A DOUBLE TOUR (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

From his and Paul Gégauff’s cunning script, Claude Chabrol directed this semi-delirious adaptation of Stanley Ellin’s mystery novel The Key to Nicholas Street. It opens with a bravura pan of artist Leda Mortoni’s cottage in Aix-en-Provence; highlighted by Leda’s absence, the passage projects the stillness of death. Seemingly confounding this, the film plunges into sexy and satirical comedy targeting the bourgeois family of married vintner Henri Marcoux, who is having an affair with Leda, the love of his life. However, with her murder, the film loses its comic veneer and gives in to cold, embittered currents that we realize have been circulating from the start. Chabrol’s film has arrived at the personality it was born for.

Although the police suspect the milkman boyfriend of the Marcouxes’ live-in maid, there is an assortment of candidates for Leda’s murder by strangulation. For one, Henri’s wife, Thérèse (Madeleine Robinson, best actress, Venice—although I’m not sure why), despises his mistress, with whom, he has announced to her, he is leaving her for good. It is true that Thérèse, named for a saint, is a control freak; but might blind rage have momentarily overtaken her fastidious aversion to mess and scandal? She and Henri have two grown children, Richard and Elizabeth, living with them, both privy to parental noise, suffering, quarrels. (One drowns these out by closeting himself in his bedroom listening to recordings of Berlioz; the other has her romance with Laszlo Kovacs, an Hungarian immigrant who is locked into open mutual contempt with Elizabeth’s mother.)  An anonymous outsider, a passer-by: Might not he have destroyed Leda’s sumptuous beauty for being shut out from it?

This is a film about “outsiders”: those who are outsiders in their own household, their own family; those—Laszlo and Leda—who met in Japan and entered France together; those whose lower class renders bourgeoism an inviting though impossible dream.

Twice, the film isn’t “straight.” Twice, its narrative bends and curves around, diverted from chronology to swerve into the very recent past. The first time this occurs the event is subtle, hardly noticeable; during a downtown parade, a national festivity, while the narrative’s forward momentum is deceptively maintained, we enter a replay of incidents we have already seen, but from a fresh, wider perspective. We find ourselves, we will realize only later, investigating the murder of Leda before it has even occurred. The second “flashback” provides the chilling solution to the murder. The murder has already occurred, and yet we see it as it’s happening. “Why have you come here?” Leda, already dead, asks. “Why have you come here?”

In A double tour, also known as Leda, a film visually compounded by mirror-images, we watch a mimicry of life.

On the verge of stardom, vulgar, virile Jean-Paul Belmondo gives a sensational, brilliant performance as Laszlo. It is Laszlo, not the police detective officially investigating the crime, who digs into the matter, excavates it, and uncovers the relatively simple (because utterly logical) solution. And why not? He is driven by love.

Whatever you do, do not miss this film. It is riveting. It is essential. It is why I love the cinema of Claude Chabrol.

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LE CORBEAU (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Inspired by an actual series of events that occurred in Tulle in 1922, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau—The Raven—likewise unfolds in a provincial village. Poison-pen letters, taking initial aim at Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay, solid) for being an abortionist and an adulterer, neither of which is the case (it turns out he isn’t even Rémy Germain), contaminate the place, creating an atmosphere of dread and paranoid suspiciousness. Who is “The Raven,” the name with which the anonymous letters, all in capitals, are signed? Clouzot intended his film as a critical reflection of the bourgeois mindset and bourgeois activities, including back-biting, back-stabbing, jealousy and gossip, that help explain the generation on French soil of collaborators with the German Occupation during the Second World War—a challenging insight. Thus the film was condemned by the Germans and the Vichy government, who had no difficulty perceiving that The Raven was targeting them*; but bourgeoisism being sacred to the French, the film was also condemned after the war, imposing a cloud of political suspicion over Clouzot, that he himself had collaborated, which never totally disappeared in his lifetime. It didn’t help that the film was produced by Continental Films, a German-owned firm.

