Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire 9781788318617, 9781784539719

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Published in 2019 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2019 Deborah Walker-Morrison The right of Deborah Walker-Morrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of the Moving Image 57 ISBN: 978 1 78453 971 9 eISBN: 978 1 78673 518 8 ePDF: 978 1 78672 518 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Minion Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 2.1 La bête humaine

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Figure 2.2 La bête humaine

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Figure 2.3 Human Desire

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Figure 2.4 Human Desire

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Figure 3.1 Le corbeau

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Figure 3.2 Les héros sont fatigués

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Figure 3.3 Les héros sont fatigués

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Figure 4.1 Manon

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Figure 4.2 Manon

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Figure 5.1 Martin Roumagnac

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Figure 5.2 Casque d’or

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Figure 5.3 Martin Roumagnac

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Figure 5.4 J’irai cracher sur vos tombes

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Figure 6.1 Le dernier tournant

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Figure 6.2 The Postman Always Rings Twice

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Figure 6.3 Thérèse Raquin

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Figure 6.4 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud

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Figure 6.5 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud

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Figure 7.1 Les Diaboliques

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Figure 7.2 Voici le temps des Assassins

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List of Illustrations Figure 7.3 Retour de Manivelle

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Figure 7.4 La vérité sur Bébé Donge

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Figure 8.1 Bonnes à tuer

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Figure 8.2 Une Manche et la Belle

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Figure 8.3 La Bête à L’Affût

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Figure 9.1 Quai des Orfèvres

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Figure 9.2 Le désordre et la nuit

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Figure 9.3 En cas de Malheur

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Figure 10.1 Bob Le Flambeur

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Figure 10.2 Du Rififi chez les hommes

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Figure 10.3 Touchez pas au Grisbi

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Figure 10.4 Du Rififi chez les hommes

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Tables Table 4.1 Effect of World War II (1940 – 60) on operational sex ratios and marriage markets in France and USA

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Table C.1 The comparative popularity of Classic French noir

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Table A.1 Demonic fatale, amoureuse* or garce as major antagonist

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Table A.2 Homme fatal* as duplicitous seducer, redeemed homme(*) or evil/flawed male anti-hero

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Table A.3 Romantic fatalitaire or good-bad girl as protagonist (star-crossed lovers* 18) 33/75

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Acknowledgements Classic French Noir is the fruit of over 15 years’ thinking, research and writing in the field of film noir. Thus I have many people and organisations to thank. First, thanks to Phil Powrie, Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, organisers of the Annual French Cinema Studies Conference, London 2002, for hosting my very first paper on the subject, which examined the quasi absence of the spider-woman femme fatale in French film noir. Since then, preliminary research and early chapter drafts have been presented at a number of international conferences. In particular I would like to thank the Society of Cognitive Studies for hosting papers at annual conferences in 2011 and 2016, and Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate Quinn, organisers of the Sixth Interdisciplinary Conference of the International Crime Genre Research Network, Ireland, ‘Consuming Crime’, Limerick, 2015, at which I presented preliminary research for Chapter 10. Sections in Chapters 5 and 10 have drawn on material published in several of my chapters in French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Rolls and Walker, 2009). I thank Palgrave-Macmillan, and Alistair Rolls, who authored the first five chapters. Thanks also to the Film & History journal, which published an early version of Chapter 4 (Walker-Morrison 2015). Carrying out French research from Antipodean Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, can be a challenge. I am therefore especially grateful to staff of French film and research libraries in Paris: the Bibliothèque Nationale Franc ois Mitterrand, L’Inathèque, the Bibliothèque du Film and the Iconothèque at the Cinémathèque franc aise, for their invaluable assistance during my numerous short research trips to the City of Lights. Closer to home, I also thank staff at the University of Auckland Library for their tireless efforts in procuring DVDs of rare films and facilitating access to French databases. Thanks also to the team at CBO Box Office for providing an invaluable resource, and for being quick to update and add entries in response to requests.

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Acknowledgements Friends, family, colleagues and students have contributed directly and indirectly to the book. First, thanks to my husband Neil Morrison, for years of patience and support, especially during moments of writer’s block, research fatigue and manuscript panic, and for enthusiastic feedback on successive drafts. Thanks to Bob Swaim and Franc ois Thomas for hours of café conversations and encouragement during my stays in Paris. Thanks to Pascal Bensadoun for sharing off-air recordings of classic films. Thanks to friends who have provided hospitality in Paris and London, in particular Termis Tousson, Chikako Inoue, Sabine Bernert and Brigitte Gauthier. And to Cendrine Jarraud-Leblanc, thanks for providing the perfect writing retreat, in the South of France. To my colleague and friend, Emerita Professor Raylene Ramsay, thanks for casting a keen and generous eye over the revised manuscript. Thanks to students of ‘France on Screen, from Lumière to Godard’, whose questions, comments and curiosity have been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. I began using evolutionary theory to examine gender in noir at a time when such an approach was viewed with scepticism and distrust by the majority of film scholars. I therefore extend a special thanks to Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland, for his wisdom and support, for introducing me to leading scholars of evolutionary and biocultural approaches to film and literature, and for insightful comments on a draft of my early work (Walker 2007). This project was generously supported by successive grants from within the University of Auckland: the School of European Languages and Literatures, the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, and the Faculty of Arts. I am grateful to Campbell Birch, Philippe Valax and Ian Fookes for research assistance, and to Tim Page for assistance with the images. Finally, thanks to all involved in bringing the manuscript to production. I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers whose encouraging, perceptive feedback prompted me to further refine the work. Warm thanks to copy editor and indexer Pat FitzGerald, for her excellent contributions. Last but certainly not least, a huge thanks to my editor, Maddy HameyThomas (and team) at I.B.Tauris for supporting and nurturing the project over the last 18 months. Merci à tous et à toutes. Ng
a mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

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1 Introduction

Since the late 1970s, gender in film noir has been a ‘hot topic’. Feminist scholars have produced an impressive body of work, focusing largely on the femme fatale in American film noir.1 Yet, despite close connections between French and American noir (film and fiction), both having emerged out of the anxieties and pleasures of a complex and on-going transatlantic exchange,2 the issue of gender in French film noir remains relatively unexplored. The present book aims to fill this critical gap, focusing on the dangerous, most often fatal (in the dual sense of deadly and/or ill-fated) desires that are key to the genre. I cover French film noir of the Occupation, Liberation and postwar period (1946 – 59) as it evolved out of French poetic realism in the 1930s, comparing and contrasting key films with their American counterparts. I look at both fatal females and males, asking to what extent these figures are distinctly French, and what specific sociohistorical and cultural contexts and crises of masculinity inform their construction. Notably, I explore whether these gendered representations provide evidence of latent or blatant misogyny, designed to shore up patriarchal norms, or whether they signal progressive moves in the direction of gender equality. Noir’s constitutive hybridity, its emergence as transatlantic Franco-American exchange, make it an ideal candidate for contrastive sociological analysis, with differences in gendered representations pointing to sociohistorical differences between the two 3

Classic French Noir countries. Common features (between French and American noir) point beyond social contexts, to human universals. Thus my primary working hypothesis is that the highly charged atmosphere of noir and its focus on a tightly woven nexus of sexual desire, socioeconomic striving, violence and death enable these films to be read from a biocultural perspective: as sociohistorically, culturally inflected dramas of co-evolved human mate selection and reproduction.

Defining film noir I do not define noir as simply a genre or sub-genre, although I will sometimes refer to it this way, as a kind of shorthand.3 Neither do I see it as primarily a historical cycle or movement, although I will use specific terms like classic French and American noir to refer to historically situated corpora. And though visual style is central, noir is more than a style,4 nor is it necessarily linked to a single ideology or philosophy, despite clear links in classic American noir to the left5 and to existentialist angst.6 In line with recent thinking, I shall define noir as an ideologically diverse, transcultural, transhistorical, transgeneric phenomenon: the coming together of thematic and narrative concepts and visual style expressive of the noir mood as conveying a certain sensibility, optique,7 or worldview.8 Following Steve Neale’s call for a ‘clear and consistent set of criteria’9 and bearing in mind his masterful dissection of the problematic nature of previous canonical definitions,10 I will use the term film noir for any films which display the following interconnected stylistic, narrative and thematic features, all of which – with the notable exception of romantic love – were mentioned in Borde and Chaumeton’s seminal 1955 study: 1. the association of crime and eroticism: greed, desire or doomed romantic passion and death; 2. sombre emotional tone, reflected metaphorically in visually dark, unbalanced composition, via expressionist lighting (chiaroscuro) and oblique angles, at least for key moments in the narrative; 3. underlying sense of pessimism, fatalism, existential angst and/or cynicism and paranoia, often highlighted by the use of flashback, circular narrative and/or subjective or omniscient voice-over narration; 4

Introduction 4. moral ambiguity: the problematisation of conventional boundaries between good and evil, often underscored by an alternation between realism and metaphorical (lyrical or surreal) imagery; 5. absence of positive closure: good does not triumph or merely appears to do so at a surface level. Even when the crime is solved and/or the culprits neutralised, the spectator is left with a feeling of malaise. This complex of features, none of which are unique to noir, allows the inclusion of generically diverse films, from romance and melodrama, female gothic to adventure, ‘hard-boiled’ police procedural and gangster and heist films. The linkage between crime and desire, outlined in the first point, highlights the centrality of gender trouble to noir, trouble that will play out in wildly diverse and complex ways. Omitting from my definition specific terms like hard-boiled or femme fatale recognises the transgeneric nature of the phenomenon. Films noirs involving a sexually exploitative fatal male as homme fatal and his female victim(s) also include elements of the melodrama and female gothic, as has been recognised.11 Le polar or crime drama includes police procedural or detective fictions, in which the solving of a violent crime (murder, robbery) drives the plot, and the gangster or heist film. I distinguish straight or conventional polars from noir by the former’s moral and epistemological certainty, their clear distinction between law-enforcing protagonists and criminal antagonists, as reflected in the absence of the last two or three key elements of my definition. For films which display the first four features but which end well, I use the term film gris or ‘grey film’, as a noir sub-genre.

Corpus Film noir is often defined in relation to specific historical moments. Classic American noir, for example, generally refers to black and white Hollywood noir-style studio films made during the 1940s and 1950s. For French noir, films corresponding to my working definition can be roughly divided into four, partly overlapping periods: poetic realism (as proto-noir) 1930 – 40; Occupation noir, 1940 – 4; Liberation noir, 1944 –6; and classic French noir 1946 –59 (roughly covering the period of the Fourth Republic (1945 – 58)). While often set in the rapidly modernising Parisian capital, my corpus also 5

Classic French Noir includes many films with a rural or provincial, small town or historical setting and includes films set outside France, in the USA or ‘exotic’ locations in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. To date, scholars of French cinema focusing on highly acclaimed authors and works have constructed a small canon, leaving dozens of popular and/or critically well-regarded (but often less accessible) French films noirs unstudied. There have been two book-length studies fully devoted to the subject, both of which provide very incomplete corpora. Robin Buss’ French Film Noir (1994) barely discusses gendered representation, and Thomas Pillard’s recent work, Le film noir francais face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre [French Film Noir and Postwar Upheavals] (2014) includes only 25 films from the postwar period, ten of which are comic parody noirs that lack the dark fatalism and paranoia which I see as central to the noir optique.12 The present study proposes a broad corpus of 101 French films noir from 1931 –59 (see Appendix 1), many of which are not mentioned in these previous works and have received little or no scholarly attention. My detailed analyses will often privilege lesser known films, generally with a claim for their artistic contribution,13 sometimes simply because their popular success makes them better exemplars in terms of ideological impact, sometimes because their commercial failure is key to understanding the star trajectories and gender dynamics underpinning French noir. Where I gloss over well-known, canonical films, readers are referred to existing analyses.

French and American film noir: historical links The term film noir famously owes its origin to French critic Nino Frank writing for L’Ecran Francais in 1946, after viewing a large number of cynical American crime thrillers made during World War II.14 Panorama du film noir (1955), the seminal work on classic American noir, recently re-edited in translation,15 was of course also written by French film commentators. But even before its inception as a French critical construct of an American phenomenon, film noir emerged out of a transatlantic dialogue. In Dark Crossings16 I examined French film noir as reflective of French attitudes to American culture and modernity, extending the insights of leading film theorists of French cinema17 to argue that the 6

Introduction sombre tone of French noir, following the novelistic Série noire from which it derives its name, is uniquely placed to translate the love-hate ‘affair’ between France and the USA during the postwar 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, the complex relationship between French and American film noir speaks of noir’s constitutive hybridity: the emergence of classic noir as a French critical construct of an American film phenomenon that was itself heavily inflected by European influences, not the least of which was French poetic realism,18 with its central narrative focus on doomed passion, as we shall see (Chapter 2).

Sociological theory Starting from the sociological premise that filmic representations emerge from a complex sociocultural matrix, I argue that the equally complex representation of gendered relationships and desire in French noir of the Occupation and postwar decades, and the particular crises of masculinity which it figures, is inflected by a number of interlinked sociohistorical contextual factors, the most salient of which are: . .

.

. .

traumatic experience of World War II: Nazi occupation, resistance and Vichy collaboration (Chapters 3 and 4); postwar Marshall Plan driven American-led modernisation ushering in an age of prosperity but also consumerism and increased competition (Chapter 10); concomitant changes in gender roles, although French women are still less economically and legally independent and politically active than American women (Chapters 3 –10); disintegration of empire: progressive loss of French colonial power culminating in the Algerian Civil War (Chapters 3, 5 and 6); extremely low sex ratio, i.e. large numbers of single women of reproductive age vs a dearth of marriageable males (Chapters 4 – 8).

Underlying these contextual factors are century-old cultural traditions, e.g. the French obsession with romantic love (although they didn’t invent it!), their constant alternating between extreme idealism and extreme cynicism in matters of love, and their greater tolerance of non-monogamous relationships than in Anglo-Saxon cultures of the period. 7

Classic French Noir In turn, I argue that cultural factors are underpinned by co-evolved, mostly ‘soft-wired’ adaptive features of human sexuality and reproduction.

Constructivism and psychoanalysis Feminist film theorists have read the femme fatale and other manifestations of femininity through constructivist and psychoanalytical frameworks whose basic premises are that: gender is, for all practical purposes, independent of biology and entirely culturally constructed; . the roots of desire and pleasure are unconscious and function according to very specific Oedipal scenarios of repression and displacement; . thus the visual focus on the female form in film is a clear instance of Freudian fetishisation arising from unconscious castration anxiety.19 .

Scientific reasoning clearly refutes the Freudian claim that infants have a primary incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex, which must be repressed for development to occur.20 I suggest rather that cinema’s focus on female (and male) bodies arises from the primary role of vision, especially among males, in assessing a potential partner’s suitability as a short- or long-term mate: youth and beauty are clear fitness markers, hard to fake signals of health and fertility.21 Undeniably, constructivism has outlined and raised important questions about the social mechanisms that modulate human development and behaviour. But despite its ability to map such existing sociocultural mechanisms, notably gender roles (and the oppression of women and minority groups under patriarchy and capitalism), constructivism is powerless to explain why and how these have developed the way they have, with both striking differences and remarkable similarities across cultures and throughout history. More importantly, it cannot tell us why some of these mechanisms are so notoriously resistant to change. Feminist constructivist and psychoanalytical theories can map the oppressive practices of patriarchal cultures and their transmission, yet they cannot explain how patriarchy came about or why it is and has been such a dismally prevalent feature of human cultures for at least the last 10,000 years, since the advent of agriculture.22 8

Introduction Constructivist explanations for gender differences (and sexual orientation) begin with a demonstrably false assumption: namely, that gender is exclusively a cultural construct. For the constructivist, if not for cultural conditioning, men and women would think and act the same. Such a premise flies in the face of over a century of empirical biological and psychological research (notably into the role of genetic transmission and sex hormones in brain development, morphology, personality and behaviour), not to mention common sense. And even if one can readily accept such constructivist insights as Judith Butler’s into the performative dimension of gender (as both assigned by culture in a process of ‘forced reiteration of norms’ and as a site of endless contestation by individuals who refuse such assignment),23 this still begs three central questions. Why do particular individuals choose to either perform or contest assigned roles? And what is the origin of psychological mechanisms that lead individuals to conform to or resist cultural construction? More importantly, why are fundamental aspects of gender performativity so cross-culturally uniform at the statistical level? Finally, the premise that gender is a cultural construct can indeed be defended, to the extent that culture itself is recognised as partly a response to and consequence of, as well as contributing factor to the evolved (driven by genes responding to experience) human brain, not simply the sole, sui generis root cause of experience.

Biocultural approaches For all the above reasons, therefore, this book largely contests canonical constructivist and psychoanalytical claims, adopting an alternative, though overlapping biocultural view, using insights from cognitivist and evolutionary science (cognitive neuroscience, behavioural ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology and evolutionary approaches to psychoanalysis) including the emerging sub-disciplines within the humanities of both cognitivist, biocultural and neuro-psychoanalytical film and literary studies. Freud was wrong about a lot of things but he got one crucial thing right: the existence of the unconscious. Recognising his contribution, contemporary neuroscience emphasises the central role of unconscious emotional processes in grounding perception, subjectivity, selfhood and intersubjective (personal and social) relationships: 9

Classic French Noir The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and nonconsciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative stability required for survival . . . I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the unconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self.24

Thus, while rejecting a number of Freudian conceptualisations (e.g. the Oedipus complex, as based on incestuous infantile desire; primary narcissism; female narcissism arising from biological inferiority to and dependence on men25) this book will use a number of robust, psychoanalytically-based concepts and theories of the unconscious (including concepts of projection and identification; Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theory (1965)), in order to describe and analyse aspects of character construction, film production, authorship and reception. Finally, the book is premised on the adaptive view that cinema and other ‘[i]maginative fictions are far more than entertainment: they are a strategy that human beings have devised, as the human brain enlarged and became more complex, to help ensure their very survival’.26

Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology (EP) is the application of evolutionary principles to the study of the human mind.27 It posits that the mind, as much as the body, is to a large extent a product of Darwinian evolution (random genetic variation, non-random selection) and thus subject to natural and particularly sexual selection. Often erroneously described as ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Darwin never liked the phrase, which was T.H. Huxley’s), natural selection simply means the non-random retention of genes (and traits) that result in better survival and reproduction. Sexual selection operates on two levels, the first being ‘intrasexual’ selection, in which members of the same sex compete with each other for reproductive opportunities or advantage, especially in the case of male-male combats. Secondly, ‘intersexual’ selection operates where individuals secure reproductive advantage by displaying a feature or features attractive to 10

Introduction the opposite sex (especially male-female, in the case of female choice of males among most non-human species). In the case of male-male intrasexual competition, usually size and strength or combat armour (like a stag’s antlers) confer reproductive advantage; in the case of intersexual male-female choice, reproductive advantage accrues to males who possess traits desired by females: impressive feathers in peacocks, melodious song in nightingales, aesthetic taste and architectural skill in bowerbirds, and so on. Natural selection is what drives evolution: individuals within a species will vary genetically, making some better suited to their environment and therefore more successful at surviving and reproducing offspring. Sexual selection means that intra- and inter-sexual competition for mates will favour the evolution of certain gender-specific traits. EP maintains that psychological attributes that proved adaptive, in other words, and that conferred significant benefits in terms of survival and reproduction in the environment in which our hominid ancestors had evolved as a species28 are present today in the form of evolved, contentspecific, information-processing brain modules or algorithms designed to solve specific ancestral problems. Such problems, which arose from the situation of living in social groups with long-term pair-bonds and combined male and female parental investment, include optimising mate selection for both sexes, enhancing paternal certainty for males, ensuring and allocating optimal resources for the survival of offspring, acquiring language, recognising kin, detecting cheaters, guessing what others are thinking and evaluating risks.29 Thus, while the merest mention of biology is still seen by some as essentialist and deterministically antifeminist, in my view this is an unfortunate error. An evolutionary approach is necessarily dynamic and biocultural: in no sense does it define species as unchanging essences30 or (in humans) deny the importance of culture, the environment and individual agency.31 Au contraire. In respect to gender roles, for example, EP recognises that these are undoubtedly (though often unjustifiably and unjustly) reinforced by culture, and entail a degree of performance, more or less conscious role-playing. However, gendered behaviour patterns also have a biological substratum that is the product not just of a lifetime of experience, nor even of hundreds or thousands of years of culture, but of at least two million years of evolutionary history.32 Evolution is the end product of nothing other than the dynamic interplay

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Classic French Noir of individuals striving for survival and reproductive success within their specific environment. And where Homo sapiens is concerned, the single most decisive element of our environment has always been other humans, i.e. culture. Current evolutionary science seeks to discover mechanisms of the mind that enable culture and learning to take place and to explain how and why human cultures evolved in the particular ways that they have. Nor is an evolutionary approach deterministic. As pioneering evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) remind us, evolution does not deny intelligent purpose, indeed, it is the precondition of such purpose. According to this view, first advanced by one of the founders of experimental psychology, William James (1890), humans do not have fewer instincts than other animals, we have more. Our instincts are enablers as much as they are constrainers. They underpin our stupendous cognitive competency, our extraordinarily developed emotions and social instincts for both cooperation and competition: that which defines us as human.

The biocultural turn in evolutionary science The most exciting recent trend in evolutionary theory, which I shall term the biocultural turn, looks precisely at the interdependent relationship between biology and culture.33 The biocultural turn enables bridges to be built between evolutionary science and constructivist theories.34 For example, the concept of multilevel selection has led to a growing emphasis on pro-social behaviours and within-group cooperation in human communities.35 Also, while there is still much healthy debate around the degree of hard-wiring vs plasticity in the human brain, recent accounts stress the ability of cognitive processes to override certain modular biases. Thus many evolved, so-called ‘hard-wired’ instincts are now seen as ‘soft-wired’, i.e. differentially triggered via experience,36 and some are amenable to reconfiguration via reflection and learning. Within this context, human life-history theory is an emerging field that describes human nature in terms of species-typical patterns in adaptive development and organisation over the course of an individual lifespan.37 Compared to other mammals and primates, human life history is characterised by a long lifespan coupled with a much extended period 12

Introduction of juvenile development and dependency, due to our large brain. This fact underpins the unusual provisioning of food by human males to their mates and offspring, thus mammalian bonding between mothers and infants is supplemented by monogamous pair-bonding between parents as sexual partners.38 Moreover, humans have evolved to live not in isolated nuclear family units but in communities, which communicate via verbal language and in which related and non-related and individuals compete but mostly collaborate, providing reciprocal support and enabling the group to better compete for resources with other human groups. Thus humans are highly social beings, forming shifting coalitions and dominance hierarchies, like chimpanzees, our closest relatives, but we also display a much higher degree of cooperation than any of the great apes, and an egalitarian aversion to domination and injustice. The combination of large brain, language, pair-bonding and group living means that culture plays a far greater role in human life history than for any other species (many of which have recognisable cultures). A particularly elegant definition of culture in the context of human life history is as follows: Culture consists of information transmitted in non-genetic ways: arts, technologies, literature, myths, religions, ideologies, philosophies and science. From the evolutionary perspective, culture does not stand apart from the genetically transmitted dispositions of human nature. It is rather, a medium through which humans organise those dispositions into systems that regulate public behaviour and inform private thoughts. Culture translates human nature into social norms and shared imaginative structures.39

In viewing culture as an integral component of human nature, human life history theory enables evolutionary psychology’s focus on ultimate, evolved causes of behaviours and the brain modules claimed to support them to be integrated into a culturally informed study of proximal mechanisms as they operate throughout individual life cycles. Moreover, in this view, culture is involved in a dynamic, mutually reinforcing system of feedback loops with genetically evolved dispositions. This is what is meant by ‘evoked culture’40 and ‘gene-culture co-evolution’.41 Contemporary evolutionary science is thus highly compatible with and complementary to sociocultural theory, as this book will demonstrate. 13

Classic French Noir

A biocultural approach to gender: similarity and difference On one hand, evolutionary thinkers have underlined the prevalence of gender similarities in humans as arising out of the shared pressures of natural selection, like disease, predators and famine. However, they have also attempted to isolate and explicate gender differences as arising from the differential workings of sexual selection on human males and females: Where the sexes differ most clearly, it is the result of sexual, not natural selection. The strategies that enhanced reproductive success for females were not identical to those that enhanced it in men. Through sex-linkage and sex-limitation, evolution has coupled genetically encoded adaptive strategies to the sex of the individual receiving them.42

Evolutionary theory thus posits the existence of a certain number of hard- or soft-wired i.e. co-evolved, innate (genetic) though often environmentally triggered and/or culturally reinforced (or repressed) differences between males and females. An increasing body of evidence (over 25 years of empirical research) is pointing to a role for evolved physiological and psychological differences as being at the root of dominant – quasi-universal – cultural gender role construction. For example, men’s higher levels of testosterone (more than 10 times that of women, with no overlap between the sexes) ‘are linked with some of the traditional sex differences in behaviour such as aggression, domination and career choice’.43 Conversely, women’s greater obligatory investment in child rearing (due to internal gestation and breastfeeding) requires a greater capacity for caring and empathic investment, greater emphasis on resource accrual, lesser propensity for risk taking and greater choosiness in terms of sexual partners (quality over quantity).44 Of course, patriarchal societies often abuse these biological differences to acculturate women in ways contrary to their own reproductive and survival interests: confining women in caring roles of wife and mother, controlling women’s sexual choices or punishing them for pursuing optimal mating strategies (which may include having more than one sexual partner). Needless to say, evolutionary science does not condone nor justify oppressive social norms, even though these may well be rooted in our evolutionary past. Firstly, to 14

Introduction equate the natural with the good, to confuse what is with should be, is to commit the naturalistic fallacy, a fundamental error of scientific reasoning contemporary evolutionists take great pains to avoid.45 Evolutionary accounts describe what is as a function of what has been, over the long period of human evolution, not what should or can be. Moreover, feminist evolutionary scientists like anthropologist Barbara Smuts, sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy and others have long questioned malecentred tenets of early Darwinist views on gender, most notably the assumption of unbridled male sexuality versus female modesty and coyness.46 Thus, today’s best evolutionary thinkers do not claim that ‘natural’ behaviours considered adaptive in specific contexts (e.g. male promiscuity, group violence and oppressive control of females47) are either desirable or unchangeable.48 And leading male evolutionary psychologists Buss and Schmitt (whom I shall quote extensively) state explicitly that their work is aligned with feminist agendas: We share the view that the mate preferences of one gender can inflict psychological damage on the other, whether it is women being treated as ‘sex objects’ or men being treated as ‘success objects’ . . . We share the view that gender discrimination in the workplace is morally wrong . . . We share the view that rape is abhorrent, and policy, anchored in accurate scientific understanding, should be directed at eliminating its occurrence . . . We share the view that men’s historical control of power and resources, a core component of patriarchy, can be damaging to women in domains ranging from being forced to endure a bad marriage to suffering crimes such as genital mutilation and ‘honor killings’ for perceived sexual infractions.49

Moreover, while evolutionary theory claims validity at the statistical level, it makes no claims at the level of the individual. To cite a less controversial example, the statement that human males are taller than human females is not contradicted by the obvious fact that some human females are demonstrably taller than the average human male. A major challenge for feminism lies precisely in recognising and explaining statistical gender differences without succumbing to essentialist overstatement or the reactionary misapplication of moral judgements, i.e. the naturalistic fallacy, which relegate women to positions of subservience.

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Classic French Noir

The cinema of fatal desire This book will argue that evolved, gender-related adaptive strategies can be seen to underlie culturally and sociohistorically inflected gendered constructions in noir. For example, romantic love is treated not as a purely cultural construct but as a human universal, a central feature of our evolved nature as a pair-bonded, social species: a ‘complex suite of adaptations’50 or neurophysiological state51 designed to focus mating effort on the selection of an optimal partner in terms of producing and co-rearing viable offspring. In order to highlight both sides of this nature vs nurture equation, I read gendered figures in French noir against their American homologues and in relation to their specific sociohistoric and cultural contexts, noting similarities but also key differences. The most striking of these, I will argue, is the role of romantic love as a key trope in French noir, via the dyad of the ill-fated starcrossed lovers, as opposed to the more common spider-woman/fall-guy dyad of American noir. The remainder of the book is laid out as follows. Chapter 2 reviews 1930s French poetic realism as an early form of both classic French and American noir, arguing that the distinctive French noir couple of the star-crossed lovers can be traced back to these dark films of the pre-war years. In Part II, ‘The Long Shadow of War’, I read the sombre period of World War II, marked more by the Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration than by the frequently lionised Resistance, as a ‘clue’ to (though not the sole reason for) the gender paranoia of much French noir, as well as its moral ambiguity. French experience of World War II was in many ways far from heroic, and this can be seen to result in a crisis of masculinity that both produces a number of flawed heroes and failed patriarchs (Chapter 3) and also scapegoats women (Chapter 4). Here I also point out that large-scale war inevitably leads to low sex ratios: a dearth of marriageable men and a concomitant oversupply of unwed young women seeking partners. I use cross-cultural studies informed by socioeconomic and evolutionary theory52 to argue that low sex ratios, along with the accession of women to positions of increased power, are a significant contributor to the diverse cinematic representations of assertive feminine sexuality in American and French variants of the femme fatale. Chapter 8 argues that a dearth of eligible men also contributes to the emergence of fatal, sexually exploitative males.

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Introduction Part III, ‘Cherchez la Femme’, focuses on feminine figures of fatal desire and their significant others in both French and American noir, extending recent work on the complex female characters of American noir.53 While I see the romantic, star-crossed lovers as the central figures in French noir (Chapters 5, 6), I also chart the emergence of a number of scheming and sometimes monstrously ruthless French fatales (Chapter 7). Part IV, ‘Cherchez l’homme’, shifts the focus to masculine characters, whether sexually exploitative, fatal men (Chapter 8), law enforcers embroiled with seductive women (Chapter 9) or gangster anti-heroes (Chapter 10) as conspicuous consumers and cynical, world-weary or romantic ‘honest thieves’. I read gendered figures in relation to both contemporary sociohistorical contexts and ‘mythical’ archetypes of femininity and masculinity, from evolutionary, anthropological-mythological and cultural perspectives. Against the view that ‘[m]yth is an essentially cultural phenomenon . . . it cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things’,54 I argue that in many cases, the power of myth itself stems from its ability to encapsulate ancient, evolved human traits and mating strategies within socioculturally inflected, archetypal figures, including a raft of fatally attracted males and females.

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2 Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism

Introduction: poetic realism as proto-noir The term poetic realism refers to a body of highly popular, culturally influential French films of the 1930s, marked by dark fatalism, featuring a tragic working-class hero, usually played by France’s biggest star, Jean Gabin, paired with a range of fatale-like females. National icon by the end of the decade, Gabin has been described as ‘[a]rguably the focus of identification for an entire nation, his roles and his style condense the poetic realist optique into a single figure’.1 Combining ‘realist’ workingclass settings with highly evocative, symbolic use of props, décor, lighting, music and dialogues, poetic realist works were often adapted from contemporary Francophone writers like Georges Simenon, Pierre Véry and Pierre Mac Orlan, or written for the screen by the supreme poet of simplicity, Jacques Prévert. Indeed, some contemporary commentators already referred to these dark melodramas as films noirs.2 The European connection to classic American film noir involves the group of expressionist émigré directors and technicians, most of them Jewish exiles fleeing Nazism, who also contributed to and ‘were prime carriers of poetic realism into the noir aesthetic’.3 Jewish directors Wilder, Siodmak, Lang, Litvak and Ophüls moved to Hollywood after working in France during the 1930s, as did French-born (naturalised American)

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Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism director of classic US noir, Jacques Tourneur (Experiment Perilous, 1944; Out of The Past, 1947). The émigré phenomenon also underpins the series of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood remakes of French poetic realist films as film noir or film gris.4 To cite but one example, in Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939), Jean Gabin’s working-class hero, Franc
ois, murders a sleazy, middle-aged sexual predator who has seduced the innocent girl of his dreams, his soulmate, Franc
oise. Holed up in his tiny garret room, surrounded by police armed with guns and tear gas, Franc
ois commits suicide rather than face an oppressive justice system. Remade by Anatole Litvak as The Long Night (1947), with Henry Fonda in the Gabin role, a more assertive modern girl (replacing Carné’s corrupted ingénue) manages to convince the embattled hero to trust in justice and turn himself in, knowing she will wait for him. The main focus of this introductory chapter will be on Renoir’s masterful 1938 adaptation of Zola’s La bête humaine, remade by the émigré Fritz Lang as Human Desire (1954). Pierre Chenal’s little discussed seminal poetic realist adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as Le dernier tournant [The Last Turn] in 1939, later readapted in Italy by Visconti as the neo-realist Ossessione [Obsession] (1943) and later still, by American director Tay Garnett, as the 1946 Hollywood noir classic, will be discussed in Chapter 6.

Gendered figures in poetic realism A review of late 1930s films starring Jean Gabin as tragic populist hero reveals that poetic realism mobilises four basic feminine ‘types’, most of which can prove fatal. The ingénue is an innocent young virgin, most often a waif or lost girl, corrupted or threatened by ‘evil’ personified in often older male antagonists (Jacqueline Laurent as Franc
oise in Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939); Michèle Morgan’s Nelly in Quai des Brumes [Port of Shadows] (Carné, 1938)). She will be inevitably separated from the lover, either by these antagonists or by social circumstances figured as incarnations of cruel fate (Morgan again, as another mysterious lost girl in Remorques [Stormy Waters] (Gremillon, 1941)). The good-hearted worldly woman or generous tart (Arletty in Le jour se lève) is a positive figure, in contrast to both the scheming, gold-digging garce [bitch], combining venality and sexual duplicity (Viviane Romance in La belle 19

Classic French Noir équipe [They were Five] (Duvivier, 1936)). Her more mysterious, sophisticated sister, the vamp, represents the twin lure of both sexual desirability and social mobility (Mireille Balin in Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937)), though she may morph into a high-class garce, the proverbial rich bitch (Balin in Gueule d’Amour [Lady Killer] (Grémillon, 1938)).5 The fatale in her many, often shifting guises drives the poetic realist narrative in that the hero is always driven to extremes to possess and keep her. Particularly in the case of the negatively coded garce and vamp, the fatale causes him to lose sight of his social and/or professional obligations, to spurn the good woman who loves him selflessly, and to cut himself off from more positively coded relationships, namely male friendships. In his study of the French Vamp, Michel Azzopardi6 defines her as the ultimate femme fatale. Marked by a superb emotional coldness, the vamp is an alluring siren, a belle dame sans merci who demands total allegiance from the male while offering nothing in return but the illusion of possessing her. In transferring emotional attachment from the male to material resources and social status, like the garce, Azzopardi’s vamp is aligned with the American spider woman: evil angel sent to earth to tempt man and provoke his ‘fall’, giving in to her would result in eternal damnation.

Star-crossed lovers: the tragic hero and French fatale as fatalitaire In their impressive study of the battle of sexes in French cinema (1930 – 56), Burch and Sellier (1996) argue for the ubiquity of the sexually predatory female as garce during the poetic realist (and postwar) period as evidence of the prevailing misogyny of French society. They nonetheless recognise that considerable ‘slippage’ occurs in the construction of this figure.7 Indeed, their analyses demonstrate unequivocally that the prime antagonist of poetic realism (and of 1930s cinema overall) is a Bad Father figure, the oppressive and/or (literally or symbolically) incestuous patriarch, who appears much more often than the ruthless garce or vamp. I will therefore argue that the most representative female figure of poetic realism is a sympathetic character rather than a heartless vamp or garce. As corrupted or threatened ingénue or good-bad girl, either marginalised (like the hero) by polite society or unattainably high class, 20

Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism falling in love with the hero rather than simply seducing (and discarding) him, this fatale is the unwitting instrument of oppressive social forces (unscrupulous patriarchs) or blind fate. I will describe her using the term fatalitaire (originally a malapropism for fataliste or fatalistic, made famous by Arletty in Hôtel du nord (Carné, 1938)) to differentiate her from the more unscrupulous feminine figures associated with the term, femme fatale. Particularly opposite Gabin as tragic hero, the fatalitaire founds the ill-fated lovers dyad that figures in the most popular (in terms of box office) and critically well regarded of the poetic realist canon.8

La bete humaine [The Human Beast] (Renoir, 1938) During this period of emergence, the most striking illustration of the fatalitaire as corrupted ingénue is to be found in Jean Renoir’s adaptation of Zola’s La bête humaine (1938), considered by Dudley Andrew, author of Mists of Regret (1995), the most comprehensive study in English of 1930s French cinema, to be the apogee of poetic realism.9 Jean Gabin plays Jacques Lantier, a good-hearted train driver who suffers from hereditary, murderous fits of psychosis. Returning home as a passenger, Lantier is sole witness to the murder of local aristocrat, Grandmorin, by the dreary, middle-aged station master, Roubaud and his pretty young wife, Séverine (Simone Simon). When Séverine makes overtures to him, Jacques is at first unsure as to her motives, but the two eventually become lovers. La bête humaine is emblematic of the epistemological uncertainty surrounding the fatale: is she heartless garce, good-bad girl or corrupted ingénue? Despite her childlike appearance, Séverine’s attraction to the hero is presented as having sinister ulterior motives. She seduces Lantier, ostensibly in order to protect her husband from a murder charge, but it soon appears that her ultimate goal has been to persuade him to rid her of this unwanted older husband. When the lover does not have the stomach for murder, Séverine abandons him and quickly finds a (handsome young) replacement. A half-hearted attempt at reconciliation fails and he murders her in a fit of psychopathic rage. A plot summary thus situates the fatale unambiguously as garce, an avatar of the ruthless, self-serving American spider woman, callously using the man for her own selfish ends. 21

Classic French Noir

Figure 2.1 La bête humaine.

But the crucial difference here, one that Renoir (after Zola) goes to considerable lengths to show, is that both Séverine and Lantier are victims, incapable of enjoying a normal sexual relationship, and this fact serves to cement their intimate – if tainted – bond. For Jacques, his fits of depression and violent rage, brought on by sexual contact, are the result of generation upon generation of alcohol-contaminated genes. (We see evidence of this when he almost strangles his childhood sweetheart, Flore, a pure ingénue.) For Séverine, her self-professed frigidity stems from what we would now term child sexual abuse in the form of quasi-incestuous rape: she was sexually initiated as a very young girl by her (subsequently murdered) aristocrat godfather, Grandmorin, who is possibly also her natural father. This revelation of childhood abuse in a sense absolves her: shame and ensuing avoidance of romantic and emotional attachment are shown to be the result of severe childhood trauma. This knowledge reconfigures the couple of Jacques and Séverine as tragic, ‘star-crossed’ lovers, twin victims of oppressive social forces and cruel fate, their shared flaw drawing them together in a unique, primal bond. When they first make love, in the dark recesses of a railway-yard shed, Renoir’s mise en scène suggests that their sexual union is mutually satisfying, thus liberating

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Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism for both. Jacques is apparently freed from his fits of psychotic rage; Séverine also, finally experiences pleasure. Nonetheless, other visual indices point to the couple’s doomed nature, its sullied foundation. Séverine wears a shiny wet black raincoat, sartorial index of dark female sexuality, linking her to other ‘lost girl’ figures of the period.10 As the entwined couple sink to the floor of the shed, Renoir’s camera pans away to an overflowing bucket, sparkling, gushing rainwater spilling over onto the muddy ground against soaring orchestral music. An elliptical dissolve signals that the rain has ceased and the camera tracks horizontally back to the entrance as two pairs of shoes emerge then continues vertically, to come to rest, in medium close-up (MCU), on the couple’s tight embrace, their radiant faces pressed together, their gaze turned upward towards a hopeful future (Figure 2.1). Moreover, their identical costuming underlines their status as inseparable ‘twin souls’. But the muddy puddles at their feet earlier in the shot, the chiaroscuro that keeps their eyes in half-shadow and the sight of Séverine’s wedding ring, even as she grips Lantier, also reveal the fragility of their dream, its tainted origins.

Human Desire (Lang, USA, 1954) To illustrate differences between gendered representation in French and American noir (prefigured by poetic realism), we will now examine some of the shifts that occur in Fritz Lang’s 1954 remake of La bête humaine as Human Desire.11 The film stars Gloria Grahame as sultry station master’s wife, Vicki, who seduces train driver Glenn Ford, as the hapless Korean war veteran, Jeff, first to buy his silence as witness to murder, then to persuade him to rid her of her brutal husband. A brief comparison of the first shots of each female lead serves to highlight their key difference. In La bête humaine, we first see Séverine in traditionally romantic pose, demurely dressed, reclining in full shot by a sunny living-room window, stroking a ‘pure’ white kitten,12 before the camera tracks into an MCU, while soft, off-screen music plays (Figure 2.2). In stark contrast with Renoir’s childlike ingénue, Lang introduces his Vicki as a sexy femme fatale: with a wide shot of a stocking-covered leg held in the air in a suggestively inviting pose, as she lazes on her bed listening to sensuous jazz.

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Figure 2.2 La bête humaine.

Figure 2.3 Human Desire.

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Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism

Figure 2.4 Human Desire.

Lang then cuts to an MCU of the recumbent Vicki as she pops a sweet into her mouth (Figure 2.3). A cross between bored housewife and greedy, predatory seductress (Figure 2.4), Vicki is a far cry from the ultimately absolved but somewhat infantilised femme-objet of Renoir’s poetic realist vision. Lang’s male lead is also significantly reconfigured. As the hallowed veteran, Jeff cannot be La Bête Humaine’s genetically challenged, psychotic killer; nor is there any suggestion of war trauma. Thus it is not he who strangles Vicki in a fit of jealous rage but her bestial husband, Carl, a rougher, more conventionally masculine version of Fernand Ledoux’s flabby, always already emasculated Roubaud. And whereas Renoir never shows either of the murders, Lang renders both in quite graphic visual detail, the couple’s depravity underscored by uneven, angular chiaroscuro. Lang’s film also simplifies the central visual metaphor of the locomotive, reducing it to an unambiguous signifier of American modernity, progress and virile control. By contrast, Renoir’s steam engine ‘translates’ faithfully from Zola its double-edged symbolism. La Lison (as Lantier calls ‘her’) is both a cipher of rational mastery (via Lantier’s ability to drive such a marvel of technological progress) and a symbol of the dark, unconscious, 25

Classic French Noir uncontrollable passions, the ‘human beast’ that seethes within him. In Renoir’s final scene, a desperate Lantier leaps from the speeding train, literally driven to his death by these uncontrollable passions. In Human Desire, the tragic, suicidal fate of Gabin/Lantier is replaced by a triumphant Jeff, still firmly in control of his phallic locomotive, reemerging into the light. He is left contemplating a rosy future, signified by the ticket to the railwaymen’s ball, given to him by his co-worker’s sweet young daughter (a stand-in for Zola and Renoir’s Flore), who has been hopelessly in love with him since the film’s opening scenes. Meanwhile, the double murderer Carl and his adulteress victim lie dead and forgotten in the shadows, Lang’s camera not bothering to return to them. Human Desire transfers the figure of the beast to the brutish husband Carl, whose sexual jealousy results in two murders, while Séverine’s tainted ingénue is reduced to the more assertive but ruthless femme fatale, who ultimately gets what she deserves. The second crime is again one of bestial passion: Carl enters, begs Vicki to take him back, then flies into animalistic rage at her. But what finally pushes him over the edge is not simply jealousy of Jeff. The final twist in Lang’s re-envisioning of Renoir is to remove all doubts as to Vicki’s victim status (in relation to the ‘protector’ and incestuous father figure, here a wealthy businessman, Owens) and reveal her to be the ultimate treacherous gold-digger. Taunting her husband, she reveals that Owens never raped or even seduced her as a young girl, as she had claimed. In fact it was she who seduced him, knowingly – in a plan to marry him for his house and money, once his ailing wife died. Contrast this to Renoir’s off-screen portrayal of Séverine’s tragic murder, crosscut with scenes from the rather dreary railwaymen’s ball, during which an on-stage singer’s wistful song symbolises the femme fatale aspect of Séverine’s character. The lyrics tell the story of a girl who has many suitors but who is unable or unwilling to give her heart to any. ‘Whoever tries to woo Ninette will inevitably suffer a broken heart.’13 The bitter sweet quality of the song, its deceptively light and carefree melody contrasted with the melancholy of the lyrics, thus suggests the two sides of Séverine’s character, a basically sweet affectionate nature marred by an inability to sustain a mature love relationship. Functioning as a clear mise en abyme (miniature reflection), the song continues to play over the scene following her murder, which shows Lantier’s zombie-like reaction to the horror of his act. Renoir’s suspenseful camera pans slowly across Séverine’s

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Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism body, showing hands, torso and finally her slit throat and face with its dead, staring eyes as the music plays, before tracking vertically to reveal Lantier’s own expressionless gaze, his hand holding the murder weapon (a phallic knife) then to his face, in a brief, side-lit MCU as he glances at his double in the mirror. For the first time in the film, in this moment of devastating self-awareness,14 he finally recognises himself for who/what he is, and it is this knowledge and (self-)disgust for the uncontrollable beast that rages within which will finally kill him. As he exits, we cut back to the singer at the ball, as the song comes to an end on the key line that absolves Séverine, highlighting Lantier’s tragic error: ‘C’est pas sa faute, non; au petit cœur de Ninon!’ [‘It’s not her fault, no! Poor little heart!’].15 Stark contrasts in lighting between the brightly lit ball scenes and those showing Lantier’s reaction to Séverine’s murder emphasise its dark, horrific aspect, expressionist chiaroscuro and venetian blind effects signifying entrapment and a barred future. Moreover, close, claustrophobic framing works together with subdued acting style to construct an introspective, emotionally intense relationship between spectator and character that is another key feature of poetic realist film. There is an unusual insistence on close-ups of hands: Séverine’s limp lifeless little hands that Lantier has so adored but which also bear the evidence of both the illegitimacy of their relationship and the reason for her frigidity (she wears Grandmorin’s ring). Her hands are contrasted with Lantier’s: powerful, active, capable of holding her in a loving embrace yet also violent and uncontrollable, here his hand does not simply wield the phallic knife, it has become almost an extension of it. Close-ups heighten understanding of and sympathy for the characters, yet, combined with absence of dialogue and lack of facial expression, they also serve to maintain a sense of the unknown, drawing the viewer into the screen in an almost desperate attempt to fathom the truth of the character’s soul.

Conclusion This short chapter has outlined the roots of French noir in the dark poetic realist dramas of the 1930s, their links to postwar American noir and the difference in the latter’s representation of the fatale as a more independent but heartless spider woman. By contrast, in Renoir’s proto-noir classic, the ‘fate’ that has so irreparably scarred the fatalitaire – as damaged ingénue – 27

Classic French Noir is presented as indissociable from the injustice and inhumanity of a corrupt patriarchy. Abused by the incestuous Grandmorin, clearly a stand-in for the moral turpitude and oppression of the ruling classes, Séverine is ‘damaged goods’ indeed.16 Even after Grandmorin’s murder, his tainted legacy remains: a simple-minded vagrant (played by Renoir himself) is wrongly convicted and even the most solid of working-class relationships are powerless to prevent the tragedy of Lantier’s murder-suicide. Schizoid personality, of which Lantier is the most extreme example, also marks other characters played by Gabin in poetic realist film. The quiet, peaceful man who has the potential to erupt suddenly into fits of murderous rage appears also in Le jour se lève and Quai des brumes, and in Gueule d’amour, in which he again murders a more cold-hearted mistress. Indeed, the quiet man goaded into violence by evil forces or cruel fate was a key feature of Gabin’s persona. The fatalistic aspect of the poetic realist optique or world view, particularly evident in La bête humaine, along with its gender politics, is emblematic of those films (most notably, Le jour se lève and Quai des brumes) figuring tragic lovers and evil patriarchs that postdated the collapse of the disastrously short-lived left-wing coalition Popular Front government (1937 –8), of which Renoir had been a fervent supporter. The fate of Jacques Lantier as he stumbles inexorably towards his doom is easily read as ‘tragic populism’, reflecting the pessimism of the left as it saw its utopian dreams of fraternity, peace and social justice (Pain, paix liberté [Bread, Peace, Freedom]) crumble in the face of economic realities, as the continued advance of fascism throughout most of Western Europe brought with it the looming shadow of war. A war that would scar the nation for a generation to come, resulting in both the idealisation and demonisation of women, and precipitating a crisis of masculinity that would be expressed between the lines of a cinema marked by an even darker, cynical realism.

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3 Looking for the Light

Introduction: invasion, occupation, collaboration When Hitler’s army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in the allied declaration of war, there ensued a nine-month phoney war, termed la drôle de guerre or funny (bizarre) war by the French, as their army waited confidently behind the impregnable Maginot Line of fortifications built during the 1930s along the German border. This ‘funny’ phoney war turned deadly serious in May 1940, when the Nazis simply marched round the top of the Maginot Line and stormed into France via Belgium and Holland. In the ensuing debacle, French troops were mowed down, populations and politicians fled and on 14 June, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed, into Paris. The resulting armistice (22 June), signed by aging World War I war hero, Field Marshall Philippe Pétain, completed France’s emasculation, with most of the country (including Paris) under Nazi rule. Meanwhile, French politicians hastily set up a government under Pétain in the small unoccupied town of Vichy, seat of the southern ‘Zone Libre’ until May 1942, when the Germans occupied the entire country. At the same time, de Gaulle left for London to set up the Free French resistance. In a series of tragic ironies, Petain’s initially popular Vichy regime fast revealed itself to be little more than a proto-fascist puppet state. In July 1940, the Third Republic literally voted itself out of existence, making

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Classic French Noir Pétain Chef d’Etat, tellingly replacing the republican motto, liberté égalité fraternité by the paternalistic ‘travail, famille, patrie’/‘work, family, fatherland’. Catalysing existing anti-democratic, anti-Semitic French sentiment, Vichy represented the revenge of the Far Right. Defeat was blamed on ‘decadent’ pre-war elements, namely foreigners, Jews, Freemasons and the left: socialists, communists and left-wing radicals who had briefly united in the Popular Front (1936 –8). Films and filmmakers were also scapegoated: poetic realist classics like Le Quai des brumes were banned for demoralising the nation and literally causing its military defeat! Having much in common with Nazi philosophy, many pro-Vichy French considered Hitler a preferable alternative to a Jewish-led French socialist coalition.1 Unsurprisingly, Vichy became more overtly anti-Semitic and collaborationist as the Occupation progressed. The shameful legacy of the period is due to France’s already humiliating military defeat being compounded by active collaboration with the Occupier, which included targeting members of the Resistance, passing a raft of anti-Semitic laws, setting up concentration camps on French soil and deporting 75,000 Jewish civilians (24,000 of whom were French citizens) and other undesirables to the Nazi death camps. France’s experience during World War II would haunt the national psyche and its cinema for more than a generation. As Susan Hayward notes, in her recent review of French noir (1947 – 79): . . . most men were not fighting: they were either taken into forced labour in Germany or were at home having to cope with the occupying enemy (at worst collaborating, at best joining the Resistance or keeping a very low profile). Thus, masculine identity was crucially aligned with the nation and, in this instance, it was not an easy one to confront – weakened, submissive, emasculated identity with which, arguably, the nation has still yet to come to terms.2

A cinema of paradox During this sombre period, French cinema faced multiple challenges: physical threats and constraints (allied bombing, air-raids, blackouts, curfews), shortages (supplies and equipment, particularly electricity and film stock) and censorship, from both the Nazis and Vichy.3 Moreover, 32

Looking for the Light many leading figures, including Jewish ex-pats (Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder) and French filmmakers alike (most notably Renoir, Gabin and Duvivier), left for the USA rather than work under Nazi rule.4 And yet, the supreme paradox is that French cinema prospered, both commercially and artistically.5 Wartime greatly increased the desire for entertainment: in June 1940, even as German tanks were surging through France, more than 800,000 people found time to go to the movies. With the closure of dance halls, cinema became the sole form of popular wartime entertainment.6 More importantly, with no competition from banned American (or British) films and general distaste for German (and Italian) propaganda, there was a huge appetite for local productions. Cinema theatres provided much needed escapist entertainment and literal escape or refuge from Nazi officials, until later in the war when ID checks were commonly held at exits to round up recruits for French workers in Germany and when air raids became more and more frequent. The upshot was that French films were so popular that any film produced was virtually guaranteed to make a profit from domestic exhibition alone (a situation rarely reproduced since). The 220 films made during the Occupation (1940 – 4) reaped record revenues, more than doubling those of the pre-war years (rising from 452 million francs in 1938 to 915 million in 1943). These combined factors also had a clear impact on the look and feel of French cinema, on its aesthetics and thematics.7 Poetic realist expressions of cinematic despair (produced at a time of great creative freedom) were replaced by messages of hope in the face of oppression and real danger. Social realism, contemporary settings and the central male figure of the working-class hero (Gabin) were diverted to more distanced genres of historical costume drama and fantasy, as many filmmakers, following Carné and Prévert, beat a tactical retreat into historical allegory and myth, where potentially subversive messages could more easily escape censorship.

Les Années noires and crime drama During these dark years of Occupation, French filmmakers and audiences sought messages of hope, constantly ‘looking for the light’. Thus, while crime dramas enjoyed renewed popularity (especially Simenon 33

Classic French Noir adaptations) in the absence of American films, these were mostly upbeat comedy-dramas, like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterful first feature, L’Assassin habite au 21 [The Murderer Lives at Number 21] (1942). In terms of gendered representation, Burch and Sellier note the crossgenre idealisation of women in Occupation cinema.8 Bearers of the light, female figures are most often in traditional roles (wife, mother, virgin bride), i.e. keeping the home fires burning in the service of patriarchy. However, a number of key films (not necessarily noir) put women in roles that imply more positive agency, sometimes coupled with sexual assertiveness. This is doubtless linked to French women having to step into the breach created by the huge number of French men who were in Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camps: over a million, out of a total of 8.6 million men (aged between 15 and 44). Not just keeping the home fires burning then, French women (who now also constituted a greater percentage of film-going audiences) often had to be out chopping the wood. Occupation comedy and melodrama thus feature a number of femmes modernes, expressing their own desire, most notably Jean Grémillon’s Le ciel est à vous [The Woman Who Dared] (1944), in which a happily married mother of two becomes a record-breaking aviatrix.9 Moreover, even darker Occupation noir feature similarly idealised and/or assertive female characters, as we shall see. Despite black humour and noir mise en scène at key dramatic points, Jean Delannoy’s 1942 crime drama, L’assassin a peur la nuit [The Murderer is Afraid at Night] is above all a story of fallible masculinity and redemption via true love. A professional burglar, on the run after a botched job, takes refuge in the countryside. He is befriended by a naive quarry worker, whose virginal sister he quickly seduces. Meanwhile, his venal femme fatale moll (poetic realist vamp Mireille Balin) wants him back. Following him to his country hideout, she attempts to shoot him dead but falls into a dungeon, whereupon she miraculously repents her ways before expiring. He is captured and handcuffed but reunited with his ever-faithful ingénue, who, we know, will be waiting once he has served his time and whose unconditional love redeems him. His final words speak of repentance and moral salvation (and could be read as a call to resist the Occupier): ‘Now I am free!’ The film’s apparently progressive gender values – the cool exterior of the tough gangster masks extreme sensitivity – are in fact

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Looking for the Light ultra-conservative. Following an old misogynist cliché, dialogues state explicitly that men rob to impress and keep venal, beautiful women. Responsibility and guilt for male criminality are thus transferred entirely to the femme. The virginal good woman, on the other hand, is scrupulously honest and utterly self-sacrificing: refusing ill-gotten gains of any sort, she gives what she has, including her virginity, and asks the hero for nothing in return. But the film does not morally condemn the ingénue for allowing herself to be seduced. She has made an emotional commitment that absolves her and redeems her ex-criminal lover. However, they will have to wait until he (France?) is free before their union can be celebrated. Poetic realism, officially banned under Vichy for its association with the populist, ‘Jewish-infiltrated’ left, is clearly referenced in one of the period’s darkest noirs, Voyage sans espoir [Voyage without Hope] (Jacque, 1943). The opening credits roll over a train hurtling through the countryside, reprising the opening sequence of La bête humaine (minus Gabin at the controls of the locomotive). The familiar poetic realist trope of the man on the run (Quai des brumes; Pépé le Moko) applies to both the male leads. Moreover, the film constructs its central couple as star-crossed lovers, whom fate brings together before cruelly separating them. Cabaret singer and gangster’s moll, the femme’s essentially good-hearted nature is suggested by her name, Marie-Ange/Mary-Angel (Simone Renant). Classic good-bad girl Marie-Ange will desert her sociopathic fugitive gangster boyfriend (Paul Bernard) for the film’s hero, fresh-faced Jean Marais in the Gabin role, as an impulsive bank clerk who has foolishly run off with stolen funds to start a new life in Argentina. Convinced by her to return the money, the film’s final scene shows him jumping aboard a train, after a last passionate embrace with his courageous and angelic fatalitaire, who, unbeknownst to him, is dying from a fatal bullet wound. The film thus reverses the poetic realist insistence on tragic male agency: in Gabin’s prewar films, it is he who is murdered or commits suicide at the end of the film. Despite Marais’ greater athleticism and displays of physical bravado,10 it is the femme whose tragic agency and redemptive selfsacrifice are foregrounded, in line with the feminisation of Occupation cinema. The film is also notable for its thinly veiled references to Vichy, via the highly ambiguous portrayal of French police as semi-competent

35

Classic French Noir and/or morally questionable snoops. When the hero is arrested for being unable to produce identity papers, already an oblique reference to the Occupation, the filmmakers have the chief police inspector declare: ‘c’est une enquête, ce n’est pas une rafle’ [‘this is an investigation, not a raid’]. The word ‘rafle’ takes on sinister connotations during this period, evoking the infamous raids of July 1942, in which French police actively aided the Nazis in rounding up some 13,000 Jewish families in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium in Paris, before sending them off to French concentration camps, thence to Auschwitz.

