France’s film production had declined precipitously from its glory days before World War I, when it dominated world screens. The coming of sound in 1929 gave it a boost, since audiences were eager to hear dialogue spoken in French, and prosperity early in the decade slightly bolstered production.
By contrast, the United States, Germany, and Japan were each producing hundreds of films each year.
Production Problems and Artistic Freedom
Even more than in the 1920s, much of the French production sector consisted of small firms. These were privately owned, unstable, and ephemeral. In some cases filmmakers found themselves working for nothing after their employers absconded with the money. Other projects had to be halted when funds ran out. During the 1930s, 285 small firms made only one film apiece, and dozens more managed to produce only a few each. Even the largest producer, Pathe-Natan, made only sixty-four films throughout the decade—about as many as Paramount was producing annually.
Size was no guarantee against corruption and mismanagement. Two of the largest firms, formed through mergers during the healthier period of the late 1920s, ran into trouble in the mid-1930s. Rather than cooperating to form an oligopoly, as the big firms in more stable studio systems did, the French companies tried to drive each other out of business. In 1934, Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert nearly went bankrupt, and only a government-sponsored loan saved it. Pathe-Natan ran into similar problems by 1936, complicated by the fact that one of its heads, Bernard Natan, was discovered to have been embezzling funds. He went to jail, and the company had to be broken into smaller firms.
The situation was not altogether gloomy, however. Government regulation and the coming of sound both helped loosen the American hold on the French market. In 1935, for the first time since World War I, French films made up over half of the domestic market. Moreover, film attendance, which had dropped early in the Depression, began to rise, and theater income increased.
The decentralized structure of French film production helps explain why so many enduring films were made during this decade. Small companies lacked the elaborate production bureaucracy that characterized filmmaking in the United States, Germany, and the USSR. Instead, as in Japan, directors were often able to work on their own, supervising many phases of production. This situation, combined with a large number of talented actors, screenwriters, designers, cinematographers, composers, and other creative personnel, contributed to the creation of several distinctive trends.
Fantasy and Surrealism: Rene Clair,
In the early 1930s, the French tendency toward fantasy during the silent era continued. The Surrealist tradition also lingered in a few works, though these were not as violent and chaotic as Luis Buiiuel’s Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or (p. 179).
Rene Clair’s early musicals, Sous les toits de Paris and A nous, la liberte! (p. 207), made him the most prominent French filmmaker. Le Million was another imaginative musical, centering on a lengthy comic chase for a lost lottery ticket in an elusive coat’s pocket. Clair substituted music for diegetic sound effects and used extensive camera movement. He also staged parts of the chase in the manner of French cinema of the 1910s (13.1). Quasi-Surrealist playfulness appears occasionally, especially in a pawn shop that serves as the cover for a gang’s criminal activities, where boots hanging into the frame from above suggest dangling bodies, and a mannequin seems to point a pistol (13.2). The final struggle over the coat looks like the characters are playing a football match backstage at a theater.
The technical challenges of the early sound era seem to have inspired Clair. After two less interesting films, he departed for England, where he made one notable comedy, The Ghost Goes West (1935). Interrupted by the war in an attempt to return to France, he spent the war period in Hollywood. Although he returned to France and made occasional films until the mid-1960s, these never quite matched the originality and wit of this early period.
13.1 In Le Million, the police chasing a thief across a rooftop create an image that could have come from a 1907 Pathe chase comedy.
13.2 A comically Surrealist juxtaposition in a pawn shop as a hidden criminal draws a bead on an intruder in Le Million.
13.3 Surrealist style in L’Affaire est dans le sac, as a mysterious stranger helps the hero into a car for a bizarre hat-stealing mission.
13.4, left In Zero for Conduct, the kindly teacher Huguet imitates Charlie Chaplin during recess, to the delight of the schoolboys.
13.5, right The pillow-fight scene ends with a triumphant slow-motion procession of the schoolboys, with a musical accompaniment played partially backward.
