I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Anna Canzi and Carlo Cabrini in I Fidanzati

Liliana: Anna Canzi
Giovanni: Carlo Cabrini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Art direction: Ettore Lombardi
Film editing: Carla Colombo
Music: Gianni Ferrio

Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati begins with an empty room, a kind of stage if you will, on which the first act of his small romantic drama will be played out. It's a large room, apparently some kind of meeting hall, in which the chairs and tables have been pushed to the sides. People begin to enter, including two men who scatter wax on what will become a dance floor. A pianist and an accordionist take their places on a small stage in a corner, and the tables and chairs along the walls begin to be occupied by people, some couples, some single. They are ordinary looking people, plain and paunchy and many of them middle-aged, but Olmi manages to direct our attention to a younger couple who are somewhat better-looking than most of the others in the room: She's pretty in a fresh, unmade-up way; he's craggily handsome. They are Liliana and Giovanni, the engaged couple of the film's title, but they're also oddly tense with each other, as if they've just had a quarrel. When the musicians strike up a banal foxtrot, people slowly, self-consciously take the floor, starting with a pair of elderly women. Liliana and Giovanni watch the dancers silently until he stands up and invites her to dance with him. She indicates her lack of interest, so he crosses the room and finds another woman to dance with. Liliana and Giovanni have been engaged for a long time, never having quite saved enough money from their jobs to get married and find a place of their own. They are at odds tonight because he has just been offered a job by his company that includes advancement and better pay, but the job is in Sicily, hundreds of miles to the south, and she can't go with him. I Fidanzati, in short, is about the incompatibility of love and work. It's also set in a crucial moment in Italian history, when the postwar industrial and economic boom has begun to transform people's lives. Olmi's film, then, might be compared to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films set in the era of the German Wirtschaftswunder, when prosperity upended people's lives. Nothing so drastic happens to Giovanni as happens to Fassbinder's Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), of course, but when he takes the job in Sicily Giovanni finds himself in much the same position as Ali: a stranger in a strange land, uprooted from all that's familiar, especially his long-term relationship with his fiancée. Fortunately, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in separation Giovanni and Liliana find their relationship undergoing some kind of renewal. Olmi is not a sentimental sap, however, and he chooses to conclude his film with a thunderstorm that interrupts a telephone call between the fidanzati, which some interpret as a symbol of their ongoing differences. But sometimes a thunderstorm is just a thunderstorm, and what really matters in Olmi's film is the skill with which he establishes the two characters, the deep authenticity of the two hitherto unknown actors who play them, the artful use of flashbacks and narrative disjunctions to create a mood and tone, and a camera that seeks out the beauty amid banality.

One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita in One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo: Isao Numasaki
Masako: Chieko Nakakita
Yamamoto: Atsushi Watanabe
Dessert Shop Owner: Zeko Nakamura
Yamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Dance Hall Manager: Masao Shimizu
Waif: Shiro Mizutani
Sono: Midori Ariyama
Apartment Superintendent: Toshi Mori

