February 5, 2013 (XXVI:4) Marcel Carné, /THE DEVIL’S ENVOYS (1942, 120 min.)

Directed by Marcel Carné Written by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche Produced by André Paulvé Original Music by , Maurice Thiriet Cinematography by Roger Hubert Film Editing by Henri Rust Production Design by Georges Wakhévitch Art Direction by Set Decoration by Léon Barsacq Costume Design by Georges Wakhévitch Assistant director….

Arletty…Dominique Marie Déa…Anne - la fille du baron qui se fiance avec Renaud Fernand Ledoux…Le baron Hugues - le châtelain, père d'Anne Alain Cuny…Gilles - un ménestrel Progevma, 1980 The King and the Mockingbird, 1975 I monaxia Pierre Labry…Le seigneur stin poiisi tou Jacques Prevert, 1973 Le chien mélomane, 1966 “À Jean d'Yd…Le baladin la belle étoile”, 1957 The Seine Meets , 1956 The Hunchback Roger Blin…Le montreur de monstres of Notre Dame, 1954 Bim, 1952 The Curious Adventures of Mr. …Le bourreau Wonderbird, 1947 Noah's Ark, 1947 Voyage surprise, 1947 La Marcel Herrand…Le baron Renaud - le fiancé d'Anne fleur de l'âge, 1945 , 1943 Adieu Léonard, Jules Berry…Le diable 1943 Lumière d'été, 1942 Les visiteurs du soir, 1939 Le Jour se …Extra (uncredited) lève, 1939 The Mysterious Mr. Davis, 1938 Ernest the Rebel, 1938 Simone Signoret…Extra (uncredited) , 1936 Jenny, 1936 The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1935 A Rare Bird, 1935 Si j'étais le patron, 1935 Jeunesse MARCEL CARNÉ (director) (August 18, 1906, Paris, – d'abord, 1934 L'hôtel du libre échange, 1934 Taxi de minuit, 1932 October 31, 1996, Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, France) directed 24 Comme une carpe, and 1932 L'affaire est dans le sac. films: 1977 The Bible, 1974 The Marvelous Visit, 1971 Law Breakers, 1968 Young Wolves, 1965 Three Rooms in Manhattan, PIERRE LAROCHE (writer) (May 7, 1902, Paris, France – April 4, 1963 Chicken Feed for Little Birds, 1960 Wasteland, 1958 Les 1962, Paris, France) has 48 screenwriting credits, some of which tricheurs, 1956 The Country I Come From, 1954 Air of Paris, 1953 are 1963 Cadavres en vacances, 1962 Le septième juré, 1962 The Adultress, 1951 Juliette, or Key of Dreams, 1950 La Marie du Hitch-Hike (dialogue), 1962 Operation Gold Ingot, 1961 The port, 1949 Fabiola, 1947 La fleur de l'âge, 1946 Gates of the Black Monocle, 1961 Women and War, 1958 Every Day Has Its Night, 1945 Children of Paradise, 1942 Les visiteurs du soir, 1939 Secret, 1958 School for Coquettes, 1957 Stars Never Die Le Jour se lève, 1938 Hôtel du Nord, 1938 Port of Shadows, 1937 (documentary), 1956 Zaza (dialogue / screenplay), 1954 Huis clos, Drole de Drame, 1936 Jenny, and 1929 Nogent, Eldorado du 1951 The Affairs of Messalina (dialogue), 1951 The Strange dimanche. Madame X (dialogue), 1951 The Pit of Loneliness (dialogue), 1950 Chéri (adaptation), 1949 The Red Angel (dialogue), 1948 The JACQUES PRÉVERT (scenario and dialogue) (February 4, 1900, Secret of Monte-Cristo (dialogue), 1947 Coïncidences, 1945 Girl Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France – April 11, 1977, with Grey Eyes, 1945 Father Serge (dialogue), 1944 Portrait of a Omonville-la-Rogue, Manche, France) has 64 screenwritring Woman, 1942 The Devil's Envoys, and 1941 L'enfer des anges credits, some of which are 2008 The Loneliness Trilogy, 2007 To (dialogue). Paint the Portrait of a Bird, 1992 Drôle d'immeuble , 1991 Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—2

ROGER HUBERT (cinematographer) (March 30, 1903, Montreuil- 1945 Documents secrets, 1943 Secrets, 1942 The Devil's Envoys, sous-Bois, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France – November 28, 1941 Foolish Husbands, and 1939 Nord-Atlantique. 1964, Paris, France) has 93 cinematographer credits, some of which are 1972 Bonaparte et la revolution, 1964 La bonne soupe, FERNAND LEDOUX… Le baron Hugues - le châtelain, père 1963 La cuisine au beurre, 1963 The Trip to Biarritz, 1961 d'Anne (b. Jacques Joseph Félix Fernand Ledoux, January 24, Dynamite Jack, 1961 Lafayette, 1960 The Dance of Death, 1959 1897, Tirlemont, Belgium – September 21, 1993, Paris, France) An Angel on Wheels, 1959 Gangster Boss, 1959 Asphalt, 1959 The appeared in 81 films and TV series, some of which are 1984 Female, 1959 The Perjurer, 1958 Thérèse Étienne, 1956 The “L'héritage”, 1982 Les Misérables, 1982 “Jules et Juju”, 1982 Perjured Farmer, 1954 Queen Margot, 1953 The Adultress, 1952 Mille milliards de dollars, 1977 À chacun son enfer, 1974 Chinese Desperate Decision, 1952 Leathernose, 1951 The Lovers of Bras- in Paris, 1973 Lovely Swine, 1973 The Burned Barns, 1969 Under Mort, 1950 Sins of Pompeii, 1947 La fleur de l'âge, 1946 The the Sign of the Bull, 1965 Up from the Beach, 1962 The Trial, 1962 Room Upstairs, 1945 La part de l'ombre, 1945 La fiancée des Freud, 1962 The Longest Day, 1960 Carthage in Flames, 1959 I ténèbres, 1945 Children of Paradise, 1943 L'éternel retour, 1943 Spit on Your Grave, 1958 Les Misérables, 1957 He Who Must Die, The Phantom Baron, 1942 Les visiteurs 1955 Square Fortune, 1954 Papa, Mama, du soir, 1941 Foolish Husbands, 1938 the Maid and I, 1953 Act of Love, 1952 Belle étoile, 1938 The Little Thing, Wolves Hunt at Night, 1947 Danger de 1938 The Woman Thief, 1938 I Accuse, mort, 1946 The Sea Rose, 1946 La fille du 1937 The Man of the Hour, 1935 diable, 1945 Sortilèges, 1945 Girl with Lucrezia Borgia, 1935 The Queen and Grey Eyes, 1944 Béatrice devant le désir, the Cardinal, 1935 Iceland Fisherman, 1943 The London Man, 1943 Des jeunes 1935 Napoléon Bonaparte, 1934 filles dans la nuit, 1943 It Happened at the Thunder in the East, 1933 La bataille, Inn, 1942 The Devil's Envoys, 1941 Stormy 1932 The Chocolate Girl, 1931 Waters, 1941 Premier bal, 1941 Volpone, American Love, 1931 End of the World, 1938 La Bête Humaine, 1938 S.O.S. 1931 The Lovers of Midnight, 1929 Mediterranean, 1936 Tarass Boulba,1936 Sables, 1927 Apaches of Paris, and Mayerling, 1935 Folies-Bergère, and 1933 1923 The Red Inn. L'homme à la barbiche.

