LA VIE EST A NOUS (Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker et al., 1936)

Commissioned by the Popular Front in anticipation of French elections, made by a collective of Leftist French filmmakers headed by Jean Renoir, Life Is Ours—actually, the title is variously translated, for instance, The Life Is with Us, Life Is for Us—combines newsreels, lectures, staged vignettes, and songs. (We hear at the conclusion the “Internationale.”) Its agitprop directly influenced Jean-Luc Godard’s filmmaking. The film was commercially released in 1969, that is, following the events of May 1968. During his postwar conservative makeover, to help ensure a viable renewed career at home, Renoir (who also appears in it) dismissed his involvement with the film—much as Pabst downplayed his role in the Third Reich’s film industry!
     In one sequence, Jean Dasté plays a schoolteacher, as he had in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933), who tells his class about the concentration of national wealth in the hands of a relatively few families and about capitalism’s management of employment/unemployment. Thus a real adult audience indirectly receives the lecture that the “stage” students directly receive—an attempt to educate French citizenry about sociopolitical forces arrayed against it, so that ordinary people can better oppose these on the basis of their own welfare and the welfare of their children. Brilliant.
     Unemployment indeed seems to be the principal issue on which the Left focused for the upcoming French elections. In another vignette, an unemployed man considers joining a fascist group before another alliance, the Young Communists, rescues him from this fate. U.S. Americans will recall the comparable presidential claim that Robert F. Kennedy and, after his assassination, George Wallace made on segments of the disaffected American electorate. To ideologues, politics may be clear-cut. For ordinary voters, it can be up for grabs.

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

Paul Beaumont has made a breakthrough in his research into the origins of our species and trusts his patron and “friend,” the Baron de Regnard, to arrange for the presentation of his findings before the assembled members of France’s Academy of Science. Meanwhile, the Baron and Beaumont’s wife, Maria, have become lovers behind Beaumont’s back. On Beaumont’s big day, the Baron takes full credit for all Beaumont’s painstaking work and discoveries, and slaps Beaumont across the face in front of their gathered peers, saying that Beaumont has been his mere “assistant.” The audience breaks out in derisive laughter at the presumptive upstart who (to their eyes) is attempting to divest the Baron of the credit that is his due. What a clown they make Beaumont feel that he is—and indeed Beaumont becomes a circus clown whose continual fate is that he is slapped across the face as many as one hundred times per performance, setting the crowds to roaring with laughter because people, who are descended from hyenas, perhaps, find it funny when someone other than themselves gets slapped. Meanwhile, Beaumont falls in love with the circus’s bareback rider, who greets the profession of his love with a fit of laughter. O what fools these mortal scientists be!
     How does it all turn out? Let’s put it this way: If Ingmar Bergman had directed it, the film might have been titled Death of a Clown.
     In fact, Bergman more or less did direct—or, rather, artistic predecessor Victor Sjöström did. Based on what must be a laughable play by Leonid Andreiev, this was both Sjöström’s first Hollywood film and M-G-M’s first-in-the-can. Its long-shots of intricate circus performances and backstage activity, punctuated by inserts of a laughing clown alongside a spinning striped globe, are stunning proof that Sjöström had not left his eye behind in Sweden.
     Lon Chaney plays Beaumont. As ever, Chaney goes over the top, but does so gently, affably.
     Irving Thalberg produced, the same year that he viciously slashed Greed. The origin of his species? Swine.