Le corbeau [The Raven] (Clouzot, 1943) The film most emblematic of the dark Occupation years, condemned by both Vichy and the Resistance for its uncompromisingly bleak vision of bourgeois French society, is undoubtedly Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau [The Raven] (1943). Set in a typical French country town, Le corbeau’s mystery plot consists in discovering the author of a fatal epidemic of poison-pen letters, ‘signed’ by the eponymous Raven. Although the film project pre-dates the war (the real-life case on which it is based dates back to 1917), the phenomenon of anonymous letter writing, from which both the Nazi occupier and the collaborationist Vichy regime benefitted, is clearly meant to be read in terms of present realities. Vichy alone received between three and five million such letters denouncing neighbours and rivals.11 As the film progresses, the town succumbs to suspicion and paranoia as one after another of its population is accused – often rightly, in the case of a clique of hypocritical notables – of various forms of fraud, theft and illicit sex. But the innocent are also targeted: a cancer patient slits his own throat on discovering the terminal nature of his illness and a little girl attempts suicide after the Raven’s intervention destroys her parents’ marriage. The principal target and the film’s hero, Dr Germain (Pierre Fresnay), is accused of being an abortionist and of having an affair with the local psychiatrist’s beautiful but prim young wife, Laura (with whom he shares a mutual attraction). Meanwhile he is somewhat reluctantly seduced by the sultry, manipulative Denise (Ginette Leclerc in her stock role), who feigns illness to lure him into her bed (Figure 3.1).

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Looking for the Light

Figure 3.1 Le corbeau.

In line with Occupation cinema’s rehabilitation of fallen women, the bad girl turns out to be a false garce, her promiscuousness revealed to be a masquerade, overcompensation for a physical handicap (a childhood accident has left her with a limp, disguised by orthopaedic shoes). By the time the spectator discovers she has fallen pregnant to Germain, it is also clear she has fallen in love. The bad girl’s redemption enables the film to effect a partially happy end when the cynical Germain finally recognises her feelings as genuine and reciprocates, accepting Denise as faithful mistress and mother of his unborn child. Beyond its tightly crafted script, superb acting and austere mise en scène, the film’s enduring reputation as seminal noir masterpiece stems from its incisive brand of black realism and its insistence on the problematically blurred lines between good and evil. In its much quoted pivotal scene, the psychiatrist Vorzet, acting clearly as authorial stand-in, uses the central noir trope of light and shadow to make precisely this point. Having just confessed to Germain that he is a morphine addict, he challenges the latter’s somewhat self-righteous moral certainty: ‘You think people are all good or all bad. You think goodness is light and evil is darkness.’ Swinging a hanging light bulb, plunging the room and the two

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Classic French Noir men into and out of darkness, Vorzet asks: ‘But where is good? Where is evil? Where is the border?’ When the ever-sceptical Germain retorts: ‘Just stop the lamp’, he burns his fingers, proving Vorzet’s point. That the latter’s comments are doubly ironical, self-servingly shielding his own guilt – he turns out to be the Raven – simply reinforces the potency of their central noir message: in human affairs, goodness and evil are often inextricably entwined. In line with this key visual metaphor, the film’s voice speaks of a shifting, decentred moral space. Speaking polyphonically, through a series of characters with whom spectators are successively aligned, the authors ensure no single character can be simplistically associated with good or evil. This is of course a key feature of the murder mystery – a series of suspects are set up before being found innocent. But Le corbeau pushes this central trope to gendered extremes. It is emblematic of Occupation cinema’s idealisation of women and its plethora of castrated patriarchs12 that the evil Raven is the film’s most respected older male, while the false culprits are all women, whether predatory false garce, voyeuristic teenage virgin, sexually repressed wife or bitter, equally repressed spinster. Moreover, all the main characters suffer from some kind of sexual repression or dysfunction – including Vorzet, whose impotence causes the anonymous letters, and Germain, whose self-imposed celibacy following the death of his wife (in childbirth) leads to lack of empathy and clouded judgement. He finds it difficult to read others’ emotions and erroneously suspects Denise because of her sexual assertiveness – which also attracts him.13 Even the resolution of the mystery and punishment of the culprit do not provide neat moral closure. In the final scene, Germain discovers the dead Vorzet, his throat slit by the mother of his first victim, his blood spilling over a half-written poisonous missive. As the camera follows Germain’s gaze on the avenging mother as she walks silently away from the scene of the crime, we sense he will not ‘inform’ on her. For this somewhat sanctimonious upholder of the law, his sense of right and wrong is shaken rather than consolidated. And so is ours. The absence of non-diegetic music serves to render the scene even more disturbing. Despite the fact that there is some hope for the film’s newly constituted odd couple of the empathic loose woman and the slightly autistic Cartesian man of science about to produce France’s next generation, Clouzot’s camera does not

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Looking for the Light return to them. In step with the blackest of noir, even today, the film leaves its spectator with a sense of malaise. On its release, the film’s popular success was counterbalanced by critical condemnation from all sides, its bleak vision of French society seen as unpatriotic by both Vichy and the clandestine communist-dominated Resistance press.

Continental Films and the liberation purges The final paradoxes of Occupation cinema are evidenced by Le corbeau’s production context, which had grave repercussions on its reception and on several of its filmmakers’ futures. Le corbeau was produced by Continental Films, a German-owned production and distribution company, set up under Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, using studio and theatres ‘confiscated’ from Jewish owners. Under long-time German industry insider Alfred Greven, Continental produced 30 out of 220 Occupation films (twice the number made by French giant Pathé). But, luckily for France, Greven was a staunch personal enemy of Goebbels (who wanted frothy, vacuous French films suitable for the amusement of a decadent, inferior race) and a fervent admirer of French cinema, which he was determined to promote. His aim was to be the top producer in France, producing high quality films that would act as a spearhead for FrancoGerman cultural expansion, penetrating world markets (especially the USA) after the war ended. Thus the Germans were partly responsible for the paradoxical prosperity and quality of Occupation cinema. As a businessman, Greven was not a fervent anti-Semite, even unofficially, turning a blind eye to the presence of Jean-Paul Le Chanois (his real name was Dreyfus), both men pretending to ignore the latter’s Jewish origins.14 Despite his flexibility, however, Greven was no Oskar Schindler. Not above coercion, he frequently blackmailed French companies and filmmakers into working for him, threatening, for example, to withhold film stock. As the symbol of an alien presence, Greven was widely detested and many who worked for him were brutally punished in the infamous Liberation purges, Clouzot first and foremost. The latter’s role as Head of Scriptwriting for Continental, coupled with his authorship of the much maligned Le corbeau, saw him face a life ban for collaboration. Largely due to the interventions of numerous industry leaders (including Carné and

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Classic French Noir Prévert), artists (Cocteau) and public intellectuals (Sartre), the ‘sentence’ was commuted to two years. The injustice of his treatment undoubtedly fuelled his natural cynicism, which he would later succeed in channelling into some of French noir’s most enduring classics, as we shall see.

Liberation crime drama and the myth of the Resistance The myth of the Resistance was ‘orchestrated very effectively, right from the moment of liberation’15 by the leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, when his troops marched into Paris on 25 August 1944. Designed to shift the focus from humiliation and shame to pride and unity crucial to the task of nation rebuilding, the Gaullist myth insisted that, despite the treachery of a few thousand Vichy leaders and collaborators (who would be swiftly and justly punished), France as a nation had massively and courageously resisted the Nazi occupier. In reality the Resistance was not only internally divided (de Gaulle’s Free French Army – many thousands of whom were colonial subjects from France’s Empire in Africa and the Pacific – and largely Jewish and/or communist-led internal Resistance groups were ideologically poles apart) but probably numbered no more than 600,000, or 1.5 per cent, of France’s metropolitan population in August 1944. Moreover, the vast majority did not join until that year, to avoid being sent to work in German factories and when the tide was turning against the Nazis (in January 1944, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) still numbered only 50,000).16 Surrealist-anarchist noir crime fiction author Leo Malet’s first Nestor Burma novel, 120 Rue de la gare (1941),17 was written and set during the Occupation. Filmed and released after the Liberation (Daniel-Norman, 1945 –6), the big screen version is highly emblematic of its times. Both a popular and critical success (almost 3 million entries, in the top 25 per cent of French box office), its tone and thematics are very much in line with the macho hymns to the myth of the French Resistance that dominated French screens after the Liberation.18 Via Burma, France’s first fictional private investigator (PI), the film displays the spectacle of triumphant Gallic masculinity and a concomitant disavowal of the defeat and moral compromise that accompanied the

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Looking for the Light Occupation and Vichy collaboration. The function of the convoluted plot (involving a shady inheritance, multiple murders, crooked lawyers, an untrustworthy dame and dumb cops) and of the secondary characters, male and female alike, is to boost the quasi-Resistance action-hero status of ‘Dynamite’ Burma, ‘the man who knocks out mystery’. Malet’s anarchistic noir sensibility is abandoned in favour of an adventure-comedy typical of Occupation crime dramas. Moreover, in the novel Burma is a freshly released POW. This inglorious detail, an unwelcome reminder of the situation of over a million French POWs incarcerated following Pétain’s armistice, is tellingly evacuated, along with the quasi-totality of the historical context. The sole direct reference to the Occupation is a scene in which the hero breaks effortlessly through a series of roadblocks every bit as easily as he slips out of police handcuffs. The film’s most interesting addition is Burma’s plucky female sidekick, Hélène Parmentier (Sophie Desmarets), a would-be sleuth19 reminiscent of Kathryn Hepburn’s screwball comedy characters. Aspiring fille moderne, she makes multiple attempts at asserting crime-solving agency, yet the film is constantly putting her in her place, the ‘couple’s’ constant banter ensuring Burma retains masculine control. Always two steps ahead of the femme and the criminals (not to mention the law), he escapes the masochistic fate of the hard-boiled PI. Never once knocked senseless, the obligatory test of his manhood comes in the form of a stray bullet in the arm during the final sequence. The proverbial scratch is of course received with barely a grimace – the wound hidden then later proudly displayed to the female love-interest. The final scene has the newly formed couple still arguing and exchanging a series of playful slaps that morph into a final embrace and humorous nod to the camera.

Le réalisme noir and flawed masculinity Nonetheless, alongside this type of self-congratulatory contribution to the Resistance myth, a number of noir crime dramas of the postwar years present the other side of a tarnished coin, in which evidence of repressed male shame and anxiety seep through.20 Thus, the immediate postwar in France, a time of briefly euphoric liberation during which French cinema glorified the Resistance, is also notable for a smaller number of popular film noirs that suggest collaborators often had the upper hand or which 41

Classic French Noir reveal underlying male anxieties around the nation’s less than heroic recent past.21 Moreover, the long shadow of war stretches across the decade of the 1950s, materialising in a small but significant body of popular films set during or immediately after the war and featuring various manifestations of damaged or toxic masculinity: sociopathic gangsters, failed patriarchs and flawed heroes. The first of these postwar flawed-hero noirs, La Fille du diable [Devil’s Daughter] (Decoin,22 1946) stars Pierre Fresnay (Le corbeau’s Dr Germain) as strangely reformed bank-robber, Saget. Wounded and on the run from police, Saget is picked up by a quiet businessman, Ludovic Mercier, returning to his hometown after making good in America. In a classic noir plot line, Mercier is killed in a car accident and Saget steals his identity – and fortune. The townsfolk are easily deceived, immediately taken in by this affable, wealthy prodigal son. All except the wily old doctor (Fernand Ledoux), who, having tended Saget’s gunshot wound, guesses his true identity and begins a highly unusual blackmail scheme. He cajoles Saget/ Mercier into giving away more and more of his stash, not for the doctor’s own personal gain but to improve the lot of the less fortunate. ‘Mercier’ becomes a local hero, providing donations to various worthy causes, including a radiotherapy centre for tuberculosis victims and a brand new stadium. Among the recipients of this philanthropic blackmail is a consumptive young orphan, Isabelle (Andrée Clément). A social outcast, driven by hatred of the local bourgeois and aristocracy, she is the ‘devil’s daughter’. A passionate admirer of the notorious Saget, she ends up guessing Mercier’s true identity and wants to join him as a partner in crime, as part of her revenge plan against society. The film displays the moral ambiguity so typical of French noir: its ethical compass is very much in the mode of Le corbeau’s swinging light bulb. So-called respectable townsfolk are reminiscent of Le corbeau’s mean, pompous hypocrites and the film sides with Isabelle in condemning them for her plight. As for the good doctor, spectatorial allegiance constantly shifts between him (he works tirelessly for his patients, including the poor) and Saget/Mercier, who is initially constructed as gangster-hero. The film’s authors underline the doctor’s morally dubious manipulations, having Saget confront him: ‘Devious old sod, you’re a bigger crook than I am!’ In a low angle close-up, the doctor replies, unperturbed: ‘I chose to let you walk around in the dead man’s shoes. Now I’m selling

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Looking for the Light you the right to remain there.’23 The cynical Saget is sure the doctor has ulterior motives, that his philanthropy is a front for self-serving ambition, thus instilling further doubts in the spectator’s mind. On the other hand, the supposedly devilish wild child Isabelle is in many ways the ‘purest’ of the three, as her simple, schoolgirlish costuming, plaited black hair and unmade-up face suggest. Neither femme nor even jeune fille fatale, she is a tortured soul and would-be romantic fatalitaire, naively seeing herself as joining Saget as avenging outlaw, as a French Bonnie Parker one might say. But he refuses to play Clyde. She has a wild, romantic crush on the heroic gangster she imagines, yet his feelings for her hardly go beyond paternal(istic) solicitude. In fact, the main role of the femme here is to precipitate (not the hero’s fall but) the film’s deconstruction of the heroic outlaw persona of its male protagonist, and its concomitant vision of triumphant masculinity. This deconstruction begins 75 minutes into the film, when Mercier/ Saget has to defend himself against Isabelle’s ‘gang’, an 8-year-old and two adolescents. In a semi-comic fight, in which the kids come flying at him from all directions, he predictably bats them off, giving them a good lesson but clearly doing his best not to do them harm. When a disgusted Isabelle states the obvious: ‘It’s easy fighting kids !’, he retorts, ‘No actually it’s hard. A man doesn’t fight kids.’ Thus far the film has reinforced the image of the traditional hero: a real man does not use his physical superiority against the weak. But then the reverse process occurs. About to leave, ‘Mercier’ stumbles across Isabelle’s scrap book, full of cuttings of none other than his former self, Saget and realises she is in love with the romantic hero she has constructed from the overblown journalistic accounts of his exploits. Oblivious to the fact that the Ludovic Mercier she despises is her hero, Isabelle launches into an impassioned defence of the gangster, while Saget counters every heroic claim: Isabelle:

Mercier/Saget: Isabelle: Mercier/Saget: Isabelle:

Nothing can stop him. No one can catch him. He’s strong, brave, daring, he broke into the biggest bank. No one knows how. Via the sewer. All he had to do was block his nose. He had to fight his way past three guards. Two actually. The third was in on it. He shot them dead.

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Classic French Noir Mercier/Saget: Isabelle: Mercier/Saget:

In the back. He’s not afraid. Yes he is. That’s why he killed them. Out of fear.

Thus the scene (along with the remainder of the film) works to undo the same stereotypical images of the gangster-hero it has so painstakingly constructed. Moreover, given the liberation context, the figure of Saget as outlaw also begs to be read as a critique of the Resistance hero, fearlessly fighting off a foe superior in number and weaponry and representing official authority (both the Nazi occupier and Vichy militia). Actor Pierre Fresnay’s widely known right-wing political views and support of Pétain (for which he was briefly jailed after the Liberation) make an antiResistance reading all the more plausible. So-called heroism is nothing more than an inglorious scramble by men with nothing left to lose, employing less than heroic tactics in a desperate bid to survive. And when Saget wearily surrenders, rather than liberating redemption, his capitulation is framed as the end of heroism, the ultimate defeat. Parallels were not lost on the left-wing Resistance newspaper La Marseillaise, whose reviewer made similar remarks to those that had previously condemned Le corbeau: ‘Our ex-Occupiers would have been very satisfied with this film.’24 Six years on, Les Amants Maudits [The Damned Lovers] (Rozier, 1952) truly is a post-Liberation French Bonnie and Clyde story, though with a sinister twist. Pierre, a humble café waiter with delusions of grandeur steals a car and becomes a real-life gangster to impress new girlfriend, Jacky, taking her along for the ride. ‘An overt pastiche’25 of American 1930s gangster movies and 1940s film noir and far from a masterpiece, the film nonetheless deserves mention for two reasons. First, although the original title, Les amants maudits, evokes the trope of the tragic star-crossed lovers, the central couple’s dynamic is far darker and more cynical: based on lust, greed and betrayal rather than romantic devotion. Moreover, contrary to the stereotype of the fallible male led astray by a venal female, it is the male lover who is the more ruthless and perfidious of the two. After a shoot-up with police, Pierre and his gang callously leave Jacky for dead. The couple is eventually reunited but when he is dying of a gunshot wound following a botched robbery, he decides to take Jacky with him to the grave. She stoically accepts her fate. Rather than ill-fated, these lovers are truly

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Looking for the Light damned – not by the femme’s duplicity but by the male’s sociopathically callous brutality. Second, the film evokes the dark moral underbelly of the Occupation and Liberation, the porous boundaries between collaboration and Resistance circles and the connection to both of criminal masculinity. For despite an obligatory disclaimer and distancing narrative frame, the film’s story is very clearly based on France’s most notorious gangster of the Occupation and liberation, Pierre Loutrel, known as Pierrot Le Fou (Madman Pierre). Emblematic of the blurred moral boundaries of this period, Loutrel began as an arch collaborator, working for the Paris-based French gestapo from 1941 – 4, living the high life, dating leading actresses (including Ginette Leclerc), and committing multiple robberies and murders. When it became clear the Nazis were about to lose the war, he switched camps (as did many others), headed south and joined the Resistance, distinguishing himself by gunning down a Nazi officer in broad daylight, subsequently presiding over trials and executions of excollaborators. He also set up the Liberation years’ most infamous and legendary gang, dubbed ‘Le Gang des tractions avant’ (after their forward traction Citroens) and went on a two year rampage, managing to evade police until he died a somewhat ignominious death, after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach. He was buried secretly by gang members, who also shot his wife, their bodies not being discovered until 1949, just 18 months before the film project began. But the film which most explicitly connects the Occupation-Resistance and flawed masculinity is Yves Ciampi’s popular hit, Les héros sont fatigués [Heroes and Sinners] (1955), a noir adventure-thriller starring Yves Montand as ex-Resistance fighter pilot Michel Rivière; Curd Jürgens as his ex Luftwaffe counterpart, Wolf Gerke. Opposite these two tired heroes, Jean Servais is a villainous, drunken coward, has-been top lawyer and ex-collaborator. Maria Félix is the femme, Manuela, daughter of an Argentinean diplomat, Servais’ ex-partner and new love interest for Montand (Figure 3.2). The steamy interactions and dramatic tensions between the characters are amplified by the film’s exotic, tropical setting: all are marooned in a newly independent Central African Republic. The setting for Heroes was loosely based on Christine Garnier’s journalistic account of her visit to the African Republic of Liberia, founded by freed African-American slaves in 1847. Director, Yves Ciampi also

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Classic French Noir

Figure 3.2 Les héros sont fatigués.

visited briefly.26 This partly explains the fact that the ex-colonisers in the film speak English with American accents and American cars and Coca Cola adverts adorn the sets (reconstructed in the Joinville Studios outside Paris). But the film is clearly ‘about’ France and its Cold War anxieties over empire: during the 1950s independence movements began to unsettle France’s colonies in West and North Africa and in Indochina. Heroes’ fictive capital city is named Free City, which evokes Libreville, capital of Gabon, then part of French Equatorial Africa until its independence in 1960. Ethnic tensions are added to gender, class difference and nationalistic divisions: ex-enemies, ex-colonial masters and black ex-colonial subjects are thrown into a psychosocial and racial pressure cooker. The screenplay is surprisingly progressive in its treatment of interracial relationships between White women and African men: a sympathetic ex-pat Parisian hairdresser with her own business is happily married to an African; Manuela’s current lover is a member of the new African elite. Dialogues predictably underscore White male racism and miscegenation fears, which are presented as an even greater threat than African independence. Antagonists are all racists, including the shady French businessman who

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Looking for the Light has opportunistically married the daughter of an African senator. As for the evil ex-collaborator Séverin, he used to ‘have it in for’ Jews, now it is Blacks. French critics were divided on the film’s merits, particularly those who were unconvinced by the sets; however, none were shocked by its interracial love relationships. But despite its sympathetic, apparently wellreceived portrayal of interracial marriage, the film is inevitably Eurocentric and clichéd: contemptuous of new African elites aping their Westernised ex-masters and somewhat patronising of their more authentic but ‘primitive’ people, who spend their time dancing half-naked. The adventure-thriller plot turns on a stash of diamonds representing a ticket out of the tropical hell the European characters find themselves in. Tellingly, it is the all-male trio who fight to the death for their possession, while the femme is more interested in love than money. In his analysis of the dysfunctional all male group in classic American film noir, Mike Chopra-Gant asks: ‘What happens when the (veteran’s) return to civilian life is not accompanied by a revitalised commitment to family life, when men’s conduct remains governed by the values of the allmale group?’27 Les héros sont fatigués, whose title translates as ‘the heroes are tired’, provides an equally bleak, French response to this question. When men’s conduct in peacetime remains governed by the values of the all-male group, the consequence is the violent foreclosure of both romantic commitment and the creation of a family unit.28 In Heroes, the lovers’ future is doomed and strange new pairings of ex-enemies emerge, battlescarred, from the ruins. Rather than the heterosexual love story, the film centres on the homosocial bond between ex-enemies Montand/Rivière and Jürgens/ Gerke. The latter has been sent to recover the stash of diamonds that Rivière has ‘found’ and is attempting to sell. Both are out of work ex-pilots and disillusioned patriots who have risked their lives for their respective fatherlands only to find that their country has little use for them in peacetime. Rivière persuades Gerke to join forces, steal the diamonds and use the proceeds to set up their own commercial airline. Privileging the male ‘couple’, Ciampi gives Montand and Jürgens more than twice as much screen time together (over 18 minutes) as Montand and Felix (approximately eight minutes), including three long scenes of over four minutes each. In the first, in which they meet as adversaries, the mise en scène and framing borders on homoerotic: a reverse shot from Gerke’s

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Classic French Noir point of view (POV) of Rivière’s lower torso, as he extracts the ‘treasure’ from inside his trousers, is held for a dizzying 17 seconds. On Christmas Eve the two men share a candlelit dinner, reminiscing about their shared battles while the sidelined femme waits on tables (Figure 3.3). Eclipsed by the male couple, visually coded as a Carmen-like vamp, Maria Felix’s character is a misunderstood fatalitaire, genuinely falling for the ‘hero’ and going to great lengths to help and defend him. But their relationship appears largely engineered to serve voyeuristic audience expectations for steamy sex scenes and a desire to emulate American models.29 Misconstruing his lover’s attempts to help him escape with the diamonds as self-interest, the hero’s mistrustful projection onto her of his own greed hampers the construction of the couple as romantic starcrossed lovers. The film’s dramatic climax and dénouement begins when the evil Séverin steals the diamonds (ostensibly to keep Manuela) and heads for the sea. Rivière and Gerke go after him, ignoring Manuela’s plea to just let him go. She joins them and is shot by Séverin, who will end up drowning, still holding her dead body, having almost managed to best the two heroes. In the final 40-second shot, the latter emerge from the water, Montand

Figure 3.3 Les héros sont fatigués.

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Looking for the Light supporting a wounded Jürgens. The ‘couple’ slowly approaches the camera as a drumbeat announces the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, ending on a low angle MCU as they look off-screen, towards an uncertain future. Heroes begs to be read allegorically on two levels: soldiers’ difficult return to civilian society and consequent loss of faith in patriotism and the new French alliance with its ex-occupier, West Germany. The Nazi invader, subsequently defeated, had since become an economic partner, with the 1951 creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), between France and West Germany, which was subsequently expanded to form the basis of the Common Market (1957). Thus the film’s male protagonists can be seen as embodying the fledgling alliance that would found the New Europe. On the other hand, the femme has been sacrificed. The hero’s mistrust and subsequent privileging of male relationships clearly seek to perpetuate a state of bachelorhood: the setting up of the airline that will enable financial security, endless physical and emotional mobility and detachment from family bonds. The tragedy of the love story is less the consequence of cruel fate than a direct result of his projected greed and greater homosocial investment.

Conclusion Among the many paradoxes of Occupation cinema, the sympathetic treatment of women extends to the darkest of noir, most markedly in Le corbeau, notable for its central femme fatale, who turns out to be a false garce, a misunderstood, good-bad girl. Moreover, the film’s cynical brand of black realism, its insistence on the problematically blurred lines between good and evil ‘colour’ classic French noir of the Liberation and postwar Fourth Republic. Current critical discourse follows Burch and Sellier in arguing for liberation cinema’s reinstatement of patriarchal power as part and parcel of the construction of the Gaullist myth of the Resistance – with its concomitant demonisation of women,30 as we shall see (Chapter 4). But this chapter has demonstrated that le réalisme noir also points out the cracks in the Resistance myth, targeting flawed masculinity, sometimes going as far as to make explicit links between the scars of war, difficult social reinsertion and male flight from romantic attachment.

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4 Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire

Introduction So much has been written on the demonisation of women through the emblematic figure of the femme fatale in classic American noir, the ruthless siren who commits criminal acts and/or lures her male victim into committing them on her behalf before seeking to eliminate him. The widely accepted sociological explanation for the emergence of this spiderwoman fatale figure in American noir of the 1940s and early 1950s sees her as emerging out of a crisis of masculinity precipitated by the nation’s traumatic experience of World War II, and the difficulties faced by exservicemen in readjusting to civilian life. This chapter1 seeks not to contest the sociological thesis but to add to it, by comparing and contrasting the American situation with that of France, and focusing particularly on the latter, in order to demonstrate the existence of a neglected aspect of this sociological mix. Large-scale war inevitably leads to a demographic imbalance: a dearth of marriageable men and a concomitant oversupply of unwed young women seeking partners. Cross-cultural studies informed by socio-economic and evolutionary theory suggest that low sex ratio (significantly higher numbers of women than men of reproductive age) leads to higher sociosexuality (‘promiscuity’), particularly among women.2 Using examples from key French and American noir films from this

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire period, I will argue that sex ratio studies offer compelling ecological and psychosexual reasons for viewing historically produced low sex ratios as a significant contributor to diverse representations of active feminine sexuality evident in the complex figure of the femme fatale.

Classic American femme fatale as spider woman The femme fatale of classic American film noir, emblematic figure of the demonisation of active female sexuality has been widely analysed, most notably as the ruthless and criminally lethal spider-woman immortalised in dozens of classic film noirs (and through such iconic stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner). The spider-woman fatale typically lures her hapless male lover into committing murder or other violent criminal acts on her behalf and then promptly sets about disposing of him in turn. Of course, she is not the only expression of feminine desire in classic noir. As a number of scholars have noted,3 the spider woman, however powerful, sits alongside other more positively assertive figures: the resourceful, modern woman and the loyal though misunderstood, goodbad girl also feature in classic noir.4 Nonetheless, as the most powerfully ruthless of fatales, the spider woman is the most memorable and the most emblematic of noir paranoia. As an agent of cruel fate, she has been productively read as the site of projection of male fears of active female sexuality and displaced male lust, greed and criminal violence. The positioning of the American noir hero as potential fall guy or victim (Murder My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1943); Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944); Detour (Ulmer, 1945); The Killers (Siodmak, 1946); Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947); The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1948)), fatally attracted and caught like a helpless fly in the fatale’s web of criminal deceit, reinforces such a reading. Cases where the male protagonist outwits the femme (The Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941)), escapes her clutches (Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)) or discovers she really loves him (The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946)) barely modify the central dynamics aligning female sexual allure with dangerous duplicity. Many commentators have noted how the fatale as spider woman combines physical seductiveness with lethal ambition: a drive for personal independence within which the man is ‘just a tool’, no longer a romantic object of desire. As Janey Place notes, ‘what she’s after is not the man. 51

Classic French Noir He’s another tool. What she’s after is something for herself’.5 Moreover, the fatale’s ruthless agency and narrative power are often signalled by her visual dominance within the frame, as in Double Indemnity, when Neff meets Phyllis Dietrichson, the mise en scène films the hapless insurance salesman in high angle, looking upstairs towards a scantily clad Phyllis, framed in commanding reverse low angle. However, despite her visual and narrative power, in the classic period, patriarchal order is of course restored at the end of the film by the fatale’s narrative punishment, via death or imprisonment. The widely accepted sociological explanation for the emergence of this spider-woman fatale figure in American noir of the 1940s and early 1950s sees her as a product of a crisis of masculinity precipitated by the nation’s traumatic experience of World War II and the wide-scale accession of women to positions of greater economic independence. The difficulties faced by ex-servicemen in readjusting to civilian life – re-entering the family and workforce, sufficient in themselves to unsettle masculine identity – were compounded by the radical transformation of both social spaces as women had been forced out of the home and into the workforce during the war years. On their return, American men, already emotionally scarred by the direct experience of war, suddenly found themselves having to compete in the workforce with those whose role had previously been limited to serving their needs as sweethearts, wives, and mothers. As Thomas Schatz first argued: The post-war return to ‘normalcy’ never really materialized – the GIs’ triumphant home-coming only seemed to complicate matters and to bring out issues of urban anonymity and sexual confusion. These concerns tinged Hollywood’s traditional macho-redeemer hero and domesticating heroine with a certain ambiguity and brought two other character types into the midst of the Hollywood constellation: the brutally violent, sexually confused psychopath and the aptly named femme noire, that sultry seductress who preys on the hero and whose motives and allegiance generally are in doubt until the film’s closing moments.6

While it is also true that the postwar years saw American women actively ‘encouraged’ to return to their traditional roles in the home, Women’s Bureau Reports (1952, 1958) show numbers of working women increasing

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire steadily from 19 million in 1952 to 22 million in 1958, from 30 per cent to almost 34 per cent of the workforce across the decade. Moreover, as media specialist Lynn Spigel notes, during this time ‘the number of married women workers skyrocketed’.7

French fatale: ‘Cherchez la femme’ The situation in France was somewhat different and ultimately led to different constructions of the fatale figure. French noir of the postwar period certainly contains many negative female characters, most of whom are either petites garces (small-time, treacherous two-timers) and golddigging would-be vamps, or unattractive, domineering matriarchs or mégères (fishwives). But although they invariably, whether unwittingly or intentionally, cause trouble for the postwar French noir hero, these are often minor characters lacking the magnificent power, visual dominance and narrative agency of the deadly American fatale. In this sense, when one ‘looks for the woman’ in classic French noir, the lady almost vanishes. When she does take centre stage, the French fatale may possess all the seductive qualities and powerful agency of her American sister. She too, excels at getting men ‘into bed and into trouble’8 but rarely does she consciously plot his demise. In this sense, she is more a fatalitaire, the unwitting and tragic instrument of doom of the poetic realist era, than the self-seeking, devouring spider woman at the centre of the most iconic classics of American noir and whose punishment or death is presented as just and desirable. Though French fatale of the postwar decades may be ambitious and unscrupulous, she is almost always an amoureuse, a woman in love whose basic aim is to get and/or keep her man. The lover is, with a few notable exceptions (see Chapter 7), her ultimate object of desire, not merely a tool to be used in the quest for power and independence, used, abused, then discarded, as is the case in the most memorable classic American noirs.

Sociohistorical origins of French fatale A number of cultural and socio-historical reasons underpin the differential construction of the fatale in French film noir. Most importantly for the present discussion, and in confirmation of the crisis of masculinity thesis,

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Classic French Noir the major determining factor can be seen to lie in the lower socio-economic and legal status of French women at this time, and in the two countries’ differing experiences of World War II. Although the German Occupation (1940 –4) had traumatic and transformative effects on the French as a nation, as we have seen, and although the period saw many women take on what had been traditionally masculine roles, it did not produce the spectacular gains in independence and economic status experienced by American women. Apart from a few key industries exploited to feed the German war machine, France’s (still largely rural) economy was largely in tatters during this period, which did not therefore involve women’s large-scale accession to professional life. More importantly, wartime ‘gains’ were often neither sought nor sustained. Most notably for the vast majority of the 790,000 wives of French POWs, wartime meant not freedom and independence but ‘grinding hardship, heavy burdens, and tiring overwhelming responsibilities’.9 French women’s priorities following the Liberation, after years of physical deprivation and danger, were thus centred on rebuilding the family rather than liberating themselves from it: ‘Men returned to work, women retired to the home to have children.’10 Pro-natalist policies, including generous child allowances, strongly encouraged them to do so.11 And for those women who had acquired a measure of autonomy during the war years and desired to hold on to it, their hopes were often frustrated by the weight of French conservatism.12 Nor was this conservatism confined to men: apart from the communist-influenced Union des Femmes Francaises, few women’s organisations of the period defended women’s right to work, focusing instead on bolstering their procreational role as wives and mothers within the patriarchal family unit.13 In stark contrast to the American situation, census figures show a progressive decline in the number of economically active French women from 1946 to 1962.14 French women were granted the vote in 1944 by de Gaulle, as a reward for their contribution to the Resistance and the war effort. However, in the political and legal spheres, they were still regarded legally as minors by the Code Civil, and remained more or less entirely absent from positions of power for the entire duration of the Fourth Republic, comprising a mere 1.3 per cent of the National Assembly in 1958. Thus, even though they were beginning to make inroads into the quasi monopoly of masculine power, French women of the postwar period were yet to present a major

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire economic or political threat to the Gallic male psyche. Given such a context, it is understandable that French fatale is yet to entertain the thoughts of economic and emotional independence from the male partner that make her American sister of classic noir so heartlessly and so magnificently ruthless.

French fatale as scapegoat for a nation’s shame The construction of the various types of classic French fatale turns not so much on a fear of women’s economic independence as on notions of fidelity and betrayal and projected shame: a Gallic crisis of masculinity provoked by military defeat and four years of Nazi occupation, as we have seen. Here the major threat posed by woman involved sexual infidelity, often more perceived than real, equated to betrayal of the nation: not simply sleeping around but sleeping with the triumphant occupying enemy in a phenomenon known as ‘horizontal collaboration’. During the Liberation, public head-shavings, estimated by recent historians to number as many as 10,000, were daily affairs, ‘in grotesque carnevalesque scenes by men who had been unable to protect either their country or their womenfolk . . .’.15 The misogynistic undertones of much postwar French noir (and nonnoir melodrama) featuring duplicitous, sexually assertive females16 can be productively read as an indirect expression of male reproductive fears. In Yves Allégret’s Manèges [The Cheat] (1950), for example, an ex prisoner of war (Bernard Blier) falls into the clutches of a scheming garce (Simone Signoret) who shows no interest in her husband’s wartime sufferings, eyeing up a handsome stranger while her spouse tearfully recounts the death of his friend and fellow POW. Several other postwar films noirs set during the Occupation and Liberation illustrate quite explicitly French POWs fears of sexual betrayal. In Le Bon Dieu sans Confession (see Chapter 7) a jealous husband escapes because he (wrongfully) suspects his wife of cheating on him. In La vierge du Rhin a released POW (Jean Gabin) returns home to discover his treacherous wife and her lover have stolen his business. Such fears of sexual betrayal also explain the extent to which the humiliations of military defeat are projected onto French women, making them the principal scapegoats for the nation’s shame. And while the numbers of French men participating in the Resistance were exaggerated to

55

Classic French Noir mythical proportions, French women’s contribution was more or less forgotten. It was not until 1959, with Henri Decoin’s immensely popular La Chatte, starring Francoise Arnoul, that a Resistance film would feature a female lead. Classic fatalitaire, her character unwittingly falls in love with a German spy, who sacrifices the résistantes’ comrades in an attempt to save the woman he loves. Her heroism is thus undermined and in the final scene, she is released by the Nazis, only to be gunned down by her Resistance chief. Among the minor characters in one of the darkest of the many resistance films that followed the Liberation, Les démons de l’aube [Dawn Devils] (Allégret 1946) features a doubly treacherous adulteress, a garce who not only takes a lover while her husband is in a German POW camp, but when he is freed (as part of an exchange of French workers for prisoners of war), knowingly sabotages his resistance efforts, almost resulting in his death. But the most powerful filmic evocation of horizontal collaboration (and the shorn women phenomenon) appears in Clouzot’s box-office hit, Manon (1948),17 which, I will argue, is also emblematic of French noir’s construction of the fatale as tragic fatalitaire.

Manon (Clouzot, 1949) Manon aptly resituates to the contemporary, Liberation period, L’Abbé Prévost’s classic eighteenth-century tale (1728/1967) of a naive young country gentleman led astray by a venal temptress. In an early scene from the film, set in 1944 among the bombed ruins of a recently liberated French village, Clouzot’s eponymous fatale, who makes no attempt to deny her involvement with German officers, is saved in extremis from a crazed mob of villagers intent on meting out the usual punishment by the timely intercession of her Resistance ‘knight’. The scene features almost as many local women as men, with the former proving among the most vocal and most keen to see an unrepentant Manon shaven, shamed and imprisoned, if not worse. Clouzot cuts from Manon’s aborted ‘trial’ to a quasi-documentary long shot of shaven headed women paraded, half naked through the village streets. Moreover, camera and mise en scène position the spectator to sympathise with Manon’s plight by suggesting, in line with historical sources18 and archival images,19 that the villagers’ self-righteous ire is fuelled not so much by patriotism as

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire

Figure 4.1 Manon.

by inglorious sexual jealousy: loss of patriarchal control on the part of the men and female intrasexual competition on the part of the women. A series of medium-close up (MCU) group shots contrast Manon’s naive blondness with the bitter faces and darker complexions of her female accusers, the most vocal of whom is a plain, middle-aged, spinsterish-looking woman (Hélèna Manson, the bitter spinster Marie Corbin of Clouzot’s Le corbeau) (Figure 4.1). When asked: ‘Did she sell any French to the Germans?’, the woman can offer no facts, merely envious assumptions: ‘Her mother’s bar was always full of Krauts.’20 The character of Manon is a complex and, in many ways, sympathetic one. For despite her amorality and apparent treachery (she is indolent, venal and materialistic, voluntarily working as a prostitute, sleeping with wealthy men for monetary gain), as the film progresses (as in the source novel) it becomes increasingly clear that her feelings for the hero, Des Grieux, are deeply genuine. A classic French fatalitaire, her man is her ultimate object of desire. Her unconventional sense of loyalty prefigures Signoret’s good-hearted prostitute roles (see Chapter 5) since she uses the proceeds from her day job for the benefit of her couple, albeit concealing the facts from her idealistic and jealously possessive lover.

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Classic French Noir Following the Liberation, the Fourth Republic outlawed prostitution (in the loi Marthe Richard of 1946) and closed down France’s 1,500 maisons closes,21 ostensibly to protect women from exploitation, violence and disease (its initial proposer, Paris City Councillor, Marthe Richard had been a working girl herself). However the new law was also a form of ‘social cleansing’.22 The disgraced reactionary Vichy regime had allowed brothels, which were frequented by the Nazi occupier and became closely associated with collaboration and the flourishing black market.23 Thus their closing down was also part of the post-Liberation purges, of which Clouzot’s Manon is almost a victim. For her pragmatic approach to love, seeking to combine romance, pleasure and material security, Manon is condemned by a society that Clouzot presents (much as he had done in Le corbeau) as degenerate, hypocritical and corrupt. But if intradiegetic French society condemns her for wanting it all, the film invites its spectator to recognise Manon’s distinctly feminine predicament and to identify with her passionate attachment to her misguided knight.

Figure 4.2 Manon.

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire In scene after scene, Manon’s pragmatic candour is counterposed to Robert’s pusillanimous idealism, as demonstrated by their exchange when the latter discovers her working in a high-class brothel (Figure 4.2). Robert: Manon:

This place disgusts me. Nothing is disgusting when you’re in love.24

Admittedly, the couple is corrupted by Manon’s materialistic hedonism. But the film also portrays Manon herself as being enticed into vice by her brother Leon, the film’s arch degenerate, who represents the repressed materialistic, cynical potential in Robert, and whom Robert will eventually kill in a fit of self-righteous rage. Subsequently, instead of fleeing to safety in the USA with her latest sugar daddy, Manon chooses Des Grieux and perilous exile that, for both, will end in death, in the parched deserts of Palestine. Manon’s passionate emotional loyalty – if not sexual fidelity – makes her a marginalised, ambiguous, modern and in many ways positive figure. As pragmatic fille moderne, she uses her charms and ill-gotten gains for the economic benefit of her couple. It is for this reason that she is ultimately a tragic figure, fatalitaire rather than one dimensional, self-serving garce or spider woman, a fille moderne (modern girl) but not quite yet a truly ‘material girl’. To conclude this section, I have argued that the crisis of masculinity thesis for the emergence of femme fatale figures holds for both French and American noir and can explain the differential construction of the fatale in French and American cinema: the less ruthless French fatalitaire figure being explainable in terms of the relatively lesser degree of political power and economic independence attained and actively sought by French women at this time. The obsessive French focus on sexual fidelity can be traced to France’s defeat and occupation by German troops, and to the subsequent scapegoating of French women for this reproductive threat and supremely painful blow to Gallic male pride.

War, demographics and assertive femininity: sex ratio theory As stated, large-scale war inevitably leads to a demographic imbalance and adverse marriage market conditions for women: a dearth of marriageable 59

Classic French Noir men and concomitant oversupply of unwed young women seeking partners. According to sex ratio theory, an imbalanced sex ratio leads to increased intrasexual competition to acquire a mate among members of the more numerous sex.25 This occurs because of fundamental economic laws of supply and demand: the less numerous sex (here men) become a scarce, in-demand resource which the more numerous sex (women) must compete harder to attract. Being an in-demand resource confers what sex ratio researchers Guttentag and Secord describe as ‘dyadic power’. They discuss at length how dyadic power can be reinforced or counterbalanced by structural power, which derives from socio-economic and cultural status, pointing out that in almost all known human societies it has been men who possess the latter. In the low operational sex ratio situations (LSR) that result from prolonged periods of war, men’s newly increased dyadic power is further reinforced by their existing superior structural power. This occurs despite the fact that, as we have seen, in mid-twentiethcentury USA and France, ironically due to two periods of large-scale war within a generation, this structural power was itself being undermined to a greater or lesser extent by women’s accession to political representation and economic roles outside the home. Indeed, Guttentag and Secord also argue that by further undermining women’s social status – women becoming less and less valued by men as their comparative numbers swell – low sex ratios ultimately fuel resistance in the form of feminist movements. The release of the original French publication of de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking The Second Sex [Le Deuxième Sexe] (1949) by Gallimard, thus further supports Guttentag and Secord’s hypothesis.26 Available statistics support hypothesised low (less than 0.9) operational sex ratio or LSR, i.e. more women of reproductive age (15 – 49 years) for both French and American populations between 1943 and 1950. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the latter had barely recovered from the disastrous effects on marriage markets of World War I, which had claimed 1,397,800 military deaths and wounded 4,266,000, the majority of whom were men in their reproductive prime: between the ages of 19 and 40 years of age.27 Moreover, many of the wounded survivors were gravely mutilated28 and thus effectively excluded from the mating pool (even though they still figure in census statistics used to establish operational sex ratios, see Table 4.1 below). Although France did not suffer as greatly from this phenomenon following World War II, the number of returned POWs

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire (1.2 million in total) suffering from traumatic stress syndrome, with disastrous effects on their ability to form sustained relationships, cannot be underestimated. Thus, existing statistics probably fail to fully capture the severity of marriage markets for women in France following both world wars. From 1942 –5, a similarly compounding factor exists for the USA, which suffered greater military casualties (416,800 compared to 217,600 in France) and war-wounded, even though these losses are much smaller relative to its total population. In France, before the Nazi invasion in 1940, the population between the ages of 15 and 44 comprised 8,628,364 men and 8,656,352 women, giving a balanced operational sex ratio of .99. By the end of World War II, this ratio had plummeted to 0.82,29 but it had recovered somewhat by 1948 (see Table 4.1 below). However, as sex ratio researchers point out, when attempting to establish marriage markets, operational sex ratio (the percentage of men to women of reproductive age30) can prove too blunt an instrument, since, even if data excludes married couples, it includes those beyond the age at which people typically seek to marry. More importantly, marriage market statistics need to take into account the fact that women typically marry older men and, more importantly, men typically seek younger women, particularly where they (men) possess greater dyadic and/or structural power. In respect to mid-twentieth century France, if we consider the average marriageable age-group for women to be 20 – 26 years, with men marrying on average later at 24 – 30 years,31 then the marriage market sex ratio index (for unmarried individuals, single, widowed and divorced) or marriage market indices (MMI) for 1945 reaches a staggeringly low rate of 0.4. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s this corrected index remains low at around 0.85 and does not stabilise until 1960. Thus during the period corresponding to classic French film noir, there was a constant surplus of young women seeking husbands (between 150,000 – 200,000 per year). Moreover, recent research suggests that when men are scarce and in high demand, and when opportunities for short-term mating are plentiful, they are less inclined to marry early, generally putting off long-term commitment for longer than would otherwise be the case.32 As we shall see, evidence from the French popular feminine press corroborates the extreme shortage of eligible, willing marriage partners for young French women of the immediate postwar period.

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Classic French Noir Table 4.1 Effect of World War II (1940–60) on operational sex ratios and marriage markets in France and USA Operational sex ratio (OSR) and marriage market indices (MMI)* for France, before and after World War I and II Year (1 Jan.) 1914 1920 1940 1945 1948 1949 1950 1955 1960

Men 15 – 44

Women 15 – 44

OSR

Unmarried* men 24 –30

8,887,252 8,117,498 8,628,364 6,996,137 8,870,013 8,864,487 8,857,509 8,722,115 8,760,153

9,006,256 9,341,970 8,656,352 8,486,667 8,823,019 8,789,548 8,759,983 8,577,647 8,516,474

0.99 0.87 0.99 0.82 1.01 1.01 1.01 1.02 1.03

1,013,613 963,775 845,069 468,077 774,715 790,035 811,843 810,843 830,230

Unmarried* women 20 – 26

MMI

1,001,354 1,495,885 575,280 1,153,356 923,528 891,507 948,752 947,522 864,983

1.01 0.67 1.47 0.41 0.84 0.89 0.85 0.85 0.95

US Census Bureau figures give a similar drop in operational sex ratio (20 –44yrs) for the postwar period: 96.2 for 1950, compared with 98.1 in 1940. Sadly, Guttentag and Secord’s study did not look into this period in the USA; however,more recent sources indicate clearly that, as we would expect, marriage markets for American women were equally difficult throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.33

Extending sex ratio theory A number of evolutionary theorists have extended Guttentag and Secord’s cultural exchange argument in a biocultural direction, noting that in LSR the more numerous sex (women) come under pressure to display attributes and qualities desired by the less frequent sex, i.e. men.34 So then, according to evolutionary theory, what do men want? Trivers’ parental investment theory (PIV), widely supported for animal species, posits that men’s lower minimum investment in parenting leads to higher sociosexuality, that is, greater interest than women in casual sex.35 Subsequent cross-cultural studies on human sexuality confirm PIV, in that men consistently score higher on measures of sociosexuality.36 Unlike 96 per cent of mammals however, humans are

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire a pair-bonded species, with most men investing in their children and spouse(s) and providing (varying degrees of) parental care. This simple fact of evolved human sexuality notably underpins the madonna-whore binary, with its attendant sexual double standard and mate-guarding practices of patriarchal cultures, since men’s greater desire for multiple, short-term partners is most often counterbalanced by an equally strong desire (driven by paternity uncertainty) for a chaste, kind, long-term partner (wife/mother) who will invest selflessly in offspring that they can be sure are their own. In terms of what women want, given that in all known cultures women’s parental investment is greater than that of men,37 PIV predicts that women (even if they are not nearly as monogamously coy as Darwin (1871), Trivers and others38 had supposed) will be somewhat choosier than men, desiring fewer ‘better quality’ partners, i.e., women will be less inclined than men to mate indiscriminately. Again, there is wide empirical support for women’s lower sociosexuality39 and desire for long-term (though not necessarily lifelong) commitment to a partner who can ideally provide resources (money, status), protection and good genes (physical strength, good looks, kindness, intelligence etc.) to themselves and/or their offspring.40 Most importantly, however, as renowned anthropologist, primatologist and sociobiologist, Sarah B. Hrdy has pointed out, because the ideal partner may often prove elusive (or socially forbidden), women have always benefitted from non-monogamous mating strategies.41 Drawing together the above observations, sexual strategies theory predicts that, while seeking fewer numbers of partners than men, women will employ a range of context-sensitive, short- to long-term mating strategies: from monogamy to varying degrees of sociosexuality, ‘promiscuity’ or polyandry.42 The latter phenomenon, often taken to lethal limits by adulterous femmes in film noir, is particularly evident in unfavourable marriage markets, marked by a shortage of eligible, single males. Moreover, female polyandry can be seen to operate even in patriarchal societies (such as the USA and France during the classic noir period) which restrict female choice, place great weight on female chastity and punish female sociosexuality, even while seeking to encourage and exploit the extra mating opportunities it affords . . . To date, the most conclusive evidence for cross-cultural gender differences in sociosexuality has come from ‘Socio-sexuality from

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Classic French Noir Argentina to Zimbabwe: A 48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating’, which analyses data from a landmark, international study conducted in 2003, with a sample size of over 14,000. Researcher David Schmitt found that ‘Sex differences in socio-sexuality were generally large and demonstrated cross-cultural universality across the 48 nations’ and in all 48 nations, men scored higher than women.43 Gender differences in sociosexuality were context-sensitive to an extent: significantly larger when reproductive environments were more demanding and reduced to more moderate levels in cultures with more political and economic gender equality.44 Moreover, in line with the predictions of Parental Investment and Sexual Strategies Theories and of particular interest to us here, levels of sociosexuality were consistently higher in nations with lower operational sex ratios, i.e., with more reproductive-age women than men.45

A biocultural theory of sex differences Schmitt is careful not to neglect the influence of culture: in gender-equality cultures women’s levels of sociosexuality rise independently of sex ratio, such that gender differences in sociosexuality are smaller. Nonetheless, even in the most liberal societies, women’s sociosexuality measures are still smaller than those of men. More recently, a study using data from a 2005 cross-cultural internet survey into sex differences in cognition, motivation, personality and sexuality conducted by the BBC46 endorses Schmitt’s key findings. Moreover, its author argues for a hybrid (equivalent to what I term biocultural) theory of human sociosexuality, concluding strongly that while some human traits (namely height and sex drive) appear entirely biological (with men averaging higher in both), for others, namely sociosexuality and its connection with sex ratios, clear biological sex differences are nonetheless significantly moderated by sociohistorical and cultural influences.47 Thus, the best evolutionary accounts of gender differences in sociosexuality do not posit an essentialist, ahistorically monogamous female human nature. However, the evidence points overwhelmingly towards higher levels of sociosexuality in males and towards strategically varying levels of sociosexuality in females, as predicted by sexual selection and theories of sexual strategies and parental investment.

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Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire

Sex ratio, marriage markets and postwar femmes fatales Studies into sex ratio thus conclude that whenever there is an oversupply of women, women are more likely to adopt sociosexual strategies that cater to men’s greater desire for short-term mating, i.e. casual sex. Moreover, in patriarchal societies where their lesser dyadic power is compounded by considerably lesser structural power, women ‘are likely regarded as sex objects, feeling immobilised and devalued by society. Due to their oversupply, they are rarely able to marry into higher socioeconomic classes.’48 It is not difficult to see these associated factors at play in noir, viz. the quintessential noir narrative of the romantic triangle: young lovers conspire and often commit murder in order to steal resources from a wealthy third party, usually an older, less attractive male spouse (See Chapters 6 and 7). This type of fictional situation will be increasingly relevant in sociohistoric contexts like that of 1940s and 1950s France and USA, in which marriage markets are particularly unfavourable to women, driving them to make less than optimal spouse choices: typically to older, unattractive or ungenerous but wealthier men. Moreover, the seductive fatale figures of both French and American noir, who actively use their sexual charms in order to secure a man, whether for romantic and/or material gain, are thereby displaying what researchers agree is the most widespread form of female intrasexual competition.49 One also notes, in a number of French noirs, for example, an emphasis on more aggressive forms of female intrasexual competition, e.g. the jealous women villagers in the trial scene in Manon, as mentioned. In American noirs, female intrasexual competition can put the fatale figure into indirect or direct rivalry with a more sexually coy ingénue (e.g. Out of the Past; Human Desire), a frigid harpy (e.g. Johnny Guitar) or faithful, good woman (e.g. The Killers). In terms of whether such phenomena can be observed in real social settings, let us return to postwar France. From 1945 to 1948, poor marriage opportunities for women, patterns of male seduction and abandonment, a rise in female intrasexual competition and the crucially important, yet difficult task of finding and retaining a husband, are indeed all abundantly documented in the popular feminine press. In 1946, leading magazine Elle (read by one in six French women) even ran a report giving sex ratio

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Classic French Noir statistics for France, England and USA,50 partly in order to dispel what were described as wildly exaggerated rumours that in France there were seven times as many unmarried women as men. Particularly interesting is Elle’s obsessive focus, during these postwar years, on the especially difficult task of attracting and keeping a good husband, exacerbated because of men’s demographic advantage as scarce resource, i.e. their greater dyadic power, coupled with their still much greater structural, socio-economic power. From February to April 1948, shortly after its readers received news of Kinsey’s groundbreaking report, the magazine ran a six part feature devoted to the quest(ion), with an American ‘expert’, one Dr Clifford Adams, and unambiguously titled: ‘Comment trouver un mari et le garder’ [‘How to find a husband and keep him’]. The opening article notes explicitly men’s demographic advantage in the post-liberation French marriage market (although I strongly suspect women’s chances are being ‘talked-up’ by feminist editor, social commentator, screenwriter and future politician, Francoise Giroud): When a young man wishes to marry, he is sure to find a woman. When a young woman wishes to marry, she has only four out of five chances of seeing her wish come true because there are fewer eligible men than women.51

The good doctor’s advice is coupled with dire warnings against succumbing to pre-marital sex in order to ‘keep’ a man and the need to beware of predatory female competitors, a clear indication that these phenomena, or might we say, ‘strategies’, were widespread. There is no indication that women were being put off marriage, despite claims by then columnist Giroud that modern French women were becoming increasingly reluctant to become the unpaid housemaids of lazy, uncaring, chauvinistic men. Au contraire, regular agony aunt columns and feature articles in the same magazine suggest rather that in postwar France, it is men who are dragging their feet – when they can. And demographically speaking, Yes, indeed they could . . . Secondly, the same magazine maps fashion changes in the postliberation period towards the tighter-fitting, more revealing dress styles that are the staple of noir costuming: breasts are back; skirts are shorter; the bikini makes its first, scandalous appearance in Cannes in 1946. While no doubt also explainable by gradual moves towards greater gender equality, 66

Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire such fashion shifts (featuring a similar rise in skirt lengths to those that occurred after World War I) are entirely in line with the predictions of sex ratio theory: women dressing more sexily in a situation of increased competition for a reduced pool of eligible men, at least in part and whether consciously or not, in order to cater to male desires. As expected, examples of this trend abound in postwar French cinema, not only in noir. And so much has been made of the (much more) highly sexualised iconography and dress codes of the American femme fatale52 that I shall not repeat the discussion here.

Conclusion In both France and the USA, in the period following World War II that corresponds to classic noir, low sex ratios and unfavourable marriage markets for women combine with social change to produce greater numbers of more assertive women adopting short-term mating strategies (higher sociosexuality, casual sex) in order to compete for the attentions of a severely reduced pool of eligible men. This situation plays out against a backdrop of highly schizoid, patriarchal attitudes to female promiscuity. On one hand, female sociosexuality is desired by men (more mating opportunities) and modern women (increased chances of attracting a better mate) while being reproved by men in potential long-term partners, by conservative/religious social forces, and for reasons of (sharply rising) intrasexual competition, by some women. It has been my contention that this sociological and evolved psychosexual constellation feeds into the many manifestations of assertive, female sexuality in film noir of the period.53 Low operational sex ratios and severely unfavourable marriage markets for women are the missing link, informing the mix of fascination and desire, admiration, fear and jealousy that crystallise in the many fatale figures of classic French and American noir, as either criminalised or idolised sexual woman, from the good-bad girl to fille moderne or modern girl to the spider woman of classic American noir; from the petite garce to the tragic French fatalitaire. Chapters 5 –7 will take an in depth look at these figures. Moreover, I will argue in Chapter 8 that low sex ratios are a contributing factor to the emergence of the fatale’s male ‘equivalent’, the sexually exploitative, often narcissistic homme fatal or fatal man. 67

5 Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers

Introduction: passionate love as universal human adaptation Romantic, or passionate, love refers to any intense attraction involving the intrusive thinking about one person within an erotic context with the expectation of the state enduring for some time into the future. It also involves the reordering of personal priorities that favor being with the loved one combined with feelings of dependency.1

The French cultural obsession with romantic passion is legendary, as evidenced by the country’s rich literary history, from the Middle Ages on. Moreover, French approaches to love over the centuries have been wide and varied, alternating cyclically between extreme idealism (e.g. medieval star-crossed lovers Abelard and Héloise; the Arthurian troubadours’ unconsummated courtly love; the nineteenth-century Romantics) and extreme cynicism (e.g. Choderlos de Laclos’ Machiavellian Valmont and Mme de Merteuil in Les liaisons dangereuses; Flaubert’s brutally anti-romantic Mme Bovary). The tension between romanticism and

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Classic French Noir realism is perhaps best captured in the great novels of Stendhal, an inveterate womaniser (like many of his nineteenth-century literary compatriots) who also wrote a treatise On Love.2 But of course the French can claim no monopoly on the subject, and they certainly didn’t invent it.3 While its myriad manifestations are clearly culturally inflected, the concept of romantic love appears to be a human universal that no culture has been documented to lack. Ethnographic studies find evidence of romantic love across human time and space: in Lahu love songs, an ethnic minority in Southwest China, in popular Tang dynasty (6th century) Fox Fairy tales, in the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, and in Kung Bushmen’s acknowledgement that being in love is an intensely satisfying experience.4

Many indigenous oral literatures feature Romeo-and-Juliet-like stories, as in Aotearoa, New Zealand, that of Maori star-crossed lovers Hinemoa and Tutanekai, still celebrated in popular song. And even in cultures possessing no linguistic signifier for romantic love, individuals can nonetheless recognise and feel its physical and emotional manifestations.5 Scientists from a broad range of disciplines (including the social sciences) investigating the once taboo subject of passionate love now agree it is ‘not a Western social construction but a universal emotion/ motivation’.6 They draw on evolutionary theory, which proposes that the desire for passionate bonding in humans is as fundamental to successful reproduction as the biological sex drive. Evolutionary psychologists see romantic love as a suite of psychological adaptations, designed to focus reproductive effort on a single mate long enough to successfully produce and rear optimally endowed offspring.7 Moreover, recent research into the neural correlates of passionate love (brain scanning studies using functional magnetic resonance) support the evolutionary view. Leading biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and colleagues propose that the neural reward systems associated with feelings of intense attraction or romantic love (mediated by dopamine) and partner attachment (mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin) evolved by 4 million years ago in conjunction with the evolution of the human predisposition for monogamous pairbonding.8 These systems serve to focus mate choice and motivate individuals to remain with the chosen mate long enough to breed and rear 72

Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers their offspring through infancy as a team. Romantic attraction is to be distinguished from pure sexual appetite or testosterone-driven lust, which motivates individuals to seek sexual gratification and can have multiple targets. The defining characteristic of romantic love is its dopamine-driven attraction to a single, idealised love object. The same neural reward systems involved in romantic attraction are also activated by the consumption of narcotics and by other forms of substance and behavioural addiction, supporting views of passionate love as a kind of mania or addiction.9 Even in ‘love restrictive societies’ that practise arranged marriage and therefore seek to minimise romantic love for its socially disruptive privileging of individual mate choice, romantic love survives.10 And the existence of the star-crossed lovers trope in film noir and literature in relatively permissive but still patriarchal mid-twentieth-century France (and in the USA to a lesser extent11) is evidence of the power of the love drive: romantically attached individuals, including the French fatalitaire and her often ill-starred mate, are willing to defy social superiors, spouses and families, to transgress cultural taboos and legal systems in order to live their passion.