ARLETTY…Dominique (Léonie Marie ALAIN CUNY… Gilles - un ménestrel Julie Bathiat, May 15, 1898, (July 12, 1908, Saint-Malo, France – May Courbevoie, Hauts-de-Seine, France – 16, 1994, Paris, France) appeared in 70 July 23, 1992, Paris, France) appeared films and TV series, among them 1995 “La in 62 films, including 1967 Dina chez famiglia Ricordi”, 1992 Le retour de les rois, 1963 The Trip to Biarritz, Casanova, 1990 Les chevaliers de la table 1963 Destination Rome, 1962 The ronde, 1987 Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Longest Day, 1962 The Dance, 1958 1987 “La piovra 3” (7 episodes), 1985 Maxime, 1957 Vacances explosives!, Détective, 1981 Les jeux de la Comtesse 1956 Mon curé chez les pauvres, 1954 Huis clos, 1954 Air of Dolingen de Gratz, 1981 Semmelweis, 1980 “La peau de chagrin”, Paris, 1954 Flesh and the Woman, 1951 Gigolo, 1949 Portrait 1979 “Le journal” (6 episodes), 1979 “I vecchi e i giovani” (5 d'un assassin, 1947 La fleur de l'âge, 1945 Children of Paradise, episodes), 1979 Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1978 The Song of Roland, 1942 Les visiteurs du soir, 1942 L'amant de Bornéo, 1942 Boléro, 1975 Ame no Amsterdam, 1975 Irene, Irene, 1974 “Antigone”, 1940 Thunder Over Paris, 1939 Circonstances atténuantes, 1938 1974 Emmanuelle, 1972 The Master and Margaret, 1970 Many Hôtel du Nord, 1938 Mother Love, 1938 The Little Thing, 1938 Wars Ago, 1969 Fellini Satyricon, 1969 The Milky Way, 1963 La Mirages, 1937 Désiré, 1937 The Pearls of the Crown, 1936 The corruzione, 1963 Banana Peel, 1960 , 1958 The Bureaucrats, 1936 The Tomboy, 1934 The Voyage of Mr. Lovers, 1956 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1953 The Lady Perrichon, 1933 Une idée folle, 1932 Abduct Me, and 1930 The Without Camelias, 1952 Anita Garibaldi, 1951 Strange Deception, Sweetness of Loving. 1942 The Devil's Envoys, 1941 Madame Sans-Gêne, and 1940 My Crimes After Mein Kampf. MARIE DÉA… Anne - la fille du baron qui se fiance avec Renaud (b. Odette Alice Marie Deupès, May 17, 1912, Nanterre, PIERRE LABRY… Le seigneur (b. Pierre Honoré Labry, December Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France – March 1, 1992, Paris, 14, 1885, Paris, France – June 23, 1948, Paris, France) appeared France) appeared in 51 films and TV programs, among them 1983 112 films, among them 1949 L'échafaud peut attendre, 1948 “Julien Fontanes, magistrate”, 1980 “Les chevaux du soleil”, 1979 Scandals of Clochemerle, 1947 The Unknown Singer, 1947 Loves Subversion, 1977 “Au théâtre ce soir”, 1977 L'homme pressé, 1976 of Casanova, 1946 Devil and the Angel, 1945 Farandole, 1943 The Good and the Bad, 1974 Marriage, 1974 “Drôle de graine”, Arlette et l'amour, 1943 Shop Girls of Paris, 1943 It Happened at 1967 “Malican père et fils”, 1966 The Devil's Tricks, 1964 the Inn, 1942 The Devil's Envoys, 1942 À vos ordres, Madame, Vacaciones para Ivette, 1963 Le glaive et la balance, 1960 “Le 1941 The Last One of the Six, 1940 My Crimes After Mein Kampf, paysan parvenu”, 1960 Tendre et violente Elisabeth, 1957 O.S.S. 1939 Les 3 tambours, 1939 The Mayor's Dilemma, 1938 The 117 n'est pas mort, 1952 The Case Against X, 1950 Orpheus, 1949 Rebel, 1938 Sirocco, 1938 The Postmaster's Daughter, 1938 The La maternelle, 1947 Rouletabille joue et gagne, 1946 Impasse, Puritan, 1937 Lady Killer, 1936 The Story of a Cheat, 1935 Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—3

Carnival in Flanders, 1935 Les bateliers de la Volga, 1934 Street city council. In 1928, without telling his father, he left the Without a Name, 1934 Aux portes de Paris, 1933 La mille et insurance company to work as assistant cameraman on Jacques deuxième nuit, 1933/I Don Quichotte, 1932 In the Name of the Feyder’s Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1928) and Richard Owen’s Law, 1931 Le réquisitoire, 1930 La femme d'une nuit, 1929 Trois Cagliostro (1929). Carné made his own first film in collaboration jeunes filles nues, 1928 Last Flight, 1925 Paris en cinq jours, 1923 with a well-known amateur named Michael Sanvoisin, This was The Werewolf, 1922 Le crime du Bouif, 1921 Gigolette, and 1920 Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche (Nogent, the Sunday Eldorado, La croisade. 