Les Misérables

1934, France, directed by Raymond Bernard

One of the few screen versions of Victor Hugo's novel conceived on something close to the scale of the source material, Raymond Bernard's adaptation was originally released as three separate feature films (which appeared on three successive weekends!), with a cumulative running time two-and-a-half times that of Richard Boleslawski's 1935 US version. That film focuses, inevitably, almost entirely on the central narrative thread covering Inspector Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean: the shorter cinema adaptations have tended to reduce the book to that one aspect, whereas Bernard's film restores many -- though by no means all -- of Hugo's interwoven themes and plotlines.

The players, too, are almost entirely the reverse of the American version of the following year: in Hollywood, Javert is played by the portly Charles Laughton, whereas Harry Baur, with a remarkably similar physique, plays Jean Valjean here, and it's a much better bit of casting (Laughton, for all his virtues, was never a credibly relentless hunter, lacking any obvious signs of hunger, while the fairly slight Fredric March can't possibly hope to fully evoke Valjean's allegedly immense strength).

As with many a great nineteenth century novel, Hugo's plot depends on an extraordinary variety of coincidences, something made more obvious by the cutting necessary to adapt a book that runs to well over one thousand pages. On film, at least, Valjean isn't so much implacable as remarkably fortunate, with Valjean falling into his lap on a number of occasions. At one point, as if to acknowledge this, Javert notes that "the world is small"; Paris seems reduced to the scale of a village, a few streets where people keep running into one another. Of course, the narrative itself was only one of Hugo's concerns, and his vignettes on the Paris suburbs, or the writing of history, inevitably disappear on film, though Bernard does create richly textured backgrounds that go some way towards providing a substitute for Hugo's descriptive detail.

As in his previous Les Croix de bois, Raymond Bernard blends a variety of techniques to create different moods. The most obvious stylistic device throughout Les Misérables is the use of canted angles -- sometimes canted so much that it appears characters are walking vertically, particularly in the film's stirring courtroom scenes -- that evoke something of the fraught spirit of German film of the late 1920's; the camera tilts notably further from its natural centre when Valjean's fate hangs in the balance, creating a terrific sense of dread, with fate apparently waiting in the wings to drag a decent man back down. At other moments, Bernard makes use of the handheld camera that proved so effective in Les Croix de bois, bringing the viewer to the heart of the street violence of the 1832 uprising in Paris, and injecting a note of grim realism that Hugo would surely have approved of.



Jean Valjean is a gift of a role, given the character's many personalities, and Harry Baur is compelling in all the guises he's called on to adopt: while Valjean's more gentle aspects dominate the running time, at least once he has cast off the baleful influence of prison, Baur's much briefer turn as Champmathieu, at the climax of the first part of the film, is a lovely bit of character acting, a vividly imagined piece of work that underlines Champmathieu's pathetic state, though Bernard is careful to ensure that we never laugh at this broken man.
(The image is snagged from the Criterion Collection site since I returned the DVD without remembering to snap a few stills that would better illustrate Bernard's use of unusual camera angles; Criterion don't suffer from a shortage of praise, but they deserve particular credit for bringing the work of a neglected filmmaker like Bernard to light once again).

L'Homme du Niger

1940, France, directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Where British colonial films generally kept their stars safely back in the studio, several similar French productions shipped the headliners overseas - as was the case for this muddled propaganda melodrama, which blends a tale of lost love and leprosy with attempts to extol the Niger irrigation scheme. That scheme was a long-gestating dream of some French colonials, who imagined they could create a cotton-growing scheme in the Sahel, partly to give French cotton manufacturers a stable supply line and partly, perhaps, to compete with pretty successful British efforts along the same lines in the Sudan.

The film's credits include thanks to the ministry for the colonies, although the real power in matters irrigation lay with the Office du Niger, a quasi-independent entity that was at the height of its powers around this time; the Popular Front government had attempted, with very limited success, to rein it in a few years earlier, and the final scenes are something of an orgy of celebration of the vast though ultimately unsuccessful irrigation effort.