Love styles Before turning to a discussion of the films, it will be useful to define love more precisely. Of the dozens of tools devised by sociologists and psychologists since the 1960s to define and measure its different manifestations, I will refer to one of those currently most popular with researchers, which examines love as comprising six distinct attitudes or constructs and corresponding behaviours or styles.12 The six love styles, which may be manifested in different combinations and to varying degrees by individuals, are: Eros:

strong physical attraction, emotional intensity, preferred physical appearance and sense of inevitability or fate. Mania: ‘symptom love’ or love as an addiction; alternates between agony and ecstasy. When strongly felt, usually does not end well. Agape: idealising, sacrificial love, placing the loved one’s welfare above the self.

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Classic French Noir Storge: Ludus:

love as friendship; quiet, companionate love. love is a game to be played with a diverse set of partners. Dishonesty and deception are frequently employed in the interest of winning the game. Pragma: pragmatic ‘shopping list’ love, gives priority to practical considerations such as financial security and status; parenting skills; common interests.13

It will be immediately obvious to readers that the romantic star-crossed lovers of film noir are defined by their high levels of eros, often accompanied by either mania, agape or both, while duplicitous garces and spider-woman fatales are characterised by ludus (which is closer to lust than love) and/or coldly calculating pragma.

Star-crossed lovers In Chapters 2–4 we have seen a number of manifestations of the fatalitaire: the passionate ‘woman in love’, often unfairly maligned, unwitting agent or victim of oppressive social forces and/or malicious fate. In Voyage sans espoir and in Clouzot’s Manon we also saw how the fatalitaire can be an active agent, a pragmatic, modern girl using her wits and/or her sexual charm for the benefit of her couple, defending her man or risking all to remain by his side. Here I extend discussion of this iconic figure.

Martin Roumagnac [The Room Upstairs] (Lacombe 1946) I will open my case studies on the ill-fated fatalitaire and her lover with the film that was designed to relaunch the career of pre-war poetic realist hero, Jean Gabin, following his return to France after participating in the Liberation, and which starred his off-screen partner of five years, Marlene Dietrich. The film was Gabin’s first attempt to revive his own popularity while also launching Marlene in France, thereby inciting her to stay on and saving their relationship.14 Both stars were deeply disappointed by the film, which was deemed a box-office and critical failure, barely mentioned by Gabin’s major commentators.15 In Martin Roumagnac, Gabin’s young proletarian hero has gained in social status, in tune with his advancing towards middle age (the star was 44 at the time of shooting). And although he retained his trim athletic 74

Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers build, Gabin’s thick head of hair had turned grey as a result of his personal war effort and had to be dyed for the film. As Ginette Vincendeau has argued, Gabin’s accession to bourgeois respectability in his postwar roles is nonetheless marked by a strong underlying continuity, with all his postwar characters self-consciously foregrounding their self-made, proletarian roots.16 Here, the eponymous Roumagnac is a working-class man, a stonemason who has made it up the social ladder by a combination of astuteness and honest hard work. A much respected, entrepreneurial provincial building contractor, tough but fair as a boss, Gabin/Roumagnac is the town’s most eligible bachelor, much courted but resisting being ‘caught’. His undoing will be precipitated by a disastrous love affair with Dietrich as an alluring vamp with a shady past: ‘Cherchez la femme!’ Her character is set up narratively and visually (in the film’s opening scenes) as a classic femme fatale, ‘entertaining’ one after another of the town’s notables, who practically queue for her favours. Not German (for obvious reasons) but improbably Australian-born French, her character, Blanche Legrand is immediately likened to the colourful exotic birds she and her shady uncle sell. This none too subtle metaphor provides the film’s structuring visual trope, with the exotic Blanche repeatedly refusing to be caged, despite a number of golden offers. In line with Dietrich’s highly sexualised persona, she is a young and very merry widow whose seduction of a string of wealthy married men is already the source of much scandal and jealous gossip. Desperate to escape the suffocating little town, her ticket out of it is her wealthiest suitor, a pompous absentee diplomat awaiting the death of his ailing wife, whose imminent passing will free him to make an honest and well-off woman of her. Blanche’s greedy, pimp-like uncle is determined to broker the deal. The introduction of Dietrich is classic fatale but with more than a hint of romanticism underpinning her overpowering sensuality. The first we see of her, five minutes into the film, is a three second mid shot (MS) of her silk-stockinged legs descending a staircase into the bird shop, voyeuristically observed by an immediately love-struck handsome young teacher (Daniel Gélin). The scene introduces the visual trope of the fatale as object of desire but also and more importantly that of her enclosure: she is almost as trapped as her avian charges. Importantly, her romantic idealism is signalled immediately, through her favourite lovebirds:

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Classic French Noir if separated, both die. The lovebirds counterbalance any reading of her as garce or spider woman, as well as anticipating the film’s tragic outcome. The besotted young man buys the birds but, given the presence of Gabin in the opening credits (behind Dietrich), the spectator knows he stands not a chance with the femme, however handsome he may be. We thus await the meeting of the true lovebirds. This will take place at a boxing match, placing Blanche/Dietrich in a masculine space that her presence immediately disrupts, in true fatale style, suggesting also that she shares with Gabin/Roumagnac an independent, combative nature. The two soon become lovers. Roumagnac ominously neglects his construction business, manically focusing all his energies to build her a ‘love nest’, a country mansion that he selflessly transfers into her name. The consul’s wife conveniently dies and, though he is aware Blanche does not love him, the diplomat proposes marriage as an attractive business proposition, ‘much better than love’.17 Pragmatically, she accepts, on condition that their partnership be an open one: if the marriage is to be a golden cage, she is determined to retain the key. When the consul, played with superb cynicism and effete arrogance by Marcel Herrand (in a role reminiscent of his elegant murderer, Lacenaire, in Carné and Prévert’s masterpiece, Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] (1945)), predictably refuses to share her with an uncultured yokel like Roumagnac, Blanche ends the relationship, staunchly defending her lover: ‘Roumagnac’s a hundred times more of a man than you’ll ever be, you boor!’18 Meanwhile, Roumagnac’s business woes multiply, as do vicious rumours regarding his mistress. Duped into believing she is the golddigging, two-timing whore that the town has branded her, he strangles her in a fit of jealous rage and leaves her magnificent house to burn down. Dialogues echo Francois/Gabin’s crazed murder of the evil Valentin of Carné/Prévert’s pre-war poetic realist classic, Le jour se lève, as he spits out the same line: ‘Shut up you filthy liar!’19 With bitter dramatic irony, the spectator knows she is innocent, and that public vindictiveness has fuelled his jealousy, blinding him to the truth. At the subsequent trial, Roumagnac pleads not guilty, using a cunning alibi devised by his spinster sister and surrogate mother. The outcome looks uncertain when the victim’s uncle suddenly reappears as a providential deus ex machina, and to the stupefaction of all, confirms her refusal of the consul’s offer of marriage and ‘undying love’ for the accused. Roumagnac is at once acquitted by the

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers jury and stricken by guilt and remorse. The homecoming party organised by his sister only exacerbates his despair. A second explosion of Gabinesque anger ensues: ‘Foutez-moi la paix!’ [‘Get the hell out, all of you!’]. Alone in his room, he paces like a trapped prisoner, again echoing Le jour se lève. Outside, in the darkness, the love-struck young teacher lies in wait, armed. Seeing him, Roumagnac knowingly moves to stand in range against the window frame, back to the camera. Shots ring out. He falls, still clasping the ‘lucky charm’ four-leaf clover Blanche had given him when they first became lovers. The camera pans from his lifeless body to the front-page headline of the evening newspaper, ironically proclaiming his ‘release’: Martin Roumagnac Libéré. THE END The film is notable for its ill-starred effect on the passionate liaison between its lead actors and for its negative effect on Gabin’s career. Indeed, its tragic narrative is an uncanny symbolic echo of the couple’s tumultuous off-screen relationship. Moreover, the attitude of the townspeople towards Blanche – a mixture of desire, envy and scorn – to a certain extent mirrors the French public’s response to Dietrich. Despite her public anti-Nazi stance (a fervent anti-Nazi campaigner, she joined the American army in 1943 soon after Gabin enlisted with the Free French), Dietrich was not universally liked or accepted in France. To many she was ‘that Bosch’, a foreign temptress who had stolen the heart of their national hero. Not long after the film’s release, Gabin effectively ‘strangled’ the relationship after Dietrich left for Hollywood, refusing to divorce her estranged husband of 20 years. The death of the off-screen couple was no doubt also hastened by the failure of the film. Although it attracted almost 2.5 million French spectators in total (2,491,431),20 ranking 26th out of 64 French films released in 1946, Roumagnac failed to catapult Gabin back into the number one spot he had enjoyed in the pre-war years and instead ushered in a long, difficult ‘crossing of the desert’.21 Despite a number of critical successes, several of which would contribute to the classic French noir corpus,22 the now middle-aged actor would take another eight years to fight his way back to his pre-war position as top French male star. More importantly for the present study than its commercial failure and doomed reflection of Gabin and Dietrich’s off-screen couple, the film’s strengths and weaknesses shed light on the extent to which key poetic realist tropes could be successfully translated into the postwar context, marked as it was by a more cynical dark realism, the returning repressed of

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Classic French Noir the humiliating Nazi occupation and shameful Vichy collaboration. Gabin’s narrative trajectory, characterisation and dialogues borrow heavily from his tragic poetic realist persona, the honest man of the people hounded by cruel fate. But there is a notable departure from this figure: Roumagnac is less than heroic, displaying an uncharacteristic and somewhat shameful lack of integrity. During the protracted murder trial he produces lie after cool-faced lie, in order to save his own skin and avoid taking responsibility for his crime. A key aspect of the Gabin myth is his characters’ courage and integrity, their moral probity and selflessness in matters of love: eros and mania are accompanied by other-centred agape. In this respect, Gabin’s hero figures are constantly contrasted against the cowardly, cold-blooded deceit and hypocrisy of their male antagonists. Thus while audiences could accept murder-suicide as a tragic crimes of passion – viz. Lantier’s suicide immediately after he strangles Séverine in La bête humaine – Roumagnac’s cool-headed self-preservation signals a lack of moral courage that seriously undermines his hero-status. His delayed, mediated suicide only partly exonerates him.

The fatalitaire as modern girl To return to the fatale, played by the iconic figure of Dietrich, ultimate incarnation of the vamp, her iconic roles as Lola Lola, Shanghai Lily and Conchita Perez, necessarily inform her Blanche’s construction.23 But as we have seen, Martin Roumagnac presents her as also a victim of this stereotyping, both by the jealous Roumagnac and the parochial, bourgeois townspeople, for whom a merry widow is necessarily a black widow, a sexually assertive woman is a threat that must be controlled or eliminated. Lacombe’s mise en scène and costuming play into the provincial vamp stereotype: several scenes have Blanche preening before a jewel-encrusted hand-mirror and her vast array of dresses and gowns (she is never seen wearing the same costume twice) also suggests narcissistic self-absorption (Figure 5.1). These aspects are at odds with her emotional sincerity underlined by the screenplay (her association with the inseparable lovebirds) and dialogues, which insist on the importance of agency and passionate commitment: ‘the most important thing is not to be loved, but to love’.24 Blanche uses her status as object of desire as a means to power but she uses that power to retain the freedom to follow her heart, rather

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers

Figure 5.1 Martin Roumagnac.

than out of the material greed displayed by the garce and the attachmentfree independence sought by the more formidable spider woman. A pragmatic modern girl, like Clouzot’s Manon, she is quite prepared to sleep with married men for material gain; indeed, she is economically dependent on their patronage. She is not primarily motivated by a love of money or property however, and (unlike Manon) ceases ‘playing the field’ once she embarks on the love affair with Roumagnac. It is neither the duplicity of the fatale nor blind or malicious fate that causes the hero’s demise in this film but his obsessive sexual jealousy (the dark side of passion), which clouds his vision and leads him to code his lover as treacherous garce rather than the emotionally loyal and courageous (though pragmatic) partner that the film has revealed to its spectator.

Male sexual jealousy Manic male sexual jealousy as prime driver in the visual construction (and punishment) of the fatale is of course a recurring feature of film noir and its less dark variants. In film gris, the confirmation of her fidelity generally 79

Classic French Noir enables positive closure, most notably in Clouzot’s ‘blockbuster’ murder mystery, Quai des Orfèvres (1947). After many dramatic twists and turns driven by a jealous husband’s fears (see Chapter 9), the female protagonist, a flirtatious cabaret singer turns out to be a faithful wife, enabling the film to end well and alleviating some of the film’s malaise. From potential fatale, she emerges as a monogamous, good-bad girl who, like Vidor’s Gilda, ‘didn’t do any of those things’ imagined by the insecure, embattled spouse. Studies on differential feelings of jealousy in men and women propose that although both are troubled by infidelity with equal intensity, men are relatively more worried by sexual infidelity; women by emotional infidelity (their partner falling in love with another woman).25 Current evidence supports the view that men harbour more deep-seated fears over paternity certainty and probably loss of status, women over withdrawal of resources and protection; though both fear emotional abandonment, betrayal and loss of status to some extent.26

Simone Signoret as modern girl and prostitute fatalitaire As good-bad girls, fatalitaires in French noir are often sexually assertive, even promiscuous, as we have seen. Like Manon and Blanche, they may be kept women, or even prostitutes. They are also modern girls in that they display a high degree of resourceful agency and independent action. The actress who personified the fatalitaire as good-hearted good-time girl or prostitute and resourceful fille moderne in classic French noir is Simone Signoret, who first played this type of role as Lilli, beloved barmaid of a legionnaire café, in Les démons de l’aube. She played similar, prostitute roles in three other major classic French noirs: Macadam (Blistène, 1946), Dédée d’Anvers (Allégret, 1948) and most famously, in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or (1952).27 In all three films, Signoret’s heart of gold is revealed when she falls in love with a good man of whom she is the equal. In both Macadam and Casque d’or her primary female antagonist is a bitter, sexually repressed spinster with whom she vies for the hero’s affections. In both cases, the ‘false ingénue’ is no match for Signoret’s gutsy fatalitaire. The hero is not simply seduced by but falls emotionally for the passionately sensual, sexually open woman, abandoning the repressed, frigid, ‘good’ girl.

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers Signoret’s characters are marked by a powerful sensuality and personal agency that Susan Hayward aptly describes as an ‘erotics of power’.28 Shared by Dietrich’s Blanche and other fatalitaires, this unruly erotics also involves a strongly ethical dimension: personal integrity and authenticity, courageous ‘resistance’ to corrupt power (refusing male control of her body as resource) and a commitment to truth. Signoret’s ethical erotics of power is most poignantly articulated in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or [Golden Marie] (1952), widely recognised as one of the most powerfully positive feminine portraits of postwar French cinema.29 Loosely based on a true story, Casque d’Or is set in the Paris demimonde of 1900. Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani) an honest carpenter with a criminal record and underworld connections, falls for Marie (Simone Signoret), the feisty but good-hearted prostitute ‘moll’ of minor crook Roland, himself under the thumb of evil gangster boss Leca, who also lusts after Marie. When Manda kills Roland in a duel over Marie, Leca has his closest friend arrested, knowing that Manda will surrender to save him, thus leaving Marie alone and unprotected. Meticulously analysed by Susan Haywood30 and Sarah Leahy,31 costume, hair and body language play a crucial role in constructing and reflecting

Figure 5.2 Casque d'or.

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Classic French Noir Marie’s status as fatalitaire. In previous work, I have extended Hayward’s complex reading of Marie’s most significant costume (Figure 5.2): the black and white striped taffeta ball gown, trimmed with white lace ruffles and which she wears with a black feather boa and a black onyx choker.32 Hayward shows how this costume can be read variously, either marking Marie as a predatory black widow or as a sign of genuine mourning, since she wears it on the night of her lover Manda’s fateful shooting of Roland, just after discovering that she has lost Manda to another woman, and before consequently deciding to sell herself to the evil patriarch, gang boss Leca. I would add that this ambiguous layering of signification is part and parcel of the film’s construction of Marie as fatalitaire. The costume, which appears straight black in long shot, is revealed to be more complex on closer-framing: black and white stripes, indicating Marie’s potential for both good and evil and emphasising the uncertainty for the spectator as to which side she will choose. Moreover, the white lace at the throat softens and offsets the cutting jaggedness of the onyx necklace. The costume is therefore a question mark: will Marie reveal herself to be black widow or loyal mistress? Is she garce or fatalitaire? Is she driven by self-interested ludus or passionate agape? The question will be answered by the progression of the narrative, which will expose the spider-woman costume as a masquerade. Marie’s tough exterior is a survival mechanism, concealing a heart that is not ruthlessly treacherous but fiercely loyal, as revealed by her sexual sacrifice to the evil Leca, her daring rescue of her wrongly imprisoned lover and her refusal to abandon him, even at the moment of his execution. Signoret’s Marie thus displays the selfless altruism or agape that is an integral part of passionate love as ‘pure’ emotional commitment. In this sense, as a romantic, misunderstood figure, set up as false appearance or falsely accused, classic French fatale as fatalitaire resembles the good-bad girl false fatales of American noirs like Gene Tierney as Laura (Preminger, 1944), Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat (Lang, 1953); Jean Peters in Pick up on South Street (Fuller, 1953), and especially Rita Hayworth as Gilda (Vidor, 1946). Signoret’s prostitute characters, like Dietrich’s Blanche, use their sexual allure as a survival strategy and a front, as does Vidor’s eponymous heroine. All are victims of the patriarchal tendency to ‘Look for the Woman’, or ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, as Rita Hayworth sings. All are revealed as loyal, courageous mistresses whose

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers ethical integrity is vindicated, thus they are ultimately positive figures. So it is inexact to see noir as always already complicit with patriarchal repression of female sexual assertiveness, particularly given cases where the sensual good-bad girl or fatalitaire is pitted against a sexually repressed female antagonist (as in the Signoret films noted above). Nor, I shall now argue, is the performance of femininity by these kinds of noir women evidence of the groundlessness of gender as masquerade.

Femininity as masquerade? For constructivists, the gendered slate is originally blank. Constructivism assumes that if it were not for (Western Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, capitalist) culture, human males and females would behave and think identically. Moreover, according to the constructivist framework, romantic love, claimed to be a Western Judeo-Christian cultural construction designed to shore up heteronormative monogamy, is an ethically indefensible illusion. While writing (on Signoret and Casque d’or) from an ostensibly constructivist agenda, neither Susan Hayward nor Sarah Leahy in fact take this view. Both authors celebrate Signoret’s love relationships (on-screen and off) and appear to endorse passionate love as a fundamental human bond. Moreover, their texts repeatedly evoke notions of feminine and masculine beauty and desire, authenticity and agency beyond the putatively groundless masquerade of gender stereotypes. While I do not disagree with either theorist’s conclusions, I wish to point out that they are more in line with a biocultural theoretical approach – which considers gender as constructed and performed on an evolved, biological substratum – than with a purely constructivist framework which sees gender (and beauty) as masquerade ‘all the way down’.33 Hayward, in particular, argues that Signoret’s costumes signal the contrast between the superficial masquerade of conventional femininity and her characters’ authenticity and agency, their erotics of power: As the masquerade of femininity drops off, so an erotics of power can emerge. . . . there is a gradual process of demasquerading – marked by her clothing and the framing of shots . . . In this process, we get to sense all her feelings and their authenticity.34

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Classic French Noir

Figure 5.3 Martin Roumagnac.

Moreover, Hayward’s definition of the split self as a result of Western repression of the libidinal body in favour of the rational mind supposes the libidinal body as the basis of the authentic subject pre-existing cultural norms, and often operating in defiance of its dictates. On both counts, I could not agree more. A biocultural approach also points out that traditional, patriarchal gender stereotypes are indeed culturally constructed, exaggerating and distorting small evolved gender differences in order to privilege male reproductive interests. Thus I agree with Leahy’s analysis of Marie in Casque d’or, which insists on her authenticity and resistance to gender stereotypes: ‘Becker’s film both acknowledges and subverts traditional representations of masculinity as active and femininity as passive. Marie shows the necessary multiplicity of gender identity.’35 These observations apply equally to Dietrich’s Blanche in Martin Roumagnac, even if Lacombe’s conventional mise en scène is not nearly as masterful as that of Allégret and Becker (in the Signoret films) in highlighting the falling away of the masquerade. Nonetheless, one scene, in which Blanche is shown gardening, is particularly effective in using simple ‘natural’ costuming and decor to underline her sincerity (Figure 5.3). It is here that she declares (to the

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers love-sick young teacher): ‘You love me. But I don’t love you . . . But that’s no reason to be sad. The most important thing is not to be loved, but to love’, before sending him on his way with a chaste kiss on the cheek. Far from abusing her erotics of power to seduce and deceive, Dietrich’s fatalitaire uses it to reinforce the central importance of emotional sincerity.

Evil pimps The role of the pimp in postwar France was paradoxically strengthened by the Marthe Richard law’s closing of the brothels (which had generally been run by a madame) because hôtels de passe, out of which working girls now operated, depended on pimps to provide and ‘protect’ (i.e. control) a steady flow of ‘merchandise’. Thus it is hardly surprising to see the pimp looming large among the masculine others of the prostitute good-bad girl, almost always coded as evil antagonist. As arch exploiter of the female body, the pimp embodies degenerate masculinity, combining moral and/or physical cowardice with controlling manipulation and bullying tactics. In all three Signoret films, the male antagonists are her characters’ evil (ex-)lovers and/or pimps: ruthless sexual rivals who attempt to eliminate the lover/ hero figure. In Dédée and Casque d’or, they succeed, precipitating the tragic noir outcome. Macadam, despite its noir dimension (seedy, petty gangster milieu and plot centring around crime, desire and betrayal) and dark visual style, is more a film gris in that it achieves positive closure with the death of the sociopathic, male antagonist (at the hands of the sexually repressed ingénue) enabling the lovers to be reunited. In the figure of the pimp, physical weakness also combines with moral turpitude, generally in the form of treacherous denunciations, thus associating him with the Nazi collaborators of the Occupation (Dédée; Casque d’or). Interestingly, the often dandyish dress codes of the pimp reveal his fundamental narcissism. In Casque d’or, Marie’s pimp, Roland, and his successor, gang boss Leca, are contrasted with the hero, Manda, whose softer but simpler, more honest and more positively coded ‘virile’ personality are signalled by the simple lines of his working-class costuming.36 In both cases there is a mixture of traits coded as masculine and feminine. In the pimp these play out negatively: masculine sadism combines with narcissism, physical cowardice and moral turpitude more often associated with monstrous garce or spider-woman figures. 85

Classic French Noir Conversely, in the hero there is a positive association of virile courage and honesty with softer, feminine nurturing qualities inherited from Gabin’s poetic realist persona. It is no coincidence that Gabin had wanted to play the tragic male protagonists in both Casque d’or and Dédée d’Anvers.

Race, class and gender in J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I will Spit on your Graves] (Gast, 1959) This final section looks at an unusual interethnic, interclass manifestation of the tragic dyad of the star-crossed lovers in Michel Gast’s screen adaptation of Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. As in Vian’s novel, the Joe Grant37 of Gast’s film (played by Christian Marquand) is a mixedrace Black American from Memphis whose fair skin enables him to pass for White. When his dark-skinned younger brother is lynched for wanting to marry a White girl, Grant leaves town, moves north and starts a new life managing a small-town bookstore. Vowing to take revenge on White society for his brother’s death, Joe seduces several White girls, including beautiful heiress Lisbeth Shannon (Antonella Lualdi), engaged against her will to marry the unscrupulous town kingpin, the handsome and wealthy but sadistic Stan Walker. Joe intends to murder Lisbeth, but, in stark contrast with the novel (though in keeping with Vian’s screenplay), he falls in love with her and is incapable of carrying out the final act of his revengeplan. When Lisbeth learns Joe is Black, instead of repudiating him as he expects, she suggests they run away together. In previous work, I have analysed the film for the way its American setting serves to examine France’s own internal tensions, namely, French racism, colonial injustice and military torture in Algeria.38 Here I will focus on how Gast draws on and modifies elements from Vian’s own screenplay to effect a quite different representation of gender, notably in terms of the novel’s central couple, with radical consequences for the film’s innovative (for its time) articulation of gender with issues of race and class. Whereas the male anti-hero of Vian’s novel is a sociopathically vengeful, homme fatal who seduces White women with the sole purpose of humiliating and/ or murdering them, the film recasts the figure, drawing on the romantic, poetic realist trope of the tragic populist hero and star-crossed lovers. And whereas the novel’s female figures are empty stereotypes, the film’s 86

Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers representations of femininity, while not particularly progressive in many respects, are more varied and nuanced, pairing the hero with a number of female characters who vie for his attentions before he is (tragically) reunited with his fatalitaire ‘soul mate’. The America of Michel Gast’s film is a stylised, mythologised America that bears little resemblance to its referent.39 The most convincingly American element of the film, one of the few to meet with Vian’s approval, and perhaps its most impressive feature, is the soundtrack, provided by Alain Goraguer’s haunting jazz-blues score, whose different moods serve to articulate the film’s construction of gendered relationships, notably as these are inflected by inequalities of race and class. It is, first and foremost perhaps, a reminder of Joey Grant’s racial identity and an ironic statement of the ultimate futility of his revenge plan. Goraguer’s score employs four main musical themes: a tense, racy, masculine jazz theme signalling violence and danger, that plays as Joey races to save his brother and again, as he flees north after the latter’s death; a light, playful and sensually feminine xylophone theme associated primarily with Lisbeth; fast-tempo rock and roll that incorporates both sensuality and danger and is associated primarily with the gang. But the most memorable musical theme, introduced and often played diegetically, is Joe’s husky, melancholy blues tune, taken from his murdered brother, Johnny (we see the latter play it in the opening scene of the film’s prologue) along with his harmonica. Joe plays Johnny’s tune whenever he has a spare moment, as if to constantly remind himself of his mission to avenge his brother. But the sad, haunting melody serves as a poignant counterpoint to the violence of Joey’s crazed plan and cues the spectator to his inner struggle: between a violent desire for revenge and an instinctive capacity for compassion. He takes up his brother’s tune to spur himself on to fulfil the mission (and as a mark of his refusal of White supremacist injustice) but the tune itself – his brother’s voice – is one of sadness and sensuality, more a call to love and forgiveness than a Fanon-inspired call to arms. The music thus anticipates the ‘failure’ of the revenge plan, and signals the futility of responding to hate and injustice with more of the same. That the revenge plan will fail is also signalled through contradictory aspects of Joey’s personality: his basic goodness is communicated through myriad plot details. He commits many small pro-social acts, his physical and moral superiority repeatedly demonstrated as he defends the weak

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Classic French Noir against cowardly, bullying oppressors, most often Walker and his gang. Gast’s construction of his hero is aided by judicious casting, most notably in the case of Daniel Cauchey as Walker’s head thug, an actor whose slight build and nervous, high-pitched voice further emphasise the virile superiority of Marquand’s Joey Grant. Marquand’s costuming also sets his character apart: his unassuming, casual working-class clothes signalling honesty and imperviousness to status, in contrast to the faux machismo of the gang thug’s biker-style leather and cowboy boots or Stan Walker’s dandyish suits. On the other hand, Joey’s seduction/revenge plan marks him as would-be homme fatal. And indeed, his tall, muscular frame, rugged good looks and understated assurance act as an irresistible girl magnet: immediately he arrives in the White town, he is the sexualised object of multiple female gazes, and the focus of intense female intrasexual competition. Soon after he enters the bookshop, deep-focus camera draws our attention to a bevy of young girls in the background, peering admiringly through the window. This pattern is repeated whenever Joey encounters young White women, with the notable exception of Lisbeth, who plays hard to get. Sultry gang moll Sheila, when she first sets eyes on Joe, responds with an appreciative wolf whistle, which she later follows up with a full-scale seduction ‘attack’, declaring: ‘You’re handsome guy, Joe. You’ve got great shoulders – like a Black boxer.’40 Undeterred by Joey’s initially violent response, she insists, dancing a sensual slow jive and whistling along to his harmonica tune. When she almost falls through a broken banister, Joey gives in, catching and carrying her almost tenderly to his bed. The next seduction scene, even more sexually explicit, is another failed revenge attempt, more sadomasochistically erotic than tender. Walking along the river, Joey chances on a half-naked blonde nymphet (gang member) swimming lazily downstream, clad only in a skimpy bikini bottom, her full breasts visible in the clear water. Our ‘hero’ immediately disrobes to his underwear, dives in and seemingly attempts to drown his victim before the attack (again) turns into an erotic encounter. Gast films the central action with an underwater camera, in close-framed two-shot, giving the scene an intimacy and erotic charge that are also ethically problematic, for the spectator’s allegiance to the hero and earlier alignment to his point of view are destabilised by his actions: sexual violence and/or predation against a helpless and innocent victim. The pattern is repeated as the young woman leads Joey out of the water to an abandoned shack,

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers ‘the hanged man’s hut’ (an eerie reminder of Johnny’s lynching) and offers herself to him. Again Joey attempts to strangle her before renouncing both the violence and the sex: the inner struggle between his better nature and evil design resolves happily, renewing spectatorial allegiance. While the film is progressive in its denunciation of racism and class inequality, its representation of gendered relationships is less so. In both seduction scenes, the response of the female characters to the hero’s violent sexuality is disturbing: they seem to assume that the violence is part and parcel of sexual foreplay and it is not clear whether they are repulsed or stimulated. Moreover, Joey’s violence aside, his status as hero, with whom the spectator is aligned and who represents the film’s moral centre, however shaky, displays culturally typical, ambivalent and contradictory attitudes to female sexuality. When Lisbeth complains that he seems to prefer the company of easy, common girls, Joey retorts with an unconscious reiteration of the sexual double standard, berating her for withholding sex, for not ‘giving herself’41 while simultaneously displaying contempt or disinterest for those girls who do. This prevalent sexist attitude is precisely the reason why smart girls like Lisbeth learn to ‘save themselves’ but it often means that they are ‘damned if they do . . .’. Finally, Lisbeth is contrasted with her deceitful promiscuous and racist sister, Sylvia, who has been having a clandestine affair with Lisbeth’s fiancé and who also sleeps with Joey. In aligning female pro-sexuality with duplicity, diminished long-term mate value and/or consenting victim status, and in keeping the pure virgin as the hero’s choice of long-term mate, the film is somewhat reactionary. We have noted, in relation to Dietrich’s Blanche (in Martin Roumagnac) and Signoret’s prostitute heroines, that this attitude, although emblematic of its times, is by no means universal in French noir. We have also noted the influence of French poetic realism on both French and American noir. In its tragic plot structure and sombre atmosphere, in its expressive, often symbolic use of decor, music and lighting, in its social analysis and construction of gender, J’irai cracher is very much in the poetic realist, proto-noir mode. Director Michel Gast, while strenuously rejecting the notion that he might have been attempting to emulate films from the recently consecrated classic American noir canon, cites poetic realism as his major aesthetic frame of reference, in particular Carné’s Le jour se lève.42 And indeed, Christian Marquand’s

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Classic French Noir portrayal of Joey Grant invites parallels with Gabin’s tragic populist heroes of the late 1930s. Though much taller and more muscular than Gabin, Marquand’s body language and diction are similarly evocative of Bourdieu’s corps proletarien or working-class male body:43 his movements are lithe and precise but restrained, his speech direct, minimalist. More importantly, Gast’s recasting of Vian’s twisted protagonist draws heavily on the pre-war Gabin persona, the quiet man of the people, the tragic hero driven to violence and death through a combination of social injustice, desire and unhappy fate. Like Gabin’s deserter in Quai des brumes [Port of Shadows] (Carné, 1938), Joe is fleeing from his past. Like Pépé (Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937)), he is trapped in exile and dies attempting to escape. Like the eponymous hero of Gueule d’Amour [Lady Killer] (Gremillon, 1937) he is the coveted object of multiple female gazes. Like Francois of Le jour se lève, he kills an evil adversary and is hunted down by police. His desire for revenge is reminiscent of Jacques Lantier’s mental illness in La bête humaine but, unlike the latter, it is based on lived experience and choice not genetic fate. And unlike Lantier, Joey falls for a ‘good woman’ who eschews the racism of her milieu and thwarts his murderous project, convincing him that if they are happy together, his brother will be avenged. Most significantly, in line with Gabin’s enduring persona, the Joey Grant of Gast’s film reacts violently against race and class prejudice, hypocrisy, injustice and exploitation. In a notable departure from Vian’s novel and screenplay, Joey responds to Stan Walker/Dexter’s offer of sex with an underage Black girl with a Gabinesque outburst. Punching and slapping the cowardly Walker, Joe runs him outdoors through a crowded bar, beating him with a length of rope before pushing him, half conscious, into the murky waters of the port. The scene ends with the hero’s departure foreground, while in the background Gast’s mise en scene positions a solitary Black musician, dressed in white, silhouetted against the night skyline, playing (on trombone) Johnny’s melancholy theme. Complicating the visual and moral symbolism of black and white, Gast thus signals to the viewer both visually and acoustically that the enemy to be singled out, if the initial injustice is to be righted, is (not White woman, often herself a victim, but) the perverse and sadistically dominant, narcissistic White male embodied by the character of Walker.

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers

Figure 5.4 J'irai cracher sur vos tombes.

The fatale function is distributed between the two Shannon sisters, who might easily have been constructed according to the classic dyad of ingénue vs garce, in deadly intrasexual competition for the ‘affections’ of the hero. Where Gast complicates this structure is in transforming the good sister Lisbeth from submissive ingénue into active fatalitaire. Rather than presenting her as submissive waif or sexual spectacle, the film’s introduction of her signals agency and independence. Out riding near the lake, with her Black servant, whose surveillance she has mischievously ‘escaped’, she appears first in extreme long shot (ELS), accompanied on the extra-diegetic soundtrack, by the playfully sensual xylophone theme. The camera moves in closer as she gallops down the lakeside towards Joey (on a fishing excursion with his boss, the town librarian and local oracle), obliging him to take hold of the horse’s reins to avoid being knocked over. A series of mid-shots and full-shots reveal her costuming: riding breeches, boots and crop signal masculine power, anticipating her romantic rebellion against her family’s desire that she marry Stan Walker, while a wide belt also accentuates her slim-waisted, feminine figure. Also significant in this scene, the hero’s physical strength enables him to effortlessly arrest her movement and their first exchange is a sparring match in which they are

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Classic French Noir relatively evenly matched (a pattern that will be repeated). When Lisbeth brandishes her riding crop as symbol of her social authority, Joey simply ignores the intended gesture, refusing to recognise dominant cultural rules of class (and race). Gender is another matter. Subsequent scenes between them repeat this fundamental courtship pattern of feigned antagonism. The introduction of the bad sister, Sylvia, sets up a set of contrasts between the two. While Lisbeth is active, her costuming elegant but often androgynous, Sylvia is presented as a lazy, alluring siren: her first scene has her lounging in the sumptuous garden of the Shannon mansion, sipping iced tea and engaging in idle gossip, Lolita-like in a strapless swimsuit, sunglasses and boater hat. In short, Sylvia is immediately framed as duplicitous visual spectacle. The evils of treachery, sexual perversity – and racism – are indeed subsequently confirmed as located in the bad sister: she is a classic garce whose sexual and material jealousy (as younger sister she will inherit little, the family’s wealth and status being reserved for the elder sibling) leads her into perverse, mate-poaching affairs with her sister’s men, first Walker, then Joey. It is the duplicitous garce (in tandem with the evil White male antagonist) who precipitates the hero’s downfall. During the final act, when Sylvia learns she has slept with ‘a nigger’, her disgust and servile attachment to Walker make her the willing instrument of Walker’s plan to eliminate Joey. Sylvia’s brief sexual liaison with our hero is hastily ‘rewritten’ as the classic rape narrative, allowing Walker to round up a lynch mob to avenge and ‘cleanse’ the innocent but ‘sullied’ White girl, in a grotesque semi-repetition of the film’s opening drama. In the penultimate sequence, a hysterical Sylvia shoots and wounds Joey before the latter manages to escape and thwart Walker’s crazed attempts to gun him down. Lisbeth arrives (after a high speed pursuit in which she runs two police motorcycles off the road) and takes over the driver’s seat, attempting to carry them both to the safety of the Canadian border. But of course, it is too late, once again Lisbeth’s attempts at agency are thwarted and the ill-fated lovers will die together at dawn, metres away from freedom. Despite its somewhat traditionalist representations of gender and female pro-sexuality, Gast’s film is quite remarkably progressive in its portrayal of a love affair between an upper-class White woman and working-class ‘Black’ man. And although the character of Lisbeth cannot be described in terms of an erotics of power, her thwarted agency and

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Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers agapic attachment to the doomed hero, transcending the twin divide of class and race, align her with Signoret’s courageous fatalitaire figures of Macadam, Dédée d’Anvers and Casque d’Or, prepared to risk all to save their man.

Conclusion This chapter has used biocultural definitions of romantic love as evolved human universal in order to examine diverse manifestations of French fatale as romantic fatalitaire. As good-bad girl or prostitute, the fatalitaire demonstrates unequivocally that female pro-sexuality, sexual assertiveness and agency are not always associated with duplicity in French (or American) noir. I am therefore less convinced by the suggestion that Casque d’or’s initially disappointing box office (and mixed critical reception) was due to French male audiences’ inability to accept the challenge to conventional morality posed by an assertive prostitute as heroine.44 The success of Signoret’s previous prostitute roles renders such a conclusion problematic.45 Popular French audiences of the period had no problem accepting assertive, sexually active female characters, provided they were emotionally honest.46 Indeed, the good-hearted prostitute figure demonstrates audience willingness to entertain the notion that emotional fidelity is separate from and ethically more important than physical monogamy.47 Of course, countless other films display varying degrees of misogyny, explicitly or implicitly demonising female sociosexuality and agency. Nonetheless, in the films noirs examined in this chapter, the sexually assertive fatalitaire, primarily driven by eros and agape, even to the point of self-endangerment, can serve to counterbalance and critique misogynous patriarchal norms. Finally, despite the failure of Gabin’s attempts to revive his mythic prewar stature as tragic lover, traces of the poetic realist legacy appear in each of the films, both in the symbolic use of decor and mise en scène and in the doomed narrative trajectories of the embattled, often criminalised, romantic hero and his loyal fatalitaire.

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6 ‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires

Introduction: what do women want? Human males provide three types of interdependent, sometimes overlapping resources to females: physical, material, social and genetic, i.e. protection, money, status and love. Framed differently, in terms of ultimate evolutionary causes, men are attractive to women for three prime reasons. Firstly, on a pragmatic level, they may possess the wealth and status that will ensure the provision of food, protection and social capital to a woman and her offspring. Secondly, they may display certain desirable genetic attributes (again, important for provision of food and protection), like general health and physical strength (i.e. handsomeness) and intelligence, increasing the likelihood of fathering offspring with similar qualities. But passionate desire and kindness (a capacity for both eros and agape) are as important as resources, strength or beauty, since they signal a willingness to commit: to invest selflessly in the relationship.1 Without erotic commitment, the man may be tempted to channel his emotional and material resources elsewhere, using his advantages against the woman rather than to her benefit. And without kindness, he may use his physical strength to coerce or harm rather than protect her and her offspring.2

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires The ideal male from a female perspective is therefore the Prince Charming who possesses material and social resources (wealth and status), genetic fitness (intelligence, strength, handsomeness, etc.) and the willingness to invest and protect (love and kindness). Since many males sadly fail to live up to this ideal, women are often forced to choose between a good provider and a genetically superior mate, especially in contexts where their dyadic bargaining power is weakened by low sex ratios.3 The only solution available may be to put pragma before eros and marry a provider, who will often be genetically inferior (old, often physically weak and/or unattractive and mean) and find romantic fulfilment with a younger, fitter, genetically superior lover. Sexual strategies theory, tested in dozens of often cross-cultural studies since the 1980s, predicts that women (and men) will adopt different strategies and priorities depending on whether they are seeking a shortterm or long-term mate.4 Important findings include evidence that women’s statistically greater preferences for wealthier, higher status males (as long-term partners) decrease slightly but do not disappear in gender equal societies in which women have access to resources.5 Even more importantly for the present discussion, already mated women pursuing short-term mating i.e. adulterous affairs, do so when they are dissatisfied with their relationship and looking for a replacement partner with whom they share a strong sexual and emotional bond.6 In noir, an extreme strategy is pursued, in which the lover is persuaded to get rid of the husband so that the adulterous pair can share the resources. I thus read the adulteress fatale as embodying an optimal female reproductive strategy within monogamous patriarchy, in cultures where women have few professional opportunities and particularly at times of unfavourable mating markets (a dearth of eligible males). In this way, the desire of the fatale (and her lover) constitutes an open challenge to patriarchal morality and authority. Two films, Thérèse Raquin (1953) and Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud [Lift to the Scaffold] (1958) will illustrate this point, constructing the adulteress fatale positively as an emotionally sincere, loyal mistress. Illicit, romantic (genetically driven) love is constructed as morally purer than traditional (resource or status driven) marriage by which older and/or impotent ‘incestuous’ males monopolise access to the most desirable women. While adulterous females in American films noirs are generally constructed and/or interpreted as cold, duplicitous

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Classic French Noir spider women, as in Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (USA 1946), in the above French films they are romantic fatalitaires, not unlike the ‘original’ Cora of James Cain’s 1934 novel. First adapted to the big screen by Pierre Chenal in 1939 as Le dernier tournant [The Last Turn], it is to this film (and its American counterpart) that we now turn.

Le dernier tournant [The Last Turn] (Chenal, 1939) Pierre Chenal’s little known adaptation is a film maudit, every bit as ill fated as its adulterous lovers. Released in May 1939, just months before the outbreak of the ‘phoney war’, it was banned by Vichy in 1940 because of its director’s Jewish origins (he had since fled into exile in neutral Argentina). The ban was maintained after the Liberation because its female lead Corinne Luchaire, who played Cora, and Robert Le Vigan (as a slimy, blackmailer) had been heavily involved in pro-Nazi, collaborationist circles during the Occupation. Forgotten until the 1980s, the film has so far received little critical or scholarly attention. I will focus on the way Chenal and scriptwriter Charles Spaak’s poetic realist adaptation of Cain’s Postman highlights the doomed romanticism of

Figure 6.1 Le dernier tournant.

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires the lovers, particularly Cora as idealistic fatalitaire, as opposed to Garnett’s construction of Lana Turner as a more modern, manipulative, ambitious fatale. This said, I nonetheless agree with Julie Grossman’s analysis of her as more complex and sympathetic than claimed in previous (mostly malegenerated) readings of her as ruthless spider woman.7 Chenal’s visual treatment is darker than Garnett’s, featuring heavier use of nighttime settings. The film opens at night, with Frank ejected from the back of a lorry after stealing a ride, against a melancholy musical score, in a scene that evokes Carné’s moody Quai des Brumes (released a year earlier in May 1938). Throughout the film, dark chiaroscuro interiors add to the sense of foreboding. The use of oblique angles in lighter daytime compositions is often similarly expressionistic: roadside scenes have the fleeing lovers hemmed in by menacing telephone poles and passing trains reminiscent of Renoir’s La bête humaine. The plot structure is paired down to the essential elements that drive the love story and dialogues resemble Cain’s direct minimalist style, which makes rare moments of verbal and visual lyricism stand out.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, USA, 1946) In his introduction to the (2004) Warner Home Video DVD release of Tay Garnett’s classic American adaptation, film historian Richard Jewell reiterates previous critical discourse on Cora as quintessential spider woman, describing the story as one of ‘a man who gets caught up in the spider web a woman spins for him . . . these femmes fatales who take guys and lead them astray’. But, as Julie Grossman has forcefully argued, Postman (and a number of other noir featuring so-called spider women) cries out for more complex, layered readings. A comparison with Chenal and with Cain’s novel will enable us to extend Grossman’s reading and highlight the modernity of the American fatale as against her French counterpart. Those aspects of the novel that each filmmaker chooses to highlight or obscure, together with their original additions to Cain’s hypotext, are highly revealing of women’s greater emancipation in postwar USA and of French noir’s construction of the fatale as fatalitaire during the poetic-realist pre-war period.

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Classic French Noir In Postman, Tay Garnett’s highly sexualised introduction of Lana Turner as Cora presents her as a seductive, narcissistic tease. John Garfield’s gaze follows a slow horizontal pan from her lipstick rolling towards him across the floor to her high heels, then tilts up her long bare calves, cutting back to a reverse shot of him before settling on a low angle full shot (FS) of her, improbably clad in white shorts, midriff-baring top and white turban (Figure 6.2). Adjusting her perfectly made-up face in front of a handheld mirror, she imperiously holds out a hand for him to return the lipstick cap, her gaze still fixed firmly on her reflexion. Lana Turner’s visual introduction is recognised as among the most erotically charged moments in film noir history, leaving male reviewers and film historians throughout the decades almost as hooked as hapless protagonist, Frank Chambers. Turner’s ‘hot’ costuming combined with the cool arrogance with which her Cora treats the ‘man’, her dominance of the frame as a dazzling ‘obsession in white’,8 is immediately reminiscent of James Cain’s more monstrous fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson. Barbara Stanwyck’s recent portrayal of her as quintessential spider woman in Wilder’s Double Indemnity (USA 1944) seems to inform Garnett’s script and mise en scène, which constructs

Figure 6.2 The Postman Always Rings Twice.

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires Cora as deceptively alluring surface from this opening shot. The impression will not dissipate until the film’s penultimate scene (in which she demonstrates the genuineness of her love for the hero, putting her fate in his hands), a shift that many critics (like Richard Jewell) have failed to register.

From fatalitaire to femme fatale In stark contrast, Chenal’s earlier film introduces Cora simply, and her erotic appeal is driven by her face, not by sexualised costuming or narcissistic appeals for attention. As she walks into the frame through a doorway in mid shot (MS), the only indication of her smouldering sensuality is in the cigarette she casually smokes and in the dark (red) lipstick that soon becomes apparent. The camera follows her as the two men sit chatting, Nick (Michel Simon) struggling to convince a reluctant Frank (Fernand Gravey) to stay and work for him. Frank’s sudden registering of her presence is captured in a series of low angle medium close-ups (MCUs) of Cora, standing above him, reversing to high angle shots of his riveted gaze. Despite her understated appearance, framing and mise en scène nonetheless make it clear she has the upper hand. In constructing the husband, both films depart from the novel’s thumbnail sketch of ‘greasy Greek’ Nick Papadakis as a one-dimensional, likeable old fool. Both Cecil Kelloway’s Nick Smith (Postman) and Michel Simon’s Nick Marino (Tournant) are jovial and naive but also excessively miserly, wanting male friendship and hard work from their new employee as long as they can get it cheap. And both proudly objectify their wives, asserting their patriarchal rights in tellingly different ways. Postman’s Nick sells Twin Oaks without consulting Cora and decides they will move back to his old family home where Cora will spend the rest of her days caring for him and his aging invalid sister. Julie Grossman notes the chilling effect of her husband’s patriarchal attempt to imprison her: Northern Canada figures here as a withdrawal from a place of possibility for Cora, as well as a cold cancellation of her desire; the paralysis of Nick’s sister represents the helplessness of Cora to act on her desires. The image of paralysis is forcefully carried over in the

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Classic French Noir shot that ends this scene, as Cora walks up the stairs into the darkness, arms paralyzed by her side, stunned and defeated. That in this scene the otherwise ineffectual Nick claims the privileges of patriarchy – he demands that Cora become domestic nursemaid to his sister (‘what was good enough for my father is good enough for me’) – foregrounds the patriarchal traditions Cora is up against.9

Although Michel Simon’s Nick delivers no cruel ultimatums, he patronises and objectifies his wife, constantly slapping her backside, treating her affectionately as a decorative little thing but one sadly lacking in intelligence, much as he does his (ill-fated) pet cat. Dialogues and mise en scène underline his infantilising misogyny and ignorance: as she serves drinks to Frank and a male customer he talks about her (in her presence as one does with very young children and pets) as ‘a lovely thing but not very smart . . . That’s my reward for a life of hard work, that’s what I bought myself as a treat for my old age.’10 Thus both husbands are reasonably benign patriarchs but show their true colours in their objectifying attitudes and unthinking assumption of patriarchal authority and ownership, despite the fact that their wives work hard to earn their keep. In adding these objectionable dimensions to the husband figure, both films elicit sympathy for the plight of the femme, making her attempt to find a way out, more explicable, though not morally justified. To return to Lana Turner’s Cora, the MGM A-list star’s glamorous blonde beauty is accentuated by highly sexualised high-status Hollywood costuming: a clear departure from the novel, which mentions Cora’s striking figure but not great beauty, and whose simple clothing is rarely described. More importantly, Turner’s glamour adds to the suggestion of duplicity, of a manufactured, carefully maintained, alluring surface designed to conceal purely venal intentions. Chenal’s Cora is closer to Cain, with Corinne Luchaire’s beauty11 undercut by very simple costuming. She most often appears in an unflattering work smock over a high neck jersey and skirt and has only three costume changes, all of which are modestly in keeping with the lower middle-class setting (whereas Lana Turner appears in a dizzying array of white dresses, swimsuits and ensembles).

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires Postman’s first person voiceover (after Cain’s subjective narration), combines with camera and mise en scène to privilege the male protagonist’s point of view and contributes to constructing spectatorial sympathy for its doomed protagonist. Robert Porfirio makes this point eloquently, noting the pivotal role of first person narration in hard-boiled fiction and its relevance to film noir – despite or perhaps because of the redundancy of its highly marked aural enunciation in contributing to the sense of fatalism that is key to the noir aesthetic.12 But Garnett’s use of both voiceover and mise en scène goes much further than the novel in constructing Cora as duplicitous femme fatale. When Frank first kisses her, she (again) coldly takes out her mirror to readjust her lipstick and in the following scene his voiceover informs us she has been ignoring him for two weeks. ‘I began to feel like a cheap nobody making a play for a girl who had no use for me.’ After their failed fugue she goes cold and ignores him again until he accepts her ‘proposal’. Again the voiceover adds to the manipulating spider woman effect: ‘She had me licked and she knew it.’ Chenal’s film is also told from Frank’s point of view (POV) but the absence of voiceover makes it less intrusive and there is no visual equivalent of the aforementioned scenes from Postman. In Tournant, Frank and Cora’s first kiss dissolves to an intimate riverside scene where they have been lovers for weeks, thus there is no suggestion of Cora displaying the hallmark behaviours of the femme fatale: preening narcissistically, dressing provocatively yet playing hard to get. This does not prevent her being described by Frank as ‘une belle garce’ sent by the devil to tempt him (a translation of the novel’s ‘hellcat’) for suggesting what he was already thinking about: getting rid of Nick. But her behaviour towards him (and towards her husband) is not suggestive of duplicity.13 Chenal’s Cora is not only less manipulative and unglamorous, she lacks Cora Papadakis-Smith’s physical energy, her driving ambition and implacable agency. Cain’s and Garnett’s Cora are both single-mindedly ambitious women prepared to go to any lengths to live the American dream. In the film, this dynamic aspect of her character is amplified in the beach scenes, in which Garnett capitalises on Turner’s strong swimming ability to convey a sense of both eroticism and agency. Moreover, her kittenish voice and feminine allure are portrayed as masquerade, disguising a ruthlessly vengeful streak. When Frank betrays her, first to

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Classic French Noir the District Attorney (DA), then with another woman, she fights back with all she’s got. Moreover, her (justified) ‘hellcat’ vindictiveness is combined with a capacity for violent action, as shown when she wields a gun to help Frank overcome the blackmailing lugs out to fleece them. There are no guns in Chenal’s version, the blackmailer is a sleazy cousin (of the defunct husband) who Frank dispenses with using only his fists, while Cora watches on, ready to tend his wounds despite the fact they have just fought. Corinne Luchaire’s Cora thus occupies a more traditionally feminine space than her more modern American homologue. Moreover, Chenal insists (even more than Cain) on his fatalitaire’s romantic idealism.14 When Frank betrays her to the judge after Nick’s murder, her reaction is romantic despair, not vindictive action. She declares desperately to her lawyer: ‘I don’t care. I love Frank. Nothing else matters. He let me down. I’d never have let him down.’15 The novel’s Cora displays extremes of romantic idealism and passionate hatred followed by philosophical resignation at her lover’s cowardly betrayals, but since she has also betrayed him, they are even: We both turned on each other . . . We were up on a mountain. We were up so high, Frank. We had it all, out there, that night . . . we had all that love and we just cracked up under it . . . I don’t want to think about the ten grand. It’s a lot but it couldn’t buy our mountain.16 (my emphasis)

Never turning Frank in, Chenal’s ever-faithful Cora claims prison would have been preferable to his betrayal, her dialogues repeating Cain’s most idealistic love-as-a-mountaintop metaphor, even when she discovers he has casually cheated on her: Coward. You dropped me the first chance you got. We had one clean thing: True Love. You gave in at the first hurdle. I would have preferred it 100 times if we’d both been convicted. We signed a pact. It was as if we were up on a mountain top.17 (my emphasis)

These lines have no equivalent in Garnett’s Postman, which instead features a long section of the film (from Cora being charged with Nick’s murder until her revealing of her pregnancy) during which Frank and Cora’s relationship turns from love to hate.

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires Women in the novel are repeatedly compared to wild felines: Cora is a hellcat, a cougar, and Madge, the woman Frank goes off with (after Cora leaves to tend to her sick mother, having been acquitted of Nick’s murder), hunts and tames pumas and other big cats for a living. While Garnett omits this detail, portraying Madge (Audrey Totter) as little more than a breezy good-time girl, Chenal keeps the wildcat image, literally translating Cain’s huntress to the screen, though she has lions rather than pumas. Played by Chenal’s glamorous Czech-born wife, Florence Marly, her cool blonde beauty and daring, bohemian restlessness are contrasted with Cora’s dark earthiness and somewhat stifling domesticity. When the huntress picks Frank up in her convertible, the two immediately recognise each other as kindred spirits, not meant for the cage of marriage. Frank’s lesser adventurousness is hinted at however, when a growling sound is heard and a young lion suddenly appears from the back seat. His new mistress laughs at his startled reaction, nonetheless proposing a hunting trip to Africa. But as they wait in the bedroom of a plush Marseille hotel for the boat to leave, Frank ‘hears’ Cora’s parting words: ‘You’ll be there when I get back?’ When she returns from her mother’s funeral, a repentant Frank is waiting. A surprise visit by the jilted girlfriend – who drops the lion cub into Cora’s arms ‘as a souvenir’ – risks upsetting Frank and Cora’s relationship again but when he declares his undying love (‘that woman meant nothing to me’), she forgives him easily. Chenal’s use of Cain’s cat-woman and the inclusion of the lion cub ‘prop’ lend the film a poetic, almost surreal dimension. It gives visual expression to the conflation of precariously tamed animality and the dangers of sexual conquest, while also underlining the image of the male torn between the dangerous thrill of sexual adventure and the chains of domesticity. When Chenal’s Cora announces her pregnancy, Frank gladly chooses the chains, which are magically transformed, via the prospect of procreation, into the spiritually liberating redemption Cora now offers: ‘We stole a life. Now we’re creating one. We’re rid of the devil now.’ Cut to the fatal car accident on the day of their wedding. Cut from a devastated Frank, holding the dead Cora to a wide shot of a prison. Outside, a crowd of prurient onlookers, including the gloating blackmailer, reinforce viewer allegiance to the bereaved, condemned lover. Inside, Frank refuses the ministrations of a priest: ‘I don’t believe in your hell and I don’t give a

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Classic French Noir damn about heaven. I’m going to find Cora. I’m going to be with her. That’s my heaven.’18 Romantic love is not simply above the law, in Chenal’s secular vision, it replaces God.

