Deathblog: Kenneth Anger (1926-2023)

“I’ve always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” —Kenneth Anger, 2002

And so we say farewell to Kenneth Anger, a man whose influence runs through the underground of 20th century American culture like a particularly potent seam of viscous, glimmering oil.

Normally, it would be unusual to apply such superlatives to an artist whose core body of work over 50+ years essentially consists of one book and a couple of hours of film, but Anger’s key works - into which category I would place the trilogy of ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ (1954), ‘Scorpio Rising’ (1963) and ‘Invocation of the Demon Brother’ (1969), along with ‘Hollywood Babylon’ (published 1959) - are so densely packed, reflecting and refining so many parallel streams of culture, and setting off such explosive series of artistic/aesthetic chain reactions in their wake, that each of them feels monumental in stature.

And, that’s before we even factor in his presence as a central instigator/lightning rod for what we might broadly term Californian High Weirdness, and an observer/participant in many of the weirdest, wildest, scariest and (ultimately) most transformative moments in mid-century culture. More so than merely a guy with his finger on the pulse, he often seemed (in keeping with persona as a self-styled grand magus) as if he was the one setting, or at least quickening, that pulse (for better or for worse).

Indeed, what I find so remarkable (nay frightening) about the films I’ve listed above is that, more-so than just boiling down their respective cultural moments into a heady, psycho-active sludge, they seem to pre-empt (or, in keeping with Anger’s core belief that the act of viewing one of his films equates to participating in his magic(k)al practice, actively invoke) a psychic darkness lurking just over the horizon.

In ‘..Pleasuredome’ - so resonant of opium-soaked cocktail lounge exotica and the spirit of mystical/irrational/‘unAmerican’ weirdness germinating within the shadows of old Hollywood and the West Coast Military Industrial Complex during the 1950s that it might as well be soundtracked with theremins and spliced with footage from ‘Forbidden Planet’ - we can already see the drift toward decadence and narcissism which would wreak havoc on the lives of some of the film’s participants as the excesses of bohemian lifestyles took hold.

Then, a few years later in ‘Scorpio Rising’, we see the unstoppable juggernaut of American POP crushing all before it, revealed in its pure, pagan strangeness (and indeed queerness), filtered this time through a lens of MK Ultra LSD, casting Brando in ‘The Wild One’ and his retinue of clones as the quasi-futurist storm troopers of the flaming, maximalist, self-immolating culture to come, as U.S. consumer capitalism spread across the globe. It remains such an overwhelming experience that it’s oft-referenced role as a pivotal precursor to both gay fetish aesthetics and MTV-era video editing seem almost like side notes.

And in ‘..Demon Brother’, first screened in mid-1969 (exact dates seem to be disputed), we see the imminent black nightmare spirit of Manson and Atlamont practically conjured and made flesh before our eyes, as nameless rituals are conducted in what looks like the dankest basement in Haight Ashbury, where soon-to-be convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil holds court as Lucifer, intercut with footage of U.S. marines descending upon the Vietnamese jungle, as clouds of noxious hash smoke seep from a skull-shaped bong and Mick Jagger (warming up for ‘Performance’) wheezes out a horrendous, atonal din on his shiny new Moog; a film almost too evil to exist.

Which seems like an appropriate note to bring us on to the way that, as a personality, Anger almost seems to have functioned entirely outside the framework by which we might usually judge a person’s beliefs and behaviour. By any conventional standard, he proved himself over the years to be spiteful, mean, narcissistic, duplicitous, vengeful and borderline unhinged, instigating public feuds and outrages at seemingly every opportunity (his disruption of Curtis Harrington’s memorial service providing an especially unforgiveable example), and turning the majority of his friends and collaborators against him at one point or another. Yet, taken on his own terms, this all just seemed like part of the package - an essential component of a man who defined himself as existing beyond good and evil, and followed that philosophy through to the bitter end.

Almost by definition, the vast majority of magickal practitioners and edgelord types who embrace ‘The Left Hand Path’ are unspeakable arseholes whose lives end in justifiable misery, but Anger strikes me as an incredibly rare example of an individual who - more so even than his beloved Crowley - seemed to thrive on an atmosphere of lies, obfuscation and psychic aggression, as evidenced by his apparent ability to hold back the ravages of time, passing away earlier this month (sharp and well-preserved as ever, insofar as I can tell) at the age of 96.

