Blue Panther (1965)

Claude Chabrol’s Blue Panther (the original title is Marie-Chantal contre Dr Kha) is a lighthearted 1965 eurospy romp, or at least that’s what you might assume.

It opens with a murder on a train heading for Switzerland. Then Bruno Kerrien (Roger Hanin), who claims to be an advertising man, meets Hubert de Ronsac (François Moro-Giafferi) and his pretty cousin Marie-Chantal (Marie Laforêt) in the dining car. Bruno gets jumpy when he realises he is being watched. He asks Marie-Chantal to do him a favour. He wants her to hold on to a piece of jewellery for him for a day or two. The jewel is a blue panther with ruby eyes.

Marie-Chantal senses some kind of intrigue here and that sounds like fun so she agrees.

Later on the ski slopes she encounters reporter who tells her he is in Switzerland in pursuit of a story about international espionage. She guesses that the blue panther is involved.

There are all sorts of shady characters at the hotel. And pretty soon there’s a murder. And Marie-Chantal makes a dying man a promise.

She now realises that she’s playing a dangerous game but she’s kind of excited. At least having people chasing you and tying to kill you isn’t boring.

The Blue Panther is of course the movie’s McGuffin. Marie-Chantal has no idea what its significance is and neither does the audience. But there’s a bewildering assortment of people who want that jewel. Some might be good guys but we figure that most are bad guys and there’s no way of knowing which are which. There are two Soviet agents, one of whom is a young boy. He’s the boss. There’s a guy who could be a CIA assassin. Another guy might be working for an African terrorist organisation. And there’s the mysterious Dr Kha, presumably a diabolical criminal mastermind.

Plus there’s Olga (Stéphane Audran). She could be working for Dr Kha or she could be a freelancer. And Paco (Francisco Rabal). We have no idea what his affiliation might be. He seems like a good guy but it would be dangerous to jump to conclusions.

Luckily Marie-Chantal is a judo expert. She also seems comfortable with handguns. As innocent bystanders caught up accidentally in espionage go she’s pretty competent. She’s a smart girl - she’s suspicious of everybody. She never panics. She’s breezily confident that she can outsmart all these spies. She behaves as if getting caught in the middle of a web of espionage is just one of those things that a sophisticated girl should be able to handle. And the spies find themselves having to dance to her tune.

Marie Laforêt really dominates the movie in an effortless fashion. It’s an odd detached performance but it’s intriguing.

This is a strange movie. It seems on the surface to belong to the eurospy genre but it doesn’t really. It’s more like Chabrol was embarrassed by having to make such a movie so he decided to approach it in an off-kilter mocking sort of way. It never develops the energy or the sense of fun that you expect in a eurospy movie. There is some violence but there are no action set-pieces. There’s no suspense. It’s the sort of movie you’d get if you asked an intellectual who despises spy movies to make a spy movie.

Chabrol was associated with the Nouvelle Vague and this movie has all the flaws that one associates with that movement. It’s more like an intellectual exercise than a movie. Chabrol was clearly trying to avoid doing anything sordid like making a popular commercial movie. And it’s self-consciously clever. If you enjoy clever-clever self-referential movies that deconstruct the genre and get all meta and play elaborate games with audience expectations then you’ll enjoy it. But this sort of thing has been done a lot more effectively. If you want to see this sort of thing done really well watch Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express instead. It’s a much better and much more enjoyable movie than Blue Panther and it’s cleverer and wittier as well.

Blue Panther often gets compared to Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise, made a year later. You could say it’s Modesty Blaise without the crazy outrageous fun elements.

As a spy movie or a spy spoof Blue Panther just doesn’t spark.

And then it just ends. Which I’m sure is very clever and avant-garde but I’m old-fashioned enough to enjoy movies with actual endings.

Of course Chabrol was not trying to make a spy movie, and he was not trying to make a spy spoof. He wasn’t interested in telling anything even resembling a coherent story. He was trying to deconstruct the genre and turn it inside out and make a movie about movies so if you’re looking for a spy movie you’ve picked the wrong movie.

Whether you enjoy this movie or not depends on whether you’re prepared to accept it for what it is. If so you’ll probably enjoy the game that Chabrol is playing, assuming that you like those sorts of cinematic games. Blue Panther is recommended if you’re a fan of this sort of thing. If such cinematic games are not your thing then you’ll be extremely bored.

