MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Drole de Drame - Ein sonderbarer Fall [de])

France 1937
d: Marcel Carné
Éditions Montparnasse (Region 2 fr)

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At the centre of a farcical plot, scripted by Jacques Prévert from a novel by J Storer Clouston and supposedly set in London, is a mild, bumbling botanist (Simon), secretly the author of murder stories and accused of murdering his wife by the Bishop of Beckford (Jouvet), who disappears, reappears in disguise as a detective, and turns a table or two. Meanwhile a real killer goes happily about his business (Barrault, who murders butchers because he loves animals). Carné isn't renowned for his wacky temperament, and he fails to extract all the fun possible from such rich material. But there are plenty of piquant absurdities, from the proliferating milk bottles delivered by Aumont's lovelorn Express Dairy milkman, to the gents in Limehouse robbed of the flowers in their buttonholes (a typical Prévert touch). And Simon is marvellous.
— GB, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
This quasi-surreal spoof of Edwardian England and Sherlock Holmes by the creators of Children of Paradise is a mad delight, full of off-beat and anarchistic humor. An all-star cast is headed by Michel Simon as the head of a bourgeois family—by day, an eccentric botanist, by night the writer of crime stories inspired by his daughter, who hears them from her lover, the milkman. Louis Jouvet is the hypocritical vicar who is convinced that detective story writers are potential murderers and brings Scotland Yard onto the scene. Out of the melée emerges William Kramps (Jean-Louis Barrault), a comical homicidal killer who loves animals but frightens the botanist out of his wits.
— PFA
•••••
Marcel Carné, director, and Jacques Prévert, writer, dip into Mack Sennett, but they serve up their farce with a surrealist sauce. This French comedy–satire on the English mania for detective fiction is improbably set in Edwardian England—and the English of the film include Jean–Louis Barrault as the detective story reader who decides to commit his own perfect crime by murdering the author (Michel Simon); Louis Jouvet as a clergyman ... etc. ... For a long time the Americans sinned against the French by buying their movies for remakes and destroying the originals. Now the French are beginning to feed on themselves: this is probably your last chance to look at the 1937 version of "Bizarre, Bizarre". ... It's hard to believe a new version could ever match that cast or recapture the madly improbable atmosphere.
— Pauline Kael, Cinema Guild, January/February 1957 and July/August 1958

Le Quai des brumes

(Hafen im Nebel [de])

France 1938
d: Marcel Carné
StudioCanal Vidéo (Region 2 fr)

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Hôtel du Nord

(Hôtel du Nord [de] )

France 1938
d: Marcel Carné
mk2 / Warner Home Vidéo France (Region 2 fr)

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A very likeable film, but for once denied a Jacques Prévert script, Carné's 'poetic realism' seems a trifle thin and hesitant in this populist yarn about a sleazy Parisian hotel and its inhabitants. While the sad young lovers (Annabella, Aumont) defy their jobless future in a suicide pact, Arletty and Jouvet run cynically away with the film as a pair of hardbitten rogues. But the real star is Trauner, whose studio sets - the mournful canal bank, the little iron bridge, the shabby rooms - are as amazingly evocative as Maurice Jaubert's score.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"Hôtel du Nord" was a surprisingly unseasonal film to be offered as a Christmas attraction at a New York art house in 1940, but new French product was hard to come by in those days. The author based his original novel on experience he underwent by growing up in the hotel that his parents operated, and this underlying realism may account for it being more gritty and less poetic than the usual Marcel Carné film. (The absence of Jean Gabin may also be a factor in this.) Yet with all its sordid underpinnings, it is finally a slightly more hopeful film than Carné's "Le Jour se lève", which followed a year later, and which reflected the almost passive pessimism brought on by the inevitability of World War Two. "Hôtel du Nord" has long been unseen in this country, and this print, brought in specially from Europe, is untitled, though a synopsis/translation will be provided. Quite apart from the superb cast, all of the writing and other creative talents-Jaubert on music for example, Trauner's art direction-are a stimulating reminder of the great days of French cinema.
— William K. Everson
•••••
In the Carné canon, "Hôtel du Nord" is usually eclipsed by "Le Quai des brumes", "Le Jour se lève" (1939) and "Les Enfants du paradis" (1945), largely because of Prévert's absence. Jeanson's dialogue is indeed broader, the film more comic. In this respect, "Hôtel du Nord" is 'theatrical realism' rather than 'poetic realism'. But in the interaction of set, camerawork and Maurice Jaubert's restrained, moody music, "Hôtel du Nord" is typical of poetic realism. Its poetry is embodied in the superb set designed by Alexandre Trauner, a replica of one side of the Canal Saint-Martin, complete with bridges, punctuated by location shots of the canal and barges. The set is plainly artificial, yet still a microcosm of Paris which we enter with the young couple, the camera following them down the side of the bridge. (A reverse of this movement takes us out at the end of the film.) Graham Greene, who loved French cinema for knowing "the immense importance of the careful accessory", once wrote, "in 'Hôtel du Nord' we believe in the desperate lovers and the suicide pact on the brass bed in the shabby room, just because of the bicyclists on the quay, the pimp quarrelling with his woman in another room, and the First-Communion party."
"Hôtel du Nord" was shot during the Munich crisis and Carné lost technicians and cast members as they were drafted. Yet the resulting film is less historically grounded (and less bleak) than Dabit's novel. Social events such as strikes are a faint echo, as is the international situation (a young Spanish refugee is marginal to the story). Carné was more daring on the gender front. Characters may take the hackneyed appearance of pimps and prostitutes, but they are free of conventional morality. Edmond and Renée's brief interlude is clearly sexual. When it is over (and although Edmond is smitten), they both shrug it off without guilt. Adrien is a (for the time) rare sympathetic portrayal of a gay character. According to Edward Baron Turk, one scene (cut from most prints) shows a male resident molesting a child. But "Hôtel du Nord" had a positive social role in an unexpected way. Dabit's novel ends bitterly: the hotel is demolished by speculators. Carné's film, on the other hand, prevented the real Hôtel du Nord from being demolished. It is now a restaurant in what has become, alas, a fashionable area, offering "traditional French food" and a show bearing the inevitable title Atmosphère! Atmosphère!
— Ginette Vincendeau, BFI

