Shadows and Frogs

Crime pays in Film Forum’s expansive French noir series.

Although it was American directors who first made guns and violence look incredibly cool in the 1930s, it took French film critics to first theorize, in the 1940s, the genre known as film noir. No wonder then that France is second only to the U.S. when it comes to the cinematic exploration of baser instincts. Film Forum’s sprawling five-week primer, “The French Crime Wave,” mixes well-known entries like Breathless and The Wages of Fear with more obscure, but no less twisted, picks (Coup de Torchon, Riptide). Rather than try to summarize all 38 movies—a feat more difficult than a diamond heist—here’s a guide to recurring themes and stars.

Found in translation

Though you may think hard-boiled novels are quintessentially American, a number of Gallic directors have successfully Frenchified Yankee pulp. Prime examples are René Clément’s definitive Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Purple Noon (1960), and François Truffaut’s takes on David Goodis (1960’s Shoot the Piano Player) and William Irish, a.k.a. Cornell Woolrich (1969’s Mississippi Mermaid). The chilling amoral landscapes in Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280 came to life in Alain Corneau’s Série Noire (1979) and Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (1981), respectively, with the latter ingeniously transposing the U.S. South to a French colony in Africa. Claude Chabrol, however, preferred the venomous atmosphere created by the veddy British Ruth Rendell for La Cérémonie (1995), a mise-en-scène tour de force that successfully transplants the literal class struggle in her novel A Judgement in Stone to Brittany.

Ceci n’est pas un spoiler

A lot of noirs are about suspense, and nobody’s going to give away the awesome twist in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955). But some of the finest films in the series aren’t so much about plot as about pitch-dark bleakness; it’s not ruining any punch line to reveal the lack—nay, the impossibility—of happy endings in these selections. Série Noire is a harsh portrait of a loser brought down by a nymphet in an urban no-man’s-land, while in Jacques Becker’s decidedly weird Goupi Mains Rouges (1943), rural France is packed with petty liars and sneaky cheats. But the biggest revelation is Yves Allégret’s Riptide (1949), in which it rains all the goddamned time and the sense of hopeless social determinism is both poetic and oppressive. Mark your calendar: It plays on August 18 only.

The beautiful menace

The tough, trench-coated icons of French noir included Jean Gabin, who evolved from romantic lead battered by fate in the 1930s (1937’s Pépé le Moko) to authoritative patriarch in the 1950s and ’60s (1969’s The Sicilian Clan), and Lino Ventura, a former wrestler whose pugnacious screen persona encompassed a sense of street honor (1960’s Classe Tous Risques, 1981’s Garde à Vue). But the ultimate genre lead may well be Alain Delon, whose acting method boiled down to a kind of aloof, opaque narcissism that read as dangerous, because you felt he had no regard for anybody but himself. This worked wonders for his Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, his emotionally closed-off adman in Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969), and especially in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge (1970) and Un Flic (1972). Delon wasn’t likable, even when playing a good guy; he was something even better—magnetic.

Quitting is for losers

The only thing harder than pulling off a perfect heist (see 1955’s Rififi and Bob le Flambeur, 1962’s Le Doulos) is trying not to do it. Some of the most interesting films show how the criminal life keeps sucking back those attempting to escape it; the generation gap between hesitating old gangsters and younger, eager thugs provided extra depth. Look out for the ethical and moral push-pull in 1954’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi, Bob le Flambeur and even the humorous Les Tontons Flingueurs (1963).

There is nothing like a dame

Of course, stars surfed the French Crime Wave, including Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows (1957), Isabelle Huppert in La Cérémonie and Brigitte Bardot in La Vérité (1960). But lesser-known actors are perhaps even more rewarding. Madeleine Robinson gives a naturalistic, singularly modern performance in Riptide; Romy Schneider dominates La Piscine like a ripe, golden goddess. Elsewhere, Edith Scob and Sylvie Testud, typical actors’ actors, burn the screen as a disfigured young woman in 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and an incestuous criminal in Murderous Maids (2000), respectively. Quai des Orfèvres (1947) alone has two stellar turns: Suzy Delair as the gleefully, exuberantly vulgar music-hall singer Jenny Lamour, and Simone Renant as the glacially elegant photographer Dora Monier. The scenes in which Dora silently covets Jenny and her exchange with Louis Jouvet’s Inspector Antoine on the topic of women suggest an undercurrent of eroticism that’s as powerful as it is suppressed. Noir c’est noir, indeed.

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