p Arys Nissotti d Julien
Duvivier w Charles Spaak, Julien Duvivier ph
Jules Kruger, Marc Fessard ed Marthe Poncin m
Maurice Yvain art Jacques Krauss
Cast: Jean Gabin (Jean), Charles Vanel (Charles), Raymond Aimos
(Raymond, aka. ‘Tintin), Viviane Romance (Gina), Rafael Medina (Mario),
Micheline Cheirel (Huguette), Charles Granval, Fernard Charpin (gendarme),
Robert Lynen (René), Jacques Baumer (Monsieur Jubette), Raymond Cordy
(l’ivrogne), Marcelle Géniat (grandmother). (France
1936 94m) not on DVD
One of the flagship films of the
Popular Front of the mid thirties, like Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
it captured the utopian mood of that movement in a nutshell. It’s not now
as well regarded as the Renoir, and certainly not seen remotely as often.
Like many Duvivier films of the period, it’s become unfashionable, marginalised
in histories of the French cinema. Of course it’s political stuff, and it
has been accused, not without some cause, of drifting a little too cosily into
melodrama in its last half, and yet it’s a film that thoroughly satisfies in
the watching and its faults are to be dwelt on retrospectively.
We begin at the Hotel King of
England, little more than a glorified tenement building for the unemployed,
where five men are drawn together through friendship and fate, as they held a
tenth stake in a lottery ticket which pays up its million franc dividend.
The five men thus have a 20,000FF prize each coming their way and they make individual
plans. Jacques wants to go to Canada and travel, Raymond wants to go to
the country, Charles to get a small wood workshop, Mario to marry his beloved
Huguette. Then there’s Jean, who suggests a communal trust between the
five where they pool resources to buy a plot of land on the Seine and
build/renovate a dance hall. Things begin quite promisingly, but Jacques
is soon gone, saying he still wants to travel, but really he loves Huguette and
can’t bear to watch her with Mario. As if that’s not enough, Raymond
falls fatally from the roof in an accident and, as piece de resistance,
another wrecking ball appears on the horizon in the shape of Charles’ poisonous
ex-, Gina, a nude model with no desire for anything but herself and her
needs.
In some ways the film could be seen
as misogynistic, as the comradeship of the quintet is torn asunder by two
women, and yet the method isn’t the thing, it’s the fact that people do drift
apart. At one point early in the film, Charles, Jean and Mario refer to
themselves as the Three Musketeers, and like Dumas’ inseparables, separation is
inevitable as individual pride and destiny overrides the collective.
Mario gets his Huguette, but it leaves Gina to drive a stake through the heart
between Jean and the weak-minded Charles. In the end, an ideal is only as
good as the men it holds together, and no bond is unbreakable because human
beings are frail creatures. What’s more, brotherhood in poverty is easy,
but when there’s money involved, all bets are off. That human frailty, it
might be said, was one of the reasons that the Popular Front itself was doomed
to failure.
Little wonder that Duvivier was so
disturbed when a happy ending was filmed against his wishes (the sad version,
only surviving from a German print with burnt in German subtitles, thankfully
survives on some prints, including my own). Yet there’s no doubting that
the first half, with essences of René Clair personified by the presence of
Raymond Cordy, is the most joyful as it deals with dreams not realities.
These “bums who look for work yet pray they don’t find any” are, in
every sense of the word, comrades. And much of the credit for that must
go to the playing of the cast. Gabin and Vanel are beyond perfect as the
pair driven apart, Romance was never better as the sexy temptress with the soul
of a leach and Aimos captures the spirit of the enterprise as Tintin, whose
death appropriately foreshadows the imploding of the dream. What makes
the film most memorable, though, and allows one to forgive the melodrama, is
that it makes tangible the feeling of comradeship in a single smell, of wood
shavings, of a fresh coat of paint, in the country air and the drifting waft of
beef and onion stew on an open fire. Substitute for your own aroma of
choice, we all have them.
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