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).

French Crime at the BFI.

Last month, the Bristish Film Institute held a series of screenings celebrating the work of legendary French actor Jean Gabin. Alongside the more revered items on his filmography (La Bête Humaine, Pépé le Moko etc.), the season also incorporated a few diversions into less familiar areas of French cinema – in particular, the numerous crime films that Gabin appeared in from the ‘30s right through to the early ‘70s. Having recently cultivated a keen interest in the way crime films developed as a genre in different countries in the post-war era (not that you’d know it from this blog), I thought catching a few slices of pre-Melville French noir might be good fun, and dutifully laid down my money for a triple bill.


First up, the translation-proof Razzia sur la Chnouf (Henri Decoin, 1955). Never released with an English title, the word ‘chnouf’ seems to have caused some confusion - seemingly an obscure slang term for drugs or narcotics, that leaves us with a less than elegant literal translation of ‘Raid on the Drugs’? I don’t know whether this title-related uncertainty harmed the film’s profile overseas, but I hope not, because ‘Razzia..’ proves to be a cracking bit of hard-boiled Parisian business, worthy of anyone’s attention.

Gabin wasn’t my main reason for watching the film, but nonetheless, it’s hard to deny that he’s absolutely brilliant here, portraying a veteran mid-level operator (‘Henri from Nantes’) hired by the boss of a Paris drug cartel to oversee his distribution network. Brutally efficient, but also calm, restrained and strangely compassionate in his approach, Henri wastes no time in establishing a kind of patriarchal respect from his underlings as he sets up HQ in the restaurant that serves as his cover, swiftly dispatching traitors, punishing slackers and even casually setting up home with the cute waitress (Fellini regular Magali Noël) that all the younger men had their eye on.

Extremely well-written and beautifully photographed and directed, ‘Razzia..’ builds up a rich picture of the Paris underworld, with much of the movie’s pleasure deriving from the scenes in which we follow Gabin as he goes about his day-to-day (well, night-to-night) business, breezing through opium dens, crash-pads, jazz clubs, farmhouse drug labs and all-black marijuana hang-outs, with Decoin’s panoramic shooting style and excellent, naturalistic performances from the entire cast helping imbue the film’s environment with a sense of depth and realism that goes well beyond the claustrophobic confines of yr average set-bound crime flick.

It helps too that the movie is hard as nails content-wise, full of stuff that you’d NEVER see in an English language film from the ‘50s, ranging from graphic drug use to explicit/non-judgemental portrayals of homosexuality and prostitution, not to mention a graphic axe murder(!) and some of the most enthusiastic cursing I’ve ever heard in the French language. (The bursts of guttural obscenity as the English subtitles offer us ‘fucking dickhead’ and ‘wide-legged whore’ etc are pretty hair-raising.) The gangster action, when it gets going, it handled in a merciless, gun-crazy style reminiscent of a ‘30s Warner Bros flick – an element which is nicely parodied in a scene that follows a police raid on Henri’s restaurant, when we see cops with brooms sweeping up the dozens of shooters that have been abandoned under the tables.

The only bum note in this otherwise wonderful film is struck by the ending. Presumably realising that up to this point they’d made a film in which presents a ruthless, drug-pushing criminal as a sympathetic, essentially decent man, the filmmakers seem to have felt the need to square things up with some more conventional movie morality, orchestrating a final reel turn-around that feels face-slappingly false – the equivalent of one of those jive-ass moral lectures that were tacked onto the end of movies like ‘The Asphalt Jungle’, but executed here without the benefit of any “ok, you’ve had your fun, now here’s this other bit we had to put in” wink n’ nod routine from the director. All the same though, a sappy conclusion can’t spoil the strength of what’s gone before, and ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’ is about as daring, riotous and stylistically accomplished as genre cinema was ever allowed to get during the ‘50s – highly recommended.


Jumping ahead almost a decade, it’s difficult to summon quite the same enthusiasm for Henri Verneuil’s Mélodie en Sous-Sol (1963), variously known in the English-speaking world as ‘Any Number Can Win’, ‘The Caper That Sank’, ‘The Big Grab’, and, most sniggersomely, ‘The Big Snatch’.

What we have here is basically a variant on the old “bunch of guys rob a casino” template, although it lacks either the intensity of Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ or the pessimism of Melville’s ‘Bob Le Flambeur’, steering far closer to light-hearted japery of Lewis Milestone’s ‘Ocean’s 11’, made two years earlier. There are somewhat fewer guys at work here at least, with the job (and the movie) basically comprising a two-hander between Gabin and his young protégé Alain Delon, and the most likeable aspect of the movie arises from the fact that instead of suave criminal masterminds, they’re basically just a pair of low-level shmucks punching above their weight – Gabin a haggard old jailbird stuck with a bungalow in the suburbs and a wife who doesn’t quite get him, and Delon not much more than a slack-jawed teenage punk.