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Keinosuke Uekusa
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday brings to mind two near-contemporary films: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In its own odd way, Kurosawa's film blends a bit of the fantasy of the Capra film with the neorealism of the De Sica, though it doesn't quite succeed in the attempt. All three are products of the postwar world. The Americans, having won the war, naturally put the stress on optimism; the Italians and the Japanese, having lost, and having been sunk in the economic crisis caused by losing, naturally put the stress on endurance, on clinging to shreds of hope. Kurosawa's protagonists are a young couple, Yuzo and Masako, who can't afford to get married, but pool their resources, a meager 35 yen, to try to enjoy a Sunday together. Yuzo's depression shadows the outing, but Masako is determined to cheer him up. She's a little bit bossy, however -- when they first get together at the train station, he has just picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the pavement, hoping to smoke it later, but she strikes it out of his hand. Then she drags him into a model home in a new housing development, even though it's well beyond their means and is, he notes, shoddily built. Their housing plight -- he lives with a friend, she with her sister's family -- is emphasized when they visit a place that has a room to rent, only to discover that it's only minimally livable and that they can't afford even that. But Yuzo manages to climb out of his depression when he finds a bunch of kids playing baseball in the street and joins their game. And so it goes through the day as they oscillate between depression and hope. A visit to what remains of the city's zoo confronts them with some sad-looking animals. A large, fat pig slumbers in a cage that used to belong to a lion, causing Yuzo to remark, "The world is run by pigs." And then it starts to rain. Yuzo suggests that they go to his place -- his roommate will be out until late, he says -- but Masako resists, angering him. Then she notices a poster for a concert featuring Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. They can afford the 10-yen tickets, so they run through the rain to the concert hall. But scalpers have bought up all the 10-yen tickets and are selling them for 15 yen, and when Yuzo protests, they beat him up. When they go to Yuzo's room after all, where Masako treats his wounds, he tries to persuade her to sleep with him and she leaves. More depressed than ever -- even the roof is leaking -- Yuzo broods until Masako returns, contrite, but her sobs make any further sexual moves impossible, so they decide to spend the last of their money in a coffee shop. Even there, they are stymied: The coffee shop bills them for café au lait, instead of the regular coffee they thought they ordered, so Yuzo leaves his overcoat, saying he'll return the next day to make good on the bill. Now penniless, they begin to live in their dreams. They pretend that the ruins of a house are the coffee shop they want to open some day and, discovering an old band shell, try to pretend that Yuzo is conducting the performance of Schubert's Unfinished that they missed. At this point, Kurosawa departs from neorealism and has Masako address the movie audience directly: If they'll applaud for all the sad, impoverished lovers in the world, then she and Yuzo will be able to hear the music he's pretending to conduct. It works, and they hear the music. They part as the film ends, promising each other to meet again next Sunday. In fact, Kurosawa's borrowing from Peter Pan and asking for the audience's applause didn't work in Japan, where audiences were simply puzzled, though when the film was shown in France years later, French audiences responded enthusiastically. The sentimentality of One Wonderful Sunday is hardly characteristic of Kurosawa, but it's tempered by some masterly use of locations -- blended with more stylized studio sets -- and good performances by the leads: Isao Numasaki, in fact, does manage to evoke both James Stewart in Capra's film and Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica's, even though he couldn't have seen the latter and probably didn't see the former. There are moments when Kurosawa prolongs the depression of Yuzo and Masako a bit too much, and the film seems a little overextended for the slightness of its narrative, but it's clearly a formative work for a master director, as well as a heartfelt depiction of the plight of his country.

La Truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

Isabelle Huppert in La Truite

Frédérique: Isabelle Huppert
Rambert: Jean-Pierre Cassel
Lou Rambert: Jeanne Moreau
Saint-Genis: Daniel Olbrychski
Galuchat: Jacques Spiesser
Daigo Hamada: Isao Yamagata
Verjon: Jean-Paul Roussillon
The Count: Roland Bertin
Mariline: Lisette Malidor
Carter: Craig Stevens
Party Guest: Ruggero Raimondi
Gloria: Alexis Smith

Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Monique Lange, Joseph Losey
Based on a novel by Roger Vailland
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Marie Castro
Music: Richard Hartley