Back in 2007-2008-ish (I don’t remember the exact date), I attended a public appearance by Anger, at the Imperial War Museum, of all places, where he was presenting some of his films and answering questions. To be honest, I remember very little of what he actually said that night, but I found his sheer presence mesmerising.

Aside from anything else, I was amazed that a man who made his first surviving film in 1947 could seem so young (faint Dorian Gray vibes), and I was surprised too that - contrary to his fiery, hex-throwing reputation - he seemed so humble, self-deprecating and soft-spoken. Above all though, he had a sense of presence about him - an ‘aura’ or ‘energy’ I might say, were I of a more hippie-ish persuasion - which is difficult to explain in words. I mean, perhaps I was just projecting here, based on his legendary life and exploits, but… it felt a bit like sharing a room with one of the denizens of ‘the other place’ from a David Lynch film, if that makes any sense? All cynicism aside, it made his boasts of magickal mastery seem eerily plausible.

As another latter-day memory, I’m reminded of a cover story the British music magazine The Wire ran on Anger in around the same period (and, the very fact they put a non-musician on their cover for what might well be the first and only time in their history tells you something vis-à-vis his underground stature I suppose). As I recall, the interviewer met Anger in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and hailed him… only to see him walk straight into a pond! The photographer caught him emerging from the mire, drenched head to foot in pond weed, looking like Swamp Thing, pulling an exaggerated military salute. Extraordinary stuff.

All in all, it feels incredibly banal to drop a mere “rest in peace” on a figure like Anger, but…. whatever idyll his Luciferian spirit is resting in (hopefully not pond weed), let’s hope it’s fiery, thrilling, awe-inspiring, frightening and strange.

It’s a real shame he didn’t make it to 100.

(In the spirit of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ by the way, I’ve not bothered fact-checking any of the above, but if any of it turns out to be grossly inaccurate -- all the better.) 

Noir Diary: Witness in the City [‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1959)

Whilst the first two films in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection were both interesting, enjoyable and well worth making time for, it is the third and final movie in the set which proved by far my favourite.

Édouard Molinaro is back at the helm, and Lino Ventura is back on the street, for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ [‘Witness in the City’], in which a Boileau & Narcejac script (with an additional writing credit for none other than Le Dos au Mur’s Gérard Oury) reshuffles a few of the plot elements from Molinaro’s earlier film, honing them into a movie which sits on the cusp between being a distinctly superior programme picture and an out-and-out genre classic.

Proceedings certainly begin in alarming fashion, with the sight of a screaming woman being callously thrown from a speeding train. Composing himself after returning to his compartment, her killer (Jacques Berthier) pulls the emergency cord, and we cut straight to the courthouse, where a clearly disgusted judge is forced to dismiss the case against him due to a lack of evidence. (“Doubt… your closest collaborator,” the judge dryly remarks to the man’s lawyer, perhaps in homage to a certain Hitchcock movie featuring similar train-bound maleficence.)

On his way home, the liberated murderer is delayed by a minor road accident which leaves his car out of commission, forcing him to rely on taxis to complete his journey. Far greater trouble awaits him though back at his remote and luxurious home.

In the meantime, y’see, we’ve been presented to a succession of gloriously menacing, giallo-esque POV shots, depicting a looming, trench-coated fellow (soon revealed to be Ventura) breaking into Berthier’s house. Sabotaging his fusebox and leaving mementos of his late mistress meaningfully strewn around the rooms (photo in the picture frame, dress laid out on the bed), Ventura proceeds to lurk in the shadows, awaiting his intended victim’s return. Not a sight any wealthy playboy really wants to be confronted with after a hard day spent clearing himself of his mistress’s murder, needless to say.

Ventura’s character Monsieur Ancelin is, of course, the dead woman’s husband. And, if you’re at all familiar with his usual screen persona in this era, you’ll realise he’s not about to take any guff from Monsieur “honest guv, I didn’t push her, it was suicide, she couldn't live with her betrayal, she loved only you.”

Long story short, the confrontation between the two men is beautifully played out, shot in brooding, gothic horror-esque candlelight, with Berthier’s two-faced pleading crashing hopelessly against the rocks of Ventura’s immoveable, soul deadened cynicism. Once the former has been left swinging from the rafters, Anselm sweeps the joint to remove traces of his presence, before making a swift exit, and…. running head-first into Pierre (Franco Fabrizi), the driver of the radio taxi Berthier ordered a few minutes before his untimely demise! Oops.

