A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, February 17, 2020

Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946)

Michel Simon in Panique
Cast: Michel Simon, Viviane Romance, Max Dalban, Émile Drain, Guy Favières, Louis Florencie, Charles Dorat, Lucas Gridoux. Screenplay: Charles Spaak, Julien Duvivier, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer. Production design: Serge Piménoff. Film editing: Marthe Poncin. Music: Jean Wiener.

Panique is widely interpreted as a post-war French reaction to collaborators in the German occupation, a study of how mob violence can germinate. But it holds its own today as a noirish tale of crime and punishment gone wrong. Michel Simon plays a solitary misanthrope, a far cry from his more devil-may-care raffish slobs in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) and Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932). His M. Hire keeps to himself in the busybody-filled neighborhood where he lives, which only generates suspicion when an elderly woman is murdered. The real murderer and his girlfriend fan the flames of suspicion by planting evidence against M. Hire, with tragic results for the innocent man. The film has a sour, pessimistic tone to it that may reflect Duvivier's attitude on returning to France after his wartime exile in Hollywood.

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