Jacques Rozier: Dream vacations run aground

Photo by
Raymond Cauchetier.

While Godard remains the only one of the internationally famous French New Wave filmmakers to still be with us, a lesser-known French filmmaker whose work in the late Fifties and early Sixties was distinctly in line with the “nouvelle vague” (both the Cahiers posse and the Left Bank group) is still alive at 95. Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) is the greatest New Wave film to never receive a single legal release on U.S. DVD or Blu-ray (or even VHS), but his later lengthy comedies are just as worthy of study — and just as unavailable in the U.S.

This piece will not be a survey of Rozier’s life and career, but rather an in-depth exploration of the four fiction films of his that are available in France on DVD and are thankfully now all on the Rarefilmm site. Adieu Philippine is most definitely the masterpiece in the bunch, but the three comedy features that followed possess a charm and a deadpan notion of (Rozier’s favorite theme) things falling apart that makes them very unique farces.

Younger Rozier.

Although Rozier’s 1955 comic short about a precocious schoolboy, “Rentree des classes” is delightful, the true prelude to Philippine is Rozier’s short “Blue Jeans,” which qualifies as an early New Wave short, as it was released in 1957. All the hallmarks of the movement are there: real locations, innovative camerawork, editing (mostly wipes here) to move the plot along, the behavior of young people as the subject, and “empty” moments where the characters contemplate their future.

The films follows two young men in Cannes — Rozier offering a preliminary version of a theme he loves, namely people on vacation. The boys wander the city and the beach trying to pick up girls, but when they get them they have neither the money to romance them properly nor the savoir faire to move it to the “next level.”

Rozier employs an older-sounding narration to voice the thoughts (in past tense) of one of the young men. The age in the voice convinces us that, while this short was shot in the present tense, the events are being pondered by an older man remembering his youth. (Rozier, like the other New Wavers, was around 30 when he made his filmmaking debut.)

His feature debut, Adieu Philippine (watch it on Rarefilmm) is indeed his best-known film. The film contains all of the facets that New Wave debut features have, plus it has a wonderful musical soundtrack consisting of original compositions by Jacques Denjean, Paul Mattei, and Maxime Saury, pop songs, and some irresistible (to the characters and us) cha-cha music.

The film’s plot is beautifully structured. The most commonplace aspect of it — two young women (Stefania Sabatini, Yveline Céry) are in love with one young man (Jean-Claude Aimini) — is complemented by the fact that the young man knows that he’s about to be “called up” for military service in Algeria (during the Algerian War, a conflict that was not supposed to be mentioned in French films).

This serious element serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the mostly light-hearted tone of the film, which is emphasized in the second half from the shift in location — the lead Parisian trio go on a Club Med vacation to Corsica. In the final scenes, the girls begin to truly suffer over their “shared” love of the boy, and the boy finally registers his uncertainty at going off to war.

Thus, Philippine is an apparently light romantic comedy that has a barely concealed serious subtext. This is particularly fascinating in light of the fact that the film falls into the “two carefree girls” subgenre of New Wave film, which stretches from Godard’s “Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick” (1959) to Rivette’s masterwork Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Rozier added flavor to his tale of young people by hiring non-professionals for the three lead roles. They are all surprisingly good and lend an air of awkwardness and authenticity to their roles.

The visual experimentation that Rozier utilized in “Blue Jeans” is used wonderfully here, as the wipes — and jumpcuts and fades — again convey the movement of time, while the film’s most memorable musical sequence has the camera serving at one point as the “dance partner” for one of the girls (Céry). 

As a cha-cha tune plays, she dances with us, staring into the camera, providing the sort of bond with the viewer that characterized the famous moment in Monika (1953) by Bergman where Harriet Andersson looks straight into the camera (as Godard had Karina do in Vivre Sa Vie).

The film’s release was delayed for a few years. It was shot in 1960 and was to be edited and released in ’61. There was a major problem, however — the sound was missing from various scenes, and so Rozier had to lip-read what the characters said, since he had allowed his non-pro leads to largely improvise their dialogue.

Godard was a great admirer of Rozier’s (see below), to the extent that he introduced him to the producer Georges de Beauregard. Unfortunately, Rozier didn’t get along with Beauregard; it is noted in Rozier’s French Wikipedia bio that Rozier’s feud with the producer was one reason he was considered “the enfant terrible of the New Wave.” Philippine came out without Beauregard’s name on it, and in a version that had been reedited by Rozier from the initial cut intended for release, approved by the producer. 

Rozier may not have been a writer for the Cahiers or a Left Bank storyteller, but his work was very warmly received by two of the most outspoken of the “nouvelle vague.” Francois Truffaut’s review proclaimed: “You will not find a single unusual frame in Adieu Philippine, not a single camera trick, and neither will you discover a single false note nor any vulgarity. Nor will you find ‘poetic moments’; the film is an uninterrupted poem. Its poetry could not emerge clearly from looking at rushes; it arises from any number of perfect harmonies between images and words, sounds and music.” [Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1978, Simon & Schuster, pp. 324-325]

Godard declared Philippine to be one of his ten favorite films of 1963, and wrote about “Blue Jeans”: “Here the truth of the document makes common cause with the grace of the narration. True are the two layabouts who patrol Cannes on scooters in search of girls; graceful the long tracking shots along the Croisette or the rue d’Antibes, boldly edited one after the other in direct cuts. True the dialogue and attitude; graceful the realism of the photography and the shutters which poetically scan the afternoon on the warm sand…. It is a film about time passing — in doing what? In exchanging kisses. So its moral, both gay and sad, is that of Louis Aragon’s quatrain:

In the crossways of kisses/The years pass too quickly/Beware beware/Shattered memories.”

[Godard, Godard on Godard, ed: Milne, 1972, The Viking Press, pp. 114-15]

Uncle Jean’s opinion of Philippine was pithier: “Quite simply the best French film of these last years.”

Regardless of these raves, the film failed at the box office. It took nearly a decade for Rozier to produce his second fiction feature. In the years between he directed shorts and several original TV programs, many of which were about music (popular and classical) and fashion. A bunch of these shorts can be found on the “underside” of the Internet. Most are not available with English subs, but a few are.

The two earliest shorts (mentioned above) are both included in the French box set with English subtitles; two others, “Dans le vent” (an early Sixties short about the fashion trend of women wearing capes) and the extremely silly “Nono Nenesse” (a 1970s pilot for a TV show where four adult actors, including noted comic performers Jacques Villeret and Bernard Menez, played precocious babies) are also available with English subtitles on the Net  (although the latter barely needs any).

Three of the best of Rozier’s interim documentaries have been included on Criterion discs. “Paparazzi” and “Bardot et Godard” (both 1964) are on the Contempt release — both were authorized by Godard to show the making of the film, with the former focusing on the many photographers trying to get even a telephoto glimpse of Bardot, the latter showing some location footage and explaining the film’s plot and themes. Rozier’s full-length 1964 doc about the legendary Jean Vigo for the “Cinéastes de notre temps” series is included on the Complete Jean Vigo collection on Criterion. (My review of the set is here.)

