In short: Action Man (1967)

Original title: Le soleil des voyous

After a pretty successful career as a criminal (mostly in Indochina, it seems), Denis Farrand (Jean Gabin) has retired into the more or less straight life as a club and restaurant owner, married a woman who wouldn’t approve of his getting back to his old business, and is getting bored out of his mind. A plan to rob the payroll of the US forces in France is percolating in his brain – it’s one of those opportunities that just drops into a guy’s lap – but he’s not quite bored enough yet to act on it.

That changes when Farrand’s refusal to allow the underlings of the local crime bosses to sell drugs in his restaurant leads to a reunion with his old good buddy and crony Jim Beckley (Robert Stack). Which is to say, Beckley is part of the group of goons sent to convince Farrand otherwise, but obviously changes his mind on seeing his old buddy in trouble. With a partner, the whole bank and payroll thing looks too tempting to resist, particularly since Farrand’s plan is pretty great.

So great, the heist itself isn’t what goes wrong in this particular heist movie – it’s the aftermath, when said local crime bosses as well as a female partner the deeply misogynist Farrand never wanted (Margaret Lee) start making trouble that’s going to be the problem here.

The English language title for Jean Delannoy’s heist movie is pretty damn absurd – neither the now apparently touchable Robert Stack nor Jean Gabin in his 60s are any kind of action men (though giving that epithet to Gabin at this stage in his career is rather funny), and the film only has a couple of scenes that would qualify as action scenes. In truth, this is a calm, focussed and collected heist movie that stages its (pretty imaginative and fun) heist with the same precision it uses to portray an aftermath that sees the result of Gabin’s calm calculations destroyed by all of those pesky little human things like emotions and plain stupidity.

On the way, we get quite a few scenes of Gabin doing that curious Gabin thing where phlegmatic acting suddenly feels as if it were incredibly emotionally expressive, some neat variations on gangster movie standards, as well as one of the finer bloodless heists I’ve seen on screen. There’s also a thematic line running through the film – embodied in Gabin’s Farrand as well as Lee’s Betty - where boredom is the true enemy of happiness, the inability to live a boring life like everybody else (when they’re lucky) leading to doom and destruction.

Three Films Make A Post: Boy Meets Dog

Love and Monsters aka Monster Problems (2020): If you’re patient enough to get through the film’s atrocious first twenty minutes that combine lots of exposition, crappy jokes and an intensely annoying main character, you, as was I, might be surprised by how entertaining Michael Matthews’s science fiction comedy adventure with medium sized monsters then becomes. It’s still a movie with not a single original bone its body, mind you, insists on a very traditional way for a guy to turn into a hero™, and ends trying to sell us people inspired by a speech of our protagonist going out for what amounts to mass suicide as a hopeful ending, but at least, it puts its borrowed bits and pieces into a pleasant series of adventures. More often than not, it’s really quite charming in its undemanding way, and if you survive the first act, you’ll probably be entertained on rainy Sunday morning.

Maigret voit rouge aka Maigret Sees Red (1963): This is the second time Jean Gabin steps into the shoes of Simenon’s police inspector hero of oh so very many novels and adaptations. Directed by Gilles Grangier, this outing finds Maigret hunting a trio of actual American gangsters using their particularly violent methods (US crime is to this film as Russian crime to today’s US crime cinema) on his home turf. It’s clearly a matter of national honour, with a low-level nationalist vibe running through affairs that would be much more annoying if Grangier’s nice eye for interesting side characters, Gabin’s always lovely (and often pretty funny if he wants it to be) low-key acting style, and the film’s absurd ideas about the way US gangsters of its time worked, weren’t so damn distracting and charming. It’s certainly as pulpy in mood as Maigret gets.

El esqueleto de la señora Morales aka Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960): This macabre thriller/comedy by Rogelio A. González is generally seen as a gem of Mexican cinema, its heavy-handed satire of Mexican bourgeois mores clearly the thing to delight the people compiling “The Most Important Mexican Films of All Time” lists and such. The film’s gender politics have aged rather badly, though, as has its critique on the bourgeoisie. Chabrol, this ain't.

