The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

Cast: Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Betty Bronson, Patsy Kelly, Karen Conrad, Marie Devereux, Virginia Grey, Linda Francis, Bill Sampson, Edy Williams. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Art direction: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Paul Dunlap.

The Naked Kiss begins with a bang: a woman beating the crap out of a man, using her shoe and everything else that comes to hand, even spritzing him with seltzer from a siphon before she finally knocks him cold, collects the $75 he owes her, replaces the wig that has fallen off her bald head during the fight, and departs. It's going to be hard to top that, you might think, unless you know Samuel Fuller's movies and can be sure that he will. We learn that she's called Kelly, that she's a prostitute, and the man she's beating up is her pimp, who shaved her head as a punishment. Some time later, long enough for her hair to have grown back fully, we catch up with her arriving in the town of Grantville, posing as a traveling saleswoman with a sample kit of a Champagne called Angel Foam. And it's there that she will try, after one last trick with the good-looking town police captain named Griff, to go straight. She gets a job in the local hospital for children with disabilities, thrives, and gets engaged to the town's most prominent citizen, a man named Grant. Of course, when we first encounter Grant, who is handsome in a particularly oily way, we know that things won't go right -- even after Kelly confesses about her past to him and he accepts her anyway. This is melodrama at its pulpiest, and Fuller makes the most of it in his own special way. There is nothing "realistic" about The Naked Kiss. You might even call it "para-realistic" -- existing somewhere alongside reality in the way lurid fictions do. Fuller's films, made without benefit of the budgets and technical resources of the big studios, look like the work of someone playing with the available money and resources to express a private vision that's slightly askew, like memories or even dreams of big studio movies. They're filled with unexpected details, such as Kelly's wig or the dressmaker's dummy that Kelly's landlady costumes in the uniform of her late fiancé, killed in the war. They make us laugh as much as they creep us out. There's even a slightly hallucinatory quality to the disabled kids Kelly works with, who are called on for a performance of a song known as "Little Child," which takes on a sinister irony when we discover that Grant, for whom Kelly stages the performance, is a pedophile. Sometimes I'm not even certain if I watched The Naked Kiss or if I dreamed it.

This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943)

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, Walter Slezak, Kent Smith, Una O'Connor, Philip Merivale, Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Nancy Gates, Ivan F. Simpson, John Donat. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Frederick Knudtson. Music: Lothar Perl.

Charles Laughton plays a cowardly mama's boy schoolteacher in a Nazi-occupied country not unlike director Jean Renoir's native France. Albert Lory is secretly in love with his fellow teacher, Louise (Maureen O'Hara), but she's engaged to George Lambert (George Sanders), the administrator of the local railway yard who thinks the best way to proceed under the occupation is to submit to the Nazis under the command of Major von Keller (Walter Slezak). But Louise's brother, Paul (Kent Smith), is a member of the Resistance who tries to assassinate von Keller, provoking reprisals -- and a good deal of plot complications -- when he fails. Some dubious casting -- Sanders and O'Hara make an odd couple -- and a too-heavy reliance on melodramatic posing undermine a film that seems aimed more at Renoir's compatriots than at American audiences, though it was a box office success. 

La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Jean Gabin and Julien Carette in La Bête Humaine

Jacques Lantier: Jean Gabin
Séverine Roubaud: Simone Simon
Roubaud: Fernand Ledoux
Flore: Blanchette Brunoy
Grandmorin: Jacques Berlioz
Pecqueux: Julien Carette
Victoire Pecqueux: Colette Régis
Cabuche: Jean Renoir

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Denise Leblond
Based on a novel by Émile Zola
Cinematography: Curt Courant
Production design: Eugène Lourié
Film editing: Suzanne de Troeye, Marguerite Renoir

Jean Gabin has been called "the French Clark Gable," perhaps because he has some of the charged virility we associate with Gable. But it seems to me that he possesses in equal, or even greater, measure the quiet, sometimes gruff integrity as an actor that we associate with Spencer Tracy. It's very much on display in La Bête Humaine, in which he underplays the role of the doomed Jacques Lantier, making us feel the solidity of the man rather than the inherited demons that Émile Zola's novel inflicted on him. (Perhaps he underplays a bit too much for some people, like Pauline Kael, who found him sometimes "a lump.") In any case, the star of the film is not so much Gabin as the train whose engine Lantier has affectionately named Lison and regards as female. Throughout La Bête Humaine, we see trains rushing down the tracks and surging through tunnels or hear their roar and rumble and shrieking whistles. The film is driven by the energy of trains almost more than by the passions of the characters. In a close adherence to Zola's biological determinism, the trains would be emblematic of unstoppable, mechanistic destiny, but Jean Renoir has tempered Zola's naturalism with his own humanism. Renoir's nods to Zola's determinism are perfunctory: The scene in which Lantier reverts to the darkness of his ancestors and starts to strangle Flore is an awkward way of introducing Zola's ideas. But whenever the passions of the characters come most to the forefront, as in the murders of Grandmorin and Séverine, Renoir's tendency is to look away: Grandmorin dies behind the closed curtains of a railway compartment, and Lantier's assault on Séverine is interrupted by cuts to the dance hall they have left behind. What I remember from the film is less the crushing force of destiny that overwhelms the characters than the irrepressible elements of ordinary life, epitomized in the camaraderie of Lantier and Pecqueux, and reinforced by the film's ending when Pecqueux stops the hurtling train and returns to find his dead friend and gently close his eyes.

Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Grand Illusion

Maréchal: Jean Gabin
Boeldieu: Pierre Fresnay
Rauffenstein: Erich von Stroheim
Rosenthal: Marcel Dalio
Elsa: Dita Parlo
Cartier: Julien Carette
An Engineer: Gaston Modot
A Teacher: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir
Cinematography: Christian Matras
Production design: Eugène Lourié
Music: Joseph Kosma

I have to confess that when I first saw Grand Illusion a long, long time ago, I didn't get what the fuss was about. Why was this mildly amusing prison-escape movie considered one of the greatest films of all time? I mean, I got the general idea: That people are the same everywhere and that what divides us more than nationality is class. But where was the action? Why was there so little suspense? Why don't we get the raucous humor of Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953) or the heroics of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)? All of which is to say that our expectations have been so shaped by Hollywood to the point that it's difficult for the casual filmgoer to fully appreciate the subtlety of Jean Renoir's treatment of a story about which we have so many preconceptions. The greatness of Grand Illusion consists in Renoir's understanding of people and in his cast's dedication to bringing depth to the roles they are playing. To expect Grand Illusion to give us the full Hollywood measure of laughter, thrills and tears is like expecting War and Peace to stop teaching us history and concentrate entirely on the love life of Natasha Rostova. Like a great novel, Grand Illusion is designed to be savored and reflected upon, not to be watched and swiftly forgotten. The rapport between enemies, i.e., Boeldieu and Rauffenstein, and the tension between allies, i.e., Maréchal and Rosenthal, is what the film is about, and not Boeldieu's self-sacrifice and Rauffenstein's pomposity. It's also why we don't have closure on the stories of Maréchal and Rosenthal: Do they survive the war? Does Maréchal return to Elsa? Does Rosenthal become a victim of the Nazis? It's only because they have become such real characters to us that we even feel a twinge of frustration at not knowing those things. Hence the irony of the film's title. Hollywood gave us illusions. Renoir is determined to let us see the realities behind them.

The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The first time I saw The Rules of the Game, many years ago, I didn't get it. I knew it was often spoken of as one of the great films, but I couldn't see why. I had been raised on Hollywood movies, which fell neatly into their assigned slots: love story, adventure, screwball comedy, satire, social commentary, and so on. Jean Renoir's film seemed to be all of those things, and none of them satisfactorily. I had to be weaned from narrative formulas to realize why this sometimes madcap, sometimes brutal tragicomedy is regarded so highly. And I had to learn why the period it depicts, the brink of World War II, isn't just a point in the rapidly receding past, but the emblematic representation of a precipice that the human world always seems poised upon, whether the chief threat to civilization is Nazism or global climate change. The Rules of the Game is about us, dancing merrily on the brink, trying to ignore our mutual cruelty and to deny our blindness. Renoir's characters are blinded by lust and privilege, and they amuse us until they do horrible things like wantonly slaughter small animals or play foolish games whose rules they take too lightly. I'm afraid that makes one of the most entertaining (if disturbing) films ever made seem like no fun at all, but it should really be taken as a warning never to ignore the subtext of any work of art. Much of the film was improvised from a story Renoir provided, to the glory of such performers as Marcel Dalio as the marquis, Nora Gregor as his wife, Paulette Dubost as Lisette, Roland Toutain as André, Gaston Modot as Schumacher, Julien Carette as Marceau, and especially Renoir himself as Octave. Renoir's camera prowls relentlessly, restlessly through the giddy action and the sumptuousness of the sets by Max Douy and Eugène Lourié. It's not surprising that one of Renoir's assistants was the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. And, given my own initial reaction to the film, it's also not surprising that The Rules of the Game was a critical and commercial flop, trimmed to a nubbin of its original length, banned by the Vichy government, and after its negative was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942, potentially lost forever. Fortunately, prints survived, and by 1959 Renoir's admirers had reassembled it for a more appreciative posterity.