The subsequent, lengthy comedy features by Rozier are, as noted above, included in the French box set and on the Rarefilmm site. The first of these is the epic-length (for a comedy) Du côté d'Orouët (watch it on Rarefilmm), which is the most “immersive” of Rozier’s comedies crafted in the documentary style. Shot on 16mm for French TV in 1969, the film was never shown on television and was released to theaters four years later.

No dubbing or visual effects for Rozier — he shot Orouët in a candid style with direct sound. All the better to convey the realistic side of a journey to the Atlantic coast by three young women who are looking for diversions from city life.

These ladies giggle. A lot. They in fact spend a great deal of the first two-thirds of the film giggling at various situations. Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) is our initial focus of attention, as we see her at her white-collar office job. She has been invited on vacation by her friend Kareen (Françoise Guégan), who has the ability to share with cousin Caroline (Caroline Cartier) a family beachfront house in the coastal town of Saint Gilles Croix de Vie. Shortly into their visit, the girls are joined by nerdy Gilbert (Bernard Menez), Joëlle’s coworker, who has a pretty evident crush on her.

Gilbert becomes the central figure in the film, with Kareen and Caroline teasing and taunting him, and Joëlle being oddly cold. The film’s tone shifts at the hour and 45 minute mark (Orouët runs a full 154 minutes) when Joëlle is openly seen as being miserable at the dinner table. Rozier studies the antic behavior of the three girls and Gilbert up until then, and his documentary approach (documentary conveying a “serious” tone to most viewers) does blend in an unusual fashion with the light-hearted silliness.

The last half-hour finds the vacation falling apart, as the girls lose their taste for the local life by the beach and Gilbert finally snaps — after preparing a big dinner that no one eats, he finally notes to Kareen that “you take me for an imbecile.” This rebellion is cemented in the final, “turnaround” scene where we are back in Paris and Joëlle watches at a restaurant as her new coworker flirts with Gilbert, while she (Joëlle) laments how uncertain her future is.

Menez featured
on the DVD release.

The above sounds like quite a lot of plot, but it is actually conveyed in a very short span of time. One comes away from Orouët thinking of it as a tale of a man who has been (latter 20th-century phrase) “friend-zoned” by the object of his affection and can find no way out. (This was further underscored by the fact that Menez went on to have a successful career as a confused “nice guy” comic actor in TV and movies.)

Orouët does rework the notion behind Philippine: that “happy summer vacation” movies can have dramatic subplots lurking behind the carefree images of girls in swimsuits. Rozier continued to explore vacations that go awry in his next two comedy features. 

Watching Rozier’s lengthy comedies one is struck by his desire to create humor in a deadpan fashion by shooting the most farcical sequences in real time. This sense of “real duration” comedy that lasts longer than that in conventional farces (which run 80–100 minutes tops) is quite a tall order for a filmmaker, and only one other filmmaker in my opinion has undertaken it and succeeded; Jean Rouch in the several-hour version of Petit a Petit (1970), about African dignitaries who visit Paris to find out how to properly build skyscrapers. (This version is rarely exhumed, but I saw it at Anthology Film Archives many years ago.)

Orouët was indeed Rozier’s longest comedy, but his next feature, The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976; watch it on Rarefilmm), has the most solid comedic premise: A travel agent comes up with a “Robinson Crusoe” getaway where the customers go to a desert island and live by their wits.

The travel agent is played by the great French comic actor Pierre Richard, who by the time of Castaways was already famous, having made The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972). Rozier was asked to dream up a vehicle for Richard, who was eager to work with Rozier but who had to move on to a different project at a certain point — therefore, an odd twist near the end of the film where his character disappears for several scenes and then is revealed to have been jailed.

As with all of Rozier’s features, Castaways has an episodic structure, in which Richard and chubby, jovial Jacques Villeret function as a comedy team, running the vacation in a wholly incompetent manner. The passengers initially like the idea of being adventurous, but they soon grow tired of Richard’s odd demands — for example, he stipulates that they must swim from boat to shore as they approach the island, since Crusoe was the survivor of a shipwreck. Thus, their boat can’t neatly dock at their destination.

A passenger who remains interested is Julie (Caroline Cartier), a press attaché whom Rozier utilizes as a narrator in the last third of the movie. This might have been because of Richard’s “disappearance” from the plot or because a “joining” device was needed to guide the viewer, since Rozier had no completed script for the film and allowed the actors to improvise.

The scenes that work best are the ones in which Richard imparts his castaway “logic” to the passengers. The scenes that don’t quite gel are an introductory subplot about Richard cheating on his girlfriend with a Brazilian woman (which runs the first 20 minutes of the picture and amounts to nothing in terms of the story as a whole) and some of the sequences at the end of the journey, where Villeret and Cartier nearly become a romantic couple.

Rozier is quite skilled at shifting the tone of his films. Even so, the chubby and playful Villeret seems like a very odd choice as the would-be Crusoe who does indeed know what he’s doing on the desert island — and thus seems desirable to the press attaché.

As had happened with Rozier’s two preceding features, Castaways had a troubled post-production period, after an eight-week in Guadeloupe and Dominica. The producers didn’t like Rozier’s improvisatory method of filming and the large amount of footage he shot. It took two years before he had a final cut assembled, and the film ultimately failed at the box office, despite Richard’s enthusiasm for the project from start to finish.

As it stands, Castaways has some great scenes and memorable images, and it leads the way to Rozier’s next comedy, Maine Ocean (1986).

Maine Ocean (watch it on Rarefilmm) is the closest thing to a conventional French farce that Rozier ever made, but it still has all the hallmarks of his style, from documentary filming techniques to deadpan comedy rendered in “real duration.” The difference, here, however, is that the filmmaker didn’t concentrate his energies on delivering a linear storyline — he lavishes attention here on subplots and gets rid of all his main characters save one in the final scene. The characters do take a very linear trip, as is reflected in the title, from the Gare Montparnasse (which is located on the Avenue du Maine in Paris) to the Atlantic Ocean.

The plot, such as it is, starts off with a classic farcical misunderstanding: a Brazilian dancer (Rosa-Maria Gomes) who speaks very little French is accosted on a train by two by-the-books ticket takers (Bernard Menez, Luis Rego) who badger her about not having followed ticket-approval protocols. A French lawyer (Lydia Feld, who also coscripted with Rozier) who speaks Portuguese comes to her aid, and the dancer ends up accompanying the lawyer to one of her trials — a very funny case involving a violent fisherman (Yves Alonso) who believes himself to be easygoing and a victim of circumstances.

