It required some self-convincing before I crossed my fingers and watched this filmed version of Emile Zola's L'Assommoir. Zola's work, I find, is nearly impossible to translate to the screen. To wit, I cite Jean Renoir's horrible adaptation of La Bete Humaine, with Jean Gabin no less and Simone Simon. Somehow film has not succeeded in capturing the dark, dismal heart of Zola's naturalisme. Read Zola's 20-volume series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart. The only question you will have is which one ends on the bleakest note. Few of his protagonists walk away on the final page, if they live to walk away at all, happily into the sunset - the exceptions being invariably the scoundrels, power-hungry Eugène Rougon, his money-grubbing brother Aristide, or the grasping retail magnate Octave Mouret. L'Assommoir, along with Germinal, La Curée and L'Oeuvre, are among the most dismal, though personally I was left most entirely depressed at the end of La Terre and the ironic La Joie de Vivre. That said, I was surprised. René Clément's Gervaise almost succeeds. It comes close to conjuring the darkness and despair and sense of futility in a Zola novel. Almost. He had a tremendous assist from Maria Schell. Her Gervaise is a truly hertbreaking characterization. She is exactly as Zola depicted her: kind-hearted, hard-working, generous, but totally lacking in the ruthlessness needed to survive - a born victim of a ruthless world. Zola would have applauded.
The screenplay changes some of the story, but not nearly as much as do other cinematic adaptations of great novels. It omits some characters, the brutal domestic violence episodes of the family Bijard. But that is to be expected. It reduces the role of Gervaise's in-laws the Lorilleux, who in the novel work rapaciously in their narrow, overheated apartment hammering out enough tiny gold chains to stretch from Paris to Marseille. It exaggerates the character of Virginie, building her into a veritble femme fatale. She, in the novel, is not the machinator of Gervaise's downfall. She is herself a victim of Lantier's parasitism, once he latches onto her household. Life and heredity are the cause of Gervaise's fated fall. Those are her nemeses. Zola himself, defending his work against critics - for the right, L'Assommoir was a left-wing attack on the virtue of the capitalist work ethic; for the left it was a right-wing slander on the noble and virtuous working class - described it as "la déchéance fatale d'une famille ouvrière dans le milieu empesté de nos faubourgs," the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in our sordid suburbs.
Two scenes are perfect evocations of the book: the party scene and the visit to the Louvre. Coupeau's long, agonizing descent into alcoholism is more drawn out and more devastating, and his death, not at home but in the hospital drunk ward in the grip of delerium tremens, is much more harrowing in the novel. The film leaves Gervaise alive. Zola did not. His story continues to her death of starvation, huddled in the tiny cubby-hole once inhabited by père Bru. That, I guess, was a sadness too far for the film. The film leaves us with a wink and a nod as little Nana flaunts out into the street with her new ribbon. Those who have read on in the series know what will be her degenerate life and miserable death once she gets to star in her own novel. For a mediocre filming of that story, try the 1955 movie with Martine Carol and Charles Boyer.
