The film comes in various forms. It has been called Two English Girls and even Ann and Muriel, and it has different lengths to watch out for. But this confusion captures the uncertainty over how far Claude or the girls are the center or the key observers of the story. The interplay is fascinating, very fast, and entirely satisfying. And in the odd history of film and literature, this film has a special place that turns on the original novel by Henri-Pierre Roché (the author of Jules et Jim, too).
Truffaut did the screenplay with Jean Gruault. The radiant color photography is by Néstor Almendros, and the rich, expressive sets are by Michel de Broin. It comes as no surprise that the music is by Georges Delerue. As never before or since (apart from Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore), this picture digs into the acting persona of Jean-Pierre Léaud—we see the posturing and the pride, the solitariness and the brusqueness, and they all fit together. Truffaut’s perseverance with Léaud is an oddity, and who knows how happy the man was being an actor. But this is a full, rounded performance. Even so, the towering stars of the film are Kika Markham (as Anne) and Stacey Tendeter (as Muriel). We are accustomed to Truffaut’s special skill with actresses. We also have to recall his being helpless with the English-speaking Julie Christie in Fahrenheit 451. Yet here, with English actresses, he seems to know that they are the poles of a major film. It’s all the more poignant that, beyond this one, the two women hardly had any other career.
The Devil Is a Woman (1935)
The game was up. Even before The Devil Is a Woman began, Paramount announced that this would be the last time Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg worked together on the studio’s payroll. Sternberg would say later that he did not intend the very pointed title, that his chosen title—Capriccio Espagnole—was overruled by Ernst Lubitsch in his new capacity of head of production at the studio. On the other hand, just to compare the images of Marlene in Morocco and The Devil Is a Woman is to see an extraordinary journey in fondness. In Morocco Dietrich is so soft, so enticing; but in the later film she is a painted mask, dark, sardonic, and cruel. It is very hard not to see this as a baleful, albeit respectful, farewell by a beaten man. Moreover, Marlene had a long and eventful career ahead of her, whereas Sternberg became almost instantly both forgotten and mysterious. Cut adrift from Paramount, he never had the same command of resources again.
The Devil Is a Woman is based on the book The Woman and the Puppet, by Pierre Louys. John Dos Passos is credited with the screenplay, but scholars suspect that most of it was done by Sternberg—and as if to make it a one-man show, or a private room, he apparently did the cinematography himself, too, with the young Lucien Ballard as his assistant. It is a story of Concha Perez, a woman who plays every man in her life off against all the others. Her victims are played by Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, and Edward Everett Horton, and there is not one relationship that seems remotely wholesome or plausible. Indeed, Concha is a temptress by profession and a liar by instinct. She is the bleakest portrait of female purpose in the world that Sternberg ever allowed himself.
The Spanish government chose to be insulted (in that the setting was Spain), and it would have barred all Paramount product if the film had not been withdrawn. It did little better in countries not offended. Stylistically the movie is brilliant: The look of it is very severely black and white, as if done in Spain’s real heat. Yet the emotional temperature is icy and unforgiving. The dark humor evident in Morocco and even Shanghai Express is gone, and the mannered style that Sternberg loved always needed an undercurrent of humor.
If you want more on that, go to Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, derived from the same material—not much less impressed by the behavior of men, but made with a kind of acid tenderness that burns even as it comforts. It’s a dead end to the Dietrich–Sternberg story, and it surely points to the latter’s arrogance and intractability. She really wasn’t his kind of woman, no matter that in looks, gesture, and affect he had made a creature so lovely that her monstrousness clogged his heart. Their story is one of the great tragedies in screen history, and anyone touched by it should see all seven films the pair made together (I have restrained myself to just five of them in this book).
