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.

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)

Pleasure, as the poets never tire of telling us, is inextricable from pain.  Le Plaisir is an anthology film dramatizing three stories by Guy de Maupassant that center on what has been called the pleasure-pain perplex. An elderly man nearly dances himself to death in an attempt to recapture his youth. The patrons of a brothel quarrel and even come to blows when they discover that it is closed. An artist marries his mistress to atone for his cruelty to her. Max Ophuls brings all of his elegant technique to the stories, including his characteristic restless camera, which prowls around the wonderful sets by Jean d'Eaubonne, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for art direction. It's also, like Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), an all-star production -- if your stars are French. Claude Dauphin plays the doctor who treats the youth-seeking dancer; Madeleine Renaud is the madame of the brothel, Danielle Darrieux is one of her "girls," and Jean Gabin plays the madame's brother, who invites her to bring the girls to the country for his daughter's first communion, hence the temporary closure of the brothel; Daniel Gélin is the artist, Simone Simon his model/mistress, and Jean Servais his friend who also narrates the final section. Of the three segments of the film, the middle one is the longest and I think the most successful, moving from the raucous opening scene in which the men of the small Normandy town discover the brothel closed into a comic train ride to the country, which is as fetchingly pastoral a setting as you could wish. The sequence climaxes with the filles de joie dissolving in tears at the first communion -- the little church in which it takes place is one of d'Eaubonne's most inspired sets -- then returning to town and a joyous welcome. Intriguingly, Ophuls never lets us inside the brothel: We see it only as voyeurs, through the windows. Nothing of this segment is "realistic" in the least, making the melancholy first and last segments more important in establishing the film's theme and tone. The first segment does its part to set up the course of the film as a whole, beginning with a riotous opening as tout Paris flocks to the opening of a dance hall, a pleasure palace, followed by scenes of lively dancing, then the collapse of the elderly patron, who is wearing a frozen and rather creepy mask of youth, and concluding with the bleakness of his normal existence, tended by his aging wife, who is fittingly played by Gaby Morlay, once a silent film gamine. The final segment is the bleakest of all, as the film concludes with the artist pushing his wheelchair-bound wife along the seashore, penance for having provoked her suicide attempt. The film leaves me with something like the feeling I get from the song "Plaisir D'Amour."

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment. 
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie. 

The pleasure of love lasts only a moment. The pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

The success of Rififi had a lasting effect on the "caper" or "heist" genre, which is still with us in one form or another, including the Mission: Impossible movies. Dassin's 30-minute sequence depicting the break-in and safe-cracking was hailed as a tour de force. I can't help wondering if Robert Bresson saw Rififi before he made his great 1956 film A Man Escaped, which takes a similar wordless and music-free approach to showing the preparations for Fontaine's prison break. Other than that, of course, nothing could be further from Fontaine's noble efforts to find freedom than the larcenous thuggery of Dassin's jewel thieves. Dassin knows, of course, that audiences respond positively to cleverness and skill, which is virtually all that his quartet of thieves have going for them. Tony (Jean Servais) is a brutal ex-con who beats his former mistress (Marie Sabouret) with a belt; Jo (Carl Möhner) is a swaggering, handsome guy for whom Tony took the rap for an earlier heist because Jo has a wife and child; Mario (Robert Manuel) is an easy-going ne'er-do-well; and César (Dassin under the pseudonym Perlo Vita) is a professional safe-cracker. Dassin manipulates us into thinking of these guys as heroes, if only because the gang led by Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who wants to muscle in on their ill-gotten gains, is even worse. In the end, both sides are wiped out, but not before Jo's little boy (Dominique Maurin) is kidnapped and held for ransom. The final sequence of the film is particularly harrowing, especially to contemporary viewers used to mandated seatbelts and conscientious childproofing: A dying Tony drives the 5-year-old boy across Paris in an open convertible as the delighted kid stands on and even clambers over the seats of the speeding car. For all its unpleasantness, Rififi is as memorable as it was influential. It led to countless imitations, usually more light-hearted, including Dassin's own Topkapi (1964). It also revived Dassin's career, which had been at a standstill after he was blacklisted in Hollywood; Rififi's international success was a defiant nose-thumbing directed at HUAC's witch hunts.