STREAMING ON YOUTUBE - Barrie Pattison unearths some rare gems of popular French cinema - MONSIEUR LA SOURIS (Georges Lacombe, 1942), LA ROSIERE DES HALLES (Jean De Limur, 1935)

 Boulevard Cinema.

There has always been an accumulation of pre-fifties French Boulevard Cinema on YouTube. Only recently I found a site offering five hundred from 1930 to 1950 titles. It was like having the Paris Cinémathèque  in the front room. Well not quite as good as it sounded. There were a couple dozen ring-ins - Belgian movies, dubbed Hollywood regulars and the copies could best be described as fair. However a chance to delve into the output of Marc Allegret, Victor Tournjanski and Henri Decoin was a sizeable come-on - even without workable subtitles. The machine-generated ones just conflict with any attempt to follow what’s on screen.

My French mates are often dismissive of such material, calling it theatrical and crude - not unlike the attitude English speakers often take to the Jeanette McDonald - Nelson Eddy films which their olds used to adore. 

But now I’ve lost them, as happens with YouTube favorites, which is frustrating. Here are a couple I descended on before they went away.

Monsieur La Souris, a Simenon adaptation directed by Georges Lacombe in 1942, starts reasonably with hobo Raimu escorting visitors to le Bar Nil under his umbrella in studio rain, only to find a car door he opens reveals a dead man. He goes to fetch club Chasseur Émile Genevois but when they double back the car drives off.  Raimu picks up a wallet at the spot and his con man buddy Aimos (Goupi mains rouges) concocts the scheme of turning the money in it over to the cops and saying he found it in the Metro to collect it without problems. Raimu hides the wallet behind the seat cushions in a cafe and that doesn't work out all that well. Aimos’ three card trick is a similar failure for Raimu trying it at a Street Kermesse like the one in Panique.

Turns out the dead man is noted financier and his associates are at one another’s throats while detectives  (René) Bergeron and Paul Amiot (Le commissaire Lucas) investigate and the dead magnate’s family Aimé Clariond  and Micheline Francey  accuse one another over payments represented by a cheque and receipt in the missing wallet. Meanwhile Raimu encounters (at the base of the Eiffel Tower, one of the few locations enlisted) a mother and brattish child who appear in the photo in the wallet and Raimu drinks with their neighbor.

Raimu, Monsieur La Souris

There’s some not very convincing studio material - a metro station interior and contrasted homes and Raimu comes up with the “chasse aux lions” plan where he will act as the sacrificial goat to draw out the criminals, which goes better than he and cops anticipated when the bad hats abduct him in a bogus police raid while the real police pursuit is co-ordinated from a Simenon Police Central Communications room (much less imposing than the one in Maigret) while gendarmes phone in the progress of the kidnap car from street Police call boxes. 

Back at headquarters, Raimu is congratulated but gratitude doesn’t run to giving him a reward and he slopes off with Aimos, who is the only one of the faceless support cast to register. The film’s one real strength is Raimu’s restrained comic performance - resisting the kid’s assertion that he’s badly dressed or failing to execute the scams Aimos devises for him.

The film has the drabness of 1940s French cinema which would persist after the liberation. Shots go together awkwardly and the mix of poor studio and location is distracting. Georges Auric’s score is subdued. Lacombe ‘s Dernier des six (script by Clouzot) is much more involving but he never did fulfill the promise of his l928 Documentary short La Zone.

Slightly more interesting is Jean de Limur’s 1935 La rosière des Halles (The Virgin of the Markets). De Limur is a question mark outside his own turf, having started his directing career in Hollywood with the excellent Jeanne Eagles version of The Letter before re-locating to France where he spent his life making A features that nobody thought worthy of sub-titles.
    
Here at last is one of them. You want to know what a French farce looked like on its own turf, this offers one with home town favorites who probably imagined their work would vanish after it played the provinces. It’s moderately ambitious - recognisable featured players, a crowded dance hall sequence and the final matte roof wide shot of Les Halles, though no one would believe the studio vegetable stall where Paul Azaïs and Raymond Cordy compete for the attention of cook Paulette Dubost (La Régle de jeu) with greenery is part of that. Country girl Dubost takes the train to Paris meeting jeune premier Pierre Stéphen (“leading man - is that dangerous?”) in the train buffet car.

She’s been hired at the home of screen writer Pierre Larquey (Le Corbeau) who is having problems. His woman of the world wife Alice Field, who reads romance novels in their bed, is having an affair with Stéphen and Pierre’s producers don’t think he can write working people dialogue.

The market trader-suitors Cordy (A nous la liberté) and Azaïs (with Field in Cette vieille canaille), doing cut price Gabin with the cap on the back of his head, both give Paulette invitations to Le Bal des Porteurs. 

Failing at copying down snatches of conversation in the market, Pierre decides an uneasy Paulette is working class and tries rehearsing his romantic scene with her. Field sees them, assuming they are having an affair. She decamps for Stéphen’s flat with the reversible picture frame - family one side, glamor photos the other. Spotting the ball invite, Pierre gets Paulette up in his wife’s revealing silk gown (“Oh, les belles robes!”) - jokes about her being reluctant to undress. 

They hit the ball where Pierre’s producer shows up and Field and Stéphen follow with the other ticket. Paulette gets drunk and Pierre has to take her home putting her to bed in his room. Field shows up and her suspicions are confirmed finding their cook there so she heads off to Stépane’s flat but, by an arrangement natural for one of these, she finds Paulette has been shifted to his bed - Alice twice betrayed in one night!

Things resolve in the morning with Azaïs’s mum Madeleine Guitty throwing her shawl round Paulette’s bare shoulders and accepting her as daughter in law material while Field and Larquey prove to have an unlikely depth of tolerance. “Tout ça arangera.”

It’s not particularly amusing - or daring - or slick but it gets by and probably played to Larquey’s fans well enough. De Limur registers as ham fisted in the early scenes, though he occasionally manages a nice piece of camera work but he comes into his own in the ambitiously staged ball where the worker bouncers throw Larquey out and Dubost falls in the pool while imitating the dancer. Several protracted tracking shots including one through successive walls & the odd bit of nice staging - substituting a tea spoon for the apartment key that Larquey is fingering.  There is no evidence of the sophistication of The Letter. Vincent Scotto’s score is nice.

Larquey retains a comedy following and the film will surprise those who only know his dramatic turns.

I can’t say my curiosity about French popular cinema has been sated yet.