Kino Lorber’s DVD provides a very nice transfer and there’s an audio commentary with Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson.

Sissi (1955)

Sissi, released in 1955 and directed by Ernst Marischka, was the most famous and most successful entry in the heimatfilm genre.

Sissi made sixteen-year-old Romy Schneider a major star. The male lead is Karlheinz Böhm, best-known to English-speaking audiences as the star of Michael Powell’s notorious Peeping Tom.

The heimatfilm (or homeland film) was an incredibly popular film genre in West Germany and Austria in the 1950s. It’s a genre that has for decades been despised by German film scholars and critics and it’s a genre that was passionately loathed by the intellectuals who supported the so-called New German Cinema that emerged in the 60s. To them it represented everything they hated about the German film industry of the 1950s.

Much of this loathing was simply intellectual snobbery. Intellectuals tend to be enraged by the kinds of movies that audiences actually enjoy. In the case of the heimatfilm there was also the fact that this was a genre aimed very much at a female audience. The condescension with which critics and film scholars regarded Hollywood “women’s pictures” was mirrored by a similar condescension in Germany towards movies such as the heimatfilm.

Heimatfilms were a mixture of romantic melodrama and comedy and were determinedly optimistic in tone. They were lavish productions with lots of location shooting in picturesque countryside and they looked gorgeous.

Sissi tells the story of the budding romance between Bavarian Duchess Elisabeth (known as Sissi) and the young Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph. The movie turns the story into a kind of fairytale romance. In reality Sissi’s life (she was actually nicknamed Sisi rather than Sissi) was somewhat tragic and the marriage was a long way from a fairytale romance. But this is the world of the movies, in which real life plays no part.

As the movie opens Duchess Ludovika is hoping to marry her daughter Helene (known as Nene) to the handsome young Emperor Franz Joseph. But it is Nene’s high-spirited kid sister Sissi (Romy Schneider) who catches the emperor’s eye. It seems hopeless since the Emperor’s mother, the Archduchess Sophie, has decided he’s going to marry Nene. The young emperor usually does what his mother tells him to do, but this time things might be different. He has fallen head-over-heels in love with Sissi. He really is determined to marry her.

That’s about all there is to the plot. I’s just a matter of whether Franz Joseph can overcome the obstacles that his mother will put in his way.

His mother does not approve of Sissi, considering her to be uncouth, headstrong and rebellious. She is of course all of those things.

The story plays out like a fairy tale. A handsome emperor and a beautiful spirited princess in love, having to battle the emperor’s imperious and rather scary mother who is determined to thwart their romance and with the beautiful princess’s sister as her rival for the handsome emperor’s love. The settings look like they’re straight out of a fairy tale. The whole movie takes place in what is in effect a fairytale world. This is a gloriously frothy insanely romantic movie which makes no concessions whatsoever to historical accuracy or to the real world. And that’s its charm.

Karlheinz Böhm plays Francis Joseph as a perfect Prince Charming. Romy Schneider is charming and likeable.

Incidentally Sissi’s mother in the movie is played by Magda Schneider, who was Romy Schneider’s real-life mother.

There’s some comic relief from Josef Meinrad as Major Böckl, the bumbling chief of palace security, and from Gustav Knuth and Sissi’s father Duke Max, a bit of a bumpkin but rather wise in his own way. And the comic relief is genuinely amusing.

Had it been made in Hollywood this movie would have been shot in Technicolor but being Austrian it was shot in Agfacolor which has a softer slightly more pastel look which matches the tone of the movie perfectly. I have no idea what the budget was but this movie certainly looks lavish and expensive.

Umbrella in Australia have released this movie (and its two sequels plus a fourth movie which is a sort of prequel) in a four-disc DVD set. The films are in German with removable English subtitles. Sissi gets a pretty impressive transfer. It’s in the correct 1.37:1 aspect ratio. And the set is very inexpensive. The Sissi trilogy has also had a Blu-Ray release.

If you’re in the mood to indulge yourself in a lightweight feelgood fluffy romance with a fairytale vibe then this movie is just what you’re looking for. And it has Romy Schneider. Sissi is recommended.

Ladies' Man (1962)

I’m a huge fan of the French Lemmy Caution movies of the 50s and early 60s. Ladies' Man (Lemmy pour les dames), directed as usual by Bernard Borderie and released in 1962, was the second last of the proper Lemmy Caution movies. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville has its merits but I don’t count it as a real Lemmy Caution movie.

