Quai des Brumes is the first of the Carné-Prévert collaborations, and it has a lofty reputation for being down and dirty. Yet there’s plenty wrong with it. Gabin is too quickly aggressive as the soldier, and he really needs some nasty backstory, enough to make Nelly’s nostrils quiver. And then there’s the unlikely but so convenient suicide of Krauss, opening up the story line but proving a tough act to follow even for Le Vigan.
But the real problem is that, with that great title and a mood of fate closing in, far too much of the film is bright-looking. The Le Havre exteriors are very good, especially Panama’s shack on a spit of land, and Alexandre Trauner did great interiors back in the studio. But the lighting is downright wrong (for once), no matter that Eugen Schüfftan did the photography and the camera operators included Henri Alekan and Philippe Agostini.
Gabin is as moody as can be, and he’s very effective slapping Pierre Brasseur around. But Michel Simon’s villain is a bit of a disappointment, and Morgan seems far too knowing to be the innocent girl. Maurice Jaubert did the music. Pauline Kael was not impressed, and she thought the great reputation of the picture in the late thirties came from the sudden shot of despair on top of the gross overoptimism of so many American films. But that explanation doesn’t work. There are American films of the same period, like You Only Live Once, that do the noir dismay a lot better. The cast also includes Raymond Aimos, René Génin, Jenny Burnay, and Marcel Perez. There’s also a dog that refuses to give Gabin up.
Quai des Orfèvres (1947)
Quai des Orfèvres means “police headquarters” in Paris, and eventually this lush film becomes a whodunit that must be solved by a rather bad-tempered policeman (played by Louis Jouvet as a star turn). But what makes the film “lush” is the world in which the killing occurs—a cheap music hall, tiny bars, cramped apartments, dressing rooms, and the general clutter of backstage. And does Henri-Georges Clouzot love it! It’s a movie of people with big egos squeezing together in narrow corridors and tight corners, and it has the most fabulous black-and-white photography (by Armand Thirard) so meticulously conveyed on the Criterion DVD that you know why “noir” was first recognized in France.
Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier) is a failure in most respects. He’s a little plump and he’s losing his hair. He might have been a hot songwriter, but all he can claim now is that he is married to a star singer, Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair), who has a sculpted body and a blackbird’s voice. She’s a treat, and Clouzot shoots her in patterned stockings, bombazines, underwear, every bit of saucy costume he can find. Jenny is relaxed and Maurice is not, so Jenny sees no reason not to have “lunch” with Brignon (Charles Dullin), a cadaverous lecher, because he might smooth her way to a movie part and some real money. On his side, Maurice knows just what Brignon is after as a percentage, and he threatens the predatory old man—in the hearing of others. Something that doesn’t help when Brignon turns up hit over the head very dead. In his own apartment.
This comes from a pulp novel, Legitime Defense, by Stanislas-André Steeman, published in 1942. Author Luc Sante claims that Clouzot and Jean Ferry adapted the book from memory for the simple reason that they couldn’t find a copy anywhere. The film has that freedom and—for Clouzot—a rare sense of fun and pleasure in the characters. Of course, in this sort of picture everyone needs to be capable of the killing—and so they are. Clouzot knows the atmosphere is what counts, and this is a film that reveals him as a genuine minor master of mise-en-scène. Thirard worked very closely with production designer Max Douy, and you can smell the sweat, the greasepaint, and the cheap perfume.
Jouvet is a little too proud, perhaps—the story needs a shabbier cop. But Blier is patently neurotic and living on the edge, with just the right wife to drive him crazy. But, of course, one thing that unites noir in all its contributing countries is the way in which men marry women they’re going to want to murder. So it’s a lightweight film and a tremendous entertainment. It doesn’t have the real dread of Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (1949) or Clouzot’s own Diaboliques, but it’s hugely enjoyable. There are long passages where shot after shot improves on the last one—just like a perfect box of chocolates (with just one of the goodies containing poison).