In a show of spontaneity that is the norm in Maine Ocean, the lawyer then accompanies the dancer on her cross-country trip to “see the sea” at Les Sables-d'Olonne. (They eventually wind up in a fishing town on Yeu Island.) The newfound friends then re-encounter the two ticket takers and the violent client, all of whom are in love with our heroines.

This ragtag group are joined by a Mexican entrepreneur (a wonderfully over-the-top Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), who believes the Brazilian dancer can sing (which she can’t). He sets in motion the third act, in which there is a delightful scene set in an empty civic center, where the entrepreneur finds out the truth about the Brazilian, and all the characters (including the drunken ticket takers and the equally drunk fisherman) take part in an impromptu dance.

Benez’s ticket taker ends the film alone, taking a circuitous journey home to his wife and kids in Nantes. Although one misses the rest of the cast, his character’s moving from a small boat to a bigger one, back to a smaller one, and then to the smallest of all in the finale to reach the shore makes him perhaps the ultimate Rozier figure — a guy whose vacation fell apart but who has exciting and incredible memories that will last him the rest of his life.

Menez is clearly one of Rozier’s favorite performers (the Wiki photos of Rozier in both his American and French Wiki bios come from an appearance the filmmaker made at a Menez book signing), but the performer that amused this viewer the most is Yves Alfonso, who had showy roles in Godard’s Masculin-Feminin, Made in U.S.A., and Weekend. Alfonso’s staccato-sounding way of speaking (which is actually a regional dialect of French called “Poitou”) and his character’s short temper are great comic devices that make him stand out from the otherwise friendly and low-key characters in the film.

As noted above, Maine Ocean is closer to the “normal” French film farce than any other Rozier picture. Average French farces move along familiar lines — mistaken identity, characters who try to reinforce their lies, role-playing, and the misadventures of dunderheaded comic “types.” The fact that Rozier worked in this, more traditional fashion of emphasizing characters and gags most likely contributed to the film being not only a critical success (all of Rozier’s films had that distinction) but also a modest hit with the public.

The Seventies farces of filmmaker Bertrand Blier, whose dark and absurdist comedies are generally dissimilar to Rozier’s (and who was the subject of a series of 14 episodes on the Funhouse TV show!), bears one strong element in common with Rozier’s humorous films, especially Maine Ocean: the male characters are all idiots and the women possess the clear minds (or at least the rational logic) needed to get things accomplished. Rozier is very different from Blier (and is from an earlier generation of French filmmaking), but their shared fascination for chaos-causing males does unite their comedies.

Perhaps it was the presence of Feld as a co-scripter, but the vacation in Maine Ocean involves no lingering images of women in swimsuits — although the Brazilian does dance in her very skimpy costume in the civic center scene.

Rozier’s work changed a great deal from the late Fifties through the late Eighties, but his visual approach remained the same. One can lament that he was only able to make five feature films in his career (the last being Fifi Martingale in 2001, costarring Alfonso and Feld, who again coscripted). But those films are engrossing models of French farce, delivered in a uniquely realistic manner and with a common theme — sympathetic but harried characters using their “getaway” vacation to prove something to themselves. It’s a very different approach that refreshed an age-old genre.

Rozier in recent years.

I said at the outset of this piece that I would not be discussing M. Rozier’s personal life, but I must at least mention the latest, very sad headline that appeared across the Internet in July of 2021 concerning Rozier. A movement arose to amass many signatures on a petition to get the filmmaker lodging after it was revealed that his landlord was throwing him and his wife (who was ill at the time) out of their apartment.

This is a very sad development, which is explained in English here; the fact that his eviction was occurring as he (age 94!) prepared prints of his films for a tribute to his work at the Cinematheque Francaise was an even unkinder cut. A recent article in English on the Criterion website states briefly that “fortunately, filmmaker and writer Paul Vecchiali came to [Rozier’s] aid.” I could find no confirmation of how Vecchiali helped out Rozier — one must also be aware that Vecchiali himself is currently 92 years old.

If anyone has any additional info or links about what is happening with M. Rozier’s living situation, please let me know in the comments section. In the meantime, I urge everyone to watch the Rozier films that are now available on the Net, and rejoice in the fact that a filmmaker who worked against adverse conditions for most of his career is finally getting his vacation in the sun.

UPDATE (5/23): Thanks much to "Gone to the Movies" for the note verifying that Vecchiali did indeed help out Rozier. The organization mentioned in the Tweet is the Société des Auteurs Réalisateurs Producteurs. It's good to know that old New Wavers are there to help each other out. Bravo, M. Vecchiali!

Thanks to friend and superior cineaste Paul Gallagher and Rarefilmm mastermind Jon Whitehead for help with access to these films. The Rarefilmm site can be found here.

Leaping into the Void: Jacques Becker (part 2 of two)

“Subjects don’t interest me in and of themselves. The storyline (the anecdote, the plot) matters to me a little bit more but I am not passionate about it… Only the characters in my stories (who become my characters) truly obsess me, to the point that I think of them all the time.” [Jean Becker, Becker on Becker, p. 19; translation mine]

“The passion that I put in my marionettes is perhaps all that is of interest in my films.” [Becker in Arts, April 1953, quoted in Queval]

I finished writing this piece two weeks ago, but in the interim three more books about Becker arrived in the mail. The first, Becker par Becker by Jean Becker (Editions PC, 2004), offers an interesting package of cut-and-paste quotations. The second, Jacques Becker: etudes, textes et scenarios inedites... edited by Claude Beylie and Freddy Buache (1991), contains invaluable documents by and about Becker — his articles, unproduced scripts, interviews with colleagues, essays about his work, and a critical roundup of contemporary comments on his films.

The third book, Jacques Becker by Claude Naumann (BiFi/Durante, 2001), is a more “written” book that has only one author and includes a full, nearly 100-page biography of Becker before the “documents,” which overlap with the Beylie/Buache book but also include new, unique interviews and other uncollected articles by Becker.

These books have given me additional perspective on Becker, and so I open this second and last part of my appreciation with more information about the man and his art. One of the most valuable pieces in the Beylie-Bauch book is by the master filmmaker Alain Resnais, who speaks about the fact that Becker was a classical filmmaker and an innovator at the same time.

Resnais proclaims his love for the “minor” Beckers (Falabas, Eduouard and Caroline, Rue de l’Estrapade), which he said plunged the viewer into “a state of happiness that isn’t often found in cinema.”

He then offers a concrete example of the way that Becker influenced his own work. After having praised him as a filmmaker of “suppleness” and “fluidity,” he mentions that Antoine and Antoinette (see the last part of this piece) had something like 1,200 edits in it. “It doesn’t feel that way because the cuts are almost always linked to movement….”