Ace FBI agent Lemmy Caution was created by English writer Peter Cheyney in the 1930s. Cheyney was immensely popular at one time, particularly in France.

The star of these movies was granite-faced gravel-voiced American actor Eddie Constantine who became a major pop culture icon in France as a result.

Ladies' Man opens with Lemmy enjoying vacation in France but wherever Lemmy goes trouble is sure to follow. At the moment it’s not trouble that is following him but a woman. In Lemmy’s world trouble and women tend to go together. The woman seems to wan to talk and then clams up.

Lemmy soon finds himself with a murder on his hands.

Lemmy has not one but three glamorous possibly dangerous dames to deal with. Three female friends. The curious thing is that at one time there were five of them but two met with unfortunate accidents. This interests Lemmy. He has a suspicious mind.

When somebody tries to gun him down from a speedboat Lemmy becomes even more interested.

Lemmy has plenty of suspects but the big problem is figuring out a possible motive. And the motive in this case is more complicated than it seems.

The plot is serviceable enough. Lemmy is pretty sure that one of the three women is either a murderess or an accomplice to murder and both Lemmy and the audience are kept guessing as to her identity (and there’s always the slight possibility all three women are innocent).

Eddie Constantine is terrific as usual. He had exactly the right devil-may-care attitude and he had charisma to burn. And a certain rough charm.

It’s certainly a bonus having the lovely Françoise Brion as one of the three ladies. Brion’s most memorable performance was in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s strange perplexing and fascinating L’immortelle (1963). The other cast members are perfectly adequate, with Paul Mercey as the long-suffering rather cynical Inspector Boumègue and Robert Berri as Lemmy’s good-natured but not overly smart wartime buddy Dombie being quite good and adding some comic relief. Thankfully the comic relief is kept to a minimum - it’s not needed since Lemmy Caution provides more than enough amusemnt with his hardboiled one-liners.

Finding the Lemmy Caution movies in decent English-friendly versions has always been quite a challenge and without the grey market they would have been impossible to see. It would be really nice if somebody were to release a boxed set of restored versions of these films but sadly there’s still no sign of that happening.

Ladies' Man is part crime thriller and part eurospy movie. It’s a typical entry in the series. In other words it’s an immense amount of fun and highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Lemmy Caution movies - the excellent Poison Ivy (1953) and Women Are Like That (1960).

Tip Not Included (1966)

Tip Not Included (Die Rechnung – eiskalt serviert) was the fourth of the German crime thrillers featuring George Nader as ace G-Man Jerry Cotton. It was released in 1966.

It opens with a glamorous girl singer in a nightclub, always a good way to start a movie. In the English dubbed version her name appears to be Phyllis but in the German version I believe she’s named Violet. Don’t ask me why. Jerry is at the bar and sees a young guy (we later find out his name is Tommy) getting menaced by a couple of hoods. Naturally he intervenes.

What Jerry doesn’t know yet is that he has stumbled upon a clue that could foil a spectacular hoist.

The villains are intending to steal millions of dollars in withdrawn bank notes, plus ten million dollars’ worth of diamonds.

There’s another clue. The controller who has to supervise the shipment of the cancelled currency was mugged. That worries Jerry. He can’t see a connection with the currency shipment but he has a hunch there’s a connection just the same. And of course he’s right (Jerry’s hunches usually are right).

The nightclub canary (played by Yvonne Monlaur) is Tommy’s girlfriend and Tommy is mixed up in the heist.

The complicating factor is that a rival gangster is taking an interest in this heist, meaning that a double-cross is a real possibility.

Jerry has his own problems. He tries to do something honourable and generous and ends up getting suspended. Of course that doesn’t mean he’s going to give up his interest in the case. He did tell Phyllis that if she found herself in trouble she should call him and now she’s in trouble and she calls him. And Jerry finds himself in trouble as well.

There are all the standard plot complications that you’d expect. It’s maybe just a little too reminiscent of the previous movie in the series (The Trap Shuts at Midnight) which was also a heist movie, and in my view a slightly better one.

The robbery itself is quite clever and is handled skilfully by director Helmuth Ashley. It’s very much the highlight of the movie although the action finale is quite good as well. Helmuth Ashley seems to have worked mainly in television although he did direct one of the Edgar Wallace krimis for Rialto.