1929), a lyrical little silent documentary about Parisian working people enjoying their Sunday afternoon in the country. The JULES BERRY… Le diable (b. Jules Peaufichet, February 9, 1883, following year Carné worked as one of René Clair’s two assistant , Vienne, France – April 23, 1951, Paris, France) appeared directors on Sous les toits de Paris. in 95 films, including 1951 Les maître-nageurs, 1950 Le gang des Meanwhile Carné had entered a competition organized by tractions-arrière, 1950 Without Trumpet or Drum, 1949 Portrait Cinémagazine for the best written by an amateur. He d'un assassin, 1947 Dreams of Love, 1946 Distress, 1946 The won the competition and from 1929 to 1933 was a regular Murderer Is Not Guilty, 1944 Le mort ne reçoit plus, 1944 contributor to Cinémagazine, also writing for Cinémonde (edited Béatrice devant le désir, 1943 The London Man, 1943 Tristi amori, by his friend and roommate Maurice Bessy) and other journals, 1943 Le soleil de minuit, 1943 Marie-Martine, 1943 Le voyageur sometimes under the pseudonym “Albert Cranche.” During this de la Toussaint, 1943 Après l'orage, 1942 The Devil's Envoys, period Carné made a umber of short advertising films in 1942 L'assassin a peur la nuit, 1942 Soyez les bienvenus, 1942 La collaboration with Jean Aurenche and the animator Paul Grimault. symphonie fantastique, 1942 The Big Fight, 1940 The Mondesir He also served briefly as editor of the weekly Hebdo-film but Heir, 1940 Paris New-York, 1939 Daybreak, 1939 Unknown of resigned when the proprietor made him publish a negative article Monte Carlo, 1938 Carrefour, 1938 Café de Paris, 1938 Hercule, about Chaplin’s City Lights. 1938 The Woman of Monte Carlo, 1937 Balthazar, 1937 A Picnic In any case, Carné was more interested in making films on the Grass, 1937 Arsene Lupin, Detective, 1936 Le mort en fuite, than reviewing them, and in 1933 he became permanent assistant 1936 27 rue de la Paix, 1936 Les loups entre eux, 1936 The Crime director to Jacques Feyder (Carné says “I owe him everything”). of Monsieur Lange, 1935 Jeunes filles à marier, 1932 King of He worked with Feyder on three of the director’s best films—Le Hotels, 1931 Mon coeur et ses millions, 1929 Crossroads, 1928 Grand Jeu (1934), Pensions Mimosas (1935), and La Kermesse L'argent, and 1911 Olivier Cromwell. héroïque (1935). When Feyder went to England to make Knight Without Armor for Korda, he arranged for Carné to direct a film he was to have made, Jenny (1936). It stars Feyder’s wife Françoise Rosay as the manager of a shady nightclub whose lover, the reluctant gangster Lucien (Albert Préjean), falls in love with her daughter (Lisette Lanvin). In spite of its melodramatic plot, Carné’s first feature is of great interest, showing that he already possessed an exceptional talent for visual narrative and characterization, and a predilection for misty and tenebrous backgrounds. His great ability as a director of actors was apparent in his handling of a cast that also included Jean-Louis Barrault, Roger Blin, and . Jenny began Carné’s fertile partnership with Jacques Prévert, coauthor of the script (from a novel by Pierre Rocher) and author of the skillful dialogue. It was followed by Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937), a fantastic farce set in London and played by another brilliant cast. The hectic plot involves an impoverished bourgeois couple ( and Françoise Rosay), a lunatic who murders butchers ( Lean-Louis Barrault), and a young milkman (Jean-Pierre Aumont) falsely accused of murder. Some critics have detected a prophetically Absurdist note in Prévert’s insolently implausible script, and the film has been revived in recent years with great success. The witty sets, representing a shamelessly bogus London, were by Alexander Trauner, who became Carné’s regular designer, and the score was by , who “Marcel Carné,”from World Film Directors, V.I, Ed. John provided music for some of the director’s best films. Wakeman. The H. W. Wilson Company, NY, 1987. However, it is as a master of the melancholy tradition of Carné, Marcel (Albert), French director and critic, was born in that Carné is (or was) revered—poignant stories Paris—in Montmartre, where he grew up. He was the son of Paul about decent people ill-used by fate (and its human instruments ) Carné, a cabinetmaker and Marie Racouët. His father got him a job who find a brief interlude of happiness through love before destiny with an insurance company, but Carné was intent on a career in the sweeps them apart forever. The emergence of this despairing mode cinema and went to evening classes in cinematography given by in France in the late 1930s has been attributed to the growing threat the Association Philomatique, an institution sponsored by the Paris of war, coupled with the failure of the Popular Front. Certainly Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—4 there is a strong populist element in these films—Carné asserted Le Jour se lève (Daybreak) which followed in 1939, is the his preference for stories about “the simple life of ordinary people” quintessential achievement of “poetic realism.” It begins with the rather than “the overheated ambience of dance parties.” fatal shooting of a man on the fourth floor of a workers’ tenement The first of the Prévert-Carné films in this manner was in an industrial suburb of Paris. His killer, François, barricades Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), which stars himself in his room, the police surround the house, and a siege as a