Resnais then discusses an editorial decision he made for his 1965 film Muriel ou le temps d'un retour: “When I made Muriel, I said to myself: I’m going to do the opposite of Becker here, meaning that I’m going to cut the shots a little earlier or a little later than he would’ve done, in order to release a sort of madness... concerning an ordinary subject and characters, like his, as he would search for a calming, gentle effect….” [p. 230-31]

Another document found in the Beylie-Buache and Naumann books is Becker’s article “L’auteur de film?... Un auteur complet.” (The author of a film?... A complete author; there are no English translations of Becker’s articles, except the short excerpts found in the Casas/Iriarte book, so all translations from this point on are mine.)

First things first: Becker wrote this piece in November 1947 when the “politique des auteurs” had not been fully formulated (Truffaut did that with certainty in 1954) as a guiding principle of film criticism and study in France. The phrase “auteur” was used in late-Forties French criticism, though — the pre-Cahiers magazine La Revue de Cinema found various writers discussing the “auteurs” of certain films, and in March 1948 an article appeared by Alexandre Astruc in L’Ecran Francaise in which he discussed the “camera-stylo” (camera-pen), saying the director was the author of the film. (That article can be found here.)

Also, for sheer perversity’s sake, I will note that Becker’s title is an eerie foreshadowing of Jerry Lewis’s “Total Filmmaker” label, which in itself was a slangy, American way of expressing the auteur concept.

In any case, Becker extols the virtues of personal cinema in this short article, which ran only one page in L’Ecran Francaise (the original can be found here). He states outright that “One cannot tell a good story on screen unless it is a story about one’s self.”

He declares that “All the great filmmakers… who have made this such a marvelous art, have always prepared their stories personally and from the ground up, before shooting starts.” He has harsh words for filmmakers who merely directed their pictures without working on the screenplays, claiming that is an “abdication of paternity” (!) for the film.” As for those who merely direct: “I don’t despise them, but I feel sorry for them, because they went to the studio while leaving their heart at home.”

He closes out by underscoring a notion that I mentioned in the first part of this piece – that he considered himself a uniquely French filmmaker (his famous fans, like Godard, felt the same way about him). He maintains that the strength of French cinema is that it “seems authentic…. The auteurs of French film must underscore their personal connection to their films. By doing this they reinforce the position of our cinema in the world… and our pleasure.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 139]

Another moving article by Becker that appears in the Beylie-Buache and Naumann books is “Le cinema a besoin d’amants” (The cinema needs lovers, which appeared in Arts in Nov. 1959; found in Beylie-Buache and Naumann). The piece is a rebuttal to criticisms that the “nouvelle vague” filmmakers were too young to be making features.

He starts off bemoaning the “New Wave” label and declares that age has little to do with artistic talent. He notes that he was an assistant of Renoir for eight years, and while he valued the lessons he learned at the side of the master, he wished he had started his own filmmaking career earlier.

Becker notes that if he were a producer, he would hire younger filmmakers instead of those who have “not gotten too old but have become too wise. Nothing is more boring than knowing ahead of time what is going to come out of a machine. It’s true that in the cinema we know nothing in advance…. I repeat: painters, musicians, or writers, none of them wait until they are 40 to begin their work.” [Beylie-Buache, pp. 143-44]

He goes on to state outright that “one can only learn this metier by doing it.” His final words are without doubt the kind of thing that made him much beloved by his younger fans: “I therefore think that it’s more important to not become a filmmaker before having fallen in love, and that one must take a little time to watch others live their lives.” [pp. 143-44]

Perhaps the tersest summation of Becker on a personal level is supplied by scripter-director Marc Maurette in an interview. When asked at the end of the chat to describe Becker, he merely says “L’élégance.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 111]
*****

Back to the filmography, interrupted at the end of part one of this piece:
Becker returned to familiar ground with the utterly charming Rue de l’estrapade (1953). As noted above, the film is basically a fourth entry in what critics called Becker’s “youth trilogy.” It is, like the preceding films, a blissful blend of romantic longing and out-and-out comedy, as well as a beautifully constructed sketch of a community.

The plot sees a young wife (Anne Vernon) leaving her cheating husband (Louis Jourdan) to live in a small apartment. While her husband breaks up with his mistress and tries to make amends with his wife, the wife is seduced by both a bisexual fashion designer (his boyfriend’s reappearance during the seduction being a fascinating moment in a Fifties movie romance) and a bohemian musician (Daniel Gelin, again!).

Becker once more delivers a detailed sketch of a community — in this case the inhabitants of the apartment house Vernon’s character moves into. One of the film’s best moments, however, occurs early on: Jourdan dons Vernon’s scarf for a moment and she takes the opportunity to act like a man and sexually harass him while he is overwhelmed by her overtures. It’s a surprising and endearingly odd scene, which indicates Vernon’s character is more multifaceted than her husband gives her credit for.

Becker’s next film, Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), made him a legend in noir cinema. The film is radically different because the “big caper” has occurred before the film begins. We are witness to the scramble for loot (“grisbi”) and, again, see the code of honor among the more noble crooks.

The noblest of all the crooks depicted here is Max (Jean Gabin), a meticulous and dapper criminal who wants to fade out of the “milieu.” He is dragged back when his sidekick and best friend (Rene Dary) is kidnapped by a rival gang leader (the terrific Lino Ventura, in his big-screen debut). Max has to decide whether to give up the loot for the life of his friend, and we are certain from the first what his response will be.

The two most jarring, ultimately welcome aspects of Grisbi are its mellow pace, which serves to introduce the characters and their environment in detail (including Max’s extraordinary hideout — a secure, fully stocked luxury apartment) and the fact that these gangsters deal in matters that American movie gangsters never mentioned before the late Sixties, namely prostitution and drug dealing. Max’s sidekick in fact admits that if he were younger that he’d be pimping off his girlfriend, played by a young and very beautiful Jeanne Moreau.

The film’s theme of sacrifice for a friend links it to Casque d’or and the indelible work of Becker admirer Jean-Pierre Melville. Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) was unfavorably compared with Grisbi, but they are in fact complementary, in that they both discuss the theme of aging in the criminal world and do not show the big caper that drives their plots.

In his review of the film, Truffaut emphasized Becker’s focus on the commonplace in his characters’ lives: “It is not so much his choice of subject that distinguishes Becker as it is his treatment, and the scenes he selects to illustrate it. He keeps only what is essential in the dialogue, even the essential part of the superfluous (he sometimes keeps even onomatopoeias). He will skimp what another director would treat most seriously in order to linger over the characters eating breakfast, buttering a roll, brushing their teeth… In Casque d'Or he shows us Reggiani and Simone Signoret in nightgowns, and in Grisbi we see Gabin in pajamas.” [Francois Truffaut, The Movies in My Life, 1975, translation in 1978 edition, Simon and Schuster, p. 179]

The next two films in Becker’s filmography were works for hire. They are both entertaining, but it would be quite a stretch to connect them with Becker’s more personal work — although that was done by Francois Truffaut, who justified Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954) as an auteurist work. The Truffaut biography by de Baecque and Toubiana [University of California Press, 1999]. includes this information about Truffaut championing the film:

“The movie was ignored by the critics upon its release and Truffaut himself was embarrassed by its failings. Again, he used the art of paradox to extricate himself from a difficult position, subscribing to Becker's body of work, ‘with no exception,’ in the name of coherence in taste. ‘Even if Ali Baba were a failure, I would still defend it by virtue of the auteur theory to which I and my fellow critics subscribe.