Thérèse Raquin [The Adulteress] (Carné, France/Italy, 1953) As much as Chenal’s film owes Cain, the adulterous femme (and her lover) is of course not a hard-boiled invention and her easy circulation (from USA to France in this case) is evidence of the transcultural resonance of the trope. We have already noted the opposite movement with Fritz Lang’s ‘remake’ of Renoir’s poetic realist adaptation of Zola’s nineteenth-century La bête humaine. Poetic realist auteur Marcel Carné’s adaptation of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (starring Simone Signoret and Raf Vallone) could almost be a loose, romantic remake of both Renoir and Chenal’s films. Carné had planned to be the first to adapt Postman, in 1938;19 he was familiar with Tournant and impressed by Ossessione (Italy, 1943), Visconti’s unacknowledged neorealist adaptation. Thus his Thérèse Raquin can be seen as bending, extending and complicating the intertextual reverberations and international circulation of Cain’s key noir hypotext.20 Carné’s highly personal adaptation, also scripted by Charles Spaak, largely rewrites Zola, replacing the novel’s murderously greedy, lust-driven lovers with a pair of star-crossed innocents.21 Signoret’s eponymous Thérèse has been forced by poverty and a sense of moral obligation to the aunt who took her in when she was orphaned, to marry her sickly (i.e. impotent), mean-spirited cousin, Camille, to whom she remains faithful for six years before falling in love with Laurent, a virile Italian truck driver (Figure 6.3). Carné and Spaak are unambiguous in constructing the lovers as morally superior to the grimly materialistic, reactionary social forces that marginalise them and that conspire to bring them down. Frozen by the weight of duty and fears of material deprivation should she abandon her stifling marriage, Thérèse declines Laurent’s honest offer that they go away together. Torn between the need for emotional and sensual connection and material security, like many women under patriarchy, she chooses the latter. Although she works constantly, running the family

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires

Figure 6.3 Thérèse Raquin.

haberdashery business without a salary and ministering to her sickly husband and his nagging mother, she has no resources of her own. Even her meagre inheritance was invested in the business, in which she holds no financial stake. As in Cain’s Postman and its French and American adaptations, married women’s labour is utterly exploited – and respectable society deems they should be grateful for it. Carné accentuates (even further than Chenal) his heroine’s exploitation and entrapment by patriarchal law. When confronted with his wife’s intention to leave him, her husband plans to sequester her, reminding her that she owns nothing and has no rights: the law is on his side. As it so often happens in noir, blind fate conspires with an unjust patriarchal law. During a train trip to Paris, the two men quarrel and Camille accidentally falls out an open door to his death. Laurent escapes but Thérèse is subjected to arduous police scrutiny that almost destroys the couple. Barely is she exonerated and reunited with Laurent than the lovers fall victim to a sinister blackmailer. They pay him off but in yet another cruel twist of fate, he is killed in a freak road accident before having a chance to stop his blackmail note going to the police. 105

Classic French Noir The film’s closing shot tracks away from the incriminating letter being posted to an extreme long shot (ELS) of the town’s rooftops as a siren ominously sounds. The filmmakers constantly remind their audience of the French state’s continued victimisation of married women: despite having the vote, they could not own property or work without their husband’s permission. Framing the love affair in terms of a legitimate political aspiration, as Susan Hayward notes, ‘Carné portrays the passion between Laurent and Thérèse with an energy that has a “moral nobleness” to it that cannot help but be violent if the lovers aspire to be free.’22

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [Lift to The Scaffold] (Malle, 1958) The most modern representation of French fatalitaire as adulteress is Louis Malle’s first feature Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Played by New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau, her character, Florence Carala is prepared to actively risk reputation, status and freedom, not simply to rid herself of an unwanted husband and pocket his fortune, but to be with the man she loves. Perhaps the film’s most distinctively modern feature, the lover is no indigent drifter or brave proletarian but an ex war hero and upwardly mobile career executive. The plot centres around the perfect murder gone wrong, with the hero trapped for most of the film’s duration in an ultra-modern lift. Meanwhile, his racy new convertible is stolen by a wannabe James Dean and his florist girlfriend, a poignant example of French youth ‘led astray by the movies’.23 The young Louis, who impersonates Tavernier, ends up committing another murder, of a couple of affluent German tourists, in which Tavernier is wrongfully implicated. The film’s opening shot is an extreme close-up (ECU) of Florence’s eyes opening. Her eyes are lit while the rest of her face is initially in complete darkness. Her first words as the framing widens to include her sensuously full lips: ‘C’est moi qui n’en peux plus. Je t’aime’ [‘I’m the one who can’t take it anymore. I love you’]. Light reveals more of her face, still in ECU, then the camera slowly pulls back to show that her addressee (fiancé? lover? husband?) is not present: she is speaking from a telephone

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires booth. Lighting also catches Florence’s wedding ring: she is married, though presumably not to the addressee. As Vincendeau notes, ‘Moreau’s mouth, close to the telephone, also draws attention to her voice, a mixture of world-weariness and sensuality’: it is her voice as much as her image that produces the ‘cult impact’ of the scene.24 Shot-reverse-shot alternates between two locations (Tavernier, pacing, looking out of the window of a tall, modern office-building) as the lovers converse. Frontal and profile close-ups (CUs) capture Florence’s intense gaze as the camera pulls out slowly, Miles Davis’ jazz score ‘frames’ the lovers respectively and the opening credits roll. The conversation then continues in silence as Florence leaves instructions for ‘after it is done’ then hangs up. The exposition thus sets the scene for the classic Postman metanarrative: beautiful wife pushes young lover to eliminate older, resource-rich husband. Drawing on audience familiarity with treacherously adulterous American noir females, Malle sets up a subtle investigative structure around the female protagonist that constantly returns to the burning question: is she sincere mistress or scheming garce? Fatalitaire or spider woman? Moreau’s Florence appears dreamy and enamoured, desperate to ‘get it done’ so that she and her lover can be together. With ‘Angel-Face’ Maurice Ronet25 as lover, it is not difficult to understand why. And yet, aspects of camera work and mise en scène also work to question her motives. She is dressed in black and dialogues suggest that the idea for the murder was probably hers, hinting at the possibility that her lover may be more reluctant. His dialogues, facial expression and body language suggest the opposite but her insistence (‘il faut bien’ [‘you’ve got to’]) raises doubts: is she manipulating him into murder? For spectators familiar with noir, the ghosts of lovers and husbands past haunt the scene, from La bête humaine to Human Desire; from Le dernier tournant to Garnett’s Postman; Wilder’s Double Indemnity and so many others. Framing is tighter on Florence, chiaroscuro keeps areas of her face often hidden in shadow, rendering her dialogues more ambiguous (il faut bien can be rendered as either, ‘you’ve got to’, ‘we’ve got to’ or ‘it must be done’), making her harder to read, heightening the investigative structure. Is the softness of her voice proof of the sincerity of the opening lines? Are her sensual lips truly burning for him alone? Is her perfect coiffure perhaps yet another index of narcissistic duplicity?

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Classic French Noir While a question mark remains as to the woman’s position, Tavernier’s hero status is demonstrated immediately and unequivocally during the following first ‘act’, by the admiring attitude of minor characters in his workplace and especially through the courage and cool, military precision with which the ex-paratrooper carries out the murder plan. Malle builds audience allegiance for his criminal lovers by constructing the husband as an unattractive, cynical capitalist who lives off France’s colonial wars. In other words, he is a contemptible if powerful parasite who gains wealth, power and status by exploiting the bravery and sacrifice of veterans like Tavernier and via the oppression of colonised peoples. In this context, Carala’s murder, disguised as a suicide, is presented not as a desperate crime of passion, nor as a cynical attempt on the part of the lovers to misappropriate the husband’s fortune, but as an ethically and politically justified execution. Following the murder, the question of the fatale’s sincerity is soon answered, as Florence’s voiceover gives us access to her private thoughts. Indeed, her poignant voiceover narration, a device usually reserved for the male detective or protagonist in classic American noir, underscores the investigative agency of Moreau’s fatalitaire, as her character engages in a relentless search for her lover through the rain-soaked Paris streets. When she learns he is wanted for murder, her voiceover declares immediately: ‘Je te sauverai Julien’ [‘I’ll save you’]. Her command of both sound- and image-track is further accentuated by Miles Davis’ hauntingly sensual, melancholy jazz score as it becomes indelibly associated with Moreau’s image (Figure 6.4). From potential spider woman/fall guy, the couple are henceforth firmly positioned as star-crossed lovers, with Florence as fatalitaire, unswerving in her attempts to locate and save her man.26 Their physical separation heightens this effect: never once shown together in the frame, their intimacy is represented via montage, visual and acoustic parallels. In the most poignant moment of the search, Malle intercuts between Tavernier in the lift and Florence outside the locked building, shaking the prison-like bars of the gate in desperation. The same diegetic lighting from a flashing neon street sign falls on them both, the sound of the rattling bars is heard over shots of the trapped Tavernier as he uses all his military know-how to extricate himself, in vain.

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires

Figure 6.4 Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.

The sincerity of Moreau’s fatalitaire and the desperate tenacity of her search are also communicated through costuming and lighting. Her Chanel suit is elegant and understated rather than sexualised. She is barely made-up, natural lighting reveals the shadows under her eyes, and by the end of the night, she is almost haggard looking.27 The film thus plays on the folk-psychological tendency to equate the natural and the authentic. This is in stark contrast to the smooth, manufactured perfection of most female star faces of the period, especially when they play treacherous or morally ambiguous noir women, as we have seen. All the above equates to a steady build-up of viewer allegiance to the hapless lovers, which makes their final inculpation appear tragic rather than just desserts, as according to the dictates of formal justice, it should. After all, they have plotted and executed a cold-blooded murder. The dénouement unfolds with breath-taking swiftness as Florence arrives at the motel darkroom where she has followed the young Louis, desperate to retrieve a series of photos (taken with Tavernier’s camera) that incriminate him in the murder of the German tourists (with which Tavernier has been charged). But Louis is too late: the police have already 109

Classic French Noir had the film developed. Florence allows herself a sigh of relief as she views shots of Louis with the Germans. But wait, there’s more . . . Satisfaction turns to dismay as the detective (Lino Ventura) leads her roughly by the arm through the cramped, dimly lit space, to view the remaining photos, still in the water bath of developer fluid. A close-up of Florence and Tavernier embracing comes into focus before her eyes, as the detective stands in judgement behind her, gloatingly announcing the years of prison that await her. She barely listens but her face is dimly lit, her head surrounded by encroaching darkness, signalling the long period of imprisonment she faces. The final scene makes explicit the gulf between the formal justice of the conventional law, articulated by the detective (Lino Ventura) and the moral law of emotional loyalty and passionate attachment that here binds the noir couple. Miles Davis’ sensual, melancholy trumpet invites the viewer to side with the latter, especially with the demonised fatale who will be more severely punished for the crime than will her lover. And Malle’s camera denies the detective’s discourse by limiting his access to the frame. Shallow focus chiaroscuro close-ups focus instead on Florence’s face, alternating with shots of her hands, dreamily stroking the still immersed

Figure 6.5 Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.

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‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires photos of her lover’s face, and of her own face reflected in the water, superimposed on the photographs. The final shot (Figure 6.5), the image that the film invites us to take away, shows a photo of Julien and Florence embracing (the only time they are together in the frame) while her voiceover declares: ‘There we’re together. You see, they can never separate us.’28 Here I concur with Grossman’s critique of teleological reading practices that simplistically equate narrative punishment of the fatale (and/or her lover) by dominant social forces with a misogynistic message: ‘Reading the conclusion as a final “message” concerning the film’s meaning often misrepresents the tone and character of the film.’29 This point applies equally to other tragic fatalitaire narratives discussed here and in earlier chapters.

Conclusion A couple based on love (cerebral or sensual) is never monstrous, whatever their age, social class, or race. What is monstrous, is the socalled marriage of reason or convenience.30

For the above female French viewer (frequent contributor during the 1950s to popular film magazine, Cinémonde), the law that condemns true lovers and upholds marriages of reason is equally monstrous. The popularity of the trope of the romantic adulterous lovers suggests that the comment and its logical conclusion is representative of at least a significant section of the female audience in France. No matter how guilty the lovers, how manic their desire, where their passionate bond is constructed as ‘real’, as a sincerely felt, reciprocated combination of eros and agape, spectators are inclined to prioritise the purity of their passion and – at least partly – absolve them of their crime. Where the husband/victim is constructed ambivalently (Tournant [Postman]) or as an unsympathetic or unscrupulous antagonist (Thérèse Raquin, 1953; Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud, 1958), the film positions its spectator on the side of the criminal lovers. Illicit, romantic (genetically driven) love is seen as morally purer than traditional (resource or status driven) marriage which traps women in sterile, exploitative relationships and which makes the most desirable women unavailable to younger, fitter, albeit lower status men. 111

Classic French Noir In the French films noirs investigated in this chapter, the fatalitaire and her lover are again tragically pitted against malevolent rivals or oppressive social forces. Far from simply reinforcing misogynous cultural discourses, the injustice of the couples’ defeat stands as a plea for female agency and mate choice against the alienating and oppressive structures of patriarchal control. In comparing Chenal’s 1939 Postman adaptation with Garnett’s 1946 version, we have noted the greater agency of Lana Turner’s American fatale. Partly understandable given the seven year time difference between the two films, the difference is also emblematic of French women’s more traditional cultural positioning, even after the war, as illustrated by Thérèse Raquin (1952). Here, it is the fatale’s lack of property rights and need for material security that trap her within a loveless, childless marriage, resulting in the husband’s accidental death as well as her own and her Italian lover’s tragic demise. But while Signoret’s Thérèse is portrayed as a victim of her own misplaced allegiance to the patriarchal forces which oppress her, by 1959 Moreau’s Florence has become a truly ‘modern girl’. Her single-minded agency constitutes an ‘erotics of power’ that align her with Signoret’s earlier prostitute fatalitaires. And Moreau’s character’s punishment, far from reinforcing patriarchal structures, incriminates the law that would condemn her. In all four noir test cases, I have read the adulterous fatale and her lover in the context of sexual strategies theory, as pursuing an extreme strategy that highlights the complex nature of women’s mating needs.

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7 Bad Girls

Introduction: the bad-girl fatale as archetypal unruly woman In the preceding two chapters, we have seen how good-bad girl fatalitaires display degrees of unruliness in their choice of mates. Similarly, Susan Hayward has suggested that the single defining trait of the fatale, apart from her seductiveness, may well be her uncontrollability.1 Hayward has notably pointed out that in Judeo-Christian cultures, the femme’s origins can be traced back, through numerous cultural manifestations to Jezebel, Salomé, Delilah, Eve and finally to Lilith, the original unruly female: Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world but that Eve did not yet exist . . . God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust . . . Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. ‘Why must I lie beneath you?’ she asked. ‘I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.’ Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.2

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Classic French Noir In this version of the myth, the sexually rebellious Lilith subsequently had many demon partners and bore multitudes of demon offspring that were killed by God. Earlier Greek tradition also has its Lilith in the form of Pandora, the first woman, sent to earth by the Gods as a poisoned gift to punish mortals for Prometheus’ theft of fire, and whose unruly curiosity unleashes a torrent of evils upon mankind. It is no coincidence that Pandora, whose name signifies ‘possessing all gifts’, has both brains and beauty, clearly considered an uncontrollable and lethal combination.3 In evolutionary terms, this primeval feminine unruliness, clearly a metaphor for a wild and unfixable female sexuality, would correspond to the period preceding the development of monogamous pair-bonds and male parental investment (1.5 –4 million years ago), during which early human females as well as dominant males would have had multiple partners. On a physiological level (both male and) female promiscuity (and the absence of pair-bonds/durable monogamous relationships) is the sociosexual arrangement observed in chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), our closest relatives. Moreover, certain key features of male anatomy and physiology suggest that a degree of female promiscuity is a long-standing feature of our species: namely the moderately large size of testes in human males (compared, for example, to the relatively tiny testes of gorillas, who monopolise harems of faithful females) and the presence of killer and blocker sperm, both of which indicate corresponding levels of sperm competition, a physiological response to females having multiple sexual partners. The persistence of female sexual ‘unruliness’ under patriarchy can notably be inferred from the trans-historical and cross-cultural prevalence of oppressive mate guarding practices (from restrictive dress codes to sequestration, physical and genital mutilation) and intense, potentially violent male sexual jealousy.

The unruly femme and male paranoia Male fear of female sexual unruliness also underpins the convenient patriarchal myth of innate female chastity versus ‘normal’ male promiscuity.4 As does the fatale herself. Her unruliness also explains 114

Bad Girls how she has so frequently been read as embodying male fears of uncontrollable female sexuality.5 From an evolutionary perspective, such male sexual jealousy and mate-guarding tactics stems from the evolution of pair-bonds, male parental investment and consequent fears over paternity certainty. Human males always run the risk that their sexual, emotional and economic investment in a female partner and her children will be repaid by betrayal – cuckoldry – resulting in a serious waste of resources and genetic opportunity through the unwitting investment in another man’s offspring, or even in genetic suicide if the man bears no offspring of his own. Paternity uncertainty is theorised to be the ultimate, evolutionary cause of male sexual jealousy and, as such, need not be consciously registered. Put differently, intense sexual jealousy in men has its evolutionary roots in the fact that men can never be entirely sure that their children are their own, while female duplicity (real or suspected, emotional or explicitly sexual) is the proximal or immediate, consciously registered cause. In noir, as a distillation of the dangers of the malefemale dynamic, a major source of narrative tension arises from the male protagonist’s uncertainty surrounding the fatale’s honesty, more specifically, her emotional and/or sexual loyalties, as we have seen. According to patriarchal ideology, the surface beauty of the female form should be an honest mirror that reflects both the woman’s moral purity and her man’s status. The femme has the potential to negate both, since she may be a devil in disguise whose voracious treachery will undermine the male’s economic and reproductive interests and status, in other words, his virility, the very core of his identity. This is what is at the heart of the ‘endemic epistemological uncertainty’6 theorised as being simultaneously embodied in the femme and fundamental to the ethos of noir. This is the fundamental and somewhat obvious underlying motive for the visual investigation that has been the subject of so much critical discussion.7 However this chapter will also demonstrate the specificity of French figures: the classic femme fatale function can be distributed over several characters or inhabit the most apparently innocent or un-alluring form, thus escaping investigation. Nonetheless, as bad-girl antagonist, French fatale can be a monstrous figure. Not simply unruly, she may callously exploit the love and trust of her victims, occasionally even plotting his – or

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Classic French Noir her – murder. Her construction thus inevitably raises key questions around the misogyny of French noir and the extent to which it can be seen as promoting conservative or even reactionary ideologies concerning the place of women in what was still a deeply patriarchal society.

What does the femme want? ‘Lots of money and a little love’ (Dora/Simone Signoret, in Manèges [The Cheat] (Allégret, 1950))

High-risk competition by men for high mate-value (young, beautiful) women is amplified in patriarchal societies where the latter are typically the married property of older, socially dominant (wealthy) males. In French noir, when women are in this position and cannot obtain both love and money from the same male source, they resort to ruthless strategies of deceit and murder. Guilty in the eyes of the law, they may nonetheless be coded by the film’s internal ethics as ‘innocent’ or even heroic in their pursuit of true love, as we have seen. On the other hand, in some of the most popular and/or critically acclaimed French noirs, the fatale and her lover are portrayed as monstrous in their ruthless exploitation of the desire, love and trust of their victims, generally an older husband or male suitor. Here, the femme’s monstrous criminality stems from the same, fundamentally feminine predicament: how to obtain both romantic fulfilment and economic resources, i.e. the eternal dilemma of juggling love and money. But even at her most demonic, the most striking feature of the bad-girl French fatale as irredeemable garce is that her romantic attachment links her to the adulterous or otherwise unruly fatalitaires of our previous chapters. Although French fatale may be ambitious and unscrupulous, whether she is out to pin a murder on an innocent victim (Panique [Panic] (Duvivier 1947)); ruin an older, unattractive husband (Manèges, Allégret, 1950); extract resources from a devoted suitor (Le Bon Dieu sans confession, Decoin 1953); or murder her lover’s innocent, trusting wife (Les Diaboliques, Clouzot, 1955), what most often sets her apart from the American spider woman is her overriding attachment to a male character (albeit in the above films an evil or contemptible antagonist). 116

Bad Girls

Demonic fatale as amoureuse Although this figure may certainly be read as misogynous – Manèges and Panique are frequently cited as prime examples of postwar French cinema’s overriding misogyny – it is noteworthy that her main objective is not emotional and economic independence (as with so many American fatales) but emotional and sexual attachment to an ill-chosen male love object. Here the lover may be an unscrupulous gigolo (Panique;8 Manèges), an equally unscrupulous married lover (Les Diaboliques), or even a narcissistic penniless husband (Le Bon Dieu sans confession). In Clouzot’s hugely successful murder mystery, aptly titled Les Diaboliques, abused wife (Vera Clouzot) and mistress (Simone Signoret) join forces to murder the sadistic husband (Paul Meurisse), drugging him before drowning him in the bathtub and transferring his corpse to the swimming pool of the second-rate private school owned and run by the married couple. But the corpse disappears: supernatural intervention or foul play? A retired police inspector (Charles Vanel) starts snooping and the deeply religious wife, who suffers from a bad heart, is sick with fear and guilt. The film’s shocking twist (no doubt a major factor in the film’s popular success) occurs in the final scenes, in which the drowned husband’s corpse miraculously resuscitates, predictably causing the frail wife to drop dead of a heart attack. As the mistress appears and the two lovers embrace, relishing the thought of a life of ease living off the wife’s wealth (it was she who owned the school), we realise the horrific extent of their treachery. In fact the evil couple are immediately thwarted by the timely arrival of the inspector; nonetheless their impending punishment cannot dispel the prevailing sense of malaise.9 My point is that, however monstrous Signoret’s fatale, there is no indication she will now ditch her lover and go it alone, as happens in the most memorable American noirs. In fact, Clouzot’s mise en scène emphasises the intensity of this ‘diabolical’ couple’s mutual passion (Figure 7.1). In Claude Auntant-Lara’s Le Bon Dieu sans confession, leading female star Danielle Darrieux and Ivan Desny play an impoverished upper-class couple, Janine and Maurice Fréjoul, both of whom thought they were marrying into money. His profligate lack of business acumen eats up the last remains of Janine’s family fortune and they face imminent economic

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Classic French Noir

Figure 7.1 Les Diaboliques.

and social ruin but she loves him still. Her saviour will be the self-made businessman, Francois Dupont (Henri Vuibert, who won the prize for best actor at Venice for the role). When he falls hopelessly in love with her, she accepts his financial bailouts but cunningly manages not to sleep with him in return – feigning to share his old-school moral scruples against breaking up his marriage and family, promising she will wait until he is a free man to consummate their union, so as not to sully their love. The unfulfilled promise of sex can be an even more powerful weapon than its granting. Thus Janine keeps the faithful Dupont dangling like a puppet on a sexual string for over a decade, never actually becoming his mistress although unable to convince her jealous, narcissistic husband that she is simply using Dupont to save their marriage.10 The film employs a polyphonic flashback structure similar to that of Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941): opening on Dupont’s funeral procession, the narration consists in a series of subjective flashbacks initiated by his oldest friends, family and business associate, who celebrate his life and heap scorn on the falsely angelic Janine, so innocent looking, ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’.11 Films de France reviewer James Travers praises Darrieux’s performance, describing her Janine as ‘an ambiguous character whose ‘nobler qualities

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Bad Girls (unceasing devotion to an unworthy husband) are undermined by the despicable manner in which she milks her willing sugar daddy’.12 Darrieux’s desperate, ruthless attempts to keep her good-looking, good-for-nothing husband (which finally result in Dupont’s fatal heart attack) align her with Viviane Romance’s Alice in Panique, who seduces an eccentric Jewish outsider (Hire) in order to frame him for a murder committed by her gigolo boyfriend (Paul Bernard). But whereas Alice’s responsibility is counterbalanced by the cowardly viciousness of the crowd of honest citizens who demand Hire’s blood, precipitating his death, Janine is singly responsible for Dupont’s demise. And whereas Alice is manipulated by her evil gigolo (for whom she has done prison time), Janine acts on her own initiative. Her greater agency, afforded by her social status, is signified by her favourite pastime of horseriding. Indeed, it is the tragic forced sale of her beloved mare that decides her to put her seduction plan into action. In Manèges, Dora’s achievement of upward social mobility and power is also signified via horseriding.

The long shadow of war It is hardly a coincidence that all four films reference the Occupation. In Manèges, Signoret’s scheming garce callously eyes up the handsome stranger who will become her lover, while her spouse (Bernard Blier), an ex POW, tearfully recounts his wartime sufferings and best friend’s tragic death. In both Panique and Clouzot’s Diaboliques, snooping neighbours evoke the wartime national sport of denunciation previously allegorised in Le corbeau. Moreover, even more than it highlights the treachery of the fatale, Duvivier’s Panique points the finger at French mob mentality and anti-Semitism, which resulted in Vichy’s collaborationist aiding and abetting of Nazi deportations and genocide.13 Anti-war director AutantLara’s Confession takes a far more original – and more problematic – angle. The negative construction of Janine’s husband, Maurice, as a selfrighteous, narcissistic parasite and coward, despite having been imprisoned in a German stalag, is contrasted with the honourable Francois Dupont (whose name suggests his everyman status), who made his fortune in the Black Market and was briefly and wrongfully imprisoned for collaboration at the Liberation. The film thus not only undermines the Resistance myth but, also, its rehabilitation of French everyman as an 119

Classic French Noir honest Occupation profiteer indirectly endorses the neo-Vichyite right’s attempted revival of Pétainism that followed the Liberation purges.14

The unglamorous fatale as camouflage Noir is about false appearances, about the difficulty of distinguishing good and evil. As the embodiment of this central problematic, the femme is the prime object of investigation as alluring surface. Indeed, most commentators see such investigation as central to the figure’s construction. But a number of French fatales crucially escape this investigation, using drab, prim, non-sexualised appearance as camouflage, to mask their evil intentions. Diaboliques, which relies on both the victim and the spectator failing to locate the fatale until the film’s final shocking ‘reveal’, is the epitome of a non-investigative ‘queering’ of the fatale figure, as Susan Hayward has argued.15 I would add that Nicole’s apparently asexualised appearance, her sensible clothing and singular lack of glamour, is part and parcel of her masquerade as abused mistress and loyal friend. The success of her deceitfulness (key to Clouzot’s shock plot twist) depends precisely on the lack of the sexualised costuming and visual investigation (insistent close-framing) central to the construction of the femme in so many iconic American noirs, in which the male victim fears or senses her duplicity from the start. Even more than Signoret’s Nicole, the most duplicitous and the most ruthless French fatale of the post-war period is ‘camouflaged’ by a singular lack of glamour, and a high degree of sartorial restraint.

Voici le temps des Assassins [Deadlier Than the Male] (Duvivier, 1956) Gabin plays André Chatelin, celebrated restaurant owner and chef in the central Parisian market district of Les Halles. One morning, a young girl arrives seeking his aid. Catherine (Danièle Delorme), only daughter of his estranged wife Gabrielle, whom André left more than 20 years before, has just lost her mother and is alone in the world. André takes Catherine in, gives her a job in his restaurant and seeks to pair her with his adopted son, Gérard, a hard-working young medical student (Gérard Blain). However, when Catherine indicates her romantic preference is for André, he

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Bad Girls overcomes his scruples over their age difference and marries her. But the angel-faced ingénue turns out to be the proverbial devil in disguise. She begins by destroying the friendship between the two men, taking Gérard as a lover and claiming her husband’s brutality in the usual prelude to inciting him to murder. But unlike the guilty fall-guy anti-heroes of American noir, he remains a (comparatively) loyal surrogate son to Gabin’s duped husband and refuses to execute the femme’s murderous plan, whereupon she calmly murders him instead. Both men will be avenged in the film’s closing scene, by the murdered lover’s faithful wolfhound, who devours the femme as a disgusted Gabin looks on. Of particularly interest here is the film’s visual construction of its murderous jeune fille fatale. As part of her lost-girl ingénue disguise, Delorme’s costuming is excessively modest, consisting of a shapeless coat, scarf and beret over plain skirts and loose-fitting sweaters or white blouses always buttoned to the neck. Unusually wide unobtrusive framing in the first 30 minutes (placing Catherine in the background as she insinuates herself into Chatelin’s life) reflects both Chatelin’s failure to detect her deception and his disavowal of his quasi-incestuous desire. We see no close-ups, no visual investigation until the culmination of Catherine’s seduction plan, which again involves feigned innocence: she arrives in a drunken state, enticing Chatelin to undress her and put her to bed as he would a child, whereupon she initiates the sexual contact he has been longing for. The question of the femme’s duplicity, as well as her purported narcissism, is also typically signified in both French and American noir by the use of mirrors, the quintessential visual reference being the climatic hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1948). Truth and knowledge are concealed and replaced by the enigma of the femme as multiplication of appearances, a multitude of faces, each one of them apparently false, each progressively shattered. In contrast, Assassins places Catherine in only two mirror shots and these reveal more a desire to check the solidity of her facade than the narcissistic preening attributed to the fatale. The film thus confirms French fatale’s frequent lack of the glamour that defines her American sister, as we have seen in comparing Garnett’s Postman and Chenal’s Tournant. Indeed, French fatale’s relative visual drabness (even more so than Nicole’s ‘queer’ femme in Diaboliques) is informed by the postwar dark social realism of much French noir.

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Classic French Noir Known as le réalisme noir, its insistence on sordid realities can be linked, once again, to the legacy of the Occupation, which highlighted the banality of evil and the on-going economic hardships of postwar France. In the previous two chapters we have investigated the sensual fatalitaire as loyal mistress, wrongly accused of duplicity. Assassins reveals the opposite dynamic: as deceptively treacherous surface, this femme’s sexual coyness is the ultimate masquerade.16 The film’s disappointing box office (1,538,259; 52nd/81 French releases), despite the presence of Gabin, who had regained top star status in 1954, suggests that audiences preferred the good-bad fatalitaire to the heartless garce.17 The casting of Delorme, who had made a name for herself since 1949 in period dramas, playing positive ingénues as plucky modern girls or victims of patriarchal injustice,18 is also instructive. Her quintessential ‘girl next door’ played chillingly against type in Assassins may well explain the film’s relative lack of commercial success. Finally, Assassins shares with Manèges a clear suggestion of intergenerational female evil, since both films feature bad girls with bad mothers. Too old to ensnare eligible men themselves, scheming mères maquerelles or ‘pimping mothers’ seek economic security and social mobility via the only means open to them: marrying off their daughter to a financially secure male whom they can jointly bleed of his wealth. Assassins, in which Catherine’s mother is a visibly degenerate ex-prostitute and pitiful drug addict, doubles poverty and mental illness with social exclusion. In both films, well-trained daughters use sexual unruliness and deceptiveness as a tool to escape their mothers’ mediocre (Manèges) or destitute (Assassins) situation (Figure 7.2).

Paranoia, lethal femme power and risk Like the spider-woman fatale central to American noir, Danièle Delorme’s Catherine takes the unruly sexual strategy to the limit, seeking to ditch both husband and lover and keep all the resources for herself, in a triple refusal of monogamy, maternity and emotional attachment in any form. Beyond her troubled childhood, it is this emotional poverty rather than simply her desire for a measure of financial independence that condemns her as monstrous and justifies (positions the spectator to accept) her narrative punishment. It has been argued that classic American noir insidiously conflates the two, equating the fatale’s desire for material 122

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Figure 7.2 Voici le temps des Assassins.

independence with emotional coldness in order to cajole women back into the kitchen and re-establish patriarchal order. Such a reading is persuasive but also counterbalanced by the presence of fatale-like characters, in whom professional assertiveness and financial independence are combined not with ruthless, duplicitous egotism but warmth, sincerity (Helen in The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1941); Laura; Vienna in Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)) and/or maternal devotion (Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945)). In classic French cinema, the combination of female socio-economic power (wealth and status) and beauty is almost always negatively coded, revealing of French society’s more traditional attitudes and greater reluctance to accept the idea controversially put forward by de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1949) that women might follow traditionally masculine career paths. Women can be primary school teachers but not university professors; secretaries but not bankers or company directors; prostitutes and nightclub singers but not gang bosses.19 Despite the fact that more married women are working, total numbers of French women in the workplace (1945 – 60) drop. The commercial failure of Grémillon’s L’amour d’une femme (1954), whose young woman doctor is abandoned by her fiancé when she refuses to give up her career for marriage and

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Classic French Noir motherhood suggests that France as a nation was not ready to take an honest look at the possibility of women in professional careers.20

Portrait d’un Assassin (Bernard-Roland, 1949) It is no surprise that Portrait d’un Assassin, one of French postwar cinema’s few evocations of the fatale as ruthless, glamorous vamp, presents her as a highly ambitious, wealthy career woman: the very beautiful, very rich, very influential, international circus impresario, Christina (Maria Montez), who manages male daredevil acts. Her clients are also her lovers and she ‘feeds’ off their lethal exploits, making a living from their daily brush with death, sexually using, discarding and replacing them once maimed or dead. The film’s title, Portrait of a Murderer, refers to her last lover, who will end up killing her twice. Circus entertainer ‘Fabius the Great’ (Pierre Brasseur) is tired of his faithful wife and stage partner Martha (Arletty) and terrified of his job, consisting in a nightly motorcycle stunt riding a vertical wall of death, considered so risky the couple can no longer afford the insurance premiums. His professional identity is so inextricably linked to his marriage that he decides the only way out is to murder his wife: ‘I could hardly strangle my motorbike’, he weakly confesses. But he shoots the wrong woman, wounding our fatale. She has no trouble luring Fabius away from the faithful Martha and pushes him to attempt an automobile stunt even more dangerous than that which has just killed her latest lover. Critically acclaimed on its release, awarded the Grand prix du film d’Art francais in 1949, now recognised as a classic by AFCAE, the film plays with poetic realist tropes: rain-washed city streets, popular vs bourgeois spectacle, self-reflexive links between life and/as art. If not a masterpiece, the film is noteworthy for its rare portrait of a visually and narratively dominant sexual predator fatale but also for Arletty’s moving portrayal as the hero’s courageous loyal partner. The film notably reprises aspects of her wisecracking worldly woman roles in Le jour se lève and Hôtel du nord while inversing that of Les Enfants du Paradis. From ultimate object of desire in Carné and Prévert’s Occupation masterpiece, in which her legendary Garance is the ‘awesome embodiment of female mystery’,21 adored object of multiple male gazes (including that of Pierre Brasseur’s Fréderick Lemaître), she has become a childless cipher of lethal domesticity. For the loyal amoureuse, age and gender are a double tragedy.

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Bad Girls Combined with low social status and economic hardship, her situation gives rise to the popular musical tradition of the chanson réaliste (dating back to the late nineteenth century, associated with 1930s poetic realist cinema and epitomised by Edith Piaf), in which the chanteuse ‘typically chronicles the plight of a woman facing heartbreak and poverty’.22 The film poignantly evokes this tradition, as an abandoned Arletty, dressing for her last fatal performance, listens to a chanson réaliste about the hopelessness of love. Combining eros with masochistic agape, her character could easily be the subject of a chanson réaliste, with her last words as its refrain: ‘If I could die the same night as him, I’d be happy. That’s how silly I am.’ But let us return to the fatale. Voracious sexual predator feeding off the lethal spectacle of masculinity, Christina is a cipher for the danger of insatiable female desire. She is the real assassin. The male body is desirable to her uniquely because of its capacity to confront danger and death. Once she has possessed a lover, she callously moves on to the next. As insatiable spider woman, Christina combines feminine allure with masculine power and a typically masculine-coded combination of love styles. Her erotic and emotional investments are manically focused on a single love object who she uses and then discards with Casanova-like rapidity. Thus the dialogues ask: ‘Is she a man or woman?’ Impossible to categorise, Christina’s ‘preying’ mantis fatale represents the fear that if women are in a position of (masculine-coded) power, they will employ extreme masculine-coded sexual strategies: eros, ludus and mania. The scene that most clearly makes this point is introduced ominously by three knocks: the French theatrical signal for a play to begin. Cut to an engraved sign: ‘A ceux qui sont morts pour que le spectacle vive’ [‘To those who died so the show could go on’]. Track down to Christina, hammering nails into the portrait of her latest victim/hero/lover/trophy. Enter Christina’s embittered but loyal ex-lover Eric (von Stroheim in a role reminiscent of his Max in Sunset Boulevard), an ex-trapeze artist, crippled trying to save his friend and partner, who had replaced him as Christina’s lover after only four nights. Still consumed by manic love-hate for her, Eric bemoans Christina’s objectification of ‘lovers pinned like butterflies’, warning the spectator against the fatale’s emasculating power. But of course, it is a lesson the hero will learn too late. Moreover, the scene sets up an obvious parallel with that most lethal of male spectacles: war. Christina’s ‘monument’ clearly echoes the line on

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Classic French Noir every town and village cenotaph in France: ‘A ceux qui sont morts pour la patrie’ [‘To those who died for the nation’]. The male’s status as object of desire arises out of his capacity for selfless, courageous action, as epitomised by the war hero. The film thus misogynistically implies that it is sexually voracious women who are responsible for sending soldiers to their deaths. The inevitable punishment of the fatale (Fabius turns the tables, shooting her dead before performing his death-defying stunt) is counterbalanced by the posthumous rehabilitation of the faithful wife. Fabius learns too late that ‘his’ Martha has been killed trying to fill her husband’s shoes. In the previous scene we see her, wearing his trousers and boots, attempting his motorcycle act, despite the fact that ‘she didn’t even know how to ride a push-bike.’ Her lack of professional competency makes her gesture all the more tragically admirable. Not only her physical courage and thwarted agency, but also her continued selfless love (eros and agape) for the man who tried to kill her before dumping her for a younger, more luxurious model, make her the real hero of the film – for this spectator at least. Arletty’s comeback role after Liberation purges (she was 51 when the film was made), her poignant portrayal steals the show from the glamorous Montez, 14 years her junior. Would it have been possible to imagine a scenario in which Arletty’s character has been (secretly perhaps) learning to ride the motorbike and so is able to successfully replace her man?23 Perhaps while he would die attempting the lethal double somersault? Not in France, at least not in 1949. After executing Christina as justice for her dead lovers and for Martha, Fabius miraculously pulls off the double somersault then calls the police.

Retour de Manivelle (de La Patellie`re, 1957) The only other postwar French noir to feature a visually and narratively dominant vamp as spider-woman fatale is Denys de la Patellière’s Retour de Manivelle (1957). Adapted from Hadley Chase’s There’s Always a Price Tag (1956), the story is yet another variation on the Postman plot but it is unclear whether the fatale is motivated by sexual voraciousness or frigidity. The French screen version stars Michèle Morgan, quintessential lost girl of poetic realist classics and top French female star throughout the 1950s,24 as the ruthlessly cold-hearted wife of a failed financier (Peter Van Eyk). She seduces an impecunious young drifter (Daniel Gélin) into helping her

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Bad Girls get her hands on her husband’s insurance money; not however by murdering him, but by making her husband’s suicide look like a murder. The most chillingly Machiavellian part of the femme’s plan is to hire a pretty young maid (Michèle Mercier25), whom she immediately instructs the lovesick Robert (Gélin) to seduce. This second affair will provide them with an alibi and throw the police off the scent when they inevitably suspect the murderous-wife-and-her-lover scenario. Engaged to a soldier who never returned from the war, Mercier plays the classic ingénue, falls for Gélin, completing the noir love triangle: the ingénue loves the hero who loves the femme who, unusually in French noir, loves no one. Commercially in the top third of French films in France,26 no doubt thanks to Morgan’s presence, Manivelle was dismissed by the Cahiers critics (for whom popular director de la Patellière and script writer Michel Audiard were emblematic of a stale, derivative ‘tradition de qualité’) as ‘a reasonably solid French jalopy of a film, certainly not a Cadillac’.27 Interestingly, the film was better received in the USA, with New York Times reviewer A.H. Weiler comparing it favourably to Clouzot’s Diaboliques, praising ‘taut portrayals that do justice to a script that is adult and sparse’. Weiler notes the Pandora-like arsenal of Morgan’s fatale: ‘An agile mind in an equally agile body (it is strongly implied) are this designing dame’s efficient tools, so we can’t blame our lovesick swain for listening to his heart instead of his brain.’28 Gauging, winning and keeping the heart of the fatale . . . a risky business. All of which begs the question of why the noir hero falls for her in the first place, particularly when the narrative often provides him with a choice. Why is it that he wavers between, and almost invariably prefers, the sexy, mysterious, uncontrollable, potentially treacherous fatale over the homely promise of maternal security and sexual fidelity offered by the good woman, faithful wife (Portrait) or adoring ingénue (Manivelle)? The proximal narrative cause is obvious: the noir hero is blinded by desire and/or greed so that he is unable to discern or be deterred by the fatale’s duplicity and/or ruthlessness.29 In terms of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, for males, the stable, longterm pair-bond promised by the good woman may be a mixed blessing if it also entails the foreclosure of future reproductive opportunities. Secondly, the most desirable members of both sexes, those with the highest mate value, represent a costly and potentially dangerous investment, precisely

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Classic French Noir because they are the objects of intense competition. They are the hardest to get and even harder to keep, tending to make the least reliable partners because they are heavily solicited by potential lovers and because, knowing they can attract any number of high quality mates, can easily afford the risk of abandoning an existing relationship. There is therefore an unconscious correlation between desirability and unreliability, for both men and women: danger is sexy. And vice versa. In the case of the fatale, her volatility, dangerous appeal and status as feminine archetype are thus intimately causally connected (I would say the same of the less common figure of the homme fatal, the subject of our ‘investigation’ in Chapter 8). Moreover, I would argue that the dangerous challenge represented by the femme is ultimately linked to the physical risks males have always had to take, and have therefore evolved to enjoy taking, in order to compete for and monopolise sexual access to the most desirable (young and beautiful) females. On a hormonal level, increased risk-taking behaviours in males, particularly in adolescents, correlates strongly with increased levels of testosterone and has been the subject of extensive research.30 In terms of the evolution of male risk-taking behaviours and their connection to intrasexual competition, I offer two examples. Firstly, studies of hunting practices in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that men hunt primarily for the status and increased mating opportunities successful hunting provides, and not simply to provision their legitimate spouse and offspring with a source of calories and protein.31 Secondly, ethnographic studies have found that men who have killed in intertribal raids have greater chances of attracting wives and mistresses.32

Woman as spectacle and exchange object In Retour de Manivelle the key to the femme’s ruthlessness is provided by an iconic element of decor – a life-size moulded bronze torso, which has pride of place in the husband’s drawing room, mythically titled ‘Hélène, 1954’. Not present in the source novel (whose fatale is a more onedimensional spider woman), though it could certainly be read as a visual translation of Hadley Chase’s titular ‘Price Tag’, the bronze is in evidence in six scenes interspersed throughout the film. Appearing on screen for over four minutes in total (including three six-second full shots), it is an unambiguous iconic signifier of Hélène’s power but also 128

Bad Girls (and more importantly) her simultaneous subjection/objectification. Even before the hero meets her in the flesh, he is smitten by Hélène’s reified form, the quintessence of classical beauty, which her husband has commissioned and paid for; but which he is paradoxically unable to possess. (Her lack of love for him has driven him to drink, financial ruin and suicide.) De la Patellière places the bust ominously in the background when Hélène instructs Robert to seduce the maid (Figure 7.3). A later scene, opening on a dissolve to a five-second close-up of the bronze, reveals that the police inspector’s investigation has uncovered some unsavoury facts. Hélène once attempted suicide, allegedly due to her perverse husband’s habit of ‘sharing’ his ‘collector’s item’ with wealthy business associates. In scene after scene we are reminded – visually (via the bronze) as well as via dialogues – of her status as pure object of desire and exchange. It is her rebellion against a lifetime of such objectification that has rendered her emotionally (and sexually?) frigid and prompts her ruthless quest for emotional and economic independence: ‘My whole life I’ve been bought and sold like a thing. This money is mine. I’ve earnt it. Paid for it with year after year of disgust.’

Figure 7.3 Retour de Manivelle.

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Classic French Noir In the dramatic climax, Hélène goads the lovesick Robert into hitting her, by hitting him with the unpalatable truth of their relationship. But instead of knocking her out (part of their plan to mislead the police), he accidentally kills her – and is subsequently caught and accused of double murder. The film thus constructs its monstrous fatale as violent refusal of male objectification. Pure status object (like her bronze bust), paraded before and even exchanged with other men as a reflection of their worth, knowing her power depends entirely on her ability to enslave the desiring male gaze, she uses it while she can, determined to eliminate it altogether. Manivelle anticipates feminist critiques of the reduction of woman in film to visual surface, erotic spectacle and object of exchange. Feminist theory has privileged conventional Freudian psychoanalytical explanations for the fetishistic reduction of the femme and her investigation, reading her as an iconic signifier of castration anxiety. I offer instead a biocultural explanation, as arising out of the specific dynamics of human sexual selection. As we have seen, the evolution of pair-bonds and male parental investment mean that men often restrict their mating efforts (for varying periods of time) to one woman for whose offspring they provide resources and protection. It has therefore become in their reproductive interest to choose the best available woman in whom to invest, i.e. the most desirable partner in reproductive terms. The means of gauging female reproductive fitness in humans have been primarily (though not solely) visual. Of course, women also appraise men visually. However, in most cultures, since it is heterosexual men who monopolise resources and power, women’s value has been seen almost exclusively in terms of visually coded reproductive fitness and it is the female body that has become the primary site of visual spectacle. Empirical, cross-cultural research confirms the common sense intuition that men place greater emphasis on physical beauty than do women. In terms of the attributes most sought after in a mate, although both men and women value physical (beauty), intellectual (intelligence, humour), moral (kindness) and economic (wealth) qualities; wealth and status are typically rated higher by women while physical beauty is typically rated higher by men.33 The emphasis on feminine beauty and the construction of woman as visual spectacle can thus be seen to represent part of the evolutionary ‘price-tag’ women have been forced to pay for male parental investment, the establishment of pair-bonds

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Bad Girls (durable love relationships), protection and provision of material resources. In patriarchal societies, the price tag can become unbearably heavy. This brings us to examine the precise nature of the spectacle, i.e. the specific attributes of feminine beauty, particularly as they relate to the fatale. Fashion trends and cultural variation notwithstanding, evolutionary theory posits that in humans, as in other animal species, there exist a number of universal features of physical sexual attractiveness, which are essentially markers of reproductive fitness: for women the potential to bear, and for men the potential to father, protect and provide for many fit, healthy offspring. In women, unsurprisingly, these visual markers include: youth (indicating optimum reproductive potential); facial symmetry, clear skin and shiny hair (absence of parasitic infestation) and oestrogendependent features: triangular face; firm, full breasts and a low waist-hip ratio (also indicative of the absence of an existing pregnancy). In other words, cross-culturally recognised definitions of feminine beauty equate broadly to visual markers of health and female reproductive fitness.34 The youth and health accentuating make-up – tight-fitting or suggestively flowing costumes that are the sartorial hallmark of the fatale, the sensual lighting and framing of her face and body – are unambiguously designed to accentuate and display these features. The ability of the fatale to capture the scopophilic gaze of the male protagonist, along with (both male and female) critics and spectators alike, the explanation for her physical allure and source of her power, is ultimately (in evolutionary terms) that her seductive beauty and youth represent the epitome of feminine reproductive fitness. Of course, differentially gendered and sexually orientated spectatorial desire will mean that the scopophilic drive (present in females as well as in males, despite patriarchal restrictions on women’s looking) may derive from one or other of two causes: either the desire to possess or the desire to be the fatale, or in some cases, both. Either way, Freudian explanations for scopophilia as voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic overinvestment in the image of the fatale as iconic signifier of Oedipal angst (her tight-fitting, elongated dresses causing her body to resemble the phallus, whose lack can thus be disavowed, allaying unconscious castration anxiety in the male), are as redundant as they are comically improbable.35

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Classic French Noir We have seen how Morgan’s femme enacts a violent refusal of male objectification. And although Maria Montez’s predatory vamp (Portrait) revels in her own specularity, she too uses it to escape objectification; obtaining, power and status as well as a sexual thrill from controlling the spectacle of lethal masculinity.36 Danièle Delorme’s heartless, murderous fatale (Assassins) can also be read – less convincingly perhaps – as a survival strategy.

The femme as avenging angel In perhaps the most powerful example of the fatale’s rebellion against objectification, Danielle Darrieux plays opposite Jean Gabin, in exhusband Henri Decoin’s extraordinary La vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth about Bébé Donge] (1952). When she falls in love and marries rising industrialist and inveterate womaniser, Francois Donge, Elizabeth, known to all as ‘Bébé’ (Baby), naively hopes her husband will share her romantic notions of the couple. When she gradually realises she is little more than a social accessory, and that her husband’s affairs have continued unabated since their marriage, she is destroyed. The usual options, pragmatically taking a lover or dutifully finding fulfilment in motherhood, are not open to her. (Having accepted to have a child only as a last ditch effort to save the marriage, maternity clearly does not fulfil her emotional needs and the child never appears on screen.) Instead she takes radical action: one fine day, seemingly out of the blue, she calmly pours arsenic into her husband’s coffee. The film is told in flashback, ostensibly via Gabin/Donge’s voiceover, as he lies helpless in a private clinic, hovering between life and death, fully aware of his wife’s act. As he relives the relationship, he comes to see it from her point of view. His gradual understanding leads him to take responsibility for the crime (he is adamant she should not be prosecuted) and to make the declaration of love she had been waiting for – and which alone could save him. But it is too late. She declares she no longer loves him, Donge dies and in the final scene, Elizabeth is willingly led away by the law. Judged by Burch and Sellier as one of the few French noirs to take an overtly feminist stance, the film openly invites its spectator to side with its murderous femme, denouncing the patriarchal sexual economy that in 132

Bad Girls effect ‘kills’ women by relegating them to the status of expendable beautiful objects37 and compliant maternal perpetuators of male genes. Each hospital scene is punctuated by Bébé’s ghostly presence, already dressed in widow’s black, her gaze impenitent and devoid of remorse, shame, anger or pity: a victim of slow emotional starvation, she is already dead (Figure 7.4). Bébé’s nickname is a glaring denunciation of the patriarchal infantilisation of women, suggestive of the conservative judgement that her youthful romanticism (her visceral need for an enduring, passionate bond) is a childish self-indulgence: once married, she will grow out of it and into docile maternity. But she does not, whence her family’s shocked incomprehension when confronted with her crime. Donge is a good husband, he works hard, provides materially for her and her child, what more could she want? Her calm response to her mother’s desperate question ‘Why?’ is a chill reminder of the generational emotional subjection of women, even among society’s upper echelons where material needs are amply met: ‘Perhaps so as not to end up like you, Mummy dear.’ In biocultural terms, the film’s central couple represent extreme masculine and feminine love styles. Gabin’s cynical womaniser, whose social status gives him the right and the means to play the field before and after marriage (which, for him, is pure social necessity, not an emotional investment); equates to one half of a typically male strategy, the denial of eros in favour of objectifying ludus, which French upper-middle-class society of the time allows and unofficially encourages. Secondly, he has cleverly chosen a beautiful but chaste, romantically invested virgin, which leaves him free to pursue affairs with (other men’s) more sexually available women. (He displays no jealous mate-guarding because he knows his wife to be incapable of sexual infidelity.) Conversely, Darrieux’s Elizabeth embodies an extreme version of women’s romantic preference for a single long-term mate and demonstrates that such a preference can be ‘lethal’ in the face of men’s greater tendency to seek multiple, short-term partners. The film’s extraordinary justification of its unruly, murderous fatale is effected through her emotional honesty and courage: the polar opposite of the cowardly, deceiving garce, Bébé’s candour is in total disregard of her own self-interest. She never denies her rebellious action and accepts without protest or self-pity her impending punishment by the law. More importantly, the murder is reconfigured by the film as an act of selfdefence, even poetic justice, rendering her more avenging angel than lethal

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Classic French Noir

Figure 7.4 La vérité sur Bébé Donge.

spider woman. No simple crime of passion, she murders because, in refusing her love and denying her subjectivity, her husband has already murdered her spirit. Thus her character is not constructed as evil, contrary to most femmes examined in this chapter.

Conclusion: from spectacle to subjectivity Male control of female sexuality is facilitated and perpetuated by female passivity and selfless maternal solicitude, which qualities are therefore commonly elevated in patriarchal ideologies to the highest of feminine virtues. We have seen how the fatale’s demonic power, her appeal and simultaneous threat lie in the fact that she cheats the system by using her status as feminine icon to eschew the so-called feminine virtues of compliance and selflessness, daring to combine feminine beauty and intelligence with sexual assertiveness and (so-called) masculine agency. Daring to wield the gaze herself, she is guilty of claiming agency, committing the cardinal sins of active disobedience and selfish desire, wanting and getting things for herself – including the right to be with the lover of her choice.38 In other cases, she rebels against and/or exploits her 134

Bad Girls position as visual object as a means to power. In this sense, the fatale can remind us of the inherent, etymologically inscribed reversibility of subjectobject relations in human interaction: the capacity to be an active subject depends on the simultaneous capacity to become an object (of desire), subjected to the desiring gaze of the other. Bourdieu (2001) notes how strategies of masculine domination attempt to circumvent this process and attain pure subjectivity while relegating the woman to the position of pure object. The fatale’s unruly subversion and/or rejection of her objectification make her a key figure for feminism. However rare, demonic French fatale (along with the more common, less ruthless fatalitaire) can be productively read in terms of this dynamic. The venal ruthlessness, bloodlust and violent criminality of the fatale, as examined in this chapter, stands in stark contrast to social reality and point to her construction as patriarchal myth. Not that women are incapable of homicidal violence.39 But, unlike the fatale’s murderous misdeeds, real-life female criminality is mostly on a small scale, subsistence level consisting of low risk, low gain property crimes. Women most often offend to survive, to feed themselves and their families. Men, on the other hand, most often engage in high-risk criminal behaviour in order to attain status, which elevates their chances in the mating game.40 Moreover, although many fatale figures are portrayed as killers, whether out of sexual jealousy, passion or cold ambition, in reality of course it is men who are statistically more likely to rape, seriously wound or murder, particularly in ‘crimes of passion’.41 In the light of the above, the violence of the fatale would seem to serve a triple purpose. First, as noted, she may be a site of displacement for male violence that may be disavowed and projected onto the body of the bad woman.42 Second, she may act as a warning to men around the dangers of adulterous or romantic adventures with seductive young women on the make. Third, the fatale may well provide a salutary outlet for repressed female anger and violence at multiple forms of patriarchal injustice.43 This sentiment is also undoubtedly behind feminist comments that what women retain of the fatale is not her narrative punishment but her magnificent agency and challenge to patriarchal supremacy. In Retour de Manivelle and especially Bébé Donge, the femme as violent avenger is a rare and perhaps unheeded warning to French patriarchal forces that men would continue to objectify, disregard and exploit women at their own peril.

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8 Fatal Men

Introduction In the previous section, when we looked for the woman in French film noir, we found many romantic fatalitaires and duplicitous garces, but very few powerful spider women. What happens when we look, instead, for The Man? As we might expect, the sexually exploitative male appears in numerous guises, in countless films (noirs or conventional polars and melodramas) of the period. In French gangster noir, rival bad guys are inevitably rough on women. The professional proxy gigolo or pimp, exploiting innocent young women for material gain, is a common fixture, particularly of films featuring a prostitute fatalitaire (e.g. Dédée d’Anvers and Casque d’Or) as we have seen. Combining charm and exploitation with feminine coded vices of vanity, cowardice and treachery (often a police informer), the pimp is generally a minor antagonist, the male equivalent of the bitch or garce. Where he plays a major role, as in the film gris, Les Compagnes de la nuit [Ladies of the Night] (1953), the pimp is contrasted with the good man, who seeks to save the fallen-woman fatalitaire from the murderous pimp’s clutches, and return her and her illegitimate child to respectability via marriage. In other noir influenced melodramas like Astruc’s Les Mauvaises Rencontres (1955), starring Anouk Aimé, vulnerable yet ambitious young

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Classic French Noir women who come to Paris seeking their fortune fall prey to apparent Prince Charming figures. Possessing looks, money and status, these charmers pretend to offer marriage and career possibilities as a ploy to gain sexual favours, after which the young women are abandoned, often pregnant. In low sex-ratio societies where patriarchy combines with sexual ‘freedom’ or permissiveness, young women seeking social mobility are particularly vulnerable to this type.

L’homme fatal But the figure we are really ‘looking for’ is the male equivalent of the femme fatale: l’homme fatal, whom I will define (narrowly) as a deadly, sexually exploitative seducer.1 If the femme is to be read as a cipher for male anxiety over female sexual betrayal and/or economic independence, the fatal male will demonstrate that financial independence can also leave women vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In contexts where women are moving into the professional world and when eligible men are few, such as postwar France and USA, gigolos and ruthless narcissists can prosper. During the classic period, the figure of the duplicitous seductive male was made popular in comedy (Gérard Philipe in René Clément’s masterful, Monsieur Ripois [Knave of Hearts] (1955)) and melodrama (Gueule d’Ange [Pleasures and Vices] (Blistène, 1954), starring Maurice Ronet) as well as in noir, where he appears almost as often as his female counterpart (see Appendix 2).2 This chapter will focus on three films: Bonnes à tuer, Une manche et la belle and La bête à l’Affût, all of which are adaptations from contemporary American crime fiction writers that had previously appeared in French translation, in Gallimard’s iconic Série noire crime series. From a biocultural perspective, the appeal of these melodramatic films, which often involve women writers and primarily address female spectators, lies in their staging of the vital dramas of female mate choice.3

Bonnes à tuer [One Step to Eternity] (Decoin, 1954) ‘All you have to do is look at me.’

Angel-faced Michel Auclair, the White Knight ingénu of Clouzot’s Manon, here plays a narcissistic homme fatal, the ruthless, social-climbing 140

Fatal Men journalist Larry Roques. Newly ensconced in a sumptuous penthouse overlooking the Champs Elysées, Roques invites four women to dinner: ex-, present and future wives and current mistress, fully intending to murder one of them by simulating an accidental fall from his balcony, the railing of which he has cunningly loosened. The plot is cleverly structured like a journalistic investigation, comprising an omniscient voiceover narration, circular narrative and series of subjective flashbacks reviewing each woman’s relationship with the deadly Larry. The film is adapted from American crime writer, Patricia McGeer’s Follow as The Night (1950).4 On the film’s release, several critics5 noted the difficulty of transposing a quintessentially American character to a French context: the highly influential columnist working for scores of newspapers was nonexistent in France. While this may have been true, France nonetheless has a venerable literary precedent of journalism as pathway to power, in Maupassant’s nineteenth-century classic, Bel ami.6 Indeed, Bonnes can be seen as a twentieth-century Franco-American remake of the novel7 and Maupassant is evoked explicitly by having Roques’ erstwhile friend and rival at the newspaper retain the name Forestier, patronym of his novelistic homologue. Moreover, Bel ami’s satirical take on nineteenth-century dandyism is echoed in Roques’ impeccable sartorial elegance. Auclair’s boyish, almost feminine good looks and off-hand charm also evoke this figure of nineteenth-century male narcissism. The spectator knows he is a ruthless, murderous homme, barely seven minutes into the film, when the omniscient narrator declares: ‘It was at that moment he decided to kill her . . . He would push her . . . The record player would play a slow blues. It would be the perfect crime’, against a mobile full shot of Auclair, calmly smoking and sipping scotch as the camera tracks in, stopping at a mid shot. But there will be no close visual investigation. Until the film’s final dramatic climax, the mystery that the film will seek to resolve is not whether the character is an homme fatal, but what made him so, and especially, who is his intended victim? Thus Decoin’s framing remains reasonably wide, underscoring the character’s nonchalant elegance and lack of emotion, avoiding close-up until the dramatic dénouement. Until this time, most close shots featuring our homme fatal are over the shoulder, framing the back of his head, so as to focus on the effect he has on his female victims.