Georg Hurdalek wrote the screenplay (and also wrote one of the krimis).

Peter Thomas contributes yet another wild crazy score which adds to the 60s vibe.

As usual there’s plenty of stock footage to try to convince us this is all taking place in the United States.

George Nader is as usual an adequate lead. Nader was supposedly headed for stardom in Hollywood in the 50s but it never happened. He was being groomed as another Rock Hudson but he notably lacks Hudson’s charisma.

Yvonne Monlaur is a perfectly fine leading lady. She’s best known to English-speaking audiences for a couple of Hammer movies in the 60s. Birke Bruck is pretty good as gangster’s moll Mary.

The transfer is reasonably good although the image is just a bit on the soft side.

All eight Jerry Cotton films (in both German-language and English dubbed versions) are included in the recent German Jerry Cotton DVD boxed set. The movie was shot widescreen in black-and-white (the series would switch to colour for the last few movies).

Tip Not Included is a solid modestly budgeted crime thriller done with a reasonable amount of style and energy. It’s worth a look.

I’ve also reviewed a couple of earlier Jerry Cotton movies - The Violin Case Murders (1965) and The Trap Shuts at Midnight (1966) which are both slightly better than this one.

Rififi in the City (1963)

Rififi in the City is a very early Jess Franco film noir-influenced crime thriller.

A cop named Miguel Mora has infiltrated an informant named Juan into a nightclub called The Stardust. The Stardust is part of a crime empire run by an outwardly respectable businessman named Leprince. Unfortunately Juan’s cover has been blown and Mora is trying desperately to extract him from the Stardust in one piece.

Mora loses his cool, bursts into Leprince’s home and starts making threats. He gets a vicious beating for his trouble. Juan ends up in even worse trouble.

For Mora it’s now a personal vendetta. He doesn’t care if he’s dismissed from the police force. In fact he welcomes the idea. He intends to nail Leprince even if he has to use unorthodox or even extra-legal means to do so.

He has a few potential allies. There are Juan’s girlfriends. Juan was a handsome young man who had no difficulty attracting women and he always had several girlfriends at the same time. One of his girlfriends, Nina (a nightclub chanteuse), is Leprince’s mistress and she has reason to feel bitter towards Leprince.

Leprince has more than just Mora to worry about. Somebody is killing off his henchmen one by one. He thinks it might be Mora but he has plenty of other enemies so he’s not sure. The audience doesn’t know who is murdering Leprince’s stooges. We don’t think it’s Mora but Mora is a man obsessed so we can’t entirely dismiss the possibility.

Mora has gone lone wolf and it’s not certain whether, even if he finds hard evidence, the police commissioner will back him.

The best chance to get the evidence against Leprince would be to use Nina but that would put her in a lot of danger. Leprince is a ruthless man.

The writing credits are shared by Gonzalo Sebastián de Erice, Juan Cobos and Franco (from a novel by Charles Exbrayat). The plot isn’t dazzlingly original but it’s more than competent and the twists work pretty well.

While there’s plenty of noir influence is there a femme fatale? That’s for you to decide. There are several key female characters and they’re slightly ambiguous. Nina is the most interesting although that might have quite a bit to do with Maria Vincent’s sultry performance. Nina has been a gangster’s mistress but there’s plenty of good in her, although of course we can’t be quite sure where her loyalties will ultimately lie.

Miguel Mora is a good noir hero, a decent honest cop who goes off the rails a bit. Whether he can find his footing again is an open question. As the movie progresses Mora becomes increasingly a classic noir protagonist.

Like Death Whistles the Blues this is a movie that is vague about its setting but it just about gets away with convincing us that we’re in Central America.

As always in Franco film the music is crucial. Franco wasn’t just a jazz fan. Jazz influenced the pacing and the rhythms and the structure of his movies, something that would become very obvious by the late 1960s.

Much has been made of the Orson Welles influence on early Franco. Welles saw several of Franco’s early movies (including this one) and was highly impressed and he hired Franco to work on Chimes at Midnight. He seemed to regard Franco as a bit of a protégé. When you look at movies by Welles like Mr Arkadin and F for Fake the idea that Welles saw Franco as a cinematic kindred spirit doesn’t seem so crazy. They were both inclined to be undisciplined and to rely on the inspiration of the moment, and both had a taste for extreme cinematic experimentation.

