André Cayatte was the first in France-all the baby boomers nurtured on the "good " principles of the " Cahiers du Cinema" tend to forget it-to expose his disgust for the death penalty.It was 1952,please do not forget it!"Nous sommes tous des assassins " already showed it all,the prisoners' fear at night when it might be THE morning,the depiction in lavish details of the whole scene which used to relegate France to Barbary...
Seventeen years after,enter Claude Lelouch.I must confess I 'm not a big fan of that director.There are notable exceptions of course and "la vie ,l'amour et la mort" is part of them.Perhaps Lelouch's best ,just after two documentaries and just before the boring "UN Homme Qui me Plait" ,it was ,in the wake of the spirit of May 68 ,a heartfelt plea against the guillotine and the bestial rites which surround the execution.The actors were all virtually unknown -which is a departure from Lelouch's stuff which generally features French (and foreign) stars galore.Caroline Cellier was featured in Chabrol's excellent "Que la Bête Meure" and nobody had heard of Amidou when the movie was released.
Amidou's "mental disease" provides the movie with its main flaw:his impotence when he is with prostitutes ,his life with his wife,his brand new love with one of his colleagues ,all of this do not hang well.But the construction of the film is subtle :during the first half of the movie,we do not exactly know why the police try to get Toledo.Some people who do not know about the very subject of the film might think the hero is victim of a miscarriage of justice (The verdict is anyway). After the verdict,the color turns black and white (a smart move) and a voice-over tells about of the conditions of life of a man who is going to die.Flashbacks (in color) explains (in the last part) why Toledo was sentenced to die.It's all the more remarkable as his questioning by the police captain is completely silent.We cannot hear what the mouths are saying.
It was not a big smash for Lelouch who would soon return to more commercial stuff ,emerging from time to time with the occasional entertaining comedy ("La Bonne Année" " Le Voyou" )but without any genuine creativity.
The next link on the chain begun by Cayatte in 1952 which Lelouch continued was Jose Giovanni's "Deux Hommes dans la Ville" where Delon's character also died on the guillotine.Then there was Michel Drach's "Le Pull -Over Rouge" (recently remade as a made-for-TV film "l'Affaire Ranucci")in 1979,and finally by 1981,there was no more death penalty in France.