If you’re like me coming at it from a more genre savvy perspective, the satire, the black comedy and the thriller elements here don’t always fit together all that well or effectively, and while González repeatedly shoots very beautiful scenes, there’s little here to see rather more disreputable kinds of Mexican cinema haven’t done quite a bit better. On a curious note, this is also one of the few adaptations of a work by Arthur Machen, though not adapting anything of the part of Machen’s body of work I’d actually like to see adapted.

Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955)

After several years away from his native country that ended on a stint in the USA that seems to have left him with a reputation as an effective and brutal rationalizer of gangland activity, French gangster Henri Ferré (Jean Gabin), known as “Le Nantais” because French movie gangster nicknames are desperately pedestrian, has been called home to clean up the heroin running operation of one Paul Lisky (Marcel Dalio). Apparently, Lisky bumped off Henri’s predecessor because he got “too soft”, which sums up Lisky’s leadership style quite nicely. So, after having been set up with a nightclub to run as a front, Henri is supposed to tighten up Lisky’s operation, and send Lisky’s favourite killers (Lino Ventura and Albert Rémy) for anyone who doesn’t perform or wants out of the business.

Curiously enough, bloodthirsty, Henri seems to be a rather nice guy, preferring to warn off people from doing suicidal shit, being nice to junkies, and really running things with a much softer touch than his boss believes he does. He’s actually pretty nice for a brutal gangster, is what I’m saying. So it’s not a complete surprise that he quickly romances the youngest woman in his club. Plus, he’s Jean Gabin and therefore has the animal magnetism of a Tom Atkins towards younger women. Of course, there’s still quite a bit of trouble coming Henri’s way.

Henri Decoin’s Razzia sur la Chnouf is a rather interesting example of mid-50s French gangster films. It mostly lacks the highly melodramatic streak of quite a few of its peers I’ve seen, instead going about its tale of crime very much like Jean Gabin goes about acting: unfussy, focussed, with an emphasis on the telling detail instead of the telling mugging. It gives the impression of a film that knows what it is doing and why, and so isn’t going to need to get shrill about it.

Of course, it is also a film that shows a meticulous interest in portraying a mid-50s French drug milieu whose authenticity at least this viewer in 2019 can’t help but doubt, giving the film a peculiarly fairy-tale like air that fits strangely with its clear interest in the sort of detail work you’ll usually find in a police procedural. These elements of the film for the most part don’t feel dated, exactly, but rather as if they were never true in the first place, even though the film’s whole impetus insists they were. Which mostly works fine if you’re willing to just go with it, and enjoy the film’s inventiveness more than its naturalism despite all gestures it makes towards the latter. There is a painfully racist scene in a black marijuana establishment, though, that also seems to suggest that grass is worse than the heroin Henri helps sell, which really seems to be a sign of the times this was made in, and suggests a dubious knowledge of actual drugs from the filmmakers.

On the technical side, the film is often rather wonderful. Decoin not only shows that great ability to focus on telling details, he mostly gets his actors – apart from Lila Kedrova as a very melodramatic junkie the film treats with exasperation and compassion in about the same amounts - to eschew 50s French BIG acting in favour of Gabin-style thoughtful focus. There are also quite a few moments of simply excellent filmmaking on display, be it in form of many a moody shot of Parisian streets by night or Decoin’s ability to say quite a bit about his characters and the way they relate to one another simply by showing how they move through the spaces the camera creates. There’s a bit of a noir influence there, and much of Decoin’s approach to character and staging suggests a kindred sensibility to Jean-Pierre Melville’s work, just used with less abandon (which is an admittedly strange word for Melville’s style).


The only thing, apart from the racist scene, that’s going to be a bit strange for a viewer in 2019, is the film’s plot twist, that seemed preposterously obvious from very early on to me. That might have something to do with the movie going public in the mid-50s being a bit slow on the uptake (doubtful), or with them not being inundated with the particular trope about police work the film uses, or the film just not actually fooling its contemporary audience at all – who knows? Razzia sur la Chnouf is still a worthwhile watch, particularly if you think that very melodramatic acting was a part of all French genre films of the 50s.