As Pierre’s taxi screeches off, Ancelin scribbles down the registration number… and his hunt for the titular witness begins.

During the movie’s second act, our focus shifts to Pierre, his blossoming romance with switchboard operator Liliane (Sandra Milo), and the close-knit community based around the offices of the Radio Taxi company for which they both work.

In contrast to the character work in the two earlier films in the Kino set, the relationships here are simply and believably sketched out, and ultimately very endearing. There’s a real sense of the fleeting pleasures of day-to-day life and of the excitement of young love here, as passing details like couple’s brief clinch as they wait to board a crowded metro live long in the memory.

Another very nice touch is the scene in which Pierre uses his taxi’s radio to broadcast the sound of a group of drunken American soldiers singing ‘Red River Valley’ in the back seat of his cab through Liliane’s headset, prompting momentarily hilarity in the switchboard office. Indeed, the use of this song, whose indelible melody becomes a kind of totem for the lovers, proves extremely effective, adding a very poignant note once events take a darker turn later in the film.

Speaking of which, the implacable Ancelin - who has effectively become the film’s antagonist at this point - is of course lurking always in the lovers’ shadows. Ventura’s unmistakable features and elongated eyebrows lend him an almost Nosferatu-like quality here, as he silently stalks the city streets, trailing Pierre in a succession of stolen cars and seeking a way to put him out of commission before he can report what he’s seen to the police.

From hereon in, the story ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ tells is entirely linear in its development, but the ambiguities created by the way our point of view shifts back and forth between Ancelin and his potential (and actual) victims make it kind of fascinating nonetheless.

By the film’s final act, Ventura’s character has mutated into an entirely different breed of expressionist monster - closer perhaps to Chaney’s hunchback or Lorre’s child killer in ‘M’ - as, hunted, bloodied and limping, he is run to ground by the combined forces of the (largely unseen) police, and the small army of radio-equipped taxi drivers upon whom the action largely concentrates.

Though no melodramatic flourishes are employed to jog our memory, it’s impossible not to recall here that the reign of terror Anselin has by this point inflicted upon the taxi-driving community was, ultimately, triggered by love - or at the very least, by a perceived masculine obligation to avenge the death of his beloved wife.

Whilst committing additional acts of violence purely in the name of self-preservation is never a good look for a revenger, we’re inclined to wonder by this point whether Anselim was always a remorseless psychopath, or whether the loss of his wife has simply pushed him over the edge, causing him to lash out at the world in some kind of grief-driven death-trip. This is a question which the film pointedly declines to address, leaving us unsure quite how to read this frightening and desperate character with whom we are to some extent encouraged to sympathise.

An additional level of bleakness is added to Anselin’s Harry Lime-esque plight through the fact that, whilst his crimes have all been committed against individuals whom we’ve spent some time with and grown to like, his eventual fate is entirely anonymised by the film.

There are no reassuring ‘job well done’ back-slaps or closing clinches for the ‘heroes’ here; indeed, the survivors’ lives are presumably left in pieces. Instead, the ‘villain’ of the piece is disposed of in a series of high angle long shots, taken down by an unseen army of cops behind a blinding circle of headlights, forcing us to reflect on the sad cycle of violence which has led him to this sorry fate.

The knack for visual storytelling Édouard Molinaro demonstrated in the opening sequence of ‘Le Dos au Mur’ reaches its full expression in ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’, and the way in which the film manages to wrangle a mass of logical/procedural detail without resorting to dry exposition is inspired. 

In fact, for a mid-century crime drama, it’s remarkable how little the screenplay relies on dialogue. Almost everything we need to know here is conveyed visually, and, once Anselin is on Pierre’s trail, the movie is almost all action (of one kind or another), keeping the characters perpetually in motion.

The fact that the film’s events all take place in or around cars naturally helps to maintain this sense of momentum, and the eventual series of chases and confrontations which comprise the final act are genuinely thrilling, allowing us to perhaps file this one alongside Don Siegel’s The Line-Up in the pre-history of car chases movies, even as the narrow alleyways and boulevards of Paris rarely allow the motors here to pick up much speed, keeping things more at a gear-grinding, ‘stalking and blocking’ kind of level.