I wish I had known beforehand that Joseph Losey's La Truite is supposedly a comedy or a "French sex farce" as the description on Rotten Tomatoes puts it. I wouldn't have worried so much that I had lost my sense of humor -- or concluded that Losey didn't know how to tell a joke. Or perhaps I would have laughed more at the scenes that seem to be meant to be funny, like Frédérique's bowling-alley hustle or the one in which she tosses out of the window the taxidermied fish belonging to the man who molested her in adolescence. Or even at the absurdity of seeing such luminaries of French cinema as Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in a bowling alley. There was one scene that amused me: Alexis Smith's very funny cameo appearance as the worldly wise Gloria, whom Frédérique, encumbered with an armload of gift-wrapped packages, encounters in a Japanese hotel. But there's really not much humor to be found in stale marriages, suicide attempts, sexual harassment, and an apparent murder, anyway. Mostly La Truite is a slog, with Losey unable to set the proper prevailing tone -- or really any tone -- for his story about a young woman's rise to power and influence. We spend so much time puzzling out who these characters are and what their relationships to one another may be, that there's not much time left to appreciate the story, especially since it's chopped up with flashbacks. We know where we are in time mostly by the length of Frédérique's hair, which starts out in her childhood in the trout hatchery as a waist-length red mane, has become a pageboy bob by the time she meets the Ramberts and Saint-Genis, and is chopped off becomingly when the latter takes her with him to Japan. La Truite is visually interesting, thanks to the work of two veterans of French film: cinematographer Henri Alekan and production designer Alexandre Trauner. But Losey's work as both director and screenwriter lets them, and his cast, down.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)

Ava Gardner and James Mason in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Hendrik van der Zee: James Mason
Pandora Reynolds: Ava Gardner
Stephen Cameron: Nigel Patrick
Janet: Sheila Sim
Geoffrey Fielding: Harold Warrender
Juan Montalvo: Mario Cabré
Reggie Demarest: Marius Goring
Angus: John Laurie
Jenny: Pamela Mason
Peggy: Patricia Raine
Señora Montalvo: Margarita D'Alvarez

Director: Albert Lewin
Screenplay: Albert Lewin
Cinematography: Jack Cardiff
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Ralph Kemplen
Costume design: Beatrice Dawson
Music: Alan Rawsthorne

James Mason was a handsome man and a very fine actor but he seems a little miscast as the doomed and dashing Flying Dutchman, especially opposite the earthy Ava Gardner as the embodiment of the Dutchman's lost love. It's a role that calls less for Mason's cerebral, inward qualities than for a swashbuckling ladykiller of the Errol Flynn mode. That said, Mason's presence in the film is one of the things that have kept Albert Lewin's romantic fantasy Pandora and the Flying Dutchman on view for so long, even giving it minor cult status. There's a gravitas to his Dutchman that makes it possible for him to quote Victorian poetry -- Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- without looking foolish. There's also Jack Cardiff's Technicolor cinematography and John Bryan's handsome sets to the film's credit. Lewin's screenplay, unfortunately, tends to the portentous and the pretentious, including maxims like "To understand one human soul is like trying to empty the sea with a cup" and "The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it," not to mention purple passages like the Dutchman's "My mind was a hive of swarming gadflies, whose stings were my remorseless thoughts." But above all there's Gardner's scorching beauty, which transcends the absurdities of the role -- and her rather limited acting resources -- to make it credible that Reggie should take poison, Geoffrey should send his racing car over a cliff, and Juan should die in the bullring, all for her sake.

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931)

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari

Mata Hari: Greta Garbo
Lt. Alexis Rosanoff: Ramon Novarro
Gen. Serge Shubin: Lionel Barrymore
Andriani: Lewis Stone
Dubois: C. Henry Gordon
Carlotta: Karen Morley
Caron: Alec B. Francis
Sister Angelica: Blanche Friderici
Warden: Edmund Breese
Sister Genevieve: Helen Jerome Eddy

Director: George Fitzmaurice
Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, Leo Birinsky
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Costume design: Adrian
Music: William Axt