For me, The Raven is an eclectic, unexpectedly delightful film, one combining different attributes: grim satire, hilarious French farce (subsequent Clouzot films would not be so funny), suspense, Poe detective mystery. There are brilliant passages, such as the funeral procession that results from a hospitalized young villager’s receipt of one of the letters, which assures him that he is terminally ill and therefore has nothing to live for, and the rampaging mob of villagers tearing through the streets in bloodthirsty pursuit of a nun whom they suspect of being The Raven. There are also fine images: the grief-stricken mother of the suicide in her mourning black, including the veil that covers her face in a mordant parody of anonymity, at her son’s funeral; the fluttering down in church of the latest note from The Raven’s poison pen—a parody of God’s judgment, but also an ironical vision of a community’s, hence society’s, fragility, vulnerability. Nevertheless, this is also a film of dry patches for which the revelation of copycat Ravens is insufficient black comedic compensation. The film, a bona fide classic, is overrated, itself compensation for the ill treatment that its maker suffered as a result of it.

Sylvie is marvelous as the grieving mother, the self-appointed Angel of Vengeance who dispatches The Raven with a straight razor—perhaps the same one with which her son ended his life. Throughout the film, children at play in the streets signal the impermanence of innocence in a village of permanent need of redemption. Ironically, the big black “bird” that the mother appears to be is the guardian of their innocence. She, also, is insufficient in this symbolical role of hers. It is she, after all, to help him keep up with his grooming at hospital, who innocently brought her son the self-murder weapon. Here is a film that abounds with dark, dark ironies.

* Like the Gestapo, the Bush-Cheney administration in the U.S. encouraged people (including school children) to spy on one another and denounce others. As in Clouzot’s film, purely personal spite and vindictiveness thus often found a protective cloak in officially sanctioned “civic-mindedness.” This also occurred in Soviet Russia.

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ANCHE LIBERO VA BENE (Kim Rossi Stuart, 2006)

Wonderful Kim Rossi Stuart, who has been acting since he was five, has turned to directing with Anche libero va bene, which he, along with Linda Ferri, co-wrote, and in which he combustibly stars as Renato, a financially struggling photographer who is class-conscious, at war with the modern world, at war with his wife, who serially abandons him and their two children for long stretches of infidelity, and who is in over his head doing the best he possibly can to raise the kids, who more or less have to raise him much of the time. Renato can be unreasonable, such as when he demands that his son, 11-year-old Tommi, persevere with his competitive swimming despite the fact the boy hates swimming; all Tommi, the film’s coming-of-age protagonist, wants to do is play football (soccer). Renato castigates Tommi for not being a man because he worries that he, himself, isn’t much of one. Tommi and older sister Viola try hard to keep afloat in the midst of the challenging adult circumstances they are compelled to witness—and they do the best they possibly can to help keep their father afloat. Stuart plunges unexpectedly into the use of subjective camera to project Tommi’s sensation of drowning during a swim meet. Each member of the family, in one way or another, feels as though he or she is drowning.

Stuart shot his film at his own childhood school; he also swam competitively as a child; he was abandoned by his mother when he was four. Such autobiographical elements do not distract him from providing a precise, wise, clear-eyed presentation of the material—for which, I might add, he has won a plethora of prizes. However, some may feel, as I do, that Stuart’s debut feature is, simultaneously, both somewhat inflated and too small, too slight, too narrow. As a first-time director, Stuart is shakily getting his toes wet.

Reviewers have praised this film for not being a piece of sentimental garbage like Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). That is true, but it doesn’t mean that the film couldn’t have been a whole lot better.

 

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HARLOW (Alex Segal, 1965)

Shot in eight days on a threadbare budget, in the same video-to-film process, “electronovision,” that had been used for Richard Burton’s dress-rehearsal Hamlet (Bill Colleran, John Gielgud, 1964), Alex Segal’s Harlow, from a script by Karl Tunberg (William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, 1959, don’t-you-know), succeeded in beating to exhibition by one month Joseph E. Levine’s much more expensive screen biography of Depression-era star Jean Harlow, the “blonde bombshell,” who died at age 26 of uremic poisoning. The second version bore the same title (Gordon Douglas, 1965) and, despite lavish production values, is, almost everyone agrees, the lesser film—although both are so superficial and wildly inaccurate that it hardly matters. But it does matter some. Whereas the Douglas version is lurid, the Segal version is merely tawdry.