Les 400 Coups (1959)
It made a difference, I realize, if you had been reading François Truffaut in Arts and Cahiers du Cinéma, for he was a terrific, terrier-like critic, a bit of Cagney and a bit of Bazin in him. Not that anyone outside Paris in 1959 could grasp the pathos in the way Les 400 Coups was the work of a wandering child dedicated to a kind of godfather—or that Bazin had not lived to see the finished film. I’m sure Bazin had faith in the kid, and knew him very well, yet I think Bazin would have been amazed. For the marvel of this movie is not just that Truffaut grew up in making it (he was twenty-seven when it opened), but that the toughie had become a lyric artist in the process. He had found Vigo waiting for him, and he had reclaimed that very brief life and its passion for film.
So expect to be moved. I do not mean that just because this is the story of an increasingly lost child in which an ordinary cinematic sentimentality comes into play. I mean, rather, that there is emotion locked in the grim, wolfish face of Jean-Pierre Léaud, and his flagrant naughtiness that gives you a hint of the young thug in Truffaut. I refer to the music by Jean Constantin, which I cannot hear without finding tears in my eyes. And I know that the trigger of that music comes also from the wondrous discovery that the kind of critic I had loved—and it was not comfortable exactly to admire Truffaut’s writing in England then (it was not very Sight and Soundy)—had come home with a fabulous, simple film that did nothing less than pour movie into your lap.
This was also Paris in CinemaScope, with Henri Decaë handling it, and when the kids ran free in those gray streets and Constantin’s poignant, halting melodies went with them, it was enough to say that the world itself was available for cineastes. Not that the potential misfortune and worse of ordinary delinquency is ever shirked by this casual piece of realism. This is a story of parental neglect and misunderstanding, of kids so unwanted that they can hardly voice their desperation for something to love.
Léaud has his chum (in a lovely performance from Patrick Auffay), but it is finally cinema that comes to his rescue. Hence the superb ending: The boy has escaped from reform school. He runs for a few minutes, or for a day. And he comes to that wan, foggy gray French sea—la manche—the sea he has never seen before. And then the tiring, handheld accompaniment to his run becomes the smooth, streamlined slide of the sloping beach. And Truffaut is so happy he shows the wheel marks of earlier tracking shots in the background—he loves cinema so, and is so proud to be a part of it. And so the boy paddles into the sea, and turns to face his camera and us, and the image freezes and begins to speckle. To be alive then and young.
The Queen (2006)
The dangers in choosing very recent films are made clear by picking The Queen. I like the film and its director (Stephen Frears) very much, and my only immediate cavil with the picture was that Frears had fallen rather in the way he imagines Cherie Blair warning her husband, Tony: “Are you going to be one of those socialists who fall in love with the royal family?” Of course, Blair could reasonably reply that he’d never realized he was a socialist. But you can’t escape the fact that The Queen is probably the best bit of PR Elizabeth Windsor has had for years. And the republican in one laments the way in which the entertainment value of the film has ended up making HRH more endearing, more tolerable, more necessary.
I’m reminded that the very funny A Question of Attribution (written by Alan Bennett, directed by John Schlesinger, and with Prunella Scales as the Queen) had very much the same impact as far as the Queen’s image counted. The great lesson of the entire Diana miniseries is that it was a television event far more than a period of history. And if the Windsors can think of nothing else to do, they’d better learn the lesson and hire some triumvirate of David Frost, Simon Cowell, and Oprah to handle themselves.
All o
f that said, The Queen’s imagining of the private life of the Windsors (as written by the very skilled Peter Morgan) is high entertainment and pretty good gossipy history. Just as with The Deal, a few years earlier (the story of Blair’s finessing of Gordon Brown), Frears and Morgan worked very hard to put themselves in the position of guessing what was actually said behind closed doors. How? People leaked, just as they do in Hollywood. And the fusion of newsreel material (to show the reaction to Diana’s death, the funeral, et cetera) is cunningly matched with the “at home” soap opera, where the Queen even talks to the animals sometimes.
Some say the venture depended on Helen Mirren’s nerve and talent and her commitment to the part. Maybe. She is outstanding and was justly rewarded. But I think the rigor and the wit come from Morgan and Frears and from the overall audacity that the whole thing could be done in a relaxed way—it’s a film made as if by Preston Sturges, not the hacks from London’s tabloid press. Of course, it’s also part 2 of the Blair story, and Michael Sheen’s performance is even more uncanny than Mirren’s. And some of the other performances—James Cromwell as Philip, say, or even Sylvia Syms as the queen mother—are not as accurate or as sure.