Efficiently staged and competently directed, there are numerous nice moments to be found here – I particularly liked the surprisingly arty/modernistic opening credits that see Gabin returning home from jail to find that newly-built towerblocks now surround his country cottage, and the ending is really well done too. But somehow the movie just never really takes off. No problems or antagonists ever really emerge to threaten Gabin and Delon’s well-rehearsed plan, meaning much of the time leading up to the robbery is spent treading water in comedy/romance mode, following Delon as he makes the best of his ‘aristocratic playboy’ cover persona, hanging around a Cannes hotel seducing a Swedish heiress.

Which is all well and good I suppose, but rarely has a film cried out quite so desperately for a splash of tehnicolor. I realise that sounds like a strange complaint, and I guess a mid-budget movie like this could have gone either way in ’63, but as Delon spends scene after scene cruising ‘round the sea-front in his flashy motor ogling chicks in bikinis, the decision to shoot in black & white starts to seem plain perverse. Some suitably blaring, oversaturated colour would really have brought things to life, marking ‘Mélodie..’ out as an early example of the kind of frothy, jet-setting thrillers that proliferated through the following decade. But the stark black & white photography (together with the weighty presence of Gabin) unfortunately invites comparison to an older, more serious mode of crime film with which this one can’t hope to compete, content as it is to never really rise much above the level of a pleasant rainy afternoon time-filler.


And speaking of those older, more serious kinda crime films, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more austere shot at the genre than Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) (literal translation ‘Hands off the Loot’(?), otherwise known as ‘Honour Among Thieves’). A quintessentially French affair, this one sees Gabin playing an aging mobster who seems to drift through life in a cloud of sheer ennui, caring for nothing beyond a nice glass of champagne, the company of a pretty lady and, as the programme notes from Criterion’s Geoffrey O’Brien put it, “listening to that harmonica tune he seems to like so much”.

The tune in question is a melancholic, minor key melody that reminded me of the kind of thing that tends to play at the end of Japanese gangster movies, as the entire cast lies dead in some wasteground and the tragic hero limps off into the sunset nursing a bullet wound, or whatever. Apparently taking such doomed sentiments to heart before anything remotely bad has even happened to him, Gabin’s character Max likes to put this number on the jukebox wherever he goes, and, when we follow him back to his apartment, it’s pretty unsurprising to learn that it seems to be the one record he owns, a reflection of the doleful, resigned nobility that seems to radiate outward from Gabin’s performance and gradually overtakes the entire film. (Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t help thinking that you could draw a direct line across innumerable aesthetic and cultural boundaries from Gabin’s performance here to the kind of ‘sad tough guy’ archetype that Takashi Kitano made his own in movies like ‘Violent Cop’ many, many years later.)

If the three films covered in this post are any indication, Jean Gabin is the kind of actor whose performances tend to rule his films with fists of iron, setting the tone of the piece as definitively as any writer or director, and that particularly seems to be the case here, in spite of an extremely strong supporting cast. As in ‘..Chnouf’, Lino Ventura (later the star of Meville’s superb ‘Army of Shadows’) acquits himself well as a dead-eyed thug, and Jeanne Moreau practically burns a hole through the screen in one of her earliest defining roles. (I love the fact that in all these movies, Gabin – who looks like a portly, even more weather-beaten David Lynch – seems to have girls a third of his age fawning over him, and somehow actually manages to make that seem plausible, rather than indulgent and creepy.)

Although far less graphic and incident-packed than ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, ‘..Grisbi’ is in many ways an even better crime film, one in which violence is rarely seen, but forms a constant, lurking threat beneath the film’s respectable veneer, revealing itself in a quick cutaway shot of a would-be assassin brandishing a cosh under his coat as he steps out of a car, or in the sudden back-hand slaps that Gabin delivers to anyone who pisses him off. Things do kick off in pretty explosive fashion during the brilliantly staged finale in which the two criminal factions meet up on an isolated country road for a hostage / loot exchange, but despite this ‘..Grisbi’ is a film in which criminal face-offs and gang violence are merely incidental to the lives of our characters – an unfortunate inconvenience, rather than a central focus.