Carol Lynley plays Jean Harlow, born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, who arrived in Hollywood at age 16, accompanied by her mother, Jean Bello, whose ambition for her daughter’s success was legendary. In this, Mama Jean was very much like Lela Rogers, who accompanied her daughter, Ginger, to Hollywood—although Ginger Rogers had (much) more talent to push and be pushed, having already made a splash as the ingenue on Broadway in the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy, singing (in duets) “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me.” (Making a bigger splash: Ethel Merman, who introduced her full-throated anthem, “I Got Rhythm.”) Days before shooting started, Judy Garland dropped out of Harlow and was replaced by Lela’s legendary Ginger, whose full-bodied performance as Mama Jean, both extravagant and penetrating, steals the show. One pivotal scene, which employs a huge staircase as a prop, finds Rogers nailing a staggering silent moment when Mama Jean decides to throw her vulnerable daughter to the wolves for the sake of her own marriage to a ne’er-do-well. Here, in a glimpse into the abyss of monstrous humanity, we are moved to confront the selfishness of a “stage mother.” But it’s almost unfair to single out even such a brilliant moment as this in a thoroughly remarkable, revelatory, lived-in performance such as Rogers seemingly effortlessly, seamlessly delivers.

It is to her credit that Lynley doesn’t get lost in the film; her Jean Harlow, sparkling with sensitive self-doubt, commands attention, even if it doesn’t quite electrify. (Here, I am comparing Lynley’s Harlow with the onscreen Harlow as well as Rogers.) Because William Powell refused to allow the makers of either version to use him as a character (he was the love of the actual Harlow’s life), he was dropped from the scenario of the Douglas film and called “William Mansfield” in the Segal film, where this character, an amalgam, also suggests Harlow’s most frequent co-star, Clark Gable. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., is excrutiating in this role.

Since other names are changed as well, it is somewhat fun to try to guess who is meant to be whom. On the other hand, studio head Louis B. Mayer is given his own name and is, as played by Jack Kruschen (Jack Lemmon’s kindly next-door neighbor in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, 1960), an irredeemable louse.

The real Jean Harlow was very much loved by co-workers and set crews; she was by all accounts one of the nicest people in Hollywood. This film is as deficient at getting at this truth as it is at getting at the dimensions of her stardom. “Beautiful Jean Harlow Dead,” read a famous newspaper front-page headline. Onscreen, she is perhaps at her vulgar best in George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight (1933)—the same year that Ginger Rogers, in a costume of coins, sang “We’re in the Money,” in Mervyn LeRoy’s Gold-Diggers of 1933, and danced with Fred Astaire the “Carioca” in Flying Down to Rio.

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SUMMER WITH MONIKA (Ingmar Bergman, 1952)

Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman and actress Harriet Andersson helped each other to become international celebrities with Sommaren med Monika, which Per Anders Fogelström and Bergman adapted from the former’s novel about a couple in their late teens, Harry and Monika, who abandon their families and stockroom jobs and take off to live and love together on an island, with disastrous consequences. Monika becomes pregnant; they marry; they return to the mainland. However, when Harry enrolls in night school with the aim of becoming an engineer, Monika turns to infidelity and eventually abandons Harry and their daughter, June, to go off on her own. Their youth thus comes to a sad end—but not the film, which surprises with its complex tone as Harry, carrying June, reflects on his and Monika’s happy times together: ironically, the guiding inspiration of his new, responsible life.

With its adolescent nudity and sex, Sommaren med Monika would remain Bergman’s biggest hit in the U.S. Except for its fine flourish at the end, though, this is a stultifying film; for the lion’s share of its length, Bergman fails to shake loose the material from Fogelström’s restrictive moralism. He and black-and-white cinematographer Gunnar Fischer conjure a surfeit of spectacular imagery, especially on the “wild” island (for instance, a dazzling closeup of a black widow spider in her intricate, implicitly cosmic web), but the tack grows tedious and rings hollow. Making this particular film “gorgeous” helps nothing at all.

I yield to no one in my blissful adoration of Andersson, who is included in my list of the fifty best film actors of all time; but her unsympathetic role as Monika leaves me cold—except for one luscious, ambiguous, haunting closeup.

Distressingly resembling at times Leonardo DiCaprio, Lars Ekborg is good as Harry.

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