In 1932, Pierre Prevert directed another quasiSurrealist film, L’Affaire est dans le sac (“It’s in the Bag”), from a script by his brother Jacques, a major playwright and poet. Shot on a tiny budget and using sets from other movies, L’Affaire est dans le sac is an anarchic comedy concerning, among other things, people who sell, steal, and wear inappropriate hats (including a man who searches in vain for a fascist-style beret) and a rich industrialist’s daughter who is courted by men of various social classes. The film uses an exaggerated style (13.3) to reinforce the oddities of the plot. After the failure of this film, the Prevert brothers were unable to make another film together until a decade later, but Jacques scripted several of the most important French films of the era.
The most promising young filmmaker of the early 1930s, Jean Vigo, also worked in a Surrealist vein. He started with two short documentaries. The first, A pro-pos de Nice (“Concerning Nice,” 1930), drew upon conventions of the city symphony genre of experimental cinema (pp. 182-184). Its candid shots taken during carnival time harshly satirize the wealthy vacationers in a French resort town. The second, Taris (1931), is a lyrical underwater study of the great French swimmer Jean Taris. Vigo’s main work consists of a brief feature, Zero for Conduct (1933), and L’Atalante (1934; restored version released 1990).
Zero for Conduct is the more overtly Surrealist of the two films, presenting boarding-school life from children’s points of view. Its episodic story consists mostly of amusing, frightening, or puzzling scenes of their activities, as in the opening train ride when two schoolmates show off toys and pranks. Most of the teachers are seen as grotesques, with the exception of Huguet
(13.4) , who encourages the boys to rebel. One night they defiantly start a pillow fight in their dormitory
(13.5) . The final scene shows four of the boys staging a rebellion during a commemoration day at the school. The film’s antiauthority and antichurch content led to its being banned; it was not shown publicly until 1945.
In L’Atalante, Vigo presents an intensely romantic story of a barge captain who marries a woman from a village along his route. After a short honeymoon period, she longs for something beyond the barge’s routine. Intrigued by the exotic souvenirs of the first mate, Pere
13.6 After his wife’s departure, the tortured barge captain of L’Atalante plays checkers with first mate Pere Jules, surrounded by Jules’s strange souvenirs. These odd objects provide the main Surrealist motif in the film.
Jules, and tempted by a passing peddler, she runs away to Paris. Her husband refuses to admit his longing for her (13.6), but, eventually, Pere Jules tracks the wife down, and the couple are reunited.
Vigo died in 1934, at the age of 29, but, despite his small body of work, he is remembered as one of the great French filmmakers. His death and the inability of the Prevert brothers to make further films cut short the Surrealist impulse in French commercial filmmaking. Clair’s departure similarly made the fantasy genre less prominent in France.
Many important French films of the 1930s were high-quality studio productions. Some were literary adaptations, such as Crime and Punishment (1935, Pierre Chenal), from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel. Two distinguished stage actors, Pierre Blanchar and Harry Baur, give impressive performances as Raskolnikov and Por-phyre, and the elaborate interior sets display a slight influence from German Expressionism (13.7).
Jacques Feyder, who had worked briefly in the Impressionist style during the 1920s, returned to France in 1932 after a short stay in Hollywood. His most famous film of this decade is La Kermesse heroique (Carnival in Flanders, 1935), a comedy set in a Flemish town in the early seventeenth century. When news arrives that the
13.7 The
Hallway outside Raskolnikov’s room in Crime and Punishment shows a hint of Expressionist style.
13.8 Lazare Meerson, the greatest French set designer of the interwar period, created an authentic Renaissance Flemish town for Carnival in Flanders.
Duke of Alba is marching on the town, the men panic and hide, but the women welcome the invading army into their homes (and beds) for a festival. The delighted duke leads his troops away the next day, sparing the town. Of Belgian origin himself, Feyder insisted on a meticulously correct duplication of the architecture and costumes of the period (13.8).
