decided to dedicate this blog entry to his first four films, however, since they show the genesis of his style and display that style in its rawest form. The resulting pictures still have the power to disturb the viewer and are incredibly memorable — my least favorite movies from Chabrol’s last twenty years of work were the ones that one could barely remember as one exited the theater. 

The first four features are also most interesting because two have been MIA on American DVD and VHS; the other two are currently available on disc in pristine condition from Kino Lorber. Chabrol swore in later years that “films with a message make me laugh,” but he definitely had something to say about the sudden, swift cruelty that is an intrinsic part of daily life. 

His first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958), is an extremely downbeat tale of a young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial hometown to recover from an illness, only to find that his old friend (Gerard Blain) is now a far-gone alcoholic. Brialy falls for a young woman in town, played by the wonderfully sexy Bernadette Lafont (The Mother and the Whore).

 

The film revolves around the fact that Brialy is shocked by the mean behavior in his hometown — perhaps the film’s nastiest twist comes when a scummy old man finds out that his daughter is not biologically his, so he rapes her. The act occurs offscreen but the emotional violation is forefront of the narrative. Here the father character threatens Brialy:

 

Beau Serge provides a good introduction to Chabrol’s elegant, fluid camerawork as well as his blending of “light” material with the ramifications of harsh acts of violence. With his second film, Les Cousins (1959), a collaborator entered the scene who received important mention in the better-researched Chabrol obits: screenwriter Paul Gégauff. 

Works on the New Wave that mention Gégauff note that he behaved like a fascist in public around his Cahiers/nouvelle vague friends and was a flagrant womanizer. His professional side was exemplary: he cowrote the classic René Clément film Purple Noon (1960) and collaborated with Chabrol on fourteen movies (thirteen features and a short), including some of the filmmaker’s finest.

The story about Gégauff that is most often repeated is how he wore a Nazi uniform to a screening of a British war film in 1950s Paris to shock members of the audience. He is most often depicted as a sort of macho inspiration for Chabrol and Godard (who supposedly modeled all of their early womanizing antiheroes after him); he has been called Chabrol’s “model of cynicism and amorality.” 

Chabrol was a self-professed Communist who hung around this provocative character (whom he said “posed as a fascist”) for quite a while, and definitely Gégauff helped mold Chabrol’s filmic worldview, as he collaborated on six of the first eight Chabrol features. In one interview, Chabrol praises Gégauff as having “extraordinarily courageous” ideas, but he also noted that: “He fascinated me by pushing at the limits of self-destruction, by his taste for extraordinary paradoxes and his real elegance. But he also showed me just how far this could take him into self-destruction.” 

This penchant lead to his end — Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second, Norwegian wife in 1983. Rohmer said in an interview: “Gégauff influenced all of the New Wave, with the exception of Truffaut. Or we, at least, all employed ‘Gégauffian’ characters.” The most fondly remembered characters in early Chabrol are definitely “Gégauffian,” particularly the “dandies” played by Jean-Claude Brialy. 

Gégauff’s first script for Chabrol, Les Cousins, is an utterly tormented (but curiously glamorous) affair about a young man from the country (Gerard Blain) who visits his cousin (the very decadent Brialy) in the city; both are students studying for their final exams. The film is filled with “debauchery,” or what was categorized as such in 1959 — and that includes wild parties (where Mozart and Wagner are played!), sexual liberation, and an un-fucking-believeable bachelor pad (see below).

 

The film is a masterwork of the French New Wave, and shows Chabrol to truly be the most cynical of the group. Rivette’s impeccable debut feature, Paris Nous Appartient (1961) offers an incredibly paranoid, existential vision of Paris at the turn of the Sixties, but Rivette’s approach is that of the “disappointed idealist” whose characters continue to dream even as they are circled by unknown forces.

Chabrol’s early work is severely bleak and the characters are amoral, thus offering a look at Paris “from the outside in,” where if we do identify with anyone (Blain in Les Cousins, the shop girls in Les Bonne Femmes), they are bound to be victimized — in Les Cousins, a gun that Brialy owns is shown more than once earlier in the film, so one awaits its use in the third act. But, in the meantime, everyone parties!