Le Diable au Corps (1947)
Claude Autant-Lara was one of those directors regularly roasted by the young critics in Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s. François Truffaut, for one, wrote, “I have always deplored his tendency to simplify everything, make it bland. I disliked the coarseness with which he ‘condensed’ Stendhal, Radiguet, Colette. It seemed to me he deformed and watered down the spirit of any work he adapted.” The criticism is well made, and I think it still stands the test of time, but it is hardly fair to the impact left by Le Diable au Corps in the years just after the Second World War.
Raymond Radiguet wrote the original novel at the age of seventeen. It was published in 1923, and Radiguet was dead a year later. That spared him a good deal, for Le Diable au Corps was about the passionate love affair between a schoolboy and the wife of a soldier. It was based on an event in Radiguet’s own life, and for years after the author’s death the woman protested that Radiguet had greatly exaggerated—or wished for—the physical side of their relationship.
To give Truffaut credit, I can easily imagine his making that the focus of the film: a woman, still young, who becomes the figure in a scandal because of the way she was depicted in a kid’s novel. The author dies. The woman’s husband abandons her. Society settles around her in a mixture of horror and respect. She wonders who she is. Yes, it’s a more interesting idea than the novel itself. But still, it’s churlish to turn one’s back on the film that was made.
Autant-Lara got Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost to adapt the novel, and they worked faithfully enough. The coup was in the casting: Gérard Philipe was the boy (the actor was actually twenty-four), while Micheline Presle was the wife (she was the same age). Those were the days when filmgoers from America and Britain believed that the French cinema was the only one actually allowed to do sex. That spirit should proceed with caution: Le Diable au Corps is very good on the storm of feelings in these two, but it is not unduly candid or open erotically. In fact, Philipe has the tougher task by far, and he really does make us believe he’s a teenager.
Called The Devil in the Flesh when released outside France, the film was an art-house hit. It had been made by the regular unit that Autant-Lara employed: Michel Kelber on camera, René Cloëric doing the music, Max Douy on production design, his wife, Monique Dumas, on costumes, and Madeleine Gug doing the editing. It was enough to establish Philipe as a romantic lead, and it promoted Micheline Presle into a few unhappy years in Hollywood.
I’m sure the picture worked because of the young leads and because such secret loves always flourish in war. The subject was remade in 1986 by Marco Bellocchio (a better director) and with startling sexual candor. Maruschka Detmers actually delivered a blow job—but the audience acted as if they’d seen it all before.
Les Diaboliques (1955)
The study of movie genres is often so narrow. Thus, even Carlos Clarens, in his excellent book Horror Movies (1968), excludes Les Diaboliques because it is “a pure puzzle, a thriller (however black) that employs the apparatus of terror in the context of the detective story.” Well, we didn’t see the same film. While it is true that Charles Vanel plays a detective in Les Diaboliques, a man who clears up the whole problem, I know that my dreams, my waking fears in a large, dark house, were left untouched by that rescue.
The setting is a wretched school in the provinces of France, a place where the sun never shines. There is a schoolmaster (Paul Meurisse), a sadist and a tyrant to the school and his family. He has a wife (Véra Clouzot), whose dread of him is sharpened by her heart condition. He has a mistress (Simone Signoret), who eventually seems to take sides with the wife because the schoolmaster is so loathsome. They plan to kill him. They think that they have accomplished this. We believe it. But then there are signs that it may not be so. Is he about to return? W
ill he come as vengeful ghost or disfigured self?
The director is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of cinema’s most dedicated misanthropes, and the story comes from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (the team that also inspired Hitchcock’s Vertigo—Hitch loved Diaboliques and showed it to the Psycho crew). Still, I think the dank mood of the film—and it is far more about atmosphere than puzzle—comes largely from Clouzot’s way of seeing and feeling the world. It is there in the wan light, the shabby décor, the feeling that all the characters could be unclean or diseased (as well as hopeless). It is in the air of prison that hangs over the school, and the way its swimming pool—dark, clotted, poisonous?—is like the sump pit of creation. (Drowning is a special horror or trick in this film.) And the menace is calculated in terms of whether it may bring on a fatal heart attack in one of the characters.
