Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel in Magnet of Doom

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Vanel, Michèle Mercier, Malvina Silberberg, Stefania Sandrelli, Todd Martin, E.F. Medard, Barbara Sommers, André Certes, Andrex, Jerry Mengo, Delia Kent, Ginger Hall. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Production design: Daniel Guéret. Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Claude Durand. Music: Georges Delerue.

I don't know what the title Magnet of Doom means -- the original French title is L'aîné des Ferchaux, which means "The elder Ferchaux" -- but its elusive quality seems about right for Jean-Pierre Melville's shaggy dog of a movie. Ostensibly a thriller, a genre of which Melville was a master, Magnet of Doom meanders as much as the road trip which its central characters, Michel Maudet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), set out upon. Especially in its peregrinations through the United States, it reminds me a bit of Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (1974) and even more of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), two films that I suspect owe a bit to Melville's movie, and even more to Henri Decaë's cinematography for it. The story, such as it is, details the flight from prosecution in France of crooked banker Ferchaux, accompanied by Michel, a young man he hires as a secretary. Since Michel is a lean, lithe ex-boxer played by lean, lithe ex-boxer Belmondo, there's a touch of homoeroticism in Ferchaux's choice of secretary, especially since the interview is perfunctory and it becomes clear that Michel doesn't really know how to type -- he does it with two fingers. Mostly Michel's job is to drive Ferchaux on his trip through the States to New Orleans. At the outset, Michel is taciturn and submissive, doing Ferchaux's bidding without question. But after they make a stop at a bank in New York City where Ferchaux has a safe-deposit box full of cash that he loads into a suitcase, Michel begins to assert himself a little: One of his first stops on their trip is in Hoboken, N.J., so he can see the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, whom he idolizes. And after they pick up an improbably pretty hitchhiker named Angie, played by Stefania Sandrelli, he begins to turn the tables on Ferchaux, ordering the older man into the back seat and stopping to go for a swim in a river with Angie. Ferchaux regains control, however, by flinging the cash from the suitcase off a cliff, holding on to a wad of money that he can use to maintain dominance. Michel and Angie clamber down the hill to retrieve what they can of the money. But when they stop at a service station and Michel goes to the restroom while Ferchaux dozes, Angie absconds with the suitcase containing the recovered cash and hitches a ride with a trucker. Michel gives chase and outruns the truck, gets the money back, and orders the trucker to leave and Angie to resume hitchhiking. The rest of the film is a series of power plays between Ferchaux and Michel as they wait in a cabin near New Orleans for the arrival of the money Ferchaux has arranged to be sent to him upon the closing of his main account in New York, after which they plan to avoid extradition by taking up residence in Venezuela. But the older man begins to suffer health problems and Michel starts to collaborate with the authorities who are pursuing Ferchaux. This summary makes the film sound more cut-and-dried than it is, however. The pacing is, if not off, at least off-beat, sometimes engaging, sometimes lethargic, and sometimes frustrating. Melville's take on America makes it worth watching, and the performances of Belmondo and Vanel are as good as one might anticipate. It's the kind of film you watch just to try to anticipate what's going to happen next, and you usually can't.

Les Misérables (Raymond Bernard, 1934)

Harry Baur in Les Misérables

Jean Valjean/Champmathieu: Harry Baur
Javert: Charles Vanel
Fantine: Florelle
Cosette: Josseline Gaël
Cosette as a child: Gaby Triquet
Marius: Jean Servais
Éponine: Orane Demazis
Éponine as a child: Gilberte Savary
Thénardier: Charles Dullin
Mme. Thénardier: Marguerite Moreno
Gavroche: Émile Genevois
Enjolras: Robert Vidalin
Grantaire: Paul Azaïs
M. Gillenormand: Max Dearly
Monseigneur Myriel: Henry Krauss

Director: Raymond Bernard
Screenplay: Raymond Bernard, André Lang
Based on a novel by Victor Hugo
Cinematography: Jules Kruger
Production design: Lucien Carré, Jean Perrier
Music: Arthur Honegger

