French Cinema—A Critical Filmography

Volume 2, 1940–1958

Colin Crisp

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253017024
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

This invaluable resource by one of the world's leading experts in French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th century and its place and function in French society. Each filmography includes 101 films listed chronologically (Volume 1: 1929–1939 and Volume 2: 1940–1958) and provides accessible points of entry into the remarkable world of 20th-century French cinema. All entries contain a list of cast members and characters, production details, an overview of the film's cultural and historical significance, and a critical summary of the film's plot and narrative structure. Each volume includes an appendix listing rewards earned and an extensive reference list for further reading and research. A third volume, covering the period 1958–1974, is forthcoming.

PART I

1940–1945

1. La Fille du puisatier

The Well-Digger’s Daughter

Filming began May 1940, then resumed 13 August 1940; released Marseilles and Lyons, 20 December 1940; Paris, 24 April 1941

190 min, b&w

Dir and Scr Marcel Pagnol; Prod Films Marcel Pagnol; Cinematog Willy; Music Vincent Scotto; Art dir Cot and Marius Brouquier; Sound Marcel Lavoignat; Edit Jeannette Ginestet; Act Josette Day (Patricia), Raimu (Pascal Amoretti), Fernandel (Félipe Rambert), Milly Mathis (Nathalie), Line Noro (Marie Mazel), Fernand Charpin (Monsieur Mazel), Georges Grey (Jacques Mazel), Claire Oddera (Amanda Amoretti), Roberte Arnaud (Roberte), Raymonde (Éléonore Amoretti), Rosette (Marie Amoretti), Liliane (Isabelle Amoretti), Félicien Tramel (waiter), Marcel Maupi (shop assistant), and Charles Blavette (dyer).

La Fille du puisatier is often listed as the first French film to have been made under the German occupation. In fact, it was begun in May 1940, before the invasion, and resumed on 13 August, barely two months after the fall of France and the entry into Paris of German forces. Marcel Pagnol had established his production unit in Provence, which was by that time in the (somewhat optimistically named) zone libre (ZL, free zone). In the zone occupé (ZO), there was to be a drastic reorganization of the film industry, as of so much else, and filmmaking did not recommence until February 1941. In the ZL, by contrast, there was as yet little regulation, and shooting began on some seven films before that point, most of them in Pagnol’s Marseilles studio. Of these the first, and the only major, film was La Fille du puisatier. Pagnol was able to proceed so rapidly not just because of the lack of regulatory hindrances in the Midi but also because he had already prepared and initiated shooting, and because, unlike his Paris colleagues, he was in total personal control of production.

His film had initially been plotted in melodramatic ways recognizable from earlier Pagnol movies (seduction of the innocent country lass, illegitimate child, parental outrage at once moving and comic, class oppositions between wholesome provincials and dubious city folk), but like many phony-war films, it was modified to exploit the outbreak of war for dramatic purposes: it is because he is mobilized that Jacques Mazel cannot marry Patricia as he had intended, and it is because he crashes behind enemy lines, believed dead, that the fate of Patricia’s “fault” (the illegitimate child) has to be decided publicly by the Mazel family and her father, Pascal, the well-digger. Indeed, the war provided an opportunity to mobilize several familiar myths of the age—not just the “believed dead/reappears” trope but also the mythic status of the aviator that guarantees Jacques’s romantic worth. As Pascal, Raimu is provided with his standard role of Provençal patriarch standing on his comic dignity, and Fernandel is used against type as Félipe, the worthy but uncharismatic country lad willing to marry Patricia and assume responsibility for the illegitimate child. Standard city/country oppositions make of the Mazels a snobbish middle-class family obsessed with money and unhappy at the thought of such a lowly alliance, until their son is reported dead and the possibility of a grandchild suddenly becomes more interesting. On the other hand, the earthy well-digger is rude but direct, and Félipe “may not have much self-respect, but he has a lot of love.” As always in Pagnol the simple Provençal folk are the source of all genuine affection and honor. As the well-digger says, “You should never trust people who sell tools but don’t know how to use them.” Patricia herself has been away in Paris training as a dressmaker, and has returned totally transformed—this urban experience goes some way toward explaining her ready seduction. (Of course, it also helps to explain her appearance and accent, rather too sophisticated for a Provençal girl—Josette Day, who played her, was Pagnol’s partner at the time.)

The defeat and occupation initiated a modification to the original scenario: what resolves the conflict and brings together the two families of different classes is not just their mutual sentimentality about the baby but the “débâcle”—the collapse and defeat of the French Army—and the consequent necessity for all French people to unite. They all listen together to Marshal Pétain’s speech of 17 June in which he announces the armistice and bestows upon the nation “the gift of his person” as leader. When Madame Mazel grieves over Jacques, still believed dead, Patricia claims rather that it is precisely the willingness of such people to risk their lives for the nation that makes being French still worthwhile.

