Le Sang des bêtes
A certain wistful, silly, “romantic” notion
dispelled.
The horse, the cow, calves, sheep, slaughtered and
butchered professionally “at the gates of Paris”.
A sure foundation for some of Herzog’s ironies.
“L’Héautontimorouménos” for an epigraph.
Hôtel des Invalides
Where
the gravely wounded go, after France’s wars.
Franju has very
little of this, owing to necessity.
He takes a tour
of the Army Museum, from suits of armor to World War I, casualty numbers there.
Napoleon’s tomb.
St.-Louis-des-Invalides,
where the soldiers pray.
Their children
singing as they depart.
La Première Nuit
L’amour à dix ans, “et la séparation.”
Jacob’s ladder, an escalator in
the Métro.
Two trains that
pass in the night, score by Georges Delerue.
La tête contre les murs
A Dantean view
of mental illness. Dr. Valmont’s psychiatric hospital is a living hell, Dr. Emery has all
three levels in his.
But the punchline is from Kafka, especially as
analyzed by Welles in The Trial.
And so much for the problems of maladjusted youth,
with a hundred endings possible and only one indicated.
Striking score by Maurice Jarre.
Les Yeux sans Visage
A metaphor of the
Occupation.
The roots of Les
Yeux sans Visage are in Hollywood and fairly evident. The opening scene
pays homage to Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and also prepares Dr.
Génessier’s lecture on heterografting by radiation and exsanguination.
The doctor is
taken from a Robert McKimson cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny (Hot Cross Bunny),
which drew him from a Three Stooges short directed by Edward Bernds (A Bird
in the Head). There is probably an earlier avatar.
The second most
striking thing about Franju is the bariolage of his style. Delicate night
photography, day exteriors like Henri Cartier-Bressons and André Kertészs
projected on the screen, occur amidst straightforward dramatics in all manner
of styles, from Dreyer to Welles. This gives him great flexibility, like a
boxer’s stance. Each shot is unmodulated, states itself, and hies to the next
one.
Dr. Génessier has
disfigured his daughter in a car wreck, and now kidnaps girls to supply her
with a replacement face. She wears a pretty mask without coloration, and
Maurice Jarre has a very pretty waltz to accompany her walk down the corridor,
looking like the model for Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Pondering her
condition, she looks up at a bland painting of a woman with doves, an empty and
superficial painting.
Meanwhile, Franju
gives you incomparable views of Paris and environs, just a setup and a few
hundred frames, that’s it. A very novelistic treatment of description, without
moving the camera, even. Very informative.
Nothing vague
about him, he pounces on his moment. When the first girl is chloroformed, he
records her last look at consciousness. The bland portrait is prepared by
having a good one in the background of another scene.
The doctor’s dogs
are kenneled in two rows of ironwork cages, forming a shot like the galley of The
Magic Christian. The surgery was certainly the inspiration of Larry
Peerce’s Ash Wednesday, with the face besieged by hemostats like
Gulliver in Lilliput.
Subtle touches in
the sound are another hallmark, as the sound of the dogs heard from the garage
or just outside the house, or the sound of a body being dumped in a cemetery
vault, evoking a poem by Robert Frost.
Another painter
of doves, Picasso, figures as background in one scene. There are nuances of The
Island of Dr. Moreau. As the second girl is waylaid, signs reading SURGERY
and PROSTHESIS and ORTHOPEDICS can be seen behind her. A joke echoed by Godard
has a nurse repeatedly requesting her to open and close her eyes in a test.
A crackpot he may
be, but the doctor is displayed as a medical man of feeling, after his fashion,
weary and sad.
A fine bit of
detective work brings the matter to a head. The doctor’s daughter kills his
assistant (Alida Valli, superb), sets free the sacrificial victim, and sics the
dogs on her father. She walks into the night with her pet doves flying about
her.
Pleins feux sur l’assassin
Death
of a Knight of Malta, “Funérailles d’antan”,
among menhirs.
Behind the
opening credits, approach to the castle by water.
The stunning
effect of the disparition
is a complete analysis of Cocteau (Orphée).
One
of Maurice Jarre’s great Franju scores.
A
son et lumière
on the lovers in the castle, to defray expenses while awaiting the discovery of
the body.
Among
the heirs, another complete analysis.
La Bête’s
voice is heard over the tourist loudspeakers, an owl saves the day like Judex.
The assassin
strikes again, until the bright lights hit him, and a bullet in the leg.
Thérèse Desqueyroux
A supreme work of
the French cinema, like Les Yeux sans Visage (and no doubt La tête
contre les murs) a satirical view of the Occupation (cf. Clément’s Jeux
interdits).
The young provincial
girl has a crush on the blonde next door and marries the blonde’s brother to be
near her, there follows a tale of resistance and suffering and finally
liberation, in Paris.