Le Jour se lève

(Der Tag bricht an [de])

France 1939
d: Marcel Carné
StudioCanal Vidéo (Region 2 fr)

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Possibly the best of the Carné-Prévert films, certainly their collaboration at its most classically pure, with Gabin a dead man from the outset as his honest foundry worker, hounded into jealousy and murder by a cynical seducer, holes up with a gun in an attic surrounded by police, remembering in flashback how it all started while he waits for the end. Fritz Lang might have given ineluctable fate a sharper edge (less poetry, more doom), but he couldn't have bettered the performances from Gabin, Berry, Arletty, and (as the subject of Gabin's romantic agony) Laurent. Remade in Hollywood as "The Long Night" in 1947.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"The perfection of 'Le Jour se lève'," wrote Andre Bazin, "is that its symbolism never outweighs its realism but rather is complementary to it." From an apartment house in a populated working class suburb, a shot is heard. A man stumbles out, falls dead. His killer, locked in his attic flat, shoots again, and the police lay siege until daybreak. Francois (Jean Gabin) has until dawn to reconstruct for himself the events which led to this end. Alternating between the past narrative (in which Arletty plays a music hall performer who moves in with Francois) and the present moves of the police siege, "Le Jour se lève" tells its tale of "despair, inevitability of fate, and a working-class character unable to find his place in the world" (Jean Queval, BFI). Written by Jacques Prevert, "Le Jour se lève" is one of the great works of the French cinema, "A tragedy of purity and loneliness...allowing the inherent poetry to free itself and...drawing out the heart of the drama. It is in this sense that one can speak of 'poetic realism'" (Andre Bazin).
•••••
Carné was a sentimental fatalist, a melodramatic existentialist—but isn't that exactly the mixture of popular art and philosophy that conspired to make film noir?... Le Jour se lève is a testament to dead ends, despair, and suicide. It can never recover from the evil it has glimpsed. The work of [designer] Alexandre Trauner and [composer] Maurice Jaubert helps to intensify the enclosure of characters set up by Carné's deliberate but very beautiful scheme of close-ups.
— David Thomson
•••••
Apogée du film de studio où tout est reconstitué, mesuré au millimètre, tiré au cordeau pour produire l'effet et l'émotion recherchés. A son niveau le film manifeste un contrôle de l'image aussi complet que chez Fritz Lang ou que chez tel calligraphe japonais.
Cette méthode et ce soin sont propices à exprimer une certaine idée de la fatalité, qui est le sujet du film. Alors que chez Renoir, dans "Toni" par exemple, la tragédie jaillit à l'improviste comme d'un trop plein, d'un débordement d'émotion et de passions dans le cœur de l'homme et correspondent alors à une sorte de manifestation ultime de la liberté chez le personnage, la fatalité sociale mise en place chez Carné et Prévert ne laisse aucune chance au protagoniste. Ses actes sont pour ainsi dire programmés par tout son passé, ses rencontres, le décor et les circonstances de son existence quotidienne, éléments d'un engrenage qui va broyer sa vie.
Pour ajouter du poids de la fatalité, Carné innova en racontant son histoire à l'aide d'un trio de flash-backs. Peu de films avant lui avaient eu cette audace (on cite toujours "The power and the glory", 1933 de William K. Howard sur un scénario de Preston Sturges qui influença Welles pour "Citizen Kane"). En tous cas, il revient à Carné d'avoir su imposer ce type de récit au grand public. Carné a raconté dans son excellente autobiographie "La vie à belles dents", la naissance du scénario devenue légendaire. Un voisin inconnu, collectionneur de tableaux naïfs, Jacques Viot, lui apporta un jour un scénario intitulé Le jour se lève dont l'intrigue ne le passionna pas mais dont la construction toute en flash-backs, lui paru saisissante. Il demanda à Prévert d'abandonner un autre travail en cours qui avançait mal et Prévert se mit, avec réticence, à travailler avec Viot, lequel aurait également préféré travailler seul. Quant au décor non moins célèbre de l'hôtel de Gabin, il fut crée par Trauner d'après les photos prises à Paris pendant la préparation de "Hôtel du nord". Le décor de l'immeuble fut placé sur l'emplacement même du décor de l'hôtel du nord. Pour porter à son point d'intensité maximum l'aspect claustrophobique de la pièce où évolue Gabin, Carné exigea que le décor possède réellement quatre murs. Les acteurs et les techniciens ne pouvaient s'en extraire que par le haut.
— Jacques Lourcelles: Dictionnaire du cinéma