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Classic French Noir Following eight minutes of exposition, the bulk of the film consists in the fatal dinner party, intercut with subjective flashbacks from the perspective of the female characters.8 Each represents a different feminine position in relation to the homme fatal. Cecile Germaine-Thomas, Larry’s young fiancée, is a spoiled 18-yearold heiress, the daughter of his newspaper boss. Worldly ingénue, she is taken in by Larry’s masterful charm and appears to admire his ambition as a manifestation of virile power. Cecile’s flashback begins with her appreciative witnessing of a classic spectacle of hegemonic masculinity, in which Larry asserts dominance, winning a fist fight with ex-friend and rival, Forestier. Already pregnant when they meet, she sees him as the perfect solution to her predicament: a handsome upwardly mobile husband. Although their relationship has not been consummated, Larry is more than happy to claim paternity, in order to force her wealthy father to accept the marriage.9 For Cécile, Larry thus represents masculine power and protection as well as freedom from paternal authority. For Larry, the costs of raising another man’s child are far outweighed by the benefits. Vera Valpone, Larry’s current wife is a sexy young, aspiring actress. A superficial gold-digger, she resembles Larry in ambition though she lacks his intelligence, and naively imagined that once married, they would make a great team. But when Larry promptly embarks on a series of strategic affairs, she takes up with a Spanish gigolo who pushes her to demand 20 million francs for a divorce. As a woman scorned, all she wants from Larry now is money and revenge. Affecting a slight American accent ‘to make believe she’s just back from Hollywood’, the actress Corinne Calvet (1925 –2001) had spent most of her career there and her platinum blonde, Rita Hayworth looks were well suited to the role. Current mistress, socialite Maggy Lang is a garce, a wealthy, cynical viper, emblematic of a corrupt social milieu. Presented as a black widow rumoured to have poisoned her first husband, she is an older, smarter, harder version of Vera. Ironically, Larry’s first scene with mistress Maggy is filmed more intimately than with the young fiancée, in a series of two-shots in the back seat of Maggy’s chauffeur-driven car, beginning and ending on the couple’s sensual embrace. As in all homme fatal narratives, the focus is on the woman’s desiring gaze. In this case however, the pair both obtain perverse pleasure from the exchange. When Maggy declares ‘I adore you, Larry. You disgust me a little but I adore you’, we guess the feeling is more

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Fatal Men than mutual. Larry’s exchanges with Maggy are presented as a ‘dangerous liaison’, resembling the icy cruelty and moral decay of the best of eighteenth-century French literature. In stark contrast, Larry’s relationship with first wife Constance (Danielle Darrieux), is shown to be initially wholesome and almost chastely romantic. When they meet, Constance is a financially independent career woman, a successful ceramic artist with her own studio. Darrieux’s costumes underscore the masculine stance that a career still represented in 1950s France: her hair is cropped and she first appears wearing trousers and sensible shoes. In Connie’s flashback to the wedding, both look equally happy, but insistent fateful bells tolling over the scene cast a pall over their future. During their honeymoon, Larry tells of a childhood scarred by poverty and deprivation, which are ominously blamed on maternal scruples. The mother figure is framed as a prudish oppressor who blocks masculine drives and attempts to succeed (while the idealised father figure is remembered as totally indulgent). Connie puts his ambition down to naive youthful exuberance and immediately after, we see an ambitious but more human Larry, who appears genuinely in love, full of spontaneous boyish enthusiasm. He has of course, borrowed considerable sums of money from his wife but when he has a windfall, his first thought is to reimburse her. But the ever-maternal Constance is already disapproving.10 And when Larry has his immediate superior and friend fired to take his place, Constance is horrified. Larry’s response is one of violently angry dismissal of the castrating, phallic mother figure that his wife has come to represent: ‘What are you? A woman or a sermon?’ His reaction reflects the belief pattern, commonly held by pathological grandiose narcissists, ‘that the self is perfect and should be able to do or have whatever it wants’.11 Larry’s manic displays of devotion, which quickly morph into violent rejection, are illustrative of the disorganised attachment style associated by recent psychological research with pathological narcissism. Attachment, as conceptualised by British born evolutionary psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, can be described as an innate, adaptive behavioural system that seeks to maintain proximity between vulnerable infants and their primary caregiver, usually the mother. During the evolution of the human species, it would have been the babies who stayed close to their mothers that would have survived to

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Classic French Noir have children of their own. Bowlby hypothesized that both infants and mothers have evolved a biological need to stay in contact with each other . . . The determinant of attachment is not food but care and responsiveness . . . Bowlby suggested that a child would initially form only one attachment and that the attachment figure acted as a secure base for exploring the world. The attachment relationship acts as a prototype for all future social relationships so disrupting it can have severe consequences.12

Recent studies suggest that pathological narcissism can involve either hyperactivation of the attachment system, termed ‘anxious attachment’; or conversely, ‘avoidant attachment’, which is the deactivation of the attachment system by displacing dependency needs from human relationships to money, power, status; or indeed a ‘disorganised’ combination of both strategies.13 The character of Larry Roques displays precisely this combination.14 Moreover, extreme, over-indulgent and oppressive parenting styles (displayed by Larry’s father and mother respectively) are now seen to be a major cause of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).15 Larry’s schizoid abhorrence of the maternal and his narcissistic selfabsorption are behind the childlessness of the marriage: we witness a pregnant Constance being thrown from the couple’s speeding car by Larry’s reckless driving, in a scene that highlights his callous, psychopathic disregard for the welfare of both his wife and unborn child. Moreover, not only does she lose the child as a result of the accident, she cannot have more. In falling for the penniless but handsome and charming Larry, Connie unconsciously chooses genetic over material resources. But her investment will fail cruelly: the younger male who seemed certain to provide a guarantee of semi-filial devotion and reproductive success ends up recklessly destroying her chances, before callously moving on. And yet, because her character is partly constructed as masochistic good mother, the aptly named Constance will suffer in silence and continue to love him to the end, desperately hoping her feelings may be reciprocated, even when his murderous intentions become clear.

L’homme fatal: controlling the gaze Montage within each flashback sequence (swish pans rather than dissolves) expresses the traumatic nature of the memories for the women, their lack

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Fatal Men of control. Propelled through the relationship by their desire for Larry, they react rather than act. Larry is always in the driver’s seat. Even when he is young and broke, during his marriage to Constance, he manipulates her as a child manipulates a doting mother. Tellingly, his somewhat infantile pattern of manipulation is framed explicitly in terms of the gaze. During a honeymoon scene, when his social inexperience is highlighted (he doesn’t know when to tip or how much), he implores Constance to teach him, apparently putting her in the controlling Pygmalion role. ‘You’ll help me. You won’t have to do much. All you have to do is be there. All you have to do is look at me.’ All you have to do is look at me: the remark highlights Larry’s narcissistic obsession with constructing and monopolising an idealised, adoring maternal gaze. In terms of the other women, Larry’s looks appraise them not so much in terms of their beauty and sex appeal, but firstly in terms of the social advancement they may offer and secondly, to ascertain (again) whether or not they are looking at him. The narcissist knows instinctively the power of capturing the gaze and uses it actively, i.e. exploits his position as object of the desiring gaze to enhance his sphere of action as subject. When Larry first meets Vera, at a cocktail party, they both appear to give each other ‘the look’: he looks first but his gaze, registered in a perfunctory medium long shot, goes immediately past her to zero in on the socialite Maggy Lang, better able to advance his interests. When he brushes past Vera with barely a glance, she is the one left powerlessly looking. In a gender inversion of art critic, John Berger’s observation (subsequently extended by Laura Mulvey) that ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’,16 Larry demonstrates how for the narcissist, women are the adoring mirrors in which the male ego admires itself before exploiting their desire to his own advantage. The homme fatal’s narcissistic, instrumentalising mirror gaze thus aligns him with negative manifestations of the femme. Vera’s second flashback, tellingly framed with her sitting in front of a mirror, insists visually on their sexual attraction and on Larry’s narcissism, which tops even hers. She is preening, he comes into the shot behind her – invading the mirror, so to speak – and after a short flashback we cut back to a close-up on Vera. An elliptical reverse shot cuts back to the same mirror, now framing the couple in long shot on their wedding day, tracking in as

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Classic French Noir Vera describes how Larry insisted they descend the long nuptial staircase alone, so he would be sure that in the newspaper society pages he would be in close-up. Thus his displays of sexual desire for her appear fuelled by the social possibilities her starlet status affords. Her beauty is another tool for his self-advancement, a mirror in which he admires himself, before moving on to more profitable targets. In Constance’s case, when the maternal mirror refuses to reflect the image he wishes to see, he must eliminate it.

L’homme fatal as narcissistic metteur en sce`ne of female intrasexual competition Our homme fatal displays all the recognised traits of clinical grandiose narcissism: arrogant self-importance; fantasies of unlimited success and power; envy of others; exploitative lack of empathy; the construction of an inviolable self-image and the use of deception and violent aggression to defend it.17 Moreover, Larry’s narcissistic setting up of the dinner party, his grandiose sense of self-importance in gathering his ‘harem’ (as outgoing wife Vera snidely remarks), is also sadistic in that he takes pleasure in playing the women off against one another, by being the centre of competitive feminine attention, surrounded by multiple desiring gazes. Maggy and Vera’s dialogues, in particular, are a series of catty jibes, as each woman vies to oust the others. Vera is out to get her money, pregnant fiancée Cécile is unable to hold her liquor or her tongue, the devious Maggy is determined to be – and Constance is hopeful of being – the one to spend the night with their host. Maggy’s character also serves to articulate the fact that Larry’s power hinges on a lack of male intrasexual competition (his superior dyadic power in Guttentag and Secord’s terms): ‘There aren’t enough men, here, Larry. Or at least, not enough dance partners.’ The barely concealed metaphor (dance equals sex) immediately prompts an invitation, in English, from the smugly chivalrous Larry (‘Will you dance with me?’), who, by the end of the dinner, will have (literally) danced with each of the women in turn.

The female gothic As the evening wears on, the emotional threat represented by the homme fatal becomes more palpably physical. Of the four women, hard-hearted 146

Fatal Men

Figure 8.1 Bonnes à tuer.

Maggy is the only one not to demonstrate some level of fear and anxiety towards their host. This narrative trope of woman as the potential victim of male aggression inevitably evokes the female gothic, except that in our noir exempla, there won’t be a rescuing second man present to save the heroine.18 During the dinner sequence, a thunderstorm materialises the danger which the spectator knows hangs over one of the women. When three leave and Larry is alone with a now frantic Constance on the dimly lit balcony, it is clear that it is she, his conscience, who obsesses him and who he must silence. Ever hopeful, Constance attempts to dissuade him: ‘You’ll always hear me. Perhaps your obsession is that you still love me?’ The camera cuts to a forward tracking extreme close-up (ECU) on an uncomprehending Larry: ‘What are you saying? That I still love you?’ For the first time in the film, his expression conveys vulnerability; he looks almost like a lost child. He no longer controls the gaze. Interestingly, recent research into narcissism insists that grandiose narcissism is haunted by its vulnerable dark side. Fantasies of perfection and mastery are a coping strategy, designed to disguise deep-seated insecurities.19

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Classic French Noir A reverse ECU on Constance is followed by a fade to black. They struggle briefly and he is thrown over the balustrade. When the police arrive, she doesn’t know whether she pushed him or not and neither do we, but by this point, do we blame her? More importantly, the answer to her final question remains a mystery. The distorted, ghostly framing of Larry in the final ECU underlines the uncanny, gothic unknowability of the pathological grandiose narcissist: his ‘true’ motives and emotions, his vulnerable underside are sealed off from Others as from his conscious self. But perhaps the most noir aspect of the film is how its narrative supports a reading which does in fact ‘put the Blame on Mame’, via Larry’s back-story of maternal moralistic oppression and by presenting Constance as surrogate Bad Mother. By turns infantilising and castrating phallic mother, whose moral remonstrance pushes Larry into extreme behaviours, Constance’s character potentially complicates audience sympathies, undermining sympathy for the homme’s victim in a way that may be problematic for some feminists. We will see a related pattern in our next film.

Une Manche et la Belle [A Kiss For A Killer] (Verneuil, 1957) ‘It’s when a guy gets full of confidence he’s wide open for a sucker punch.’ (James Hadley Chase)20

Set in Nice, Une Manche et La Belle, after Hadley Chase’s The Sucker Punch (1954), features 1950s heart-throb Henri Vidal as would-be homme fatal Philippe Delaroche, an opportunistic bank employee who marries middle-aged ex-pat millionairess, Stella Farnwell (Isa Miranda, Gabin’s Italian fatalitaire co-star in Au-delà des grilles21), after the latter falls for his masculine good looks and athletic physique (Figure 8.2). But the relationship quickly turns sour when Stella proves a domineering, over-demanding wife, exacerbating Delaroche’s physical distaste for his aging bride. To make matters worse, he falls promptly into the siren-like clutches of her young secretary, the aptly named Eve (Mylène Demongeot). Far smarter and more ruthless, Eve manipulates her lover

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Fatal Men into eliminating the troublesome wife, in a classic simulated car accident along the Corniche. The perfect crime almost goes undiscovered but after the funeral, Delaroche receives the double sucker punch: his wife has left him a pittance, bequeathing almost her entire fortune to her son, who just happens to be engaged to . . . the lovely Eve herself. When Eve glibly suggests Philippe remain her part-time lover, things turn nasty and lethal gunshots are fired. Verneuil ends the film on an image of biblical retribution, framing the pair lying side by side in the foreground against the majestic vista of Stella’s mansion, forever evicted from its Eden-like gardens. As we have seen, homme fatal narratives focus on the male body as object of desire, particularly where the character is a gigolo. In Bonnes, we saw how this position can afford a level of power and agency. In Manche, however, marrying up does the opposite, as the eroticised male gigolo is objectified, controlled, owned. His demeaningly feminised position is explicitly evoked in the film via a cruel newspaper clipping after the wedding, featuring Vidal in a bathing costume, striking Mr Universe-like poses (the actor had won Apollo of the Year competitions on several occasions) and describing his rags-to-riches character as Monsieur

Figure 8.2 Une Manche et la Belle.

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Classic French Noir Cendrillon [Mr Cinderella]. Philippe’s toy boy fate is sealed as Stella dresses him, objectifies him and seeks to control his every movement. He rebels, and any affection (there has never been desire on his part) turns quickly to contempt. The film thus highlights a key difference between masculine and feminine beauty, the former being linked to agency rather than erotic spectacle. It would be more accurate to say that the erotic spectacle of masculinity is traditionally dependent on the capacity for physical action, risk taking and dominance. In hero figures, physical strength is also coupled with moral integrity, which can substitute for social dominance, as in Gabin’s marginalised pre-war figures. In this sense, by reducing its gigolo protagonist to powerless, dissembling erotic object, the film partially confirms Mulvey’s contention that ‘a male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego’.22 Delaroche and Stella’s relationship also highlights the double-edged sword of subject-object relations as they relate to romantic love. Since the fulfilment of romantic love requires mutual attraction and reciprocity,23 in order to be a successful subject of desire one must also be the object of desire for the other. And so for Stella, despite having been a beauty (in stark contrast to the plain, unpleasant character of Chase’s novel), despite her wealth and the power that goes with it, her subjectivity is ultimately negated. She cannot call the emotional shots because her age prevents her from occupying the position of object of desire of the younger man. Isa Miranda’s costuming emphasises the pitiable fate that awaits her character, once she falls for Delaroche. When she first encounters him, she dresses with elegant simplicity. But once she falls in love, she spends obsessive amounts of time grooming herself for him, adorning herself with tastelessly expensive jewellery, drenching herself in perfume, wearing low cut sumptuous evening gowns at the slightest occasion – even to accompany Philippe to a wrestling match. In almost every scene, his discomforted gaze is ample evidence that Stella’s efforts at seduction are a dismal failure, so many insistent reminders of the masochistic position of the aging woman in love with a younger Adonis. The honeymoon sequence, in which Stella almost drowns while the young lovers watch, is a case in point. After wavering momentarily, Philippe finally

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Fatal Men dives in and saves his floundering bride (after the siren Eve attempts to stay his hand) but it is clearly not out of love. When he carries her back on board her launch, the grotesque reality of her position is yet again revealed. Wearing a bikini that cruelly reveals her age, Stella’s bony, semi-naked body, haggard, unpainted face and wet hair are put in stark contrast with a previous swimming scene where the happy Philippe is seduced by Eve’s sculptural nakedness. Subsequently, after their first lovemaking, Eve reappears for work, her hair still cheekily and voluptuously wet. Again and again we are reminded how the aging woman must mobilise excessive resources and artifice in a pitifully unsuccessful attempt to remain attractive, while the young woman can display her natural charms, in proud defiance. It is notable that Isa Miranda’s performance – a courageous undertaking by a veteran star – was considered by leading reviewer Simone Dubreuilh24 the film’s major achievement. As always, desire or lack thereof is conveyed by the gaze: Stella’s enraptured gaze is contrasted with Philippe’s bored looks when she is not looking. His own gaze has been captured by the alluring Eve, who returns it in true fatale style. Her unruly gaze is more one of knowing complicity than desire. And if her cheeky look signifies she is onto Delaroche from the start, it is because, as we later learn, she has her own plans to marry money. Although we are not made fully aware of the extent of her deception until the closing minutes of the film, Verneuil’s camera tells us, from the very first shots of her, that this Eve has already bitten into the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Thus, not unlike the narcissistic mirror gaze of Larry Roques in Bonnes, Eve’s gaze scans Philippe, not primarily out of genuine romantic interest, but in order to check that she is the coveted object of his. Just as Eve’s youthfulness is constantly juxtaposed with Stella’s age, her costuming also moves from functional to seductive. For the evening of the murder, her feline stealth is underlined by a tight skirt and leopardskin motif shirt. Previously, her skimpy bikini is shown, not on her but where she has abandoned it, on a bathing raft. Philippe/Vidal swims to the raft, discovers the garment and happily awaits the arrival of its owner. Mylene duly surfaces, en costume d’Eve, as the French might say, revealing pert breasts and dizzying waist-hip ratio, in a brief, one second shot that impressed even female reviewer Simone Dubreuilh.25 From this moment, Delaroche is hooked.

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Classic French Noir

L’homme and the older woman Here, as in our previous film, l’homme fatal underscores the unthinkability – in social terms – of a relationship of mutual desire between a younger man and a visibly menopausal woman. Isa Miranda (1909–82), still considered beautiful, was 47 when the film was shot, ten years older than Vidal (1919–59). We have noted how her character’s desire for the younger Delaroche is presented as aesthetically grotesque, i.e. unnatural. On the other hand, the 16-year age gap between Vidal and young co-star Mylène Demongeot (1935–) is normalised and (as far as I can ascertain) was never mentioned by reviewers. The filming of Delaroche’s seduction of Demongeot’s Eve – or rather her seduction of him, since she manipulates his desire – normalises their sexual relationship by highlighting the physical beauty and mutual desire of both partners. In Bonnes à tuer, Darrieux (1917 –) is only five years older than Auclair (1922 –88), yet the relationship between their characters is figured as a maternal one. Scenes of the marriage focus on Constance working, as main provider, and there is romance but no visible passion. When they dance it is a decorous waltz (not jazz) and they kiss chastely like mother and son. And as for Larry’s mistress, despite the intense sexual nature of the relationship, Maggy Lang’s sexual power is considerably undermined by her apparent age: she has to constantly manipulate him into sleeping with her with promises of material gains and threats of their withdrawal. Thus she is more in the position of the manipulating older male suitor promising resources in exchange for sexual intimacy. And yet, even though she is portrayed as somewhat of a cougar, made up and lit to accentuate her hard, angular features, the actress Miriam Di San Servolo (1923 –81) billed as Myriam Petacci, was in fact only 31 when the film was made – a year younger than Auclair. These films’ inversion of the classic noir scenario of Le dernier tournant, Postman, Double Indemnity and so many others, thus raises another question. Is the aging female body – even that of a great beauty like Miranda – considered less desirable, more grotesque in and of itself, than that of the older male? It is hardly a coincidence that Postman-type narratives almost always figure an aging male who clearly has never been physically (or morally) attractive, even in his youth. The cuckolded husband’s unattractiveness is a function of looks and/or personality rather than simply one of age.

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Fatal Men In both Bonnes and Manche, the nonsymmetrical nature of human sexuality (due to the link between female youth and fertility) is cruelly reinforced by patriarchal social mores. Female humans are almost unique in having evolved to shut down fertility decades before the end of the natural life cycle. Evolutionists hypothesise that menopause initially allowed older females to increase their inclusive reproductive fitness by avoiding perilous late pregnancies and devoting time and resources to grandchildren. This ‘grandmother hypothesis’ has been borne out for hunter-gatherer societies, in which the presence of a maternal grandmother is directly correlated with higher child survival rates.26 Because male fertility does not shut down suddenly in humans (as occurs in female menopause), male faces and bodies do not suffer the steep decline in attractiveness to the opposite sex that female beauty does, and relationships featuring mutual sexual attraction between a middle-aged man and much younger woman are common, off screen and on. A visibly middle-aged Gabin for example, can still plausibly arouse desire in much younger female co-stars throughout the 1950s, albeit stretching those limits (as we shall see in the next chapter). To my knowledge, the opposite scenario is nonexistent. Passionate affairs between adult women (in their 20s and 30s) and younger, adolescent males were not at all unheard of in classic French cinema, and were even a relative commonplace in literature. The best filmic example from the postwar period is Autant-Lara’s hugely successful adaptation of Radiguet’s scandalous Le diable au corps (1947), about a torrid liaison between a nurse, engaged to be married to a soldier, and a 17year-old high-school student. The film starred Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle, who were, in fact, the same age, both born in 1922. Philipe also played Julian Sorel, opposite Danielle Darrieux as the older woman (five years his senior) in Autant-Lara’s 1954 adaptation of Stendhal’s classic Le rouge et le noir [The Red and the Black]. But I know of no case in classic French cinema or literature, of a love affair between a young man and a visibly middle-aged (i.e. menopausal) woman.27

The older woman as gothic victim In Manche, Philipe murders Stella in time-honoured noir style, by hiding in her car as she drives to a dinner date, knocking her out and pushing the

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Classic French Noir car over the cliff to simulate an accident. As in all three of our features, the threat to the woman is accentuated by the expressionistic use of dangerous, night-time locations, wild weather, chiaroscuro and suspenseful action. But in this film, since Stella has been constructed as an antagonist, the spectator is likely to feel more allegiance to her murderer than concern for her plight. The filmmakers nonetheless create a strange gothic sympathy for her when the bungling Delaroche has to knock out his wife twice before he can steer the car over the cliff. The first time, she escapes onto the road while he is strategically replacing one of the tyres with a flat, and he must chase after her. She is metaphorically costumed in a veil and flowing white evening dress that eerily resembles a bridal gown, its whiteness rendered even starker by the car’s headlights. Framed in a surreal pool of light in the surrounding darkness, Stella implores Philipe to spare her, but we already know such an eventuality is not part of the plot. When he scoops her up in his arms, it is to carry her over the threshold of death.

L’homme et la femme But let us return to the scheming temptress, Eve. Like Phyllis Dietrichson, she is a ‘red-hot poker’ but unlike Walter Neff, Delaroche doesn’t know just how hot for most of the film. Described by Simone Dubreuilh as garce rather than femme fatale, Catherine Demongeot’s Eve is an unambiguous antagonist, far more venal and more ruthless than Vidal’s would-be homme fatal, whose weakness for her is somewhat endearing. And yet the film also gives her her dues, complicating audience sympathies by reminding us that she is responding to the pressures of patriarchal society in the only way open to her. On several occasions Eve reminds Philipe of his double standards. When she points out that even if he hadn’t already been married to Stella, ‘You would never have considered marrying me’, he can only agree. A young woman in her lowly position, however beautiful, runs the risk of being used for sex then abandoned, as Eve well knows (and as Philipe appears to have done with his previous girlfriend, a co-worker at his bank). In a sense, she is the more honest of the two. When challenged by the jealous Philipe about her young lover, she responds candidly: ‘He’s rich. He loves me. I’m marrying him’, though adding a barb: ‘He may not be handsome, but at least he’s young.’ And when the adulterous Philipe

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Fatal Men chastises her for her sexual promiscuousness – ‘Don’t you think two men in the one evening’s a bit much?’ – she brushes off his hypocritical objections and easily cajoles him into making love anyway. For Eve, the lesson of Mrs Farnwell, made visible by Philipe’s obvious distaste for Stella’s aging body, confirms that for a woman, wealth will only bring power if you get it while you are young and desirable: ‘I want money, too’ . . . ‘I won’t wait till I’m old and ugly’. As a smart, pragmatic modern girl, Eve knows that her biggest asset is her physical charms and that she must use her intelligence to cash in on them while she can. She feels no compunction in using Philipe – both to eliminate Mrs Farnwell and for sexual gratification – since he has been doing the same. But having been able to easily play Philipe for a sucker makes her somewhat contemptuous of him, ‘You’re 35 years old. If you were ever going to make it, you would’ve done so by now.’ Philipe’s ultimate clumsiness as gigolo and conspirator are suggested by an earlier scene of him swimming: following the raft scene, instead of filming Vidal doing an elegant over-arm crawl, Verneuil’s mise en scène has him swim an ungainly butterfly stroke, so that despite his muscular frame, as he swims after ‘his’ Eve, Delaroche appears to blunder his way through the water, floundering about, as if gasping for breath. From adored object of Stella’s impotent gaze, Eve renders him a gawping subject. As the plot will amply demonstrate, he can never quite keep up with her. Intellectually too, she is always one step ahead. Her only miscalculation – and it will prove fatal to them both – is that a desperate homme fatal, a loser with nothing left to lose, is a lethal beast indeed. Which brings us to our third and final film.

La Bête à L’Affût [Beast at Bay] (Chenal, 1959): after Forests of the Night (Keene, 1956) ‘You mustn’t love me! . . . It’ll just cause trouble.’

Pretty war widow, Elizabeth Vermont (Francoise Arnoul) resists the amorous attentions of a number of highly eligible bachelors, including the local commissaire de police (Michel Piccoli), chastely devoting herself to local charities. But when her path crosses that of a handsome escaped

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Classic French Noir convict, her comfortably humdrum existence will be upset in more ways than one. The film opens on the preparations for a Christmas auction for orphans of police officers, held at Elizabeth’s stately chateau. The charity is clearly a pretext, donated gifts are intended primarily to impress the widow, who cleverly chooses the controlling auctioneer role, encouraging the male audience to bid higher and higher, enabling her to gauge which of her suitors would be prepared to invest most indiscriminately in a future relationship. As the most eligible woman in town, she is the prize piece, and as long as she remains unattached, she retains the upper hand. Moreover, as sex-ratio theory would predict, a situation in which the woman has both a degree of structural power (she is an upper-class woman of independent means) and dyadic power (in contrast to Bonnes, the diegetic sex ratio is high, with Elizabeth the only eligible woman, aggressively wooed by multiple suitors), results in romantic courtship but sexual restraint. Each of her suitors kisses her hand in greeting but that is as far as they get. In a later scene, she sidesteps even the handsome commissaire’s attempts at manoeuvring her into a romantic kiss. The artificially high sex ratio of the diegetic universe and the female protagonist’s high mate value mean she can call the shots. She hasn’t ‘given herself’ to any of her suitors because she is not sufficiently attracted to any of them, and since there is no visible female competition, she is under no compulsion to do so. Before the auction, the commissaire’s gift of a freshly cut Christmas tree is brought into the house by two prison inmates. Elizabeth’s gaze is immediately captured by the handsome Daniel Moran. The actor is again Henri Vidal, playing a much more street-wise, dangerous and mysterious homme fatal than the somewhat bungling Delaroche of our previous film. We soon see that Moran’s deferential opening line, ‘Your smile will be our Christmas present, Madame’, is a front for hungry ambition. In the following scene, when his cellmate cannot understand why he seems dispirited – ‘You’ve just seen a great-looking dame, a great-looking house’ – Moran responds: ‘So what? It’s like looking in a shop window: Hands off! I’m sick and tired of hearing trains I can’t take, looking at women I can’t touch.’ Following the auction, the record proceeds are stolen from the notary in charge of the sale during the drive back into town. Next day, the chief

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Fatal Men prison guard is found shot dead in his home along with one of the prisoners. The other, Moran, also the presumed murderer, is on the run.

L’homme fatal as criminal bad boy Wounded, Moran takes refuge at the chateau, claiming to be a victim of fate. He tells Elizabeth how he was first shot by the guard in a jealous altercation over the latter’s young wife (who was having an affair with his cell-mate) before accidentally killing him. His credibility is reinforced by a visual flashback. Not until much later will we (and Elizabeth) learn the story is false . . . its narrator more deceitfully dangerous than simply unreliable. Veteran director Chenal plays on Vidal’s muscular physique to heighten the erotic tension of these opening scenes: Moran’s bullet wound is a pretext for revealing his naked chest. Moreover, his working-class accent and outsider role (similar to that played by Christian Marquand as Joe Grant in J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) inevitably evoke Gabin’s tragic populist hero figures of the late 1930s. Chenal’s personal links to poetic realism (remember he directed the first adaptation of Cain’s Postman, Le dernier tournant, in the poetic realist mode), evident in the construction of his bad-boy hero, cues the spectator to expect a romantic relationship. Inevitably the sexual tension between the two rises until they become lovers. Significantly, the gap that separates them is not age but social status alone, which appears to pose no barrier to mutual desire. But why would a high-status, high mate-value woman fall for a criminalised outsider, especially when she is surrounded by a bevy of eager, respectable suitors? How does the film account for the attraction of the criminal bad boy? Chenal is well aware that a romantic relationship between a beautiful, intelligent, upper-class woman and a violent criminal is likely to repulse a section of middle-class audiences. The problem is evoked explicitly in an aside between the commissaire and his right-hand man, after the lovers have fled the chateau: ‘They’re not interested in a good man. But they get the hots for crooks, violent brutes.’ And indeed, Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit to her respectable suitors, constructed as pretentious effeminate snobs or (in the commissaire’s case) predictable bureaucrats, is confirmed to be due to a lack of physical desire. But even if he is less than scrupulous, Moran is no violent brute, and the film makes it clear that Elizabeth is no

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Classic French Noir

Figure 8.3 La Bête à L'Affût.

submissive masochist. What clearly attracts her are Moran’s male physicality, his courage and strength and the dangerous excitement his lifestyle offers, compared to her tranquil upper-middle-class boredom. The bad boy’s positively coded masculine attributes, the risk-fuelled dopamine high he affords, along with the potential danger he represents, are key to both the character’s and spectator’s reaction.28 Although easily missed on a first viewing, Chenal’s mise en scène hints at Moran’s deceptiveness in early scenes, by the sideways glances he throws towards Elizabeth, and by the alacrity with which he makes himself at home in the chateau, slipping all too easily into Elizabeth’s dead husband’s clothes, displaying a cheeky over-familiarity with her devoted maid and surrogate mother figure. His duplicity is finally revealed to the spectator via dramatic irony, after the lovers flee. He insists on stopping by the guard’s widow, a young blonde à la Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, shown in a lascivious pose, lying across her bed listening to husky jazz. They kiss passionately. He then exits carrying a suitcase that we guess must contain the stolen money. Alas, this is no longer the 1930s, the Popular Front is long, long dead and Moran is not the poetically tragic Gabin figure he had made himself out to be. From this point on, the film oscillates between

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Fatal Men poetic realist inspired romanticism and postwar cynicism. Are the pair truly star-crossed lovers (as in Chenal’s seminal 1939 Postman adaptation) or is Moran a heartless homme fatal? On the road to Spain, he casually remarks to Elizabeth that her presence will serve as protection for him. Her stunned reaction ‘causes’ an expressionistic shift in the landscapes as we cut to the final act, at night, in a stormy lighthouse near the Spanish border. When she finally discovers the stolen money, Moran confesses without shame, telling her he has been using her all along. The guard’s wife is to join him in Spain. Chiaroscuro mirrors Elizabeth’s disillusionment as full realisation of Moran’s treachery and the threat he now represents drag her headlong into the female gothic. Utterly betrayed, she tries to pass a note to the lighthouse keeper to alert the police. It is blown away. Unbeknownst to her, the police are on their trail anyway. The guard’s wife has denounced them out of a combination of jealousy, venality and cowardice. The erstwhile lovers sleep. He wakes before her, strokes her hair, unexpectedly tender. Before leaving, he changes his story again. No one is joining him in Spain. He needs no one. Yes, he is a liar, a hardened criminal, as they say. Yes, he used her to escape. But his last words are a (genuine?) declaration of love: Being with you, I gradually forgot the kind of man I was . . . You mustn’t love me! It’ll just complicate things and cause trouble. Besides, if it’s true that women like you can exist in the world, I may as well put a bullet through my head.

By this time, like Elizabeth, we aren’t sure which story to believe.29 As with the spider-woman fatale, both predator and prey are ultimately caught in a web of deceit, unable to distinguish truth from lies, shadow from light. In an earlier scene featuring the police and a people smuggler who is to take Moran to Spain, a seemingly unrelated aside on the Occupation and Resistance reminds us, once again, how this sombre period in recent French history continues to blur moral boundaries. The people smuggler was decorated following the Liberation for helping partisans over the border – now, for doing the same job, he’s a wanted man. Back then, the partisans were also wanted men. As he says to the commissaire: ‘So tell me, Sir, in all these justice systems, whose justice is the just one?’

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Classic French Noir In the dénouement, the police arrive and Moran is fatally wounded. The local cop sees that Elizabeth was his lover and accomplice and will seek to have her charged. This leads to consternation on the part of the commissaire, whose motivation for catching Moran owes more to his personal attachment to Elizabeth than to professional duty.30 But Moran will redeem himself, declaring with his dying breath that he had forced Elizabeth into following him at gunpoint. Le Monde critic, Jean de Baroncelli, faults the film for its improbable scenario (an odd reproach from the co-dialogue writer of Bonnes à tuer) and more particularly, for espousing dominant moral values: ‘The law is the law and morality could not possibly allow common convicts to find asylum in the arms of society women.’31 This critic is clearly disappointed by the film’s apparent adherence to conventional morality, which required that the convict turned out bad (and suffered punishment of death) in order to shock the heroine back to the real, i.e. bourgeois, world. Although this is what appears to happen, I would argue that the film eschews conventional closure in a number of ways, offering instead an ambiguously noir ending that sees the homme fatal punished but in a sense redeemed and therefore triumphant in death, a heroic figure, however flawed. By candid demonstrations of tenderness and by using his dying breath to save Elizabeth’s reputation, bad-boy Moran redeems himself, while retaining an air of mystery, ensuring he will remain in her memory and ours. In a twist on the classic female gothic plot, the representative of the law is denied hero status: Piccoli’s commissaire does not ‘save’ the heroine and we are left doubting that she will take matrimonial refuge with him as conventional morality would dictate. Significantly, the camera does not return to him after Moran dies. Instead, Chenal cuts from the dying ‘anti-hero’ to his devastated lover, thus avoiding the cynicism of our previous films and returning his Beast to the doomed romanticism of the poetic realist era.

Conclusion Over the three films, l’homme fatal presents three distinct types: opportunistic gigolo (Une manche); the more ruthless narcissistic gigolo (Bonnes à tuer) and the charming but unreliable bad boy, encountering redemption via the love of a good woman, even if the price is death 160

Fatal Men (La bête à l’Affût). The opportunistic gigolo, by falling for a more ruthless femme, ultimately occupies the position of the fall guy of classic American noir, whereas Bonnes’ narcissistic psychopath occupies that of the spider woman. Moreover, in presenting its central character as suffering from pathologically disorganised attachment syndrome, the latter film provides almost a textbook case of contemporary evolutionary and clinical explanations for grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. In each film, contra Mulvey’s still widely quoted thesis, it is the male body that is the eroticised object of singular or multiple diegetic female gazes, though with varying degrees of success in terms of translating such object status into personal agency and social capital. And as with the eroticised femme fatale, the fatal man is often a site of epistemological uncertainty, which complicates spectatorial allegiance and provides considerable narrative tension. Instead of resulting in visual investigation, however, epistemological uncertainty erupts into a physical threat that pulls each film, at key moments, into the aesthetics of the female gothic. Whether opportunistic gigolo, ruthless psychopath or criminal bad boy, this chapter has read the fatal man as a cipher for the dangers of mate choice awaiting financially independent women, especially in low sex-ratio contexts where eligible men are scarce. We have also noted how the gender role reversal implied by the fatal man is further highlighted when differences in wealth and status are compounded by the woman’s greater age. As our first two films demonstrate, patriarchal societies’ amplification of evolved links between female youth and fertility (as prime determinants of attractiveness and mate value) render any reciprocal romantic relationship between a younger man and an older woman, even played by a great beauty, always already fatal. Thus, only when the age difference is removed can the fatal man fall for his intended victim, thereby redeeming himself. Hence, in the case of the bad boy, audiences are ultimately cued to sympathise with the flawed protagonist, as a tragic hero reminiscent of Gabin’s doomed poetic realist characters of the pre- and immediate postwar years, retrospectively recasting the couple as the star-crossed lovers we have seen previously. In a sad irony, tortured actor Henri Vidal would himself die – of a drug and alcohol induced heart attack – barely six months after the release of La bête à l’Affût, at the age of 40.

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9 Law Enforcers Meet the Femme

Introduction The specificity of film noir as a particular type of crime drama with a particular optique is made clearer by a brief comparison with its non-noir counterpart within the sub-genre of the police procedural. In conventional and ‘light’ polars (which form the bulk of French production), the good is unproblematically aligned with the male investigator as protagonist-hero, usually an official representative of the law, and whose resolution of the crime results in positive narrative closure.1 In the early 1950s the polar was dominated by the massively popular American-influenced, actionadventure series featuring super-spy Lemmy Caution (starring American Eddie Constantine) and (to a lesser extent) home-grown reporterinvestigator Georges Masse (Raymond Rouleau), who spent their time busting international crime rings in often exotic locations, ‘taming’ bevies of blonde bombshells into the bargain.2 Like the detective-hero of the roman noir, the noir law enforcer may be no longer a genius of detection invulnerable to attack and far superior to his enemies. Rather, he is pitched into the very action of the novel, often disorientated and caught up in a whirlwind of events over which he has little control.3

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme This chapter will focus on such male investigator figures as emblematic of the blurred moral boundaries that define the noir optique. We will investigate a range of police inspectors or commissaires, for the ways they in turn investigate and/or become romantically involved with potentially dangerous, often criminal or criminalised females. I will extend biocultural arguments around concepts of male and female attractiveness, pair-bonding and jealous sexual rivalry, examining how gendered interactions play out in a patriarchal society on the cusp of sexual revolution.

Honourable cops and shady dames In dark polars, honest cops may be involved in solving crimes crapuleux (sordid crimes) in seedy milieus that pull the narrative in a noir direction.4 Such is the case with number one grossing French polar of the classic period, Quai des Orfèvres [Jenny Lamour] (1947) (box office: 5,544,721; 7th/71), a triumphant comeback for disgraced director H.G. Clouzot. The film’s dark semi-documentary evocation of the criminal investigation branch of the French police, metonymically represented by its headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres, inevitably evokes the inseparability of violent crime and money (‘orfèvres’ means gold merchants). The plot centres on an honest, ordinary Frenchman (Bernard Blier) pulled into a vortex of lies, deceit and murder out of jealous passion for his flighty, coquettish music hall entertainer wife, Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair). The couple and their attractive photographer friend Dora (Simone Renant), who is secretly in love with Jenny, are the principal suspects. Not appearing until 40 minutes into the film, the film’s investigator, Inspecteur Antoine, brilliantly played by theatrical great Louis Jouvet, is nonetheless a central figure. A world-weary, eccentric and somewhat cynical outsider with close ties to his ‘clients’ (declaring they have taught him many of his professional skills), not above using force and blackmail in pursuit of justice, Antoine is nonetheless a sympathetic character.5 His protective side is shown by the fact that he is a caring solo parent, bringing up a young son, fruit of a mixed-race relationship (during time spent in the colonies) and whose mother presumably abandoned them both. Not unlike Chandler’s classic American private investigator (PI), Jouvet’s Antoine can walk the ‘mean streets’ of postwar Paris, ‘though he is not himself mean . . .

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Classic French Noir a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it’.6 In Entre onze heures et minuit [Between Eleven and Midnight] (Decoin, 1949), Jouvet’s Commissaire Carrel goes undercover when he discovers he is the double of murdered gang boss and drug trafficker Vidauban. In the process of the investigation, a more romantic Jouvet falls for one of Vidauban’s mistresses, an elegant fashion designer (Madeleine Robinson) who names her fashion creations as if they were Série noire titles. Quickly realising he is not Vidauban, this classy dame clearly also has things to hide. In the above films, Jouvet’s investigators are thus confronted with two potential femmes (Suzy Delair’s Jenny in Orfèvres and Madeleine Robinson’s fashion designer in Onze heures). Crucially, however, the threat they pose is quickly dissipated and no dangerous fatale figure emerges. In Orfèvres, Jenny’s jealous husband misreads her flirtatiousness and ambition as treachery but the film makes it clear early on that her emotional and sexual loyalties remain firmly with her husband. Both female leads are prepared to take the rap for the murder to save the one they love: Jenny to save Maurice; Dora to save Jenny. But in the end, the wily Antoine discovers the real murderer (a petty thief) and the film can end happily. While Jenny is no feminist heroine (she is vain and not very bright) nor is she a garce, and in my opinion the film is less misogynistic than some commentators claim.7 It is particularly notable for its sympathetic and non-stereotypical lesbian figure, Dora (Figure 9.1). Antoine’s melancholy parting remark to her reinforces audience sympathy for both: ‘You and I are alike. We never have any luck with women.’ Moreover, as Vincendeau notes, Orfèvres resembles many other postwar French noirs that ‘also point an accusing finger at male mediocrity and cowardice’.8 In Onze heures we soon realise the femme is in fact an innocent victim whom the crook has seduced in order to rob her. Thus when Jouvet’s Carrel discovers she is the murderer, rather than turn her in (as does Bogart’s cynical Sam Spade with The Maltese Falcon’s treacherous Brigitte O’Shaunessy) he sticks by her, resigning from his police job in order to both continue the relationship and better defend her. More like Chandler’s Marlowe than Hammett’s Spade, Jouvet’s investigator figure, in both films, but especially in Onze heures, is ‘not himself mean’ and above all ‘a man of

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme

Figure 9.1 Quai des Orfèvres.

honor’. Honour is less a case of professional allegiance to the law and more a question of obedience to a personal moral code.9 Where the two clash, the former must give way to the second, in the latter film resulting in a film gris, romantic comedy ending.

Cops and robbers: blurred boundaries As early as 1955, Borde and Chaumeton’s seminal study noted that the PI of American noir was in part a solution to a moral dilemma, the desire to critique patriarchal power structures – the official representatives of law and order – without falling foul of code-based self-censorship: Casting too many aspersions on the official US police force was a ticklish problem. The private detective, midway between order and crime, running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, not overly scrupulous and responsible for himself alone, satisfied both the exigencies of morality and those of the criminal adventure story.10

Satisfying this double exigency, in French noir the undercover or flawed cop replaces the American PI. In noir polars, law enforcers, usually 165

Classic French Noir investigating police inspecteurs or higher ranking commissaires often reveal the moral boundaries between law makers and law breakers as blurred and shifting. Both Jouvet’s investigator roles reinforce this point, particularly Onze Heures, via its lookalike undercover plot. Moreover, in other films, similarities between cops and robbers are also underlined by costuming and props: both groups often wear the iconic trench coat and drive the same front-wheel drive Citroen Tractions made famous by Pierrot Le Fou’s notorious gang. Also, the fact that the same leading actors played both gangsters and law enforcers – most notably Gabin during this period but also Pierre Fresnay and second-tier stars like Charles Vanel, Henri Vidal and newcomer Lino Ventura – reminds us that such role swapping has a firm historical foundation. The figure widely recognised as the father of crime detection, Eugène Francois Vidocq, was a career criminal turned informer who subsequently managed to get himself employed by the Paris police. In 1812, Vidocq’s Brigade de la Sûreté, France’s first plain-clothes unit, composed entirely of ex-convicts (and including a few women), was made a national force by Napoleonic decree.11 Demonstrating that ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief’, this legendary nineteenth-century French adventurer (and ladies’ man) was the friend of (and inspiration for) literary greats Balzac and Hugo, and model for the first French gentleman-thief detectives (Gaboriau’s Lecoq and Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin). A legendary figure in his own lifetime, Vidocq has been the subject of numerous books, plays, films and television series.12 As a master of disguise who played many different characters in the course of his chequered career, he is also the inventor of undercover police work, infiltrating criminal networks from within prison and from the streets. Not above entrapment, extortion and fabrication of evidence, Vidocq frequently crossed the line between crime detection and criminality, long after he had set up the Sûreté, and in the course of running his own PI agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements (Information Bureau), another world first. There are echoes of Vidocq in Jouvet’s investigators, and even more so in our next two noir polars. In Pierre Chenal’s little known and underrated contribution to the investigative noir polar, Rafles sur la ville (1958), when the right-hand man of tough cop, inspecteur Paul Vardier (Michel Piccoli) is gunned down by notorious gangster Le Fendu (Charles Vanel), Vardier makes his capture an affair of personal honour. But he is fatally distracted by his new

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme partner’s pretty blonde wife, Lucie (Danik Patisson). During a mission to recapture the elusive Le Fendu, Vardier’s ignominious attempt to send Lucie’s rooky husband to his death backfires, provoking instead the death of an honest senior cop and close friend. The commissaire knows the truth and Vardier is doubly humiliated when Lucie comes to her senses and dumps him. The problematic closeness between the enforcers of the law and their clients lies firstly in morally dubious methods. Vardier callously blackmails Le Fendu’s nephew, Le Nicois into informing against his uncle. It is a cliché dating back to Vidocq that capturing ruthless criminals requires ruthless methods: the end justifies the means. But the womanising Vardier crosses the line by seducing his colleague’s wife and attempting to eliminate him. He is only partially redeemed in the film’s closing scene, sacrificing his life to save others and ensuring the arrest of the arch villain. The film abounds with visual parallels between cops and gangsters. In a stake-out scene, both groups complain of being cramped up in vans. Le Fendu and Vardier both use similar methods: charm, threats, violence. And both fall as a consequence of their sexual-emotional relationships. Moreover, dialogues of both groups repeat cliché projections of responsibility for their criminality and bad behaviour onto women. But women are not more demonised in Chenal’s film than are men. Although she switches sides when he threatens her with violence, Le Fendu’s girl is more faithful than Vardier’s bourgeois mistress, Lucie. Le Nicois’ girl remains faithful and avenges his death. Lucie might easily have been constructed as a garce but, since she does not initiate the liaison and quickly ends it, it is Vardier who is held responsible. And the film’s arch antagonist is the male gangster, Le Fendu, a ‘cracked’ sociopath, as his nickname suggests. In its underworld focus, Rafles follows a popular ‘tradition’ in postwar French polar. In a previous (also little known) iteration, Série noire (Foucaud, 1955) undercover cop, Léo Fardier (Vidal), infiltrates a Corsican gang by posing as an incarcerated bank robber and gaining the trust of his cell-mate, gang boss Mariani (Albert Dinan). On his release, Fardier contacts Mariani’s wife, cabaret singer Eliane (Monique Van Vooren), who is running the gang’s ‘business’ in her man’s absence. Léo’s courage and resourcefulness during several ‘jobs’ win the esteem of the entire gang, the heart of Eliane and the jealous enmity of the treacherous Jo

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Classic French Noir (Robert Hossein), also in love with her. After a succession of betrayals and murders, things get even more complicated when Mariani is released and discovers his wife with Fardier. The two men decide to settle that score later and join forces against Jo and a rival gang. Leo emerges victorious from the resulting bloodbath but Eliane dies of gunshot wounds, assuring her lover, whom she still believes is a gangster, that everything will work out. The cop’s melancholy reaction as he walks off into the night, to a slow blues tune, signals clearly that his involvement with her was much more than professional. The film’s undercover narrative inevitably plays on the blurred lines between law enforcers and their criminal counterparts. The role of the femme, aside from adding a romantic plotline, is both to focus male energies and further complicate male loyalties as members of both sides vie for her attention. But the convoluted plot is at times hard to follow and its serial violence appears rather formulaic. The self-reflexive title – for which filmmakers had to get permission from Gallimard – appears to have backfired somewhat. The film attracted 1.6 million viewers, a reputable score but hardly a box office hit and the majority of reviewers were not impressed. Influential critic Robert Chazal praised the film, however, noting that the project dated back to 1946, suggesting the idea was in fact well ahead of its time.13 All critics agreed that the film was saved by some excellent acting (particularly newcomer Hossein as the seedy villain) and a moody score, written and performed by New Orleans born jazz great, Sidney Bechet playing himself in a nightclub scene. But Série noire was eclipsed by the quintessential reference in the undercover ‘genre’: Razzia sur la Chnouf [Razzia] (Decoin, 1955), released the following month, and which attracted almost three million viewers, largely due to the presence of Gabin, freshly returned to his number one slot after a triumphant ‘comeback’ the previous year as gangster Max Le Menteur in Jacques Becker’s Grisbi (see Chapter 10). Gabin in Chnouf is a far more conventional figure than Vidal’s Fardier: upholding patriarchal power structures more than critiquing them; providing the comforting illusion that law and order will always prevail. Indeed, despite its undercover cop scenario and noir aesthetics, the film is a conservative, moralising polar whose documentary dimension is designed to expose the horrors of the narcotics trade. As Ginette Vincendeau notes,

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme In Chnouf, when Henri visits a chemist making illegal drugs, an air ventilator is used as a pretext to project huge rotating shadows over the room, although at this point neither of the characters is in danger . . . There is no sense of oppression or malaise, rather the noir mise-en-scène acts as generic shorthand, purely stylistic flourish or authorial mark.14

In line with this superficial use of noir stylistics, on a narrative and thematic level, Gabin is never really compromised and the women he encounters are unthreatening. Le Nantais’ young love-interest (Magali Noël, whose character works as a cashier in the nightclub he runs as a cover for his drugs operation) is unsullied by the trade. Loyal and obedient good girl, it is she who saves him by alerting his colleagues to the final shootout that reveals his true identity as Inspecteur Henri Ferré. The only shady dame he encounters is a ravaged junkie (Lila Kedrova as Léa), a pathetic creature who arouses pity but not desire. In the film’s unambiguously positive final scene, a self-satisfied Gabin surveys a long line of criminals, drug lords, petty dealers and users arrested thanks to his ‘good work’. Even if we recognise the film’s attempt to dissuade the public from any contact with narcotics, it is difficult today to side with such sanctimonious punishment of the down-and-out.

Investigating the femme Gabin’s battle against drugs continues in Le désordre et la nuit [Night Affair] (Grangier, 1958) as Inspecteur Georges Vallois, of the Paris vice squad. When Vallois is called on to solve the murder of a suspected gangster and narcotics dealer, his investigation leads to a romantic entanglement with a beautiful but emotionally unstable young drug-addict, German ex-pat and aspiring singer, Lucky (Nadja Tiller). Visual investigation of the femme is centred on a single shot sequence, filmed in front of a series of mirrors (Figure 9.2). But rather than signify her potential duplicity, as the mise en scène might seem to suggest, the scene serves rather to establish Gabin’s authority, her loss of control (due to drug abuse) and her genuine attraction to him (She slaps him, he slaps her back, after which they make love.) Once he has shown her who is boss, Gabin/Vallois not only gets the girl, he solves the murder (which turns out

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Figure 9.2 Le désordre et la nuit.

to be a crime of passion) and busts the gang ring. Forced to choose between his job and the new relationship, he chooses the latter, resigning – like Jouvet’s Carrel – and protectively putting his ‘lucky’ girl into rehab. (She does go.) In contrast, in American noir, when the hero encounters a potentially dangerous, powerful femme, the use of the mirror and obsessive closeframing (most notably in Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai), when not simply emphasising her desirability, are reflective of paranoid emotional/sexual investigation, based on the desire to possess her exclusively (and not some Freudian castration complex, as I have argued). Where the hero’s job is to get to the bottom of the truth of a crime as source of social disorder (as PI, lawyer or cop), one expects the investigative dimension to be paramount. Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) is emblematic of these processes, though in this film, it is Laura’s life-size portrait that replaces the mirror. Preminger uses the close-up parsimoniously, almost exclusively to reveal the true motive of the detective protagonist’s investigation: ostensibly legal, in reality emotional and sexual. During the first (flashback) section of the film, Gene Tierney is generally framed in wide or mid shots, the investigative mode being subtly suggested by three zoom-ins to medium

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme close-up (MCU). Framing becomes progressively tighter following Laura’s reappearance (45 minutes into the film), when her status as object of desire is complicated by MacPherson’s suspicions of her. The interrogation scene, the most closely framed in the film, in which Laura is ‘grilled’ at the police station, uses both mise en scène, shot scale and diegetic lighting to signify the obsessively personal nature of MacPherson’s enquiry. ‘Grilled’ (three minutes) consists of a series of six close-ups (CUs) on Laura alternating with invasive two shots as she seeks to prove her innocence and avoid the detective’s sadistic, semi-accusing gaze. The scene reveals that, as much as his investigation of her as possible murder suspect, MacPherson’s deepest doubts centre on her emotional loyalties. His investigation of the crime is clearly a displacement of his disavowed desire.15 In Chenal’s Rafles, the cynical playboy cop, Vardier, falls for a pretty bourgeoise, a rich girl from the upper-class 16th arrondissement. When he first sets eyes on her, a casually admiring, rapid visual appraisal is enough to determine Vardier’s seduction plan (‘justified’ by his instant dislike of her rookie husband, his imposed new partner). In subsequent scenes, he is more intent on impressing her with stories of his professional exploits than on close scrutiny, and framing remains wide. It is only once she threatens to escape him that Chenal resorts to insistent close framing, reflecting Vardier’s suddenly frantic visual investigation. Moreover, a switch in costuming (from chic streetwear to black lingerie, suspenders and stockings) signals the character’s transformation from bourgeois wife (and mistress) to unattainable vamp. While her role is too slight to categorise her as a true fatale (and her emotional disengagement means she is no fatalitaire), her character nonetheless fulfils this narrative function, since it is Vardier’s illicit entanglement with her that precipitates his downfall. And as expected, his desperate desire to possess her is signalled by intense visual investigation. Gabin’s undercover cop in Chnouf investigates the devastating effects of drug addiction on a minor female character (Kedrova’s Lea) via insistent close-ups. But framing remains determined by the context of the film’s social message. Substance abuse has already ruled her out as potential object of desire: haggard and out of control, her function is solely to underline the sordid and pitiful consequences of the drug trade. The film’s social voyeurism culminates in a scene that several critics disturbingly

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Classic French Noir deemed the film’s best,16 in which a stoned Lea dances erotically with a handsome Black man in a seedy dope den. In Désordre, once Gabin/Valois learns she is not a common tart or gold-digging garce (in fact, Lucky is a dropout literature student, runaway daughter of a wealthy Munich industrialist), he appears more intent on investigating and ‘arresting’ the negative effects of drug and alcohol abuse on his alluring but ‘crazy’ suspect than in establishing her guilt or innocence in the murder. He presumes the latter and sets about proving it. The greatly attenuated visually investigative dimension of our French exemplars reflects the lesser power or narrative importance of female figures. Police procedurals and gangster noir are heavily male-centred, overlapping genres involving mostly all-male teams, in which allegiances are pushed further in a homosocial dimension, making women less central. But when the law is represented by an individual, and when that individual encounters Brigitte Bardot, the balance predictably shifts.

En cas de Malheur [Love is my Profession] (Autant-Lara, France/Italy, 1956) Gabin as law enforcer is at his most vulnerable as distinguished criminal lawyer, André Gobillot in Autant-Lara’s hugely successful adaptation of Simenon’s En cas de Malheur [In Case of Adversity]. Gabin’s very middleaged Maître Gobillot sees his career and bourgeois marriage jeopardised by a ‘fatal’ relationship with Bardot’s sexy young prostitute. When Yvette Maudet begs him to defend her against an armed robbery and assault charge (to which she frankly admits), he agrees, easily obtaining an acquittal by means of a false testimony, eschewing payment in exchange for Yvette’s continued sexual favours. The free-spirited Yvette is more than happy to oblige, while continuing to see other men. Gobillot’s elegant wife Viviane (Edwige Feuillère), usually tolerant of his sexual dalliances, rightly sees Yvette as a serious threat but is powerless to stop her husband falling head over heels. Meanwhile the couple’s financial and social situation is under threat as Gobillot is investigated for professional impropriety. Throwing caution to the wind, he sets Yvette up in an expensive apartment, complete with a live-in maid (Nicole Berger), ostensibly so that she no longer need ‘work’, and to protect her from an obsessively jealous

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme ex-boyfriend, Mazetti (Italian leading man, Franco Interlenghi) who has begun stalking her. Months pass and the now pregnant Yvette has promised a delighted André she will never see Mazetti again but she is incapable of keeping her word, with tragic consequences. When she ‘escapes’ briefly to see him, Mazetti can’t bear to let her go and stabs her to death before turning himself in. By the time Gobillot arrives, all he can do is identify the body.

Reception The film was a scandalous hit, attracting over three million viewers and nominated to represent France at the Venice biennale. But while critics generally praised Autant-Lara’s polished mise en scène and the performances of the film’s three stars, particularly Bardot, reactions were predictably polarised according to whether its central relationship was judged immoral and sordid or ‘pure’ and authentic. Prominent literary figure Claude Mauriac judged the film ‘cruel but clean’.17 Interestingly, the two leading female critics of the day, France Roche and Simone Dubreuilh, were in the same camp.18 For both women, the film convincingly constructs its central love relationship as emotionally pure, exposing and escaping the hypocritical dictates of bourgeois marriage and morality, as per Autant-Lara’s stated intention.19 Even a brief scene unambiguously suggesting a ménage à trois with Yvette’s maid (which Yvette instigates and which could almost be read as a nod to de Beauvoir and Sartre’s famously ‘open’ relationship) is seen as part of this ‘living cleanly’, as Gobillot himself puts it.

