ARE WE ALL MURDERERS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1052, 23 October 1959, Page 16

ARE WE ALL MURDERERS?

(U.G.C.-Jolly Film) R: 16 and over F I Want to Live didn’t persuade you that the gas chamber-and the hangman’s rope-should be no part of the penal system of a civilised community, your nesves should be steady enough to consider a French point of view in Are We All Murderers? Unlike some earlier films, this one isn’t concerned only with the fundamental argument that every human being is sacred and irreplaceable-though a young prison chaplain in the film takes his stand in just these words, and the way to the suillotine is shown to be as shocking as

the way to the scaffold or the gas chamber. Are We All Murderers? is rather more interested in what makes a murderer the sort of man he is, and in our common responsibility, as members of the same community, for the conditions which produced him. I don’t think anyone could fail to see the point in the story of Le Guen, the central character in the story, who was turned into a crazy killer by the horrors of life as a "hero" in the wartime underground. Now don’t get away with the idea that this is just a mropavanda piece against

the death penalty. No doubt it was made partly for that reason, for its director, André Cayatte, has shown himself before, in Justice est Faite, to be a man with a troubled conscience where the merciless law is concerned. But this is a story with considerable human interest right from its stark, moving opening shots of the desperate struggle of the underprivileged to keep alive in occupied France. Marcel Mouloudji portrays well the corruption of Le Guen, and there are some interesting secondary characters-his young brother, his mother, his prostitute sister. Look then-the film seems to sayat society’s way of dealing with those not tough enough to survive unscathed -in particular, Le Guen. So the setting changes to a prison-to a condemned cell where three men, handcuffed by night, wait for the warders who before dawn some morning will creep in stockinged feet to the door of their cell, fling it open and pounce on another victim for the guillotine. Some of these scenes are as shocking in their inhumanity as anything I have seen-the more so since one supposes they are baséd on recent practice in French prisons-and it’s a relief to hear a faint note of hope and. compassion at the end of the film. Are We All Murderers? is not for the squeamish; but it is powerful cinema with a strong social conscience.