Move.

Due to the inability of Blogger administration site to provide reliable service, I am forced to discontinue this blog and relocate it to:

http://forgivemyfrenchfilms.blogspirit.com/

I look forward to "seeing" you there.

Henri-Georges Clouzot : ... marital trouble.

Clouzot’s work later ran into milder trouble. He was married, a common situation for a man. His wife was an actress, nothing out of the ordinary for a director, though she probably became one only when she married him.

Vera Clouzot was born Amado and Brazilian, but no born actress. She was able to make Orane Demazis, Pagnol’s long time life companion, look good.

« Le salaire de la peur » (1953) starts as the perfect movie pitch : four adventurers drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine over awful tracks through Central America to an oil field in order to stop a raging fire.

Today, the film looks as dated as « Le corbeau » is timeless : contrived stereotypes, tired tales of virile friendship, laughable tough guy dialogues, and a severe case of bad acting by Charles Vanel, whose survival skills -he died at ninety seven and nearly worked to the end- later made a French cinema icon ; a few more decades and he would have been a great, deaf, blind and mute actor.

The movie universe was purely male, but the Latin American location gave Clouzot the excuse he needed for a supporting part tailored to his wife : Brazil was in Latin America ; though her native language was Portuguese rather than Spanish, her accent would sound genuine enough to French ears ; despite her best efforts, she could not do much worse than Charles Vanel. This was sound reasoning and her role went mostly unnoticed.

In « Les diaboliques » (1954), Vera Clouzot starred next to Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret. She was resolutely bad ; whether her presence hurt or benefited the film is nevertheless open to discussion.

The movie looks like a French ancestor to « Basic instinct » : it is no coincidence that « Diabolique » (1996), the US adaptation of the same Boileau-Narcejac novel -the duo of French writers also behind Hitchcock’s « Vertigo »-, starred Sharon Stone.

The film script is silly at best, while the love triangle of Paul Meurisse -husband-, Vera Clouzot -wife- and Simone Signoret -Meurisse’s mistress- makes very little psychological sense : you can understand that the two women want to get rid of him, never why they would marry him or become his lover.

Their triangle is nevertheless visually arresting : Paul Meurisse’s ghost-like, enigmatic Eurasian face and from beyond the grave voice, Simone Signoret’s deceiving air of physical and mental good health. As to Vera Clouzot, she acts so bad as to look plainly insane.

The overall effect is outright creepy, particularly as Clouzot directs the whole film down the same path and gives up on narration and rationality to focus on visual trickery.

The picture consequently veers from the thriller genre towards a horror movie of the « Scream » kind : too ridiculous and kitsch to be taken seriously, still able to shock and scare you against your better judgement.

One year after « Les diaboliques », Clouzot found a most elegant solution to his wife’s longing for acting : he turned to documentary filmmaking.

« Le mystère Picasso » (1955) may be the director’s best thriller film : thanks to the use of a particular type of ink, Picasso’s drawings appear directly on screen as the artist creates them.

The result is a breath-taking display of sudden plot twists, astonishing U-turns, unannounced direction switches, unpredictable endings, as Picasso abruptly changes his mind or heart, shifts his mood, erases a figure or the whole drawing, starts back from scratch or decides his work is complete and moves on to the next one.

Clouzot captures a process rarely or ever seen before on screen : art in the making. With a likely mix of awe and frustration, the director witnesses the painter’s creative freedoms, all that himself will never be allowed to do, or only at the script stage, before his vision is committed to celluloid : throw away a nearly finished work and start it all over again.

With barely veiled contempt for the filmmaker, many critics describe « Le mystère Picasso » as the work of a talented director about a genius.

Their contempt may be as short-sighted as their perspective on the film : fiction and Picasso have no monopoly on plot twists, many-layered tales and drawings ; documentary films too may achieve complexity and ambiguity and their screening accommodate various readings.

Watching Picasso at work is no doubt fascinating, but the film, by its very existence, also shows the artist’s close attention to maybe his most ambitious creation : his personal myth.

The movie silently exposes the painter‘s narcissism as, through the camera lens, Picasso actually watches himself in the act of painting. In the end, what do we see on screen ? Picasso painting ? or Picasso playing the part of Picasso painting ?