‘This theory, based on Giraudoux's statement, “There are no works, there are only authors,” consists in denying the axiom dear to our elders, which maintains that films are like mayonnaise, you either succeed in making them or fail.’ ["Ali Baba et la 'politique des auteurs,"Cahiers du Cinema, February 1955] What Truffaut is plainly suggesting, in a way, is a theory of taste as intransigent as the one he had used to attack ‘quality French cinema’ a year earlier in ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.’” [p. 99]

Truffaut was being both kind and doctrinaire in this article. Ali-Baba is a light, frothy vehicle for the big-toothed comedian Fernandel. It has a gigantic budget for a Becker film — with large, detailed sets and hundreds of extras — and is pleasant and amusing. The plot is a trifle about a servant who falls in love with a dancing girl owned by his sultan boss.

The most interesting aspect of the production is that Becker hired black actors to play the Arabic characters and an Egyptian actress to play the lead female role, something that would never have been done in the U.S. in the mid-Fifties.

Becker’s second work-for-hire is his only other color feature, The Adventures of Arsene Lupin (1957). Like Ali-Baba, the film has very little that is “Beckerian” about it. Any talented French director could’ve made the film in the same manner. Also, like Ali-Baba, the film has a much bigger budget than Becker was used to working with.

Robert Lamoureux (looking like the later thin and aged Johnny Hallyday) plays the title role, a seasoned thief who was featured in a series of best-selling French novels. Lupin is a master of disguise who steals, in the film’s lively first half, valuable paintings during a high society party and jewels from a pair of unwitting jewelers. The film slows down to a crawl with the third caper, in which Lupin robs a fortune from the Kaiser. 

Lupin does indeed test the auteur theory, but Becker certainly did his best with the material. While watching the third caper unfold oh, so slowly, one is amazed that the man who made this film had previously made the tight, concise Casque d’or and Grisbi.

The next film, Montparnasse 19 (aka The Lovers of Montparnasse, 1958), is an “anti-biopic” that provoked extreme reactions from Becker’s fan base, especially critics. It was loved or hated, and it is, without question, one of the most downbeat of his films.

Some critics put it alongside Ali-Baba and Arsene Lupin as a work-for hire, because Becker took it on at the request of Max Ophuls, who died while he was preparing it. It certainly doesn’t belong in the category of its two predecessors, though. Becker made its storyline — the final weeks in the life of painter Modigliani (Gerard Philipe) — into a highly personal and very “Beckerian” film.

As was common in Becker’s work, the film telescopes the time period in which the real events occurred. He concludes the plot with Modigliani’s death, leaving out the suicide of his wife Jeanne (played in the film by Anouk Aimee), which occurred shortly thereafter. These decisions caused a major rift between Becker and scripter Henri Jeanson, but Modigliani’s daughter Jeanne presumably approved it, as she remained the technical consultant on the film. 

Montparnasse 19 is indeed loaded with cliches from the “tortured artist” handbook, and yet Becker’s portrait of the talented but self-destructive and severely alcoholic Modigliani is infused with a great deal of sincerity and a particularly pointed message about the artist’s need to sell out to make a living (perhaps Becker’s reflection on his two preceding films?). Andre Bazin gave it the highest of compliments by saying it was “the most ‘Bressonian’” of all of Becker’s films.

Certain decisions made by Becker go against what would presumably have been Ophuls’ take on the material. Firstly, Becker chose to make the film in b&w, forsaking the visual beauty of the painter’s work that could’ve been conveyed in color (as it stands, we see very little of Modigliani’s art head-on). He also used editing to convey emotion rather than using tracking shots, which were Ophuls’ specialty and his primary method of involving the viewer in the action.

The last aspect of Montparnasse 19 that received much attention was the casting. Matinee idol Gerard Philipe is good in the lead role, but often the purpose of him seems to have been seeing a “pretty” A-list star as a dissipated drunk. (Philipe winds up looking like the glamorously dissipated mid-Seventies David Bowie at a few points.)

Lili Palmer is quite good as a South African journalist whose relationship with “Modi” includes regular beatings (which, it is indicated, she not only tolerates but enjoys). Anouk Aimee has the thankless (but tragically glamorous) role of Modi’s wife.

Outshining them all is the great Lino Ventura, whom Becker transformed into an actor in Grisbi (he had formerly been a pro wrestler!). Lino was best known for playing crooks and cops, but here Becker wisely cast him as an art dealer who is following Modi around, waiting for his impending demise — and the resulting rise in value of his thus far worthless art. Lino is incredible in the film’s final scene, when his vulture-liked character finally gets his wish. At this moment Montparnasse 19 transcends all of its poetic sadness to proclaim its real message: Those who rule the art world are those who hold the purse strings.

Where most critics were trashing Becker’s “anti-biopic,” one critic raved about the film’s blatant negativism. Godard wrote: “The sole greatness of Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only a film in reverse but the reverse of cinema…. [The film]… is probably the first film to be fundamentally, entirely negative….

“The fact remains. [It] will not prove to you that Modi loved Jeanne or that Beatrice loved Modi; nor that Paris is a wonderful city, that women are beautiful and men are weak; nor that love is pleasant, that painting is amusing or that painting is tedious; nor that art is more important than anything else or anything is more important than art. No, Montparnasse 19 will not prove that 2 + 2 = 4. Its purpose lies elsewhere. Its purpose is the absence of purpose. Its truth, the absence of truth. Montparnasse 19 will prove to you only that 2 – 2 = 0….

“After all, if a modern novel is fear of the blank page, a modern painting fear of the empty canvas, and modern sculpture fear of the stone, a modern film has the right to be fear of the camera, fear of the actors, fear of the dialogue, fear of the montage. I would give the whole of the post-war French cinema for that one shot, badly acted, badly composed, but sublime, in which Modigliani asks five francs for his drawings on the terrace of the Coupole.

“Then, but only then, everything pleases in this displeasing film. Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no explanation to those who watch.” [Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972, pp. 74-75]

Becker’s final film, released after his premature death at 53, is considered his legacy. And what a legacy it is — Le Trou (The Hole, 1960) is one of the best prison escape movies ever made and got no less than Jean-Pierre Melville raving about the film in Cahiers du Cinema “How many pages would it take to enumerate the wonders of this masterpiece, of this film that I consider — and I weigh my words carefully — the best French film of all time?” [No. 107, Mai 1960, quoted in Jean Becker, Becker Par Becker, p. 82; translation mine] More on the Melville-Becker connection below; suffice to it to say Melville still felt the same about the film in 1971 when he was quoted as saying in the legendary book-length interview with Rui Noguiera that Le Trou was “one of the greatest [films] in the world.”

