| b. 1917. 1945: 24 Heures Dnas La
Vie d’Un Clown (short). 1949: LA SILENCE DE LA MER.
1950: LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES. 1954: QUAND TU LIRAS CETTE LETTRE.
1956: BOB LE FLAMBEUR. 1958: DEUX HOMMES A MANHATTAN. 1960:
(actor) A BOUT DE SOUFFLE. 1961: LEON MORIN PRETRE.
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
There can be no doubt about Melville’s importance
as the precursor of the New Wave system. His “Le Silence
de la Mer” took independence to the point of clandestinity – Vercors
had refused to sell the rights to the novel, the film stock
was acquired on the black-market, there was such opposition
from the industry that at the Gala Premiere (in the presence
of 35 Cabinet Ministers) the projection box was ringed with
gendarmes to stop the film being “snatched”. “Les
Enfants Terribles” belongs, really to a monograph on
Cocteau, though directed by Melville and photographed by
the chameleonic Decae. A little brittle and abrupt about
its Cocteauesque romanticism, its sense of “ailleurs”,
there seems an infinite depth and nastiness in its visual
atmosphere, a stench of physical obscenity which becomes
intenser at each viewing.
BOB LE FLAMBEUR
And here we come unmistakably to the tone and morality of
the New Wave. The story of an old-time Paris crook who emerges
from semi-retirement to stage a last hold-up is in the line
of Rififi, Grisbi, Chnouf. But their smash-and-grab style
is refined, dissolved away; the climax builds up to its suspense
stealthily, rather than by assault-and-battery. The crime
is a looming project, a vast, vague affair which Bob anticipates,
plans, almost in the margins on his daily existence, as he
drifts, shrewdly, sadly, through the bars of Pigalle, prepares
his own breakfast in his bachelor flat. Pigalle is, for once,
something other than a montage sequence of neon lights and
highheeled shoes treading pavements. Indeed it is surveyed,
in longshot, at dawn or dusk, in tones of grey, with a gentle,
elegiac air. The gleam of neon, the grey tone of a dusk cloudscape,
the clear spray of a waterwagon, coalesce, tenderly. There
is a purity like fatigue, a fatigue like purity. The views
of Pigalle have a meditative greyness which some perverse
little imp in me wants to compare to the Stoicism of A.E.
Housman, only here it’s criminals. The relationship
of Bob and his adopted “son”, Paolo, faintly
recalls “Grisbi”; the relationship of Bob and
the cabaret dancer, Anne (Isabelle Corey), a girl as cool,
as dewy, as calmly provocative as Decae’s photography,
is at times quite beautiful, as in the scene where, dancing
with her in a cabaret where she has become an “entraineuse” Bob
lays his cheek against her forehead. This is a “sparse” film,
not too important, perhaps, inclining to “smooth out” its
hero but endowing him with a quiet secrecy which justifies
that absurd but insistent comparison with Bresson which lingers
faintly round the film, and which is due to more than just “style” (commentary, “reserved” acting,
greyness, temps-mort), but to a sense of people as cats that
walk by themselves, of their privacy and reticence. Together
Bob, with his erfidious eyes, and Anna, so pure-perverse,
strike just the faintly dissonant chord that lingers on when
the assault on the casino is half-forgotten. They’re
so wrong for each other that by a kind of irresistible nostalgia
they become right and I very much wish Melville had made
a film about Bob, Paolo and Anne rather than about a raid
on a casino.
Many shots in the film illustrate a difference between the “traditional” and
the “new” dramatic style. Your “traditional” director
(Kazan, Reisz) thinks of arranging the action so that while,
dramatically speaking, the characters “jump out” at
one another, so the “points” jump out from the
screen and club the audience. In extreme cases, the background
is just that, a fuzz which adds plausibility, or a contribution
to expressing the characters’ feelings; the frame is “behind” the
action which leaps out into the auditorium. In “Bob
le Flambeur” everything drifts, there are obliquenesses,
silences, slow realisations seep through us, the characters
turn their profiles to one another, and to us. The film is
composed laterally; the “typical” shape is not,
as in Welles or Kazan, a “triangulation” but
three sides of a trapezium, there are gentle diagonals and
soft recessions, a great deal of free space, of freely circulating “air”,
the screen blandly “recedes”.
LEON MORIN PRETRE
At first sight it seems that the greatest compliment one
could pay Jean-Pierre Melville is not to believe he exists.
His real name is A.N. Other. His first film was called “Le
Silence de la Mer” and the film-behind-this-film might
be called “Le silence de Jean-Pierre”. It has
been suggested that the theme underlying Melville’s
choice of themes is “friendship” and I would
like to offer a, perhaps contradictory, perhaps complimentary,
one: for me, Melville’s heroes are all, like Melville,
cool cats that walk by themselves, often despite themselves.
Melville is a daylight Cocteau, an agnostic, this-worldly,
very worldly Bresson. In my cinematheque imaginaire there
is a rare copy of Melville’s version of “Pickpocket”,
with Isabelle Corey and Belmondo as the pickpocket, and a
very disturbing film it is too, for the spiritual overtones
of the script slide off it like water off a duck’s
back. Melville can ghost both Cocteau and Bresson – I
say ghost, not ape. He has one foot in every private world,
but instead of concentrating on its privacy he allows it
to be translucent to the world we are all agreed on – streets,
dogmas, bars, historical events like the Occupation and location
photography à la Decae. His third kindred spirit,
is Becker – many of whose films are set in closed communities
(young marrieds, artists, convicts, gangsters, cat-burglars)
situated in holes-and-corners of society, worlds within worlds,
each with its own code. But Becker was concerned with the
question, “In our world without gentry or gentlemen’s
agreements, what morally makes a gentleman?” Melville
has a way of watching, rather than sharing, his characters’ perplexities.