In short: Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959)

aka Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case

The venerable Parisian police inspector Maigret (Jean Gabin) comes to his old hometown in the French countryside to help out the local Comtesse (Valentine Tessier). When Maigret was still a child, his father was the steward of the Comtesse’s estate, and little Maigret had a bit of a crush on the older girl; he’s now in the age where the past takes on the golden glow of nostalgia. So when the Comtesse sends him a letter asking for his help, presenting a threatening letter sent to her stating the time and date of her death, he’s obviously coming.

Even just arriving, Maigret realizes there are quite a few dubious characters around his old friend. There’s a melodramatic “secretary” and hobby art columnist, an even more melodramatic priest, and later on, we’ll also meet the Comtesse’s son, a whiny melodramatic alcoholic. Ironically enough, the Comtesse’s son will also turn out to be the murder weapon, more or less, for a fake newspaper article reporting his suicide is what’s going to kill her. Her weak, melodramatic heart, you see?

I did enjoy Jean Delannoy’s first Maigret movie with Jean Gabin, Maigret Sets A Trap quite a bit, but where that film is a psychologically insightful cat and mouse game only very slightly marred by a couple of too melodramatic performances, this one’s the embodiment of everything that was bad about French movies from the 50s, with only very little of all the things that was great about them. So the whole thing mixes a self-important, ponderous tone with finger pointing moralizing, a ridiculous murder method, and performances that consist of theatrical wallowing in badly faked emotion as expressed through stilted dialogue. It’s grating, to say the least, and certainly not improved by the film’s nostalgia for the good old days when everyone still knew their place.

The acting is made even more annoying through the immense contrast to the absurdly wonderful (given his surroundings) Gabin. For Gabin is his usual calm to phlegmatic self, expressing emotions through a slight change of tone, small shifts in his facial expression and posture - an actual actor who has somehow stumbled into a film peopled by idiots played by fools.


Technically, Delannoy’s direction is fine, full of theoretically clever little bits that would most probably be aesthetically satisfying and praiseworthy, if not for the terribly pompous air of it all, an air nothing in the script actually puts the appropriate effort in for at all. If all this sounds as if Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre has annoyed me quite a bit, I have made myself clear.

Maigret Sets a Trap (1958)

Original title: Maigret tend un piège

aka Woman-Bait

aka Maigret Lays a Trap

aka Inspector Maigret

A serial killer stalks the streets of Paris during a very hot summer, killing women regularly, always right about sunset. The killer clearly knows all of the classics, so he summons his probable nemesis, Chief Inspector Maigret (Jean Gabin), to one of the killings via an emergency call, and seems right proud of his job. Maigret, pretty tired and frustrated after twenty years of police work, has the guy pegged as a show-off right quick, so he decides on various methods to goad him, starting out with a fake public arrest of an acquainted crook, and putting a small army of police secretaries (apparently there were no other women in the French police at the time) of the physical type he’s going for on the street as honey traps.

Eventually, investigative work and a bit of luck lead Maigret to a rather curious bourgeois couple, Marcel (Jean Desailly) and Yvonne (Annie Girardot) Maurin. Something’s clearly not right with the husband, but it will take the Inspector some time and quite a bit of interview work to get his man.

When you’re like me, you’re used to the way US cinema of the late 50s had to treat elements of the human existence like sexuality, the way it could only ever suggest the facts of the lives of quite a few people without rubbing the censors wrong. In that case, the first of two adaptations of some of the immensely popular (and often rather excellent) Maigret novels of Georges Simenon might just come as quite of a culture shock, for in the French version of the 50s, the existence of gigolos is normal, the sort of thing our protagonist takes without even raising and eyebrow, and you can even use the fact that a woman is still a virgin after five years of marriage as a perfectly spelled out plot point.