deserter from a French colonial regiment who finds refuge in a begins. François (Jean Gabin), trapped in a room intermittently squalid inn on the mist-enshrouded harbor at LeHavre. There he raked by police bullets, spends the long night remembering the meets a girl (Michele Morgan who has circumstances that brought him there. A run away from her evil guardian Zabel steelworker, he had fallen in love with a (Michel Simon). They fall in love and flower-seller (Jacqueline Laurent), and spend a single night together. The next for a while they had been happy. Then day the soldier kills Zabel in a fight. the girl becomes infatuated with He is preparing to leave on a ship Valentin, a music-hall dog-trainer, and bound for Brazil when he is shot dead François himself has a casual affair with by the gangster Lucien (Pierre Valentin’s assistant Clara (Arletty). The Brasseur). The ship sails without half-mad sadomasochist Valentin, Gabin, just as it does in Duvivier’s portrayed by Jules Berry as one of the Pépé-le-Moko: in the films of poetic most obscenely despicable villains in all realism, the dream of escape to a cinema, visits François and taunts him happier life in a better place is always with hints about the flower girl’s sexual a dream. Jean Quéval wrote that dependence on him. François, goaded “unity of action, space and time beyond endurance, shoots him. These contrives to give this film a classical recollections have brought us back to the finish, found for the first time in Carné’s work. The images have as hopeless present. François smokes his last cigarette and then shoots much narrative weight as the dialogue, the editing reveals a close, himself. The room fills with police teargas. Day breaks and light effective relationship (not at all first perceptible) between words flood in through the fumes, over broken glass, a teddy bear, a and images. The atmosphere is strangely unreal and fascinating brooch, a cigarette packet, some photographs—a few objects and the personalities of Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan convey a summarizing a life in which no sun will rise again. The dead man’s kind of supplementary fascination to their actual portrayals.” cheap alarm clock begins insistently to ring. The “strangely unreal and fascinating” atmosphere owes a It has been said that Carné had the talents of a producer as great deal to Trauner’s sets—this film like almost all of Carné’s well as a director, in that his best films owe much to his genius for pictures apart from his first documentary, was shot entirely in the selecting and harnessing exceptional talents. This is nowhere more studio. And yet at the beginning of his career he had been one of true than in Le Jour se lève. The film’s unsurpassed use of the most vocal advocates of location shooting, writing in 1932 that flashback, brilliantly executed by Carné, was first structured by he could not see “without irritation the current cinema shutting Prévert, who is also responsible for what Quéval calls the “almost itself away, fleeing from life in order to delight in sets and Jansenist division of the world into good people and bad people.” artificiality.” It was evidently the desire for complete artistic And the charged, poetic simplicity of Prévert’s dialogue would control that won Carné over to filming in the studio, where he cold seem incongruous if Trauner’s splendid expressionistic sets had plan his camera movements and lighting effects with absolute not already removed this ostensibly naturalistic film some way confidence. Speaking perhaps of Quai des Brumes he said, “Before from realism. (Presumably Trauer was also partly responsible for I shoot a film I prepare my palette. Then I see to it that everything the way the sets, and individual objects within the sets, are used is done in the same shade, always bearing in mind the main idea of again and again to reveal aspects of their owners’ characters and the work….One must compose images as the old masters did their social background.) Jaubert’s inventive score, the perfectly canvases, with the same preoccupation with effect and expression. calculated rhythms of the camera movements, the exacting balance Cinema images have the same needs.” of character against character—Carné welds all of the elements of There is actually a happy ending for the young lovers the film into a seamlessly coherent and powerfully persuasive Pierre and René in Hôtel du Nord (1938), though the film begins vision of a world in which human love is inevitably defeated by the with their botched attempt at suicide in a cheap hotel by the Canal blind forces of evil, though the sun also rises. Saint-Martin. It is Edmond, a middle-aged man with a dubious Arletty was as warmly praised for her “superbly casual” past, who died when his hope of happiness with Renés evaporates. performance as Jules Berry was for the disgusting brilliance of his, Once again Carné showed his gift for assembling a cast of but it was Gabin’s contribution that has been most widely extraordinary ability—Louis Jouvet, Arletty, Annabella, Jean- discussed. André Bazin described him as “the tragic hero of the Pierre Aumont, , François Perier. The picture was contemporary cinema. With every new Gabin film the cinema