GOING OUT WITH A FRENCH TWIST |

“The Man You Love to Hate” Takes Charge As The French Had A Name For It Takes A Final Bow

by Owen Field

—EIGHTEEN more films…that close out a remarkable series.

—THIRTEEN stars who embody the still-underseen world of French film noir…

—THE familiar—Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Danielle Darrieux.

—THE festival rediscoveries, rediscovered one more time—Robert Hossein, Henri Vidal, Dany Carrel, Françoise Arnoul, Raf Vallone.

—THE “monstres sacres”—Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Madeleine Robinson.

AND…”The Man you Love to Hate.”

THAT’s right. One of the great hidden secrets in a 10-year, 155-film festival that has rewritten the history of film noir is that Erich von Stroheim—one of cinema’s foremost maudit figures, legendary for his fall from grace—turns out to have been a significant star in the long-hidden world of French film noir.

“It’s eerily appropriate,” admits Don Malcolm (the renegade programmer who, like von Stroheim, has spent plenty of time on a “lost continent” over the past decade).

IT turns out you could make an entire FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT festival out of the appearances in French noir made by von Stroheim…

[Films underlined will screen in FRENCH ’24 & those in BOLD are von Stroheim appearances screened in previous years]

1937 MARTHE RICHARD

1937 LA GRANDE ILLUSION (Renoir)

1937 MADEMOISELLE DOCTEUR (Pabst)

1937 L’ALIBI (Chenal)

1938 L’AFFAIRE LAFARGUE (Chenal)

1938 LES DISPARUS DE ST-AGIL (Jaque)

1938 GIBRALTAR (Otsep)

1939 LE MONDE TREMBLERA

1939 PIÈGES (Siodmak)

1939/1942 MACAO, L’ENFER DE JEU (Delannoy)

1940 MENACES… (Gréville)

1940 TEMPETE

1946 LA FOIRE AUX CHIMERES (Chenal)

1948 LA DANSE DE MORT (Cravenne)

1949 LE SIGNAL ROUGE

1949 PORTRAIT D’UN ASSASSIN

1953 MINUIT…QUAI DE BERCY

1953 L’ENVERS DU PARADIS (Gréville)

1953 ALERTE AU SUD

1955 SERIE NOIRE

FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT ’24 has more than doubled the number of “von Stroheim noirs” presented to Roxie Theater audiences.

We’ll get back to That Man You Love to Hate shortly—

First, let’s examine Part Two’s overall design…

It begins with two days for FRENCH’s “film club”—the loyal subscribers that kept the series in play after the pandemic.

“BLACK FRIDAY evening” (November 29) kicks off with von Stroheim: the first of two double features devoted to him—the “flawed couple” noir LA DANSE DE MORT (The Dance of Death) and the dynamic noir/science fiction hybrid LE MONDE TREMBLERA (The World Will Shake).

But hunkier actors—Robert Hossein, Raf Vallone, and Henri Vidal—take over on SATURDAY (November 30), reminding us that these handsome heartthrobs can act up a storm. Lust, betrayal, and murder dominate the matinee films, with Hossein stepping up his usual deadpan persona as an eccentric, relentless detective in LE MEURTRIER (Enough Rope). Vallone is broodingly macho in LE PIEGE (No Escape), a steamy potboiler that reminds us just how sexy French noir was in the late 50s.

The doomed Vidal (dead at 40) is another Malcolm favorite, and we get one of his best performances opposite an electrifying Daniele Delorme in LE JEUNE FOLLE (Desperate Decision), a most unusual film from Yves Allegret, set in Ireland during “the troubles.” It kicks off an evening triple bill that traces Vidal’s physical decline (his addiction issues would take their toll—and take his life at the end of the 50s).

“He’s a doomed hunk in QUAI DE GRENELLE (The Strollers),” Don notes, “and a doomed husk in LA BETE A L’AFFUT (The Beast At Bay).” Despite the ravages of time and addiction, however, Vidal’s performance doesn’t suffer: some even suggest it improves! All in all, it’s a fascinating second look at a criminally forgotten actor.

SUNDAY (December 1) starts with the return of von Stroheim, who has a more “in the pocket” role in L’ALIBI (The Alibi), where he’s a ruthless, murdering con-man. (It’s the first of von Stroheim’s three collaborations with pivotal French noir director Pierre Chenal.)

Last (but arguably best of all) is von Stroheim’s turn as an enigmatic schoolteacher in Christian-Jaque’s innovative “boys’ adventure noir” LES DISPARUS DE SAINT-AGIL (Boys’ School), a paranoia-laden tale set in a boys’ school during World War I. Decked out in a bushy brushcut instead of his trademark chrome dome, von Stroheim radiates state-of-the-art character actor chops in a performance that is simultaneously sinister and poignant.

Les disparus de St. Agil (1938) - IMDb

Sunday’s “triple double feature” day continues with the conclusion of FRENCH 24’s showcase for director André Cayatte, whose work takes new turn in his 1960s films. LE GLAIVE ET LA BALANCE (Two Are Guilty) clusters an international cast of intense young actors (Anthony Perkins, Jean-Claude Brialy, Renato Salvatore) in a flashback-laden courtroom drama. Only two of the accused are guilty—and the film keeps us guessing right up to the very end…

PIEGE POUR CENDRILLON (Trap for Cinderella), an edgy adaptation of Sebastian Japrisot’s haunted novel of identity fracture, contains a courageous, flashy but nuanced performance by the exotic French-Vietnamese actress Dany Carrel as an amnesiac who survives a murder attempt…but doesn’t know if she is the murderer or the intended victim!