These are only some of the elements that make Jean Delannoy’s film sometimes feel strangely modern. Its idea of how serial killers work is at least in part surprisingly close to the more codified interpretations of the matter that became popular knowledge years later. The film emphasizes the importance of the appearance of the killer’s victims, the connection of this to his messed up past; Maigret understands the shortening length of time between killings as meaningful, and so on and so forth. Now, these ideas weren’t completely new for crime film and literature – or psychology - at the time, of course, but they weren’t yet set in stone as pop cultural base-line knowledge about these things, nor, as far as I know, in real life. Less modern in this regard is the film blaming the killer’s mother for his problems by basically not letting him become manly enough, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Maigret’s interview methods are a lot closer to more modern ideas of how this sort of thing works, too, his sometimes threatening, sometimes ingratiating manner combined with psychological insight de-emphasizing the search for practical clues and replacing it with one for motive. Particularly the interrogation scenes work as well as they do because of a combination of sometimes – let’s ignore the whole blaming the mother bit – incisive and insightful writing and a fantastic performance by Gabin that starts from the actor’s trade-mark phlegmatic air but can shift emotion and meaning lightning quick. Gabin’s even good enough to help one overlook the lack of subtlety and substance in Desailly’s performance as the killer Marcel, who’s really doing too much of a rote crazy person bit for the kind of film this is. The rest of the cast is thankfully as good as Gabin.


Delannoy’s direction of all this is elegant, sleek, and stylish, without the noirish shadows one might expect (or hope for), but still creating a sense of intimacy for a film that, is all about character psychology and twisted kinds of love.

Three Films Make A Post: Based on the Historical Realities

Du rififi à Paname aka The Upper Hand (1966): Denys de La Patellière's crime movie is a sort of retirement home for tired looking old and middle aged actors (Jean Gabin! Gert Fröbe! Nadja Tiller! Claudio Brook! George Raft!), the kind of film that thinks just letting the actors turn their faces in the direction of the camera equals acting performances. What's actually going on is that no one in front of the camera seems even the least bit interested in the film they are involved in, which is somewhat understandable given the been there done that nature of the film's crime plot, and the script's insistence on not developing the plot's few interesting elements in any direction worth following. De La Patellière manages to make the film pretty, but doesn't provide any sense of tension or drama, and also seems to delight in the kind of "witty" dialogue only very few films can get away with. Most of those films have actors actually doing more than coasting on their mere existence, though.

An American Ghost Story aka Revenant (2012): Derek Cole's film could be a fine, low-key ghost story, if a highly derivative one. At least, the core performances by scriptwriter and male lead Stephen Twardokus and Liesel Kopp are never less than decent, often even quite good, the camera work is atmospheric, and the film has a nice, concentrated flow to it. Unfortunately American Ghost Story suffers from a case of Advanced Jump Scare Syndrome that borders on the ridiculous. There's no quietly effective scene of the supernatural the film doesn't ruin by making inappropriate loud noises at the audience in moments that aren't at all meant to be jump scares, no scene that doesn't end up destroying its own effectiveness by shouting "boo". It's nearly like a parody of other films who like their jump scares a bit too much, and feels as if the film were afraid to just let the creepy mood it so desperately tries to build work on its audience, permanently losing faith in its own ability to function without VERY LOUD NOISES. While this technique doesn't work at all to actually make the film scarier, it ruins any mood it actually builds quite effectively, dragging the whole effort down from the at least decent to the nearly insufferable.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): I'm more than just a little surprised that this one is the film of these three I actually like, but then surprising me is what J.J. Abrams's movie did more than once: by feeling much more like a Stark Trek movie than the first one, by not just fixing the first film's dubious politics but actually consciously having and using political themes and coherent morals, by actually doing some rather great (or at the very least fun) things with the Star Trek movie it is playing with/off, and by this time around actually having something (though still not enough by far) to do for its female cast members. If the last trend continues, the next Star Trek movie might even see Zoe Saldana's Uhura as an actual female lead instead of a relatively large supporting role for Pine's and Quinto's perfectly entertaining boy's club.

As it stands, the film is still nearly up there with the Avengers or the last Batman or Pacific Rim as a film that fulfils all blockbuster demands on spectacle, yet still has the time and space for human things of one kind of the other. Most of the time, it even remembers the spectacle is there to dramatize the humanity and not the other way around.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,horror,crime,sf,in short,j.j. abrams,denys de la patellière,derek cole,jean gabin,gert fröbe,nadja tiller,stephen twardokus,liesel kopp,chris pine,zachary quinto,zoe saldana,benedict cumberbatch