Naturally, this concentration on exteriors means that the vast majority of the film is shot on location in the city, and the rain-sodden, night-for-night streets and avenues look absolutely beautiful, as they rightfully should, given that the legendary Henri Decaë (cameraman of choice for Melville, Truffaut and Louis Malle, amongst many others) was calling the shots as DP.

Alongside the swathes of inky shadow we’d reasonably expect, the diffused gleam of streetlamps, headlights and neon signage adds a hazy ‘endless night’ kind of feel to the film’s sprawling urban landscape, whilst the conclusion - staged at the historic Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park - incorporates a series of absolutely exquisite deep focus long shots, as Ventura stumbles to his doom through a nocturnal maze of empty gardens and attractions. (Some may feel Molinaro’s decision to intercut Anselin’s flight with close-ups of the park’s caged birds of prey is a bit heavy-handed, but this attention-grabbing directorial flourish actually works very well in context.)

Also noteworthy meanwhile is a great, sultry modern jazz score from saxophonist Barney Wilen, who had played with Miles Davis on his indelible score for Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ a year earlier. This was presumably what inspired the decision to hire Wilen here, and if the material he and his group cooked up for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ feels slightly more akin to the buttoned down, compositional approach to jazz that Johnny Dankworth was busy bringing to British crime films of this era, well… that’s certainly no bad thing.

For my money, this all adds up to a nigh-on flawless example of a late ‘50s European crime film. Devoid of pretention or self-importance but still loaded with powerful imagery, ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ maintains an unsettling sense of moral greyscale amid its blinding headlights and sepulchral shadows, whilst its refusal to offer a conventional, reassuring resolution means that, like all the best noir, it is liable to haunt the darker corners of viewers’ memories for a long time to come.

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Though Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection pointedly fails to bear the legend ‘Volume # 1’, they are surely doing the lord’s work in bringing films like this one to an English-speaking audience on blu-ray, and we can only hope there are more such releases in the pipeline.

Noir Diary: Back to the Wall [‘Le Dos au Mur’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1958)

In stark contrast to Gilles Grangier’s no nonsense directorial approach on Le Rouge et Mis, director Édouard Molinaro begins ‘Le Dos au Mur’ [Literal translation: ‘Evidence in Concrete’, but more snappily retitled for English-speaking viewers as ‘Back to the Wall’] - the second film in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection - with an audacious, near wordless seventeen-minute sequence depicting a man (future writer/director Gérard Oury) breaking into a ground floor apartment and methodically cleaning/rearranging the scene of a murder, before managing to drag the carpet-wrapped corpse of the victim (Philippe Nicaud) to his car, driving it to a construction site and burying it beneath a layer of freshly laid cement.

A real tour de force of noir technique, perhaps reflecting the influence of ‘Rififi’s famed heist scene, this sequence boasts expressionistic, John Alton-esque photography from DP Robert Lefebvre, full of brightly illuminated details emerging from inky pools of darkness, fragments of light gleaming off glass and chrome and the rain-sodden headlight beams momentarily blinding us as they flash through the black void. (1)

In visual storytelling terms too, this is riveting stuff, with menacing low angles and rhythmic, Hitchcockian cutting cranking the tension, as Oury is forced to hide his nefarious activities from the attentions of sundry nocturnal witnesses.

It is only once our man’s unsavoury night’s work is over, and he is once again behind the wheel, cruising ‘Lost Highway’ style through the darkness, that - in true noir style - we drift into flashback, and the story proper gets underway.

Unfortunately, this involves the film’s visual style settling down into a far more conventional routine of set-bound chat and exposition, as we join Oury’s character - who it transpires is some kind of construction/cement magnate? - as he discovers that his much younger wife (Jeanne Moreau, fresh from ‘Ascenseur pour L’échafaud’ and already something of a crime/noir veteran by this point in her career) has been cheating on him with a feckless artist/under-employed actor type (Nicaud).

Given what we’ve already learned from the opening sequence, it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that Oury does not take this news well.

Clearly veering more toward the James M. Cain-derived, murder/adultery strand of noir than the gangster/crime thread represented by ‘Le Rouge et Mis’, ‘Le Dos au Mur’s concentration on the travails of a desperate, obsessive (and ultimately doomed) central character also brings a strong Cornell Woolrich flavour to proceedings.