Sunday evening provides yet another intriguing gearshift that long-time FRENCH followers have come to expect from Don—another canny dive into the forgotten diva-world of Jeanne Moreau.

“One could argue that THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT’s real mission is to reposition Moreau’s career,” Malcolm notes, “and that wouldn’t be inaccurate. I think we’ve found the sweet spot with this double bill that straddles her emergence as the Nouvelle Vague diva.”

As usual, Don presents this premise in inverse order, showing Moreau’s full-fledged turn as a denizen of “casino noir” in Jacques Demy’s LA BAIE DES ANGES (Bay of Angels)—a platinum blonde compulsive gambler who takes an impressionable young man (Claude Mann) for quite a ride. The film made a bigger splash as an “arthouse” rediscovery in the 1990s than in its initial 1963 release, but it’s all but forgotten again. (Don suggests that “singular monetization” of such films has actually made them more fungible.)

He follows it with Moreau’s overlooked turn as an unfaithful wife in 1958’s LE DOS AU MUR (Back To The Wall), the gloriously mordant noir debut of director Edouard Molinaro, one of the stalwarts of what Don calls “the last wave” of French noir (1957-66), which operated in the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague with a wide-ranging panache that the FRENCH shows have relentlessly uncovered since their inception in 2014. “It’s entirely possible to prefer Moreau’s performance here to ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS,” Don notes, “and I recall many viewers saying so back in 2015 when we first screened LE DOS AU MUR.” (Full disclosure: your author was one of them!)

MONDAY evening (December 2) is the festival’s dedicated “Night of Gabin,” where France’s greatest cinema icon works his simple but mysterious magic over and over again. An early start (5:30pm) permits a triple bill of “Jean Gabin and His Women”, capturing the ranges of romantic noir that he could embody with nuances so subtle that they seem non-existent. His early-50s penchant for double roles is covered in LEUR DERNIÈRE NUIT (Their Last Night), where the cover for the standard-issue criminal mastermind is (get this…) being a librarian. The great Madeleine Robinson is given her last ingenue(ish) role, and it’s a magically understated romantic pas de deux until the mastermind makes a mistake and we get a late-term thriller as a bonus.

Romance turns cold and dark in LA VÉRITÉ SUR BÉBÉ DONGE (The Truth About Our Marriage), where Gabin is a clueless cad poisoned by his wife and spends a generous dollop of time discovering why his gushing young bride (Danielle Darrieux, still luminous but tilting precipitously toward the deep freeze) has decided to do him in. Director Henri Decoin takes a perverse Georges Simenon tale and makes it even darker, with stellar results.

Gabin has a string of May-December romances throughout his 50s films, but none is better than DES GENS SANS IMPORTANCE (People of No Importance), where his love interest is Françoise Arnoul, whose sexiness has always obscured her immense acting talent. Of course Gabin is married with three kids, one of whom is a saucy and defiant Dany Carrel, who creates havoc for the story in more ways than one. “It might be the template for those films that people say can only be made in France,” Don says with a sly smile.

FINALLY, on TUESDAY (December 3)…the finale—the final finale, reprising the festival’s very first double bill, presented on November 14, 2014, featuring two blonde vixens, one of whom happens to be Brigitte Bardot. It’s also a Henri-Georges Clouzot double bill, another feature of Don’s renegade approach—where the lesser-known films are defiantly thrust into the spotlight, encouraging (or, rather, demanding) that audiences revisit pre-conceived and received “wisdom” about a director’s oeuvre.

MANON, the most operatic of Clouzot’s films, somehow seems even more of the current world moment, with lust, betrayal, political intrigue, and a more heightened level of darkness than what Clouzot appended to his thrillers, which now seem more contrived. (Or, as Don puts it: “Cecile Aubry is more organically explosive in MANON than the dynamite is in THE WAGES OF FEAR.”) Both it and LA VÉRITÉ (The Truth), the grisly, gloriously overwrought “referendum on Brigitte Bardot’s sexuality” (Claude Chabrol’s words, not mine—but even Don, notoriously skeptical about the Nouvelle Vague, agrees with him) just go for the jugular with respect to society’s compulsive, corrosive need to scapegoat. (In the case of LA VÉRITÉ, the lingering irony is that Bardot tried to kill herself after becoming involved in an abusive relationship with the actor playing her abusive boyfriend in the film!)

If that’s not a full-circle moment, then such things literally don’t exist. But the lingering value of the decade-long FRENCH series is that the films that virtually no one knew existed are now beginning to change French film history and the history of film noir itself.

What about Don’s long-awaited book? It will be available on December 3 with a book signing that evening. This limited edition publication showcases all of the 155 films screened in the festival’s many programs, covers the true “dawn of film noir” (four seminal films in 1932), creates a fascinating (if somewhat complicated) comparative framework (French noir vs. American noir) for what he calls “noir tonality,” and catalogues the myriad individuals (directors, writers, actors/actresses, cinematographers) who were key players in the creation of classic French noir.