FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION
1957-59, Kino Lorber BD
Includes:
SPEAKING OF MURDER (Le rouge est mis, "The Red Light is On," 1957, 1.37:1, 85:41)
BACK TO THE WALL (Le dos au mur, 1958, 1.37:1, 94:25) WITNESS IN THE CITY (Un témoin dans la ville, 1959, 1.66:1, 89:36)
Kino Lorber’s often tempting FILM NOIR: THE DARK SIDE OF CINEMA series (now eleven volumes strong) has collected more than 30 B&W crime and suspense films from the Gold and Silver ages of Hollywood. While the genuine film noir classics tend to score individual releases, these compendiums have cast a wider and deeper net, gathering up under-appreciated gems and taking care to pair them with expert contextualizing commentaries. Now Kino Lorber has extended their reach into international terrain with the release of FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION, which collects three outstanding (if lesser-known) Gaumont releases in what I can only hope will become a parallel continuing series. This is the sort of release I'm used to having to order from Amazon.fr, often without English subtitles, and brother, are we lucky to have it.
While the films included all date from the late 1950s, by which time American film noir was somewhat past the grand climax proposed by such pictures as KISS ME DEADLY (1955) and SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1956), French noir was plainly at its peak. As good as it often was, the earliest examples of international noir were often imitative of American examples; for instance, Luchino Visconti’s OBSESSION (Ossessione, 1943) or Bernard Borderie’s initial Lemmy Caution adventure POISON IVY (Le môme vert-di-gris, 1953). However, when French noir in particular began looking away from the Hollywood model and focused on telling hard-bitten stories of struggling people forced into lives of crime, prostitution, and betrayal, they couldn’t be beat in terms of hard-bitten authenticity. Anyone expecting to find parallels to late 1950s American noir in this collection will be startled by the unflinching brutality, frank adult language, sexual candor and acknowledgment of marginal gay characters in their storytelling, which is actually more evocative of 1970s American cinema. Even admirers of a noir classic such as Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) must admit that its dense, nightmarish, borderland atmosphere is unnatural, something as calculated for dramatic effect as the Crazy House sequence in Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947); however, the world proposed by the three Gaumont titles gathered in this set is virtually documentarian, showing us a Paris that 1) no longer exists and 2) which is strangely alien to American eyes because it’s not the traditional tourist’s view of Europe's greatest city, but rather the Paris once known to its working-class locals. These films slap your face and remind you that the French didn’t have to invent noir, it was always part of their language and landscape. It also speaks well of these films that all three were scripted, or based on writings by outstanding authors of French crime and suspense fiction.
The set not only starts out impressively well but ascends in quality and impact as one advances from film to film. SPEAKING OF MURDER, presented as the lone title on Disc 1, presents the indomitable Jean Gabin in a story based on a novel by Auguste le Breton, the author responsible for his prior hit, RIFIFI (1955). Gabin takes the lead as Louis, the boss of modest but lethal crime ring headquartered behind the façade of his service station garage. It’s after hours, when “the red light is on” (the translation of the original French title), that their illegal business is conducted. Opening with an everyday scene that suddenly erupts in a brazen and violent daylight theft, the film maintains a steady simmer as it builds to a major extended heist sequence. When Louis’ gang (which includes the great Lino Ventura as the tommy-gunner Pepito) ends up killing two men and injuring two pursuant police cyclists, he is soon after betrayed to the authorities, with Louis’ younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, who has eluded, even been protected from becoming directly involvement with the gang) being wrongly perceived as the most likely snitch. As push comes to shove, Louis must decide whether his fealty is stronger to his own flesh and blood or the men who loyally follow his orders.
Directed by Gilles Grangier (who, two years later, would direct Gabin in his Silver Bear-winning Best Actor Performance in Archimede le clochard, 1959), the film also marks the screen debut of Annie Girardot "de la Comédie Française" (THE APE WOMAN, SHOCK TREATMENT), introduced wearing only a pajama top as Pierre's girlfriend. She, like virtually everyone else in the story, is forced into duplicity and corruption of character by economic considerations. Future director Jean-Pierre Mocky is also featured in a supporting role.
Of all the pictures in the set, SPEAKING OF MURDER is the most obviously constructed around the central performance of a vividly written character. While its dramatic goals are entirely within the traditional guidelines of noir, it's not as overtly stylized as its generic definition might suggest. On the contrary, this is a realistically presented story in which everyone is caught in a more or less inescapable trap. As in Martin Scorsese's most memorable films, the film casually yet effectively charts the schism between the mob's warm family ties and cold professional ethos. While the bulk of the film maintains a stimulating simmer, it builds to a chillingly tense and well-staged showdown between Louis, his brother, and an unhinged Pepito. Denis Kieffer's main theme, with its trumpet solo by Georges Jouvin, strongly recalls the later Jackie Gleason theme, "Melancholy Serenade." Also included on the disc are trailers for the main feature (including alternate takes of scenes), and other related KL releases PORT OF SHADOWS, TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, RAZZIA SUR LA CHNOUF, MAIGRET SETS A TRAP, MAIGRET AND THE ST. FIACRE CASE and THE SICILIAN CLAN - all of which KL has released separately. These should have been given a "Play All" option.