Bosley Crowther’s
priceless New York Times review ends this way, “the context of the drama
is neither sufficiently sympathetic nor moral to justify and render endurable
the long time it takes to unfold.”
Judex
The murdering
blackmailing plundering banker Favraux must be punished mercilessly.
His honest
daughter forgoes her inheritance, melting the heart of Judex.
And so begins the
second, mirror plot. The governess, now discharged, plots to secure the basis
of Favraux’s power and fortune.
The superb key is
from Fantômas, the two nuns and the empty coffin.
Score by Jarre, pictures
by Fradetal, the gift of Feuillade.
Thomas l’Imposteur
The astounding story of the princess who wanted to help the wounded in 1914
and the general’s nephew “whose name was an open sesame at the Ministry of
War.”
Cocteau-Fradetal-Auric.
“How much time
does it take war to eat a town?”
Il s’agit d’un tout
petit village. “Qu’est-ce que vous dites?”
Naval ships Fantômas, Mort Subite.
Rostand, verses. La Marseillaise, “unh, je ne connais pas
ça...”
As Mallarmé says, “un astre, en vérité...”
Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, “blandly sardonic
and tedious”.
Variety, “offbeat, worldly commentary on war.”
Time Out, “compulsive, and utterly absorbing.”
La Faute de l’Abbé
Mouret
If
there were no France, it would have to be invented for this film, in which a
young cleric out in the wilds of post-Revolutionary Empire (Louis Napoleon) rurality makes his way “as happy as God in France.”
Truffaut
has the trick of this in his least-regarded film, La Chambre verte.
From Melville’s Léon Morin, Prêtre to Dmytryk’s The Reluctant Saint is another
progression.
Zola-Fradetal-Wiener.
Vincent
Canby at his huffiest and most fatuous cited “a series of wrong decisions that
began with Mr. Franju’s desire to make the movie... a mixture of social realism
and Walt Disney” (Zola too is blameworthy, “whose occasional flights into a
kind of naturalized romanticism haven’t worn well”), he saw it as The Demise of Father Mouret
(New York Times).
Nuits rouges
A major analysis
of Pleins feux sur l’assassin in
Eastmancolor, right from the opening scene in the Marets
du Temple (the verses on this map read,
|
the city makes this world redundant herein find a burgeoning world with peoples and with goods unfurled that in everything’s abundant). |
“Non nobis”, reads
the shield of the Knight Templar, not too distantly recalling Olivier’s Henry V.
Toujours Feuillade.
“That old
wheeze,” laughs aged faux Mademoiselle Ermance in the
backroom of her shop, Au Bonheur des Dames, when the Knight’s penurious valet
mentions the Order’s treasure.
Below the shop, Le Visage sans Yeux,
or what’s mine is yours, surgically brain-dead assassins.
Ermance flips her wig and dons her mask, red, she is a
man.
Inspector Kras is Commissaire Sorbier (Gert Froebe),
superintendent in the subtitles.
Franju is
responsible for the “conception musicale”
and of course the greatly amusing sound track in general, an element not or not
entirely in Feuillade’s hands (Franju shoots in widescreen).
A
London pub for Des Esseintes. A story “so confusing that Sorbier
suspects everyone.” A brutal, delicate nightmare.
Séraphin Beauminon the Parnassian
dick, the Percy Dovetonsils of detectives, has his
virtues.
The
wreck of the Sancta Maria off the
coast of America in 1297 with gold for the Crusades. “The shallows exist...” A golden
key, “non nobis
Domine”.
Another disguise
is the spitting image of Jay Novello, the American actor (Gayle Hunnicutt is a
vicious homicidal henchwoman).
Absolute
genius. “Three
medallions, three wax seals... the key to the secret of this famous treasure,”
to be regarded “in a symbolic form, naturally.”
An
army, a labor force, a citizenry of vegetables in opposition,
surgically-created “robot men” ruled by “great minds”.
In fact, gray
faceless hairless men with red armbands marching leadenly in rags to kill,
commanded by a red-masked thief and murderer.
The
auction of the “wax seals” and other effects in the Knight’s estate. “L’Homme sans visage”,
even the dowsing from Pleins feux sur l’assassin.
A fool’s errand, the
villain’s quest, a trap laid by the Paris police.
“Alchemical
gold,” medallion, key, ciborium, “slightly radioactive.”
St.
Patrick’s Crypt, “Archæological Remains” where Professor Petrie, an eccentric
little Englishman, is assassinated for his part in the trap.
Au
Clairon de Sidi Brahim, the enemy lair at 13, Rue Fantôme. The Knights Templar launch a raid, the police
clean up.
Mademoiselle Ermance closes her shop and departs, with her niece.
“Hugely
beguiling”, in Time Out Film Guide’s
words.