Based on a real event, the plot is as straightforward as possible: An inmate (Marc Michel) is moved to a new cell and is let in on an escape plan that the four men in the cell have been developing. The quintet work diligently to dig a hole, explore the tunnels under the prison, and exit via the sewers.

Becker was stunningly meticulous in his approach (cue the opening quote of the first part of this piece), and his attention to detail is nothing short of dazzling (albeit a low-key brand of dazzling). The storyline begins in media res, the characters are quickly sketched and the time it takes them to dig the hole and journey through the tunnels and sewers is brilliantly telescoped, so that the proceedings are tense and yet incredibly quiet (no music appears on the soundtrack until the end credits).

Granted, there was one major precedent for the film — Bresson’s immaculate A Man Escaped (1956). The similarities and differences between the films are instructive. Both are exceedingly quiet, rigorous studies of a carefully mapped out prison break. Bresson, however, created a hypnotic, spiritual work focused on one inmate’s efforts (he eventually joins up with one other inmate), while Becker made a quiet yet carefully emotional film about a group’s efforts, with the emphasis placed on friendship and community.

Both directors used non-professional actors in the lead roles (with the exception in Becker’s film being the newcomer to the plan, played by Marc Michel). Bresson exclusively used non-professionals because he didn’t want the viewer to be distracted by acting flourishes. Becker, on the other hand, cast non-actors who could “feel” their way through the situations — his most impressive coup was to cast Jean Keraudy, a participant in the real prison break, to play himself in Le Trou.

The most miraculous thing about Le Trou is how Becker evokes tension with such an understated and sober-minded approach — none of the action and tension that characterizes Hollywood prison-break pictures can be found here. It is a lean piece of filmmaking that, while containing numerous changes made by Becker and co-scripter Jean Aurel to the original novel by Jose Giovanni (who also took part in the real prison break in 1947), remains true to the atmosphere of whispers, secrets, and jerry-rigged solutions that drive the action.

A final note on something that is mentioned *nowhere* in any of the Becker biographies, but found in Rui Noguiera’s timeless and wonderful interview book Melville on Melville (Secker and Warbug, 1971). Melville notes there that “Not content with the draft every film has to be, Jacques Becker entirely reshot Le Trou… in my Rue Jenner studios. He did twenty, twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, thirty three takes of every scene, invariably using the first, second, third, or at the most, sixth. It was perfection in reverse… It was incredible!” [p. 77]

It’s very peculiar that this fact occurs in the Melville books (thanks to the original interview with Noguiera), but not in any of the Becker books — either to be proven or disproven. The fact that Becker in effect re-made the film in his friend’s studio is quite something, even if he only reshot certain takes in Melville’s studio and not the entire film, as Melville maintained (harkening back to Becker’s "not meticulous… but maniacal!” side).

And an interesting interview with Jean Keraudy, shot from a weirdly oblique angle:

*****

Like Bresson and Melville, Becker’s output was small but it changed French cinema forever. Thanks to Truffaut and Godard proudly citing him as an influence (and utilizing some of the hallmarks of his approach in their early films), Becker’s influence is still felt today.

The legendary Andre Bazin came closest to the mark when he said that the viewer “comes to ‘love the characters independently’ of their place in the infrastructure of the drama or the film’s given genre.” [Bazin quote from “The Cinema of Jacques Becker: Four Original Reviews,” Film Literature Quarterly, Vol. 34, no. 4; quoted in Casas and Iriarte, Jacques Becker, p. 156].

A quote from the man himself: “What is an auteur of film? It’s a man who, like a baby, loves to tell stories to himself, and then translate these stories into images.” [Beylie-Buache, p. 145]

One of the most unique things about Becker’s work is that he did indeed craft characters that you could fall in love with. Whether he was making a film about a young couple experiencing a lightly comic crisis or a bunch of hardened crooks realizing that age was their single worst enemy, the strength of Becker’s cinema lies in the likability and sheer charm of its characters.

Sources: 
– Jean Becker, Becker par Becker, Editions PC, 2004 [Jacques’ son put together this book about his father and himself, splitting the tome in half and presenting a mostly cut-and-paste portrait of his father, using his own insights, quotes from interviews with Jacques B., and contemporary articles and reviews.]

– Claude Beylie and Freddy Buache (eds.), Jacques Becker: etudes, textes et scenarios inedites, entretiens, temoignages, florilege critique et filmographie Edition due Festival International du Film de Locarno, 1991

– Quim Casas and Ana Cristiana Iriarte (eds.), Jacques Becker, Donostia Zinemaldia-Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, Bilingual edition – in Spanish and English (the only English-language book on Becker!)

– Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972

– Claude Naumann, Jacques Becker, BiFi/Durante, 2001

– Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville, Secker and Warburg, 1971

– Jean Quevel, Jacques Becker, Cinema d’aujour’hui series, Editions Seghers, 1962

– Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; English translation: Simon and Schuster, 1978

Web link:

– Four vintage articles by Becker and one interview with him. [in French] La Belle Equipe website. 

Thanks to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher for helping me find articles and copies of the “minor” Becker titles on disc (none of the minor ones are really minor; the two color works-for-hire are indeed works-for-hire, though); to Librarie Antoine (39 bis rue Molitor in Paris) for their incredibly speedy and economical sale of the very-hard-to-find Beylie-Buache book; and to Bruce Goldstein and the Film Forum for doing a comprehensive Becker tribute for the first time in NYC in… well, forever.

Noir and romance, comedy and drama: the ‘tone changes’ of Jacques Becker (part 1 of two)

“I’m not meticulous, I am maniacal!” – Jacques Becker (Arts, Dec. 1954)

Bingeing — it’s what TV fans do, right? They make a big deal of it, discuss it with their friends, write about it online, to the point where it has become an all-too-familiar phrase referring to watching every episode of a series in a row, over a short span of time (most always through a streaming platform, because Americans is the laziest peoples…). Here’s a super-secret: Culture and entertainment fans have been doing this since... well, forever.

Fiction readers have “binged” their favorite writers, music junkies have listened to their favorite artists for weeks/months at a time, and cinephiles have gone to film retros of their favorites for eons now. And all these long-established methods of bingeing involved (gasp) leaving the house, to gather and/or experience the work!

One of the utter joys of living in NYC is being able to see all of a filmmaker’s work in a short span of time in a theater. Thus, an occasion like the Film Forum’s comprehensive Jacques Becker festival, which ran from Aug. 1 to Aug. 16, was a festival not to be missed. It allowed me to see all of his rarest films in one short span of time — since then, I’ve rewatched two of the films and read two books about Becker (see references at the bottom).