Pedants might wish to note that the film also features one of those flashback structures full of scenes which the character recalling the tale couldn’t possibly have witnessed first-hand, but… needless to say, I’m not going to split hairs over details like that, especially given that the plot, based on Frédéric Dard’s novel, actually proceeds to unfold into a rather ingenious scenario, one whose possibilities would have provided plenty of red meat for any contemporary Hollywood screenwriter to get their teeth into.

Rather than rushing straight into a campaign of vengeance after discovering his wife’s infidelity y’see, Oury’s character’s preferred course of action is to instead begin blackmailing the adulterous couple, setting himself up with a fake ID, dispatching the requisite anonymous letters, and claiming back the resultant dough (which Moreau has already finagled from his pocket using an increasingly strained series of excuses) from a post office box in another part of town.

As you might imagine, this instigates an extended game of cat and mouse between the two parties, as, amongst other things, Oury hires a sublimely shifty private detective to gather more evidence against his targets, whilst the couple in turn engage the services of some underworld heavies to track down their blackmailer, whilst both sides attempt to gain the confidence of a barmaid in the drinking hole where Nicaud and Moreau often meet.

All of which adds up to a hell of a lot of plot to wade through here, so it’s just as well that it’s all pretty engaging, fun stuff. Really though, by far the most interesting factor in play at this point is the twisted and desperate motivations behind Oury’s decision to pursue his blackmail scheme in the first place.

Driven on by a toxic combination of vengeance and crippling fear of loneliness, he not only seeks to destroy Moreau and Nicaud’s relationship through the pressures created by his financial demands, he also wants Moreau to then return to him and voluntarily confess the errors of her ways, if you can believe that - sheer desperation blinding him to the realisation of what a nightmare this artificial extension of their long dead relationship would prove, even in the unlikely event it could be achieved.

Unfortunately, it is again the lack of development of the supporting characters which proves a stumbling block for this otherwise intriguing yarn. I must confess, Moreau is a star whose appeal has always been rather lost on me, and the script gives her precious little to work with here.

I mean, we might assume that her character is a woman who has married for wealth and convenience, only to seek solace in the arms of a younger and more exciting partner when she tires of her cold fish husband - but this is just a projection on our part as viewers. Nothing in the film actually bothers to communicate this to us, leaving the errant wife’s motivation, back story and emotional life a mystery.

Likewise, Nicaud’s character also feels like an empty vessel; imbued with no real character traits beyond being shiftless and a bit lazy, he certainly doesn’t convince as the kind of passionate lover capable to tearing a wealthy and glamourous woman away from the security of her marriage, and as a result, the scenes the couple share together fail to develop much in the way of either chemistry or, crucially, audience sympathy.

Conventional movie morality would tend to suggest we should kind-of, sort-of end up on their side, in preference to the scheming, tyrannical husband, but… in this case, it’s honestly difficult to care.

Sadly then, we’re left with a bit of a one-sided love triangle, but thankfully Oury’s extraordinary performance alone proves strong enough to hold it together, maniacal intelligence and emotional desolation battling behind his eyes as he glowers, simmers and broods his way through the film, at times almost contorting his lanky frame like a physical manifestation of the tangled mess he’s created for himself - the ‘hanged man’ per excellence.

It’s fitting therefore that, as a member of that hallowed sub-category of noirs which effectively begin with their endings (paging both Mildred Pierce and Walter Neff), ‘Le Dos au Mur’ dwells heavily on that most noir of themes - man’s inability to escape his fate. In fact, it even verges into Poe-derived gothic territory to a certain extent, as a restaging of the ever-popular ‘bricked up wall’ ending, clearly inspired by either ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or ‘The Black Cat’, ends up accidentally prefiguring Roger Corman’s adultery-enhanced fusion of both those stories in his 1962 anthology ‘Tales of Terror’. Who’d have thunk it!

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(1) Exploitation fans might be interested to learn that although Robert Lefebvre was already a veteran of the French film industry by this point, having worked as a DP since the early 1930s, he actually ended his long career working on a series of erotic / sex films during the ‘70s, including Max Pécas’ ‘Je Suis Une Nymphomane’ (1971) and Radley Metzger’s ‘The Image’ (1975).

