“The French Had a Name for It” Brings Film Noir Gems Neglected for a Half-Century to Los Angeles

“THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT” BRINGS FILM NOIR GEMS NEGLECTED FOR A HALF-CENTURY TO LOS ANGELES Over the eight years that Don Malcolm edited NOIR CITY for Eddie Muller’s Film Noir Foundation, he and a small army of writers worked to expand the notions of what film noir encompassed. And that effort produced essays pinpointing the existence of many notable and forgotten noir films from around the world. Last year (2014), Malcolm went out on his own in order to take these exciting discoveries off the printed page and put them into movie theatres, where cinephiles could engage with them directly. The first result of this effort, a series of twelve French films noir that played at San Francisco’s Roxie Theatre last November, entitled THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT, created a sensation with turn-away business. “A certain received wisdom about French noir seemed to settle in over the years,” muses Malcolm, “and many of the directors of the films we’re rediscovering were raked over the coals during the ascendancy of the Nouvelle Vague. Those two factors combined to keep them pretty much ‘hidden in plain sight’ for a half-century.” But no longer. Now a slightly revised version of that remarkable festival, one that made San Francisco Chronicle lead film critic Mick LaSalle swoon at their collectively risqué panache (“the experience is like finding gold where you thought was rock”), is coming to the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre for four nights beginning Friday, June 19. What’s most amazing—shocking, even—is that many of these films feature big, big names in French cinema history. Brigitte Bardot—Jean Gabin—Simone Signoret—Lino Ventura: each of these French film icons is represented in at least one (and sometimes two) films with a glittering darkness equal to already well known French noir classics such as Rififi, Bob le Flambeur, and The Wages of Fear. “People know Lino Ventura from his work in the mid-sixties and seventies, but they’ve never seen Un Témoin Dans La Ville (1959), which is the template for his breakout as a singular leading man,” noted American Cinematheque Director Gwen Deglise, who’s more than a Francophile—she is, in fact, from France and is one of only a select few who know just what remains to be discovered in the mostly-unexplored continent of French film noir. The festival opens with a pair of films that move Brigitte Bardot from sexual object to cultural lightning rod: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s probing La Verité (1960), which literally puts her image “on trial,” and lesser-known but equally hard-charging director Claude Autant-Lara’s masterful blend of noir and melodrama, En cas de malheur aka Love Is My Profession (1958), where Bardot and Gabin hook up in a star-crossed May-September liaison. Youthful passion and worldly-wise middle age collide here with astonishing results. “These films are more explicit than American noirs could be, held back by the Production Code,” notes Malcolm. “Mick LaSalle called it a ‘special freedom’ to explore dark themes more completely. And they do.” Nowhere will this be more apparent than on Sunday night, when a pair of masterful noirs by often-overlooked director Julien Duvivier will screen. Voici les temps des assassins aka Deadlier Than The Male (1956) features Jean Gabin as the would-be victim of a desperate revenge plot by sweet-faced femme fatale Danièle Delorme (in a performance that builds to a hysterical ferocity beyond that of even American noir fatales such as Ann Savage and Peggy Cummins). “But just when you think that you’ve seen the worst there can possibly be,” smiles Malcolm, “there’s Catherine Rouvel.” Duvivier’s last noir, Chair de poule aka Highway Pickup (1963), unleashes the incredibly sexy and lethal Rouvel on an escaped convict (played with astringent brilliance by Robert Hossein) who merely wants a place to hide from the law. Instead, he finds a slowly enveloping hell on earth. “One could argue that Duvivier began film noir with Pépé le moko back in 1937,” notes Deglise, “and you could say that with Chair de poule he also brought it to an end. He’s someone who really deserves to be better known.” Monday night brings more sex and squalid societal values to the screen as the great Simone Signoret appears in Dédée D’Anvers (1948), the first of her iconic roles as women beset by smothering, deceitful men. “Dédée is a bit of a look back at French poetic realism,” Malcolm explains, “but it introduces two key actors who would be beloved in France for decades—Simone Signoret, of course, but also the great rotund character actor Bernard Blier.” And Blier, long relegated to supporting parts, gets to shine in the closing film on Monday night, Le septieme juré (1962), where his accidental “sex murder” of a provincial floozy is blamed on someone else—and he soon finds himself on the jury for the murder trial! “There wasn’t a good enough copy of Le septieme juré available last November to screen,” Malcolm notes, “but we’re incredibly pleased that the situation has changed in the past several months. Blier is amazingly moving here; it’s a performance and a film not to be missed.” If what happened in San Francisco last November is any indication, Los Angeles cinephiles and film noir aficionados are advised to get their tickets early for what promises to be the star of many amazing French noir rediscoveries. They will discover that the reason THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT is that they understood what noir was, and made their own dark films as well (or better) than anyone. For more information, please visit MidcenturyProductions.com, or contact Margot Gerber at the American Cinematheque ([email protected]).

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