THE FILMGOER IN PARIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 461, 23 April 1948, Page 16

THE FILMGOER IN PARIS

| Written for "The a

by

GORDON

MIRAMS

HERE are plenty of things to do in Paris, besides going to the cinema, and plenty to see besides films; but if that is what you want to do and see, Paris is a very good place to be. This-is, naturally, one of the aspects of Paris in which I have been specially interested, and after about three months I have come to the conclusion that if you have patience, if you keep your eyes open, if you regularly consult the weekly guide to all the shows, and if you join enough cine-clubs and societies, then there is almost no film which you cannot in time hope to see. You may even, if you are lucky, see a film which no longer exists. No longer exists officially, that is. I refer to the Carné-Prévert production Le Jour se Léve, of which all copies were supposed ‘to be destroyed when the Americans bought up the rights and Hollywood turned it into The Long Night. In fact, one copy was placed in British National Film Library with the strict understanding that it shall never be shown, even to students of the cinema, until the Ameriean company possessing the rights gives permission; and quite clearly, at least one other copy escaped the order for a general massacre, since I have seen it in Paris. It is even possible, I suppose, that the Americans permit this; that they do concede to French filmgoers the right to see one of the admitted masterpieces of their national cinema-though I did have the impression that the print which I saw at a cine-society screening was one which somebody had started delib-., rately to mutilate, but had beet half- | hearted about it, finally slipping the print under the counter before the job was finished, in order to resurrect it later for semi-private showing. Pn, If this is what happened I am grateful to that unknown rescuer, whatever his motives, because, for me anyway, the anger which any lover of the cinema must feel when he watches the film industry committing cannibalism among its brain-cHildren (it happened before in the case of Gaslight) is tempered somewhat by the fact that I have at least been able to see Le Jour se Léve. And though I haven’t seen the Hollywood ver$ion, starring Henry Fonda, and though I don’t want to seem to be re-opening what is perhaps a closed issue in the columns of The Listener, I am quite sure after seeing the French original, and despite the’ imperfections of the print, that Hollywood’s The Long Night can have been only a poor and emasculated imitation. I am sure of this for the simple reason that the story, as treated by Carné and Prévert, with Jean Gabin as the star, would defy translation into the Hollywood medium, even though whole sequences of The Long-Night have apparently been lifted -without credit-straight from the original. The subtle psychological implications of the plot (for instance, the "villain," played by Jules Berry with a magnificent sense of evil, is here the father of the "heroine," and the motives which inspire him are consequently a strange mixture of sadism, masochism, and father-love) would be much too adult and "shocking" for the American censors even if the uncompromising

tragedy of the finale were acceptable at the box-office. (Hollywood, I’m told, allows the decent, hunted young man to escape his doom in the beleagured apart-ment-house and by so doing ruins the Grecian inevitability of events upon which the whole drama depends.) 1% % oe HIS is not by any means the only notable French film I have seen these last few weeks. There is, for example, Monsieur Vincent, a drama of the 16th Century based on the life of St. Vincent de Paul, and with Pierre Fresnay in the title role. It is one of the very few films which I would describe as truly "religious," not because it was made in a Catholic country or because it deals with the life of the extraordinary little priest who was a pioneer of social welfare work, and who was later declared a Saint, but because, in the words of another critic, the "reli. gious atmosphere flows out of the very essence of the theme, and there is no conscious effort to edify or astonish or wheedle one’s sympathies." For that matter, the French cinema industry is not conspicuously clerical; Pierre Fresnay is a Protestant; and the script-writer, Jean Anouilh, whose sensitive dialogue contributes so much to the success of the film, is. an agnostic. Nor did the Church itself finance the production, the’ money being raised by the revolutionary method-revolutionary in the sphere of film finance-of taking up a national subscription. Appeals made throughout France produced contributions, large and small, from all sorts of individuals and organisations, subscriptions of 1000 francs being regarded as shares in the venture, to be repaid when the profits start to come in, In fact, these profits will probably be fairly considerable, judging by the long runs Monsieur Vincent is having everywhere-a very happy outcome for a film which not only breaks with tradition in the treatment of réligious subjects but which also’