Noir Diary: Speaking of Murder [‘Le Rouge et Mis’] (Gilles Grangier, 1957)

 To those of us in the English-speaking world, it can sometimes feel as if France’s contribution to the culture surrounding mid-century crime/noir cinema remains an obscure and mysterious prospect. Such a conclusion begins to seem increasingly misguided though, the longer one spends scanning shelves and considering the matter.

After all, Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955) and the films of Jean-Pierre Melville are universally revered touchstones of the genre. Classics like Jacques Becker’s ‘Touchez pas ou Grisbi’ (1954) and ‘Le Trou’ (1960), and Henri Decoin‘s ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, (1955), are all available on nice, sub-titled editions, as of course are arthouse/nouvelle vague-affiliated genre entries such as Truffaut’s ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ (1960) and Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ (1958). Claude Sautet’s heart-rending ‘Classe Tous Risques’ (1960) starring Lino Ventura has received a release from the BFI, and I bet your local library can still dig up a DVD of Julien Duvivier’s ground-breaking ‘Pépé le Moko’ (1937) upon request.

Nonetheless though - what unites the films listed above is their quote-unquote “importance”. All are critically acclaimed, top tier productions which - despite their intermittent brutality and nihilism - remain thoroughly respectable. They’re all great movies, no question, but, taken in isolation, can they really furnish us with a full picture of the wider culture from which they emerged?

It’s as if we’ve been given access to the Gallic equivalents of Double Indemnity, ‘Laura’, ‘White Heat’ and ‘Touch of Evil’…. but where are the Parisian analogues of ‘Raw Deal’, of The Big Combo, or of Framed..? Were the stars and directors we know from their more celebrated pictures also battling it out week by week in scuzzier, run-of-the-mill programme pictures? And if so, can we watch them please?

Such are the questions I was hoping Kino Lorber’s inaugural French Noir Collection - gathering three late ‘50s examples of the form from the Gaumont archives which I don’t believe have previously been granted much international exposure - would begin to address. Long story short: it doesn’t disappoint.

Straight out of the gate, Gilles Grangier’s ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ (1957) opens with a sight sure to warm the heart of any French crime enthusiast, as genre heavyweights Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura lead a four-man gang carrying out a stick up job on a street corner bank in a quiet Parisian suburb.

The film’s recurrent theme of violence erupting from placid, everyday surroundings is disturbingly foreshadowed as Ventura, scowling intently in regulation trench-coat, briefly turns his tommy-gun in the direction of a cowering mother and her children who have inadvertently wandered into the midst of the robbery. Pausing, Ventura’s character ‘La Gitan’ (‘The Gypsy’) seems to be thinking it over, before he comes to his senses and ducks into the getaway car - demonstrating a sense of restraint which he will increasingly abandon as the movie progresses.

Rather inadequately retitled as ‘Speaking of Murder’ for English-speaking audiences (wouldn’t something closer to the literal ‘The Red is Lit’, or ‘The Red Light Is On’ have worked better?), Grangier’s film has the particular ice-cold, proletarian atmosphere which defines so many post-war French crime movies down pat.

Certainly, there’s little of the smoky glamour and lethargic ennui which defined some of Gabin’s other films in the genre be found here. Instead, he and his gang conduct their day-to-day from remote lock-up garages, chrome-countered street corner bars and shabby rural outbuildings. Mirroring the atmosphere of dour alienation later perfected by Jean-Pierre Melville (who had directed his first crime film a year earlier), the gang members are squinty-eyed hard cases who’d rather lose a limb than express emotion in front of their colleagues. Everywhere looks absolutely freezing.

Despite this though, Grangier dials back the nihilism considerably here, humanising his crooks, and (with the help of his fine cast) making their interplay rather fascinating. Admittedly, ‘La Gitan’ is indeed the remorseless, taciturn psycho which our initial encounter with him suggested, but ‘Sailor’ (Jean Bérard) provides rather rather more reluctant muscle, whilst Gabin (‘The Blond’) provides a rather more paternal presence, labouring under the strain of keeping the outfit together whilst also affecting the appearance of a legitimate businessman. The fly in the ointment meanwhile is Fredo, ‘L’American’ (Paul Frankeur), the gang’s fixer, a slimy chancer Ventura doesn’t trust as far as he can throw him, but whom Gabin - much to his later chagrin - insists is legit.

