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.

Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

Cast: Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, André Garey, Gérard Buhr, Claude Cerval, Colette Fleury, René Havard, Simone Paris, Howard Vernon. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, August Le Breton. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Production design: Claude Bouxin. Film editing: Monique Bonnot. Music: Eddie Barclay, Jo Boyer. 

Sometimes the pleasures you get from a movie are not the intended ones of plot or action or dialogue. For example, I get a great delight from hearing how the French actors in Bob le Flambeur pronounce the title character's name: It's closer to "Bub" than to the American "Bahb." But even that incidental detail is somehow essential to what the film is all about: a reworking of American culture -- the gangster movie -- in the French manner. It would be different somehow if the title character were named Jules or Pierre or Marcel, but calling him Bob, even with a French accent, sets up all sorts of subliminal reverberations. It's intriguing that the foreign filmmakers who most successfully translated the gangster genre to their own cultures were the French and the Japanese. The latter reworked the figure of the samurai into that of the yakuza, while the former turned the existential loner into the outlaw. Jean-Pierre Melville's film is a celebrated precursor of the French New Wave, to which Melville himself became central in 1967 when he gave Alain Delon Bob's fedora and trenchcoat and made Le Samouraï, thereby merging all three cinematic gangster mythologies. For my part, the chief delight of Bob le Flambeur is its essential Frenchness, particularly Henri Decaë's lovingly crafted images of Montmartre, as masterly in their way as those of Lautrec or Utrillo.  

Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)

Maurice Ronet in Elevator to the Gallows

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall, Iván Petrovich, Elga Andersen, Lino Ventura. Screenplay: Roger Nimier, Louis Malle, based on a novel by Noël Calef. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Art direction: Jean Mandaroux, Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Léonide Azar. Music: Miles Davis.

Crime doesn't pay, we're often told, and if any movie seemed designed to make that point it's Louis Malle's first non-documentary feature Elevator to the Gallows which is about two intersecting crimes that both go wrong. The first is the plot by Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) to kill his boss, Simon Carala, whose wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), is Julien's mistress. Things begin to go wrong when Julien's car is stolen during the carefully plotted murder and Julien finds himself trapped overnight in an elevator. Then the car thief, Louis (Georges Poujouly), and his girlfriend, Véronique (Yori Bertin), go for a joy ride, during which Florence spots the car with Véronique in it and thinks Julien has abandoned her. Meanwhile, the joyriders find Julien's identification in the car they have stolen and check in under his name in a motel on the outskirts of Paris. They wind up partying with a German couple, taking pictures of the group that Véronique leaves for developing. But Louis murders the German couple when he tries to steal their Mercedes so he can abandon Julien's car. Oh, murder will out, too. Moreau was already well known in France as a stage actress, but her performance in Elevator to the Gallows made her a movie star, especially after Malle cast her in his next film, The Lovers (1958). The engaging twists of the film are given a melancholy cast by Miles Davis's evocative score.

Le Silence de la Mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1948)

Jean-Marie Robain, Howard Vernon, and Nicole Stéphane in Le Silence de la Mer 

Werner von Ebrennac: Howard Vernon
The Niece: Nicole Stéphane
The Uncle: Jean-Marie Robain
The Fiancée: Ami Aaroë
The Orderly: Georges Patrix
The Friend: Denis Sadier

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Based on a novel by Jean Bruller aka Vercors
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film editing: Henri Decaë, Jean-Pierre Melville
Music: Edgar Bischoff