Horror dates so often—not here. That alone is a sign that the purity of the puzzle has nothing to do with the insidious, infectious growth of the film in your mind. For it grows out of an authentically bleak and nasty attitude toward life, and the unkindness is in every word or glance, not just in the constructs of the mystery plot. You can see the film many times and still be able to recall how, in your teens, the necessary descent at night down two flights of stairs to the cellar to get coal, with lights that did not always work, was enough to send you back to that school.
The story was remade in America three times: once with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani, and most effectively of all as Reflections of Murder, with Tuesday Weld, for television. But no American setting can seem as imbued with toxic feelings as the one Clouzot created. Horror, for Carlos Clarens, maybe, is a way of goosing yourself. But for Clouzot it is the discovery of a dread that has always been there, in us.
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Here is one of those Hitchcock films where objects mean so much. The key, for instance: This is a story of several latchkeys floating through the ether. It’s a drama waiting for the dressmaking scissors on the table. And, of course, the telephone. Trust Hitchcock to make a picture in which dialing is a moral ordeal. In the great exhibition “Hitchcock and Art” that Dominique Paini designed for Montreal and the Pompidou, the recurrence of these objects in Hitchcock was much alluded to, and in the end their hard, guilt-inflicting role surpasses the many ways in which Dial M was out-of-date even in 1954.
It was from a play by Frederick Knott (he would do Wait Until Dark a few years later) that had been a hit in London and New York, and Hitch hired Knott to do the screenplay, if only because no one else could grasp the movements of that key or comprehend the convoluted ways in which, once upon a time, a fellow might have his wife killed. Nowadays, it can happen in a twinkling of irresistible impulse. But Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) creates etiquette problems for himself with his lovely wife, Margot (Grace Kelly).
They have no children. They have a very nice South Kensington garden flat. Yes, he has money troubles. Still, if Tony wants to kill Margot, I suspect that Tony has got a gay spirit locked in his closet with all those old tennis rackets (he was a Wimbledon player once). It’s true that Margot is having a minor fling with Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), but the day when Ray Milland can’t outvolley Bob Cummings will be a long time coming. And really, Margot is so lovely, so fragrant, and so stupid—what more does a man about town want?
Well, Tony hires a rogue (Anthony Dawson) to do the wicked deed, in the apartment with a stocking. A phone call will trigger it all. But Margot is so plucky she is leaning back in last gasp when her hand strays to those scissors and plunges them into the small of his back! For reasons that only Mr. Knott could get away with, Margot will end up about to be executed for murdering the rogue, unless….
This is very stagy, but so it should be: Nearly everything takes place on the one set. After films like Notorious and Under Capricorn, this was a leap backward (though it was a hit). But you can see Hitch taking on fresh life as he looks at Grace Kelly. Victimized blondes were his meat and drink, and you can feel the hunger. Ray Milland does a very suave job as a Fred Perry type who has run out of cash. Bob Cummings is the ball boy, and John Williams gives a nice little performance as Chief Inspector Hubbard, who will explain it all. When you realize that Rear Window was coming up next, you see how deftly Hitch could step from the Iron Age into the eighteenth century. But only because he had Grace on his arm.
Diary of a Chambermaid (1946)
A book like this is composed of choices and selections in which the author sets out his allegiances. At the outset, coming to Jean Renoir, I wondered whether I might not be compelled to include everything; and from the 1930s, I have nearly done that. But there are so many worthy claims to be considered, and so rationing has to be accepted as policy. It hurts most when we come to Renoir in America. Every one of the films he made there is distinctive and personal. Yet the greatest admirer of the man has to admit that those films are flawed (This Land Is Mine, Woman on the Beach) and perhaps, just because of their virtues or their attempts, unbalanced or misguided. So where does the choice fall? It would be nice to go for the “most American” picture—The Southerner, say? But I end up with the “most European,” Diary of a Chambermaid.