With all this good heist movie stuff already in play, I confess I was slightly disappointed that much of the remainder of the film concentrates instead on Gabin’s relationship with his much younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, later of ‘The French Connection’), a feckless kid who’s just got out of the joint on bail, but insists on skipping town to hook up with his girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot).

Regrettably, Hélène is characterised here in strictly one-dimensional terms, as a greedy, black-hearted bitch who cuckolds naïve Pierre at every possible opportunity, mocking him behind his back and earning the contempt of his far cannier big brother in process. Meanwhile of course, the cops are hovering, keen to pull Pierre in for breaking his bail conditions and hoping they can persuade him to spill the beans on his brother’s outfit to avoid heading back to the slammer.

The scenes between Gabin, Bozzuffi and their elderly mother (Gina Licloz) convey a great deal of warmth, establishing their strained and unconventional family dynamic rather nicely, but beyond that, it’s a shame that the film’s story eventually takes a rather melodramatic turn, incorporating a series of door-slamming familial confrontations, and culminating in a would-be tragic denouement hinging on the consequences of an easily resolved misunderstanding.

It’s difficult to credit that this rather bathetic bit of plotting came from the pen of Auguste Le Breton (whose novels provided the inspiration for about half of the calssics I listed in this review’s opening paragraphs), but… many a slip betwixt page and screen, I suppose.

For the most part, Grangier’s direction here is plain and unobtrusive, devoid of the stylistic flourishes we usually associate with noir, but, perhaps for that very reason, the film’s intermittent scenes of bloodthirsty violence stand out. In particular, a bungled armoured car heist followed by a vehicular chase and massacre midway through the movie really makes an impression, framing outbursts of chaotic carnage against a bleak, uninhabited rural backdrop, whilst the climactic confrontation between Gabin and Ventura (you knew it was coming) achieves an impressive level of intensity.

If ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ can be seen then as a rock-solid exemplar of French crime cinema, its routine story-telling elevated by a seedy atmosphere and an exceptional cast, the second film in Kino’s French Noir set proves a far more unconventional and off-beat proposition… as we shall discover in a few days.

The Other Breakfast in the Ruins & other updates.

So, first of all, I owe loyal/remaining readers an apology for yet another lapse in posting. I had been looking forward to regaining a bit of free time to devote to this-sort-of-thing during March and April, but, once again, the responsibilities and nasty surprises of grown up life have contrived to do a number on me. We’ll see how things go moving forward, but for now at least I’ve finally got a few new posts together to keep things ticking over through May.

Meanwhile though, imagine my surprise when I saw an update on Andrew Nette’s Pulp Curry blog last month, stating that he’d made an appearance on The Breakfast in the Ruins Podcast (talking about New English Library biker paperbacks, no less).

After momentarily feeling a bit dizzy and contemplating the possibility of there being some (appropriately Moorcockian) multiverse-blurring type shenanigans going on, I eventually reached the more prosaic conclusion that The Breakfast in the Ruins Podcast has been operating out of Bradford since 2019, is hosted by Andrew Stimpson, and covers a wide variety of pop cultural topics spinning off from the work of Michael Moorcock.

I’ve been sampling some episodes over the past few weeks, and it’s a great listen, which I’m sure readers of this blog would enjoy.

I’m very happy to have discovered the podcast, and I hope that Andrew and his collaborators won’t bear a grudge against me for sitting on the blogger, gmail and mixcloud IDs they could otherwise have claimed. (Well, I suppose they got the coveted .com, so that’s cool.)

Anyway - hopefully our shared belief that Breakfast in the Ruins is a great name for a thing on the internet will help overcome such petty differences and bring us together, fingers crossed.

In other podcast-related news, I was also overjoyed last month to note the appearance of a new episode of one of my all-time favourites, El Diabolik’s World of Psychotronic Soundtracks - their first in several years.

I’ll save the hyperbole, and instead merely state that I find the show (and it is more in the spirit of a broadcast radio show than what we’d usually think of as a ‘podcast’, really) entertaining, educational and strangely relaxing, and it is great to see them back in action.

There are few greater pleasures in my life than cueing up a few episodes from their archive to accompany a long walk in the countryside, and I’m confident that anyone with a passing interest in film and library music and associated esoteric mysteries of ‘60s/’70s pop culture will find the experience similarly fulfilling.

Right - that’s all for now. Proper content on the way very soon.