Les Enfants du paradis

(Kinder des Olymp [de] • Children of Paradise [en] )

France 1946
d: Marcel Carné
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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A marvellously witty, ineffably graceful rondo of passions and perversities animating the Boulevard du Crime, home of Parisian popular theatre in the early 19th century, and an astonishing anthill of activity in which mimes and mountebanks rub shoulders with aristocrats and assassins. Animating Jacques Prévert's script is a multi-layered meditation on the nature of performance, ranging from a vivid illustration of contrasting dramatic modes (Barrault's mime needing only gestures, Brasseur's Shakespearean actor relishing the music of words) and a consideration of the interchangeability of theatre and life (as Herrand's frustrated playwright Lacenaire elects to channel his genius into crime), to a wry acknowledgment of the social relevance of performance (all three men are captivated by Arletty's insouciant whore, who acts herselfout of their depth to achieve the protection of a Count, establishing a social barrier which Lacenaire promptly breaches in his elaborate stage management of the Count's murder). Flawlessly executed and with a peerless cast, this is one of the great French movies, so perfectly at home in its period that it never seems like acostume picture, and at over three hours not a moment too long. Amazing to recall that it was produced in difficult circumstances towards the end of the German Occupation during World War II.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
From the opening shots of the stream of humanity flowing down Paris's famous theater street, the Boulevard du Crime (nowadays the Boulevard du Temple) in the 1840s, when pantomime and melodrama were at a height, through its delicate yet elaborate tracing of the lives of the actors and thieves who live there, "Les Enfants du Paradis" has the authority of a great work of art. "This is unquestionably both Carné's and Prevert's masterpiece and overflows with art and intelligence" (G. Sadoul). The story unfolds around the beautiful actress, Garance (Arletty, in her best performance), and her rival lovers, the actor Lemaitre (Pierre Brasseur), the Count de Monteray (Louis Salou), and the mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault in the role he created, like Chaplin's tramp, for all posterity). That such a rich, flamboyant work could be made during the German Occupation is amazing, but perhaps less so when one considers the film with its subtle references to the "stifling humiliation felt by all France. French film cameras never took in true life more heroically than when everybody dressed up for his part in 'Children of Paradise' and played the evil and loss bizarrely present in himself and his haunts...." (U. Film Soc.)
•••••
The sad, elusive, and sublime presence of Garance is at the very heart of this film. Richard Roud praised Arletty's towering performance and called it "one of the greatest portraits of a woman in all of cinema (.) a performance for the ages." Garance casually invites Frederic into her bed minutes after Baptiste professes his deep love for her. To her, love is simple, as simple as the tune of a music box ("When I want to say yes, I can't say no"). After several years away, drawn back to the theatre by her desire to see Baptiste, the one man she truly loves, she confesses in a speech of quietly moving dignity: "I'm not sad, but not cheerful either. A little spring has broken in the music box. The music is the same but the tone is different." A complex and tragic character, Garance's easy devotion to the fleeting passions of love is innocent yet destructive; her flighty nature brings her a succession of moments filled with pleasure, yet the comfort of love eludes her. At the end of the film, when Baptiste runs into the carnival crowd, attempting unsuccessfully to catch up with the departing Garance, he is swallowed up by the "audience", he is one with them, unable to be anything other than what they are. We have grown accustomed to seeing him in the privileged space of the stage, gazed upon by the admiring audience, straining forward silently in their seats. We are not ready for this fall from the rarefied spotlight of the stage to the bustling anarchy of the oppressively celebratory carnival crowd. It is a descent from artifice to reality.