Pétain, of course, proposed a return to traditional virtues as essential to the moral regeneration of a nation corrupted by an alien (Jewish and/or Marxist) ideology of despair and despondency, which the prewar poetic realist films were seen to have been a main agent in propagating. This “Vichy ideology” of national redemption was embodied in the slogan “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (Work, Family, Native Soil), and involved a mythologization of the peasant and consequent return to the land. Christian traditions and the passing on of land and customs from father to son in hierarchical fashion were central to it. There was no place for class conflict in this “révolution nationale,” but generational distinctions became more important: the younger generation would now be crucial as representing the future of the nation. These young people would constitute a new start, free from the errors of their parents’ generation, so the grandson, now recognized by both families, is duly glorified, as young children were glorified throughout the occupation.

La Fille du puisatier is thus the first wartime film to embody, if still tentatively, the Vichy ideology, though the set of values that it proposed had already been incorporated in Pagnol’s Jofroi (1933) and Regain (1937), not to mention La Terre qui meurt (1936). These values are made explicit here by Patricia, when she says to Jacques, “This farm, these un-worked fields, … couldn’t you do something with them? I don’t mean become a peasant, exactly … but there are modern ways, tractors, harvesters.… It seems to me I could be happy doing the washing and the dishes, and each day at sunset walking to the gate to wait for my man coming home from his land with his workers.” Given what we have learned of Jacques, and indeed of Patricia, this fantasized future is wildly improbable, but it is merely the first of many such improbable peasant fantasies from the occupation years.

All films made in the ZL had to be approved by the German censor before they could be released in the ZO. In the meantime, La Fille du puisatier was screened in Lyons and Marseilles (December 1940) before finally being released in Paris (April 1941). It was enormously successful, attracting the largest audiences in Paris of any film during the occupation years, outdone among occupation films only by Les Enfants du paradis (#27), which of course was not released until after the liberation. In view of this, it might seem hard to explain why Pagnol, who had directed one film per year in the previous decade, did not direct any further films until Naïs in 1945. In fact, he was working for several years on a scenario called La Prière aux étoiles, and even filmed large sections of it, but scrapped it all for reasons that commentators disagree on—perhaps simply because he decided it was not up to standard, and he alone in France could afford to make such a costly decision.

2. Premier Rendez-vous

(First Encounter)

Filming began 22 April 1941; released 14 August 1941

105 min, b&w

Dir Henri Decoin; Prod Continental Films; Scr Max Colpé (clandestinely) and Michel Duran; Cinematog Robert Le Febvre; Music René Sylviano; Art dir Jean Perrier; Act Danielle Darrieux (Micheline), Fernand Ledoux (Nicolas), Louis Jourdan (Pierre), Jean Tissier (Roland), Gabrielle Dorziat (governess of orphanage), and several young actors who were soon to become stars: Georges Marchal, Daniel Gélin, Jean Parédès, Suzanne Dehelly, Annette Poivre, Simone Valère, and Sophie Desmarets.

The Germans permitted production to resume in the ZO in February 1941. Of the eleven films produced that year by their agency, Continental, this was the first to be released. It benefited from intense promotion both in France and in Germany, and the Berlin premiere was the occasion for a grand gala to which all the best-known French stars were invited, including the lead actress. Danielle Darrieux. Joseph Goebbels himself presided, even playing the piano to entertain his guests.

Like Abus de confiance (1937), Mademoiselle ma mère (1937), and Battement de cœur (1939), Premier Rendez-vous was designed as a vehicle for Darrieux and directed by her then-husband, Henri Decoin. It was cunningly designed to include a mass of narrative and character tropes popular in the late 1930s, most of which were to become even more popular during the war: orphanhood and the institutionalization of the young, the celebration of youth culture, the wry representation of relations between a young girl and an elderly man, the Oedipal jealousy of the latter for a “filial” rival, the theme of acting and sincerity, and a finale in which the orphan is integrated into a new family.

Darrieux plays the orphan, whose melancholy daily routines are sketched (rather clumsily) in the opening scenes, and who dreams of escape “Loin, très loin,” or at least as far as marriage with a suitor whom she has contacted through the Lonely Hearts column of a newspaper. Nicolas, the suitor, an elderly teacher, realizing there has been a misunderstanding, tactfully allows her to believe it is his “nephew,” Pierre, who has been communicating with her. He conceals her in his college lodgings, and the bulk of the narrative thereafter concerns her interactions with Nicolas, with Pierre, and with the students whom Nicolas teaches (Pierre is in fact a former student). When the authorities discover her where-abouts and return her to the orphanage, the students lay siege to it and manage to gain her release. Nicolas will adopt her, and Pierre will marry her.