Although still functioning as a bloody and effective crime film, ‘..Grisbi’ also manages to acquit itself as a more ‘high brow’ piece of French cinema, telling a simple, emotionally resonant tale full of dense and believable characterisation that, though highly stylised, never tips over into melodrama. A good litmus test for these things I think is the fact that it would still be a thoroughly watchable movie even if Max never stooped to picking up a tommy gun and just sat around for ninety minutes drinking champagne and listening to his harmonica tune. Classy stuff indeed.

Losey at the BFI, Part # 1: Blind Date (1959) and Eva (1962)

All of Joseph Losey’s major concerns as a director can be seen, admittedly in pretty clumsy fashion, in the earliest of his British films I caught at the BFI, 1959’s Blind Date. A quick, low budget (I’m assuming) whodunit, ‘Blind Date’ gets off to an excellent start, as an aspiring Belgium artist played by Hardy Kruger hops off a London bus with a bunch of flowers, and proceeds to hop, skip and jump his way along the North bank of the Thames to the accompaniment of John Dankworth’s terrific, upbeat modern jazz score. (Mixing lively strings with bebop cool, it’s VERY Miles & Gil influenced sort of stuff – pretty damn fine.) Reaching what we assume to be his lady’s residence – an exquisitely, almost disgustingly, lavish art & antique-filled flat – Kruger finds the door on the latch and wonders in, making himself at home as he awaits her arrival. To his surprise, the police – led by tough Welsh detective Stanley Baker – arrive instead. A dead girl is discovered in the flat’s back bedroom, and poor Hardy is understandably subjected to some serious questioning. So far so good, but things really begin to flag as Kruger’s character begins to recount his affair with the wife of a prominent diplomat (Micheline Presle), instigating a a series of flashbacks, as the dastardly secrets culminating in the murder of a nightclub singer begin to unravel.

‘Blind Date’ is a very well made film, no question – Losey’s powerful eye for detail and claustrophobic use of interiors are in evidence throughout, and the difficult theme of class privilege and public school networks being utilised to whitewash aristocratic scandal is excellently and subtley handled, several years before the Profumo Affair would throw similar concerns directly into the public eye. The scene in which Baker’s working class detective is curtly informed by one of his softly spoken superiors that he’s “perfectly good at solving crimes”, but “fails to understand the wider ramifications of public service”, is chilling.



These points of interest aside though, the film is sunk by some major flaws. Primarily: the script is lousy. The relationship between Kruger and Presle, the pivot upon which the rest of the drama is supposed to balance, rings completely hollow, their scenes filled with passionless gestures of unconvincing passion and flatulent pseudo-bohemian dialogue of the “is this what art means to you??” variety. It’s also amusing to see that, in the grand tradition of films about artists, Kruger’s paintings are absolute crap, making his humourless pontificating about the struggle of the artist even more of a chore to sit through. And when the big plot reveal rolls around at the end, ‘Blind Date’ achieves a somewhat unique place in the annals of crime fiction by featuring a trick ending that manages to be both entirely predictable, and also to make almost no sense whatsoever.

Good performances might have saved the day, but, whilst Baker is characteristically solid, both Kruger and Presle ham it up horribly, never managing to convince us that their characters are anything other than thoroughly dislikable, ruining any sense of human tragedy that might have been extracted from the Double Indemnity-esque plotline.


‘Blind Date’ is not a terrible film by any means, but sadly these failures outweigh its obvious strengths. It could easily be argued that Losey put a lot of himself into the character of Kruger’s painter, portrayed as he is as a deadly serious, socially-conscious artist stumbling into the labyrinthine weirdness of the British class system, but nonetheless, as an early ‘60s British noir I found it decidedly inferior to Basil Dearden’s much-discussed but rarely-screened ‘Victim’ (1961), and I fear it is ultimately best viewed as a curio, or as an interesting precursor to the director’s later work.

(A far more interesting analysis of ‘Blind Date’ as it fits into Losey’s wider work can be read here at Sense of Cinema.)

Much the same mixture of strengths and failures can be seen, on a much grander scale, in one of the most ambitious and troubled films of Losey’s career, the French/Italian co-production Eva.


Whilst Losey may have maintained a low profile in the English speaking world, it seems that many in the European New Wave were hip to him from the word go. Apparently his name was being thrown around by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics even before he left America, and a still from the otherwise obscure initial release of ‘The Damned’ even made their cover. With a rep like that on the continent, I guess it was hardly surprising that Losey might have wanted to blow the comparatively stuffy British film industry for the more visionary realm of French and Italian cinema, and it was on that basis that he found himself shooting ‘Eva’ in Italy, with substantial backing from France’s influential Hakim brothers.