The opening and closing sections were filmed in what's now Mali, including in a working leper colony in Bamako, with an extended sequence back in Paris sandwiched in the middle. Leprosy is a key plot element - indeed L'Homme du Niger is the second Harry Baur film within two years to feature leprosy, though Baur's character was not the victim in either case. There's a nice bit of business, involving a lighter, cigarettes and an observant physician, to reveal the leprosy problem, although it's telling, and entirely expected, that a single European character gets far more screen time than the entire hospital of African patients, most of whom are dismissed in the usual patronizing terms.

Although he was a prolific director, particularly in the silent era, very few of Jacques de Baroncelli's films are available today, and although he extracts several nice performances here, particularly from Harry Baur - who is especially good in the key diagnosis scenes - and Victor Francen, the love story elements fail to convince, which seriously hobbles a film that's already uncertain of whether to emphasize the politics or the drama.

Un Carnet de bal

1937, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

I hadn't realized that Duvivier's film has an episodic structure, so my hopes for scenes in which Louis Jouvet faces off with Harry Baur, Raimu or Fernandel came to naught -- each plays in his own discrete segment, as another of the men featuring on a long-ago dance card wielded by the lovely Françoise Rosay. Jouvet does play in later films with all three actors, so there is that to look forward to; this is ultimately hardly the best showcase for all of the various players, since some of their sequences are very thin indeed. Jouvet, as Jo, a lawyer turned criminal, gets one of the best parts -- the kind of thing that Humphrey Bogart might have played in an American film a couple of years later, layered with world-weary gestures, though there's something very Jouvet-ian about the precise way in which Jo outlines the various articles of the criminal code, which he cites to his partners in crime as a means to ensure the lightest possible sentence in the event of a criminal mishap.

The Baur and Fernandel segments are fairly unmemorable, at least as far as the actors are concerned, though the ecclaesiastical backdrop in the Baur section makes for some interesting set design; Raimu's segment is rather stronger, not least because the sequence is constructed in such a way as to actually give his character some depth. The whole affair threatens to go in an entirely different direction in the startling section featuring Paul Blanchar as a back-street abortionist and tortured addict, wrung out from years in the colonies; the entire segment is shot off kilter, in keeping with Blanchar's state of mind, and it's as though the tale drifted in from an entirely different movie that happened to be shooting on an adjacent, and much grimier, sound stage. The segment is so distinctive that I looked back through the rest of the film to see whether or not Duvivier had used similar, if less obvious, ways of marking the visual signature associated with each entry on the dance card, perhaps like the technical challenges Claude Chabrol assigned himself when shooting his Lavardin films, but I didn't pick up on anything obvious.

Volpone

1941, France, directed by Maurice Tourneur

I loved Ben Jonson's original play when I read it in college, but I'd never previously seen Volpone on stage or film, and somehow it never occurred to me that it might be quite so broad in performance. This version is at a couple of removes from Jonson -- it's a filmed version of a stage adaptation that came the pens of Jules Romains and Stefan Zweig, which altered Jonson's original ending -- and perhaps it plays up the farcical elements to an even greater degree. That's especially true of Harry Baur's performance in the title role: although Baur is capable of great subtly elsewhere, his work here hits the same note over and over, with only the briefest of more nuanced asides -- the performance is in keeping with his enormous fake nose, as seen above.

Louis Jouvet, as Volpone's sidekick Mosca, is rather more toned-down, at least within the context of the play, and there are some terrific supporting players, especially Charles Dullin, a great theatre actor who tutored Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau, among others; he plays the decrepit Corbaccio so convincingly that it's easy to forget the actor was only in his fifties. Maurice Tourneur, so good a director elsewhere, mostly settles for observing the actors at work, with only a handful of interesting shots (a conversation shot in silhouette, or the shadows of dancers late used as a striking backdrop); it sounds as though the film had a troubled production history in the early months of the Occupation, and perhaps in the end it's most valuable as a record of a work which had its greatest fame on the stage.

Poil de carotte

1932, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

It's not hard to imagine that life for many children in the early 1930s was a less than pleasant experience, with terrible poverty taking its toll, as documented in films like La Maternelle (or Wild Boys of the Road, which I haven't yet seen). There's something more going on here, however, with Duvivier exploring a profound disconnect between adults and children, and the terrible suffering that children endure as a consequence. The director previously filmed the same story in 1925, but clearly felt that the material had more to offer.