 

 

Chabrol was in fact very fascinated by hanging around right-wing types, and reportedly based the party scenes in the film on his experiences fraternizing with them between 1947 and ’49 (he was the “token” left-winger among them, perhaps because he was such a pleasant type…. or perhaps because he was a decadent sot himself?). Among the partiers he knew was the womanizing, binge-drinking French National Front party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who lost his position as head of the law students when he interrupted a church service.

Chabrol was annoyed by critics who labeled Les Cousins a “fascist” film, since he felt the message was that fascists were still alive and well in France. He said, “at the time people didn’t believe that there were Fascists in France. It was as stupid as that. So they thought I was a Fascist, because they didn’t want to think that the characters on screen were.”

It should be noted, however, that while Blain is a thoroughly virtuous character, Brialy is the one most viewers remember best (if only for his decadent lifestyle). 

The contribution of another Chabrol collaborator, cinematographer Henri Decaë, also can’t be overstated. Decaë worked on many of Melville’s finest (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge). This sequence from the latter part of Les Cousins shows his subtle lighting in the bachelor pad, as Blain attempts to kill his debauched cousin. (This is the anti-climax, not the film's finale.)

 

The deceitful and treacherous go unpunished in Les Cousins, and Chabrol continued this theme in Á Double Tour (1959), his first color feature and first thriller. The film, which is available in the U.S. from Kino Lorber, offers more incredibly cruel dialogue from Gégauff:

 

It also is an unusually constructed work that springs its flashbacks on us with no telegraphed “memory” introductions. The rich family at the core of the film is empty and shallow, and so we begin to “attach” to the family’s sexy maid (Bernadette Lafont), the father’s foreign mistress (Antonella Lualdi), and her Hungarian friend, played by a scene-stealing Jean Paul Belmondo, who appeared in Á Double Tour around the time he made Breathless (the film was released right before Godard’s film made him a star).

 

Chabrol later said he regretted devoting so much of the film to Belmondo’s character (I notice he didn’t regret showcasing the ladies’ physiques), but when Belmondo isn’t on screen, Decaë’s exquisite imagery is commanding our attention. The plotline isn’t very involving as a result, but when one has Belmondo, Lafont, and Lualdi to watch, who really requires a compelling and logical plotline? 

Chabrol’s brilliant and disturbing fourth film, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), also available from Kino Lorber, is arguably his best, and was the one that he referred to as his favorite. The film’s plot is very simple: four young shop girls deal with the rigors and pleasures of daily life in Paris. Chabrol and Gegauff create charming and sympathetic portraits of the ladies but, as the film moves on, we become aware of how the men around them control their every move. It first becomes apparent in comic scenes:

 

 And time capsules like this one where exotic dancer “Dolly Bell” performs:

 

The film’s tone changes as it moves along, from a seemingly innocuous and infectiously lively portrait of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the Sixties to a far grimmer drama about a young woman whose trust is tragically misplaced. Scenes like this one reflect the change in tone:

 

Like Hitchcock, Chabrol was known to make darkly humorous comments in interviews. On the subject of men dominating women, he said in one seminal interview conducted by Dan Yakir:

If there are men, women are the victims. This I admit quite willingly given what the poor things have to bear… Women in a modest milieu suffer terribly. It’s not amusing at all. It’s a cliché, but if they work all day in a factory and at night have to cook and wash — it’s terrible! We men are monsters [laughs uncontrollably] It’s funny… If women don’t laugh, I understand, but I find it funny….

On the other hand, he talked about Les Bonnes Femmes in some depth in another interview that can be found here:

I wanted to make a film about stupid people that was very vulgar and deeply stupid…. I don't think that it's a pessimistic film. I'm not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live. When we wrote the film the people were, for Gégauff, fools. It was a film about fools. But at the same time we could see little by little that if they were foolish, it was mainly because they were unable to express themselves, establish contact with each other. The result of naïvety, or a too great vulgarity. People have said that I didn't like the people I was showing, because they believe that you have to ennoble them to like them. That's not true. Quite the opposite: only the types who don't like their fellows have to ennoble them.