Bardot as ‘natural’ beauty Like Gabin, Bardot’s star persona is based on her perceived naturalness: rather than act, both appear to simply exist on the screen, projecting aspects of their inner selves. But Vincendeau also argues that Bardot’s new ‘brand’ of beauty (contrasted with older, established female stars, epitomised here by Edwige Feuillère’s haute couture elegance) is a carefully constructed, therefore fake naturalness. Her long blonde hair is often worn un-coiffed but it is dyed. While her inexpensive, simple clothing is made of soft natural simple fabrics (especially cotton) and she is often barefoot, she also wears heavy eye make-up and lipstick. Her graceful, ‘natural’ poise and

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Classic French Noir dancing ability are in fact the result of years of training (in classical ballet).20 The underlying assumption is, not only that the natural is always already culturally constructed (human nature does not exist as a thing in and of itself), but also that cultural constructions – here Bardot’s performance of female beauty – are arbitrary, like language. It is undeniable that many patriarchal cultural constructions aim to pass themselves off as natural in order to further male reproductive interests. But the point I would make here is that cultural constructions of female beauty, while they vary considerably, both between and within cultures and over time, are not arbitrary but highly motivated, seeking (in popular forms) to imitate evolved features that signal reproductive fitness. It is not arbitrary that Bardot’s constructed beauty, her use of cosmetics and clothing, together with her casual but poised deportment, all serve to accentuate physical features connoting youth, health and fertility. Naturalness is attractive because it signals key aspects of reproductive fitness that would have been hard to fake in ancestral environments. Of course, humans have long used technology to accentuate and/or fake natural beauty in both women and men cross-culturally. The advent of cosmetic surgery during the twentieth century – which Bardot herself has famously refused in her later years – can be seen as simply the next step in an ancient trend.

Investigating Bardot As international sex symbol, French cinema’s biggest female star (with 15 films, including Vadim’s cult classic, Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman] (1956)), Bardot’s highly eroticised persona and visual presence are clearly key to the film’s ethos and its aesthetics. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the camera’s infatuation with Bardot as it relays the point of view of Gabin is more an admiring but understated response to her exhibitionistic character and persona than an anxious investigation. This is particularly evident in their famous opening scene in which she offers to pay for Gobillot’s legal services in kind. Autant-Lara opens the exchange on Gabin in full shot several metres away, then closes in to a series of reverse mid shots as Bardot edges along a desk. An MCU of an impassive Gabin, then cuts back out to a long shot as Bardot (shot from

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme behind) lifts her skirt: an almost subliminal (on screen for barely one second) low angle glimpse of her long, stockinged legs and suspenders in the foreground (Figure 9.3).21 This shot famously replaces a censored image that is highly emblematic of Bardot’s sex-kitten persona. In it, her character lifts her skirt much higher, almost to the waist, revealing naked buttocks, for a full four seconds. (A more modest version of the split-second image appears in posters for the film, with Bardot’s skirt still covering her suspenders.) The subliminal shot that remains in the final version is perhaps more consonant with Gabin’s on-screen reaction. His character remains motionless in the background, legs astride and hands in the pockets of his immaculate double-breasted suit, apparently unmoved. But as a weeping Yvette is about to leave, he agrees to take the case. When the affair begins, it is an open relationship. Yvette is delighted to be free to see whoever she wishes but simultaneously piqued at Gobillot’s lack of interest in her life outside their liaison, i.e. his lack of jealousy and failure to investigate her. Investigation is not long coming: in the same scene he suspects her of taking drugs. Assuming she is on a slippery slope to addiction (as with his young mistress in Désordre), he immediately takes

Figure 9.3 En cas de Malheur.

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Classic French Noir hold of her face, holds up a table lamp, scrutinises her eyes and slaps her across the face like an angry father or a cop conducting a rough interrogation. But no, Yvette is no junkie, she has simply started dealing coke to repay his services, and promptly hands him a wad of cash. Now showing a mixture of paternal concern and professional alarm (as a lawyer he knows the risks) he flushes the drugs down the toilet, returns the cash and the investigation is over, so to speak. She offers fidelity in exchange; he is apparently not interested but moves her into a better apartment. Anxious investigation is transferred to the manically possessive Mazetti, who literally stalks Yvette for much of the remainder of the film, shredding her wardrobe when she refuses to move in with him; posting himself in the street outside her apartment, scrutinising and seeking to control her movement from a distance. Their few scenes together end in nervous close-ups as he interrogates her over her continued liaison with Gobillot; in a passionate embrace when he thinks he has won . . . When Yvette admits to seeing Mazetti again after promising she won’t, Gobillot wants to end the relationship, but his resolve is no better than hers. When he refuses to employ surveillance tactics with her, she suggests he sequester her. He complies, buying her a new apartment and when he learns she is pregnant to him, moves in. Throughout this section of the film, his point of view (POV) shots of her are admiring and confidently proprietary, his somewhat paternal gaze both desiring and devoted. There is none of Mazetti’s manic investigative gaze. In this film, as in our previous examples, the investigation of the femme via the POV of a romantically involved male character most often equates to a form of mate-guarding (an attempt to monopolise access to one’s mate; to keep her in the relationship and prevent access by intrasexual rivals), which may be protectively benign, as with Gobillot, or suspiciously threatening, as with Mazetti. While seeking sexual and emotional freedom, Bardot’s character actively solicits a high level of mate-guarding on the part of her older protector.

From protection to violent surveillance: the bodyguard hypothesis As early as 1992, evolutionary anthropologist and psychologist Barbara Smuts proposed a rethinking of the origins of human pair-bonding, which

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme were assumed to have evolved primarily for ‘economic’ reasons, from male provisioning to females and their offspring of vital protein and calories in the form of meat from hunting. Drawing on a large body of data from primate studies and anthropological records from diverse human societies, Smuts proposed that, as well as the provision of resources, male protection of females from aggression, infanticide and sexual coercion by other males constituted an equally important, perhaps even more important causal factor in leading hominid females to develop long-term alliances, or pair-bonds with males.22 Sarah Mesnick subsequently developed the concept in what she termed ‘the bodyguard hypothesis of female mate choice’: ‘that situation in which a female chooses to mate with a particular male based on the male’s ability to defend her, or her young, from aggression by other, con-specific males’.23 One prediction of the bodyguard hypothesis is that human females will prefer physically strong, dominant males: Female preference for dominant males can lead to selection for increased size, strength, and fighting ability among males, as well as to the evolution of traits that might advertise a male’s ability to protect females . . . females may prefer an aggressive male as a mate because of the implication that he is an aggressor capable of protecting her and, subsequently, her young.24

A second prediction is that a human male bodyguard will exact a price for his protection in the form of exclusive sexual access, in order to advance his own genetic interests by ensuring paternity certainty over his mate’s offspring. Exclusive sexual access may not be in the female’s own reproductive interests and she may seek other reproductive opportunities, which the male will seek to prevent. In other words, the bodyguard hypothesis also predicts aggressive male mate-guarding, often fuelled by sexual jealousy.

Sexual jealousy: cherchez l’homme! Empirical studies support evolutionist claims that sexual jealousy is a form of mate-guarding, closely linked to romantic attachment, constituting an adaptive response to the threat of defection of a cherished mate to a rival.25 Moreover, paternity uncertainty means that male jealousy is predicted to

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Classic French Noir be triggered more by cues of sexual infidelity (whether real or perceived), and is thus closely linked to aggressive (sometimes lethal) mate-guarding. Female jealousy, on the other hand, is predicted to be triggered more easily by emotional defection, in other words, the partner falling in love with another. This is because of the greater threat that the male will desert, transferring resources and protection to the new mate and leaving the woman (and offspring) vulnerable. In Malheur, predicted patterns of male sexual jealousy and female emotional jealousy are illustrated by the attitudes of all four main characters. Gabin/Gobillot exhibits no sexual jealousy, visual investigation or other mate-guarding behaviours towards Yvette, as long as he sees her purely as a short-term mate, presumably one in a long, on-going series of ludic sexual encounters. But once he falls in love with her and decides to invest economic and emotional resources, he demands exclusive sexual access, even before she falls pregnant. The passionately romantic Mazetti seeks to monopolise Yvette from the start, whence his manic mateguarding that culminates in the tragic murder, precipitated by her refusal of a monogamous relationship. Although both men and women feel jealousy with equal intensity and are equally prone to aggression in intimate relationships,26 men’s greater strength and higher propensity to resort to physical violence explains why, cross-culturally, men are the perpetrators in over 90 per cent of cases of domestic violence and partner homicide. The prime motivators of such violence are, overwhelmingly, real or perceived female infidelity and/or abandonment of the relationship. Researcher Margo Wilson’s prediction that the greatest risk of partner homicide would be for young women of the highest reproductive value, i.e. especially attractive to rival males, has been borne out by a number of studies.27 To return to the film, Yvette’s murder (as that of Dietrich’s character in Martin Roumagnac) is an extreme manifestation of this all too common social reality. Ironically, Interlenghi’s character evokes Gabin’s poetic realist tragic lover, so often confronted with libidinous/incestuous older males and prone to crimes of passion, as we have seen. Even more politicised than pre-war Gabin, Interlenghi’s poor medical student, Mazetti, paying for his studies with night-time factory work is an original invention of the left-wing filmmakers. But his revolutionary utopian ideals (he tells a perplexed Yvette that if she committed a crime because she

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme was hungry, then she is justified in doing so and must feel no shame) are marked by self-righteousness and a propensity for violence – as when he cuts her clothes to shreds in a grotesquely humorous foreshadowing of the murder. In line with the predictions of evolutionary theory, Viviane displays no jealousy of her husband’s frequent sexual affairs, seeking instead to keep up bourgeois appearances and to ensure her husband does not develop an emotional attachment. Their separate bedrooms suggest their relationship is no longer sexual, but it initially appears warm and companionate. She tolerates his lustful dalliances, but a love affair is a threat to their relationship and her social standing, thus she attempts to control it (driving him to Yvette’s hotel, shrewdly offering to pay for half of the new apartment, rather than have it in her husband’s mistress’ name). Her jealous outburst over a huge bunch of white roses intended for Yvette, which Gobillot mistakenly sends to his own address, gains her audience sympathy. Her distress over such an overt symbol of romantic attachment reveals she still loves her husband and is not motivated by status concerns alone. Yvette is the adored object of multiple male gazes who, between them, provide for all her (sexual, emotional, material) needs, thus she has no cause for jealousy. Gobillot’s wife is not a rival since Yvette does not seek to replace her socially. Indeed, when Mazetti suspiciously suggests she is angling for a wedding ring, she displays moral outrage. According to her intuitive system of ethics, she is not doing wrong by Viviane because she is not seeking to steal her husband. With self-serving naivety, she does not see that having his child might be construed as a form of mate poaching. However, she does understand intuitively that romantic love and sexual jealousy go together and is perplexed, even a little ‘vexed’ when Gobillot shows no possessiveness of her. When Mazetti visits her at the first apartment, she logically interprets his jealousy as a sign of love.28 Childlike, she narcissistically craves being the centre of erotic and paternal attention. Gabin/Gobillot provides the latter, leading her to behave like a spoiled child, declaring to the possessive Mazetti that she must be allowed to do whatever she wants. But she displays none of the other negative features of grandiose narcissism: the self as perfect; callous disregard for others (as seen in Chapter 8). Indeed, it is the self-righteous Mazetti who ticks the latter box.

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Bardot as new fatalitaire Gobillot compromises professional career, marriage, financial security and social standing risking everything for Yvette, whose promiscuous insouciance makes Bardot’s character – which was tailored to her star persona – a new kind of fatalitaire. Her sexual amorality evokes Clouzot’s Manon, but while she appears to lack the latter’s pragmatic, somewhat calculating venality, she also lacks Manon’s passionate attachment, while remaining economically and emotionally dependent on patriarchal benevolence. Unlike previous romantic fatalitaires (Chapters 5 and 6) and demonic fatales (Chapter 7), she cannot decide emotionally between her young lover, whom the French describe as ‘l’amant de coeur’ [lover of the heart] and her father-figure protector-provider. Bardot’s originality is that she appears genuinely attracted to Gabin/Gobillot, as well as fond of and grateful to him. Neither materialistic, class-conscious nor malicious, her frequent lies serve her need for freedom of movement. Bardot’s ludic fatalitaire thus possesses a level of authenticity and childlike innocence that are lacking in the more calculating garce. De Beauvoir admired Bardot’s frank sexual agency and freedom of movement and her first husband and impresario, Roger Vadim, marketed it. But her sexual unruliness, however modern, however integral to her attraction, remains paradoxically tied to a system based on gender inequality, as Vincendeau has observed.29 Without contraception, young women’s sexual ‘liberation’ often ended in dangerous, backroom abortions or ‘unwanted’ pregnancies. Both situations are documented in Malheur: Yvette has already had two abortions and her maid Nicole has lost a child, whom she was forced to put into care. Contemporary commentators noted Bardot’s paradoxical reception: fans’ polarised love-hate relationship, particularly as compared to Gabin, who was universally liked. Bardot was most popular with younger, single women who desired to emulate her (constructed) naturalness and carefree sexual agency, while older married women often saw her as a threat. This split is mirrored in the film’s diegesis: Yvette’s prostitute friend with whom she commits the bungled robbery and her pretty maid both display admiration and a desire to emulate (though they are unable to match her) while Viviane understandably sees her as a deadly rival. Older, married women spectators no doubt identified with the plight of the abandoned

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Law Enforcers Meet the Femme older wife, intelligently scripted and beautifully played by veteran actress, Edwige Feuillère. Given Bardot’s astronomically high reproductive fitness and mate value, coupled with the fact that her persona was sexually available, warm, responsive and ostensibly uninterested in extracting commitment or resources, it is small wonder Vadim claimed she was ‘the married man’s impossible dream’.30 But as ludic fatalitaire, she also poses a threat to any male attempting to monopolise her, as the film so graphically demonstrates.

Conclusion This chapter has seen law enforcers frequently involved in investigating potentially dangerous females but has not uncovered a classic femme fatale. The femmes in French polars (even the progressive images of independent professional women in Orfèvres and Onze heures) are less powerful or less duplicitous, or both, resulting in a lesser focus on their visual investigation. Bardot emerges as the most powerful figure: a carefree, modern fatalitaire who prefigures the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But her unruly agency, in being tied to a childlike, economically dependent sex-kitten persona, depends largely on a patriarchal system for its scandalous impact. And her character’s tragic fate reveals the double-edged sword of the bodyguard hypothesis, as her older protector fails to save her from the manic sexual jealousy of her murderously over-protective younger lover. Gabin/Gobillot falls for Bardot’s Yvette because of her disarming sincerity and because she needs and genuinely desires him. In all three of Gabin’s law enforcer noirs of this period in which he has a romantic relationship with a much younger woman in her early 20s, it is she who first approaches him sexually and who falls for him first. This flattering narrative framing means that, even as a rotund, white-haired cop or bourgeois lawyer, often risking his career for the sake of romantic fulfilment, Gabin’s middle-aged characters retain something of the star’s pre-war good-bad boy persona and his status as both subject and object of desire. Constructing his middle-aged characters as ‘girl magnet’ rather than seducing patriarch also conveniently allows him to escape the unenviable position of incestuous father. In three of the seven films discussed in this chapter, the patriarchal nature of French society is underlined by the continued presence of the middle-aged Gabin in romantic relationships with women 20 to 30 years 181

Classic French Noir younger than himself. This pattern is seen across the star’s production during the postwar period (1946 – 59). As Gabin (born in 1904) aged, his ‘leading ladies’ grew progressively younger.31 Out of 15 films across our postwar noir corpus, his character is romantically involved in 12, only two of which were with actresses his own age: Martin Roumagnac (1946), with Dietrich (b. 1901), and Au-delà des grilles (1948), opposite Isa Miranda (b. 1905). In the remaining ten films, he was partnered with women at least 12 years his junior: for example, Colette Mars (b. 1916), in Miroir (1947), whom he almost married, and Madeleine Robinson (b. 1916), in Leur dernier nuit (1953). From his comeback hit Grisbi (1954)32 until Malheur (1958), the age gap widened to an average of 25 years. Born in 1934, 33 years his junior, Brigitte Bardot (whose initials spell Bébé, Baby in French) was the youngest of all his female co-stars and the only one to enjoy equal billing. Although there is much evidence to suggest that cross-culturally, women (still) prefer men who are older (and taller, and higher status) than themselves,33 such evolved preferences are exaggerated in low gender equality, low sex-ratio societies in which older males monopolise resources and status and can impose their own preferences for younger women, to whom they also provide protection. Positive images of masculinity centre on courage, dominance (whether physical, intellectual or social) and protectiveness. These qualities, crossculturally admired by men and desired by women, are relatively unaffected by age. In the films we have covered, desirable masculinity takes the form of muscular athletic beauty (Vidal in Série noire); intelligence and intuition (Jouvet in Orfèvres and Onze heures); heavy-set physical ‘formidableness’ (Gabin in Chnouf; Désordre) and social status (Gabin as Gobillot in Malheur). Gabin and Jouvet’s older characters also display high levels of paternal warmth and protection, acting as ‘good bodyguards’. Where investigator narratives involve the underworld, despite the often blurred boundaries between law enforcers and law breakers, negative features of hegemonic or dominant masculinity are generally transferred to (though sometimes shared with) criminal antagonists: aggressiveness, ruthless physical violence, jealous stalking, and/or the so-called feminine vices of cowardice and duplicity. In the next chapter we will shift our focus to gangsters as heroes, in films that, once again, either reinforce or question traditional gender roles.

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10 Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir

Introduction Sitting at the interface between crime, greed and desire, conspicuous consumption is at the heart of noir. More particularly, it is the driving factor behind the noir underworld, its macho gangster culture and resulting gender-relationships. The present chapter will use insights from economics, social and evolutionary science to shed new light on this key issue, notably investigating ways in which French gangster noir may perpetuate or interrogate gender norms. Firstly, a study of the gangster in classic French noir as cipher of hyper-masculinity will reveal highly ambivalent, apparently contradictory attitudes towards the conspicuous consumption – of automobiles, gambling and other extravagant entertainments and, of course, beautiful women – that is the hallmark of the gangster lifestyle. Secondly, in terms of its sociohistorical context, the classic French noir period of the late 1940s and 1950s also happens to be the period during which the country was introduced to consumer culture, as both byproduct and driving force of American-led modernisation.1 Ways of consuming (and being consumed) are therefore inextricably linked, not only with questions of

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Classic French Noir gender, but also, of national identity. Love and money, gender roles and modes of consumption, all of which are undergoing rapid change in the postwar Marshall Plan driven era, are inextricably linked to questions of Frenchness. I shall focus firstly on the three most critically acclaimed 1950s French gangster noir: Gabin’s comeback hit, Touchez pas au Grisbi [Hands off the Loot] (Becker, 1954), after and with dialogues by Albert Simonin; Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi Means Trouble] (Dassin, 1955), after and with dialogues by Auguste Le Breton; and Bob Le Flambeur [Bob The Gambler] (Melville, 1956), dialogues by Auguste Le Breton. Frequently bracketed together by critics and academic commentators alike, all three films involve popular French Série noire writers Simonin and Le Breton and a classic heist plot: an aging gangster is involved in one last caper, the ultimate heist that will enable him to retire and enjoy a life of ease and carefree consumption. In Grisbi, the heist has taken place before the film begins, so the problem lies in converting the loot into usable cash and, as the title suggests, keeping a rival gang’s hands off it. Rififi centres on the mechanics of the heist itself, which is successful, but the rival gang ensures the protagonists don’t live to enjoy the fruits of their ‘labour’. In Bob, the heist is meticulously prepared and imagined (via a long, hypothetical flash-forward) but never actually takes place. All three films end in true noir fashion, in the death of the hero’s friends and accomplices (Grisbi; Bob), and in the case of Rififi, of the hero himself. As a coda highly revealing of rapidly changing gender roles and of the resilience of the trope of the tragic romantic lovers, the final section will discuss Alex Joffé’s little known Du rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls] (1959), also after Le Breton.

Urban spaces of conspicuous consumption I am using the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in Veblen’s classic sense of wealth as status display, spending to enhance status rather than ensure survival. In sociological terms, conspicuous consumption relates also to Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural capital.2 In neo-Darwinian terms, this translates to a form of direct or indirect reproductive effort or sexual display: status seeking as a means to attract high-quality mates, which in turn, increases power and status.

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Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir

Figure 10.1

Bob Le Flambeur.

It is no coincidence that all three films in my primary corpus share as central location Pigalle, the French capital’s most infamous space of conspicuous consumption. Its iconic nightclubs, strip clubs and gambling joints (as well as its restaurants and cafes) are clearly related to status seeking and/or reproductive effort – in a word, sex (Figure 10.1). And, since the Liberation and arrival of American troops and African-American civilians on French soil, these spaces are frequently overlaid with the sensuously exotic sounds of jazz.3 Pigalle’s nightclub district is first and foremost the space of the consumption of (mostly female) flesh. In Bob, Melville insists on this with multiple location shots, flashing neons and posters advertising saucy cabarets and floorshows. The fact that gangsters and their associates own these spaces (in all three films) underscores the role of the underworld in the transformation of the city into what American sociologist Terry Nichols-Clark (2004) would later describe as an ‘entertainment machine’. In contrast to the red-light ambiance of Pigalle, more bourgeois sites of conspicuous consumption provide the backdrop for the heist: jeweller Mappin and Webb on the prestigious Rue de la Paix (Rififi) and the provincial Deauville casino (Bob). Nostalgic evocations of ‘clean’ rural

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Classic French Noir spaces, putatively unburdened by the violent competition that conspicuous consumption inevitably involves, punctuate both films. In an early scene from Rififi, an associate advises the ailing hero to ‘[g]o to the countryside, get some air in your lungs’. But when he finally gets there, near the film’s apocalyptic close, he finds the Parisian countryside is already being taken over by corrupt capitalism, symbolised by rival gangsters’ half-built villa. Bob does include a glimpse of rural utopia in the form of a stud farm owned by an ex-convict turned gentleman farmer, the dream of many a fictional gangster, most notably the ill-fated Dix Handley of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (USA, 1950), to whom Melville’s film makes intertextual reference.

Conspicuous consumption, honour and hyper-masculinity Grisbi opens on an extreme long shot (ELS) of Pigalle by night, with the iconic Moulin Rouge dissolving into a medium close-up (MCU) of the film’s hero, Max, presiding over an opulent meal for which he ostentatiously foots the bill. As this first scene demonstrates, for the hypermasculine gangster, money is more than a matter of somatic effort or means to physical survival in the banal, biological sense. Money is central because the gangster’s identity, his self-esteem, honour and status as patriarch and ability to attract high mate-value women, depend on two things: the ability to be on top of the game of conspicuous consumption (and its offshoot of conspicuous charity as in the scene above) and the ability to meet challenges to his status with the threat and use of violence. In a sense, the gangster is like the pure capitalist, obtaining resources via high-risk investment, often paying others to do much of the work, whence the pervasive, conceptual metaphor of criminal enterprise as business, as ‘just another form of left-handed endeavour’ (Asphalt Jungle). For the gangster, making money generally means appropriating it from others, with or without their consent – either via illegal trades (drugs and prostitution) or via theft or robbery. All of this involves significant risk, further aggravated by the fact that the gangster generally has no recourse to the law. The high risk factor, with its adrenalin fix of sudden gain and constant spectre of total loss, means a high reliance on chance, whence the centrality of gambling. And in gambling as in business, one has to be in to win: ‘ya gotta have money to make money’, one might say. Both Rififi and 186

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir Bob open on images of the hero gambling. And both lose. In the opening scene of Rififi, Tony’s loser status is underscored by his being ejected from a poker game for want of funds. His young sidekick, Jo, arrives to bail him out, reminding the hoodlums running the game that they should know Tony, aka Le Stéphanois, from his ‘rep’. In other words, no questions asked credit should be forthcoming. But the remark is brushed aside as passé. In postwar, Marshall Plan era France, only hard cash counts: ‘No money. No cards’, Tony is told. When he looks to respond to this affront to his honour with violence, Jo wisely bustles them both out of the room. There is no point in fighting when they are so hopelessly outnumbered and more importantly perhaps, there is no need. In honour culture, the willingness to fight is often sufficient, as Donald Black, drawing on renowned anthropologist, Julian Pitt-Rivers (1966), points out, Honor is a form of social status based on force. A display of disrespect challenges a man of honor to defend himself in an appropriate fashion, or lose his honor . . . A defense of honor does not require victory, however, nor does it require physical power or skill. It requires only bravery: a willingness to risk injury or death.4

Rififi’s expository scene thus serves to introduce the character of Tony as a man of honour – brave enough to risk injury or death against all odds. Honour is also his central predicament: loss of face and the need to restore it. More importantly, the scene underlines a fundamental breech in the code of honour central to the gangster’s identity, which has become divorced from its central ‘moral’ foundation: bravery, loyalty, reciprocity and trust. In all three films, the protagonists nostalgically deplore the loss of these core values, the so-called ‘honour among thieves’ that in France, since the Nazi Occupation, Vichy Collaboration and American-led Liberation, has been fatally compromised. The honour economy has been replaced by a consumer-cash economy.

Reconfiguring left-handed endeavour as collaborative labour In films with gangster protagonists, in order to enlist audience sympathy, illegal and morally disreputable forms of production-consumption must be

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Classic French Noir reconfigured to resemble more acceptable behaviours. The primary means of achieving spectator allegiance is by constructing protagonists with positively coded personal character traits: intelligence, professional knowhow (all three protagonists mastermind and drive the heists and subsequent actions); or virile courage and pro-social agreeableness5 in the form of loyalty and self-sacrifice, as when the hero takes the rap and does prison time for the group (Tony in Rififi), or risks all to rescue a friend (Max in Grisbi; Tony in Rififi) or even helps a cop (Bob). Generosity, conspicuous consumption and/or charity are displayed by all three major protagonists (even the down-and-out Tony in Rififi ostentatiously pays for champagne in a nightclub). One likewise observes instances of chivalrous protectiveness of the weak and innocent. Bob, especially is a gentleman, the classic honest thief. Moreover, since all drama is based on agonistic structure, gangster protagonists are made to look good by setting them against negatively coded antagonists: crooked or puritan law enforcers (as in Huston’s Jungle) or in the case of our three French noirs, cowardly pimps and drug dealers and unscrupulous, psychopathic rival gangsters. Finally, perhaps the single most key factor in all heist films lies in constructing the left-handed endeavours of protagonists as highly skilled, collaborative work: these are not violent, unscrupulous crooks, they are chivalrous teams of master craftsmen. Dassin’s Rififi remains the uncontested king of the genre in this respect. In a sense extending and improving on Asphalt Jungle, Rififi was a cinematic first that revolutionised the heist genre and earned the film an enduring place in the noir canon. The dramatic intensity of the heist sequence, still the quintessential reference in the genre, is wrought from an almost surgical attention to detail (the transformation of everyday objects into professional, precision tools), taut direction and camera work (crosscutting between the closely framed action in the room, ticking clock on the wall, and the street below) and a minimalist, Bressonian sound-track, entirely without dialogue and music for 25 minutes. In fact Dassin eliminates dialogue for the entire duration of the heist and getaway: 31 minutes, over 200 of the film’s 832 shots. Moreover, in this sequence as elsewhere, the director uses egalitarian editing, framing and mise en scène to emphasise the collaborative nature of the heist and the complementary skills of its craftsmen.6

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Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir In Grisbi, released the previous year, the protagonists’ work, which consists centrally in retrieving their stolen loot, is also framed reasonably collaboratively, although the star status of Jean Gabin as Max means his character receives more screen time and close shots. Here, the key conceptual metaphor – which would also be taken up by Melville – is military, invoking the French Resistance (a rival thug is tortured by being strung up by his wrists, a method used by Nazi occupiers, Vichy collaborators and the Free French alike). And Melville’s Bob plans the casino operation as if it were a commando operation, hardly surprising given his and writer Le Breton’s Resistance connections.7 From a neo-Darwinian perspective, we might say that as sympathetic protagonists, these gangster figures display high adaptive individual fitness (intelligence, courage, skill) and cooperation8 to promote both group and individual survival and status in high-risk, unstable environments9 via the acquisition of dangerously hard-to-obtain resources. While not framed in evolutionary terms, this point has not been lost on commentators (journalistic and academic). As early as 1956, Yale professor Jacques Guicharnaud noted: Jules Dassin has managed to evoke a fundamental and fundamentally moral theme, namely, the greatness, the dignity of man’s intelligence and labor . . . Those on whom its ‘evil influence’ might take effect are not the slothful who dream of ‘making an easy buck’ but the hard-workers, the connoisseurs of the job well done, the perfectionists, all who have the vocation of a skilled craftsman or precision engineer.10

Females in (gangster) noir: insatiable consumers If male protagonists are constructed as noble producers in gangster noir, female characters, particularly antagonists, are most often represented as insatiable consumers. In Bob, the sultry, greedy young temptress, Anne, casually demands of the hero’s lovestruck young protégé, ‘Donne-moi la lune’ [‘Get me the moon’]. Anne’s venal nature is also revealed by her reaction to Bob’s Cadillac, when she states her ambition to make it her own, though wisely not in his presence. The last time she is seen, after Bob has left her his key (he has resisted the temptation she represents but 189

Classic French Noir Melville intentionally leaves a question mark over the strength of his resolve), a brief conversation with a fellow working girl makes her intentions clear: – What are you thinking about, your mink coat or your Cadillac? – Both.

In a similarly venal fashion, the unattractive wife of minor character Jean, the croupier, is impressed when her husband buys her a bracelet as an advance on his participation in the heist, though also suspicious as to its provenance. The slightly distorting low angle and subtle chiaroscuro employed in this scene, together with the erasing of the husband’s face, suggest the ‘unnatural’ assumption of masculine power by the wife.11 Moreover, in a later scene, she is casually dismissive of the modest 4 Chevaux her husband has (presumably) slaved to purchase. Predictably, since greed goes hand in hand with treachery, this character will also goad her cowardly ex-pimp of a husband into informing on the gang to the police.

Gendered consumption and control Only women and weak (i.e. feminised) sociopaths succumb to uncontrolled consumption, which is thus always already coded as feminine. Represented in both Rififi and Grisbi by hard drugs, together with prostitution, these were the social evils of the day, already indelibly associated with the gangster underworld and providing the narrative focus for several other French noirs of the period (most notably Razzia sur la Chnouf and Le désordre et la nuit, starring Gabin in law enforcement roles, as we have seen). In Grisbi, Riton’s unreliable showgirl girlfriend, Josie (Jeanne Moreau), is a coke addict. The sociopath younger brother of the evil, rival gangster boss in Rififi is addicted to heroin. Because masculinity equals power, real men must keep control, over objects of consumption, and above all, over their women – as consumer objects. In all three films, the good gangsters’ demise is precipitated by the uncontrolled desire of one of their number for an alluring but unreliable, often greedy female.12 All these female characters are fatal in this sense however all are minor characters – none have the narrative power of the ‘true’ femme fatale. 190

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir

Women as consumer objects/objects of the gaze As Mulvey (1975) argued, classic Hollywood cinema constructed women predominantly as fetishised objects of the (male) gaze. Without subscribing to the Freudian assumptions underpinning Mulvey’s analysis, one can agree that much film noir would appear to conform to this mode of spectatorship, with the femme fatale as the ultimate object of obsessive fascination. And yet, as I have argued, both men and women can derive power from being the adored object of another’s desiring gaze. The dangerous, often lethal allure of the fatale (in any of her various guises, in classic noir and melodrama and on both sides of the Atlantic) is highlighted by the way she uses her object status to her own power advantage, capturing the male gaze and – in the case of the spider woman – using it to spin the web of desire that will entrap him. In classic American gangster noir, Ava Gardner as Kitty in The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) is emblematic of this figure. Although French noir contains few powerful spider-women fatales, as we have seen, and though none are evident in our three test case gangster noirs, in Bob, we indeed see Anne attempt to use her charms as part of a fatale-like power play, with mixed results. Because most female characters in gangster noir are involved in the sex and/or entertainment industries, obviously their status as consumer objects is emblematic of this fundamental gender dynamics, whereby women’s primary means to subjectivity under patriarchy is their paradoxical status as object of the desiring male gaze. If uncontrolled sexual desire is always the biggest threat to masculinity, it is largely because it affords woman a level of subjectivity and power. Across the three films, we observe both sides of this somewhat perverse coin. In Rififi, nightclub singer Viviana’s sensual performance of the film’s theme song cuts to reverse shots of the riveted gaze of the male audience, in particular Italian safecracker, Césare (played by Dassin himself), who has been introduced as a master craftsman with a weakness for beautiful women (‘They say there’s no safe that can resist Césare; no beautiful woman that Césare can resist’). It is this uncontrolled desire that will prove the gang’s undoing. Conversely, in Grisbi, a similar cabaret scene signals Max’s worldweariness by his utter lack of sexual interest in the already possessed objects of his desultory gaze. The numerous scantily clad dancers and

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Classic French Noir strippers parading on and off stage, including his supposedly steady girl, Dora, appear somewhat cheap and devoid of erotic appeal despite the glitzy costumes. Knowledge and possession here signal the death of desire. And the death of desire on the part of the male consumer denies power, status and agency to the female. No longer a fetish object, she is also denied subjectivity. Ironically, although female characters are most often constructed as insatiable consumers and/or objects of consumption, and although engaged in adult entertainment professions which are a thinly disguised code for prostitution (the principal means of subsistence for the underworld since being made illegal in 1946), they are the ones doing the most honest labour. As Tony’s ex-girlfriend, Mado (Rififi) retorts when he sneeringly assumes her expensive jewellery has all been gifted to her by his arch rival, also her current ‘protector’: ‘Not this piece. I earned it’. Although the film portrays her as a nightclub hostess, audiences would understand the reference to prostitution, explicit in the novel. Novelists, insider commentators and historians all agree that the violent misogyny of the underworld stems from the fact that female flesh is its prime commodity, and that this commodity must be kept under strict control;13 in other words, not so much protected as ‘guarded’. Indeed, the violent relationship between the tough-guy gangster-pimp and his prostitute moll, in this film as elsewhere, can be read as a perverse iteration of the sexual dynamics arising from the bodyguard hypothesis, in which the double-edged protection provided by the pimp is designed to advance his commercial property (rather than simply genetic) interests. Rififi also critiques this dynamics, as I shall argue later in the chapter.

Domestic spaces: tradition vs modernity We have noted how the classic French noir period of the late 1940s and 1950s also sees the advent of consumer culture, as both by-product and driving force of American-led modernisation under the Marshall Plan. Given the centrality of consumption to noir, it is no surprise that our three test cases document the rapid move towards consumerism that would transform both workplaces and domestic spaces and ultimately impact on gender roles. 192

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir In gangster noir, most of the action takes place in public and professional spaces of conspicuous consumption. Interestingly, however, each of our three films also shows gangsters in domestic spaces that are more often than not marked by bourgeois elegance and conspicuously decorated with modern consumer objects.14 Bob’s eponymous hero inhabits a chic studio with a view of the Sacré Coeur; gangsters in Rififi (except momentarily down-and-out Tony) live in bourgeois comfort, displaying the iconic features of modern consumerism, including modern kitchens and appliances, baths, television sets, and the iconic white telephone. This was at a time of acute housing shortage, when France was just beginning to recover from the deprivations of World War II, when most French still used public baths and many houses had no running water, let alone inside toilets and their own bathrooms.15 And, as Marc Vernet argues, the spaces inhabited by Jean Gabin’s Max in Grisbi, and the objects he displays and consumes, can be read as a clever attempt to negotiate between tradition and renewal as a means of re-appropriating modernity for Frenchness. Max’s second apartment is spacious, ultramodern, chicly appointed, complete with chrome furnishings, juke box, Frigidaire, electrical appliances and vast bathroom. Moreover, Becker’s camera takes the spectator on a long, leisurely tour of the space, as if it were a veritable show-home.16

Within the diegesis, Max’s apartment signals covert rather than conspicuous consumption. It is his clandestine safe house, lavishly furnished for his own comfort and (narcissistic) pleasure. However, in the famous scene where he acts as host to his troubled partner, Riton, the film certainly uses this space as status display, both in terms of reinforcing the hierarchical relationship between the two gangsters and allegorically, on a nationalistic level, proudly displaying both modern French decors and traditional food and wine, implicitly inviting its spectators to consume local, once they have the means. In Rififi, Dassin adds an unusual feature in making his young gangster, Jo, a pipe-smoking, family man, showing the potential of left-handed endeavour to serve as a vehicle for both social mobility and family values. Jo’s apartment, while not situated in an 193

Classic French Noir

Figure 10.2

Du Rififi chez les hommes.

opulent quartier, is smart, luminous and comfortably well appointed. Housewife Louise first appears wielding an ultra modern vacuum cleaner as her husband lounges on the sofa (Figure 10.2). One is reminded of Sylvia Harvey’s comments on class-like divisions of labour within noir: The value of women within exchange has been to a large extent determined by the position of women within the structure of the family. Women’s place within the home determines her position in society, but also serves as a reflection of oppressive social relationships generally. As Engels suggested, ‘within the family she is the proletarian, he the bourgeois’.17

Nonetheless, as Rififi reminds us, gangster husband Jo’s line of work is also proletarian in the sense that it demands real physical labour. Moreover, his high-risk endeavours are put firmly and explicitly in the service of providing for wife and son. Finally, while Louise appears to fully accept her role as ‘proletarian’ (house)wife and mother, she begins to question the violent competition underpinning her husband’s profession, as we shall see. 194

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Iconic objects of conspicuous consumption: the ultimate consumer durable The gangster epitomises and renders visible the narcissistic commodity fetishism at the heart of modern consumer-capitalism. This is signalled firstly and most obviously via dress codes, whether elegant (for major protagonists) or dandyish (minor protagonists and antagonists) gangsters are typically more appearance conscious than cops. Gabin is visibly more elegant as Max than any of the other male characters in Grisbi (the only one to wear a white pocket handkerchief, even in the final shootout), and more so than his soberly attired inspector Valois in Désordre, not to mention the staid, middle-aged waistcoats, scarves and greatcoats of his Maigret films. Melville’s Bob, anticipating the director’s subsequent gangster figures of the 1960s, is obsessively preoccupied with his image and the rise and fall in his fortunes are signalled via costuming.18 But nowhere is the relationship between the gangster and commodity fetishism clearer than in the automobile: the ultimate icon of modernity, mobility and status.19 And, as with the conspicuous displays of modern decors and state-of-the-art appliances, the automobile will serve, allegorically, as a vehicle for the reaffirmation of national identity. The classic gangster car of the period is the black Citroen front-wheel drive Traction,20 driven notably by Max’s old-school partner in crime, Pierrot (Grisbi). Also driven by cops, the Traction is highly evocative of FrancoFrench traditions, and particularly of the Resistance.21 But the most iconic automobile in our corpus is the (often white) oversize American-style sedan or convertible. The ultimate fetish object, it is all the more envied and prized for being emblematic of that loved and hated icon of modernity: America. This ambivalence is particularly evident in Grisbi. Max’s car is the French response to the American luxury sedan: a limited edition, top-of-the-line Simca22 V8 Vedette Matford, originally a Ford design, but hot off the factory floor in Poissy, just outside of Paris. His car, and that of his sidekick, Riton,23 ‘attest to three values: wealth, novelty, and Frenchness, reconquered from overseas sources’.24 Americanophile Jean-Pierre Melville’s hero, Bob, drives an even more ostentatious, late model American Cadillac convertible similar to those driven by Melville himself. According to his collaborator, Francoise Bonnet, the director frequently used it to pick up girls. Among them was

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Classic French Noir Isabelle Corey, whom he subsequently cast as Anne in the film, playfully including a mock pick-up scene in which Roger Duchesne/Bob utters Melville’s stock line ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, which way is the rue Pigalle?’25 If I mention this somewhat salacious piece of paratextual gossip, it is to underline the role of the automobile in gender relationships. More than simply a Freudian phallic symbol, I read the luxury car via the evolutionary concepts of the handicap-principle and costly signalling, pioneered by Israeli biologists Amos and Avishag Zahavi (1997). Amos Zahavi (1975) first explained the existence of costly physiological ornaments, such as the peacock’s tail, in terms of sexual selection, by arguing that they are effective fitness indicators and key to (female) mate choice, precisely because they are so difficult to grow, maintain and carry around. Only the fittest animals can afford them, thus females are attracted to their owners. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller was quick to see the link to Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, citing the Hollywood example of the quintessential gold-digger, Lorelei Lee, played by Marilyn Munroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953). ‘Miss Lee was not the brightest button ever to baffle “Doctor Froyd in Vienna”, but she understood the principle of costly display.’26 In his recent study of consumerism, Miller expands further on human status symbols as forms of sexual display, in particular the American luxury automobile: Signalling theory applies equally to nature and culture. Nature produced peacock tails: large, symmetrical, colourful, costly, awkward, high-maintenance, hard-to-fake fitness indicators. Human culture produced . . . the Hummer H1, which is also large, symmetrical, colourful, costly, awkward and high-maintenance. These qualities make it hard to fake as a fitness indicator – even if you could steal an H1, you probably couldn’t afford its gas or insurance.27

To return to the films, as mentioned above, Marc Vernet’s analysis of Grisbi reads it as a nationalistic re-appropriation of the gangster genre in the form of ostentatious advertising of locally produced French consumer goods, whether food, wine, furniture or cars. Such showcasing also serves to reclaim French cinema in the face of renewed postwar competition from Hollywood. Indeed, the French Série noire films often adapted and/or scripted by their literary authors, were themselves a commodified 196

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir re-appropriation of American tropes, an attempt to wrest back market share of the postwar French film industry from the all-devouring Hollywood hydra. Grisbi’s other key commodity is, of course, its star Jean Gabin, as symbol of Gallic virility, which had suffered ignominious defeat, four years of Nazi Occupation and shameful Vichy Collaboration during World War II. That Gabin had joined the Free French on his return from Hollywood in 1943 and was decorated for valour before participating in the Liberation of Paris cements the visual links to the Resistance made by the film in its mise en scène of gang warfare and final shoot out. But, surprisingly perhaps, Gabin/Max’s role in Grisbi focuses more on his personal relationships with friends and the central issue of women, tellingly linked to the icon of the automobile. Among Max’s many feminine conquests (Pigalle showgirls and secretaries) his favourite is Betty, a beautiful, elegant, independently wealthy American. Moreover, and more importantly, Betty drives a Cadillac convertible, which the French dubbed La belle Américaine [The American Beauty],28 and she drives Max to the final scene at his favourite Montmartre restaurant. Could this be a seminal case of a dame in the driver’s seat? Symbolically, I think not. For the film ensures Gabin/Max retains the upper hand. He may be getting on in years; in this film he is no doting sugar daddy, no aging fall guy. Ever the Latin lover, his character is cast as Betty’s ultimate object of desire. The film insists on this: after the previous afternoon’s lovemaking (in between shoot-ups) of marathon length, whose duration is signified by a long elliptical shadow slowly falling across Betty’s classy boudoir, she is utterly starry eyed. Here, and in the final restaurant scene, the spectator is left in no doubt as to who is really in charge. Shot reverse shot camera emphasises the looks of envy from Max’s hangers-on as he shows off his own belle Américaine. ‘How do you do it?’, one asks, gawping. No response from Max, but Becker’s camera cuts to a low angle of Gabin standing ‘protectively’ over Betty, claiming her as she gazes adoringly up at her (French)man (Figure 10.3). Yet again, literally and figuratively, La belle Américaine has been re-appropriated for Frenchness. Max’s seduction of (rather than by) Betty, played by none other than ex Miss America, Marilyn Bufferd,29 hugely reinforces Gabin’s status as Latin Lover and therefore that of Gallic masculinity, so badly bruised by the experience of the Occupation and its

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Classic French Noir

Figure 10.3

Touchez pas au Grisbi.

aftermath.30 On the other hand – contra Vernet perhaps – this is hardly a case of consuming local. In both Grisbi and Bob French gangster heroes are shown to obtain mastery over the iconic signifiers of American consumerist modernity. In doing so, both films also engage in an implicit glorification of gangster machismo, its dirty side largely hidden by the films’ somewhat romanticised vision of their affluent, agreeable, largely non-violent protagonists, who share a distinctly Parisian elegance, a certain worldweary charm and laconic chivalrousness. Rififi however, directed by American blacklist exile Jules Dassin, is less nostalgic, and more critical, a point to which I now turn.

Rififi: questioning gangster culture Like ex-Communist Jules Dassin’s 1940s American noir, which emerged out of a climate of disillusionment with the failure of the New Deal, and against a background of the HUAC hearings and Dassin’s subsequent exile in Europe, Rififi is underpinned by a leftist critique of consumerism, drawing clear parallels between gangsterism and capitalism, pointing out the violent macho ethos that underpins both. 198

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir Its critique hinges on the theme song, Rififi Means Trouble, presented diegetically as a cabaret act, sung by Fellini actress Magali Noël as Viviana, as part of the film’s expository sequences. The term Rififi is an underworld slang neologism (invented by author, Le Breton) signifying gangster-style violence and fighting, and which the film’s producers felt needed to be explained to audiences. But Dassin’s mise en scène lends the song thematic resonances that extend far beyond semantic explanation. The scene notably includes a highly stylised dance routine of unabashed phallic symbolism, showing a silhouetted gun-toting gangster, acting out the song’s sadomasochistic lyrics (Figure 10.4).31 . . . If another guy just gives me a nod, Straight away he goes for his rod He tips his hat and yessiree! It’s time for some Rififi ... In love he can be kinda rough, he don’t go in for sentimental stuff A chick he keeps telling me, Gets her kicks on Rififi And when he really lets himself go, I get a cuff just for show But when I’m lying by his side, I’m nothing, I got no pride In paradise I wanna be, I’ll pay the price in Rififi.32

The lyrics proclaim unambiguously that women are attracted to tough guys, who move from protection into attack mode at the slightest suggestion of interest from potential male rivals (If another guy gives me a nod . . . it’s time for some Rififi). Moreover, the masochistic, sexual pleasure women obtain by being objectified and beaten up (when I’m lying by his side . . . In paradise I wanna be) is glorified and reinforced by gangster ideology (A chick . . . gets her kicks on Rififi). The fact that the singer enters the diegetic screen halfway through the song, changing costume to participate in the dance routine, further underlines the porous border between representation and reality, performance and identity. Thus, the song begs to be read as a mise en abyme in terms of its exposition of the performativity and violent objectification underpinning gender relationships in gangster noir. The key question is of course: does the film critique or glorify the rififi ethos? When I last taught this film to an undergraduate group of 50 students, most read the song literally, describing it and the film as a whole, as deeply misogynistic. However, the more astute among them picked up on the ways in which Dassin 199

Classic French Noir

Figure 10.4

Du rififi chez les hommes.

disavows the gangster ethos of the Rififi song, inviting a more critical rereading. Charges of misogyny are understandable, particularly when one considers that the film’s hero Tony has previously acted out the ‘bodyguard’ dynamics of the Rififi lyrics, giving his ex-girlfriend a brutal beating for leaving him for a rival while he was in prison. But far from coming back for more, Mado retains her dignity, by leaving her current ‘protector’ without ‘grassing’ on Tony and by refusing Tony’s subsequent attempts to rebuild the relationship. Denouncing the underworld’s violent, ultimately self-destructive, materialistic machismo, Mado predicts the film’s outcome: ‘The lot of you will die like dogs!’ Though a minor character (appearing in only five short scenes), Mado’s rejection of the rififi ethos and her adherence to ‘cleaner’ values (she later provides key information that enables Tony to save Jo’s kidnapped son from the rival gang) is pivotal to the film’s thematics. The second challenge comes from Jo’s wife, Louise, who takes her husband to task for his responsibility in their son’s kidnapping by the rival gang, suggesting there is more courage in enduring the daily routine of honest work than in being a so-called, tough guy.

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Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir Finally, Rififi’s dark ending, as the fulfilment of Mado’s bleak prophecy, is the ultimate indictment of the gangster ethos. Here again, the automobile plays a key, symbolic role. In the final sequence, Tony Le Stephanois makes his getaway in yet another white convertible, stolen from the rival gangsters. Bleeding from gunshot wounds, Tony plays the wounded knight, on a desperate mission to return Tonio, his godson and son of his now dead partner, Jo, to his frantic mother. In a surreal sequence, breathtakingly filmed by Philippe Agostini as a wild ‘succession of impressionistic point-of-view shots of trees and sky demonstrating a visceral sense of movement’,33 Tony races across Paris, while his uncomprehending godson, dressed in a cowboy costume, playfully aims a toy pistol at his dying godfather’s head. One cannot but read this detail of mise en scène as a poignant comment on the generational transmission of machismo and its link to American visual culture. But clearly, machismo and honour culture are not confined to the USA. As nineteenth-century French writer and art critic Théophile Gautier put it, ‘la lessive d’honneur se lave dans le sang’ [‘the laundry of honour must be washed in blood’]. Even though the flawed hero redeems himself (after his sadistic treatment of Mado) by returning his godson, Dassin’s mise en scène questions how ‘clean’ the bloodwashing is. For Tony’s stolen convertible, his ‘white charger’ is noticeably sullied in the process of fulfilling his mission. And the film ends on a long shot of Louise running off with her son, leaving Tony in the background, an insignificant figure, dead and already forgotten.

Du rififi chez les femmes: the first French noir action babe Critics constantly note American and French noir’s misogynist tendency to vilify women or relegate them to the back seat.34 And cultural anthropologists and historians confirm that real world gangsters were often more ruthless still.35 In gangster noir film and literature, femmes fatales and other female antagonists are continuously scapegoated as the cause of the male drive for wealth and attendant status, while positively coded female protagonists are mostly minor characters, with little power and agency, even if several (like Rififi’s Mado) show considerable courage.

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Classic French Noir But the 1950s also saw the emergence of the first female noir action heroine: in the sadly under-rated Du rififi chez les femmes, a heist film set in Brussels, also closely adapted from and scripted by Le Breton. Although of German origin, nightclub owner, cabaret singer and gang boss Vicki de Berlin, played by ex-Miss Austria, Nadja Tiller (Gabin’s young mistress in Le désordre et la nuit), might be described as the first French-speaking noir ‘action babe’.36 A tough but fair boss, Vicki will lead her ‘troops’ of nightclub hostesses into battle against a surprise attack from a rival femaleled gang, and will refuse to give in to pressure from powerful, local and international gang lords. Demonstrating – for once, if not for all – that ‘when the going gets tough, a lot of women are worth more than men’, Vicki plays a key role in the heist itself. Forced to stand in for a captured associate, she totes heavy bags of money, saves the hero (fellow gangster, played by Robert Hossein) and descends a dizzying lift shaft on a rope, albeit wearing a Balmain outfit and stilettos. Presented initially as a cynical bachelor girl who substitutes money and power for love (having been raped by Russian troops after the fall of Berlin), she will eventually fall for the hero, although their romantic affair is of course, cut tragically short. In true French noir style, Vicki and her newfound love will die together at the end of the film. But the spectator’s allegiance remains with her and she will be remembered for her courage and loyalty, which are shown not to be exclusively masculine domains. While a modest commercial success,37 the film was not remembered fondly by critics.38 One can only speculate as to whether its unfavourable reception relates partly to a level of misogyny on their part. Although none found – or admitted to finding – the central premise of a female gang boss to be preposterous, most considered the Série noire formula old hat, were unimpressed by the resemblance of the heist to Dassin’s Rififi and understandably put off by instances of clumsy mise-en-scène, most notably a voyeuristic girl-on-girl fight scene. One could indeed criticise the film further on feminist grounds, for having the female protagonist (and her ‘troops’) engage in masculine-coded violence, mimicking and glorifying antisocial male behaviours. But in the noir universe, without the capacity for violence, there can be no real human agency. I would argue therefore, that despite its shortcomings, the film is worthy of note, if only for its creation of a physically and morally

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Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir courageous, active and independent female protagonist, femme moderne and classic fatalitaire.

Conclusion This chapter has examined three iconic French gangster noirs to argue that the milieu’s hyper-masculine honour culture, and the conspicuous consumption that fuels it, are ciphers for French masculinity coming to terms with rapid sociocultural change, seeking mastery over the iconic signifiers of modernity and reclaiming American-driven modernisation for Frenchness. Grisbi and Bob are also notable for their traditionalist attitudes towards issues of gender, although its gentleman-thief protagonists present hegemonic masculinity as a benign force. By contrast, even while it constructs its protagonists as honourable craftsmen and family men, Dassin’s Rififi nonetheless critiques the dark side of honour culture, its senseless violence and subjection of women. In Du rififi chez les femmes, whatever the film’s shortcomings its actionheroine protagonist is progressively revealing of changing gender roles. The film also mounts a critique of conspicuous consumerism: money and status reveal themselves a poor substitute for love. Its theme song, a bittersweet musing on the power of money, sung by the protagonist herself, aligns the film with Dassin’s and will bring us back to evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller. Money! It’s the heart of the world. Money is King. What Money says goes. It can turn a loser into a star. If you want furs, diamonds, elegance, intelligence . . . If you want to hide ugliness, stupidity; to win a heart . . . or just respect . . . Ya gotta have money! Nothing but notes and coins, it holds the world under its thumb . . . Money, I adore you, money I deplore you . . . (Du rififi chez les femmes, my transl.)39

Read with the intended irony, ‘L’argent’/‘Money’ could almost be the theme song for Miller’s (2010) study of consumerism. For, while his thinking is firmly grounded in evolutionary theory, seeing the links between Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and costly signalling, Miller’s 203

Classic French Noir conclusions are a vehement denunciation of status-seeking consumerism as an ultimately destructive and ineffective form of self-advertisement. It is no coincidence that the genetically transmissible traits listed as the most desirable are precisely those that attract star-crossed lovers to one another. . . . the most desirable traits are not wealth, status, and taste – these are just vague pseudo-traits . . . Rather, the most desirable traits are universal, stable, heritable traits closely related to biological fitness – traits like physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, intelligence, and personality . . . Consumerism’s dirty little secret is that we do a rather good job of assessing such traits through ordinary human conversation, such that the trait-displaying goods and services we work so hard to buy are largely redundant, and sometimes counterproductive.40

All well and good, but . . . are wealth and status truly nothing more than redundant pseudo-markers? Consumerism (particularly as costly signalling) would hardly operate to the extent it does if this were entirely the case. Nonetheless, its counter productiveness is almost axiomatic. As gangster noir serves so vividly to remind us, the trait-displaying goods that intelligent, independent risk-takers strive so hard (protagonists) or so ruthlessly (antagonists) to obtain involve them in violent competition that is dangerously counterproductive, if not deadly. Moreover, as I have argued, some gangster noirs, like Rififi, are also ‘resistant’41 rather than complicit with the dominant macho ideology of the genre. On another level, noir tends not to moralise in conventional ways: the death or demise of criminal protagonists is more a driver of sympathy than the somewhat sanctimonious injunction that ‘crime doesn’t pay’.42 Nonetheless, and at the very least, by its association of conspicuous consumption and death, noir in general, gangster noir in particular, reminds us that consumption is a zero-sum game. One man’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. And in terms of gender, both Rififi adaptations underline the fact that men’s violent gain or endeavour is both proximately and ultimately, every woman’s loss.