Does he not consciously overact -or rather « overpaint »- to show off and exaggerate his improvisation skills and the richness of his inspiration, and force upon the passive camera his ideal view of himself as a versatile God ?

Vera Clouzot died in 1960, of a heart attack, like in « Les diaboliques ». In the film, her character’s death resulted from Machiavellian -if unbelievable- plotting by husband Paul Meurisse.

In real life, Clouzot was not suspected. Maybe the director managed the perfect murder and killed his wife with the news that he would direct Brigitte Bardot in « La verité » (1960) and she would have no part in the movie. « La vérité » -the truth- is sometimes so hard and cruel that it breaks hearts.

At the time of her death, Vera Clouzot’s acting career amounted to three films, all by her husband.

Henri-Georges Clouzot : war fortunes and...

When war rages, opportunity may knock. On would-be filmmakers’ doors too.

During WW2, major directors fled Nazi-occupied France : Renoir, Clair, Duvivier.... Others stayed but were forbidden to work for all too clear reasons.

Life was nevertheless to go on and films to be made : so, many holes had to be filled.

Before the war, Henri-Georges Clouzot was a screenwriter. With war, he graduated to film direction.

His second movie created enormous turmoil, not because it was great.

« Le corbeau » (1943) portrays a provincial French town plagued with a mysterious « corbeau » : a crow or raven, and the French nickname for a writer of poison pen letters.

At a time when anonymous letters denounced Jews and underground fighters, it was difficult not to watch the film as a parable of Nazi-occupied France.

It was equally difficult to believe the film had been produced by Continental Films, a production company set up in Paris by the Germans and headed by Alfred Greven, a former UFA production manager, who had been appointed by Josef Goebbels.

To this day, what Continental Films was truly about and after remains of source of vigorous controversy and its story was the subject of Bertrand Tavernier's « Laissez-passer » (2002).

According to one school of thought, Alfred Greven was a film lover and an astute producer much more than a Nazi doll and pulled an impressive job : with a mix of charm and double talk, he both enticed the French film community to work with him and placated his Berlin masters’ desires for ideology-correct fare.

He may have skated on very thin ice and sometimes appeared to turn himself into a German « collaborationist », colluding with French filmmakers against his official mandate. As war wore on -and matters more pressing than French film production arose-, he seems to have convinced his running officers to grant him free rein.

Why « Le corbeau » escaped Nazi censorship and how Greven sold the project to Berlin became clear when the film was released in Germany as a picture of French moral baseness and decay.

Watched today, « Le corbeau » is an outstanding « film noir » : one of the darkest depictions ever of small town evil and meanness, with none of the ironic smile of Chabrol’s « La fleur du mal » and its comparatively harmless anonymous political tract to dilute them.

« Le corbeau » is a true psychological thriller and the precursor of modern day serial killer movies : Clouzot’s « corbeau » needs no gun or knife to murder, or injure forever, he does so with his pen and takes such pathological pleasure in it that the flow of letters cannot but grow to a fateful climax.

But « Le corbeau »’s victims are seldom innocent, this is where the film escapes all contemporary clichés and reassuring moral : he lays bare the town intimate and very real ugliness.

Though a screenwriter by trade, Clouzot did not write the film script or dialogues ; instead, he demonstrates a director’s true skills : the eye to tell a story with images and a talent with actors.

In the best « film noir » tradition, the movie black and white cinematography gives to see and feel evil at work and the town oppressive atmosphere.

As the outsider, newly arrived physician and first recipient of the letters, Pierre Fresnay gives another wonderfully restrained performance of elegant coolness, much closer to « Grand Illusion »’s « capitaine » de Boieldieu than to Pagnol’s Marius.

Just as Simenon’s Maigret is a « commissaire », but would have been a medical doctor, Fresnay’s Dr. Germain doubles as the investigator : the town is sick, it is case for a physician, rather than for the police.

As France was liberated, « Le corbeau » and those associated to the film became easy targets, if not stool pigeons and scapegoats. The movie drew a picture of France so dark that nobody could accept it at a time when the myth of a « resistant » country was being created.