Becker is an unusual case for American film fans. Three of his films, undisputed classics (Casque d’or, Touchez pas au grisbi, Le Trou), have pretty much always been in circulation in the U.S. — all available on DVD at the current time. But, aside from a VHS release of two others (Antoine and Antoinette and Rendezvous in July) in 1998, his other films have been out of circulation over here.

Becker died prematurely but accomplished much in his last two decades. He went from being an assistant director to Jean Renoir in the 1930s to making films of his own during the Occupation, following his release from a German prison camp. He forged a recognizable style, distinguished by his meticulous visuals and attention to detail, and even more recognizable subject matter, in the Forties and Fifties, and died at the age of 53 in 1960 of hemochromatosis (a build-up of iron in the bloodstream).

The Film Forum retro featured all 13 of his features and the films on which he assisted Renoir. While I didn’t see the films in chronological order, it was more than apparent that Becker got better and better as a filmmaker from ’42 to ’60. He blended the humanist concerns that he surely drew from Renoir with a vital visual style that only got “showy” when he was intent on probing a character’s dilemma — and then a super-tight close-up was used.

Becker directs Montparnasse 19.

It’s easy to see how his work influenced the French New Wave, who wrote favorably about his films when they were critics. His use of real locations in romances like Antoine and Antoinette influenced Truffaut and Godard, but his focus on common characters — both in the forefront and as marginal “color” — is reflected in the early work of the New Wave directors.

He never made a film directly based on his own experiences, but his life crept into his narratives. “You can only tell a personal story well on screen,” he maintained. “You can borrow from someone else but you must love it so much that, by thinking and working on it, you end up forgetting that it belongs to someone else.” [“L’auteur du film? Un auteur complet,” L’Ecran Francais 1947]

Becker with young
Jeanne Moreau.

Coincidentally, Becker completed 13 features, as did his countrymen and colleagues Jean-Pierre Melville (an admirer of Becker’s work, who died at 55) and Robert Bresson (who lived to the ripe old age of 98). Out of the 13 features he directed, eight are absolutely terrific, two are very good, and three are uneven.

What was the word that his biggest critical advocates used to describe his films? Uncle Jean (aka J-L Godard) put it in his usual detailed style: “There are several good ways of making French films. In the Italian style, like Renoir. In the Viennese style, like Ophuls. In the New York style, like Melville. But only Becker was and remains French in the French style.” [quote from the 1960 article “Frere Jacques,” Godard Par Godard, p. 209; translation mine]

The filmmaker himself agreed, several years before: “It’s a bit of my entomologist side: [the films] take place in France, I am French, my work is about the French, I observe the French, I am interested in the French.” [Interview conducted by Truffaut and Rivette, Cahiers du Cinema, Feb. 1954; translation mine]
*****

His first feature, Dernier Atout (1942), was made during the German Occupation of France, and so it avoids political (or even humanist) messages entirely and is merely a frothy bit of entertainment. Oddly set in South America, the plot involves two French student policemen who compete for the distinction of being the school valedictorian. The slightly cross-eyed character actor Noel Roquevert (a favorite of Becker’s) plays their boss, and their assignment is to apprehend the second in command of an American crime ring.

The film is workmanlike and betrays none of Becker’s later mastery at depicting a criminal milieu. The most interesting thing is the convenient murder of one female lead, thus allowing the more handsome of our protagonists to take up with the second woman. (Atout also features way too much music on the soundtrack — Becker’s films after this contain scenes left silent, for dramatic emphasis.) 

Goupi Mains Rouges (1943), besides having a wild name (“Goupi Red Hands”), is Becker’s first masterwork. An uncategorizable picture that radically changes tone at least twice in its running time, Goupi starts out as a familiar tale of a city slicker visiting his (very) small town relations (the titular Goupi clan). His visit is initially quite nightmarish, with menacing events including a whipping and a murder.

The film then adopts a lighter tone as the city/country rift is emphasized, and then in its third act it is a well-constructed mystery that finds the most “backward” of the characters (the city slicker’s uncle, nicknamed “Red Hands”) turning into a sort of detective solving not only the murder, but the matter of where the family “treasure” is hidden.

An incredible leap forward from Atout, Goupi shows Becker in a more assured mode, switching effortlessly from genre to genre, and starting to use some of his trademark techniques, including an evocative use of music and a carefully subdued visual style.

Falabas (1945) presents more refinements, as this completely sincere yet wonderfully over-the-top melodrama begins with the sight of a dead man and a female mannequin lying on the sidewalk being gaped at by a group of women. We then track backward to find out how and why the “couple” landed there. With its tragic resolution already established, the film moves through its paces beautifully, as we see a ladies’ man fashion designer fall madly in love with one of his conquests.

Becker adopts the tone familiar to “women’s pictures” of the time but also moves the film quite deftly into obsessional territory, portraying the designer’s amorous fixation as une amour tres folle. Unlike the rather lengthy-for-its-plotline Atout, its 110-minute running time is perfectly utilized to show the designer’s increasingly crazy passion.

Becker’s fourth film, Antoine and Antoinette (1947), set the standard for Becker’s excellent run of love stories, which took place in a recognizable, realistic environment but contained fanciful plot twists and coincidences.

The film is considered the first of Becker’s “youth trilogy” — that term being a critical invention, since the films do not overlap in any way and the notion of a trilogy leaves out the fourth “young love” film, Rue de l’estrapade (’53). The plot is wafer-thin but beautifully executed: A young married couple are living on a tight budget until the girl (Claire Maffei) buys a winning lottery ticket… and the boy (Roger Pigaut) loses it in the Paris metro.

Here Becker devotes a good deal of time to setting up the characters and their colorful environment, an apartment building where the neighbors know each other very well, to the extent that one of Antoine’s friends (and Antoinette’s admirers) climbs out of his window and moves along the ledge to enter the couple’s apartment for a conversation. The only villain in the piece (besides fate, which lets Antoine lose his wallet with the lottery ticket in it) is a lecherous grocer, played by Noel Roquevert. 

One can see a clear line between Antoine and the later work of the New Wave. All of that younger generation looked up to Renoir (from whom Becker was carefully borrowing), but Truffaut’s work most clearly shows the influence of Becker. Many beautiful shots of Paris punctuate Antoine, prefiguring the shots of Parisian landmarks that appear in the first few films of every critic-turned-filmmaker in the Cahiers “posse” of nouvelle vague filmmakers. Becker also veered away from his mentor Renoir (who specialized in long takes) by including hundreds of shorter shots in Antoine. 

Rendezvous in July (1949) was the centerpiece of the retro, since Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein’s Rialto Pictures has acquired it for U.S. distribution (meaning, hopefully, there will be a fourth Becker film released by Criterion). This is the first time Becker adhered to an element he perfected in the next few films — presenting a story that has already begun (with the younger characters being differentiated from each other through a series of phone conversations that establish who each one is).