Le Silence de la Mer marked an extraordinary double debut: This was the first feature film for not only its writer and director, Jean-Pierre Melville, but also its cinematographer, Henri Decaë. Both were working under handicaps of budget and location -- the film was made in the home of Jean Bruller, who wrote and published the celebrated underground novel under a pseudonym, Vercors. Exterior shots, such as the countryside and the glimpses of Paris, were filmed mostly on the fly and sometimes rely for their effect more on editing than on camerawork. But it's the spareness and somewhat makeshift quality of the making of the film that gives it such a haunting quality. The novel was embraced by the French Resistance for its object lesson in resisting: Forced to house a German officer during the occupation, an elderly man and his young niece remain completely silent whenever he is present. The German comes to accept this silent treatment, and visits the two in the evening to deliver monologues about his life and his ideals, which were awakened, he says, by the Nazis. He sees the German occupation as a step toward a uniting of Germany and France. He admires French culture to the extreme, particularly its literature, fondling the volumes on the shelves in the room as the Frenchman smokes his pipe and the niece does her mending and knitting. The Germans, on the other hand, he claims are superior in music -- he was a composer before he became a soldier -- and he once sits down at the harmonium in the room to play a Bach prelude. The Frenchman occasionally gives a flicker of wanting to respond to the German's statements, but his niece's steadfast silence hold him in check. These visits continue from winter into summer, when the German goes away to Paris to meet with the German command. He returns a changed man: He has learned to his horror of the death camps and of the designs of the Nazis to obliterate the French culture he so admires. At the end he goes away, having volunteered to serve at the front, a suicidal gesture, and the niece speaks, in a faint whisper, the only word she has ventured in his presence: "Adieu." Melville's manipulation of the relations among the three characters, only one of whom speaks, is extraordinarily subtle, and Decaë's brilliant use of light and shadow -- when we first see the German, he emerges from the darkness in the doorway in a glare of light that makes him look like a sinister presence -- adds immeasurably to the quiet drama of the film.

Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Alain Delon in Purple Noon

Tom Ripley: Alain Delon
Philippe Greenleaf: Maurice Ronet
Marge Duval: Marie Laforêt
Riccordi: Erno Crisa
O'Brien: Frank Latimore
Freddy Miles: Billy Kearns

Director: René Clément
Screenplay: René Clément, Paul Gégauff
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Paul Bertrand
Film editing: Françoise Javet
Music: Nino Rota

The original title of René Clément's Purple Noon, Plein Soleil, which means "full sun," with its implications of something done out in the open, by the light of day, seems to me a better indication of what this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is all about. And not just because the first part of the film, including Ripley's first murder, takes place under the bright sun of the Mediterranean. Ripley is the perfect embodiment of Hamlet's discovery "that one may smile and smile and be a villain," that someone can be as beautiful as Alain Delon and get away with murder. Henri Decaë's gorgeous color cinematography and the film's handsome settings are sometimes thought to be at odds with the darkness of the story. Even Ripley's shabby room at the Hotel Paradiso has a kind of glamour to it -- though that may just be the nostalgia of someone who recalls staying in places like that during his first visit to the Continent, a copy of (it is to laugh) Europe on $5 a Day in hand. But that kind of dissonance is very much to the point:  Ripley is almost an antihero, or antivillain, if you will. His victims are the abusive Philippe Greenleaf and the snotty Freddy Miles, both of whom scorn Ripley for his lowly origins. Highsmith disliked the film's ending which, although it doesn't quite show Ripley brought to justice at least implies that he's about to be caught. Her novel ends with Ripley in triumph, though edgy and paranoid, and able to con and kill again through four sequels. 

Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

Gian Maria Volontè, Alain Delon, and Yves Montand in Le Cercle Rouge

Corey: Alain Delon
Inspector Mattei: Bourvil
Vogel: Gian Maria Volontè
Jansen: Yves Montand
Fence: Paul Crauchet
Chief of Internal Affairs: Paul Amiot
The Prison Guard: Pierre Collet
Rico: André Ekyan
Santi: François Périer

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Théobald Meurisse
Film editing: Marie-Sophie Dubus
Music: Éric Demarsan

Caper films are such a standard movie genre that it takes a skilled director to make it new. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge stands out from the herd of jewel heists and missions impossible because of its effortless-seeming cool. Of course, if you want effortless cool you cast Alain Delon and Yves Montand, whose pictures should accompany any dictionary definition of the word. Nobody ever wore a trenchcoat with such handsome finesse as Delon and nobody ever smoked a cigarette with such world-weary fatalism as Montand. The centerpiece of Melville's film is the extended sequence in which the trio of thieves light-finger the loot, a scene distinguished by its near-silence, so that you hear every bump and rustle (along with the gasps and chuckles of your fellow viewers) as it takes place. But Melville has given us more: A fable based on a quotation from the Buddha that Melville himself made up, to the effect that men who are fated to meet "will inevitably come together in the red circle." So Corey, released from prison, finds himself linked to Vogel, who has made a daring escape from Mattei, the cop who arrested him and is transporting him to prison, and eventually to Jansen, an alcoholic sharpshooter, in pulling off a spectacular jewelry theft. Their coming-together forms the plot, but what distinguishes the film is the quiet mastery with which Melville draws each of his characters, giving us details about them, like Corey's failed relationship with his former mistress or Mattei's devotion to his three cats, that bear no significance in terms of the plot. Mattei's slipup in letting Vogel escape puts him on the hot spot with internal affairs, a sinister figure (of course) who believes in the essential depravity of humankind: "All men are guilty," he growls. "They're born innocent, but it doesn't last." That's about as noir a sentiment as you can get, even in a film made in color.