Garbo ... dances? Well, only if you call the posing, prancing, and strutting she does before a statue of Shiva in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari dancing. It unaccountably brings on a storm of applause, though that may be because in the version shown on Turner Classic Movies we don't see the finale of the dance that audiences saw in the original pre-Code version of Mata Hari: an apparently nude Garbo. The movie was such a big hit for Garbo that it was re-released after the Production Code went into effect three years later, at which time the censors swooped in with their scissors, cutting not only the nude scene -- which in any case featured Garbo's body double with only a suggestion of nudity -- but also some scenes showing Mata Hari and Lt. Rosanoff in bed together. The film is mostly proof that Garbo in her prime could sell almost anything, even this piece of MGM claptrap. Here she vamps a very pretty Ramon Novarro, playing a Russian aviator with a Mexican accent, and connives with the Russian general overplayed by Lionel Barrymore and the sinister spymaster played by the almost as hammy Lewis Stone. Swanning about in some preposterous outfits by Adrian, Garbo's Mata Hari is the typical wicked lady -- she even persuades Rosanoff to snuff the candle he has promised his mother to keep burning before the icon of Our Lady of Kazan -- redeemed by falling in love. Rosanoff atones for his weakness by being blinded in a plane crash, and Mata Hari conceals from him the fact that she's been sentenced to the firing squad and goes off bravely to face her doom. They don't make them like this anymore, and there's a reason: We have no Garbos to pull them off. 

Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936)

Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, John Halliday in Desire

Madeleine de Beaupre: Marlene Dietrich
Tom Bradley: Gary Cooper
Carlos Margoli: John Halliday
Mr. Gibson: William Frawley
Aristide Duvalle: Ernest Cossart
Avilia: Akim Tamiroff
Dr. Maurice Pauquet: Alan Mowbray
Aunt Olga: Zeffie Tilbury

Director: Frank Borzage
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein
Based on a play by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Frank Borzage's Desire was one of the first films Marlene Dietrich made after she and Josef von Sternberg went their separate ways. Though she's still very much in the Sternberg mode in her makeup, her consciousness of the way she's being lighted, and the couture by Travis Banton, she's also softer, funnier, and more human. She also benefits from being re-teamed with Gary Cooper, her co-star in Sternberg's Morocco (1930), and the only leading man with whom she had any real chemistry in the Sternberg films. Desire is still glamorous nonsense, a romantic comedy in which Dietrich plays a jewel thief and Cooper a seemingly naïve American automotive engineer. They meet on the road to Spain, where Cooper's Tom Bradley plans to spend his vacation and Dietrich's Madeleine de Beaupre is meeting up with her accomplice, Carlos Margoli -- a part planned for John Gilbert that went to John Halliday after Gilbert suffered a heart attack. Cooper is delightful as the infatuated American, whose native shrewdness manifests itself eventually. A subtext about the unsettled situation in Europe runs through the film, though there's no direct reference to the civil war brewing in Spain. Tom Bradley is not one to be outwitted by Europeans like Carlos, who, in a conversation about whether the United States would get involved if war breaks out in Europe, observes, "America's a very large country." Tom replies, "Six feet three." Like most good romantic comedies, Desire gets the best out of its supporting players, including Ernest Cossart as the jeweler and Alan Mowbray as the neurologist whom Madeleine plays off against each other to get her hands on the loot, Akim Tamiroff as a police officer, and Zeffie Tilbury as the larcenous, tippling Aunt Olga. Ernst Lubitsch, who produced, also directed some scenes while Borzage was finishing up another film, and his celebrated touch gives Desire some of its vivacity.

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman

Concha Perez: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Don Pasqual "Pasqualito" Costelar: Lionel Atwill
Antonio Galvan: Cesar Romero
Gov. Don Paquito "Paquitito": Edward Everett Horton
Señora Perez: Alison Skipworth
Morenito: Don Alvarado
Tuerta: Tempe Pigott
Alphonso: Francisco Moreno

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, David Hertz, Oran Schee
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Josef von Sternberg
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: John Leipold, Hans Roemheld