While the eponymous Poil de Carotte (Robert Lynen) initially embraces his return to the country after the school year, and runs free through the fields, there's a terrible hole in his life the moment he returns home: his siblings are actively conspiring against him, and his parents, whose marriage is a sham, alternatively abuse and utterly ignore him, with the latter fate especially bitter. Duvivier illustrates the physical distance between Poil de Carotte and those whose acknowledgment he craves, but focuses to an even greater degree on his protagonist's psychology. He dramatizes his inner life through clever use of double and triple exposure, showing conversations between Poil de Carotte's "good" and "bad" sides as the boy lies asleep, and conveying his growing sense of helplessness.

Although some adults sense the boy's troubles, and even endeavour to convey this to the parents - breaking class taboos in the process - they're apparently helpless to effect much change, and there's a distressing sense of inevitability, together with an almost brutal honesty about what a desperate child might consider (an echo again of La Maternelle). Those climatic scenes are almost unbearably tense, and Duvivier also introduces dramatic close-ups to underline the enormity of what may occur. As nuanced as the psychological portrait is, however, the scenes of family life seem less subtle: while Harry Baur is simply a gruff, uncommunicative father, Poil de Carotte's mother (Catherine Fonteney) is a harridan, taking out the failures of her own life on her youngest child, and lacking any sympathy even though her own story has many elements of tragedy. That said, there's something bracing in Duvivier's refusal to contemplate even mild sentimentality in the domestic portrait, with the household dissected without pity.

Le Golem

1936, France/Czechoslovakia, directed by Julien Duvivier

David Cairns examined Duvivier's 1935 feature Golgotha at his invaluable blog Shadowplay, and suggested that the director flings himself "headlong" into the Biblical movie trap, that is, the problem of characterising people in convincing fashion when we're so separated from them in time and space. Although the distance to the events of Le Golem isn't quite as profound, I couldn't help feeling that Duvivier hadn't quite extricated himself from the previous year's trap: as striking as the film is at times, its so lavish with atmosphere and half-digested mythology that there's very little sense of characterisation. The sets are frequently remarkable - the retorts and flames of a legion of alchemists, the crannies of the Jewish ghetto, the interior of an archetypal country inn - but the actors are trapped within the broadest of strokes, compelled toward melodrama and rarely able to articulate more subtle emotional shades (Harry Baur, as the Emperor Rudolf II, descends into a madness that seems occasionally and unfortunately comical). Similarly, while Duvivier uses his camera and framing in the service of the inner lives of his characters in other films here the camera's constant movement reinforces the sense of a whirlwind of events, but to ultimately overblown effect.

Mollenard

1938, France, directed by Robert Siodmak

An assured film from Siodmak's French period, though with a somewhat unusual structure -- it almost feels like two different films, albeit both featuring the same protagonist, with the capacious frame a tale of domestic spite and poison and the inset a rousing sketch of colonial skulduggery in Shanghai (a pretty common backdrop at the time). Harry Baur is in fine form as the titular Mollenard, a merchant marine captain facing ruin and shame, a circumstance that brings every dark aspect of his relationship with his wife, played by Gabrielle Dorziat, to the fore. The film rigs the game somewhat, though, by making Dorziat's character so utterly unsympathetic -- the same rather unpleasant trick Renoir played in La Chienne -- that the audience is cast on the side of the criminal by default. Still, the downbeat ending manages to channel something of the spirit of Quai des brumes, made the same year, with the two films also sharing Eugen Schüfftan as director of photography.

La Tête d'un homme

1933, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

Quite a shift from his previous film, Poil de Carotte, this is one of the earliest appearances of George Simenon's Maigret character: Jean Renoir and Jean Tarride both filmed Maigret stories the previous year, and those were, as it happens, the only other Maigret films of the 1930s. The film isn't a whodunit - we know more or less from the beginning of the movie who is responsible, and Maigret (played by Harry Baur) quickly sees the lie of the land - but rather a how-can-I-prove-it, which allows for frissons aplenty as we follow the apparently remorseless killer.

