La Poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951)

Michel Simon and Germaine Reuver in La Poison

Cast: Michel Simon, Jean Debucourt, Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Germaine Reuver, Pauline Carton, Albert Duvaleix, Georges Bever. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Robert Dumesnil. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: Louiguy.

I thought there was something off about the title of Sacha Guitry's La Poison, and I was right: The French word for substances like arsenic and strychnine is masculine -- le poison. When the word becomes feminine, la poison, it can be roughly translated as "pest" or "nuisance." Exploring the psychology behind the genders assigned to words in languages that have such inflections is dangerous, but it seems somehow in keeping with what some have called the film's "misogyny" that the feminine form of the word should take on such connotations. La Poison is a dark comedy about wife-killing, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), though without Chaplin's sentimentality and tendency to moralize. The great Michel Simon, who is lionized in Guitry's extended opening credits sequence, plays Paul Braconnier, married to a slatternly drunkard, Blandine. She hates him as much as he does her, and is in fact the first to put in motion an attempt to do away with him when she buys a supply of rat poison. Eventually, however, he gets the upper hand (which holds a knife). But the film is most centrally about the justice system, in which sharp lawyers like the defense attorney Aubanel (Jean Debucourt) are able to help the guilty escape the guillotine. Braconnier hears Aubanel on the radio, talking about how he has just achieved his hundredth acquittal, so Braconnier goes to see him, pretending that he has just murdered his wife, when in fact he's really there to figure out the safest way to do it. Shrewdly, Braconnier tricks the attorney into pointing him in the direction of the best ways to murder someone -- by, for example, staging it to look like self-defense and to avoid any hints of premeditation. So Braconnier goes back to his village and does Blandine in, then recruits Aubanel for the defense. The lawyer is indignant at being so used, but Braconnier has the goods on him as an unwitting accomplice in the crime. He stands trial and is acquitted. Guitry has learned a lot about filmmaking since his movies of the 1930s, which were often more static and talky than was good for them, and there's a crispness and fluidity to La Poison that's admirable. Simon is at his best in the trial scene, but there's a sourness to the concept that keeps the film from being entirely enjoyable. Critics and scholars of Guitry's work have pointed out that it's a bit of revenge flick, its hits at the judicial system expressive of Guitry's resentment at having been interned as a collaborator after World War II, when in fact he was always anti-Nazi and even helped some Jewish friends escape.

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.

Feu Mathias Pascal (Marcel L'Herbier, 1926)

Ivan Mozzhukhin in Feu Mathias Pascal 

Mathias Pascal: Ivan Mozzhukhin
Romilde: Marcelle Pradot
Adrienne: Lois Moran
Mathias's Mother: Marthe Mellot
Aunt Scholastica: Pauline Carton
Sylvia Caporale: Irma Perrot
The Widow Pescatore: Mireille Barsac
Jérôme Pomino: Michel Simon
Terence Papiano: Jean Hervé
Scipio: Pierre Batcheff
Batta Maldagna: Isaure Douvan

Director: Marcel L'Herbier
Screenplay: Marcel L'Herbier
Based on a novel by Luigi Pirandello
Cinematography: Jimmy Berliet, Fédote Bourgasoff, Paul Guichard, René Guichard, Jean Letort, Nikolas Roudakoff
Art direction: Erik Aaes, Alberto Cavalcanti, Lazare Meerson