Josef von Sternberg wanted to give The Devil Is a Woman the title of the music by Rimsky-Korsakov on which the film's score is based, Capriccio Espagnol, but studio head Ernst Lubitsch overruled him. The decision probably helped the movie a little at the box office -- though it was a flop that ended Sternberg's career at Paramount as well as helping Dietrich get stigmatized as "box office poison" in an infamous complaint by a distributor. But The Devil Is a Woman really is a "Spanish caprice," a film that has about as much to do with its ostensible setting, Spain, as the earlier Sternberg-Dietrich films Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Scarlet Empress (1934) had to do with North Africa, China, and Russia. They are products of Steinberg's fevered imagination, with baroque settings designed by Hans Dreier in which Marlene Dietrich could wear impossible gowns by Travis Banton. The 1930s moviegoing public may have tired of Sternberg's idiosyncratic melodramas, but they have stood the test of time as consummate expressions of what the Hollywood studio system could do if it gave free rein to one man's tastes and obsessions. Like Sternberg's first film starring Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), The Devil Is a Woman is about masochism, though the same could be said about all of the other films he made with her. In this one, she's Concha Perez, who leads a Spanish officer she calls Pasqualito on a merry-go-round of erotic entanglements, snaring him and deserting him repeatedly. And though Don Pasqual seems to have come to his senses enough to tell his story as a warning to a young political fugitive, Antonio Galvan, who has fallen for her, Concha returns to play with them again. None of this is remotely credible in any realistic context, which is why the Sternberg-Dreier-Banton concoction of a fantastic Spain is essential. The film thus becomes both silly and sublime and, with Sternberg in charge of everything but its title, one of the purest expressions of a director's sensibility available.

Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, and Marlene Dietrich in Angel

Lady Maria Barker: Marlene Dietrich

Sir Frederick Barker: Herbert Marshall 

Anthony Halton: Melvyn Douglas 

Graham: Edward Everett Horton 

Wilton: Ernest Cossart 

Grand Duchess Anna Dimitrievna: Laura Hope Crews 

Mr. Greenwood: Herbert Mundin 

Emma: Dennie Moore 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch 

Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Guy Bolton, Russell G. Medcraft 

Based on a play by Melchior Lengyel 

Cinematography: Charles Lang 

Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher 

Film editing: William Shea 

Costume design: Travis Banton

Music: Friedrich Hollaender

In Ernst Lubitsch's Angel, you can almost feel the Production Code censors breathing hotly down the director's neck, driving some of the oxygen out of the room. What's meant to be a light and airy sophisticated comedy, like for example Lubitsch's pre-Code masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), often feels starchy and coy. The emigrée grand duchess played by Laura Hope Crews is clearly a high-class procuress and her "salon" a very upscale brothel that enables a "fling" by Lady Maria Barker with a curiously naïve Anthony Halton. Their affair never seems to get consummated, although there are the usual narrative jumps when the relationship seems to come to the boiling point. And of course the Code's aversion to divorce and abhorrence of any sign that adulterers might get away with it unpunished means that the film must end with Lady Maria and Sir Frederick happily reconciled. We're used to such evasions in Hollywood movies of the 1930s through the 1950s, but it's a little depressing to see them stifle Lubitsch's usually sublime naughtiness. Sometimes it feels as if Marlene Dietrich is to blame: She never really strikes sparks with either Melvyn Douglas or Herbert Marshall -- certainly not the way Greta Garbo does with Douglas in Ninotchka (1939) or Miriam Hopkins with Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. But lovers of Lubitsch have plenty to enjoy in Angel, chiefly the way the director subverts expectations. When Sir Frederick invites Halton, an old war buddy, to dine with him and his wife, who neither man knows is the "Angel" Halton met in Paris and has been rhapsodizing about ever since, we expect a big explosion, especially when the husband points out his wife's picture to her lover. But just as Halton is about to look at the photograph, Lubitsch cuts. We don't see the awkward encounter between wife and lover we expect when she comes downstairs to meet the guest. Instead, we pick up with them later and realize that both have exerted exceptional self-control at the meeting. And we don't see the three of them at the dinner table; instead, Lubitsch takes us into the kitchen, where the servants are wondering why neither Lady Maria nor Mr. Halton has touched their food. Lubitsch leaves to our imagination scenes that other directors would have milked shamelessly. In another example, at their first encounter Maria and Halton are in a Parisian park at night, and after he proclaims his love for her he spots an old woman selling violets. He goes to buy the flowers, but Lubitsch holds the camera on the old woman, whose expressions tell us what's going on: Maria has chosen the moment to disappear and we hear Halton calling out "Angel!" in his pursuit of her. The flower seller sighs and picks up the dropped bouquet, dusts it off, and puts it back with the other flowers, then turns and walks away. Similarly, Lubitsch doesn't linger on the reconciliation scene between Maria and Frederick: They simply walk out the door, headed for Vienna and what we hope is a revived marriage. In the end, these "Lubitsch touches" aren't quite enough to lift Angel out of the middle tier of the director's films, but they constitute its saving grace notes.  

Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy

Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.

Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

Lino Ventura in Le Deuxième Souffle

Gustave "Gu" Minda: Lino Ventura
Commissioner Blot: Paul Meurisse 
Paul Ricci: Raymond Pellegrin
Manouche : Christine Fabréga 
Jo Ricci: Marcel Bozzuffi 
Inspector Fardiano: Paul Frankeur 
Antoine Ripa: Denis Manuel 
Alban: Michel Constantin 
Orloff: Pierre Zimmer 
Pascal: Pierre Grasset 

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: José Giovanni, Jean-Pierre Melville 
Based on a novel by José Giovanni
Cinematography: Marcel Combes 
Production design: Jean-Jacques Fabre 
Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Michele Boëhm 
Music: Bernard Gérard

I have to admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the plot of Jean-Pierre Melville's  Le Deuxième Souffle, other than to sort out the major relationships among the characters. And I think I'm right about that, just as I think it's foolish to try to unravel the plot of, say, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Because the point is not what story Melville (or Hawks) is telling us, but how he's telling it. It's a film full of ironic twists, starting with the jailbreak scene that frees our protagonist, Gu. He and one of his accomplices make a leap from a roof to a facing wall and land just short enough to find themselves clinging to that wall. But the third accomplice leaps well across the gap. We think he's the one who made it to the other roof with room to spare, except that there's no "other roof" -- it's a sheer wall, as we discover when Gu and the other man rappel down the far side and find the third man fallen to his death. And so the film goes, with Melville undermining our expectations at every turn. When Commissioner Blot arrives at a crime scene where a man has been murdered, we expect the standard interrogation of witnesses. Instead, Blot, jaded by too many such crime scenes, tells each of the witnesses what lies they are about to tell him and lets them go. Even the big set piece, the elaborately planned platinum heist, undermines our expectations because nothing goes especially wrong. There is one innocent guy who arrives on the scene, but he's neatly dealt with. Usually, in big thriller heists, there's a major screwup that causes the thieves to come up with a Plan B, but not here. The big screwups come when the crooks have to deal with sharing the loot. There's also a witty setup for the confrontation of one of the conspirators with several others, in which we see him case the joint and plant a gun on top of an armoire. Then we see another conspirator find and remove the gun. We expect the guy who planted the gun to get shot when he goes for the hidden gun, but it turns out that he's anticipated this move and has the element of surprise on his side after all. So it goes throughout Melville's film, which is sometimes seen as a story of "destiny, death, and bleak existential choice," full of "elemental concerns."  It may well be that, but it's also a kind of very dark comedy. There are also scenes that I cherish for their slight absurdity. After being badly beaten by the cops under the direction of Inspector Fardiano, Gu is confined to a hospital bed under guard. When a pretty nurse comes in to check on Gu, the guard follows her out into the hallway, giving Gu a chance to rip out his IV and get the jump on the distracted guard. Standard thriller stuff, but I was amused to notice that the nurse was wearing high heels. I doubt if French hospital nurses have ever made their rounds in Louboutins, so it's possible to think of this as a kind of gaffe on Melville's part, but I rather suspect that he wanted the nurse to look as sexy as possible and couldn't care less about verisimilitude. In short, he loved movies more than he loved realism. For all its existential subtext, Le Deuxième Souffle is a movie movie.