admired for its acting, for the naturalistic photography of the canal rewinds the infernal machinery of his destiny just as in Le Jour se and its surroundings (reconstructed by Trauner), and for such lève, that night, as on every night, he winds up the alarm clock notable set-pieces as the dancing in the street at the end, but most whose ironic and cruel ringing will sound at daybreak the hour of critics thought it seriously weakened by the shapeless plot and his death.” anecdotal structure. The script, based on a populist novel by Le Jour se lève was almost universally recognized as a Eugène Dabit, was written not by Prévert but by Henri Jeanson and great film, and it established Carné as a dominant figure—along Jean Aurenche. with René Clair and —in the French cinema. There Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—5 was an international outcry when RKO attempted to buy and passionate, but with a mysterious underlying melancholy—was the destroy all the prints of the picture to make way for Anatole finest of her career; Richard Roud calls it “one of the greatest Litvak’s mediocre postwar remake, The Long Night. However, portraits of a woman in all cinema. . . a performance for the ages.” during the German occupation of France a school of thought Few historical films so convincingly evoke a period and a emerged in Vichy circles that blamed Carné’s fatalistic films, milieu. It was immediately recognized as a masterpiece, but to together with the works of Gide, Cocteau, Proust and others, for many critics it seemed a flawed one. Jan Mitry said that it was “a encouraging “defeatism” and thus hastening or even causing the very great film s much in its scope as in its ambitions, but it is a fall of France. Carné replied that the artist must be the barometer very great film that has misfired.” It had done so, he thought, of his times, and it was not the barometer’s fault if it foretold the because of radical change in the relationship between Carné and coming storm. Nevertheless, these criticisms no doubt contributed Prévert (who provided the witty and poetic dialogue, and also the to the fact that Carné made only two films during the Occupation, rather sprawling and shapeless plot): “In the past…Carné had the both of them set in the past to avoid the need for any overt upper hand in the breakdown into the shooting script andi n the comment on ugly contemporary realities. cinematographic construction of the film….[Now] it is Prévert Les Visiteurs du soir (The who conceives the subject of the film, Devil’s Envoys, 1942) deals with the who develops it, writes the continuity basic Carné-Prévert theme—the struggle and often breaks it down into an between good and evil—in terms of a extremely detailed form….They are no medieval morality play. The devil’s longer Carné’s films with dialogue by envoys (Alain Cuny and Arletty) arrive Prévert, but Prévert’s films directed by at a baronial banquet intent on creating Carné” and “the visuals serve only to emotional anarchy. They succeed until illustrate a story whose development is one of them falls genuinely in love, but never indicated except in words.” after that the devil himself (Jules Berry) There is truth in this, but, imperfect is powerless to separate the two lovers; and uneven as it is, Les Enfants du he changes them into statues, but their paradis has a vigor and humanity that hearts continue to beat. Some critics continue to earn it a place on any list have seen in this elegant, soberly of the classics of the cinema. designed, rather static film a covert None of Carné’s postwar attack on the Occupation itself, and a films equaled the best of his earlier promise that France would survive. work, and the first of them was a It was followed by a picture disaster. Les Portes de la nuit (Gates that some place even above Le Jour se of the Night, 1946) conceived as a lève, in Carné’s oeuvre, Les Enfants du vehicle for Gabin and Dietrich, had to paradis (The Children of Paradise). It make do with the inexperienced Yves was set in Paris in the 1840s, when Montand and Nathalie Nattier in a melodrama and pantomime were the Prévert story (based on a ballet) about most popular forms of entertainment, collaborators and black marketers in and the Boulevard du Crime—the postwar Paris, with Destiny theatre district—lived up to its name. intervening in the shape of a battered The plot centers on the beautiful Garance (Arletty),who in the vagabond (Jean Vilar). Impatient reactions to the picture made it course of the film is loved by the witty and dandified murderer clear that the public mood had changed. As Penelope Houston Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), the rising young mime Baptiste wrote, “fatalism began to look like affectation. We had been there Duburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), and the great tragedian Fréderic once to often.” What is more, the movie had been made with a Lemaïtre ()—all historical figures—as well as the staggering and pointless extravagance that had damaged Carné’s wealthy Compte de Montray (Louis Salou). The action takes place reputation within the industry. His next film, La Fleur de l’âge, mostly in the theatres of the Boulevard or in the crowded streets begun