Befitting this change of scene, ‘Eva’ certainly marks a sea-change in the director’s approach. Gone are the tight narratives, tight framing and tight budget of his thrillers – ‘Eva’ immediately sets out its stall as a fuckin’ Work Of Art, with capital letters. A deliberate attempt to establish its creator as a cinematic maestro to be reckoned with, it is a sprawling, diaphanous, decadent mess of a movie that exists in any number of confusing variant prints, stretching between two and three hours in length. (The restored print the BFI are showing has been cobbled together Frankenstein style in an attempt to recreate the director’s original cut – as a result, some scenes are blighted by irremovable Norwegian subtitles, and image quality varies throughout.)


In purely visual and technical terms, the film is astonishing. Losey may have toyed with a distinctive palette of architecture, furnishings, artworks, shadows and reflections in the mise en scene of his previous films, but here, in the heart of European opulence and off the leash of commercial cinema, he just goes bonkers, filling every available space with rich, dramatic texture than almost overshadows the human drama. Rarely have Venice and Rome been rendered so exquisitely on film, and with Stanley Baker, Jeanne Morreau and the beautiful Virna Lisi mooning around them to another killer jazz soundtrack (this time by prolific French soundtrack composer Michel Legrand), it’s hard not to just sit back and let ‘Eva’s gorgeous aesthetics roll over you like a velvet tank. Stuffed to the gills with jagged juxtapositions and sledgehammer visual symbolism, it’s rare that five minutes goes go without me wanting to hit ‘pause’ and exclaim “now THAT’S a fucking shot!”

The elephant in the room though is of course, Fellini. To say that ‘Eva’ was very much working within the new blueprint for European film that Fellini had perfected with 1960’s incomparable ‘Le Dolce Vita’ would not be to take anything away from Losey and his collaborators. But with its labyrinthine party scenes, its gratuitous nightclub acts, and snatches of overheard conversation..? With its high-heels clattering across nocturnal cobbled streets, its glistening fountains, fast cars and strained attempts to be as Italian as it possibly can..? With its virile male protagonist staggering senselessly between alluring women and endless insane scenarios without pause for upwards of two hours…?

Let’s just say that, for much of its running time, ‘Eva’ approaches a homage to Fellini in much the same spirit that Ronnie Biggs might be dubbed ‘the great train-homager’. (Joke courtesy of Stephen Fry on ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ the other week).


Nonetheless, ‘Eva’ is blessed with more than it’s fair share of shattering pure-cinema moments and images liable to live on in one’s mind forever, and it could still have emerged from Federico’s shadow to become a powerful film in its own right. But, as with ‘Blind Date’, it’s the poor handling of narrative that eventually sinks the picture. Admittedly, ‘Eva’s more sprawling and amorphous nature doesn’t call for the same tight plotting as the earlier film, but still, every time the director tries to convince us that this is a serious and profound exploration of human feeling, its pulpy origins in James Hadley Chase’s source novel can’t help but shine through, veering into the realm of unintentional camp, as situations become increasingly fatuous and melodramatic, and characters’ motivations remain distinctly unbelievable.

The film left me with frankly no idea why Stanley Baker’s ambitious Welsh novelist (a walking cliché of the ‘shrewd-boyo-made-good’, for all of Baker’s attempts to invest him with more depth) would want to betray his clever and charming movie star fiancée (Lisi) for Moreau’s frankly shifty and less attractive (relatively speaking) courtesan, and vague intimations of potboiler-style ‘uncontrollable passions’ fail to fill the gap, leaving us with the impression that Baker’s character is simply some kind of mixed up fool, instantly sabotaging the empathy we’re supposed to share with him later as his carefully-crafted persona begins to collapse and his life disintegrates.


Enjoyable as the film may be if viewed out of context, or as a sumptuous relic of a now distant era, there is a faintly desperate feeling behind ‘Eva’ that is hard to ignore. Shot at the same time as Fellini was preparing to unleash ‘8 1/2’ on an unsuspecting world, during that brief window in which Italian culture, Italian fashion, Italian cars, French art cinema and American jazz were the last word in untouchable cool, it gives the impression of an Anglo-American director overreaching himself massively in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the continent’s tastemakers in the most garish and obvious way possible, abandoning in the process most of the elements that had initially attracted the French critics to his work.

By all accounts, Losey put his heart and soul into realizing ‘Eva’, and brooded for years over the way its near total failure in the face of producer-enforced cuts and botched distribution killed his attempt to establish himself as a European auteur. But, as the chap who introduced the BFI screening pointed out, Losey’s failure is our gain, as he returned to England tail between his legs and immediately proceeded to make what’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, and perhaps one of the greatest British films I’ve ever seen, 1963’s ‘The Servant’.