This movie hits the ground running and early on we get some quite stylish action scenes, with a surprisingly high level of violence for 1963. Franco shows that he knows the tricks of the trade and throws in some Dutch angles and other cinematic flourishes.

There’s also a very marked film noir visual style. The movie was shot in black-and-white and there are plenty of shadowy alleyways and dark corners. The whole feel of the movie is very noir, and the noir atmosphere is very effective.

Interestingly we are told that these events are happening not in Spain but in an unnamed Central American nation. In 1963 Spanish film-makers had to tread carefully and the suggestion that respectable Spanish businessmen might run crime syndicates and might put pressure on senior police officers (and that senior police officers might be open to such pressures) would probably have been a bit risky. The fact that Leprince is an aspiring politician running on a platform of democracy would have made it even more advisable not to set the film in Spain.

This is a Jess Franco movie so you might be wondering if there’s going to be a slightly bizarre nightclub scene. The answer is yes. I certainly think a robot dancing with a girl in a bikini is a bit bizarre. It’s intercut, very effectively, with the scene in which Mora gets a savage beating.

It’s not as kinky as nightclub scenes in later Franco movies but Jess already understands that such scenes really build an atmosphere of sleaze mixed with glamour and danger. There’s a later nightclub scene that is somewhat sexier.

Severin have paired Rififi in the City with Death Whistles the Blues in an excellent two-movie Franco Noir Blu-Ray set (and it’s available on DVD as well) with an appreciation of the film by Franco expert Stephen Thrower.

Rififi in the City is a neat little film noir. Highly recommended.

Stormy Waters (1941)

Jean Grémillon’s Stormy Waters (Remorques) isn’t quite in the style of the French film noir of the 30s (or poetic realism as it was also known) as I’d hoped, but it does have enough in common with that style to make it interesting. And it’s a good film in its own right.

Although released in 1941 it was apparently shot a couple of years earlier. Given the fact that France was going through the trauma of war and the Occupation at the time we’re probably fortunate the movie was completed and released at all. The plot is extremely simple but that’s one of the movie’s strengths. It’s the response of the characters to events that matters.

André Laurent (Jean Gabin) is the captain of an ocean-going tug, the Cyclone. The salvage and rescue work by which he and his crew make their loving is lucrative but dangerous. André has no real choice though. The sea is in his blood. His wife Yvonne would like him to give up the sea. He keeps promising to do so but of course he never does.

Events come to a crisis for André when the Cyclone attempts to tow in a stricken freighter, the Mirva. The Mirva’s captain is strangely indifferent to the fate of his ship. His wife Catherine (Michèle Morgan) is on board and it appears that their marriage is, like the ship, drifting helplessly towards the rocks. In fact his wife takes to one of the lifeboats and is picked up by the Cyclone.

The attraction between André and Catherine is immediate. Catherine tells André that she and her husband are through. We see to have here a setup for a classic romantic triangle but it turns out to be more complicated than that. There are in fact three rivals for André’s love - Catherine his wife Yvonne, and the sea itself. Yvonne and the sea are very similar - they both demand unconditional love and absolute commitment, and both are capable of overwhelming the unwary sailor and dragging him down into the depths.

Everything in the movie relates to the sea or ships. The Cyclone’s job is to rescue ships that are adrift. The lives of all the major characters are also adrift. They are not unhappy because they are weak or bad or selfish. They’ve simply failed to choose a definite course and to maintain it, and have not realised that without a steady hand on the tiller you will always be in danger of shipwreck.

The attraction between André and Catherine is not quite what you expect, given the conventions of romantic movies. Catherine does not represent the stormy waters of uncontrollable sexual passion; rather she represents for André a safe port. He feels comfortable with her. But to reach that safe haven he will have to navigate his way through some treacherous emotional waters.

The ending is emotionally wrenching and works superbly.

The movie benefits enormously from the extreme underplaying of both Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan. They had been paired very successfully a couple of years earlier in one of the great masterpieces of French cinema, Marcel Carné’s Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows). They have a wonderful chemistry that is all the more powerful for not being obvious and overtly sexual.

As you’d expect from a French movie of this period the black-and-white cinematography is very impressive, even in the slightly battered print that was screened on Australian cable TV.

Perhaps not quite in the same class as the very greatest French movies of that era such as Le quai des brumes and Hôtel du Nord but still a wonderful movie. Highly recommended.