Clouzot’s guilt was three-fold : he came out of the war in an better position than he had entered it ; he had run Continental Films’ screenwriting department ; he had shot a film of anti-French propaganda.

During two years and a half, Clouzot was blacklisted but remained free. Some were not so lucky : Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc, her partner in « Le corbeau », went to jail.

But, while the supply of food and commodities eventually returned to normal, talent remained scarce : the director and his actors ultimately resumed their careers.

The emperor's post scriptum : "Fat is beautiful".

Africa was the fabled land of wildlife documentary filmmaking.

Then, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle took us underwater to « the world of silence » (« Le monde du silence »-1955).

Half a century later, « La marche de l’empereur »’s producers hit box office gold in Antartica.

Africa’s wildlife was, well, wild : a beautiful, but cruel and violent world. The lion king seems to doze lazily in the high grass, yet danger is looming. A sudden flash of R-rated action and there goes the elegant antelope. The king’s family briefly dines then returns to sleep ; garbage men move in : hyenas and vultures feast on leftovers. A dangerous world indeed.

On the ice-fields of Antartica, what do we see ? Penguins. What do they do ? Based on the film title, they walk. Based on screen evidence, they mostly stand still. Action ? An egg is laid. Dangers ? Cold, wind and the odd visit of a silly bird with a ridiculous Cyrano beak which clumsily attempts at hijacking and killing a couple of newly born ; despite the soundtrack full blown efforts -voice over and music together- to dramatise the sequence, it looks rather like a Mack Sennett short film.

In front of African wildlife, powerful lions, lean and mean leopards, greedy ugly vultures, we feel totally out of place and inadequate. Crocodiles are vicious, rhinoceroses scary, hippopotamuses an enigma. Giraffes seem nice, but awkward. However intimidating, the big friendly looking elephant is the only true crowd favourite.

Watching penguins on their ice field, our sense of inadequacy subsides, we feel no inferiority complex. They are so much like us, obviously ill-equipped, if not physically challenged : they cannot fly and barely walk ; they swim wonderfully, but the film only shows glimpses of them in their favourite environment not to hurt our self-esteem.

We are tired of gorgeous looking stars and overachievers, we crave for common place heroes : penguins.

The film was said to be a success in the US for its worship of conservative family values. The truth runs deeper : the whole film whispers a message which may not be said aloud, though each picture frame shouts it at us : fat is beautiful.

The film penguins are so overweight their celebrated walk displays the rolling gait of an obese drunk.

Fat is beautiful. Without fat, the cold kills you ; without fat, you do not survive when food becomes scarce ; without fat, you cannot feed your baby and your baby dies.

The film penguins do not discuss earth warming ; they probably refuse to believe in it : they would need fewer calories to beat the cold.

Building fat is your duty in life, obesity is heroic : proof of your commitment to your family.

The film moral is ice field clear : obese people are our penguins : undervalued, humble, hard-eating caloric overachievers.

It is also theatre owner friendly : food shortage may strike at any time, rush to the concession counter for a giant bucket of pop corn, add a spare one for good measure ; keep up the good work during feature film presentation : eat as much as you can as you watch your penguins siblings.

Jean Girault : ... oblivion in outer space.

In the battle to mine De Funès gold, Jean Girault initially seemed to have the edge. Despite the « gendarme » franchise, he somehow lost it.

De Funès’s higher profile films and biggest box office hits were with Gérard Oury : « Le corniaud » (1965), « La grande vadrouille » (1966).

Jean Girault’s winning formula was De Funés’s and a supporting cast, Oury’s the odd couple : with Bourvil first, then with Yves Montand in « La folie des grandeurs » (1971), a half-successful period comedy loosely based on Victor Hugo’s « Ruy Blas », eventually with himself : in « Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob » (1973), De Funès plays a prejudiced French business man forced to impersonate a US rabbi.

It is true that Gérard Oury’s first association with De Funès came before « Pouic-Pouic », but in « Le crime ne paie pas » (1961), De Funès was, as usual then, far from the top of the bill.

