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: 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.

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.