Harry Baur gives one of the great film performances in Les Misérables, beginning with a tour de force in the first installment, subtitled Tempest in a Skull, in which he plays not only the brutish convict Jean Valjean and his first assumed identity, the benevolent mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, M. Madeleine, but also the addle-brained Champmathieu, wrongly fingered as the fugitive Valjean. Baur's Valjean is not the dashing, younger heroic figure embodied by Fredric March in Richard Boleslawski's 1935 Hollywood version or Hugh Jackman in Tom Hooper's 2012 film of the musical. March and Jackman had to work hard to suggest Valjean's hardened convict past, but Baur looks the part. He cleans up nicely, though. Raymond Bernard's version is closer to the epic Victor Hugo novel than the later adaptations, which necessitates its miniseries length: a 281-minute total run time, divided into three films. Trilogies typically sag in the middle: In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, for example, The Two Towers (2002) is weaker than The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003). But Bernard manages to give each part fairly equal heft, concentrating on Valjean's transformation in Tempest in a Skull, on the thwarted manipulations of the titular couple in The Thénardiers, and on the fight on the barricades in Freedom, Dear Freedom. This is not to say that there isn't some slackness within each installment: Bernard, like many directors who mastered their skills making silent films, doesn't seem fully at home with sound even yet; there are scenes in which the actors seem to be holding a pose a beat or two longer than necessary. And despite Arthur Honegger's distinguished score, Bernard allows some scenes that could use the "sweetening" of background music to go without it. In The Thénardiers, for example, the plot to ensnare Valjean and the ensuing fight scene could have used some tension-and-release music, but the score only begins, rather abruptly, when the lovers, Marius and Cosette, meet. But as a totality, Les Misérables is a triumph, and apparently a little-known one, to judge by the fact that it doesn't come up as one of the top results in an IMDb search. Jules Kruger's cinematography gives an expressionist tilt to some of its scenes, and the production design, from the slummy haunts of the Thénardiers to the opulence of Gillenormand's mansion, is superb. But most of all it has Baur and a tremendous supporting cast, particularly Florelle* as a very touching Fantine, and Émile Genevois as a memorable Gavroche. Charles Vanel's Javert is not humanized sufficiently in the script, I think, so that his suicide comes as something of an anticlimax, but he gives it all the implacable menace the role allows him. But it's Baur who carries the film as impressively as he carries Jean Servais's Marius through the sewers in the climax.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

*Her full name was Odette Elisa Joséphine Marguerite Rousseau, and she was occasionally billed as Odette Florelle. It's too bad that today her screen name sounds like that of an air freshener.

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief

John Robie: Cary Grant
Frances Stevens: Grace Kelly
Jessie Stevens: Jessie Royce Landis
H.H. Hughson: John Williams
Danielle Foussard: Brigitte Auber
Bertani: Charles Vanel
Foussard: Jean Martinelli
Germaine: Georgette Anys

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: John Michael Hayes
Based on a novel by David Dodge
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Costume design: Edith Head

To Catch a Thief was the third film in a row for Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, and it reteamed the director with such valuable coworkers as screenwriter John Michael Hayes and cinematographer Robert Burks, not to mention Cary Grant, with whom Hitchcock hadn't worked since Notorious (1946). All the talent in the world seemed to be there. And yet is it just because it comes after such a masterwork as Rear Window (1954) that To Catch a Thief seems so lightweight and unmemorable? Preparing to watch it again for the umpteenth time, I found that I didn't remember much about the movie other than the spectacular Riviera scenery, the orgasmic fireworks scene, and Kelly in the gold lamé dress. The plot was something about a jewel thief, wasn't it, with Grant in one of the "wrong man" plights so prevalent in Hitchcock? So it was, and while it all works like a well-oiled machine, I sense a flagging of inspiration, especially in the scene in which Jessie snuffs out her cigarette in a fried egg, which is a gag Hitchcock used 15 years earlier in Rebecca.