Finally, if the film ended up kinder than maybe Frears expected or intended, that is a measure of just how far it is in the Lubitsch tradition of regarding satirical subjects with tenderness. The Queen is not rebellious—it could even get Frears a knighthood, if HRH can summon up the poker-faced humor that Helen Mirren has given her.
Queen Kelly (1928)
We behold an enchanting valley in a rural setting, with brighter light falling magically on the grass and the dew so that we seem to feel every detail. It is Griffith Park, but it feels like a precious meadow somewhere in mittel-Europa, and this natural beauty is a setting for the meeting of two lines of people—the one of mounted cavalry with swords, breastplates, and helmets that bear the form of eagles; and the other a troop of convent girls in white frocks so bright they could be radioactive.
Make no mistake—the scene is hardly natural or plausible: Do the cavalry really exercise as if on the way to a coronation? And where do the convent girls think they are going? But the look of it all is hallowed, engraved, and very beautiful. There is only one respect in which I demur from Gloria Swanson’s estimate of the footage: She says the photography made her look like sixteen. That day in Griffith Park, the great lady was thirty—and I would concede that she looks a winning thirty. However, what do I know? My limited knowledge of convent school girls is not just that most of them were turned loose before thirty, but on walks in the country they seldom went out Max Factorized, with false eyelashes or with underwear that collapsed at their ankles.
You see, Patricia Kelly (Swanson), a convent girl ready to be a mother superior for Luis Buñuel, does meet the Prince (Walter Byron) at the head of his column of cavalry, and yes, her prettiness does catch his eye. But somehow her panties are at her ankles. It is typical of director Erich von Stroheim that this is not explained—and it is typical of his provocation that he doesn’t bother with that but moves directly to the embarrassment.
The Prince sees the problem and teases her so that the headstrong Catholic girl makes a ball of the panties and hurls them at him. He catches them and takes a quick sniff. When Ms. Swanson, a coproducer on the film, saw this scene, she could hardly believe it or the chance it had of getting past censors. Not long thereafter, with $600,000 spent and less than half the script shot, Swanson and her partner, Joseph Kennedy, called a halt on the picture.
I am talking about Queen Kelly, which survives in a version of about 90 minutes, overly full of the mittel-Europa stuff—though Seena Owen is terrific as the often-naked queen, whipping poor Patty Kelly, and with glimpses of the African scenes—where Patty inherits a bordello and accepts marriage to a drooling cripple, presented with full effect by Tully Marshall.
It would be foolish to make a great cause of Queen Kelly. It is trash, filmed sometimes with delirious detail and delight, and always threatening to get into the lewd and the lubricious—in heavy-handed ways that seem less sexy than helpless. Did Stroheim direct his downfall? It’s a better explanation than “accident” or the notion that he was too deep into his art to notice. Queen Kelly is a great curiosity—to be seen, but not believed—and only a fraction of what Greed is in its butchered form.
The Queen of Spades (1949)
Alexander Pushkin’s novella The Queen of Spades was published in 1834. It is one of the great works on gambling at cards and a very impressive portrait of nineteenth-century Russia, and it has a rather neglected film version, made in 1949 by Thorold Dickinson. Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) is a tsarist officer obsessed with cards. He hears a story that the old Countess Ranevskaya (Edith Evans) knows a secret way of winning. And so he insinuates himself with her companion, Lizoveta Ivanova (Yvonne Mitchell), in an attempt to learn the secret. Eventually, he is driven to threaten the old woman, and then to violence. But when he comes to play again, as supposed beneficiary of the secret, he discovers that he has not learned the whole answer.
Thorold Dickinson is a fascinating fringe figure in the British film industry. He made a few inventive feature films before the war, including a version of Gaslight (from Patrick Hamilton’s play) in which Walbrook played the husband in a full-blooded melodramatic way. He then went into documentary before returning to fiction with The Queen of Spades. He ended up teaching film at the University of London.