Feu Mathias Pascal takes nearly three hours to demonstrate the truth of Kris Kristofferson's observation that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Mathias is a studious young man working on a magnum opus, The History of Freedom, while the world around him begins to crumble: His widowed mother is cheated out of her home by an unscrupulous magistrate in their small Italian town. Meanwhile, his shy, homely friend Pomino wants him to court Romilde on his behalf, but she secretly has a crush on Mathias, who falls in love with and marries her. Because Romilde is under the thumb of her shrewish, demanding mother the marriage quickly sours, and when the two people Mathias loves more than any others, his mother and his infant daughter, die, he decides to leave town. In Monte Carlo, he wins a fortune at roulette, but after deciding to go home he learns that he has been declared dead. Embracing this new opportunity for freedom, he goes incognito to Rome, where he spots the pretty Adrienne and, following her home, takes a room that her father has for rent. There's much ado involving a plot to marry Adrienne to the odious Terence, and in the course of it Mathias realizes that you can't have your freedom and enjoy it too. It's a fascinating mess of a film, with startling shifts in tone from pathos -- the death of Mathias's mother and child -- to Kafkaesque surrealism -- Mathias's stint as an assistant librarian in a dusty, rat-filled jumble of a library -- to romantic comedy -- his rescue of Adrienne from the clutches of Terence and his fake-spiritualist cohorts. The narrative gets a little elliptical, especially toward the end, when Mathias exposes the corrupt magistrate who cheated his mother. But the Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukin is adept at both the pathos of Mathias's life and the Buster Keaton-like deadpan comedy of much of the film, and he's well-supported by the cast, including Michel Simon in one of his earliest roles as Pomino. Filmed on location in San Gimignano, Monte Carlo, and Rome, the movie provides glimpses of such familiar places as the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Forum, strikingly free of traffic and tourists.

La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Seeing Michel Simon as the milquetoast Maurice Legrand in La Chienne after L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) and Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932) is something of a revelation, even if at the end of La Chienne he has become something like Boudu. But the entire film is a revelation: The second sound film by Renoir, it demonstrates an innovative mastery of what was essentially a new medium, one that even the Americans who claimed to have invented synchronized sound were still struggling with. Renoir -- with the help of sound technicians Denise Batcheff and Marcel Courmes -- creates an auditory ambience still rare in 1931, relying on dialogue and sound effects created on set and not in post-production. The most often-cited example is the rasp of the paper knife held by Lulu (Janie Marèse) as she cuts the pages of the book she's trying to read -- just before Legrand kills her with it. But the film is full of small auditory details like the squeaking of the shoes worn by the defense attorney (Sylvain Itkine) as he paces nervously back and forth before his doomed client, Dédé (Georges Flamant). But beyond the technical mastery, which also includes some brilliant camerawork by cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl, the film is a tour de force of bitter irony, not least because Renoir keeps it from falling into sensationalism or unrelieved darkness. Legrand, initially the henpecked husband to a termagant (Magdeleine Bérubet), brings calamity to several lives, not only those of Lulu and Dédé, but also those of his wife and her supposedly dead ex-husband (Roger Gaillard). And yet, at the film's end he survives, not only unbroken but in many ways a stronger man than he was at the film's beginning. His story is framed as a puppet show with, as a puppet claims, "no moral message." But though Legrand commits fraud, adultery, and murder without receiving the official punishment of the law, the moral is aimed at those who scorned and abused him: Beware the worm who may turn and prove to be a viper.

Two by Jean Renoir

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)

Michel Simon in Boudu Saved From Drowning

Priape Boudu: Michel Simon
Édouard Lestingois: Charles Granval
Emma Lestingois: Marcelle Hainia
Chloë Anne Marie: Sévérine Lerczinska
Vigour: Jean Gehret
Godin: Max Dalban
A Student: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin
Based on a play by René Fauchois
Cinematography: Georges Asselin

A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Sylvia Bataille and Georges D'Arnoux in A Day in the Country

Henriette: Sylvia Bataille
Henri: Georges D'Arnoux
Madame Dufour: Jane Marken
Monsieur Dufour: André Gabriello
Rodolphe: Jacques B. Brunius
Anatole: Paul Temps
Grandmother: Gabrielle Fontan
Uncle Poulain: Jean Renoir
Waitress: Marguerite Renoir