in 1946, had to be abandoned when it overran its budget. outside, among the tumblers and jugglers and vendors. The story is This abortive project was Carné’s last collaboration with Jacques too complicated to describe in detail, but it emerges in the end that Prévert/ Garance, who loves only Baptiste, will not separate from his After that, Carné made no more pictures for three years. family or his métier, and they lose each other among the carnival His fortunes began to revive a little with (1950), crowds on the Boulevard de Crime. based on a Simenon story and adapted (like most of his later films) Work began on this ambitious and expensive film in by Carné himself in collaboration with another scenarist. It starred August 1943 and continued, with interruptions, for nearly two Jean Gabin in a new kind of role, as a wealthy Cherbourg hotelier years. There were armies of extras, and Trauner’s magnificent trapped by a calculating woman. A polished and atmospheric reconstruction of the Boulevard de Crime alone cost more than five piece, financially very modest and with none of the fatalistic million francs. (Trauner’s contribution to the film had to be overtones of poetic realism, it is a good film but a minor one. clandestine, as did that of Joseph Kosma, who provided the Juliette ou La Clef des songes (1951) was closer to Carné’s old brilliantly evocative score: both were of Jewish descent, and style—a fantasy in which a young convict dreams of escape to a Kosma later paid tribute to Carné’s courage in employing him magical world in search of his beloved. Released from prison, he during this period.) Arletty’s performance as Garance—intelligent, loses his girl and elects to return as a suicide to the dream world. Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—6

The film has sets by Trauner and music by Kosma—both working Shadows (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939) for Carné for the last time—but neither these nor Gérard Philipe’s making him for a time the most respected filmmaker on the attractive performance in the lead could rescue it from banality. European continent. One of the most admired of Carné’s postwar films was Of course, things changed, and after the Germans Thérese Raquin (1953), adapted from marched in, Carné and every other Zola’s novel by Carné and Charles French film artiste who didn’t emigrate Spaak and set in present-day Lyons. In had to struggle to survive and keep Carné’s version of the story it is not making movies, which meant charting a the social forces but a malevolent blind course through the no-man’s-land destiny that controls the lives of between collaborationism, active Thérese (Simone Signoret) and her resistance, compromise, integrity, and lover (Raf Vallone). Roy Armes write laissez-faire neutrality. Filmmakers that “Carné’s handling of composition were under enormous pressure to work and editing is assured as always and for the Nazi-controlled, Goebbels- nowhere more strikingly displayed conceived Continental Films, which than in the death of the blackmailer competed with the existing studios and which forms the film’s ironic climax.” sent films to theaters confiscated from There was an excellent performance as Jewish owners—but was taking such the blackmailer from Roland work, as André Cayatte, Henri-Georges Lesaffrem who had becomea regular member of Carné’s team. He Clouzot, , and Richard Pottier would do, abetting appeared again as a young boxer in L’Air de Paris (1954), which the occupiers or using their facilities and funding against them? starred Gabin and Arletty in an undistinguished piece about a The moral calculus was never simple. Some, like screenwriter Jean retired fighter and the young hopeful he trains for the Devaivre (as described in both his memoirs and Bertrand championship. Les Tricheurs (1958), an old-fashioned “exposé” of Tavernier’s 2002 epic Safe Conduct), accepted Continental the sins of modern youth, also had a notable cast (including Jean- employment only to use it as a cover for wild Resistance derring- Paul Belmondo, Laurent Terzieff, and Jacques charier) and do. enjoyed a considerable financial success. Carné’s later films have Clearly, covert heroics aside, what each film “meant,” been routine, perhaps the best of them being Trois Chambres á whether it was made for Continental or not, was the crucial Manhattan (1965), another modest and convincing Simenon question, and it was answered by the Nazis, the Resistance, and the adaptation. beleaguered populace all at once. (Famously, Clouzot’s 1943 It was fashionable for a time to attribute the abrupt Rorschach drama Le Corbeau pissed off everyone from the decline in Carné’s immense reputation to the end of his Vatican to the Vichy government to the Communist Party, and it collaboration with Prévert, but this seems implausible. As Richard can still be easily read as either an act of spectacular subversion or Roud points out, it was Prévert who wrote Les Portes de la nuit, an artifact of prosecutable cooperation.) It was into this ethical and the first and most spectacular of Carné’s failures, while there were interpretive minefield that Carné’s magical Les visiteurs du soir only a few successes among the film Prévert wrote for other (1942), produced by André Paulvé’s independent company, directors. A more obvious explanation is that in the age of Discina, gingerly stepped, a medieval fairy tale that seemed neorealism, improvisation, and political engagement, there was intentionally devoid of political allegory. Or was it? No longer able simply no place on the screen for Carné’s sad vision of the world to breach the class-minded contemporary milieus that had made at the mercy of fate. He turned to other films, but his heart wasn’t him a star in the thirties, Carné, aided by Paulvé and screenwriters in them.” Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche, bet the bank on an outrageously expensive, Perrault-esque romantic fantasy, Michael Atkinson, “Les visiteurs du soir: Love in the Ruins” something that could be all things to all people: homegrown (Criterion Notes) French and yet nonconfrontational, emotionally substantive and yet Think of it as a one-of-a-kind cultural hothouse experiment: metaphor-free, conspicuously goyish yet embracing of difference French cinema between 1940 and 1944, during the German and disruption. occupation. No thriving cinema culture had ever before been Lavish, expansively designed (by famous production subjected to such horrifying and bizarre sociopolitical pressures— designer Alexandre Trauner, a Hungarian-born Jew whose suddenly, the substance of your film’s narrative could get you shot participation in the film was hidden by Carné and uncredited), and by the Nazis or condemned as a collaborator, or both, depending plaintively lovelorn, Les visiteurs du soir was a sensation, what on its figurative nature. Up to 1940, the French film industry had critic André Bazin would call just a year later “a revolutionary been dominated by the studios Pathé and Gaumont, and, thanks event.” In retrospect, the galvanizing impact Carné’s movie had on largely to films directed by Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, Jean France—it was easily the most popular film of the entire Grémillon, Jacques Feyder, and and starring Jean occupation period—is a little mysterious. It’s such a simple, Gabin, it was an international giant, happily disseminating languorous, brooding film, but in that dire moment, it satiated the uniquely cool French fatalism and uniquely sexy French satire to French thirst for escape as no other work could. The tale is hardly a the world’s implicitly more provincial audiences. Many of these clean template for happy endings and easy solutions, however. films—thunderclouds of pessimistic romanticism, penniless rue, When two of the devil’s emissaries, Gilles and Dominique (Alain and tough-guy melancholy—came to be labeled “poetic realism,” Cuny and Arletty), appear on horseback, posing as minstrels, and and that was Carné’s terrain, with the love heaped upon Port of enter an alabaster-white castle during a troubled wedding party, we Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—7 may well expect a tidy morality play in which vanity and greed are Given all this, Les visiteurs du soir is a surprisingly sober trounced by way of the visitors’ trickery. But life is not so simple, film, far less entranced visually with a sense of storybook and we sense immediately that the film is too somber for that. The contrivance than with a medieval frieze aesthetic (when the lovers proceedings are eventually sorcerously halted in mid-dance; Gilles are transformed into a statue at the end, the change is hardly seduces Anne, the bride (Marie Déa), while Dominique, in abrupt). Ironically, Port of Shadows, a poetic realist film with a transparent drag until now, alluringly distracts both the brutish contemporary setting, seems much more fantastic, with individual groom (Marcel Herrand) and the bride’s widowed father, the shots and stylistic flourishes compounding the story’s emotional mournful Baron Hugues (Fernand Ledoux). And then the devil’s thrust. Far colder, Les visiteurs du soir contains its fairy-tale plan collapses, as Gilles (the victim of a Faustian bargain, and a elements in depth-composition tableaux, and there is little effort to kind of pre-Bogart loner whose love for Dominique died bitterly muster a lighting-defined atmosphere. At times, as in the first visit ages ago) falls in love with the pure-hearted Anne, an unforeseen to the wedding feast, the setting and compositions are almost circumstance that brings about bloodshed and eventually summons sterile and still, as if the film were holding its breath, anxiously the devil himself (Jules Berry). awaiting the inevitable collision between love and evil. We don’t Once the know, but this may have Midsummer Night’s given a censor a Dream crisscrossing moment’s pause— morphs into a true nothing is frivolous in lovers’ tribulation for Carné’s movie, and little Gilles and Anne, the besides the devil is film becomes both a played as comedy. This metaphysical farce small matter of emotional (with Berry’s impish insurgency in the face of Mephisto popping in doom was deadly serious. and out of rooms, The beginnings encouraging disaster at of the path forward, for every turn) and a tale of Bazin at least, had been amour fou passionnel. It laid by Marcel L’Herbier has been suggested that and his Midnight