The Lovers (Louis Malle, 1958)

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory in The Lovers

Jeanne Tournier: Jeanne Moreau
Bernard Dubois-Lambert: Jean-Marc Bory
Henri Tournier: Alain Cuny
Maggy Thiebaud-Leroy: Judith Magre
Raoul Florès: José Luis de Villalonga
Coudray: Gaston Modot

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louise de Vilmorin
Based on a novel by Dominique Vivant
Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Anna Karenina without the train. That's one way of looking at Louis Malle's once-scandalous but now somewhat tepid The Lovers. That seems to be the way the German censors saw it: a story about a woman who abandons not only her husband but also her child, and seemingly gets away with it. In the German release, the scenes involving Jeanne Tournier's daughter were cut, as if the idea of a mother leaving so adorable a child was too horrible for audiences to contemplate. In the United States, of course, it was the depiction of sex -- not "cutting away to the window" as Malle once described the traditional approach to sex scenes -- that caused the censors to draw their knives. The result was the Supreme Court decision that The Lovers didn't fit Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." He didn't, and it isn't: What we see in the scene are a briefly flashed nipple and the look on Jeanne's face as Bernard brings her to orgasm. Even the fact that she is being pleasured orally by him is only implied by his absence in the frame. The Lovers is more satiric than erotic, its targets the stale marriages and pro forma affairs of an haute bourgeoisie obsessed with hairstyles and polo games. Malle attempts to contrast the sterile dalliances of the idle rich with the more spontaneous relationship between Jeanne and Bernard, a casually dressed archaeologist who drives a clunky tin-can Citroën, but the film gets a little too formulaic, especially in the lushly romantic moonlight stroll and boat ride that serves as foreplay to the consummation of their affair. He switches back to irony at the end: Jeanne and Bernard escape together under the astonished gaze of her husband and her other lover, but we sense their uncertainty about whether it will work, anticipating the way Mike Nichols tempered romance with reality by holding the camera just a little bit too long on Benjamin and Elaine after they escape from the church in The Graduate (1967). Maybe we don't see the train but we hear it approaching.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies 

The Antoine Doinel Cycle

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Julien Doinel: Albert Rémy
Gilberte Doinel: Claire Maurier
René Bigey: Patrick Auffay
M. Bigey: Georges Flamant

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Music: Jean Constantin

One of the unquestioned great movies, and one of the greatest feature-film directing debuts, The 400 Blows would still resonate with film-lovers even if François Truffaut hadn't gone on to create four sequels tracking the life and loves of his protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). There are, in fact, those who think that the last we should have seen of Antoine was the haunting freeze-frame at the end of the film. But Antoine continued to grow up on screen, and perhaps more remarkably, so did Léaud, carving out his own career after his debut as a 13-year-old. (It's hard to think of any American child actors who were able to maintain a film career into adulthood as well as Léaud did. Mickey Rooney? Dean Stockwell? Who else?) Having Truffaut as a mentor certainly helped, but Léaud had an unmistakable gift. He is on screen for virtually all of the 99-minute run time, and provides a gallery of memorable moments: Antoine in the amusement-park centrifuge, Antoine in the police lockup, Antoine on the run -- in cinematographer Henri Decaë's brilliant long tracking shot. And my personal favorite moment: when the psychologist asks Antoine if he's ever had sex. Léaud responds with a beautiful mixture of surprise, amusement, and embarrassment. It's so genuine a response that I have to think it was improvised, that Truffaut surprised Léaud with the question. But even so, Léaud never drops character in his response. This praise of Léaud is not to undervalue the magnificent supporting cast, or the haunting score by Jean Constantin. It's a film in which everything works.