To compensate for his favourite actor’s increasing unavailability, Jean Girault tried his hand at a younger and sillier brand of humour. He had taken « Le gendarme » to New York, he took « Les charlots » to « Spain » (« Les charlots font l’Espagne » - 1972). Maybe he had a gift for foreign languages.

« Les Charlots » were a short-lived, musical then screen sensation of the lowest order. Though Jean Girault took them to Spain, their fame never crossed French borders. They were the conscious parody of a very distant French answer to British pop groups : the Dumb Four.

Their success remains a mystery to which I am a party. I never was a fan of them, did not enjoy their music, I nevertheless watched most of their films. Why ? I could not say. Maybe, all kids are rabid image eaters : they sort them out later.

Claude Zidi’s was « Les Charlots »’s appointed director. Later in the 1970’s, he got more than even with Girault : he borrowed De Funès for two films.

« L’aile ou la cuisse » (1976) simultaneously played the odd couple and crossover cards. Zidi partnered De Funès with comic boy wonder Coluche, as immensely popular as him and a genuine major leaguer, unlike « Les charlots ». Film topic was as consensual as can be imagined in France : food. De Funès played a food critic who loses all sense of taste and goes to his estranged part-time clown son Coluche for help. Film was a -public- success.

« La Zizanie » (1978) was « L’aile ou la cuisse » perfect opposite. The movie subject was the most divisive of all : politics, though with a fashionable ecological background. De Funès was married to Annie Girardot, it was no happy marriage. Zidi aimed again for a winsome odd couple, he got the wrong one : fire plus fire ; overacting and overacting ; his funny, hers not -or accidentally in other films supposed to be dramas.

Film was a flop. This was no doubt sweet vindication for Claude Gensac.

Maybe its failure also lived up to the promise of its title and bred « zizanie » -discord- between Zidi and De Funès.

In 1978, Jean Girault seemed to have lost the De Funès wars for good : their last film together was 1971 « Jo ». In 1979, the director unexpectedly rebounded : for four years and four films, Girault and De Funès would work exclusively with each other.

« Le gendarme et les extraterrestres » (1979) and « Le gendarme et les gendarmettes » (1982) were too sad efforts by ageing men to rejuvenate a dying franchise and demonstrate they remained finely tuned to their times : in the first one, De Funès faced aliens, in the latter one, female colleagues ; both encounters were scary and no fun.

« L’avare » (1979), based on Molière’s classic play of a man in love with his « cassette » -money box- was a naive and doomed shot at critical recognition.

« La soupe aux choux » (1981) was a misguided screen adaptation of a popular novel, involving again a visitor from outer space, with a weak spot for cabbage soup.

De Funès is often described as a great actor in mediocre films. This is unfair. The actor is good because the films are mediocre, the films are mediocre to give him every opportunity to be good.
De Funès films are concertos written for a solo player. At regular intervals, the orchestra stops to play and leaves the virtuoso alone to show off his technique and engage into his madness. The work balance is shattered, but the star shines and the crowd loves it as much as in the golden age of Bel Canto, when the operas librettos served only as pretext to vocal performance.

Erotic cinema scripts laboriously plod between sex scenes, Jean Girault movies stumble from De Funès antics to more De Funès antics. Filmed sex amateurs are fair enough not to complain about story gaps.

Four De Funès films in four years was too much for Jean Girault. He died while shooting « Le gendarme et les gendarmettes » : of exhaustion ? too much pleasure ? overwhelmed by the true mediocrity of what would be his last film ?

Maybe the aliens from « Le gendarme et les extraterrestres » and « La soupe aux choux » grew so fond of him and his films they returned and took him home with them.

His partner in filmmaking did not survive him long. Louis De Funès died in 1983, twenty years after « Pouic-Pouic ». « Le gendarme et les gendarmettes » was his last film too. A sad ending, unless he too was taken away by aliens to a distant planet and reunited with Girault for a local remake of the « gendarme » franchise.

If so, Claude Gensac was left behind and unconsoled : « Le gendarme et les gendarmettes » was not her last film, but she has since come out of mourning in only three movies.

Jean Girault : De Funès or...