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Classic French Noir: The Dark Side of ‘Quality’ Cinema (1946 – 59)

During the postwar period 1946 – 59, despite huge competition from the USA,1 French cinema was overwhelmingly popular, constituting the form of popular entertainment par excellence: over 75 per cent of French produced films attracted audiences of more than a million (for a total population base of 40 – 45 million) as against barely 6 per cent of films from 2010 – 6 (for a total population of around 66 million). In order to compete against Hollywood, the French cinema industry invested in culturally specific, technically sophisticated, high-production value ‘quality’2 productions, often co-produced with European partners. The most popular genres were light comedies, musicals, lavish scale historical swashbucklers and heritage dramas that drew on France's prestigious literary past. In contrast, le réalisme noir and dark polars represented the dark side of French quality cinema, in which postwar cynicism, romantic despair and crises of masculinity seep through. While classic noirs often attracted smaller audiences than conventional crime dramas, adventure thrillers and comic parody noirs offering lighter entertainment and the emotional reassurance of positive closure, they were nonetheless an integral part of the popular mainstream. The most successful featured in the top ten French releases (out of an annual production of 64 –84 films including co-productions) for eight out of fourteen years. From 1955 – 59, even though critics were growing increasingly weary of a ‘genre’ many felt had become formulaic and repetitive, films noirs remained popular with audiences. (See Table C.1) 207

Table C.1 The comparative popularity of Classic French noir Number 1 grossing French film3 cf. top grossing French noir (or film gris) 1946–59 Romantic fatalitaire or good-bad girl*

Year (Total French noirs)

Position/ total French releases4

1946 7 1947 3 1948 3 1949 5 1950 2 1951 2 1952

1/64 21 1/71 7 1/65 12 1/70 4 1/79 37 1/74 19 1/ 74

4 1953 6 1954 5 1955 9 1956 6 1957 8 1958 9 1959 6

17 1/ 75 2 1/72 3 1/68 9 1/81 42 1/84 3 1/69 8 1/ 77 8

Original film title

Genre

Mission Spéciale Macadam* Bataillon de ciel Quai des Orfèvres* La Chartreuse de Parme Dédée d'Anvers* Jour de Fête Manon* Nous irons à Paris L'épave* Andalouise Porte d'Orient* Le petit monde de Don Camillo La P. . . respectueuse* Le retour de Don Camillo Le salaire de la peur Si Versailles m'était conté Touchez pas au Grisbi Le conte de Monte Cristo Diaboliques Michel Strogoff Crime et Châtiment Le triporteur Porte des Lilas Les Misérables En cas de Malheur* La vache et le prisonnier J'irai cracher sur vos tombes*

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Resistance drama Gris War (WWII) Polar Gris Heritage romance Noir Comedy Noir Musical Noir Musical Gris Comedy Noir Comedy Noir thriller Historical drama Gangster noir Heritage adventure Noir Historical adventure Polar noir Comedy Noir Heritage drama Noir Comedy Noir

Box Office (Audience numbers Source: CBO.com) 6,781,120 2,742,018 8,649,691 5,544,721 6,151,922 3,077,336 6,863,729 3,412,167 6,659,174 1,841,800 5,735,108 2,406,528 12,791,213 2,513 419 7,425,550 6,944,665 6,986,987 4,714,865 7,780,963 3,664,080 6,868,932 1,782,212 4,888,290 3,946,553 9,940,668 3,152,082 8,844,285 3,488,415

The Dark Side of ‘Quality’ Cinema (1946 – 59)

Gender and power in classic French noir Leading commentators on classic French cinema Noel Burch and Geneviève Sellier frequently cited over the course of this book, make strong claims for its prevailing misogyny, as evidenced by ‘a plethora of evil women’. According to their research, 25 per cent of French films made between 1945 and 1955 (across genres) feature the ‘sale garce or evil bitch, who uses her powers of seduction to exploit, enslave and/or destroy men’.5 A key question for the present study has been: is French noir misogynous? Given that noir addresses the dark side of human social and personal relationships, and given its central focus on desire, we must expect negative gendered portraits. And given the patriarchal nature of French society, a level of misogyny is to be expected. But do we find more evil (treacherous, ruthless, murderous) women than evil men? This study suggests that we don't. Burch and Sellier's claims for the deep misogyny of French cinema (as a whole) cite four key noirs: ‘The real balance of power is to be read in the box-office successes of the most misogynistic films (Panique; Quai des Orfèvres; Manèges; Manon) and in the increasingly spectacular failures of films taking the opposite stand.’6 In fact neither Panique nor Manèges were huge box office successes and Signoret's positive prostitute fatalitaire figures in Macadam and Dédée d'Anvers were more popular (see Appendix 2). While one can certainly conclude that all these ‘most misogynistic films’ present women as inferior to men in various ways, none feature heartless spider women. Indeed, the present study has argued that the lead female roles of both Orfèvres and Manon are romantic fatalitaires rather than evil garces. Signoret's character in Manèges is a gold-digger but she is also an amoureuse, like several other demonic French fatales, including Alice in Panique. This latter film might just as easily be categorised as a fatal man narrative, since Alice is in a sense a victim: seduced and manipulated into framing the hapless, love-struck Hire by her narcissistic, sociopathic boyfriend, the real murderer. Of my corpus of 75 classic French noirs (1946 – 59), films that present the most powerful negative images of women are generally not as common or popular as those featuring romantic fatalitaires (Appendix 2). Of the top grossing noirs (1946 –59), only Diaboliques features a bad girl as major antagonist. The film featuring the most ruthless and murderous femme,

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Classic French Noir Voici le temps des Assassins (1956) was a commercial disappointment (1,538,259; 51/81), despite the presence of Gabin, two years after his return to stardom. And while French noirs contain many minor female antagonists as petites garces, films foregrounding flawed or toxic masculinity and fatal men (though many of the latter redeem themselves in extremis) are just as prevalent as those featuring major female antagonists during the classic period (Appendix 2).

Noir as sociohistorically inflected dramas of mate selection Underpinning cultural difference, I have read noir narratives as dramas of mate selection. For the femme, the central predicament, amplified in patriarchal societies, is that of juggling between often conflicting needs for love and money. The emotionally frigid spider woman, rare in French noir, abandons romantic attachment in favour of economic independence. But other noir females' strong desire for a long-term romantic partner, coupled with their need for material security often pit them (and their lovers) against competitors, jealous and often powerful rivals, possessive spouses and oppressive social forces. Moreover, males' preference for younger women means the femme is always racing against the clock to capitalise on her erotic potential. Questions around the femme's moral or criminal guilt or innocence must be read in terms of the fundamental issues of emotional/sexual fidelity. Although fears of women's economic independence may be displaced into the sexual arena, sex is what underlies epistemological uncertainty and male paranoia in noir, though not in any Freudian or Lacanian sense. In evolutionary terms, it is sexual jealousy and ultimately uncertain paternity that make the fatale ‘simply a catchphrase for the danger of sexual difference and the demands and risks desire poses for the man’.7 For protagonist and spectator alike, the question of the femme's (sexual attractiveness and) sincerity is the crucial and fundamental issue in film noir, and not an unconscious Oedipal investigation of traumatic sexual difference, as canonical psychoanalytical accounts have claimed. It is for this reason that the blackest of classic American noirs – in which the woman is the official socio-legal property of a male antagonist – are

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The Dark Side of ‘Quality’ Cinema (1946 – 59) those in which the duplicity of the fatale is either established beyond a shadow of a doubt, or worse still, remains unanswered, creating a vortex of ‘epistemological uncertainty’8 and paranoia into which the narrative swirls and disappears, often taking both hero and fatale with it.9 We have seen that most femmes in French noir are either less overtly sexual or less duplicitous, or both, resulting in a lesser focus on this type of manic visual investigation. The relative scarcity of professional women in my noir corpus (as in French cinema as a whole) is clearly reflective of French women's lesser socio-economic and politico-legal status or structural power as compared to American women. The crisis of masculinity in postwar France is fuelled more by fears of ‘unruly’ female sexuality than by the threat of women's economic independence (only just beginning to emerge). I have read the latter sociohistorical fact as underpinning the quasi-absence of the powerful spider woman in French noir, as opposed to the more common demonic amoureuse. On the other hand, on both sides of the Atlantic, women's weak dyadic power (due to historically low sex ratios and an excess of unmarried women) feeds into multiple expressions of female sociosexuality, producing sexually assertive female characters as both antagonists and good-bad girl protagonists. In France this gender imbalance also underlies the frequency of fatal men narratives, which correspond loosely to the American female gothic.

French fatale as romantic fatalitaire The predominant female figure in classic French noir, the good-bad girl or unruly romantic fatalitaire, is constructed positively as loyal mistress and often also as tragic heroine. The fatalitaire (paired with an ill-fated lover in 18 films) appears in a total of 33/75 French noirs (Appendix 2), while the evil garce or murderous demonic fatale is a major antagonist in only 14. While often a socially marginalised figure – adulteress or prostitute –the fatalitaire may also be a member of ruling elites. Whatever her social standing, the fatalitaire drives a narrative in which romantic (genetically driven) love is seen as morally purer than traditional (resource or status driven) marriage or ‘protective’ sexual arrangements (e.g. pimps and prostitutes) by which older, corrupt or more powerful male antagonists assert property rights. Admittedly, in the classic period, the threat to the

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Classic French Noir established order posed by the fatalitaire and her lover is partially contained by means of narrative punishment. Only partially, however, since society's verdict, whether meted out directly via the law or indirectly via the workings of fate, is constructed as tragically unjust, reinforcing spectator sympathy for the fatalitaire and her lover, thereby questioning the patriarchal order that condemns them. Despite the prevailing cynicism and misogyny of postwar French cinema, the most salient and surprising fact of French noir is that, in this bleakest of cinematic optiques, romantic love not only survives, but figures in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of the period.

French noir as an evolving constant By defining noir broadly, as a cinematic optique or way of viewing the world, rather than a geographically or historically situated cycle, this study suggests that French noir contains a cluster of aesthetic and thematic constants. I have argued that these correspond to a set of universal human concerns around reproductive and economic striving. However, I have also demonstrated that French noir is a set of sociocultural artefacts that cannot but be inflected by and respond to contingent, evolving sociohistorical realities, like war, demographic shifts and modernisation. Thus we have seen how the romantic pessimism that characterises 1930s poetic realism is largely replaced by lighter comedic crime dramas and female-centred melodramas during World War II, as French cinema strove to provide messages of hope to an embattled nation. During the postwar period, however, once Liberation euphoria subsided, once the bitter realities of the Occupation could no longer be papered over with Resistance triumphalism, and with the slow pace of economic recovery, French noir became marked by a darker, more cynical realism, known as le réalisme noir. Moreover, as modernisation gathered speed during the second half of the 1950s, changing gender roles began to be reflected in the appearance of female characters with increasing levels of agency. Nonetheless, I have also argued that poetic realist romanticism remains an important thematic and stylistic trend in French noir throughout the 1950s, as evidenced by the persistence of the trope of the star-crossed lovers. Moreover, films like Ascenseur pour L'echafaud and Du rififi chez les

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The Dark Side of ‘Quality’ Cinema (1946 – 59) femmes demonstrate that this trope is highly compatible with modern, egalitarian discourses around gender.

Directions for future research Ending this study in 1959, at the dawn of the Fifth Republic and on the cusp of the New Wave inevitably raises questions. What happens next? Volume 2 will attempt to provide some answers. I will investigate the continuing story of gender in French noir, from the upheavals of the New Wave to the present, notably charting the impacts of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and second wave feminism; the gay rights movement; globalisation; immigration, and the continuing ‘dialogue’ with America.

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Appendix 1: 101 French Films Noirs

Filmography layout Year of Release (Year of Production). Original Title [USA Title /English Translation (where available)]. Director. Same consecutive director –-. DVD edition (VHS if specified) and year of release, where available. (Running time in minutes.)

1930s: poetic realism/early noir (18) 1931. Paris-Béguin [The Darling of Paris]. A. Genina. (117 min.) 1931. La Chienne [The Bitch]. J. Renoir. The Criterion Collection. (95 min.) 1934. La Rue sans nom. P. Chenal. (82 min.) 1935. La Bandéra [Escape from Yesterday]. J. Duvivier. Vanguard Cinema 2003. (96 min.) 1936. La Belle Equipe [There Were Five]. –-. Pathé 2016. (101 min.) 1937. L'Alibi. P. Chenal. René Chateau Vidéo, 1995 (VHS). (84 min.) 1937. Pépé le Moko [Pépé le Moko]. J. Duvivier. Criterion Collection 2003. (94 min.) 1937. Gueule d'amour [Lady Killer]. J. Grémillon. René Chateau Vidéo 2006. (ca. 85 min.) 1938. Métropolitain [Metropolitan]. M. Cam. Rene´ Chateau Vidéo 2008. (80 min.) 1938. Hôtel du Nord [Hotel du Nord]. M. Carné. S.l.: Soda Films 2006. (92 min.) 1938. Le Quai des brumes [Port of Shadows]. – -. Criterion Collection 2004. (90 min.)

217

Classic French Noir 1938. La Maison du Maltais [Sirocco]. P. Chenal. Gaumont c2012. (89 min.) 1938. Le Puritain [The Puritan]. J. Musso. (95 min.) 1938. La Bête humaine [The Human Beast]. J. Renoir. Criterion Collection 2006. (96 min.) 1939. Le jour se lève [Daybreak]. M. Carné. The Criterion Collection 2009. (90 min.) 1939. Le dernier Tournant [The Last Turn]. P. Chenal. The Movie Detective. (88 min.) 1939. Sans lendemain [There's no Tomorrow]. M. Ophüls. Gaumont Vidéo 2010. (82 min.) 1941 (1940). Remorques [Stormy Waters]. J. Grémillon. Criterion Collection. (84 min.)

1941 –4 Occupation noir (8) 1942. L'Assassin habite au 21 [The Murderer Lives at Number 21]. H.G. Clouzot. Gaumont Vidéo 2011. (80 min.) 1942. Les Inconnus dans la maison [Strangers in the House]. H. Decoin. Studio Canal 2010. (100 min.) 1942. L'assassin a peur la nuit [The Murderer is Afraid at Night]. J. Delannoy. M6 Vidéo: distrib. Warner Home Vidéo France 2008. (100 min.) 1942. Macao, l'enfer du jeu [Gambling Hell]. –-. StudioCanal 2004. (93 min.) 1943. Douce /[Love Story]. C. Autant-Lara. René Chateau Vidéo (VHS). (104 min.) 1943. Goupi Mains Rouges [It Happened at the Inn]. J. Becker. René Chateau Vidéo 2002. (104 min.) 1943. Voyage sans espoir [Voyage Without Hope]. Christian-Jaque. SND / M6 Vidéo 2008. (ca. 86 min.) 1943. Le Corbeau [The Raven]. H.G. Clouzot. Criterion Collection 2004. (92 min.)

218

Appendix 1

1946 –59 Classic French noir (75) 1946. Macadam [Back Streets of Paris]. M. Blistene. The Movie Detective. (100 min.) 1946. Les Portes de la nuit [Gates of the Night]. M. Carné. Pathé Distribution. (105 min.) 1946. La foire aux chimères [Devil and the Angel]. P. Chenal. (107 min.) 1946. Martin Roumagnac. G. Lacombe. Imovision. (115 min.) 1946. Miroir. R. Lamy. SND/M6 Vidéo 2007. (90 min.) 1946 (1945). Les Démons de l'aube [Dawn Devils]. Y. Allégret. TF1 Vidéo. (100 min.) 1946 (1945). La Fille du diable [Devil's Daughter]. H. Decoin. René Chateau Vidéo. (105 min.) 1947. Quai des Orfèvres [Jenny Lamour]. H.G. Clouzot. Criterion Collection. (106 min.) 1947. Non coupable [Not Guilty]. H. Decoin. LCJ Editions. (95 min.) 1947 (1946). Panique [Panic]. J. Duvivier. LCJ Editions. (91 min.) 1948. Dédée d'Anvers [Dédée]. Y. Allégret. Collection Ciné Club. (90 min.) 1948. Impasse des deux anges. M. Tourneur. The Movie Detective 2016. (83 min.) 1948 (1947). Les Condamnés. G. Lacombe. (100 min.) 1949. Portrait d'un assassin [Portrait of an Assassin]. Bernard-Roland. Image Entertainment 1999. (86 min.) 1949. Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga]. R. Clément. Studio Canal, France 2006. (95 min.) 1949 (1948). Une si jolie petite plage [Such a Pretty Little Beach]. Y. Allégret. Pathé Distribution 2007. (86 min.) 1949 (1948). Manon. H.G. Clouzot. DVD-Video USA 2009. (105 min.) 1949 (1948). Entre onze heures et minuit [Between Eleven and Midnight]. H. Decoin. StudioCanal 2004. (94 min.) 1950. Manèges [The Cheat]. Y. Allégret. StudioCanal 2004. (90 min.) 1950. L'Epave [Sin and Desire]. W. Rozier. (94 min.) 1951. Porte d'Orient [Oriental Port]. J. Daroy. (100 min.) 1951. Boîte de nuit [Hotbed of Sin]. A. Rode. (90 min.) 1952. Casque d'or [Golden Marie]. J. Becker. Criterion Collection 2005. (94 min.)

219

Classic French Noir 1952. La P. . . respectueuse [The Respectful Prostitute]. M.P. Charles Brabant. René Chateau Vidéo 2006. (90 min.) 1952. La Vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth About Bebe Donge]. H. Decoin. Gaumont 2010. (111 min.) 1952. Les Amants maudits [The Damned Lovers]. W. Rozier. (97 min.) 1953. Le Bon Dieu sans confession [Good Lord Without Confession]. C. Autant-Lara. (112 min.) 1953. Thérèse Raquin [The Adulteress]. M. Carné. Kino on Video, New York 2005. (102 min.) 1953. Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear]. H.G. Clouzot. Criterion collection, 36. (147 min.) 1953. La Vierge du Rhin [Rhine Virgin]. G. Grangier. StudioCanal 2004. (85 min.) 1953. Les Compagnes de la nuit [Companions of the Night]. R. Habib. René Chateau Vidéo 2013. (90 min.) 1953. Leur dernière nuit [Their Last Night]. G. Lacombe. René Chateau Vidéo 2004. (90 min.) 1954. Touchez pas au grisbi [Hands Off the Loot]. J. Becker. Criterion Collection 2005. (96 min.) 1954. Bonnes à tuer [One Step to Eternity]. H. Decoin. StudioCanal Classics 2010. (90 min.) 1954. Les intrigantes [The Plotters]. –-. The Movie Detective 2016. (96 min.) 1954. Obsession [Obsession]. J. Delannoy. StudioCanal 2012. (98 min.) 1954 (1953). La neige était sale [The Snow Was Black]. L. Saslavsky. (104 min.) 1955. Les Mauvaises Rencontres [Bad Liaisons]. A. Astruc. Gaumont Columbia Tristar Home Vidéo (VHS). (84 min.) 1955. Les héros sont fatigués [Heroes and Sinners]. Y. Ciampi. LCJ Editions 2016. Collection Les films du patrimoine. (105 min.) 1955. Les Diaboliques [Diabolique]. H.G. Clouzot. René Chateau Vidéo: Distribution, TF1 Vidéo: distrib. Cinédis 2000. (110 min.) 1955. Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi]. J. Dassin. Criterion Collection, 2001. (118 min.) 1955. Razzia sur la chnouf [Razzia]. H. Decoin. M6 Interactions 2005. (101 min.) 1955. Série noire [The Infiltrator]. P. Foucaud. René Chateau Vidéo 1991 (VHS). (88 min.)

220

Appendix 1 1955. Bob le flambeur [Bob the Gambler]. J.-P. Melville. Criterion Collection, USA 2002. (102 min.) 1955. La Môme Pigalle [The Maiden]. A. Rode. LCJ Editions 2010. (100 min.) 1955. Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance]. H. Verneuil. René Chateau Vidéo: TF1 Vidéo 2000. (95 min.) 1956. La Mort en ce jardin [Death in the Garden]. L. Buñuel. Transflux Films; San Francisco, CA: Microcinema International 2009. (100 min.) 1956. Voici le temps des assassins [Deadlier Than the Male]. J. Duvivier. René Chateau vidéo 2004. (110 min.) 1956. Mémoires d'un flic [Memories of a Cop]. P. Foucaud and A. Hunebelle. (88 min.) 1956. Les salauds vont en enfer [The Wicked Go to Hell]. R. Hossein. (91 min.) 1956. Crime et châtiment. G. Lampin. Editions Atlas (VHS). (107 min.) 1956. Le Salaire du péché [The Wages of Sin]. D. de la Patellière. (110min.) 1957. Jusqu'au dernier [Until the Last One]. P. Billon. René Chateau Vidéo 1992. (90 min.) 1957. Porte des Lilas [Gates of Paris]. R. Clair. René Chateau Vidéo: distrib. TF1 Vidéo 2005. (94 min.) 1957. Les Espions [The Spies]. H.G. Clouzot. C'est la Vie DVD 2003. (137 min.) 1957. Le Rouge est mis [Speaking of Murder]. G. Grangier. M6 Interactions 2005. (82 min.) 1957. Retour de manivelle [There's Always a Price Tag]. D. de la Patellière. René Chateau Vidéo 2005. (125 min.) 1957. Les Louves [Demoniac]. L. Saslavsky. (101 min.) 1957. Une manche et la belle [A Kiss for a Killer]. H. Verneuil. René Chateau Vidéo 2012. (100 min.) 1958. En cas de malheur [Love Is My Profession]. C. Autant-Lara. René Chateau Vidéo 2001. (115 min.) 1958. Le Miroir à deux faces [The Mirror Has Two Faces]. A. Cayatte. Gaumont à la demande. (94 min.) 1958. Cette nuit-là [That Night]. M. Cazeneuve. René Chateau Vidéo 2014. (90 min.) 1958. Rafles sur la ville [Sinners of Paris]. P. Chenal. LCJ Editions et Productions, éd. 2011. (82 mins.)

221

Classic French Noir 1958. La Chatte [The Cat]. H. Decoin. TF1 Vidéo 2004. (108 min.) 1958. Maigret tend un piège [Maigret Sets a Trap]. J. Delannoy. René Chateau Vidéo: TF1 Vidéo 2001. (115 min.) 1958. Le Désordre et la Nuit [The Night Affair]. G. Grangier. René Chateau Vidéo 2004. (90 min.) 1958. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows]. L. Malle. Criterion Collection (335) 2006. (92 min.) 1958. Le Dos au mur [Back to the Wall]. E. Molinaro. Gaumont 2012. (91 min.) 1958 (1957). Le Désert de Pigalle [A Priest in Pigalle]. L. Joannon. (100 min.) 1959. Délit de fuite [Hit and Run]. B. Borderie. (95 min.) 1959. La Bête à l'affût [Beast at Bay]. P. Chenal. Gaumont Columbia Tristar Home Vidéo (VHS). (95 min.) 1959. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes [I Spit on Your Grave]. M. Gast. CTI Paris DVD. (107 min.) 1959. Toi le venin [Blonde in a White Car]. R. Hossein. Gaumont Vidéo 2012. (92 min.) 1959. Du rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls]. A. Joffé. LCJ Editions 2012. (110 min.) 1959. Deux hommes dans Manhattan [Two Men in Manhattan]. J.-P. Melville. Entertainment One Film USA 2013 (85 min.)

222

Appendix 2: Tables

Films highlighted in grey ¼ films gris

Table A.1 Demonic fatale, amoureuse* or garce as major antagonist Year Position 1947 17/71 1949 35/70 61

Film title 1. 2. 3.

1950 57/79 1952 44/74

4. 5.

1953 41/75

6.

49 1955 9/68 1956 52/81

7. 8. 9.

53

10.

1957 24/84

11.

34 57 1959 24/77

12. 13. 14.

Panique [Panic]* Portrait d'un assassin [Portrait of an Assassin] Une si jolie petite plage [Such a Pretty Little Beach] Manèges [The Cheat]* La Vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth About Bebe Donge] Le Bon Dieu sans confession [Good Lord Without Confession]* Les intrigantes [The Plotters] Les Diaboliques [Diabolique]* Voici le temps des assassins [Deadlier Than the Male] La Mort en ce jardin [Death in the Garden] Retour de manivelle [There's Always a Price Tag] Les Louves [Demoniac] Une manche et la belle [A Kiss for a Killer] Toi le venin [Blonde in a White Car]

223

Box office (CBO) 23 m 2,493,526 1,860,774 849,005 1,508,026 1,249,698 1,387,691 1,367,468 3,664,080 1,538,259 1,536,292 2,083,608 1,838,874 1,326,583 1,886,626

Classic French Noir Table A.2 Homme fatal* as duplicitous seducer, redeemed homme(*) or evil/ flawed male anti-hero Year

Position

Film title

1946

30 /64

1.

1947 1948 1952

35/71 17 46 /65 51/74

2. 3. 4. 5.

1954

28/72

6.

1956

70 68/81

7. 8.

1957

– 3/84 57

9. 10. 11.

1958

11/69

12.

1959

47 55/77

13. 14. 15.

La foire aux chimères [Devil and the Angel] (*) Non coupable [Not Guilty] Panique [Panic]* Impasse des deux anges(*) Les Amants maudits [The Damned Lovers]* La neige était sale [The Snow Was Black] (*) Bonnes à tuer [One Step to Eternity]* Les salauds vont en enfer [The Wicked Go to Hell]* Le Salaire du péché [The Wages of Sin]* Porte des Lilas [Gates of Paris]* Une manche et la belle [A Kiss for a Killer]* Le Miroir à deux faces [The Mirror Has Two Faces]* Rafles sur la ville [Sinners of Paris] (*) Le Dos au mur [Back to the Wall] La Bête à l'affût [Beast at Bay] (*)

224

Box office 22 m 2,314,912 1,674,626 2,493,526 1,324,304 1,126,805 2,096,711 838,002 62,378 – 3,946,553 1,326,583 2,864,701 1,039,009 1,051,237 997,123

Appendix 2 Table A.3 Romantic fatalitaire or good-bad girl as protagonist (star-crossed lovers* 18) 33/75 Year Position 1946 21/64 23 26 28 29 1947 4/71 1948 12/65 46 28 1949 4/70 21 1950 37/79 1951 19/74 1952 17/74 26 51 1953 12/75 18 27 42 1955 20/68 58 28 1957 62/84 1958 8/69 10 27 34 37 50 1959 8/77 46 55

Film title 1. Macadam [Back streets of Paris]* 2. Les Portes de la nuit [Gates of the Night]* 3. Martin Roumagnac* 4. La Fille du diable [Devil's Daughter] 5. Les Démons de l'aube 6. Quai des Orfèvres [Jenny Lamour] 7. Dédée d'Anvers [Dédée*] 8. Impasse des deux anges 9. Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga]* 10. Manon* 11. Entre onze heures et minuit [Between Eleven and Midnight] 12. L'épave [Sin and Desire] 13. Porte d'Orient [Oriental Port] 14. La P... respectueuse [The Respectful Prostitute] 15. Casque d'or* 16. Les Amants maudits [The Damned Lovers] 17. Les Compagnes de la nuit [Companions of the Night] 18. Thérèse Raquin [The Adulteress]* 19. La Vierge du Rhin* 20. Leur dernière nuit [Their Last Night]* 21. Les Héros sont fatigués [Heroes and Sinners] 22. La Môme Pigalle [The Maiden] 23. Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance]* 24. Jusqu'au dernier [Until the Last One] 25. En cas de malheur [Love Is My Profession]* 26. La Chatte [The Cat]* 27. Le Désordre et la Nuit [The Night Affair] 28. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows]* 29. Le Désert de Pigalle [A Priest in Pigalle] 30. Cette nuit-là [That Night]* 31. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes [I Spit on Your Grave]* 32. Du Rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls]* 33. La Bête à l'affût [Beast at Bay]*

225

Box office 72 m 2,742,018 2,559,337 2,491,431 2,414,962 2,411,165 5,544,721 3,077,336 1,324,304 2,018,745 3,412,167 2,230,281 1,841,800 2,406,528 2,513,419 1,917,248 1,126,805 3,307,827 2,364,260 1,784,823 1,365,507 2,874,200 1,130,733 2,394,712 1,244,915 3,152,082 2,920,662 2,171,400 1,905,253 1,455,263 1,022,454 3,488,415 1,196,171 997,123

Notes

1

Introduction

1. See especially (Doane 1983, 1991; Kaplan 1980, 1998). 2. (Rolls and Walker 2009). 3. Some noir commentators, like Foster Hirsch (1999) and James Damico (1996) define it as a genre or sub-genre. Thomas Pillard’s recent monograph on French film noir (2014) also adopts a generic definition. 4. For attempts at defining noir as a cycle and a style or movement, see for example (Silver and Ursini 1996, 1999; Porfirio 2013). 5. See (Neve 1992; Buhle and Wagner 2003a, 2003b, 2002). 6. See (Faison 2008). 7. I have borrowed the term ‘optique’ from Dudley Andrew (1995), originally describing the sombre worldview of French poetic realism. 8. See for example (Spicer and Hanson 2013; Naremore 2008). 9. (Neale 2000: 144). 10. On the pitfalls of defining noir, see also (Telotte 1989; Naremore 1998; Conard 2006). 11. See for example (Hanson 2007). 12. Pillard (2014) devotes one third of his study of French film noir to the popular cycle of action hero comedy noirs that cascaded onto French screens during the 1950s, most often starring Raymond Rouleau as a suave journalist-investigator (e.g. Méfiez-vous des blondes [Never Trust Blondes], A. Hunebelle, 1950); American ex-crooner Eddie Constantine as tough guy Lemmy Caution (e.g. La Môme vert-de-gris [Poison Ivy] (Borderie, 1953)) or occasionally even French comic star Fernandel (e.g. L’ennemi public no. 1, Verneuil, 1953). While these films fall outside of my definition of noir, Pillard’s analysis is a welcome addition to scholarly discourse, especially in terms of how these ‘faux films noirs’ shore up threatened masculinity and reinforce stereotypical patriarchal images of women as compliant or dangerous but tamed sex objects. 13. Most films in my corpus, including many that have received little scholarly attention, are recommended by AFCAE (L’Association Francaise des cinémas

226

Notes to Pages 6 –11

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

d’art et d’essai), which lists films considered aesthetically innovative, i.e. avantgarde and art films, but also films with unquestionable artistic qualities, which may not have enjoyed commercial success; films of artistic or historical interest, and in particular those considered ‘screen classics’. See http://www. art-et-essai.org/. These included The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941); Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944); Laura (Preminger, 1944); Murder My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944); The Woman in the Window (Lang, 1944); The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945). (Borde and Chaumeton 2002). (Rolls and Walker 2009). (Forbes 1992: 48; Powrie 2003: 123). See (Andrew and Morgan 1996; Naremore 1998). For the specific link to French poetic realism, see (Vincendeau 1992; Hirsch 1999: 67 –76; Spicer 2002: 11 –6). (Mulvey 1989; Hayward 2000: 447–8). Freud seems to have erroneously conflated the infant’s attachment to the mother or father as primary love object with sexual desire (on the part of the child). Moreover, the fact that cross-cultural parent-child incest taboos target parental (overwhelmingly paternal) paedophilia is a clear indication that Freud got the direction of such (very uncommon child-parent) incestuous desire the wrong way around. See for example (Sugiyama 2005). The movement from a hunter-gatherer to agrarian lifestyle led to a loss of selfsufficiency for women and the ability of a few men to monopolise resources, power and females. ‘In the past 10,000 years, women, unlike their primate sisters, became economically dependent upon males. The survival of their children depended increasingly upon maintaining a strong bond with a provisioning man’ (Campbell 2002: 247). See in particular (Butler 1990, 1993). (Damasio 2000: 22). See (Freud 2012: 18– 9). (Fox 2016: 241). (Tooby and Cosmides 1992: 3). The environment of evolutionary adaptedness or EEA, for the genus Homo, corresponds very roughly to the mid Pleistocene period, which lasted from 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago. (Campbell 2002: 8 –9). See pioneering geneticist Richard Dawkins’ (2015) succinct refutation of essentialism. See (Ridley 2003) for an accessible well-documented survey. Many of our emotional systems, including our sexual emotions, evolved much earlier, although their human form was settled in terms of its current parameters, if not its underlying mechanisms, in the last two million years.

227

Notes to Pages 12 –18 33. As an indication of the increasing attention paid to culture by evolutionary scientists, the recent re-edition of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Buss 2015) includes sections on group living and culture and co-ordination, and a specific chapter on cultural evolution (Chudek, Muthukrishna and Henrich 2015). 34. (Wilson 2012). 35. See for example (Tomasello 1999, 2014; Boyd and Richerson 2005; SloanWilson 2014). 36. See, for example (Silva and Stanton 1996). 37. See, for example (Giudice, Gangestad, and Kaplan 2015). 38. Monogamous long-term mating or pair-bonding is common in birds but rare in mammals, affecting only 3 –5 per cent of mammalian species (Kleiman 1977). 39. (Carroll et al., 2010: 213). 40. See (Cosmides and Tooby 1992). 41. (Wilson and Lumsden 2005/1989). 42. (Campbell 2002: 12). 43. (Larsen, Buss and Wismeijer 2013: 457). 44. In the contemporary study of sex and gender differences, leading personality psychology textbooks integrate socialisation theories with biologically based theories (hormonal theories) and evolutionary psychology. See (Larsen, Buss and Wismeijer 2013). 45. Contemporary evolutionary psychology must not be confused with Social Darwinism, an outdated and long discredited misapplication of Darwinian theory. 46. (Hrdy 1999; Smuts 1992). 47. See for example (Buss and Duntley 2011). 48. Persistent claims that evolutionists validate sexist gender stereotypes (e.g. Kreutzer and Aebischer 2015: 273) are not supported by current work in the field. 49. (Buss and Schmitt 2011: 783). 50. (Buss 2006: 65). 51. (Jankowiak 2008: 9). 52. (Schmitt 2005b). 53. (Hanson 2007; Grossman 2009). 54. Roland Barthes in (Vincendeau 2000: 64).

2

Fatal(e) Desire in French Poetic Realism

1. (Andrew 1995: 226). 2. See (Chartier 1946; in Moine 2007: 150; Vincendeau 1992; Pillard 2014: 12). 3. (Brook 2009: 3).

228

Notes to Pages 19 –28 4. The quirky dark comedy Pièges [Personal Column] (Siodmak, 1939), directed by Siodmak during his stay in France was remade in Hollywood in 1947 as Lured by fellow ex-patriot German, Douglas Sirk. Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), was remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlett Street (1945), both films featuring a scheming fatale. See Moine (2007: 150–62) for a detailed analysis of poetic realist originals and their American remakes. 5. As examples of feminine figures in poetic realist films not featuring Jean Gabin: Janie Marèse is a venal, manipulative garce in La Chienne (Renoir, 1931) as mentioned; as is Ginette Leclerc in Métropolitain [Underground] (Cam, 1939). Arletty again plays a generous tart opposite Louis Jouvet’s cynical pimp in Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938). In La maison du Maltais [Sirocco] (Chenal, 1938), Viviane Romance’s hard-nosed prostitute is ultimately revealed to be the epitome of the good-bad girl as fatalitaire: warm-hearted, loyal mistress and self-sacrificing mother. Similarly, in Max Ophuls’ contribution to poetic realism, Sans lendemain [No Tomorrow] (1939), Edwige Feullière is a good woman fallen on bad times who resorts to prostitution to feed her son, and must hide the truth from the love of her life. 6. (Azzopardi 1997: 14– 5). 7. (Burch and Sellier 1996: 52 –3). 8. Reliable box office figures are difficult to obtain for the 1930s. However, a list of the most popular films of 1937 and 1938 (Lagny, RoparsWuilleumier and Sorlin 1986: 19) supports my view, in that the figure of the garce (Naples au baiser de feu [The Kiss of Fire] (Genina, 1937), starring Viviane Romance as garce and Balin as ingénue) figures only once, while the tragic lovers appear three times (Pépé Le Moko, Quai des Brumes, La Maison du Maltais). 9. (Andrew 1995: 304–17). 10. Ginette Vincendeau (1992: 54) notes how the shiny black raincoat functions ‘(m)etonymically transferring the night-time street – in its dark and wet look onto the body of the woman . . .’. 11. Although billed (in the opening credits) as an adaptation of Zola’s novel, Lang’s film is clearly a remake of Renoir. 12. Simone Simon’s kittenish face subsequently saw her cast in the lead role in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (USA 1942). 13. ‘Tant pis pour qui s’entête, à lui faire la cour, Qui veut aimer Ninette doit souffrir de l’amour’. 14. See (Sesonske 1980). 15. Unless indicated otherwise, all English translations are the author’s. 16. Vincendeau (1988) and Burch and Sellier (1996) see ‘incestuous’ father figures – whether literally or symbolically, where a young woman is married to or abused by a much older, more powerful male – as a dominant trope of 1930s French cinema.

229

Notes to Pages 32 –41

3

Looking for the Light

1. ‘Plutôt Hitler que Blum’ [‘Rather Hitler than (that Jewish Socialist) Leon Blum’] was a key Vichy slogan. 2. (Hayward 2014: 38– 9). 3. Despite Vichy’s reactionary and racist political ideologies, it nevertheless played an essential role in ensuring the survival of the French film industry by laying the foundations for the current regulation, financial and cultural support, without which it would almost certainly have long ceased to exist. 4. A few filmmakers went into hiding in the south. Of the 1930s greats, only Carné and his scriptwriter Jacques Prévert remained. 5. See Evelyn Erhlich’s groundbreaking exposé, Cinema of Paradox (1985). 6. Theatres and top restaurants were constantly full, often with German officers and administrators and those who chose or were forced to collaborate with them. 7. For an insightful discussion (in English) of Occupation cinema see (Williams 1992: ch. 10, pp. 245– 71). 8. See (Burch and Sellier 1996: 99– 107). 9. See (Burch and Sellier 1996: 197–202). 10. During the postwar decades, Jean Marais became famous for doing his own stunts as a swashbuckling hero of French quality cinema. 11. (McMillan 1985: 133). 12. See (Burch and Sellier 1996: 87–97). 13. See Judith Mayne’s wonderfully insightful analysis (2007). 14. Greven did not realise however that Le Chanois/Drefus was also working in the Resistance. 15. (Gildea 2015: 3). 16. (Buton 2004: 102). See also (Marcot, Leroux, and Levisse-Touzé 2006). 17. For a more detailed analysis of this and subsequent screen incarnations of Malet’s Burma, see (Walker-Morrison 2016). 18. Of the top 10 French films released in 1946, half centred on male Resistance heroism. Mission Spéciale by Maurice de Canonge; Le père tranquille and La bataille du rail by René Clément; Henri Calef’s Jéricho and Raymond Bernard’s Un ami viendra ce soir. Tellingly, references to women’s involvement were rare and allegorical: as in Christian Jacque’s immensely popular, 1945 adaptation of Maupassant’s Boule de suif [Angel and Sinner] (Box office: 3,000,550), the tale of a patriotic prostitute during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. 19. According to Gwénaëlle Le Gras (2012), female investigators, while they mostly acted in a non-professional capacity, became a relatively common feature of light crime dramas during the Occupation and Liberation, averaging between five and six per year from 1942 – 9, although numbers declined to an average of one or two films per year during the 1950s.

230

Notes to Pages 41 –53 20. Claire Gorrara (2003, 2007) has examined a similar trend in the postwar roman noir, including in the work of Léo Malet. 21. Set during the Liberation, Carné and Prévert’s Les portes de la nuit [Gates of The Night] (1946) features a resistance hero (Yves Montand) whose new-found love (Nathalie Nattier) is murdered by her jealous ex-husband (Pierre Brasseur) on the instigation of her estranged brother, a cowardly ex-collaborator (Serge Reggiani), responsible for the torture and execution of dozens of resistance colleagues. 22. Like Clouzot (and actor Pierre Fresnay), ex-Continental director Henri Decoin was a victim of the Liberation purges (Hayward 1993: 338; Bertin-Maghit 2002: Chapter 11). And like Clouzot, Decoin subsequently produced some of the bleakest examples of le réalisme noir. 23. ‘Vous êtes une pire crapule que moi . . . Je vous aurais dénoncé; on vous aurait exécuté; la justice aurait été rendue. Entretemps des enfants continueraient à crever . . . Je choisis de vous laisser dans la peau de l’autre. Et de vous vendre très cher le droit d’y être.’ 24. (Anon. 1946). 25. (Travers 2011). 26. (See Garnier 1955). 27. (Chopra-Gant 2006: 169). The quote refers specifically to Crossfire (Dmytryk, USA, 1947) and The Blue Dahlia (Marshall, USA, 1946). 28. Clouzot’s hugely successful Le salaire de la peur [Wages of Sin] (1953) also starring Montand, shared this central thematic: testing the strength of homosocial bonds in an all male group marooned in an exotic hell, against the temptation to succumb to individual greed, hubris, cowardice and betrayal. 29. Reviewer James Travers (2011) notes how the beach love scene evokes Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancester in From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, USA, 1953). 30. See (Burch and Sellier 1996: 217–37).

4

Too Many Women? War and Fatal(e) Desire

1. 2. 3. 4.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as (Walker-Morrison 2015). (Schmitt 2005b). See (Martin 1998; Walker 2007; Grossman 2009). Examples of the resourceful, modern woman in classic American noir are: Phantom Lady (Siodmak, 1944); The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945); This Gun for Hire (Tuttle, 1945); Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945); Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954). The misunderstood, good-bad girl, best exemplified by Gilda (Vidor, 1946), is also a notable feature of Laura (Preminger, 1944), Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946) and Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958). 5. In (Horowitz 1994). 6. (Schatz 1981: 113). 7. (Spigel 1992: 42).

231

Notes to Pages 53 –61 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

(Marie Windsor in Horowitz 1994). (Fishman 1991: xii). (Gildea 2002: 145). (Duchen 1994: 105). (Diamond 1999). (Burch and Sellier 2001: 49). (Duchen 1994: 132). (Gildea 2002: 67). See (Burch and Sellier 2001). Manon sold almost 3.5 million tickets, ranking number four among French produced films at the French box office for 1949. Virgili (2000) notes that while women’s organisations protested fiercely against the practice of head shaving, women were often gleeful onlookers if not active participants in these public humiliations. See (Duchen and Bandhauer-Schöffmann 2000: 238 –9). ‘Sa mère tenait le bistrot. C’était toujours plein de Fritz.’ Available at http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2006/04/13/il-y-a-soixanteans-la-france-fermait-ses-maisons-closes_761129_3224.html (accessed 13 October 2016). See (Ross 1995: 80– 92). See (Corbin 1978: 506– 7). Robert: ‘Cet endroit me dégoûte’; Manon: ‘Rien n’est dégoûtant quand on aime.’ See (Pedersen 1991; Guttentag and Secord 1983). Guttentag and Secord cite the emergence of American feminist movements of the nineteenth (149 –50) and twentieth (196– 7) centuries. My hypothesis would certainly also apply to post-World War I cinema and society, since France had suffered a similar dearth of young marriageable males that lasted until the late 1930s, leaving many women single or forced to marry much older men (Hayward 2005b: 126). Leading commentators of 1930s cinema note that the older husband or lover as symbolically incestuous father figure is a common figure, appearing in around 300/1,000 films produced from 1929 – 39 (Burch and Sellier 1996: 26). Historical sources differ on exact numbers of mutilated war survivors but conservative estimates put this figure at around 300,000 (See, for example, Touzet 2012). Before the return of French POWs in 1945 there was a surplus of 1,490,530 women between the ages of 15 and 44. All French statistics are sourced from INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Surveys]), obtained from official records of births, deaths and marriages, and census data. I have reproduced INSEE data for the male and female population aged between 15 and 44 years. USA Census sources give figures for 15 to 49 years.

232

Notes to Pages 61 –72 31. In France, from 1990 to 2004, the average age at marriage evolved from 26.8 to 28.8 for women, from 28.7 to 30.8 for men, with a consistent age gap of two years. Although no official figures are available for previous years, other INSEE statistics (on total annual numbers of single married men and women) show clearly that until the 1960s, women married a lot earlier than men and that the age gap between spouses was larger, as one would expect in a still largely patriarchal society in which women enjoyed relatively poor educational opportunities and financial independence. 32. See (Kruger 2009). 33. See (Barber 2003: 383). 34. See (Stone, Shackelford and Buss 2007; Schmitt 2005). 35. (Trivers 1972). 36. (Buss and Schmitt 1993; Clark and Hatfield 1989; Schmitt 2005a/b). 37. See, for example (Munroe and Munroe 1997). 38. For example (Symons 1982). 39. For example (Buss and Schmitt, 1993). 40. (Buss 1989). 41. (Hrdy 2000). 42. (Buss and Schmitt 1993). 43. (Schmitt 2005 a/b: 247). 44. (Schmitt 2005 a/b: 272). 45. Guttentag and Secord (1983) also found that in low operational sex-ratio populations, men are less inclined to commit to a woman via marriage and illegitimate births rise: both are indicators of higher levels of sociosexuality. 46. (Lippa 2009). 47. (Lippa 2009: 631). 48. (Poston, Terrell Kincannon and DeSalvo 2009: 1448). 49. See, for example (Tesser and Martin 1996). 50. (Giroud 1946). 51. ‘Lorsqu’un jeune homme désire se marier, il est assuré de trouver une femme. Lorsqu’une jeune fille veut se marier, elle n’a que 4 chances sur 5 de réaliser son vœu parce qu’il y a moins d’hommes à marier que de femmes’ (Adams and Segal 1948: 6). 52. See for example (Doane 1991; Kaplan 1998: 31; 64– 5; 117; Copjec 1993: 24; Silver and Brookover 1996: 267). 53. The same could be said of other genres, particularly French contemporary melodrama and costume drama.

5

Fatal(e) Passions: Tragic Fatalitaires and Star-Crossed Lovers

1. (Jankowiak 2011). 2. (Stendhal 1853).

233

Notes to Pages 72 –6 3. Despite its misleading (and factually inaccurate) title, Margaret Yalom’s How The French Invented Love (2012) provides an informed, trans-historical review of romantic love in French literature. 4. (Jankowiak 2016: 110). 5. See for example (Jankowiak and Fischer 1992; Jankowiak 2008). 6. (Hatfield, Bensman and Rapson 2012: 159). 7. For a succinct recent review of The Evolution of Love, see (Buss 2006). 8. There is currently no scientific agreement on when monogamous human pairbonding evolved. Fossil evidence for Homo erectus (1.5–2 million years ago) shows that males and females were of comparable size, pointing to the existence of pair-bonds. Strong sexual dimorphism tends to correlate with male intra-sexual competition: males grow much bigger than females in species where there is constant violent competition for access to females (e.g. gorillas). Pair-bonded primates are similarly sized (e.g. gibbons). Some fossil evidence suggests that pair-bonds may be even older, predating Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species thought to have lived 4.4 million years ago, around 3 million years after the split between apes and humans. See (Edgar 2014) for a review. 9. (Fisher 2006; Fisher et al., 2016). 10. See for example (Fisher 1998). 11. The romantic lovers appear less often in American noir, and are generally on the run. They may be ill-fated innocents: You Only Live Once (Lang 1937); They Live by Night (Ray 1947); or antisocial criminals: Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950) (See Silver and Brookover 1996). 12. For a recent review of scientific attempts to measure passionate love, see (Hatfield, Bensman and Rapson 2012). 13. The love attitudes scale (LAS) was designed by psychologists Clyde and Susan Hendrick in 1986 and updated in 1998. Definitions adapted from (Hendrick and Hendrick 2006: 153). 14. See (Loubier 2002; Ursini 2007). 15. The key combination of Gabin and poetic realist co-auteurs, Carné and Prévert, to the star’s pre-war success is made cruelly evident by their absence. The pair refused the film in 1938 when Gabin first proposed it (he had purchased the screen rights to Pierre-René Wolf’s novel on its release), and again in 1945. It is worth noting that without Gabin, Carné and Prévert also failed to translate their poetic realist vision to the post-war context: viz. the similar ‘failure’ of Les portes de la nuit [Gates of The Night] (1946), featuring newcomers Yves Montand and Nathalie Nattier, last minute replacements for Gabin and Dietrich who were originally to star in the film as another pair of star-crossed lovers. 16. (Vincendeau 1993: 162). 17. ‘Me voilà libre et riche. Je vous offre infiniment mieux que l’amour.’ 18. ‘Goujat. Roumagnac vaut 100 fois mieux que toi.’ 19. ‘Tu vas te taire oui. Menteuse. Saleté.’ Lacombe’s camera mimics Renoir in La bête humaine, panning away to avoid showing the actual murder.

234

Notes to Pages 77 –86 20. While Martin Roumagnac’s 2.5 million ticket sales is more than respectable by today’s standards, the film lagged far behind the number one French hit of 1946, Resistance spy drama, Mission Spéciale (6,781,120) (see Appendix 2), which came in just behind Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (7,835,702). 21. Gabin’s French biographer (Brunelin 1994: 336– 424) titles his chapter on the postwar period as the actor’s ‘période grise’ or grey period. Chapters 9 and 10 of this book cover his subsequent return to stardom in 1954. 22. Gabin again plays the tragic lover, opposite a loyal good woman as fatalitaire in Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga] (Clément 1949); La Vierge du Rhin [Rhine Virgin] (Grangier, 1953); Leur dernière nuit [Their Last Night] (Lacombe 1953); Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance] (Verneuil 1955). 23. According to (Azzopardi 1997: 18). 24. Lacombe’s film is far less misogynous than Wolf’s original (1935) novel, in which Blanche’s character is a scheming, lying garce. 25. (Schmitt 2005a: 266; Campbell and Ellis 2005: 433– 4). 26. For a comprehensive review of studies and literature to date, see (Sagarin 2005). I will extend discussion of sexual jealousy in Chapter 9. 27. For detailed discussion of each film, see Susan Hayward’s excellent monograph on Signoret (2004). 28. (Hayward 2004: 77 –87). 29. See for example (Burch and Sellier 1996: 263; Naumann 2001: 56). 30. (Hayward 2004: 112– 9). 31. (Leahy 2007: 49– 53). 32. This reading of Hayward (2004: 112– 113) originally appeared in Dark Crossings (Walker 2009b: 137– 138). 33. (Doane 1991: 17 –43). 34. (Hayward 2004: 82). 35. (Leahy 2007: 66). 36. Burch and Sellier (1996: 263) were among the first to praise Casque d’or’s egalitarian sexual politics, describing Becker’s Manda as a ‘New Man who has no need to dominate (women in particular) to exist’. 37. Vian’s original screenplay (1989) modified much of the plot and changed the names of the novel’s three central characters and main town. Vian and Gast fell out over the latter’s subsequent modifications to the screenplay and a legal battle ensued. The extremely fraught situation surrounding the film’s genesis (see Arnaud 1974), compounded by Vian’s untimely death from a heart attack at a press screening, was a near fatal blow in terms of critical reception, Gast’s film being more or less lynched by the Parisian literati. Nonetheless, Vian’s name remained atop the opening credits and J’irai cracher did very respectably at the box-office in France, totalling almost three and half million entries in 1959, making it the ninth biggest selling French film of that year, just behind Truffaut’s 400 Blows. 38. (Walker 2009a: 128– 9).

235

Notes to Pages 87 –95 39. Like Vian, first-time director Gast had never been to the USA when he undertook the project, and for budgetary reasons the entire film was shot in France: on location near Fréjus and in the Victorine Studios in Nice. 40. ‘T’es beau Joe. T’as des épaules de boxeur noir.’ 41. ‘Elles, au moins elles se donnent . . . .’ 42. The streets of Trenton were built on the very set that had once recreated the famous Boulevard du Crime of Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), the epitome of poetic realism and one of Gast’s most loved films. 43. In (Vincendeau 1993: 162; Glâtre and Millot 2004: 38). 44. (Burch and Sellier 1996: 263): ‘le tranquille défi de ce personnage féminin constituait sans doute en 1952 une provocation trop directe . . . pour que le public et les critiques (masculins) puissent le supporter.’ 45. Dédée d’Anvers (1948) had been a big hit for Signoret, attracting over 3 million spectators at the French box office (3,077,336) while Casque d’Or (1952) didn’t quite reach the 2 million mark (1,917,248). 46. Two other huge popular successes of the Liberation feature sexually free female lead characters: Arletty as free-spirited Garance in Carné and Prévert’s masterpiece, Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] (4,805,403) and Michele Prèsle in Christian Jacque’s screen adaptation of Maupassant’s generous, patriotic prostitute Boule de suif (3,000,550). 47. If Casque d’or was not initially as commercially successful as Signoret’s two other prostitute films, I would suggest the film’s unusual genre mixing as a key factor. A period costume drama with a social realist, intimist focus (on the everyday lives and loves of small-time career criminals and prostitutes) represents a highly original combination that would have frustrated conservative audience expectations for a high production value, grand scale melodrama with lavish sets and costumes, and centring on the wealthy upper echelons of society.

6

‘Thou Shalt Not Covet’: Adulterous Fatalitaires

1. (Campbell and Ellis 2005). The most comprehensive, cross-cultural studies of human mate preferences have been undertaken by Davis Buss (1989) and Richard Lippa (2009), as noted. 2. The ‘bodyguard hypothesis’ (Smuts 1992; Mesnick 1997) proposes that for human (and other) females, male protection from other males is a key driver of (sexual alliances and) pair-bonding. See Chapter 9 for more detailed discussion. 3. For a discussion of women’s polyandrous mating strategies, see (Hrdy 2000). 4. David Schmitt (2014) gives a comprehensive review of the predictions of and evidence for sexual strategies theory. 5. (Schmitt 2014: 8). 6. (Schmitt 2014: 22).

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Notes to Pages 97 –108 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

(Grossman 2009). (Hare 2003). (Grossman 2009: 46). ‘C’est gracieux mais c’est un peu bête! . . . j’ai trimé dans la vie. C’est ma récompense d’avoir pu me payer ca pour mes vieux jours.’ Chenal conceals Corinne Luchaire’s long blonde hair beneath a rather unflattering dark wig, perhaps to bring her more in line with the novel, perhaps to contrast her with the ‘other’ woman, with whom Frank will have an affair later in the film, played by another blonde beauty, Florence Marly, Chenal’s wife. (Porfirio 1985: 106–7). ‘Tu dois sortir de l’enfer, toi!’ Cora’s romantic idealism is also underlined in Cain but absent from Garnett’s film until the final act, eight minutes before the end, when she announces her pregnancy. ‘Tout m’est égal. J’aime Frank. Rien d’autre ne compte. Il m’a lâchée. . . je ne l’aurais jamais lâché, moi.’ (Cain 1934: 141– 2). At 1h 04: ‘Lâche ! Tu m’as lâchée le premier jour . . . une seule chose propre. Nous avions un grand amour. Tu as flanché le 1er jour . . . J’aurais préféré 100 fois si nous avions été condamnés. Nous avions signé un pacte. Comme si nous étions ensemble tout en haut d’une montagne.’ ‘Vous pouvez rien pour moi. L’enfer j’y crois pas. Votre paradis je m’en fous. Je vais rejoindre Cora. Je vais la retrouver c’est là mon paradis à moi. . . .’ Carné’s Postman project was to star Gabin and Viviane Romance but fell through due to Romance’s unavailability (Turk 1989: 378). Renoir had also planned to adapt Postman and once the project fell through, sent Visconti his script in 1939. It is unlikely that the latter had seen Chenal’s film in 1939 as it was not released in Italy; however, that did not prevent Chenal’s producers, Gladiator Films, from taking a plagiarism suit out against Visconti’s film (Lagny 1996: 118– 20). For a perceptive reading of Carné’s adaptation and intertextual links to his previous films, see Kate Griffiths (2011). Hayward (2004: 99) quotes Michel Pérez’s (1994: 22) monograph on Marcel Carné. (Buss 1994: 52). Vincendeau (2000: 126) also notes how the impact of Moreau’s performance during the telephone scene is given cult status by her image’s featuring on a France Telecom phone card series. Ronet had played an unscrupulous gigolo in Gueule d’Ange [Pleasures and Vices] (Blistene 1955) whose French title translates as ‘Angel Face’. Pace Sellier (2001), who reads the film as a misogynistic mise en scène of male entrapment by a stereotypical femme fatale.

237

Notes to Pages 109 –20 27. Malle defended his unflattering mise en scène of Moreau’s Florence, going against his crew’s professional advice to film his female lead in a more glamorous light and braving criticism by the press for rendering his star ‘ugly’; preferring instead to portray her raw emotion (French and Malle 1993: 12). 28. ‘Là, nous sommes ensemble. Tu vois bien qu’on peut pas nous séparer.’ 29. (Grossman 2009: 50). 30. ‘Un couple basé sur l’amour (cérébral ou sensuel) n’est jamais monstrueux, quels que soient l’âge, la condition, la race de ceux qui le composent. Ce qui est monstrueux, c’est le mariage de raison ou d’intérêt.’ In (Sellier 2015: 96).

7

Bad Girls

1. (Hayward 2005a). 2. (Graves and Patai 1964: 65– 9). 3. For an extended discussion of the Pandora myth and recurring Western cultural associations of feminine beauty and evil, see (Remaury 2000: 63– 4). 4. Various studies indicate that extra-pair mating in humans is around 50 per cent for men, 30 per cent for women: (Buss 1999) in (Schuiling 2003: 57). 5. See, for example (Maxfield 1996; Place 1980; Doane 1991). 6. (Dyer 2002: 110). 7. See for example (Doane 1991: 91; Gledhill 1998: 28). 8. Panique’s unscrupulous, murderous seducer might equally be classified as an homme fatal: see Chapter 8. 9. See Susan Hayward’s (2005b, 2010) thorough analyses. 10. The cover photo of the English version of Burch and Sellier’s classic study, La guerre des sexes (2013) is a shot of the devoted Dupont (Vuibert) kissing the hand of the haughty, bored-looking Janine (Darrieux). 11. This is the English equivalent of the French title which translates roughly as (one would give her) ‘communion without confession’. 12. (Travers 2016). 13. See (Pillard 2014: 51– 6). 14. Calls for an end to the purges of collaborators, amnesty for ex-Vichy administrators and for the imprisoned Pétain himself (still seen by many on the right as a hero who had sacrificed himself for the nation, struggling to save France from the Nazi occupier) corresponded with the expulsion of the Communists from the government in 1947 and the beginning of the Cold War. See (Rousso 1991: 27– 42). My reading of Confession as contributing to what Rousso would term the ‘Vichy syndrome’ makes sense in the light of director Autant-Lara’s later shift from far-left to far-right political activism: from a staunch member of the Communist-leaning CGT trade union, in 1989 he was elected to the European Parliament as a member of Jean-Marie LePen’s Front National, before being removed for anti-Semitic slurs against socialist politician, Simone Veil.

238

Notes to Pages 120 –7 15. Susan Hayward (2005b, 2010) argues that Diaboliques effects a queer double twist – it is the body of the husband, male faux victim that is investigated (Cherchez la femme, c’est l’homme!), which fragments the figure of the fatale and produces a strange returning repressed of the source novel’s lesbian narrative. In Boileau and Narcejac’s Celle qui n’était plus (1952), the feeble husband is the victim of his wife and his mistress, who turn out to be lovers, and who literally get away with murder. 16. Sexual coyness as a front for duplicity is also a feature of Luis Saslavsky’s Les Louves [Demoniac] (1957). As often happens in French noir, the fatale function is distributed across two characters: the ‘hero’ (Francois Perrier as a concert pianist and escaped POW with a shady past, who steals the identity of his dead co-escapee) is torn between Jeanne Moreau’s sensual, unruly fatalitaire and Micheline Presle’s prudish, proper older sister. It is the latter who turns out to be evil. first poisoning her sister (dressing up the crime as a suicide) then attempting to poison her husband. Although he discovers her murderous intent and manages to neutralise her, it is too late to save himself and both end up dead. 17. See Appendix 2. 18. (Rollet 2012). 19. The exception is Du rififi chez les femmes, 1959: see Chapter 10. 20. Burch and Sellier (1996: 261) note the film’s extremely weak distribution and box office. CBO figures give 716,844; 68th/72 French films released in 1954. 21. (Turk 1989: 387). 22. (Conway 2004: 5). 23. The thought of a woman replacing her husband in the professional arena appears a terrifying prospect. Viz. Henri Decoin’s (deservedly) little known film gris, Les Intrigantes (1954), starring Jeanne Moreau as a ruthlessly ambitious adulteress who has her husband interned in a psychiatric clinic (ostensibly to save him from a murder charge) so that she can take over his theatre. Luckily for the husband, he is saved, in extremis, by his good-girl secretary, who has been secretly in love with him and will clearly be rewarded by getting her man. As Geneviève Sellier (2012: 55) notes, the film’s major weakness lies in the scenario’s construction of Moreau’s character, whose sudden evolution from loving wife to adulterous garce is quite unconvincing (despite her strong performance). 24. See (Le Gras 2015). 25. Michèle Mercier would become a huge popular star in the 1960s as the resourceful, eponymous heroine of the Angélique costume dramas. 26. CBO gives box office for Manivelle as 2,083,608; 24th/84 French releases. 27. (Givray 1957: 61). 28. (Weiler 1958). 29. This sinister twist is an invention of the filmmakers. In Hadley Chase, the hero is motivated more by money than desire for the femme: realising her evil nature from the start, his erotic attentions are quickly transferred to the smart young

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Notes to Pages 127 –40

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

8

student hired as a maid, with whom he falls genuinely in love although (perhaps because . . .) there is no sexual relationship between them. His (failed) plan is to get half the insurance money and run off to South America with her. See, for example (Badcock 2000: 8 –9; Dabbs and Dabbs 2000). (Low 2000: 115). (Chagnon 1992) in (Ridley 2003: 240). (Buss 1989). See, for example (Thornhill and Grammer 1999). For a recent review of adaptationist studies of physical attractiveness in both men and women, see (Sugiyama 2015). On the other hand, psychoanalytical readings of the fatale that draw on Deleuze’s theorisation of masochism, in particular appear to provide a more plausible account of the visual and sexual power of the fatale (Studlar 1984). In their emphasis on the primacy of the mother, masochistic theories are perhaps less incompatible with a biocultural perspective. Maria Montez’s Spanishness inevitably evokes the corrida. Interestingly, Daniel Gélin played a matador in the Franco-Spanish colour melodrama Sang et Lumières [Beauty and The Bullfighter] (Rouquier and Suay, 1954), costarring Zsa Zsa Gabor as an irredeemable garce and Christine Carère as devoted ingénue. (Burch and Sellier 1996: 296– 302). (Place 1998: 56). Of course, noir also foregrounds male violence and criminality: see Chapters 9 and 10. (Campbell 2002: 221– 2). (Archer 2000). (Williams 1993). (Pidduck 1995).