Come Dance With Me! (1959)

My Brigitte Bardot obsession continues to grow. It’s not an easy obsession to follow since her movies are not all that easy to find in Australia, but I do my best. My most recent find was Come Dance With Me! (Voulez-vous danser avec moi?).

Made in 1959, this is a murder mystery but done in a strictly light-hearted way, with generous helpings of comedy and romance.

Bardot is Virginie, a young woman who falls in love with a dentist named Hervé and despite the opposition of her father marries him. They have a silly little lovers’ tiff and he takes refuge in a local bar. He meets a woman there who offers to dance with him, and also offers a shoulder to cry on. He is persuaded to drive her home, and then is persuaded to come in for just one drink. One thing leads to another and pretty soon he has his head buried between her breasts. At which point her co-conspirator snaps some very incriminating photos. Our hapless dentist has been set up by a blackmailing operation.

The unlucky dentist hasn’t really done anything terribly wrong, he hasn’t technically been unfaithful, but such photos are rather difficult to explain away. He confronts the blackmailing woman, but she is insistent, and when he turns up to a second meeting at her dance studio he discovers her dead body, Which is very embarrassing indeed given that he has a very strong motive for wanting her dead.

To make things more complicated for our unfortunate dentist, Virginie has followed him to his meeting with the blackmailer and arrives to find him standing over her lifeless body. Now he has to convince her of his innocence. And having done that, he’s going to need her help in proving his innocence to the police.

Luckily Virginie takes to amateur detective work like a duck to water. And that’s one of the things I like about Bardot’s movies. She might often seem to be set up as a superficially stereotypical movie dumb blonde but her characters generally turn out not to be dumb at all. They’re often wildly eccentric, but never dumb. In this movie she’s rather ditzy but that doesn’t prevent her from being a better crime-solver than the police.

Another thing I like about Bardot’s movies is that she’s usually extremely funny but when we laugh at her it’s always in an affectionate way. We don’t laugh at her because she’s ridiculous or stupid.

Come Dance With Me! is rather racy for a 1959 movie, even for a 1959 French movie. The heroine’s quest for justice leads her to a gay bar in Paris, and we’re treated to a drag show. And there’s no hedging about the subject matter. There’s no subtext here.

Of course what really matters with this type of movie is whether it’s entertaining or not, and this one is very entertaining. It’s a well-crafted murder mystery and it’s a fun romantic farce as well. And Bardot is delightful, as always.

Bob le flambeur (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, released in 1956, wasn’t just a major influence on the French New Wave film-makers. In many ways it is a fully fledged New Wave film.

The title character, Bob the Gambler, is an ultra-cool gangster, gambler and tough guy in 1950 Paris. Or at least he used to be. He still has the pose, and the flash American car, and the clothes, but really he’s just a rather ridiculous old man living on past glories. His last big job was the Rimbaud bank robbery, and that was 20 years earlier. And it was a failure anyway. All he has left is his image, and to maintain that he has to keep gambling. And he’s losing. Losing continuously, and losing big time.

In fact he’s so broke he decides on one last spectacular heist, a last desperate throw of the dice to avoid admitting that he’s over the hill and in serious anger of becoming merely pathetic.

While Bob le flambeur is heavily influenced by American film noir, and shows the depth of Melville’s admiration for American popular culture and for Hollywood movies, there’s nothing even remotely American about the film. This movie is about as French as a movie could possibly be.

While it’s in some respects more morally ambiguous and more cynical than the American crime films of the 40s and early 50s, it’s also a lot more romantic, and even whimsical. The whole exercise is done with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and is absolutely dripping with irony. It’s that blend of romanticism and irony that makes it, for me at least, so overwhelmingly French. It has the fatalism of classic film noir, but with a strongly absurdist edge to it.

Bob likes to imagine that he has assembled an elite team of crooks for the heist of the century, and has drilled them so that they function like a well-oiled precision machine, but they’re like actors who think they’re the heroes of a classic heist movie when in reality they’re merely players in a farce. This is a film noir story, but told as black comedy.

It’s a movie in which atmosphere and tone are infinitely more important than plot. Melville draws us into this seedy world of phoney glamour and cut-rate wannabe big shots, with some glorious location filming. The camerawork as well as the style anticipate the New Wave.

It’s a terrific looking movie, and the Region 2 DVD from Optimum Home Entertainment boasts a superb transfer (and is less than half the price of the Criterion DVD). The movie looks like it was filmed yesterday rather than half a century ago. Highly recommended.