Carnival in Flanders has been interpreted as favoring collaboration with the enemy at a time when the fascist threat was growing. In fact, Feyder and Charles Spaak had written the script in the mid-1920s, when pacifist films were becoming common. They were unable to find a producer then, and the timing of the film’s eventual appearance proved unfortunate. It was not well received in France or Belgium but was immensely popular in Germany and England, and it won a director’s prize at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar as best foreign film in the United States.
Less prestigious and more typical of quality French filmmaking in the 1930s is Marc Allegret’s 1934 Lac aux dames (“Women’s Lake”). Its slim plot involves a
13.9 A picturesque location shot in Lac aux dames.
13.10 The frame story in Le Roman d’un tricheur takes place in an unabashedly theatrical set representing a sidewalk cafe, but the narrator takes us into a series of flashbacks.
13.11 In Le Drame de Shanghai, Pabst created a sense of the sleazy underworld of Shanghai.
Young man who works as a swimming teacher at a Tyrolean lake and is besieged by female admirers. He has been separated from the woman he really loves, and an innocent rich girl who develops a crush On him finally helps him reunite with her. As in many French films of this era, this conventional story gains interest through beautiful cinematography (13.9) and its stars. Lac aux dames introduced both Jean-Pierre Aumont and SimOne Simon, and the character actor Michel Simon plays a small role. Although the French industry was relatively weak, it had many popular stars and character actors during the 1930s. Raimu, Michele Morgan, and Jean Gabin often proved to be drawing cards abroad as well—something that had seldom been the case in the 1920s.
Sacha Guitry, a successful author of sophisticated comic plays and fiction, turned to the cinema—starring in, adapting, and directing several of his own works. Critics and filmmakers deplored Guitry’s unabashed defense of his “filmed theater,” yet many of them shared the audience’s delight in these witty, well-constructed comedies. Outstanding among them is Le Roman d’un tricheur (The Story of a Cheat, 1936), based on a Guitry novel about a confidence man and cardsharp. Guitry innovates by having the trickster’s voice narrate the tale, filling in for all the characters’ dialogue—women as well as men (13.10).
Julien Duvivier, who participated in all the main trends of French filmmaking in the 1930s, made Pail de carotte (“Carrot-head”) in 1932. (In 1925 he had directed an earlier version in the Impressionist style.) The protagonist is a boy whose cheerful personality is worn down by a tyrannical mother and an indifferent father. He nearly commits suicide before the father belatedly reveals that he loves him. Pail de carotte’s sophisticated style and rural location shooting create a touching story seen largely from the boy’s viewpoint.
Quite a few high-quality French films of this period were created by foreign, especially German, directors. Many German and French filmmakers moved between Berlin and Paris, and, even after most multilingual production had been abandoned in favor of dubbing or subtitles, many French films were still reshot in German versions, and vice versa.
G. W. Pabst had two lengthy sojourns in France. During the first, he directed a multilingual version of Don Quixote (1933), starring the legendary opera star Fedor Chaliapin. After a disappointing visit to Hollywood that resulted in a single film, Pabst returned to France to direct three more features, all melodramas. In Le Drame de Shanghai (“Shanghai Drama,” 1938), the heroine, Kay, is a nightclub singer who has for years been working for an underworld gang in Shanghai; when her innocent daughter, who has been away at school for years, comes to visit, Kay tries to go straight but is forced to kill one of the gang members so that her daughter can escape from China just as the Japanese invade. Pabst used the exotic setting to create an effective film noir (13.11). Surprisingly, once the war began, Pabst decided to return to Germany, where he worked under the Nazi regime.
Max Ophiils also worked regularly in Paris during the 1930s, making seven intensely romantic features in the vein of Liebelei. In Le Roman de Werther (“The Romance of Werther,” 1938), Ophiils adapted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of doomed love. The hero comes to serve as an official in a small town, falls in love with his superior’s fiancee, Charlotte, and eventually
13.12 Ophiils commented on the action using his characteristic camera movement in Le Roman de Werther, tilting up to a crucifix as the clergyman tells Charlotte to reject Werther’s love.