in Berry’s urbane and Paris–like La nuit destructive demon fantastique (1942), which represented for French “gave the signal for a audiences the malignant reversal of steam” presence of the occupation, or even of Hitler himself, but the leading to the achievement of Les visiteurs du soir later that year. movie’s crazed romanticism is a more persuasive explanation for After that, the mini wave of ostensibly neutral French earnest, with its success. Consider the disarming moment, late in the film, when and Jean Cocteau’s L’éternel retour; Maurice Gilles is chained and tortured for his transgressions while Anne is Tourneur’s Gérard de Nerval adaptation La main du diable; Serge sequestered, and the spiritually connected and romantically de Poligny’s Le baron fantôme, featuring Cocteau as the titular empowered pair simply will themselves out of their confinement to ghost; and Grémillon’s Lumière d’été (all 1943). Together, these meet in a sun-drenched meadow. This kind of daring, matter-of- films stand as one of the great fermentative moments in cinema, fact magic, with its built-in potential for defiance of oppression when the medium dreamed the dreams of an entire nation under and physical obstacles, may seem loaded for combat to us today, spectacular duress. Hollywood saw a similarly organic spurt of id- but both Nazi and Vichy censors apparently considered it merely venting gothics in response to the Depression, and certainly the paradigmatic Gallic escapism. For viewers, however, this return to deprivations and dreads of Soviet life triggered the popularity of the all-or-nothing medieval courtly love tradition was stone-cold old-fashioned fantasy yarns in the 1960s and 1970s (Boris liberation, courageous and indisputably native, all about resisting Rytsarev, Aleksandr Ptushko, and Aleksandr Rou forged entire evil machinations with only the fierce devotion of an enraptured thriving careers in the genre). spirit. Because of the strictures they themselves imposed, the One doesn’t quite need to label it allegory; it would be Nazis didn’t have a chance of controlling the discourse—the more difficult to come up with any dramatically structured film that, had fanciful and romantic and quintessentially French the films were, it been made under Nazi noses, could not be somehow construed as the more loudly they proclaimed an intuitively nationalist creed. a protest or expression of resolve. Does that make any perceived Goebbels had wanted to use the film industry to neutralize popular subtext meaningless or, in this historical context, all the more patriotism, but the French people became more French after seeing poignant? According to a twenty-five-year-old Bazin, writing in Les visiteurs du soir and the other fantasias of the era, not less. Revue jeux et poésie in 1943, Carné’s movie initially had a Relatively unobjectionable to the Germans, the films were like contentious reception across France—arguments would break out messages tied to doves’ legs, missives of salvation and cosmic in theaters, and “it even appears that several screens were bashed hope. in.” But quickly it became the film du jour, the manifestation of the Since the war, and outside of its special circumstances, national spirit, and “the diabolical, the fantastic, and the marvelous this film has been overshadowed by Carné’s subsequent soon became the conventions of our present production.” masterpiece, Children of Paradise (1945), in terms of scale, profundity, and the amount of occupation intrigue that plagued its Carné—LES VISITEURS DU SOIR—8 production. But the latter film, for all its majesty, stands as a monument to a very real triumph over the Nazis, crafted, as it was, For more on Carné, see Ben McCann’s excellent, well- in semisecrecy and finished and released seven months after the documented survey of his work and place in film history liberation of Paris. Les visiteurs du soir meant something else: like posted on the Senses of Cinema site 13 March 2011: its own doomed lovers, the movie embodied an unquashable will http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/great-directors/marcel-carne/ in a moment of cultural impossibility, when only what was in your heart could save you.

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2013 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXVI: Feb 12 Orson Welles, Touch of Evil 1958 Feb 19 Kon Ichikawa, Revenge of a Kabuki Actor 1963 Feb 26 John Huston, Fat City 1972 Mar 5 Volker Schlöndorff, The Tin Drum 1979 Mar 19 Mike Leigh, Naked 1993 Mar 26 Michael Cimino, Heaven’s Gate 1980 Apr 2 Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love 2002 Apr 9 Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead 2007 Apr 16 Zack Snyder, Watchmen 2009 Apr 23 Marleen Gorris, Within the Whirlwind 2009

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.

Bruce’s exhibit, Being There: Bruce Jackson, Photographs 1962-2012, opens this Friday at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. There is an opening reception 5:30—7:30 p.m., free & open to the public. The exhibit will be up until June 16, 2013. For further information visit http://www.burchfieldpenney.org/exhibitions/exhibition:02- 08-2013-06-16-2013-bruce-jackson-being-there/