proves what may be accomplished creatively when production can be divorced from the demands of some cinema magnate or commercial enterprise mainly interested in securing, at the box-office, a good return for an investment. * * * ONE old (pre-war) French film which I ran to earth in triumph on the Champs-Elysées was Les Perles de la Couronne, a delightfully amusing and "typical" production by Sacha Guitry, whom until then I had seen only in The Cheat, shown in New Zealand some years ago, and more recently in Nine Bachelors. I have since seen Guitry, in the flesh, on the stage of the ThéAatre Edouard Sept (yes, our King Edward; there’s an equestrian statue of him in the little square outside). Guitry was playing the leading role, and as usual taking almost all of the limelight, in hig own play Le Diable Boiteux (The Limping Devil) dealing with the life of Talleyrand. : He looks much older now than he did in the three films I’ve mentioned-he is, I think, 62-which is perhaps not surprising, in view of the rather uncomfortable situation in which he found himself just after the Liberation. But he is still a great actor, brimming with ideas and vitality; and though my French wasn’t equal to all the double-entendres with which his dialogue is peppered, it was obvious even to me that he was, through the mouth of Talleyrand, getting in some shrewd jabs at the current political situation in France as well as at his own fairly recent period in prison. The French, who live for politics, thoroughly © appreciated them. * * * ON’T let me give the impression that all the films in Paris are worth seeing or that the French themselves make only good ones. The French industry at the moment is in the doldrums, with, it is estimated, anything up to 80 per cent of the workers in it unemployeda result attributed to the Blum-Byrnes Agreement under which only four out of every 13 weeks of playing-time in France are devoted to French produc-

tions. (At the time of writing there is sttong pressure on the Government to increase the al« location for French films to seven weeks out of 13, and a rather more dubious move to restrict the screening of "mediocre" American films by some form of censor ship.) One of two not-so-good French efforts to have come my way is Les Requins de Gibraltar ("The Sharks of Gibraltar"), @ spy thriller in which the French idea of the British Navy and of high society in England is as ludicrous as anything the Americans -or the English-have ever perpetrated. The other is Ruy Blas, a costume piece contrived by Jean Cocteau from. Victor Hugo’s drama, with

Danielle Darrieux supplying the feminine charm and Jean Marais contributing cloak-and-dagger antics reminiscent of Tarzan and Douglas Fairbanks the Elder. One French critic has fittingly dismissed this pretentious failure as "Ruy Blah-blah-blah." As against these two French deficits on my balance-sheet, however, must be offset La Bataille de L’Eau Lourde, a good, exciting documentary feature made, in. conjunction with the Norwegians, about the wartime sabotage of the heavy-watef factory in Norway vital to the Nazis’ atomic experiments, and employing a mixture of professional players and actual participants in the events; Le Diable au Corps, a very mature and authentically French drama about a very young man’s tragic loveaffair with a young, but married, woman; and the _ deservedly-popular Quai des Orfévres, starring Louis Jouvet, who will be remembered by some lucky New Zealanders as the unctuous priest in La Kermesse Héroique. This Quai des Orfévres is what the French call "un film policier" and gives, incidentally, as damning an impression of third-degree methods in France as anything comparable from Hollywood (say, Boomerang) does about the tough tactics of American policemen. x % Ba , UT Paris, with its multitudinous movie-houses (there are, by my count, 251 in the 20 arrondissements of the city area) isn’t only the place where you may take your pick of French films ancient and modern; it is also the place where, you have a very wide choice of the "foreign" variety-and by that I mean American, British, Italian, Russian, or even Indian and Portuguese. The Indian example on my list was rather a curiosity, picked up on my first evening here when I was taken to a@ cine-club screening at the Palais de