The Spanish critic Eulalia Iglesias points to Rendezvous as “the first film to treat the notion of youth culture.” [“Comedies of love, freedom, and youth,” Jacques Becker, 2016, p. 75] Given the fact that American movies had only previously focused on teens who were super-wholesome (the Andy Hardy pictures) or in a gang (the “Dead End Kids” movies, and later Forties dramas like City Across the River), Rendezvous is indeed an “early” study of young people who are neither ridiculously wholesome nor endearing crooks.

The film is just as charming as Antoine and yet it is not as sympathetic, because it is a group portrait and thus has more protagonists. The group-portrait aspect makes it a more fascinating time capsule, dwelling on the cultural fascinations of young people (college-age and twenty-somethings in this instance).

The lead male characters are interested in ethnography, jazz, and filmmaking; the lead females are both aspiring actresses who also have a love of jazz. Becker was 42 at the time of the film (Godard was later chided for being “too old” when he made the youth film Masculin-Feminin at the age of 36). He clearly felt connected to the characters, though, because he himself loved jazz and had the ethnographer/film student character — the conscience of the piece — lament that “The French aren’t making movies!”

Different viewers will latch onto different scenes as favorites. The jazz club scenes are the most joyful, while the moments in the theater-class are great satires of both pompous acting teachers and hammy acting students. The centerpiece of the film, though, is clearly the scene where the ethnographer freaks out on his fellow bohemian buddies, who have informed him that they can’t go on an expedition with him that was to be the subject of a documentary they would film as a team.

The scene seems to be one that could have easily utilized Woody Allen’s “author’s message” thought balloon (from What’s New Pussycat?), as Lucien (Daniel Gelin) tells his friends to “wake up, dammit!” and laments that the French aren’t making films (read: thoughtful auteur cinema, as distinguished from what the nouvelle vague writers later called the “tradition of quality” features). 

While the scene is overly preachy, one can see how it inspired (again!) the nouvelle vague critics, who were fed up with the films that Truffaut branded “le cinema de papa.” In a way, the sequence in Rendezvous is a “manifesto” moment in a film that has its share of dramatic sequences, but which will be best remembered for its light-hearted interludes — as when the lead characters ride together throughout Paris in an amphibious vehicle left over from the war (that takes them through the streets then into and across the Seine, and then back up on land) to drop off and pick up their little inner circle of friends.

Becker’s next love story, Edouard and Caroline (1952), is another beguiling concoction but, in comparison to the preceding two films, it comes off as a filmed play. The plot concerns a classical pianist (Daniel Gelin) whose wife (Anne Vernon) comes from a rich background. Her uncle is having a private party at which the pianist will perform — that is, if the couple can overcome their arguments.

Becker never made a bad romance, so Edouard is indeed very entertaining but it lacks the sense of place and feeling of community that Antoine and Rendezvous had. We also know from the beginning that the couple’s love is stronger than their petty squabbles and a happy ending is most certainly in the cards. (The film’s most notably odd aspect is that Vernon’s character is being seduced by her upper-class cousin, who likes reminding her of how poor her husband is.)

Interestingly, this film and his last young-couple film, Rue de l’Estrapade, were scripted by his real-life partner Annette Wademant. Perhaps this is the reason that Caroline and the female protagonist of Estrapade (both played by the wonderful Anne Vernon) are among the most fully realized women characters in Becker’s work?

The only onscreen interview with Becker that one can find online is this snippet from the INA archive, where he talks about Edouard and Caroline and his love of jazz (with no English subtitles):

Becker’s first masterpiece came out in 1952. Casque d’or was a flop at the box office in France when it first came out , but it became a big success in other countries and then returned to find a bigger French audience, and the richly deserved status of “classic.”

A beautifully constructed blend of romance and crime, the film is set in the “Apache” world of La Belle Epoque and the script was based on real-life individuals (whose fates in many regards were not as sad and doomed as the characters in the film are). Meek-looking Manda (Serge Reggiani) slays a gangster in a knife fight over the gangster’s moll (Simone Signoret). He and the moll then have an idyllic time together until Manda’s friend is arrested for the murder of the gangster, and Manda has to decide what to do.

The film works on many different levels, but most of all it is a moral tale, featuring a character with a very strict code of honor in a thoroughly dishonorable community (this emphasis on honor was one reason Casque was a favorite of Becker’s colleague Jean-Pierre Melville). The plot moves toward an inexorable conclusion and one of the best finales in Becker’s works (and cinema history), a heartbreaking gesture by Signoret that remains in the memory. Signoret and Reggiani are sublime in the film, and it loomed large in their filmography for the rest of their lives.

A beautiful scene from the film (with English subs):

Francois Truffaut was a major fan of the film and lionized it in his 1965 intro to the issue of L’Avant-Scene Cinema that contained the full script of the film: “Those of us who love Casque d'Or are clear in our minds that Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani had their best roles ever in it, even if the French public (but not the English, decidedly more subtle) was cool to this paradoxical coupling, so beautiful precisely because of its contrasts — a little man and a large woman, the little alley cat who is made of nothing but nerves, and the gorgeous carnivorous plant who doesn't turn her nose up at any morsel.” [Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; 1978, Simon and Schuster, p. 177] 

Serge Reggiani in Casque d'or.

As is so common of great critics, Truffaut also summarized the appeal of the film in a single phrase when he noted that it evoked the past “with tenderness and violence by means of a refined use of tone changes.” [p. 178]

Here is some silent behind-the-scenes footage from the film’s production (which can be found on the Criterion release):

A wonderful bit of connecting-the-dots (which is what this blog and the Funhouse TV show have been all about for the last 25 years) appears in the bilingual book Jacques Becker [Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, pp. 108], where it is noted that the memorable song “Le Temps des Cerises” is used at the end of Casque. This Utopian song, identified with the French Commune and then the Popular Front in the Thirties, has been used by filmmakers to summon up a feeling of a “paradise lost” (or about to be regained?).

Carlos F. Heredero notes (in his “Melancholy elegy for a defeated Utopia,”) that the song was later used prominently by other Funhouse deities – namely, Alain Tanner in his classic Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) and Aki Kaurismaki in his dialogue-less melodrama Juha (1999). 

Part two to come.

In the meantime, here’s a beautifully edited clip-comp of Becker images:

Sources:

– Quim Casas and Ana Cristiana Iriarte (eds.), Jacques Becker, Donostia Zinemaldia-Festival de San Sebastian/Filmoteca Espanola, 2016, Bilingual edition – in Spanish and English (the only English-language book on Becker!)

– Jean-Luc Godard, Godard Par Godard, Cahiers du Cinema/Editions de l’Etoile, 1985

– Jean Quevel, Jacques Becker, Cinema d’aujour’hui series, Editions Seghers, 1962

– Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1975; 1978, Simon and Schuster]

Web link:

– Four vintage articles by Becker and one interview with him. [in French] La Belle Equipe website.