Jean Girault is such a common French name that it could be the local Alan Smithee : the alias a US director uses when he chooses to dissociate himself from his film (Alan Smithee, i.e. « the alias men »).

Some, watching Jean Girault’s films, may even agree that a sensible director would disown them.

But there is no French Alan Smithee. « Droit d’auteur » protects French filmmakers better than copyright law does their US colleagues : they have final cut and imprescriptible moral rights.

This is no guarantee against a truly bad film, but it means you cannot wash your hands, and name, of your mistakes.

Besides, among the many French Jean Girault, one did direct films. All are not be memorable, some were very successful. But, rather than as Jean Girault films, they are known as Louis De Funès movies.

Jean Girault directed eleven films with the comic actor. And twenty without him, best forgotten.

The director and the actor first paired on « Pouic-Pouic » (1963). Most of De Funès’s career was already behind him, but he best was fortunately still to come : he had played in close to one hundred films, but except in a handful of them, only cameos.

As the saying goes : you can make a killing in movies, you cannot make a living. For thirty years, the latter was dangerously close to true for De Funès ; as to a killing, in his dreams only.

« Pouic-Pouic »’s script revolved around a piece of land which was, or was not, oil rich. That was the question and probably a metaphor for the quest Girault and De Funès had just embarked on together : to find the elusive story that would bring them fame and fortune.

On that road, « Pouic Pouic » was no home run, but at least a single : De Funès topped the cast and was free to grimace and rage at will.

The home run happened one year later : home and the oil field were in Saint-Tropez : « Le gendarme de Saint Tropez » (1964) was a popular triumph and a long-awaited gift for De Funès’s fiftieth and Girault’s fortieth birthdays.

« Maréchal-des-logis » -sergeant, or about...- Cruchot (De Funès) is transferred to party happy and morally loose Saint Tropez, nearly ten years after Vadim introduced the Côte d’Azur resort to international screen fame, while creating woman and Bardot.

Cruchot’s teenage daughter, Nicole, gets mixed up with a gang of art robbers, but eventually helps her father and his colleagues arrest the ring.

Pretty thin story line for a killing, even for a living ? Rationale for success laid elsewhere.
French « Gendarmerie » -military police in charge of rural areas and small towns- was popular, much more so than its civil counterpart left to care for the bigger cities.

By mocking it gently, the film also catered for the French anarchist streak, while the main actors wore uniforms at a time when a general had been elected head of state.

As its title clearly states, the film is not about an ensemble cast forming the « brigade de gendarmerie » -the MP outpost- but about De Funès and a supporting cast headed by Michel Galabru -another long struggling comic actor-, who plays « adjudant » Gerber : « Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez », not « Les gendarmes de Saint-Tropez » ; all titles in the series will use the singular mode.

« Adjudant » Gerber, not « maréchal-des-logis » Cruchot, heads the « brigade » : Cruchot is middle management and the film core target French individualistic middle class.

Through Cruchot’s daughter, Nicole, the movie also lightly addresses the fast widening generation divide that will lead to the student revolts of 1968.

Set in Saint-Tropez, it allows its public to glimpse and laugh at a privileged set and a way of -easy- life it both envies and spurns.

From the start, « Le gendarme » franchise appealed to a conservative crowd.

Two years later, Jean Girault took his « gendarme » to New York (« Le gendarme à New York » - 1966), as if crossing the pond, even only for shooting purposes, was a sure measure of success for French artists.

Two more years and, while French students rioted and Godard, Truffaut and others stopped the film festival in nearby Cannes, « Le gendarme » got married (« Le gendarme se marie »- 1968) : Cruchot needed no prior divorce and did not turn bigamist, he was a widower.

The lucky spouse’s name was no surprise : Claude Gensac was De Funès’s wife in ten films ; in only eight, did she play another role.

Some actors fear to be cast forever as James Bond or Batman. Probably no feminist, Claude Gensac always appeared content to enter French film history as De Funès’s on screen wife. Real life Mrs De Funès did not seem to mind either.

Claude Gensac and Louis De Funès were the perfect couple : water and fire. She monitored her husband’s eruptions with quiet amusement and « bourgeois » aloofness and contributed her own brand of well-behaved, cool lunacy to their movies.