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Music: Joseph Kosma

"Épater la bourgeoisie!" went the rallying cry of France's 19th-century poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who styled themselves as "Decadents." But ever since Molière's M. Jourdain, the social-climbing bourgeois gentilhomme, was delighted to discover that he was speaking prose, French artists of whatever medium have delighted themselves in satirizing the manners and morals of the middle class, sometimes affectionately and sometimes savagely. On my living room wall I have two prints of cartoons done by Honoré Daumier in a series he called "Pastorales." Both show very solidly middle-class and middle-aged couples, presumably Parisians taking a day in the country. In one, the husband carries his large, copiously clad wife on his back as he fords a small stream that barely comes to his ankles. They have evidently been caught in a summer storm, for he is chiding her that such things are to be expected, even on the sunniest day. Meanwhile, she is urging him, "Ah, Jules, don't let the torrent sweep us away!" In the other, a similarly clad woman sits on the bank of a pond in which her husband, wearing his glasses and with his head wrapped in a handkerchief, has been taking a dip. "The water is delicious, Virginie," he says. "I assure you, you're making a mistake by not joining me." I was reminded of these prints while watching Jean Renoir's great short film -- it's only 40 minutes long, but every minute is golden -- A Day in the Country. In it, the Dufour family -- husband, wife, daughter, future son-in-law, and comically deaf grandmother -- find a country inn in a beautiful setting on their day away from the city. The mother and daughter immediately become targets for two young men, who manage to set off with them in their skiffs on the river, after diverting the other men by lending them fishing poles. The daughter, Henriette, goes with Henri. When a storm comes up, they take shelter in the woods, where she yields to his advances. Years later, she returns to the same spot with her husband, Anatole, an unromantic drip, and while he naps, she encounters Henri and recalls their brief encounter. The film is an exquisite mix of comedy and melancholy, the kind of subtle blending of tones Renoir is known for from his greatest films, The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). A Day in the Country was in fact never finished -- weather interrupted the shooting and Renoir had to move on to another commitment -- but the existing footage was assembled ten years later under the supervision of the producer, Pierre Braunberger, with two explanatory intertitles, and it stands on its own as a masterwork. In sharp contrast to the affectionately amused treatment of the bourgeoisie in A Day in the Country, Boudu Saved From Drowning is a raucous free-for-all centered on the great eccentric Michel Simon in the title role. Boudu is a tramp, a shaggy monster, who after his dog runs away decides to drown himself in the Seine. But he is rescued by Édouard Lestingois, a bookseller, who takes him into his home. Boudu proceeds to trash the place and seduce both Mme. Lestingois and the housemaid, who is also Lestingois' mistress. Simon's performance pulls out all the stops in one of the greatest comic tours de force in film history. If you want to see what épater la bourgeoisie really means, just watch Boudu.   

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

L'Atalante is one of those near-universally acclaimed film masterpieces that failed theatrically on their first release and were rediscovered and re-evaluated more than a decade later. But it's also one of those films that young contemporary movie lovers may not "get" on first viewing today. I remember my own reaction to films like The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) and L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), movies that didn't fit what I expected from being raised on energetic, plot-driven, star-centered American movies. Melancholy and irony are not widely praised American values, although lord knows we have plenty of it in the best American literature. They surfaced for a time in the best American films of the 1970s, but have been driven back into the underground by the blockbuster mentality. There was a time, even after the great cinematic awakening of the '70s when I found myself resenting film critics for their inability to appreciate popular movies I enjoyed: "Critics see too many movies to enjoy them," I sniffed. But the truth is, the more movies you see, the more you're able to appreciate those that don't walk the line, that don't instantly gratify the hunger for plot resolution, for spectacle, for something that sends you out of the theater blissfully untroubled by thought. L'Atalante confused and bored its contemporary viewers, but today those of us who love it do so because it seems to us alternately tender and brutal, simultaneously comic and touching, and, taken as a whole, one of the few movies that successfully transport us to a time and place and a company of human beings we have never found ourselves in the middle of before. It is also, despite years of mishandling and cutting and botched attempts at restoration, one of the most technically dazzling films ever made. The performances -- by Michel Simon as the rather gross Père Jules, Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté as the young couple trying to start married life on a cramped river barge, and Gilles Margaritis as the madcap peddler who almost wrecks their marriage -- are extraordinary. Cinematographer Boris Kaufman overcame the severe limitations of filming scenes in the cramped quarters below-decks as well as open-air scenes for which the weather refused to cooperate. Vigo and Kaufman stage visual compositions that have a freshness that never seems arty. And who can ever forget Simon's Père Jules clambering aboard the barge with a kitten on his shoulders? Every corner of L'Atalante is filled with life.