Of course, in the late 1940s, British film had a very serious line in period films with lavish production design and costumes, and The Queen of Spades needs to be seen in that tradition. William Kellner was in charge of the imposing Russian sets, but a young Ken Adam was one of the draftsmen who assisted him. Oliver Messel did the rich costumes (you can hear them creak and sigh), and Otto Heller handled the black-and-white photography. The screenplay was done by Rodney Ackland, with some help from Arthur Boys; and the picture was produced by Jack Clayton (the suspense in his own The Innocents is plainly influenced by this film) and Anatole de Grunwald.
It may be a small touch, but this is one of the few films in which Anton Walbrook plays without a mustache. He looks a touch younger clean-shaven, and a great deal more vulnerable and less honest. Herman, in essence, is a hysterical type who believes as much in sinister atmosphere as he does in the fateful fall of the cards. The film is so constructed (like the novella) that there is probably no assured strategy at any card game. But Herman believes there may be, and while Herman is a panic-stricken officer on the edge of being broke, he is rich in superstition. But luck and magic are equally difficult to film: Each one feels like the other. And so Herman is especially prey to signs of the ghostliness in the old countess after he thinks he has disposed of her.
Edith Evans eats up her part (and rivals her own work in the later The Whisperers), and Yvonne Mitchell is plausibly Russian as the romantic lead. The rest of the cast includes Ronald Howard, Mary Jerrold, Anthony Dawson, Miles Malleson, Michael Medwin, Athene Seyler, and Ivor Barnard.
A Question of Attribution (1992)
This is not just the best thing John Schlesinger ever did. It is superior by so much that it leaves you wondering if anyone else turned up and directed it. Perhaps it’s just that Alan Bennett’s script is so gentle and yet cast-iron that the emerging film couldn’t help but seem like his. But in that case, why isn’t An Englishman Abroad (1983) less vulgar? That’s the story of resident exile Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) reaching out for a little London gossip with actress Coral Browne as she comes to Moscow on a theatrical tour. That’s a nice modest film for television, but just one sprig of thyme next to the full-scale daube of A Question of Attribution.
We are observing the life of Sir Anthony Blunt (James Fox), expert on seventeenth-century art, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, an esteemed figure in the art world—and yet, the fourth man, which is to say a member of the espionage group (Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Blunt) that did so much to enliven British life in
midcentury. He is already under examination from the Secret Service, and as our film begins he has a new interrogator—the blunt, dogged David Calder. This newcomer reflects the deft way Blunt has exhausted previous scrutiny with affable, empty small talk.
Blunt is also ill, so he is at the same time concerned to know the results of purely private X-rays and the X-ray photography of a picture (possibly Titian) in the Queen’s collection. Is there another man in the painting? Covered up by another surface of paint? The three-card trick of painting-health-espionage is a little fusspot—but Alan Bennett is more likely to give you Ten Little Spies than Detour. Still, it’s very intriguing and perfectly suited to Fox’s camp overdone underplaying. Explanation? Fox in this film does decorative underplaying, a tradition in English acting observable also in Claude Rains, Laurence Olivier, and the sublime James Villiers.
The action reaches its height when on a visit to Buckingham Palace, Blunt encounters the Queen in the art gallery. She is played by Prunella Scales. Of course, these days, the Queen of England is Helen Mirren, and it’s nearly treason to suggest anyone else. We know why: In the film The Queen, batting on a very treacherous wicket, Mirren invented a kind of limp-wristed but steel-nerved defense that made a heroine of the Queen. Scales, on the other hand, sees a very formal woman who knows how to apply the light lash of wit or even scorn.
The Queen-Blunt scenes are elegant confrontations in a comedy of manners, not episodes from a soap opera. And they leave us with the suspicion that the Queen knows exactly the degree of light and shadow in the keeper of her pictures. Moreover, the oblique way in which this movie comes on the question of attribution (or loyalty) cuts much deeper than we expect. It may be that Fox and Scales simply disdained any vulgarity in the playing. It could be that Bennett’s script resists color. But there’s no reason to deny Schlesinger credit here.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 112