As good as SPEAKING OF MURDER is, the two films on Disc 2 are arguably even better. Both are directed by Édouard Molinaro, perhaps best-known for directing the original LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978) and, among my readers particularly, DRACULA AND SON (with Christopher Lee, 1976). BACK TO THE WALL—based on the novel DÉLIVEREZ-NOUS DU MAL ("Deliver Us from Evil") by Frédéric Dard (whose voluminous work was most popularly filmed by director Robert Hossein in THE WICKED GO TO HELL, 1955, and BLONDE IN A WHITE CAR, 1958) and adapted by Jean Redon (EYES WITHOUT A FACE) was Molinaro’s feature film debut and it’s a corker.
BACK TO THE WALL was Molinaro's first feature film and it's hard to think of a more audacious, fully realized debut. The film's first 17m is a tour-de-force, unfolding with almost no dialogue; the only sound we get is incidental and does not pertain to the events unfolding in the foreground. The film opens with gripping music as a snap-brimmed, trench-coated man (Gérard Oury) exits a palatial villa and heads out for a night ride, whose spectral glide through the city streets quietly underpins the main titles. He goes into the city, dons dark gloves and enters a stranger's apartment, where he either murders the male tenant or discovers his corpse. (The scene cuts away briefly to a comic counterpoint in the building's lobby at the critical moment.) Either way, our intruder then proceeds to meticulously dispose of the corpse, and we are almost 20m into the film before he takes us into his confidence with some furtive, savory narration.
Jeanne Moreau (in the same year she made THE LOVERS and ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS) stars as Gloria, the wife of wealthy industrialist Jacques Decrey (Oury) who learns she is having a romantic affair with a young actor Yves Normand (Philippe Nicaud). Decrey, having the confidence of wealth and position, decides to make his duplicitous mate suffer by blackmailing the actor and then the pair of them, forcing them into a situation of mental cruelty that turns worse as his wife has to begin taking money from her husband to pay her supposed blackmailer. The supporting cast includes fine performances by Claire Maurier (as Ghislaine, an overlooked barmaid who also loves Yves) and the difficult-to-identify actors who play the quirky private detective hired by Decrey and his wife, who flaunts her infidelities in his face. Gorgeously photographed with impressively deep blacks by Robert Lefebvre (whose career ranged from CASQUE D’OR to GIRL’S DORMITORY and several José Benazeraf films including I AM FRIGID… WHY?), BACK TO THE WALL is a Hitchcockian noir masterpiece whose reputation stands to soar in light of this new release.
Remarkably, this praise is (if anything) truer of WITNESS IN THE CITY, which came along a couple of films later in Molinaro’s career. A star vehicle for Lino Ventura, here playing a wounded man on the run, this is an atmospheric suspense piece to beat most others, scripted by the famous crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (LES DIABOLIQUES, VERTIGO, EYES WITHOUT A FACE), photographed by Henri Decäe and drenched in voluptuous jazz by Barney Wilen, a tenor saxophonist who had previously worked with Miles Davis on the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS. (The Barney Wilen Quintet features Kenny Clarke, Kenny Dorham, Paul Rovere and Duke Jordan.) Again, the film opens with a stunning set-piece as yet another scheming industrialist (Jacques Berthier) commits a murder by forcing a woman (an early, brief appearance by Françoise Brion) to her death from a speeding train car. When the suave, contemptible killer is declared innocent of this crime in a court of law, the dead woman’s husband Ancelin (Ventura)—in another magnificently sustained, mostly silent sequence—enacts his revenge and meticulously stages the murder scene as a suicide by hanging. (The sudden introduction of heavy percussion during this scene anticipates the murder-jazz vibe of Quincy Jones' score for IN COLD BLOOD, 1968.) On his way out of the house, Ancelin is surprised by a taxi driver summoned to the house by a prior call. The driver narrowly escapes being hushed by a bullet, and the remainder of the film documents Ancelin’s attempts to hail the right taxi and silence the only witness to his act of justice.
The film proceeds virtually without a traditional hero for its first half-hour, long enough for us to invest our conflicted concerns in Ancelin's’s fate for the remainder of the film. This early part of the film is also the more traditionally stylized. Then, with the introduction of taxi driver Lambert (Franco Fabrizi) and his switchboard operator girlfriend Liliane (JULIET OF THE SPIRITS’ Sandra Milo), the film takes a more documentarian turn to authentic locations and our traditional hero turns out to be just one charismatic face among many, all of them night drivers for Radio-Taxi of Paris. (This was an actual company employing some 400 drivers, who are thanked in the credits for their production assistance.) It’s unusual for a noir film to use night scenes to generate such a warm and prevalent sense of bonhomie and brotherhood, and when one of their own is injured in the line of duty, the other drivers (led by veteran actor Robert Dalban) band together to track down and apprehend Ancelin, some of them not emerging from their mission unscathed. The idea of an entire taxi squad mobilizing to stop someone who has harmed one of their own puts a surprisingly upbeat spin on a reel-long climax that recalls the resolution of Fritz Lang’s M (1930), and the film is thrilling in the way it captures an automobile's careening, almost three-dimensional prowling of the city by night. This is one of the very best films to carry the Boileau-Narcejac brand.
The second disc also includes trailers for BACK TO THE WALL, LES LIASONS DANGEREUSES '60, VIVA MARIA!, THE VALACHI PAPERS, A PAIN IN THE ASS and ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES, which generally feature Moreau, Ventura or Molinaro. I'd be derelict in my duty if I didn't mention that this release's QC shows some carelessness, with occasional typos in its subtitling and some notably inaccurate accounting of the films' running times, which are actually more generous than they read. But these are minor quibbles considering that the set presents us with beautiful presentations of three major discoveries in this genre, each of which whets the appetite for more of the same.
If you're drawn to films of human conflict, style and emotion, consider FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION an essential purchase.
(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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