Antoine and Colette (François Truffaut, 1962)

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Marie-France Pisier in Antoine and Colette

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Colette: Marie-France Pisier
Colette's Mother: Rosy Varte
Colette's Stepfather: François Darbon
René: Patrick Auffay
Albert Tazzi: Jean-François Adam

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut
Cinematography: Raul Coutard
Music: Georges Delerue

Four years after he made The 400 Blows, Truffaut was asked to contribute to an anthology of short films by directors from various countries to be called Love at Twenty. As he had with the first film, Truffaut drew on his own experience, an infatuation with a girl he had met at the Cinémathèque Française. And since Léaud was available -- he had worked with Julien Duvivier on Boulevard (1960) after completing The 400 Blows -- it made sense for him to play Antoine Doinel again. A narrator tells us that Antoine had been sent to another reform school after escaping from the first, and that this time he had responded well to a psychologist: After leaving school, he has found a job working for the Phillips record company and is living on his own. Then he sees a pretty young woman at a concert of music by Berlioz and falls for her. Colette is not much interested in him, but she is evidently flattered by his advances. Her parents like Antoine and encourage him so much that he rents a room across the street from them. (Truffaut had done the same thing during his crush.) But one evening when he comes to dinner at their apartment, a man named Albert calls on Colette and she leaves Antoine watching TV with her parents. It's a droll little film, scarcely more than an anecdote, and the stable, lovestruck Antoine doesn't seem much like either the rebellious Antoine of the first film or the more scattered Antoine of the later ones in the cycle.

Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut, 1968)

Jean-Pierre Léaud in Stolen Kisses

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Christine Darbon: Claude Jade
Georges Tabard: Michael Lonsdale
Fabienne Tabard: Delphine Seyrig
M. Blady: Michael Lonsdale
Mme. Darbon: Claire Duhamel
Lucien Darbon: Daniel Ceccaldi

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon
Cinematography: Denys Clerval
Music: Antoine Duhamel

The Antoine of Stolen Kisses is in his 20s, but has reverted to the more haphazard ways of his adolescence: He has been kicked out of the army, and now relies on a series of odd jobs to get by. But he has also renewed acquaintance with a young woman he met before going into the army, Christine Darbon. Like Colette's parents, hers are quite taken with Antoine, and they help him get a job as a night clerk in a hotel. He gets fired from that job after helping a private detective who is spying on an adulterous couple, but the detective helps Antoine get a job with his agency. While working for the detective agency, he has to pose as a clerk in a shoe store, and winds up in a liaison with the store owner's wife, Fabienne. When that ends badly, he becomes a TV repairman, which brings him back to Christine, with whom he winds up in bed after trying to fix her TV. At the film's end, a strange man who has been following Christine comes up to her and Antoine in the park and declares his love for her. She says he must be crazy, and Antoine, who perhaps recognizes his earlier infatuation with Colette in the man's obsession, murmurs, "He must be." Stolen Kisses is the loosest, funniest entry in the cycle, though it was made at a time when Truffaut was politically preoccupied: The film opens with a shot of the shuttered gates of the Cinémathèque Française, which was shut down in a conflict between its director, Henri Langlois, and culture minister André Malraux. This caused an uproar involving many of the directors of the French New Wave. Some of Antoine's anarchic approach to life may have been inspired by the rebelliousness toward the establishment prevalent in the film community. But it's clear that the idea of a cycle of Antoine Doinel films has been brewing in Truffaut's mind: There is a cameo appearance by Marie-France Pisier as Colette and Jean-François Adam as Albert, now married and the parents of an infant.