13.13 In La Maternelle, Marie sees Rose as her mother. Resenting her romance with the school-board director, she tries to commit suicide and finally is adopted by the couple.
13.14 Realism in La Maternelle: Rose with Fondant, a child from an abusive home who never smiles. Although she draws him out of his shell, he dies at home of unexplained causes.
Commits suicide (13.12). Ophiils fled to the United States once World War II began.
Other emigres found France a way station to Hollywood. Anatole Litvak, a Russian Jew who had worked for a while in Germany, fled the Nazis and worked briefly in France. Mayerling (1936), the story of a prince’s doomed love for a commoner, was shot in a style virtually indistinguishable from that of polished Hollywood productions, and it was extremely popular abroad. Actors Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux became international stars; they and Litvak all went to work in Hollywood. Fritz Lang also paused briefly in France, having left Germany to avoid working l, mder the Nazis. He made a fatalistic romantic drama, Liliom (1934), before moving on for a long-term stay in the United States. Similarly, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Curtis Bernhardt, and others worked briefly in France but soon went on to careers in Hollywood.
While many prestigious productions relied on polished technique, romantic stories, and stars, several films stressed everyday realism. Prominent among these is a film that, like Zero for Conduct and Poil de carotte, deals sympathetically with children: La Maternelle (1933), by Jean Benoit-Levy and Marie Epstein. Benoit-Levy, who was primarily a documentarist, and Epstein, who had scripted three films for her brother Jean in the 1920s, had previously collaborated on some silent features on social issues involving children. La Maternelle, their most important film, focuses on neglected and abused children attending a kindergarten. An educated, but impoverished, young woman, Rose, takes a menial job there and becomes the object of the children’s repressed longings for love—especially those of Marie, abandoned by her prostitute mother (13.13). Avoiding studio glamour and stars, Benoit-Levy and Epstein filmed in an actual working-class kindergarten and used children with no acting experience (13.14). This simple story was well received by French and foreign audiences. As a result, Benoit-Levy and Epstein collaborated again, on Itto (1934), one of the few films about France’s North African colonies that treats the native population sensitively.
Another filmmaker emerged in the 1930s whose work was highly individualistic and centered in everyday reality. Like Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol was already a highly successful playwright, but, unlike Guitry’s plays, his were leisurely character studies. Upon seeing The Broadway Melody, Pagnol decided that sound films were an ideal way of recording plays. He supervised the film adaptation of his hit play Marius (1931, directed by Alexander Korda, who was soon to revolutionize the British cinema by directing The Private Life of Henry VIII [p. 241]). When the producer, Paramount, declined a sequel despite the film’s huge success, Pagnol went on to produce Fanny (1932, Marc Allegret) himself. With the profits, he set up his own production firm, turning out one popular film after another. He directed the third entry in the trilogy, Cesar (1936).
The Marius trilogy covers about twenty years in the lives of its three central characters, yet many of its scenes contain little action. Instead, the inhabitants of a waterside district of Marseille bicker and chat at length. Although the slow pace derived in part from the stage origins of the films, Pagnol was also striving to capture the meanderings and shifts in tone that characterize everyday conversation.
By 1936, Pagnol’s success permitted him to equip his own studio facilities in Marseille. His actors and
13.15 Pagnol’s celebration of fertility: as the couple sow their field in the final scene of Harvest, the heroine reveals to her h us-band that she is pregnant.
Crew remained fairly constant from film to film, forming the “Pagnol family.” They lived and worked together wherever the location scenes for the films were being shot. Pagnol’s oft-quoted formula was “The Universal is attained by staying at home,”l and he made his most successful films of the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Provence region around his hometown, Marseille. They were less stagy than the trilogy and told simple stories of village life. In La Femme du boulanger (The Baker’s Wife, 1938), the departure of the baker’s wife with another man causes the baker to stop making bread, and the villagers band together to fetch her back. Regain (Harvest, 1937) celebrates the fertility of the earth, as a lonely peasant and an outcast woman struggle to raise a family and run a farm in a deserted village (13.15).
World History