He seems not to mind what they do, provided it suits them.
He is not unkind, but feline. If “Leon Morin, Pretre” can
accommodate equally well the responses of the Roman Catholic
and of the agnostic spectator, it is because for Melville
the only morality involved is his characters’. The
artist’s job is to be the Invisible Man.
It is fitting that he should appear in “A Bout de
Souffle” as The Man From the States, the incisive commentator,
the onlooker with dark glasses and enigmatic quips, the spiritual
uncle of the loveless lovers for whom love is conditional
on casuistry. Melville is the very opposite of “committed”.
Critics have not, give his avowal of agnosticism, and cheerful
declaration of a desire for a popular success, condemned
him as “Leon Morin, Traitre.” I think they’re
right, as it happens; the theological arguments which Morin
advances are more likely to strengthen the question marks
in Catholic minds than to impress non-believers. As it is,
Melville has created a film of moral halftones and dogmatic
uncertainties.
In a sense the film is a pattern of betrayals. Everyone
betrays his side. The Communist and the Vichyite girl have
heart-to-heart talks. Barney, the anticlerical heroine, is
converted to Catholocism, and then half-betrays her conversion – or
her love. The French are on good terms with the Italian occupying
forces, who fight it out with their German allies. Barney’s
little daughter “adopts” a German soldier while
the Germans rout out Jews. Morin and Barney confess to each
other that they are excited by the sounds of shells, as promises
of change, even though, for all they know, it’s the
Maquis who are under fire. Barney’s daughter keeps
her religious instruction secret from her mother because
she thinks her mother in anticlerical. Barney has a passionate
dream of Morin kissing her, and wakes up to find herself,
oh so heartbreakingly, alone – with her daughter sleeping
innocently beside her in her bed – a quiet but disturbing
reminder of the highly sophisticated secrecies inherent in
the most basic relationships; it made me think of the Surrealist
challenge to bourgeois ideas of “sincerity”: “Parents,
racontez vos reves a vos enfants!”. A hardboiled tart
becomes a raving penitent after only two visits to Morin,
revealing a startling volatility of temperament. How far
is the heroine’s conversion self-delusion? can we see
her sexual love of the priest as a betrayal of their friendship?
did Morin let his need for friendship titillate and so betray
her? Barney too can be fickle. Before fixing her widow’s
passion on the priest, she is fascinated by a proud young
girl, Sabine: but her fascination abruptly disappears when,
after her brother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Sabine becomes
gaunt and aged with grief. Among other things, the film is
a study in the spiritual fickleness of the nicest people.
One of its most extraordinary scenes is the abrupt metamorphosis
of a Jewish philosophy teacher who, over the years, has allowed
himself to decline into a shambling, dusty pedagoque. Suddenly
he is menaced by the German pogroms. He acquires false papers,
he crops his tangled mane, he straightens his shoulders,
his eyes gleam with a new manliness and independence which
is nothing less than redemption. A more profound and holy
one than the heroine’s, maybe.
The chaotic tangle of beliefs and party-lines is more than
Melvillian “cynicism”, it is a sociological matter,
helping to explain the moral nihilism of Godard’s generation.
In exposing this maze of disbeliefs and contradictions Melville’s
films show an eely honesty. The price of his suppleness seems
to be a subtle lack of emotional drive, difficult to pin
down. A great artist is apt to be “uncommitted” because,
wrestling with a problem, he keeps, in anguish, questioning
and contradicting himself; Melville is “uncommitted” because
he neatly slips past the larger problems, limiting himself
to a solipsistic adoption of his characters’ morality.
I felt Barney would soon recover from her heartbreak.
The tart seemed to be a superfluous character and the film’s
grip slackened around here. Belmondo’s Leon Morin,
I’m afraid, didn’t convince me. It’s not
so much his face, as he feared, or the identification with
Michel, but his voice, which struck me as unresonant, childish;
his glance was too light, his abruptness too suave. Sometimes,
of course, this was meant; I know few more touching scenes
of helpless love when the young priest, confronted with “honest
doubt”, counters with scholastic arguments which he
himself doesn’t understand and which he senses are
inadequate. Maybe Melville had difficulty with a character
so firmly rooted in an absolute code, but I think he meant
us to feel that this priest still had his crises to come,
that his spiritual composure was as transient and fragile
as the beauty of Sabine.
Riva’s performance as Barney is perfect; though Barny
has in common with the heroine of Resnais’ film a spiritual
integrity and a streak of masochism, the modest little widow
here has hardly a gesture, a pose, a glance in common with
the smoothly révolté film-actress; yet there
is no hint of strain; can there be any higher praise of acting
than that? The film is deepest when it is most superficial.
Melville, even more than Astruc, is as conscious of the everyday
around the characters as of the feelings in the characters.
This, together with the carefully established Occupation “period” gives
each moment of the film an elegiac sadness. The scene where
Barney watches Leon Morin put her child to bed, the drab
staircase up to his room, Riva scrubbing her floor as Morin
calls on her – many beautifully integrated little asides
like this achieve a delicate balance of inner and outer worlds.
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© Copyright
Raymond Durgnat Estate 1963 . No part of this article
may be reprinted without permission.
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