Bed and Board (François Truffaut, 1970)

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Bed and Board

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Christine Darbon Doinel: Claude Jade
Mme. Darbon: Claire Duhamel
Lucien Darbon: Daniel Ceccaldi
Kyoko: Hiroko Berghauer

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Music: Antoine Duhamel

Antoine and Christine have married, and they have settled down in a small apartment. (There's some indication that it's paid for by her parents.) She gives violin lessons and he sells flowers -- carnations, which he dyes, using some environmentally questionable potions. But settling down isn't in Antoine's nature, and when Christine gets pregnant he looks for more lucrative work. He finds a curious sinecure in a company run by an American: Antoine maneuvers model ships by remote control through a mockup of a harbor. ("It gives me time to think," he says.) One day, a Japanese businessman comes to see the demonstration, accompanied by a pretty translator named Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), and Antoine is soon involved in an affair with her. Naturally, this precipitates a breakup, though by film's end they have seemingly reconciled. Still, it's obvious that the marriage is not destined to be permanent. They can't even agree on a name for their son: She wants him to be called Ghislain, and he wants to call him Alphonse. Antoine wins out by a trick: He's the one who goes to the registry office to legalize the boy's name. Antoine also spends time writing a novel about his boyhood, to which Christine objects: "I don't like this business of writing about your childhood, dragging your parents through the mud. I don't know much but I do know one thing: If you use art to settle accounts, it's no longer art." Truffaut had his own regrets about the portrait of his parents in The 400 Blows. Less farcical than Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board still has a strong vein of comedy tinged with melancholy.

Love on the Run (François Truffaut, 1979)

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Love on the Run

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Colette Tazzi: Marie-France Pisier
Christine Doinel: Claude Jade
Liliane: Dani
Sabine Barnerias: Dorothée
Xavier Barnerias: Daniel Mesguich
M. Lucien: Julien Bertheau

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel, Suzanne Schiffman
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Music: Georges Delerue

Truffaut admitted that he wasn't happy with the final film in the cycle. It's a bit too heavily reliant on flashback clips from the four earlier films, and if it's intended to show that Antoine has finally stabilized now that he's in his 30s and divorced from Christine, it doesn't quite make the case. He has a new girlfriend, Sabine, his novel has been published several years earlier, and he works as a proofreader for a printing house. He's on friendly terms with Christine, and agrees to take their son, Alphonse, to the train station when the boy leaves for a summer music camp. At the station, he runs into Colette, now a defense lawyer, who is on her way to confer with a client -- a man who has murdered his 3-year-old boy. Perhaps a little too coincidentally, Colette is involved with Sabine's brother, Xavier, and having encountered Antoine before, she has bought a copy of his novel to read on the train. Antoine impulsively boards the train, and sets up a meeting with Colette in the dining car, after which she invites him back to her compartment. All of this sets up a series of revelations: Colette's marriage to Albert broke up after their small daughter was killed by a car. She claims that she supplements her small income as a lawyer by prostituting herself with men she meets on trains. Antoine finally made peace with his mother after her death when he met her old lover, M. Lucien, who persuaded him to visit his mother's grave. (There is a flashback to the scene in The 400 Blows when Antoine, playing hooky, sees his mother kissing a strange man on the street.) Antoine became infatuated with Sabine after hearing a man in a phone booth arguing with a woman on the other end of the line and then tearing up her photograph. Antoine picked up the pieces from the floor, put them together, and after some sleuthing, discovered the woman was Sabine. His marriage to Christine finally broke up after he slept with her friend Liliane, who he previously had thought was having a lesbian relationship with Christine. And so on. The result of all the flashbacks and revelations is not to round out the Antoine Doinel saga, but to make Love on the Run feel over-contrived. Marie-France Pisier, incidentally, contributed to the screenplay, which is mostly by Truffaut. 

Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

Les Enfants Terribles was released in the United States as The Strange Ones, which has the effect of reducing monstrosity to mere nonconformity. For the siblings Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Édouard Dermithe) are monsters, even if they are perhaps more destructive to each other than they are to other people. Not that Jean Cocteau, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, had anything against monsters: He created the most memorable non-animated version of Beauty and the Beast (1946), after all. Les Enfants Terribles was an uneasy collaboration between Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville; being no slouch as a director himself, Cocteau was capable of imposing his ideas on Melville, who was almost 30 years younger. But somehow they prevailed and produced a film that is either a "masterpiece," as David Thomson calls it, or "pretentious poppycock," as Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic, called it. I trust Thomson's judgments far more than those of Crowther, a notorious fuddy-duddy, but I prefer to think of the film as not "either/or" but instead "both/and." It's certainly not poppycock in any case, especially in its depiction of adolescence as a kind of fever dream, and the way incest flickers around the relationship of Paul and Elisabeth like heat lightning. But there is certainly a whiff of pretentiousness in the voiceover narration (by Cocteau himself) that hammers home the folie à deux of the siblings, which is apparent without any comment. If it's a masterpiece, which I'm not entirely confident in calling it, it becomes one from Melville's staging, in collaboration with production designer Emile Mathys, Henri Decaë's cinematography, and especially the performance of Stéphane, whose invocation of Lady Macbeth in one scene makes me wish she had played the part on film. Melville didn't want to cast Dermithe, Cocteau's lover, in the role of Paul, and I think he was right. At 25, Dermithe was too old and too sturdy to play the neurasthenic 16-year-old who is felled by a snowball. But Renée Cosima is impressive in the dual role of Dargelos, the schoolboy who throws the snowball, and Agathe, who falls into Elisabeth's clutches as a weapon with which to torment her brother.

Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol, 1958)

Le Beau Serge has been called the first film of the French New Wave because it was made before the first features by Claude Chabrol's fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critics, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960). The two later films were bigger successes internationally, but the influence of Chabrol's debut on the look, the narrative, and the technique of film continued to be felt, and his next movie, Les Cousins (1959), established Chabrol's reputation. Like Truffaut and Godard, who made international stars of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jean-Paul Belmondo with their features, Chabrol launched the careers of Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, who appeared in his first two films. In Le Beau Serge, Blain plays the title role, a young man who, by staying in his provincial village (Chabrol's own home town of Sardent), becomes an alcoholic layabout, trapped in an unhappy marriage. Brialy plays François, an old friend of Serge's, who left Sardent and became a success, but now returns home after a long absence to recuperate from a lung ailment. The roles are striking in both the similarity to and the differences from the ones Blain and Brialy play in Les Cousins, which takes place in Paris, where Blain is the strait-laced provincial and Brialy is his dissipated cousin. Le Beau Serge follows François's somewhat misguided attempt to help Serge clean up his life, which is complicated when François begins an affair with Serge's sister-in-law, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). In the climax of the film, Serge's wife, Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), goes into labor with the child everyone in the village expects to be deformed or stillborn, as their first child was. In a howling snowstorm, François takes it on himself to go in search of the village's doctor, and then looks for Serge, who is sleeping off a drunk in a chicken coop. The concluding scene, of Serge convulsed in hysterical laughter, is profoundly ambiguous. Chabrol's use of the actual village of Sardent, including many of its townspeople as actors, is brilliantly done, greatly aided by Henri Decaë's cinematography. Les Cousins is a more sophisticated and satisfying film, but it really has to be seen in tandem with Le Beau Serge. Both actors are terrific, but Blain attracted more attention because of his supposed resemblance in both looks and style to James Dean, though to my mind he recalls Montgomery Clift more than Dean.

Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

Chekhov's gun plays a major role in Les Cousins, heightening the suspense about who will use it on whom. But the film isn't a suspense thriller, despite Chabrol's admiration for Hitchcock, so much as it is a deliciously perverse adaption of some classic fables: the country mouse and the city mouse, and the ant and the grasshopper. It also resonates ironically with Balzac's Lost Illusions, the novel that a bookseller (Guy Decomble) allows Charles (Gérard Blain) to "steal" from his shop. In the Balzac novel, a young man from the provinces goes to Paris to seek fame, fortune, and love, and his misadventures wreak havoc on himself and the people he loves. In Les Cousins, country mouse/ant Charles goes to Paris to share an apartment with his cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), the city mouse/grasshopper, while both study law. Paul is a somewhat decadent hedonist, who tries to introduce the straiter-laced Charles, who is very much dedicated to his mother back home, to the delights of the city. One of these delights is the promiscuous Florence (Juliette Mayniel), with whom Charles falls in love, only to have things end badly when she chooses to live with Paul instead. Chabrol fills the movie with quirky, somewhat sinister characters, though never turns the film into a clear-cut tale of good vs. evil. Innocence doesn't triumph over cynicism here, though cynicism pays a price, which is what makes Chabrol's film such a grandly satisfying one to watch and to think about afterward. Blain and Brialy (in a suitably Mephistophelean mustache and beard) are brilliant, and the cinematographer, Henri Decaë, gives us a grand evocation of Paris in the 1950s.