There was a novel, by Octave Mirbeau, a rather naughty French classic, of life in a great house as viewed from the servants’ quarters. It had been turned into a play, and it was from that play text that Renoir and the actor Burgess Meredith made a screenplay. This was nothing less than Renoir’s weary discovery in the United States that his only possible way to work was to find friends and be encouraged by them. So it was the comradeship of the director with Meredith and his then wife, Paulette Goddard, that led to this film. Their other ally in this was Benedict Bogeaus, a Chicago real-estate agent who had come to Hollywood in the early forties with hopes of being a producer. He, had just made The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Captain Kidd, and he later would produce The Macomber Affair and Slightly Scarlet. So he was not a nonentity—and Renoir thought highly of him.
Diary is a strange film, on nineteenth-century sets that often seem not quite finished—or tending to the abstract. Eugène Lourié designed them, and he had worked on La Règle du Jeu. All he did here was to make artificiality more pronounced, but that gave original viewers a hard time. American crews, Lourié thought, sugarcoated the sets—they wanted to feel they could live in the film. Another Frenchman (though based in Hollywood), Lucien Andriot, did the photography, and Michel Michelet wrote the music.
Still, Renoir was of the opinion that it was Meredith’s script that gave the film its flavor. It was by turns harsh and playful, gentle and, as Truffaut said, “ferocious.” It is a script that understands the madness of the household and the difference between waywardness and folly and absolute evil. In 1946 there was so little ability in an American audience to respond to those shifts in mood and tone, but today it’s much easier to see how the truly frightening and the childlike sit side by side. And that’s where this picture is truly Renoir: in grasping the precariousness of existence.
Meredith and Goddard are the children, if you like, but then don’t forget the degrees of vacancy or malice in Hurd Hatfield, Reginald Owen, Judith Anderson, Florence Bates, Irene Ryan, and the most foreboding figure of all, Francis Lederer as the vicious manservant, Joseph.
Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
“An hour ago, my life seemed in order,” says the countess to the country priest in the course of their scorching conversation. Be careful, or be hopeful, for some spirit could visit you with the same suddenness. There is always a moment with this film when one is weeping for the glory of the cinema, only to realize that the tears are for some larger or more extensive possibility. The cinema cannot be good without subject matter. But if you are open to subject matter, then you may forget the cinema.
This is an adaptation of a novel by Georges Bernanos, written for the screen by Robert Bresson himself. Let me speak about the method: We hear the narrative voice of the young priest (Claude Laydu) as w
e realize that he is reciting his diary entries—black ink on graph paper. The words, written and spoken, are like prayer, which he admits he finds so difficult. This is his first parish. He is proud, yet he is so humble he hardly eats. Another reason for that is the stomach cancer that is killing him. He is an invalid seeking validity, and this struggle is imprinted second by second on the face of Laydu.
On the screen, in a sunless French countryside, we see the priest’s slowing journeys to visit parishioners. There is a grand house, with a count and a countess. The count is having a love affair with the governess. This has mortified his wife and his extraordinary, raging daughter. The priest is an innocent in such a crucible, but he seeks to be their confessor. This takes the form of fixed-frame imagery, hugely enriched but offset by offscreen sounds—the raked gravel during the debate with the countess, for instance. It turns on the faces of the people and the severity and beauty of what they say. The photography, by Léonce-Henri Burel, is in a spectrum of grays. It seems objective and drained, but as you stay with the film, so its reverence for faces and objects grows.
The film is 115 minutes, and it is nothing less than the progress of this priest toward death. His debates with the people in the big house are added to by talks with a neighboring priest (André Guibert), a very different kind of man, older, less extreme and austere, played by a psychiatrist friend of Bresson’s. There are views of the film that address the insignificance of this country priest and his failure. I do not see it that way. His encounter with the countess is a triumph. That with the daughter is more open-ended. And if this priest dies, he has never been deflected from his own path.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 36