He added that “the girls aren't shown as idiots. They're just brutalized by the way they live.” The question of whether Chabrol and Gégauff were sketching realistic characters in order to show their eventual entrapment, or simply observing victims-to-be for the sheer thrill of watching the final trap spring shut, brings one back to the eternal question surrounding Hitchcock’s work: is it sadistic, sympathetic, or both? 

The lead quartet in Les Bonnes Femmes undergo numerous things that qualify the film as either a thoroughly sexist vision or a thoroughly feminist one — depending upon which lens you’re using. One can definitely see the sympathetic side in this scene beautifully depicting the boredom of the work day:

 

In the two films that followed Femmes — Les Godelureaux (1961) and L’Oeil de Malin (1962) — one is presented with an array of completely unsympathetic characters; thus, one is certain that Chabrol/Gégauff are showing society as filled with deceptive, unpleasant types (in articles of the time that condemned Chabrol, he was most often compared to Billy Wilder and obviously liked the comparison, as he used Wilder’s trademark tune “Fascination” in more than one picture). 

Les Bonnes Femmes does paint a sympathetic portrait of the shop girls, as in this scene, which does much to change the tone of the film. It is lengthy and uncomfortable to watch:

 

Watching some of Chabrol’s later films, I often felt that he should’ve veered sharply away from the influence of Hitchcock — much as I think some singer-songwriters desperately need to break their Dylan records and rely on their own original talent. 

However, early on, Chabrol used his fan-obsessions with Hitchcock and Lang to brilliant effect. In Les Bonnes Femmes one could argue that the camera takes an omniscient viewpoint on events, and the filmmaker is taking a certain glee in showing how arbitrarily cruel the world can be to the clueless innocent. 

Instead, Chabrol follows the film’s final outburst of violence — which I will not spoil here, and I urge readers not to watch the scene on YouTube if you haven’t seen the whole film — with a memorable scene involving a new young woman, not yet seen in the film, who just might end up like our unlucky shop girl. Or she might find companionship and love in the very cool, and very cold, world that is Paris. Hope continues to exist in this colorful but sad universe. 

Chabrol was indeed a diehard cynic when compared with his dreamer-friends Godard and Truffaut (and the “Left Bank” New Wavers Resnais, Varda, and Marker), but in his finest works he also offered sympathy for those trapped in situations that were definitely a good deal more menacing than anything found in the average whodunit. 

Thanks to the Claude Chabrol Project and Paul Gallagher for the Chabrol interviews.

Voices of the New Wave: translated vintage Cahiers

As the world mourns the passing of a guy (that Hughes dude) whose career started with fairly decent articles in National Lampoon, proceeded with some era-defining cute comedies (remember, the Eighties was the Empty Decade, kids), and then morphed into being involved with some seriously awful films (Dutch, Flubber, Beethoven, and the scarily atrocious Curly Sue), I sit around reading very rare translated articles from Cahiers du Cinema about the great American filmmakers, including le cineaste to the right (I'm so proud I own that book).

The location for this is the Blogspot of J.D. Copp, which can be found here. Copp has been translating from French to English lists, “thumbnail” director portraits, reviews, and snippets from interviews that appeared in Cahiers du Cinema in the magazine’s golden age (the Fifties and Sixties, when the staff was comprised of many fledgling filmmakers and wannabe auteurs). I found that the best way to review Copp’s blog is to simply move from page to page (read: month to month), but you can also use the search function atop his blog to search the names of certain directors who are discussed in the items he has translated.

One caveat: Copp’s mode of translation leans to the literal and in fact might be declared "stiff” in certain linguistic regards (sorry, I’m a copy editor by day, I notice this stuff). One could argue that he could be a little more liberal in terms of rewording the French text into truly smooth English, but the service he’s providing to those who don’t read French at all, or who can, but don’t have ready access to the Cahiers archives, is indeed invaluable. To add to the positive side of the ledger, he also translates passages from books he’s reading in French (thus far untranslated into English, obviously) that have anecdotes concerning the Cahiers “posse,” most notably Truffaut and Godard.

