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.

Quadrille (Sacha Guitry, 1938)

Georges Grey and Gaby Morlay in Quadrille

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Gaby Morlay, Jacqueline Delubac, Georges Grey, Pauline Carton, Jacques Vitry. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

One of Sacha Guitry's strengths as a filmmaker was that he was a prolific playwright who knew how to craft dialogue and plot. One of Sacha Guitry's weaknesses is that he was a prolific playwright who never quite mastered the difference between a play and a film -- namely, that the actors in a film have to perform without benefit of an audience, and the dialogue they're speaking shouldn't ramble on, as it tends to do without the interruptions of laughter or other unscripted responses of a live audience. The masters of film comedy -- I'm thinking here of directors like Howard Hawks and George Cukor -- knew that a continued stream of bons mots or wisecracks needed the right pacing to keep a movie theater audience from covering up the best moments. But Guitry's characters in Quadrille talk non-stop, none more so than the director-writer-star himself, never giving us a break to savor what has been so wittily said or so poignantly evoked. Quadrille is a pleasant French romantic comedy about a publisher with a mistress who's a star on the stage. She cuckolds him with a handsome American movie star, just as the publisher is about to propose marriage to her. When she learns that she has just blown the possibility of marrying him, and it looks like the movie star has decamped, she attempts suicide. But things are set right by the fourth player in this quadrille, a pretty reporter who manages to sort things out, rescuing the actress in the nick of time, sending her off with the movie star, and taking the publisher for herself. Guitry plays the publisher, with Gaby Morlay as the actress, Jacqueline Delubard as the reporter, and Georges Grey -- who had made his film debut in a small role in Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown (1937) -- as the movie star. There's a certain French insouciance about playing the actress's suicide attempt for comedy -- it doesn't work in the more American context of Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), for example.

Désiré (Sacha Guitry, 1937)

Alys Delonce, Jacques Baumer, Sacha Guitry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Delubac in Désiré

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Jacques Baumer, Arletty, Pauline Carton, Saturnin Fabre, Alys Delonce. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

Sacha Guitry's Désiré -- not to be confused with Frank Borzage's Desire (1936) or Henry Koster's Désirée (1954) -- is an upstairs-downstairs comedy about a valet and the woman he serves. It's stagy and talky -- especially when Guitry himself is onscreen, as in the scene near the start of the movie when he delivers a lengthy plea to Mme. Cléry to hire him despite a rather sensational report from his former employer, and in the scene near the end when he apologizes at length for his behavior, which he sees as inherent in the relationship between master and servant, as well as between men and women. Odette Cléry, played by Guitry's wife and frequent co-star Jacqueline Delubac, is a former actress who is the mistress of a French cabinet minister, Felix Montignac. She'd like to marry Montignac, but he's reluctant because he feels it's good for his image as a prominent government official to have a mistress. That comedy of manners premise sets up what follows when she hires a new valet, named Désiré and played by Guitry. He's clued in to the nature of the household by his fellow servants, Madeleine the maid, played by Arletty, and Adèle the cook, played by Pauline Carton. Complications ensue when Madeleine overhears Désiré, through the thin wall separating their bedrooms, talking in his sleep about his passion for Mme. Cléry, while Montignac hears Odette talking in her sleep about making love with Désiré. There's some farcical goings-on involving a book of dream interpretations, and the whole thing comes to a crisis at a dinner party for Adrien Corniche (Saturnin Fabre) and his very deaf wife, Henriette (Alys Delonce). There's some very funny, albeit cruel, comic business involving Henriette's deafness, but the whole film may be just a little too arch and loquacious for its own good. It's also a little hard to imagine Guitry as the kind of man who inspires forbidden passion in his female employers, as Désiré is said to do.