But the film is not as schematic as this account suggests. Nicolas (who, as the waiter at their encounter notes, “could be her father”), though basically kindly, is represented in quite a sinister and threatening light when he insists on taking her back to his lodgings, yet very soon comes to seem pitiful as his “high-spirited” (but in fact repulsive) students mock and torment him, constantly interrupting his lectures. But the repulsive students in turn are seen not just as “youth” but as “privileged youth”—the progeny of businessmen, bankers, and the aristocracy, whose repulsiveness had long been considered normal in French films. Premier Rendez-vous, however, ultimately has to engineer these young people’s rehabilitation as fundamentally good-hearted. It does so by having Micheline take pity on her “savior” and harangue his students for their boorish behaviour (“they are just daddy’s boys, snobs”), thus shaming them into a rather unconvincing transformation. Henceforth they will be helpful and supportive.

Cumulatively, therefore, the representation of youth is curiously ambivalent, and it is surprising to read commentators of the time referring to the film as “a triumph of youth and love,” “a hymn to Joy and Life,” endowed with “all the delights of youth and optimism.”¹ Moreover, the opposition between “father” and “son” is not weighted in any simplistic way in favor of the latter. Indeed, at one stage, faced with a lack of beds in Nicolas’s lodgings and asked where she will sleep, Micheline suggests alternate nights with father and “son.” Finally, however, she comes upon them arguing angrily over her, and acknowledges the Oedipal discord she has introduced into the household. The film moves to resolve it: she opts for youth rather than age, passion rather than punctuality, trendiness rather than timidity, and when in the final scene Pierre dashes after her departing train and leaps athletically onto the rear carriage, Nicolas mutters, “I could never have caught that train.” So Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier are at least partially justified in writing Nicolas off as, “from the opening images an object of repulsion and of pity,” the first of a string of quasi-incestuous wartime fathers whose desires by contrast with those of their 1930s predecessors are to be rejected and/or thwarted during the war years.² Nevertheless, largely because of the intense humanity that Fernand Ledoux brings to the figure of the elderly teacher, it is easy to see Micheline as having made a drastic mistake in opting for the youthful Pierre.

But if the film’s preference for youth over age is frequently ambivalent, what is not in doubt is the film’s preference for youth culture over traditional culture. When Micheline sings the theme song to Pierre’s piano, the music suddenly modulates into a hip jazz beat, and she sways and bounces in time, hands in the air, to show that she (like Pierre and all modern youth) is totally “with it.” Nature too sides with Pierre, when in park and guinguette (bar-restaurant) settings, he and Micheline act out a reprise of their first meeting, though even here the balance is nicely maintained when she tells him she finds his version of their meeting less satisfactory than his “father’s.” He agrees to take lessons, and this is the pretext for introducing a debate concerning the stock theme of “sincerity and acting.” Finally, adopted by Nicolas and committed to Pierre, Micheline has recovered the sense of belonging that her status as orphan had defined her (and indeed her whole age-group) as lacking.

Technically the film is efficient without being remarkable, except for the astounding proliferation of forms of punctuation to be found throughout: there are 64 such linkages between scenes (61 per 100 min), 50 percent more than normal for the period, but symptomatic of a trend that was to culminate with Le Voile bleu (#10, 95 per 100 min) and Le Chant de l’exilé (105 per 100 min). In this film, most punctuation consists of cross-dissolves, with 14 wipes and 6 fades to black or white, but one instance toward the end involves a “hole” ripped in the screen—the newspaper in which Pierre has advertised for news of her (much as in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1936), and through the torn hole we see the station where he will reencounter her.

Darrieux’s impending separation from her director-husband Decoin was already common knowledge when the film was made, and she married the Portuguese businessman Porfirio Rubirosa in Vichy the following year. At that time, she broke not only with Continental but with all filmmaking for three years (1942–1945), only reestablishing herself as a leading lady in 1950 with the films of Max Ophüls.

1. Siclier, La France de Pétain, 49; Régent, Cinéma de France, 27–28.

2. Burch and Sellier, La Drôle de guerre des sexes, 87–90.

3. L’Assassinat du père Noël

Who Killed Santa Claus?

Filming began 15 February 1941; released 15 October 1941

105 min, b&w

Dir Christian-Jaque; Prod Continental Films; Scr Pierre Véry and Charles Spaak; Cinematog Armand Thirar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. 1940–1945
• Part II. 1946–1951
• Part III. 1952–1958
• Appendix: Festivals and Prizes for French Personnel and Productions
• Bibliography
• Index