Whereas Poil de Carotte focused particularly on inner lives, Duvivier is more interested here in power relationships and how the different characters interact with one another. He underlines these relationships through the placement of his actors - like above, when prime suspect Heurtin, played by the apparently massive Alexandre Rignault at the very beginning of his film career, shrinks back from the much smaller Radek (Valéry Inkijinoff). Maigret, too, dominates Heurtin, with the inspector quickly realizing that Heurtin's bulk is not matched by his wits. Later in the film, Duvivier shoots Heurtin in a manner that explicitly equates him with Frankenstein's monster as incarnated in the 1930s Universal movies directed by James Whale. There's a brief scene where the "monster" looms over a young girl, swiftly followed by a shot where Heurtin, barely visible at the bottom of the screen, is overpowered by villagers who misunderstand his motives.

That scene is fascinating, too, for the image it conveys of the area surrounding Paris. It's a desolate landscape, more like something we would associate with the northeast of France, rather than the revivifying impression we often get of the Parisian fringes, such as in Duvivier's own La Belle équipe a few years later. The country scenes have none of the life we find in the cafés of Montmartre throughout the film: there's a similar contrast between suburbs and city in Godard's Bande à part. Duvivier also draws an amusing parallel between the insalubrious place Radek spends most of his time and the break room where the Parisian police gather to smoke, drink, and generally let off steam.

Although the film is generally strong in construction - and there are numerous very striking shots exploiting shadows and space - it does stumble in the relative time accorded to Maigret and his prey. Maigret, as most subsequent adaptations recognised, is a fascinating character, but here we learn relatively little about him apart from gathering that he's a very smart, and rather bulky, man. Instead, we spend much time in the company of Radek, a problematic character: although inherited from the book, he's a rather a stereotypical outsider - he's Czech, although Inkijinoff, who was from Siberia, looks much more obviously "foreign" - intent on corrupting the innocent (in every sense) Frenchman. In addition, Inkijinoff isn't nearly as subtle an actor as his colleagues, so it can be hard to take the character seriously - though the fact that Maigret never under-estimates him helps to restore some balance.

L'Assassinat du Père Noël

1941, France, directed by Christian-Jaque

As with so much of French cinema during the occupation era, L'Assassinat du Père Noël is set in an enclosed community - a snowbound Alpine village in this case - that it's tempting to interpret as a sort of metaphor for occupied France, and particularly for the threat of corruption from within in the form of collaboration. Accusations of collaboration no doubt rang in the ears of director Christian-Jaque (and others, like Henri-Georges Clouzot, then also in the employ of the German-controlled Continental Films), and obviously obliged them to be rather indirect in their critique. As Susan Hayward has written, though, it's almost equally easy to interpret the film, and others of the period, as a paean to a France of the past, in other words to find in it a rather conservative, even vaguely Pétainist viewpoint.* It's perhaps that ability to be all things to all people - and, crucially, to appear innocuous to the German censors - that accounts for the film's substantial success when first released.

Although the film announces itself as a whodunit, the promised plotline is ultimately rather unimportant, with the question of Father Christmas's killer not even raised until well past the halfway point in the film. Instead, Christian-Jaque spends his time serving up a detailed portrait of the village, populated - indeed over-populated - with a variety of eccentrics, not the least of whom is the baron, just returned from many years abroad to cast his sinister shadow over the village. Harry Baur, one of the great stars of the era, and shortly to die in the custody of the Gestapo, plays a local craftsman, a globe manufacturer, who dresses up as Santa Claus each year, and he's especially amusing in the sequences in which Santa comes under the increasing influence of the alcohol with which each and every family rather liberally plies him.

As David Cairns has noted, Christian-Jaque employs a highly mobile, eye-catching camera, moving around within both the village and the interior spaces - a cosy inn, a rather bleak castle, a workshop - to explore both the nooks and crannies and their inhabitants, and he makes good use of the unusual, snowy location, perhaps most obviously in the atmospheric nighttime scenes when two rambunctious boys go exploring. Given the shadows in these sequences, I'm guessing that they may have been shot "day for night," but they're still filled with mystery and a sense of danger - much more than the main intrigue. That plot is the film's weakest element, thankfully balanced by an intriguing group of character actors and the prowling, curious camera.

*Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, revised edition 2005.