Port of Shadows (1938)

Marcel Carné’s 1938 production Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) belongs to the “poetic realism” school of French cinema of the 1930s. It’s often regarded as a precursor of film noir. In fact it’s very film noir indeed.

It tells the story of a man who has deserted from the French army. We’re never told his reasons, although he does admit to having done terrible things in anger. It’s likely he has also been scarred by his experiences in Indo-China. He finds himself in a seedy waterfront bar, where he meets a girl Nelly, who is as alone and despairing as he is.

He also crosses the path of a painter whose despair has gone even further, and who bequeaths him his identity. More ominously, he also encounters Lucien, a cowardly but vicious small-time gangster, and Zabel, Nelly’s sleazy and creepy guardian. He and Nelly fall in love, but they never for a moment believe that they have a future.

The air of fatalism in this film is overwhelming. Not one of the characters has the will to avoid their fate. The fact that the movie was made in France in 1938, with Europe heading inexorably towards a cataclysm that no-one seemed to have the will to avoid, is undoubtedly very significant.

Jean Gabin brings a certain dignity to the role of the deserter Jean. Michèle Morgan is superb as Nelly. The acting in general is low key, which also add to the feeling of inescapable doom. The cinematography is moody and anticipates much of the feel of film noir. Lots of fog. The ending is predictable but then tragic endings are tragic because you can see them coming but somehow the characters are unable to do anything to avert their fate.

Compared to Hollywood films of the same era Port of Shadows is much more sexually frank, and much more grownup. There are no phoney tacked-on happy endings, and no tedious moralising at the end, in this movie. No-one deserves their fate, justice has not been done, life has simply crushed a few people because that’s what life does. A cynical but also a very romantic movie. Highly recommended.

Belle de Jour (1967)

Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour is the story of Séverine (played by Catherine Deneuve) and her double life.

The subject matter could easily lead you to expect a soft porn film, but Belle de Jour is nothing of the sort. If you’re expecting lots of nudity or graphic sex you’ll be very disappointed – this movie actually manages to be extremely coy while dealing with very adult subject matter, but then Buñuel understands that sex is very much a mind thing. What we imagine is more exciting than what we see.

Séverine is married to a wealthy, handsome, young doctor. She loves him, but she can’t bear to have sex with him. The film continually cuts between Séverine’s real life and her fantasy life, and her fantasy life makes it clear why she won’t have sex with him – Séverine wants to be dominated and humiliated, and her husband is just too nice and too clean to turn her on. Her name is obviously a reference to Severin, the hero of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs”.

She lives a double life in the sense that her fantasy life is more real and more fulfilling to her than her real life, but then after a chance remark by a friend leads her to a Paris brothel she starts living a real double life – prostitute by day, virtuous wife by night. Inevitably she finds that eventually her two lives collide. If this was a Hollywood film you could pretty much predict the ending, but this is most definitely not a Hollywood film.

Buñuel is not interested in moralising (and he has some fun satirising the hypocrisy of middle-class morality), he simply views his subject matter with amusement. Catherine Deneuve is superb, and manages to make Séverine completely believable.

This is an intelligent, incisive, amusing and non-judgmental look at sex, and it’s a very entertaining film. Highly recommended.

Ossessione (1943)

Luchino Visconti’s first feature film, Ossessione, was an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain’s gritty 1934 novel was ideally suited to the Italian neo-realist style of film-making. I’ve always felt that the 1946 Hollywood movie version suffered from being too clean, not seedy enough, and definitely not desperate enough. And Lana Turner, although she projects the necessary sensuality, looks too much like a Hollywood starlet.

Clara Calamai in Visconti’s film is a lot more earthy than Turner, and seems more authentically working class. She gives a great performance as Giovanna, conveying her mix of calculation and desperation. Massimo Girotti as Gino, the drifter, is more of an innocent. He seems totally unable to make decisions, and gets swept along by events. The uncontrollable lust that draws these two characters together is conveyed extremely well and extremely economically.

The film is much more aware of class, and of the degradations of poverty, than the Hollywood version. There are a few changes from the book, but the essentials of Cain’s plot remain. The photography has a stark beauty to it. The movie also touches on wider issues involving sexuality, with Gino’s relationship with a prostitute, and his friendship with another drifter, Lo Spagnola, which has definite homosexual overtones (Visconti himself was of course gay).