Watched on Showtime

The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

With John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear forms an unholy trinity of adventure films. All three are about soldiers of fortune in Latin American countries seen as ripe for the pickings by predatory outsiders. Clouzot's film is probably the most deeply cynical of the three: Houston at least lets two of his adventurers survive, and Peckinpah's bunch at least shows some sympathy for the exploited poor. But from the opening of Clouzot's film, in which a half-naked child is seen tormenting some cockroaches (a scene Peckinpah borrowed for his film's opening), we are in hell. The unnamed country is being plundered by the Southern Oil Company, known by the acronym SOC, pronounced "soak." The S and the O, however, suggest Esso, the old trademark of Standard Oil before it and Mobil morphed into the double anonymity of Exxon. An oil well is on fire 300 miles away from the SOC headquarters, which lie on the outskirts of an impoverished village, and the easiest way to deal with the fire is to seal it off with explosives. So the foreman at the headquarters, Bill O'Brien (William Tubbs), proposes sending a couple of trucks cross-country, laden with nitroglycerin. Union drivers would balk at such dangerous work, so the company hires some of the local layabouts: Mario (Yves Montand), a swaggering Corsican; Jo (Charles Vanel), a French gangster from Paris; Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian who has just learned that he has a terminal lung illness from his work handling cement for SOC; and Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a German who survived forced labor in a salt mine under the Nazis. All three have been idling in the village waiting for the big break that will allow them to leave, and this seems to be it. Desperation at getting out is so intense that one of the men who vie for the job commits suicide after he fails to land it. The journey is, to say the least, harrowing, and Clouzot, who adapted the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi from a novel by Georges Arnaud, makes the most of every nail-biting moment of it. As a director, Clouzot is as smart in what he chooses not to show us and in what he does. Jo, for example, is not the first choice as a driver: O'Brien goes with a younger man. But when that man doesn't show up on the morning of departure, Jo takes his place. We don't see what Jo did to eliminate or delay his rival, but we're sure it wasn't good. And when one of the trucks explodes, we don't see the buildup to or the cause of the explosion: We witness it from a distance, and then join the surviving truck drivers as they come upon the scene, which they treat as just another hazardous obstacle on the road. The Wages of Fear was heavily cut on its first American release: The portrayal of American capitalism didn't sit well in the era of HUAC investigations. Clouzot's nihilism in The Wages of Fear sometimes feels a little heavy: One character actually dies with the word "nothing" on his lips. The screenplay for The Wages of Fear lacks the polished wit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which also contains the great performances of Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and the undervalued Tim Holt. And The Wild Bunch displays Peckinpah's great narrative drive and unequaled handling of action sequences. But Clouzot's film easily belongs in their company, and its uncompromising darkness makes many think it the best of the three.

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

Diabolique (or Les Diaboliques) was probably one of the first foreign language films I ever saw (although I'm sure I must have seen it in a version dubbed into English, as most U.S. releases were back then). The only thing I retained from it, I'm afraid, is the surprise ending. So I'm glad to say that it holds up after all these years, as any good thriller must even when you know its twists. I am, for the record, not one who is spoiled by "spoilers": I knew the gimmick in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) before I saw it, and I like to think I appreciated it more because I could see how it was being set up, and I enjoyed The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) more the second time I watched it. To my mind, any good thriller with a twist has to work independently of that twist, which Diabolique does. What it has going for it especially is Clouzot's superb control of atmosphere: sets (Léon Barsacq), music (Georges Van Parys), cinematography (Armand Thirard), and of course the performances of Véra Clouzot as Christina, Simone Signoret as Nicole, Paul Meurisse as Michel, Charles Vanel as Fichet, and a gallery of mildly grotesque supporting players, all working together to create a thoroughly sordid and unpleasant but also hypnotizing milieu. Even before the murder takes place, I was seriously creeped out by the shabby old school, its rowdy boys and ratty staff, and the sadism displayed by Michel toward his wife and mistress. That said, the story doesn't entirely hold together in any dispassionate post-viewing analysis. Without giving away any of the film's secrets, I spotted numerous loose threads. To name one, why is Christina so insistent on not divorcing Michel when she's perfectly willing to go along with a plot to murder him? We are expected to believe that she's a devout Catholic with religious scruples against divorce, but surely the church is at least as much against murdering your husband as it is against divorcing him. But I'm perfectly happy to ignore the implausible when the movie is as gripping as this one is.