Copp’s specialty are the “best” lists compiled by the magazine, which included a special feature called the “Conseil des dix,” which found ten critics assigning critical “ratings” to the latest releases showing in Paris. Included were the “Glimmer Twins” of the nouvelle vague (right), as well as their many compatriots including Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol. In the process, Copp’s blog presents many oddball pairings of critic and subject, including this note from our fave, Uncle Jean (Godard), who was looking forward to seeing South Pacific:

Such is the opening of South Pacific from the Rodgers and Hammerstein operetta where Joshua Logan has redone these couplets in his own words. Apart from that, Todd-AO, six million dollars, the Hawaiian Islands, Mitzi Gaynor, Rossano Brazzi, John Kerr and under the paternal eye of Buddy Adler, introducing France Suyen [sic]. Doubt is not permitted, esthetically speaking, the next film of Joshua Logan will be colossal."

Copp’s blog also focuses a great deal of attention on Truffaut, who of course was the most radical critic of the New Wave group — therefore the head-scratching that occurs when one confronts the fact that his later films were like the ones he was raking over the coals in the Fifties. His original storyline for Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless) can be found here.

Copp has been doing posts that group together excerpts from Cahiers reviews of certain director’s work. Among these are Wilder, Wise, Wyler (no, no Welles yet), Mankiewicz, and even the critics’ fellow cineaste Alain Resnais. The two things that Copp has included that are invaluable for me especially are translations of Godard’s narration for his epic Histoire(s) du Cinema, which still doesn’t have a legal release in this country, because ALL the distributors are terrified of having to clear the clips Uncle Jean used without legal clearance. Copp’s translations of JLG’s cinematic poetry (the words, that is) begins here.

Oh, and yes, Copp has provided us with translations of excerpts from dozens of Cahiers reviews of the films of (you guessed this one, right?) Jerry Lewis —seen in the pic to the right, reading the magazine! I heavily recommend you check out Copp’s survey-post which can be found here.

But being a major fan of Joseph Levitch et son cinema (and that of Frank Tashlin, the man he arguably lifted his directorial style from), I must repeat some of the juicer passages here. In this case Copp’s literal translation produces some passages that appear as if they were made up by a humorist trying to prove a point about “the French and their love of Jerry Lewis” (my response to that one is always to remind the scoffer that they also loved Ford, Hitchcock, Ray, Fuller, Cassavetes, Altman, and Scorsese before we did):

Today, it is possible to define Lewis's character, yet, it is not possible to define the respective roles of the director, the actor and the character which he embodies. But is not the key to this universe precisely this division? And is not his visage, metaphorically, the mirror?

At the beginning, the Cahiers boys were not very kind, referring to Scared Stiff as containing the “usual clowning of two half-wits of American film.” The Money From Home review refers to Martin and Lewis as “a pair of nitwits even more nitwit than all the others.” A later Godard review of Hollywood or Bust found Uncle Jean proclaiming that “in 15 years [it will be seen] that The Girl Can't Help It functioned, in its time, meaning today (1957), as a fountain of youth where the cinema of now, meaning tomorrow (1972) drew a renewal of inspiration.”

The very curious review for The Ladies Man (which in French was titled “the Stud for these Ladies”) gets into what the reviewer calls “argument Lewis” (“argument for Lewis” or "the case of Lewis" would be a more liberal translation). The last sentences of the snippet Copp reproduces say “Yes, there is a depth to laughter but there is also a shame of laughter. From one to the next, the argument Lewis, to our mind, offers a good example.” I assume this means one should feel, by turns, deeply happy and full of shame watching a Jerry picture.

Other odd remarks include one about Visit to a Small Planet: “Ever since he has gone out on his own, Jerry Lewis no longer bases his films on homosexuality, but on powerlessness.” Whoa, baby. And of course there are the moments where the praise was incredible, as with a positive review of the unbelievably indulgent The Big Mouth: “The refinements of construction, the physical-metaphysical reach of the slightest gag, the tidal wave of madness which bowls over the dimensions of space, time and cinema, force us to dedicate a special issue to their analysis. The Big Mouth marks the center of gravity, the inevitable outcome of the previous films of Lewis.”

That's a far cry from the first review of a solo Jer movie, The Delicate Delinquent, which was one of many times the critics mentioned that Jerry was at his best when directed by Tashlin (which is definitely true): “With Tashlin absent, Dean Martin's partner is not the equal of Fernandel on his worst day.” Damn, that hurts.

Thanks to friend Paul for the discovery of Copp’s treasure trove of translation!