Fatal Men

1. Vincendeau uses the term more broadly, notably applying it to Gabin in his tragic late 1930s poetic realist roles, as ‘a tragic hero whose fate fatally crossed with crime and death . . . a romantic figure, an homme fatal though fatal mostly to himself’ (2000: 62). 2. André Cayatte’s Le Miroir à Deux Faces / The Mirror Has Two Faces (1958) is an interesting twist, featuring a singularly unhandsome fatal man (comic actor Bourvil as a miserly, mean-spirited maths teacher) who tricks a homely spinster (beautiful Michèle Morgan, wearing an unsightly prosthetic nose) into marriage. Years later, when his wife is providentially offered cosmetic surgery, it is her husband’s true face that is revealed: after attempting to rape her, he murders the surgeon in a fit of jealous rage. See (Pillard 2014: 38–43). 3. See Kramer (2004).

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Notes to Pages 141 –8 4. Bonnes is one of very few classic French noirs to involve a female writer at any stage of production. Annette de Wademant was also co-dialoguist of our next film, Une manche et la belle. The fatal male in Le salaire du péché [The Wages of Sin] (de la Patellière, 1956) featuring another social-climbing journalist as narcissistic, murderous homme fatal, was also adapted from an American woman crime writer, Nancy Rutledge. Emily will Know, 1949, was published by Gallimard the following year as Emily le saura! (1950). 5. (Néry 1954; Arlaud 1954; Ro 1955). 6. Maupassant’s Bel ami was remade by Daquin in the same year as Bonnes but was not released until 1957 and was not a commercial success. 7. For Communist commentator Georges Sadoul (1954), the film was yet another product of American plagiarism. 8. Mistress Maggy Lang’s back-story is narrated in the present, and obliquely, via the other women’s flashbacks. 9. The ubiquity of the ‘shotgun strategy’ among the respectable upper-middle class is suggested when we learn Cécile’s mother had used it to force her own father to agree to her marriage. 10. Interestingly, Auclair’s character is here in the position of the amoral Manon of Clouzot’s eponymous film, whereas Constance plays the moralist, as did Auclair’s somewhat sanctimonious Des Grieux. 11. (Fossati et al., 2015: 423 –4). 12. McLeod (2007) summarises Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980). But see Hrdy (2009: 111– 41: Chapter 4) for recent expansions of attachment theory to include multiple attachments to allo-parents. 13. See (Fossati et al., 2015: 423). For a well-informed review of narcissism (and infamous narcissists) in contemporary Western culture, see (Manne 2015). 14. Daniel Gélin’s tortured homme fatal anti-hero of Saslavsky’s 1954 La neige était sale [Stain in the Snow], whose mother (an ex-prostitute and brothel keeper) is forced to put him into care as a small child, can also be read as suffering from violently avoidant attachment syndrome. He grows to be a cynical black marketeer, collaborator (the film is set during World War II, though the action is transferred to an unnamed Nazi occupied country) and murderer who callously exploits the love of a saintly ingénue. The sentimental dénouement will see him redeemed in extremis, realising his repressed love for the girl minutes before he is shot. 15. See, for example (Hill and Roberts 2011). 16. (Berger 1972: 48). 17. See for example (Lobbestael et al., 2014). 18. (Hanson 2007: 129). 19. (Kealy and Rasmussen 2012). 20. (Chase 1973a). 21. Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga] (Clément, France/Italy, 1949) is one of a series of postwar films (following Martin Roumagnac) in which Gabin

241

Notes to Pages 148 –60

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

attempted (somewhat unsuccessfully) to revive his poetic realist ill-fated romantic hero persona. (Mulvey 1989: 20). While I do not share Mulvey’s Lacanian reading of the ego ideal, I retain her observation that the glamour attached to male stardom (as idealised masculinity) and male characters depends on moral and physical agency. Being a pure object of erotic contemplation is counterproductive to masculine glamour. See for example (Leckman et al., 2006: 125). Dubreuilh (1957a, and b). The shot was apparently cut from American versions of the film, to the chagrin of leading American critic Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film for the New York Times (1958). See (Hrdy 2009: 257– 60). Douglas Sirk’s romantic melodrama, All that Heaven Allows (USA, 1955) is exceptional in featuring a love affair between an upper-middle-class widow with teenage children (Jayne Wyman, 1917 – 2007) and a handsome young nurseryman (Rock Hudson, 1925 –85). Another classic French noir that presents its female protagonist with the romantic choice between a socially respectable suitor and a criminal bad boy is Impasse des deux anges [Dilemma of Two Angels] (Tourneur, 1948). Starring Simone Signoret as a successful stage actress about to abandon her career to marry a wealthy aristocrat (Marcel Herrand), her fairy-tale engagement is disturbed by the reappearance of an old flame (Paul Meurisse), now a hardened criminal hired to steal her fiancé’s family jewels. The film’s dénouement, which sees Signoret’s character abandon the bad boy for the aristocrat, should result in an unequivocally happy ending. But the somewhat effete, pompous fiancé is far from a Prince Charming, despite his declaration of love. More importantly, the bad boy redeems himself by returning the stolen jewels before allowing himself to be gunned down, in a Gabin-like gesture of romantic despair, by his sinister fellow criminals. The final shot, showing the happy couple driving off to their wedding, oblivious to the bad boy’s sacrifice, shifts the ostensibly positive resolution to a bitter-sweet reflection on the death of love, suggesting the marriage may well be a romantic dead end, as suggested by the French title. From an intertextual perspective the fact that, just two years previously, Henri Vidal had played another homme fatal, an unscrupulous escaped criminal who takes advantage of an innocent young woman, in René Clair’s immensely popular Porte des Lilas [Gates of Paris] (1957) (which attracted over three million viewers), undoubtedly coloured the perceptions of a significant number of viewers, adding to the suspense. Michel Piccoli had played a romantically and ethically compromised police inspector in Série noire (1954), as we shall see, and would do so again in 1971, in Claude Sautet’s magnificent Max et les ferrailleurs. (Jean de Baroncelli 1959a).

242

Notes to Pages 162 –79

9

Law Enforcers Meet the Femme

1. Representative figures include Pierre Fresnay’s wartime roles as Inspecteur Wens; Albert Préjean’s Maigret performances (Cécile est morte (1944), Picpus (1943) and Les Caves du Majestic (1945)); or as private detective, Nestor Burma in 120 rue de la gare, as we have seen. 2. See Pillard (2014: 111– 210). 3. (Gorrara 2003: 4). 4. This can be the case for Maigret adaptations, notably Maigret tend un piège (Delannoy, 1958). 5. See (Amiel 2012). 6. (Chandler 1995: 977). 7. (Burch and Sellier 2001: 52). 8. (Vincendeau 2007: 34). 9. (Amiel 2012: 25). 10. (Borde and Chaumeton 2002: 7). 11. (Ramsland 2006: 50 –1). 12. (Guyon 2003). Vidocq’s Mémoires (1828) are available on-line at Project Gutenberg and in English translation (Vidocq 2014). For a recent biography, see (Morton 2011). 13. Scriptwriter Gaspard-Huit registered the first script, after Raymond Fauchet’s (1945) novel, Tué le soir, with the working title Leur compte sera réglé (Just Desserts) in 1946, but according to Chazal (1955), it was judged too ‘bold’. 14. (Vincendeau 2007: 38–9). 15. (Walker 2007: 10). 16. (Arlaud 1955; de Baroncelli 1955; Faure 1955; Néry 1955). 17. (Mauriac 1958). 18. (Dubreuilh 1958; Roche 1958). 19. (Favelli 1958). 20. (Vincendeau 1992b: 89– 91, 2000: 99 –102). 21. (See DVD extras, René Chateau 2001). 22. (Smuts 1992). 23. (Mesnick 1997: 218). 24. (Mesnick 1997: 219). 25. See (Buss 2000, 2006; Buss and Duntley 2011). 26. (Fletcher et al., 2013: 261–2). 27. (Daly 2015: 678). 28. A small number of South American hunter-gatherer cultures (Ache, Bari and Canela) have partially circumvented the problem of male paternity anxiety and sexual jealousy by a belief in shared paternity: all men who have had intercourse with a woman prior to pregnancy are deemed fathers and share paternal responsibilities. Nonetheless, among the Canela, who also practise

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Notes to Pages 179 –95

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

10

unrestricted and group sex, men must still be taught to repress feelings of jealousy (Fletcher et al., 2013: 252). (Vincendeau 2000: 92–7) In (Vincendeau 2000: 94). Gabin’s second wife and mother of his children, ex-Lanvin model Dominique (née Fournier), whom he married in 1949 and remained with until his death in 1976, born in 1918, was younger than him by 14 years. See Chapter 10. As the decade progressed, the star expressed discomfort at playing opposite much younger romantic partners, and after Malheur, refused such roles. (Buss 1989; Lippa 2009).

Love and Money: Gender and Consumption in Gangster Noir

1. (Ross 1995; Rolls and Walker 2009). 2. (See Trigg 2001). 3. As Higonnet (2002) notes, ‘the post-war period marked a highpoint for exchanges between Parisians and Black Americans, including GIs, jazzmen, and now famous activists and writers, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes.’ 4. (Black 2011: 71– 2). 5. Rififi’s Tony is a darker, more ambiguous character, as we shall see. 6. (Walker 2009c: 153– 4). 7. (See Vincendeau 2003). 8. (Boehm 1999). 9. ‘From microbes to mammals, cooperation is selected-for in harsh, uncertain and unpredictable environments’ (Heininger 2015: 2). 10. (Guicharnaud and Goldman 1956: 12). 11. By contrast, even though Anne is shot in high angle in the scene mentioned previously, her seductive power over the male protagonist is nonetheless emphasised. 12. Riton/Josie (Grisbi); Cesar/Viviana (Rififi); Paulo/Anne (Bob). 13. (Kalifa 2011: 257–8). 14. (Walker 2009a: 122). 15. Bob Swaim’s documentary, France Made in USA (Arte, 2007), which retraces the American presence in France during the postwar decades and its farreaching impact on French society, makes this point nicely. 16. (Vernet 2009: 66). 17. (Harvey 1998: 36). 18. (Bruzzi 1997). 19. (Ross 1995: 15– 70).

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Notes to Pages 195 –204 20. The Citroen front wheel-drive Traction was made infamous by the Traction Gang, led by the notorious, Pierre Loutrel a.k.a Pierrot le Fou, the inspiration for Les amants maudits, as we have seen. 21. (Vernet 2009: 63). 22. Simca had recently been purchased from the Italians. 23. Riton drives the slightly less prestigious Aronde. 24. (Vernet 2009: 65). 25. (In Chapeau Bob 2003). 26. (Miller 2000: 123). 27. (Miller 2010: 92). 28. Viz. La belle Américaine, 1961, a popular comedy directed by Robert Dhéry with comic star, Louis de Funes, on the trials and tribulations that befall a factory employee after he ‘acquires’ a Cadillac. 29. Thanks to Dominique Jeannerod for pointing this out. 30. Moreover, the on-screen relationship probably helped to assuage very real French fears over the presence on their soil of thousands of American troops, many of whom were involved in sexual relationships with French women (Viz. France Made in USA). 31. The dance routine appears loosely modeled on the popular Danse des apaches, which originated among the Belle Epoque underworld as seen in Casque d’Or. 32. ‘Rififi’, song translation from English subtitles. Original Lyrics (2nd Verse): ‘En amour ce n’est pas un tendre, Les p’tits mots doux j’peux les attendre . . . Il dit toujours que les souris, Ça doit marcher au rififi! Et quand y s’laisse aller pour de vrai, Rien que pour le principe, y beigne après! Mais quand il m’a bien corrigée, Qu’auprès d’lui je suis allongée . . . Pour retourner au paradis, C’est moi qui d’mande du rififi . . . .’ 33. (Phillips 2009: 64). 34. (E.g. Phillips 2009: 65– 6; Burch and Sellier 1996). 35. (See Kalifa 2011: 257– 8). 36. See (Schubart 2007). 37. Du rififi chez les femmes totalled 1,196,171 entries in 1959, 45th/73 French productions released that year and 7th/15 French polars (CBO box office). 38. (De Baroncelli 1959b; Garson 1959; Guyonnet 1959; Magnon 1959). 39. Title song: ‘L’argent’/’Money’. Sample of original lyrics: ‘L’argent . . . Il est le cœur du monde . . . Il est le roi, il fait la loi. Par son pouvoir le minus le raté a du talent . . . pour les fourrures les diamants . . . pour être élégant, intelligent; pour faire oublier sa laideur, sa bêtise . . . Faut de l’argent . . . Pour s’offrir un cœur . . . et pour les honneurs . . . moins que rien pourtant il tient le bien et le mal dans ses mains . . . L’argent, que je déplore, l’argent moi je l’adore.’ 40. (Miller 2010: 76). 41. (Colm Hogan 2011: 138). 42. Viz. the self-righteous, Hays Code-imposed coda to Asphalt Jungle.

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Notes to Pages 207 –11

Classic French Noir: The Dark Side of ‘Quality’ Cinema (1946 –59) 1. (Hubert-Lacombe 1996: 153; Walker 2009a: 119– 20). 2. The French ‘Tradition of Quality’ was famously decried as stuffy and passé by then Cahiers critic and aspiring filmmaker Francois Truffaut (1954). 3. NB: tables include only French (co-)produced films, excluding the often hugely popular Hollywood productions (which beat the number one French film in 8/14 years, with super-productions like Bambi (1948, 10.6 million); Gone with The Wind (1950; 16.7 million); and The Ten Commandments (1958; 14.2 million). In 1957 the top feature was British war film Bridge Over the River Kwai (13.4 million). 4. Data is taken from French box office site, CBO. While the CBO database does not capture every single French production, missing entries probably number fewer than four (little known) films per year. 5. (Burch and Sellier 2001: 47). 6. (Burch and Sellier 2001: 61). 7. (Cowie 1997: 125). 8. (Constable 2005), 9. Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (Milestone, 1946), Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett 1946), The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1948).

246

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Index

120 Rue de la gare see Daniel-Norman, Jacques Adams, Clifford, 66 adutery, 63, 94 –112, 116, 135, 211 Africa, 6, 40, 103 Central African Republic, 45 French Equatorial, 46 Gabon, 46 Liberia, 45 North, 6, 46 Sub-Saharan, 6 West, 46 agency female, 11, 34, 35, 41, 52, 53, 78, 80, 81, 83, 91, 92, 93, 101, 108, 112, 119, 126, 134, 135, 180, 181, 192, 201, 212 male, 11, 35, 83, 148, 150, 161, 202, 242n.22 narrative, 53 Agostini, Philippe, 201 Aimé, Anouk, 139 Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter, 10 Algeria, 86 Civil War, 7 allegory, 33, 49, 119, 193, 195, 230n.18 Allégret, Yves, 55, 56, 80, 84, 116 Dédée d’Anvers, 80, 85, 86, 93, 139, 209, 236n.45

Les démons de l’aube [Dawn Devils], 56, 80 Manèges [The Cheat], 55, 116, 117, 119, 122, 209 American noir, 3, 4, 5, 6, 16, 17, 23, 27, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 65, 67, 82, 89, 93, 107, 108, 117, 120, 121, 122, 161, 165, 170, 198, 210, 234n.11 Andrew, Dudley, 21, 226n.7 anti-Semitism, 32, 39, 119, 238n.14 Arletty (Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat), 19, 21, 124, 125, 126, 229n.5, 236n.46 Arnoul, Franc oise, 56, 155 Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud [Lift to the Scaffold] see Malle, Louis Asphalt Jungle, The see Huston, John Astruc, Alexandre, 139 Les Mauvaises Rencontres, 139 Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga] see Clément, René Auclair, Michel, 140, 141, 152, 241n.10 Audiard, Michel, 127 Auntant-Lara, Claude, 117, 119, 153, 172–9, 238n.14 Le Bon Dieu sans Confession, 55, 117, 119, 238n.14 En cas de Malheur [Love is my Profession], 172 –9, 180, 182, 244n.32 Le diable au corps, 153 Le rouge et le noir [The Red and the Black], 153

261

Classic French Noir Auschwitz, 36 Azzopardi, Michel, 20 Balin, Mireille, 20, 34, 229n.8 Balzac, Honoré de, 166 Bardot, Brigitte, 172, 173–6, 180– 1, 182 beauty, 94, 130 feminine, 8, 83, 115, 123, 130, 131, 134, 150, 153, 174, 238n.3 masculine, 83, 150, 182 Becker, Jacques, 80, 81, 84, 168, 184, 193, 197, 235n.36 Casque d’or, 80, 81, 83– 6, 93, 139, 235n.36, 236n.45, 236n.47, 245n.31 Touchez pas au Grisbi [Hands off the Loot], 168, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196–8, 203 Belgium, 31 Berger, John, 145 Berger, Nicole, 172 Bernard-Roland, 124–6 Bernard-Roland, Portrait d’un Assassin, 124– 6, 127, 132 Bernard, Paul, 35, 119 Big Heat, The see Lang, Fritz bioculture, 4, 9 –10, 11, 12 –13, 14– 15, 62, 64, 83, 84, 93, 130, 133, 140, 163, 240n.35 biology, 8, 11, 12 Black, Donald, 187 Blain, Gérard, 120 Blier, Bernard, 56, 119, 163 Blistène, Marcel, 80, 237n.25 Gueule d’Ange [Pleasures and Vices], 140 Macadam, 80, 85, 93, 140, 209 Blum, Leon, 230n.1 Bob Le Flambeur [Bob The Gambler] see Melville, Jean-Pierre bodyguard hypothesis, 176 –81, 182, 192, 200, 236n.2 Bogart, Humphrey, 164

Bonnes à tuer [One Step to Eternity] see Decoin, Henri Bonnet, Franc oise, 195 Borde, Raymond, 4, 165 Bourdieu, Pierre, 90, 135, 184 Bowlby, John, 10, 143– 4 box office, 20, 40, 56, 74, 93, 122, 163, 168, 209, 229n.8, 230n.18, 232n.17, 235n.37, 236n.45, 239n.20, 239n.26, 245n.37, 246n.4 Brasseur, Pierre, 124, 231n.21 Bufferd, Marilyn, 197 Burch, Noel, 20, 34, 48, 132, 209, 229n.16, 235n.36, 238n.10, 239n.20 Buss, David, 15 Buss, Robin, 6 Butler, Judith, 9 Cain, James M., The Postman Always Rings Twice, 19, 96– 8, 100–3, 104, 105, 107, 112, 126, 152, 157, 159, 237n.14, 237n.19, 237n.20 Calvet, Corinne, 142 capitalism, 8, 83, 186, 195, 198 Carné, Marcel, 19, 33, 39, 76, 89, 90, 97, 104–6, 124, 229n.4, 230n.4, 231n.21, 234n.15, 236n.42, 236n.46, 237n.19 Hôtel du nord, 21, 124, 229n.5 Le jour se lève [Daybreak], 19, 28, 76, 77, 89, 90, 124 Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise], 76, 124, 236n/42, 236n.46 Quai des Brumes [Port of Shadows], 19, 90, 97 Thérèse Raquin [The Adulteress], 95, 104– 6, 111, 112 Casque d’or see Becker, Jacques casual sex, 62, 65, 67 see also promiscuity, sociosexuality Cauchey, Daniel, 88 Chandler, Raymond, 163, 164

262

Index chastity, female, 63, 114 Chaumeton, Etienne, 4, 165 Chazal, Robert, 168, 243n.13 Chenal, Pierre, 19, 96– 7, 99, 100– 4, 105, 112, 121, 155– 7, 158– 9, 160, 166, 167, 171, 237n.11, 237n.20 La Bête à L’Affût [Beast at Bay], 140, 155– 7, 161 La maison du Maltais [Sirocco], 229n.5, 229n.8 Le dernier tournant [The Last Turn], 19, 96– 7, 99, 101, 104, 107, 111, 121, 152, 157 Rafles sur la ville, 166, 167, 171 China, 72 Chopra-Gant, Mike, 47 Ciampi, Yves, 45, 47 Les héros sont fatigués [Heroes and Sinners], 45– 9 Citizen Kane see Welles, Orson class, 28, 46, 86– 93, 111, 194, 241n.9 Clément, Andrée, 42 Clément, René 140, 230n.18, 241n.21 Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga], 148, 182, 235n.22, 241n.21 Monsieur Ripois [Knave of Hearts], 140 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 34, 36 –8, 39, 56–9, 74, 79, 80, 116, 117, 119, 120, 127, 140, 163, 180, 231n.22, 231n.28, 241n.10 L’Assassin habite au, 21 [The Murderer Lives at Number, 21], 34 Le corbeau [The Raven] 36– 8, 39, 42, 44, 49, 57, 58, 119 Le salaire de la peur [Wages of Sin], 231n.28 Les Diaboliques, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 127, 209, 239n.15 Manon, 56– 9, 65, 74, 140, 209, 232n.17, 241n.10 Quai des Orfèvres [Jenny Lamour], 80, 163, 164, 181, 182, 209

Clouzot, Vera, 117 Cocteau, Jean, 40 Cold War, 46, 238n.14 collaboration see Vichy regime Common Market, 49 communism, 32, 39, 40, 54, 238n.14 concentration camps, French, 32, 36 Constantine, Eddie, 162, 226n.12 constructivism, 8– 9, 12, 83 consumerism, 7, 192, 193, 196, 198, 203–4 consumption conspicuous, 183, 184–7, 188, 193, 195– 8, 203, 204 gendered, 183– 204 Continental Films, 39– 40, 231n.22 Corey, Isabelle, 196 Cosmides, Leda, 12 costume/costuming, 23, 43, 66, 78, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 88, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 109, 120, 121, 131, 143, 150, 151, 154, 166, 171, 192, 195 crime, 4 –5, 15, 26, 38, 85, 135, 170, 183, 240n.1 crime detection, 166 crime drama see also polar, le, 5, 33– 6, 40–1, 162, 207, 212, 230n.19 crime of passion, 78, 108, 134, 135, 170, 178 criminality, 35, 116, 135, 166, 167, 240n.39 Crossfire see Dmytryk, Edward cultural construction, 9, 83, 174 see also gender, role construction, 8, 9, 16, 174 culture, 3, 4, 7– 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 62, 63– 4, 71, 72, 83, 84, 92, 95, 112, 131, 174, 183, 196, 210, 228n.33 American, 6 consumer, 183, 192 Franco-German, 39 gangster, 183, 198– 201 honour

263

Classic French Noir see also honour, 187, 201, 203 Judeo-Christian, 113 Curtiz, Michael, 123, 231n.4 Mildred Pierce, 123, 231n.4 Daniel-Norman, Jacques, 40 120 Rue de la gare, 243n.1 Darrieux, Danielle, 117, 118– 9, 132, 133, 143, 152, 153, 238n.10 Darwin, Charles, 10, 15, 63, 184, 189, 228n.45 Dassin, Jules, 184, 188, 189, 191, 193, 198–201, 202, 203 Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi Means Trouble], 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198– 203, 204, 212, 239n.19, 244n.5 Davis, Miles, 107, 108, 110 de Baroncelli, Jean, 160 de Beauvoir, Simone, 60, 123, 173, 180 Le Deuxième sexe [The Second Sex], 123, 146 de Gaulle, General Charles, 31, 40, 54 de la Patellière, Denys, 126– 8, 241n.4 Le salaire du péché [The Wages of Sin], 241n.4 Retour de Manivelle, 126 –8, 130, 135, 239n.26 de Laclos, Choderlos, Les liaisons dangereuses, 71 de Maupassant, Guy, 141, 230n.18, 236n.46, 241n.6 Bel Ami, 141 Boule de suif [Angel and Sinner], 230n.18, 236n.46, 241n.6 Decoin, Henri, 42, 56, 116, 132, 140– 8, 164, 321n.22, 239n.23 Bonnes à tuer [One Step to Eternity], 140– 9, 151, 152, 153, 156, 160– 1, 241n.4, 241n.6 Entre onze heures et minuit [Between Eleven and Midnight], 164, 166, 181

La Chatte, 56 La fille du diable [Devil’s Daughter], 42 La vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth about Bébé Donge], 132 Le Bon Dieu sans confession, 116 Les Intrigantes Decoin, Razzia sur la Chnouf [Razzia], 168– 9, 171, 182, 190 Dédée d’Anvers see Allégret, Yves Delair, Suzy, 163, 164 Delannoy, Jean, 34 L’assassin a peur la nuit [The Murderer is Afraid at Night], 34 Delilah, 113 Delorme, Danièle, 120, 121, 122, 132 Demongeot, Catherine, 154 Demongeot, Mylène, 148, 152 Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance] see Verneuil, Henri Desmarets, Sophie, 41 Desny, Ivan, 117 Detour see Ulmer, Edgar G. Di San Servolo, Miriam (Myriam Petacci), 152 Dietrich, Marlene, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 178, 182, 234n.15 Dinan, Albert, 167 displacement, 8, 135 Dmytryk, Edward, 51, 227n.14, 231n.27 Crossfire, 231n.27 Murder My Sweet, 51, 231n.27 Double Indemnity see Wilder, Billy
Dreyfus, Jean-Paul Etienne see Le Chanois, Jean-Paul Du rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls] see Joffé, Alex Du rififi chez les hommes [Rififi Means Trouble], see Dassin, Jules Dubreuilh, Simone, 151, 154, 173 duplicity, female, 19, 45, 51, 79, 122, 127, 182, 211, 239n.16 Duvivier, Julien, 20, 33, 90, 116, 119, 120–2

264

Index La belle équipe [They were Five], 19 –20 Panique [Panic], 116, 117, 119, 209, 238n.8 Pépé le Moko, 20, 35, 90, 229n.8 Voici le temps des Assassins [Deadlier Than the Male], 120–2, 210 economic independence, women’s, 52, 55, 59, 117, 122– 3, 140, 210, 211 England, 66 Entre onze heures et minuit [Between Eleven and Midnight] see Decoin, Henri Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman] see Vadim, Roger European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 49 Eve, 113 evolution, 10– 2, 14, 15, 72, 143, 177 evolutionary psychology (EP), 9, 10– 2, 13, 228n.44, 228n.45 evolutionary science, 9, 12–3, 14, 183 evolutionary theory, 12, 14, 15– 6, 50, 62, 72, 131, 179, 203 Experiment Perilous see Tourneur, Jacques exploitation, 5, 17, 58, 67, 90, 105, 139, 140 fall guy, 16, 51, 108, 121, 161 fatal man, 3, 5, 16, 17, 67, 139–61, 209, 210, 211, 240n.2, 241n.4 see also homme fatal fatalitaire, 20 –7, 35, 43, 48, 53, 56, 57, 59, 67, 71– 73, 74– 112, 113, 116, 122, 135, 139, 148, 171, 180– 1, 203, 208, 209, 211 –2, 255, 229n.5, 235n.22, 239n.16 see also good-bad girls femininity, 8, 17, 83– 5 femininity, assertive, 59– 67 see also pro-sexuality, female

feminisation, 35, 149, 190 feminism/feminist, 3, 8, 15, 60, 130, 132, 135, 202, 213, 232n.26 femme fatale, 3, 5, 8, 16, 17, 18 –28, 34, 43, 49, 50– 6, 59, 65– 7, 74, 75, 76, 78–9, 80, 82, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113–24, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132–4, 135, 140, 151, 154, 159, 161, 164, 171, 180, 181, 190, 191, 201, 209, 210–2, 229n.4, 237n.26, 239n.15, 239n.16, 240n.35 fertility, female, 8, 153, 161, 174 Feuillère, Edwige, 172, 173, 181 fidelity, 55, 59, 79, 93, 127, 210 film gris (grey film), 5, 19, 79, 85, 139, 165, 208, 239n.23 Fisher, Helen, 72 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 71 Ford, Glenn, 23 Foucaud, Pierre, 167 Série noire, 7, 140, 164, 167, 168, 182, 184, 196, 202, 242n.30 Fourth Republic, 5, 49, 54, 58 Frank, Nino, 6, 97 Free French Army, 31, 40, 77, 189, 197 French Forces of the Interior (FFI), 40 Fresnay, Pierre, 36, 42, 44, 166, 231n.22, 243n.1 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 227n.20 castration anxiety, 8, 130, 170 fetishisation, 8, 130, 131 Oedipus complex, 8, 10, 131, 210 the unconscious, 9– 10 Fuller, Pick up on South Street, 82 Fuller, Sam, 82 Gabin, Jean, 18, 19, 21, 26, 28, 33, 35, 55, 74 –8, 86, 90, 93, 120, 121, 122, 132, 133, 148, 150, 153, 157, 158, 161, 166, 168– 9, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181– 2, 184, 189, 190, 193, 195, 197, 202,

265

Classic French Noir 210, 229n.5, 234n.15, 235n.21, 237n.19, 240n.1, 241n.21, 244n.31
Gaboriau, Emile, 166 gangster noir, 129, 172, 183 –204 gangster, as hero, 17, 34, 42, 44, 166, 167, 182 garces [bitches], 19 –20, 21, 37, 38, 49, 53, 55, 56, 59, 67, 74, 76, 79, 85, 91, 92, 116, 122, 139, 154, 180, 209, 210, 211, 223, 229n.8 Gardner, Ava, 51, 191 Garfield, John, 98 Garnett, Tay, 19, 96, 97– 104, 107, 112, 121, 237n.14 The Postman Always Rings Twice, 51, 96, 97– 104, 105, 107, 111, 112, 121, 152, 246n.9 Garnier, Christine, 45 Gast, Michel, 86– 93, 235n.37, 236n.39, 236n.42 J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I will Spit on your Graves], 86 –93, 157, 235n.37 Gautier, Théophile, 201 Gélin, Daniel, 75, 126, 127, 241n.14 gender, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14–5, 16, 17, 19– 20, 34, 38, 46, 83, 84, 86–93, 131, 145, 161, 183– 204, 209–10, 213 differences, 8, 14, 15, 63, 84, 228n.24 equality/inequality, 3, 5, 64, 66, 95, 180, 182, 211 role construction, 14 –5 roles, 7, 8, 11, 182, 184, 192, 203, 212 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes see Hawks, Howard Germany, 32, 33, 49 gigolo, 117, 139, 140, 149, 150, 160–1 Gilda see Vidor, Charles Giroud, Franc oise, 66 Goebbels, Joseph, 39 good and evil, boundaries between, 5, 37, 49, 82, 120

good-bad girls, 20, 21, 35, 49, 51, 67, 80, 82–3, 85, 93, 113, 122, 208, 211, 225, 229n.5, 231n.4 see also fatalitaire Goraguer, Alain, 87 Grahame, Gloria, 23, 158 Grangier, Gilles, 169, 235n.22 La Vierge du Rhin [Rhine Virgin], 235n.22 Le désordre et la nuit [Night Affair], 169, 172, 175, 182, 190, 195, 202 Gravey, Fernand, 99 Gremillon, Jean, 19, 34, 90, 123 Gueule d’Amour [Lady Killer], 20, 28, 90 L’amour d’une femme, 123 Le ciel est à vous [The Woman Who Dared], 34 Remorques [Stormy Waters], 19 Greven, Alfred, 39, 230n.14 Grossman, Julie, 97, 99, 111 Gueule d’Amour [Lady Killer] see Gremillon, Jean Gueule d’Ange [Pleasures and Vices] see Blistène, Marcel Guicharnaud, Jacques, 189 Guttentag, Marcia, 60, 62, 146, 232n.26, 233n.45 Habib, Ralph, 139 Le Compagnes de la nuit [Ladies of the Night], 139 Hadley Chase, James, 126, 128, 148, 150, 239n.29 There’s Always a Price Tag, 126 The Sucker Punch, 148 Hammett, Dashiell, 164 Harvey, Sylvia, 194 Hawks, Howard, 196 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196 Hayward, Susan, 32, 81– 2, 83 –4, 106, 113, 120, 239n.15 Hayworth, Rita, 51, 82, 142 heroism, 44, 56, 116, 230n.18

266

Index Herrand, Marcel, 76, 242n.28 Hitler, Adolf, 31, 32, 230n.1 Holland, 31 Hollywood, 5, 18, 19, 52, 77, 100, 142, 191, 196–7, 207, 229, 246n.3 homme fatal, 67, 86, 88, 128, 146, 149, 154, 160, 224 see also fatal man honour, 163–5, 186– 7 see also culture, honour Hossein, Robert, 168, 202 Hôtel du nord see Carné, Marcel Hrdy, Sarah, 15, 63 Hugo, Victor, 166 Human Desire see Lang, Fritz human life-history theory, 12– 3 Huston, John, 51, 186, 188 Asphalt Jungle, The, 186, 188, 245n.42 Maltese Falcon, The, 51, 154, 227n.14 Huxley, T.H., 10 idealisation, 28, 34, 38, 73, 242n.22 identity, 10 gender, 84 masculine, 32, 52 national, 184, 196 Impasse des deux anges [Dilemma of Two Angels] see Tourneur, Jacques infidelity emotional, 80 sexual, 55, 80, 178 ingénues, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 35, 65, 80, 85, 91, 121, 122, 127 injustice, 13, 40, 90, 112 colonial, 86, 87 patriarchal, 28, 122, 135 social, 90 Interlenghi, Franco, 173, 178 invasion, of France, 31 –2, 61 J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I will Spit on your Graves] see Gast, Michel Jacque, Christian- 35

Voyage sans espoir [Voyage without Hope], 35, 74 James, William, 12 Jewell, Richard, 97, 99 Jews/Jewish, 18, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 47, 96, 230n.1 Jezebel, 113 Joffé, Alex, 184 Du rififi chez les femmes [Riffraff Girls], 184, 186, 202, 203 Jouvet, Louis, 163– 4, 166, 170, 182, 229n.5 Jürgens, Curd, 45, 47, 49 Kedrova, Lila, 169, 171 Kelloway, Cecil, 99 Killers, The see Siodmak, Robert Kinsey Report, 66 L’amour d’une femme see Gremillon, Jean L’assassin a peur la nuit [The Murderer is Afraid at Night] see Delannoy, Jean L’Assassin habite au, 21 see Clouzot, Henri-Georges L’ennemi public no. 1 see Verneuil, Henri La belle équipe [They were Five] see Duvivier, Julien La Bête à L’Affût [Beast at Bay] see Chenal, Pierre La bête humaine [The Human Beast] see Renoir, Jean La Chatte see Decoin, Henri La Chienne see Renoir, Jean Lady from Shanghai, The see Welles, Orson La fille du diable [Devil’s Daughter] see Decoin, Henri La maison du Maltais [Sirocco] see Chenal, Pierre Long Night, The see Litvak, Anatole Lost Weekend, The see Wilder, Billy

267

Classic French Noir La vérité sur Bébé Donge see Decoin, Henri La Vierge du Rhin [Rhine Virgin] see Grangier, Gilles Lacombe, Georges, 74 –9, 84, 234n.19, 235n.22, 235n.24 Leur dernière nuit [Their Last Night], 182, 235n.22 Martin Roumagnac [The Room Upstairs], 74– 9, 84, 89, 178, 182, 235n.20, 241n.21 Lamy, Raymond, Miroir, 182 Lang, Fritz, 18, 23– 7, 33, 51, 82, 104, 229n.4, 229n.11 Big Heat, The, 82 Human Desire, 19, 23– 7, 51, 65, 107, 158 Scarlett Street, 229n.4 Woman in the Window, The, 227n.14 You Only Live Once, 234n.11 Laura see Preminger, Otto Laurent, Jacqueline, 19 law enforcers, 17, 162– 82, 188 see also police Le Bon Dieu sans Confession see Auntant-Lara, Claude Le Bon Dieu sans confession see Decoin, Henri Le Breton, Auguste, 184, 189, 199, 202 Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 39, 230n.14 Le ciel est à vous [The Woman Who Dared] see Gremillon, Jean Le Compagnes de la nuit [Ladies of the Night] see Habib, Ralph Le corbeau see Clouzot, Henri-Georges Le dernier tournant [The Last Turn] see Chenal, Pierre Le désordre et la nuit [Night Affair] see Grangier, Gilles Le diable au corps see Auntant-Lara, Claude Le jour se lève [Daybreak] see Carné, Marcel

Le rouge et le noir [The Red and the Black] see Auntant-Lara, Claude, 153 Le salaire de la peur [Wages of Sin] see Clouzot, Henri-Georges Le salaire du péché [The Wages of Sin] see de la Patellière, Denys Le Vigan, Robert, 96 Leahy, Sarah, 81, 83, 84 Leblanc, Maurice, 166 Leclerc, Ginette, 36, 45, 229n.5 Ledoux, Fernand, 25, 42 Les Amants Maudits [The Damned Lovers] see Rozier, Willy Les démons de l’aube [Dawn Devils] see Allégret, Yves Les Diaboliques see Clouzot, Henri-Georges Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise] see Carné, Marcel Les Intrigantes see Decoin, Henri, 239n.23 Les Mauvaises Rencontres see Astruc, Alexandre Leur dernière nuit [Their Last Night] see Lacombe, Georges Liberation, the (of France), 3, 39, 44, 45, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 74, 96, 119, 120, 126, 159, 185, 187, 197, 212, 230n.19, 231n.22 Liberation cinema, 5, 40 –1, 231n.21, 236n.46 lighting, 4, 18, 27, 89, 107, 108, 109, 131, 171 Lilith, 113–4 Litvak, Anatole, 18, 19 The Long Night, 19 Loutrel, Pierre (Pierrot Le Fou [Madman Pierre]), 45, 166, 245n.20 love styles agape, 73 –4, 78, 82, 93, 94, 111, 125, 126

268

Index eros, 73 –4, 78, 93, 94, 95, 111, 125, 126, 133 ludus, 74, 82, 125, 133 mania, 73 –4, 78, 125 pragma, 74, 95 storge, 74 love, romantic/passionate, 4, 7, 16, 71–3, 82, 83, 93, 95, 104, 111, 131, 150, 179, 183–204, 210, 211, 212 loyalty, 57, 59, 110, 187, 188, 202 Lualdi, Antonella, 86 Luchaire, Corinne, 96, 100, 102, 237n.11 lust, male, 44, 51, 73 Mac Orlan, Pierre, 18 Macadam see Blistène, Marcel, 140 male paranoia, 114– 6, 210 Malet, Leo, 40 –1, 231n.20 120 Rue de la gare, 40 Malle, Louis, 106 –11, 238n.27 Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud [Lift to the Scaffold], 95, 106– 11, 212 Maltese Falcon, The see Huston, John, 227n.14 Manèges [The Cheat] see Allégret, Yves Manon see Clouzot, Henri-Georges Manson, Hélèna, 57 Marly, Florence, 103, 237n.11 Marquand, Christian, 86, 88, 89 –90, 157 marriage market indices (MMI), 61 marriage arranged, 73 markets, 59 –63, 65– 7 of convenience/reason, 111 traditional, 95, 111, 211 Mars, Colette, 182 Marshall Plan, 7, 184, 187, 192 Marthe Richard law (1946), 58, 85 Martin Roumagnac [The Room Upstairs] see Lacombe, Georges

masculinity, 17, 34, 40, 43, 84, 125, 132, 142, 150, 182, 190, 191, 197, 203, 226n.12, 242n.22 crisis of, 3, 7, 16, 28, 50, 52, 53, 55, 59, 207, 211 flawed/toxic, 41– 9, 85, 210 hyper, 183, 186– 7, 203 mate selection, 4, 11, 210–1 mate value, 89, 116, 127, 156, 157, 161, 181, 186 mate-guarding, 63, 115, 133, 176, 177–8 Mauriac, Claude, 173 McGeer, Patricia, Follow as The Night, 141 media magazines Cinémonde, 111 Elle, 65– 6 newspapers, La Marseillaise, 44 Le Monde, 160 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 184, 185, 186, 189–90, 195–6 Bob Le Flambeur [Bob The Gambler], 184, 185, 186–7, 188, 189, 191, 193, 198, 203 Mercier, Michèle, 127, 239n.25 Mesnick, Sarah, 177 metaphor, 4, 5, 25, 38, 75, 102, 114, 146, 186, 189 Meurisse, Paul, 117, 242 Mildred Pierce see Curtiz, Michael Miller, Geoffrey, 196, 203 Miranda, Isa, 148, 150, 151, 152, 182 misogyny, 3, 20, 35, 55, 93, 100, 111, 112, 116, 117, 126, 164, 192, 199–200, 201, 202, 209, 212, 235n.24, 237n.26 modernisation, 7, 183, 192, 203, 212 modernity, 6, 25, 97, 192 –4, 195, 198, 203 monogamy, 13, 63, 64, 72, 80, 83, 93, 95, 114, 122, 228n.38, 234n.8

269

Classic French Noir Monsieur Ripois [Knave of Hearts] see Clément, René Montand, Yves, 45, 47, 48– 9, 231n.21, 231n.28, 134n.15 Montez, Maria, 124, 126, 132, 240n.36 morality, 93, 95, 160, 165, 173 Moreau, Jeanne, 106–7, 108– 9, 112, 190, 237n.24, 238n.27, 239n.16, 239n.23 Morgan, Michèle, 19, 126, 127, 132, 240n.2 Mulvey, Laura, 145, 150, 161, 191, 242n.22 Munroe, Marilyn, 196 Murder My Sweet see Dmytryk, Edward music, 18, 23, 27, 38, 87, 89, 97, 107, 108, 168, 199– 200 myth, 13, 17, 33, 114 patriarchal, 114, 135 Resistance, 41, 49, 119 narcissism, 10, 67, 78, 85, 121, 140, 143–5, 146, 160, 179, 195 narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), 144 narcotics, 73, 168–9 narrative, 4, 7, 20, 45, 65, 77, 78, 82, 92, 93, 111, 127, 141, 142, 147, 148, 149, 152, 163, 168, 169, 172, 181, 182, 209, 210, 211, 239n.15 closure, 162 focus, 7, 190 function, 171 power, 52, 190 punishment, 52, 111, 122, 135, 212 tension, 115, 161 meta, 107 National Assembly, 54 natural selection, 10 –1, 14 Nazism/Nazis, 18, 31, 32 –3, 36, 40, 44, 45, 49, 56, 58, 60, 85, 96, 119, 189, 238n.14 Neale, Steve, 4 New Zealand, 72

Nichols-Clark, Terry, 185 Noël, Magali, 169, 199 objectification, 129, 130, 132, 135, 149, 199 Occupation cinema, 5, 35, 37, 38, 39, 49, 124, 230n.19 occupation, Nazi (1940– 4), 3, 7, 31– 2, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 45, 54, 55, 78, 85, 96, 119– 20, 122, 159, 187, 197, 212 Ophüls, Max, 18, 229n.5 Sans lendemain [No Tomorrow] 229n.5 oppression, 8, 15, 28, 33, 108 optique, 4, 6, 18, 28, 162, 163, 212, 226n.7 Ossessione [Obsession] see Visconti, Luchino pair bonding, 11, 13, 16, 63, 114, 115, 127, 130, 163, 176–7, 228n.38, 234n.8, 236n.2 Pandora, 114, 127, 238n.3 Panique [Panic] see Duvivier, Julien parental investment female, 11, 63, 64 male, 11, 114, 115, 130 see also Trivers, Robert, parental investment theory (PIV) parental investment theory (PIV) see Trivers, Robert paternity anxiety, 63, 80, 115, 177, 210, 243n.28 Patisson, Danik, 167 patriarchy/patriarchs, 3, 8, 14, 15, 26, 20–1, 28, 34, 38, 42, 49, 52, 54, 57, 63, 65, 67, 73, 82, 83, 84, 93, 95, 99, 100, 104, 105, 112, 114, 115, 116, 122, 123, 131– 3, 134, 135, 140, 153, 154, 161, 163, 165, 168, 174, 180, 181, 186, 191, 209, 210, 212, 226n.12, 233n.31 peace/peacetime, 28, 47

270

Index Pépé le Moko see Duvivier, Julien Pétain, Field Marshall Philippe, 31– 2, 41, 44, 120, 238n.14 Peters, Jean, 82 Philipe, Gérard, 140, 153 Piaf, Edith, 125 Piccoli, Michel, 155, 160, 166, 242n.30 Pick up on South Street see Fuller, Sam Pièges [Personal Column] see Siodmak, Robert Pierrot Le Fou see Loutrel, Pierre Pillard, Thomas, 6, 226n.3, 226n.12 pimps, 85– 6, 139, 188, 192, 211 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 187 Place, Janey, 51 Poland, 31 polar, 5, 139, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 181, 207 see also crime drama police, 35, 36, 163, 165 –9, 172 see also law enforcers polyandry, 63, 236n.3 Popular Front, 28, 32, 158 Porfirio, Robert, 63 Portrait d’un Assassin see Bernard-Roland Postman Always Rings Twice, The see Garnett, Tay postwar cynicism, 4, 159, 160, 207, 212 postwar period (1946 – 59), 3, 6, 7, 20, 27, 41, 42, 49, 52 – 4, 55, 61, 62, 65 – 7, 75, 77, 81, 85, 97, 117, 121, 122, 124, 126, 140, 153, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167, 182, 184, 187, 196, 197, 211, 212, 244n.15 power colonial, 7 dyadic, 60, 65, 66, 95, 156, 211 erotics of, 81, 83, 85, 92, 112 female/feminine, 16, 122– 4, 125, 134– 5, 152, 172, 191, 192, 201, 209– 10, 240n.35

male/masculine, 15, 54, 81, 91, 125, 130, 142, 145, 146, 149, 190, 192, 209– 10, 227n.22 patriarchal, 49, 165, 168 political, 59 socio-economic, 66, 123, 150. 203 structural, 60, 61, 65, 156, 211 Preminger, Otto, 82, 170, 227n.14, 231n.4 Laura, 82, 123, 170, 227n.14, 231n.4 Presle, Micheline, 153, 236n.46, 239n.16 Prévert, Jacques, 18, 33, 39– 40, 76, 124, 230n.3, 231n.21, 234n.15, 238n.46 Prévost, L’Abbé, Manon Lescaut, 56 prisoners of war (POW), 34, 41, 54, 55, 60–1, 232n.29 pro-sexuality, female, 89, 92, 93 see also sexual assertiveness, female promiscuity female, 50, 63, 67, 114 male, 15, 114 see also casual sex, sociosexuality propaganda, 33, 39 prostitutes, 80, 85, 123, 211, 236n.47 prostitution, 58, 186, 190, 192 proto-noir, 5, 18 –20, 27, 89 psychoanalysis, 8 –9, 10, 130, 210, 240n.35 psychopathy, 52, 161, 188 Quai des Brumes [Port of Shadows] see Carné, Marcel Quai des Orfèvres see Clouzot, Henri-Georges race, 86– 93, 111 racism, 46, 86, 89, 92 Radiguet, Raymond, Le diable au corps, 153 Rafles sur la ville see Chenal, Pierre Ray, Nicholas, 123 Johnny Guitar, 65, 123

271

Classic French Noir Razzia sur la Chnouf [Razzia] see Decoin, Henri realism, 28, 72 black/dark, 37, 49, 77, 121, 212 see also réalisme noir poetic, 5, 7, 16, 18–28, 35, 89, 157, 212, 228n.7, 229n.5, 236n.42 social, 33, 121 réalisme noir, 41 –9, 122, 207, 212, 231n.22 see also realism, black Reggiani, Serge, 81, 231n.21 Remorques [Stormy Waters] see Gremillon, Jean Renant, Simone, 35, 163 Renoir, Jean, 19, 21– 3, 25– 6, 27, 28, 33, 97, 104, 229n.4, 229n.11, 234n.19, 237n.20 La bête humaine [The Human Beast], 19, 21 –3, 25, 28, 35, 78, 90, 97, 104, 107, 234n.19 La Chienne, 229n.4, 229n.5 representation gendered, 3, 6, 7, 23, 34, 86, 89 of fatalitaire, 106 of female sexuality, 16, 51 of femininity, 87 of femme fatale, 27, 51 political, 60 traditional, 84, 92 repression, 8, 14, 83, 84, 135 reproduction, 4, 8, 10, 11, 72 reproductive fitness, 130, 131, 153, 174, 181 resistance, 60, 81, 84 Resistance, French, 7, 16, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40–1, 44, 45, 49, 54, 55, 56, 159, 189, 195, 197, 212 Retour de Manivelle see de la Patellière, Denys Robinson, Madeleine, 164, 182 Roche, France, 173 Romance, Viviane, 19, 119, 229n.4, 229n.8, 237n.19

romanticism, 71 –2, 75, 96, 133, 159, 160, 212 Ronet, Maurice, 107, 140, 237n.25 Rouleau, Raymond, 162, 226n.12 Rozier, Willy, 44– 5, 245n.20 Les Amants Maudits [The Damned Lovers], 44– 5, 245n.20 Salomé 113 Sans lendemain [No Tomorrow] see Ophüls, Max Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40, 173 Scarlett Street see Lang, Fritz Schatz, Thomas, 52 Schmitt, David, 15, 64 Secord, Paul F., 60, 62, 146, 232n.26, 233n.45 selfhood, 9– 10 Sellier, Geneviève, 20, 34, 48, 132, 209, 229n.16, 235n.36, 238n.10, 237n.26, 239n.20, 239n.23 Série noire see Foucaud, Pierre, 167 sex ratio, 7, 16, 50 –1, 59– 67, 95, 140,156, 161, 182, 211, 233n.31 sexual assertiveness, female, 34, 38, 55, 78, 80, 83, 93, 134, 211 sexual attractiveness, 131, 210 sexual jealousy, male, 79 –80, 114, 115, 177–9, 210m, 243n.28 sexual selection, 10– 1, 14, 64, 130, 196 intersexual, 10– 1 intrasexual, 10 –1, 57, 60, 65, 67, 88, 91, 128, 146, 176 sexual strategies theory, 63,64, 95, 112, 236n.4 sexuality, 8, 62– 3, 64, 153 female/feminine, 16, 23, 51, 67, 89, 93, 114–5, 134, 211 male/masculine, 15 Signoret, Simone, 56, 57, 80 –3, 84, 85, 89, 93, 104, 112, 116, 117, 119, 120, 209, 236n.45, 236n.47, 242n.28 Simenon, Georges, 18, 33, 172

272

Index En cas de Malheur [In Case of Adversity] 172 Simon, Michel, 99, 100 Simon, Simone, 21, 229n.12 Simonin, Albert, 184 Siodmak, Robert, 18 Killers, The, 51, 65, 191 Pièges [Personal Column], 229n.4 Smuts, Barbara, 15, 176– 7 social capital, 94, 161 socioculture, 7, 8, 13, 17, 203, 212 sociohistory, 3, 4, 7, 16, 17, 53, 64, 65, 183, 210–1, 212 sociology, 3 – 7, 50, 52, 67, 184 sociosexuality, 50, 62–5, 67, 93, 114, 211, 233n.45 see also casual sex, promiscuity Spaak, Charles, 96, 104 spider woman, 16, 20, 21, 27, 51– 3, 59, 67, 74, 76, 79, 82, 85, 97, 101, 107, 108, 116, 122, 125, 126, 128, 134, 159, 161, 191, 210, 211 Spigel, Lynn, 53 Stanwyck, Barbara, 51, 98 star-crossed lovers, 16, 17, 20–7, 35, 44, 71–93, 108, 159, 161. 204, 212, 225, 234n.15 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 72, 153 Stendhal Le Rouge et le noir, 153 On Love, 72 subjectivity, 9, 134– 5, 150, 192 Thérèse Raquin [The Adulteress] see Carné, Marcel Third Republic, 31 Tierney, Gene, 82, 170 Tiller, Nadia, 169, 202 Tooby, John, 12 Totter, Audrey, 103 Touchez pas au Grisbi [Hands off the Loot] see Becker, Jacques Tourneur, Jacques, 19, 51, 229n.12 Cat People, 229n.12

Experiment Perilous, 19 Impasse des deux anges [Dilemma of Two Angels], 242n.28 Out of The Past, 19, 51, 65, 246n.9 Travers, James, 118, 231n.29 Trivers, Robert, 62 –3 parental investment theory (PIV), 62 –3, 64 Turner, Lana, 97, 98, 100, 101, 112 Ulmer, Edgar G., 51 Detour, 51 Une manche et la belle [A Kiss For A Killer] see Verneuil, Henri Union des Femmes Franc aises, 54 United States of America (USA), 6, 7, 33, 39, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 73, 87, 97, 104, 127, 140, 195, 201, 207, 213, 236n.39 Vadim, Roger, 174, 180, 181 Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman], 174 Vallone, Raf, 104 vamps, 20, 53, 78, 124 Van Eyk, Peter, 126 Vanel, Charles, 117, 166 Veblen, Thorstein, 184, 196, 203 Ventura, Lino, 110, 166 Vernet, Marc, 193, 196, 198 Verneuil, Henri, 148– 55, 226n.12, 235n.22 Des gens sans importance [People of No Importance], 235n.22 L’ennemi public no. 1, 226n.12 Une manche et la belle [A Kiss For A Killer], 140, 148– 55,160, 241n.4 Véry, Pierre, 18 Vian, Boris, 86 –7, 90, 235n.37, 236n.39 Vichy regime, 7, 16, 31 –2, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 44, 58, 78, 96, 119, 187, 189, 197, 230n.3, 238n.14

273

Classic French Noir Vidal, Henri, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 166, 167, 168, 182, 242n.29 Vidocq, Eugène Franc ois, 166, 167, 243n.12 Vidor, Charles, 80, 82, 231n.4 Gilda, 82, 231n.4 Vincendeau, Ginette, 75, 107, 164, 168, 173, 180, 229n.10, 229n.16, 237n.24, 240n.1 violence, 4, 15, 51, 58, 87, 88, 135, 178, 182, 202 Visconti, Luchino, 19, 104, 237n.20 Ossessione [Obsession], 19, 104 Voici le temps des Assassins [Deadlier Than the Male] see Duvivier, Julien Vooren, Monique Van, 167 Voyage sans espoir [Voyage without Hope] see Jacque, ChristianVuibert, Henri, 118, 238n.10 wealth, 94 –5, 116, 123, 130, 155, 161, 184, 201, 204 Weiler, A.H., 127

Welles, Orson, 51, 118, 121, 170 Lady from Shanghai, The, 51, 121, 170, 246n.9 Citizen Kane, 118 Wilder, Billy, 18, 33, 98, 107, 123, 246n.9 Double Indemnity, 51, 52, 98, 107, 152, 227n.14, 246n.9 Lost Weekend, The, 123, 227n.14, 234n.4 Wilson, Margo, 178 Woman in the Window, The see Lang, Fritz Women’s Bureau Reports, 52 World War I, 31, 60, 62, 67, 232n.27 World War II, 6, 7, 16, 32, 50, 52, 54, 60, 61, 62, 67, 193, 197, 212, 241n.14 You Only Live Once see Lang, Fritz youth, female, 8, 131, 153, 161, 174 Zahavi, Amos, 196 Zahavi, Avishag, 196 Zola, Emile, La bête humaine, 19, 21– 2, 25, 26, 104, 229n.11

274

‘Providing convincing academic insights of femmes fatales and hard-boiled detectives, Walker-Morrison explores French film noir by taking a Corporeal Turn, centring the issues on the body and bodily life.’ Laurent Jullier, Professor of Film Studies, Université de Lorraine,

France, and Director of Research at IRCAV Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

French film noir has long been seen as a phenomenon distinct from its Hollywood counterpart. This book – an innovative departure from conventional noir scholarship – adopts a biocultural approach to exploring the French genre through the years 1941 to 1959. WalkerMorrison addresses Gallic noir as a product of the social and cultural factors at play in occupied, liberated and post-war France: marked by malaise at military defeat, Nazi collaboration and the impact of rapid industrialisation. Furthermore, the book looks beneath the national context to uncover the evolutionary mechanisms of sexuality and reproduction that drive gendered behaviour on screen. During this period, for example, the urgent demand for population growth, coupled with a severe shortage of eligible males, rendered the mating game particularly perilous for women beginning to enter the workplace. This helps explain the seductive, sometimes cynical behaviour of the femme fatale. Walker-Morrison focuses on the dangerous, often deadly, desires of an array of male and female character types: moving past the celebrated, fatal ‘femme’ to tragic heroines, psychopathic narcissists, fatal ‘hommes’ and gangster antiheroes. The book re-examines productions by celebrated directors such as Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jacques Becker, and introduces many lesser-known films, pulling together strands of sociological, biological, psychological and evolutionary science to create an illuminating study of the fatal desires of French noir.

Cover image: Michel Auclair and Cecile Aubry in Manon (directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1949) courtesy of Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com

Deborah Walker-Morrison

DEBORAH WALKER-MORRISON is Associate Professor of French at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published widely on French cinema and is co-author (with Alistair Rolls) of French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009).

Classic French Noir

Richard Neupert, Wheatley Professor of the Arts, University of Georgia, USA

Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

‘Walker-Morrison provides a fresh biocultural perspective on French film noir. This study forces us to reassess many classical-era films, their transnational contexts, and especially their narrative functions in relation to gender, desire, and, of course, death.’

Classic

French Noir

Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire Deborah Walker-Morrison