While the movie is uncompromising in its treatment of the actions of Giovanna and Gino it steers way from simplistic moralising. It’s made clear that women like Giovanna were left with few options if they wanted to escape from grinding poverty, and it’s made clear that they were often forced by circumstances into loveless marriages that were little different from prostitution.

Ossessione represents an intriguingly different approach compared to the two American versions of this story, and it’s an excellent film in its own right. It remains the definitive movie version of Cain's novel.

While it lacks the opulence and obvious decadence of late Visconti, it’s still visually impressive. Visconti was discovering his political consciousness, but the left-wing political slant isn’t overly laboured.

The Region 4 DVD is not a fantastic print at all, but it’s worth picking up if you can find a cheap enough copy.

Hôtel du Nord (1938)

I’ve now seen quite a few examples of French film noir from the late 1930s, and I’m completely addicted. Hôtel du Nord, directed by Marcel Carné, is a perfect specimen.

French film noir is sometimes also referred to as poetic realism, and both terms are in their own ways perfectly appropriate. The feel is similar to, but by no means identical with, the later and more familiar American style of film noir.

The setting is a cheap hotel in Paris, the Hôtel du Nord. At the beginning we meet the owners, the permanent guests and regular customers, a motley but mostly good-hearted and fairly likeable assortment of low-grade workers, petty criminals, cops and whores.

And we meet the newest guests, Renée and Pierre, a young couple obviously very much in love who have chosen Room 16 in the Hôtel du Nord as the place in which to spend their last night on this Earth. Defeated by life, they have made a suicide pact, but events don’t turn out as they expected. What does happen has a profound and unexpected effect on Edmond, a rather dandified, somewhat cold-blooded and very enigmatic ex-criminal who lives there with his prostitute girlfriend Raymonde.

Suicide, both active and passive, and other attempts at evading life are the principal themes of this movie. It has the characteristic film noir fatalism in spades, although oddly it manages to avoid being a mere wallowing in self-pity and bleakness. It’s both an affirmation of life and an acceptance of fate.

Louis Jouvet gives a subtle performance as Edmond, a character for whom we have little sympathy in the beginning. As the film progresses we come to understand him, as the character comes to understand himself and his destiny. The same change occurs in our perception of Jean-Pierre Aumont as Pierre and Pierre’s view of himself. In fact the key characters are all confronted by circumstances that turn out to be turning points in their lives and in their self-awareness. Annabella is sweetly vulnerable as Renée, while Arletty (there seem to have been a real fashion at this time for French actresses to have single-word names) is amusing and engaging as the cynical Raymonde.

A superb movie that works on both an intellectual and a emotional level. The ending is inevitable, which makes it all the more effective. Highly recommended.

Erotikon (1920)

Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon is a delightfully wicked and outrageously immoral 1920 Swedish silent comedy about infidelity.

Leo Carpentier is a rather stuffy professor of entomologist. He knows rather a lot about the sex lives of beetles, but rather less about the sex lives of attractive young wives, such as his own. His wife copes with marriage to the somewhat unexciting professor by taking a lover. In fact two lovers. The professor isn’t pleased when he finds out, although if the truth be known he has developed a very cosy relationship with his attractive and fun-loving niece Marthe.

This movie was apparently a major inspiration for the young Ernst Lubitsch, and it has a similar feel to Lubitsch’s films – it’s sophisticated and sexy, and totally lacking in any redeeming moral message. Stiller assembled a superb cast for this movie - Tora Teje is wonderful as the free-spirited wife, Karin Molander is great fun as Marthe, and Anders De Wahl is pompous but likeable as the hapless entomologist.

It’s the sort of silent comedy that has nothing whatever in common with the ghastly slapstick comedies that most people associate with that era, and the acting is modern and naturalistic. Stiller was a pretty good judge of acting – among his discoveries was a young actress named Greta Garbo.

The first thing you need to do when you put the Kino DVD in your DVD player is to turn the volume down to zero and leave it there – the score is possibly the most atrocious I have ever encountered. It’s both intrinsically awful and ludicrously inappropriate.

On the plus side the picture quality is generally extremely good, and there are some extras including a useful introduction to the film by Peter Cowie. And it preserves the tinting of the original, a feature that adds so much to the distinctive flavour of silent cinema

I highly recommend this one to fans of silent cinema, and if you’re not a fan of silent movies it’s not a bad place to start.