Le Crabe Tambour is like no other movie about soldiers that you will see, being a movie that in some parts resembles Citizen Kane, in other parts Rashomon. The doctor on a ship's final voyage across the Atlantic serves as the connecting link for the episodes that describe the title character, Wilsdorf, nicknamed "Drummer Crab." At one point, the ship's captain says Wilsdorf's two best friends were his black cat and the doctor. From what happens, Wilsdorf had another best friend, the captain, but that friendship ends as a result of events described in the movie.
Wilsdorf's adventures start off as picaresque, but they become grimmer as he takes a role in a military conspiracy, details of which are only vaguely described. You have as characters in this movie older soldiers –the captain, the doctor and the chief, and Wilsdorf, who is not shown as aging. A nurse at the harbor the ship stops at comments that usually ship's doctors are young. But Le Crabe Tambour is about old soldiers fading away, all except Wilsdorf, who is only shown through the memories of others.
Pierre Schoendoerffer also directed La 317e section in 1967, which has the character Lt. Wilsdorf in it, then in a supporting role as a soldier at Dien Bien Phu. Wilsdorf was an Alsatian drafted by the Nazis who then became a French soldier and finally, a fisherman, with a boat off the fishing grounds by Labrador. Being a literary sort, Schoendoerffer does not explain everything at the end like a typical mystery story. Behind the opening and closing credits are images of ships beached on shore, wrecks that have outlived their usefulness, just like the ship's captain. The real French frigate, the Jaureguiberry, filmed for this movie on its last voyage, gets a mention in the last credit. When you see the ship's bow plowing through high waves in the North Atlantic, you also see the sides of the ship, with rust patches on it. The ship, like some of its passengers, has reached the end of the line. Le Crabe Tambour is not about just the adventures of an errant soldier, but is an attempt to put on screen the meaning of life for career military men at the end of their careers, with one, the ship's doctor, having a last chance to find out the truth about Wilsdorf.
I doubt that the French movie industry will finance another movie like Le Crabe Tambour, which is an example of "art for art's sake." I saw the movie on the Image laser disc of the movie, an Interama Video Classic. The LD version had hardcoded English subtitles. The movie was released overseas in 1977, but in 1977 there was almost no distribution anymore of subtitled foreign movies in the United States. Le Crabe Tambour only made it to New York City in 1984 for a short run. There is a DVD version of the movie now on sale in France, but like most French movie DVDs, that DVD has no English subtitles. So, Le Crabe Tambour falls by the wayside, even though its subject, soldiers' fates, is as timely as ever.