The invisible membrane between theatre and life is repeatedly ruptured in the film. When Frederic mocks the melodrama he plays in ("Brigands Inn"), he throws away his lines and turns the play into an acerbic farce, improvising lines that luxuriate reflexively in condemning the solemn pretensions of the play he is mocking. He then bounds off stage and appears in one of the audience boxes, and upon pleading, returns to the stage. When Baptiste runs into a blind beggar and befriends him, he discovers when they arrive at a tavern that the man has been "acting" blind. He is assuming the character of a sightless person to improve the quality of his performance on the street of life (and improve the state of his alms!). Lacenaire the murderer is also a public scribe. He assumes the character of his client and writes a love letter from the client's point of view. In these explorations, the film looks presciently forward to the mid-1950s theatre-as-life-as-theatre period of Renoir ("Golden Coach" and "French Can-Can") and Ophuls' piercing "Lola Montes". Perhaps the most crushing lesson to emerge from the theatre-life dialectic by film's end is probably this: Love and happiness are much more easily achieved in the indoor make-believe space of unreality than on the wide-open boulevard of life.
— Girish Shambu, Senses of Cinema January 2001
•••••
Ce monument du cinéma français n'a jamais connu d'éclipse auprès du public même durant la période assez longue (autour des années 50-70) où il était de bon ton de mépriser carné. On sait que l'idée du film s'imposa à Carné et à Prévert à la suite des discours enflammés que leur tenait Jean-Louis Barrault sur la personnalité de Debureau et sur certaines anecdotes de sa vie. Cependant Debureau n'est pas le personnage principal du film qui, à vrai dire, n'en comporte pas et préfère montrer l'entrelacs, le parcours croisés de plusieurs personnages, rêveurs ou somnambules qui traversent la réalité sur la pointe des pieds et même parfois à quelques centimètres au-dessus du sol.
Moitiés être de chair et de passion, moitiés fantômes, le monologue est leur moyen d'expression privilégié - Pour Baptiste monologue de gestes et d'attitudes. Enfermés dans leur propre destin comme des monades, ils ont du mal à communiquera avec autrui et surtout avec ceux qu'ils aiment. Tous ont une vocation et pour la plupart l'accomplissent, amis c'est alors qu'ils en découvrent la vanité, le caractère illusoire et frustrant. En même temps leur apparaît comme une évidence l'impossibilité de l'amour et du bonheur - tout du moins dans la durée.
Peut-être est-ce Lacenaire, celui des personnages que préférait Prévert, qui va le plus loin dans l'accomplissement de ses désirs, encore qu'il ait raté sa vocation littéraire et que d'une certaine façon Montray soit meilleur assassin que lui puisqu'il peut grâce à son habileté à l'épée, trucider ses ennemis en parfait homme d'honneur. Seulement Montray voulait lui être aimé pour lui-même, et là sa quête restera vaine.
Comme toujours chez Carné quand il est inspiré, le classicisme minutieux et artisanal de son style fait du film une œuvre d'équilibre. Equilibre entre les personnages réels et les personnages inventés, entre le caractère concret de chacun d'eux et leur mythique et théâtral onirisme ; équilibre entre les nécessaires méandres de l'intrigue qui a besoin de temps et de péripéties pour s'accomplir et la place considérable faite au dialogue, équilibre surtout entre l'intimisme et la fresque sociale, même si, en fin de compte, c'est l'intimisme, miroir étrange ; poétique et désespéré du cœur des personnages qui a le dernier mot.
Cet équilibre et la richesse inouïe de la distribution, où chacun des principaux acteurs trouve dans son personnage des échos profonds de lui-même (religion de l'indépendance morale pour Arletty, fascination du silence chez Jean-Louis Barrault, dandysme morbide chez Louis Salou) rendent aujourd'hui le film aussi éloigné de nous qu'un retable du Moyen âge.
— Jacques Lourcelles: Dictionnaire du cinéma

Les Portes de la nuit

(Pforten der Nacht [de])

France 1946
d: Marcel Carné
Universum / UFA (Region 0 de)

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