Chaillot: it was the full-length feature Dharti ke Lal ("Children of the Earth’), dealing with the terrible Bengal famine of 1944. The film has moments of considerable interest, horror, and some beauty (particularly the native dances of the People’s Theatre Troupe), as well as a strong undercurrent of social criticism; but it is prolonged to the point of boredom and the producers have not been able tovresist a phoney Hollywood happy ending for the love-story. Much more to my taste was Carl Dreyer’s Day ‘of Wrath. Many New Zealand filmgoers will probably have heard of this Danish film about witchcraft and Puritanism in the 17th Century-it was given a two-page review, I remember, in the BBC Listener-and it is to be hoped that they will agitate till they get a chance to see it, for this’ is one of the cinema’s works of real art. Similarly, I hope they will some .day get the chance to see the Italian Vivere ii. Pace ("To Live in, Peace"), a simple and very human drama about the end of the war in North Italy. The film has some technical flaws (the photography is often poor), but the total effect is so realistic and moving that again one finds support for the theory that the best films have always. emerged ‘from these countries which, suffering material poverty and the devastation of war (as in Britain in 1940-45, and in France, Russia, and Germany after 1918) have been thrown back on their spiritual and creative resources. Italian films are very popular in Paris just now, and from what I have seen they deserve to be. Some other very interesting Italian productions I have encountered are the "art films" of Luciano Emmer, who uses a fascinating technique-selection of details; ingenious editing and cross-cutting, and clever musical background-to give life and (continued on next page)

FILMGOING IN PARIS

(continued from previous page) movement, to some of the classic frescoes of Italian art. One I saw, in which this technique is applied to an ancient battle fresco by Simone de Martini, is almost as exciting, though it may sound ridiculous to say it, as the Agincourt sequence in Henry V. * a * BY accident rather than design, the only British films I have seen here so far have been four dealing with United Nations and Unesco subjectsthree of them short documentaries, "Hungry Minds," "Children of the

Rhine," "Searchlight on the Nations," and the fourth the documentary feature The World is Rich, which is Paul Rotha’s companion-piece to his World of Plenty. It is to be hoped that New Zealanders will not have to wait as long, or kick up as much fuss, in order to see this new Rotha film as they did to see his other one.* Like World of Plenty, The World is Rich is a brilliant pictorial statement (marred only by curiously unimaginative diagrammatic treatment) of the contrast between poverty and abundance in the world and the need for international planning in the production and distribution of food, with a strong indictment of selfish vested interests. This time, though he appears effectively, Sir John Boyd Orr (head of FAO) is less the "star" of the piece than the late Fiorella La Guardia, who steals the show in a sequence in which he heaps scorn on the men in Stock Exchanges who manipulate food markets. The World is Rich is also notable for a clever little piece of satire in the style of a Fitzpatrick Travelogue. Es x x S for American films, I have probably been lucky in my choice, The only two I- have seen are Boomerang (a second visit) and Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. ' Since the latter will probably be a subject for controversy up and down New Zealand, if it hasn’t become so already, I shall say no more than that I found Chaplin’s tragi-comedy of a dapper little Parisian Bluebeard a truly remarkable effort, not wholly successful; but far more stimulating even in its failure than almost any film of the past five years. In passing, some spice was added to the Parisian screening by the fact that it coincided with the lawsuit brought (unsuccessfully) against Chaplin by a Frenchman who claimed thousands of francs on the ground. that his life had. been made unbearable because he and the wifemurderer in the film both have the name of Henrj Verdoux and both are bank clerks. I have missed screenings of The WellDigger’s Daughter and ‘The Baker’s Wife (with the late great Raimu), Les Enfants du Paradis, and the Swiss film Marie-Louise; I was not able to have a second look at Alexander Nevsky and twice L have been frustrated in an attempt to see the famous Russian production The Childhood of Maxim Gorki, But no matter. One has only to wait and the chance will almost certainly come again. And now, this week, my list of shows in Paris tells me I should certainly not miss the new Italian film version of Rigoletto, Britain’s Corridor of Mirrors, The Stone Flower from Russia, Paris 1900 and Les Fréres Bouquinquant from France, Crossfire from America, not to mention cine-club screenings of Ivan the Terrible, L’Etrange Monsieur Victor (with Raimu), Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Carnet de Bal, Baron de Munchausen, Atalante, and Zero de Conduite. Whew! As I began by saying, there are plenty of ways to spend your spare time in Paris besides going to the movies; but if you would like to see all the films you have up till now only been able to read about, you should start packing your bags.

*The World is Rich is now being . screened in New Zealand.-Ed.