A few highlights from “French Noir: From the Shadows into the Light,” a rewarding ongoing retrospective series that runs through Aug. 28 at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA):
Director Jacques Becker’s hard-as-nails 1960 prison picture, Le trou, presents a wrinkle on a familiar formula. What happens when a cramped cell designed to hold four men unexpectedly gets a fifth convict? And further, what happens when they decide to tell the newcomer about their plans to tunnel their way out of a stir?
Becker, whose Casque d’or and Touchez pas au grisbi toured the Parisian underworld with an ironic eye, achieves dramatic heights with a carefully measured, tantalizingly low-key story—adapted from a novel by José Giovanni—that often resembles a clandestine documentary.
Marc Michel, an actor better known as a romantic accessory for filmmaker Jacques Demy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Lola, plays mild-mannered Claude Gaspard, the new guy. Here, confined in a dirty concrete box with a quartet of tough guys, the audience fears for Gaspard. His nervous roommates are led by first-time actor Jean Keraudy in the role of Roland, a part based on Keraudy’s real-life misadventure at the very same Paris prison, La Santé.
Becker tells the story with deadpan economy and painstaking mechanical detail, down to the smallest hinge or handful of sand. The result: a claustrophobic meditation on freedom and confinement, in a style of smothered suspense on par with the best screen moments of Robert Bresson. Le trou is an oddball masterpiece. It screens Aug. 6.
BAMPFA’s wide-ranging series demonstrates how many subgenres find shade underneath the noir umbrella. If Le trou has stylish fun with the prison pic, then Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) does the same with the heist piece. Silver-haired gambler/hustler Bob (Roger Duchesne) prowls late-night hangouts from Place Pigalle to the Deauville Casino behind the wheel of his outrageous, two-toned Plymouth Belvedere convertible, always on the lookout for the big payoff.
Along the way he gets played for a sucker at poker games, the Longchamp race track and in his haphazard hobby of adopting the wrong pals—note how casually Paulo (Daniel Cauchy) and Anne (Isabelle Corey) take advantage of their boss’s nonchalant generosity. And yet Bob always finds a way to lay down another bet, no matter how fantastic the odds.
When Melville got into one of his American moods (Le doulos, Le samouraï), admiring colleagues like Jean-Luc Godard paid rapt attention, in the same way both directors did to Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. Melville’s seedy/glamorous Paris, gorgeously shot by cinematographer Henri Decaë, is at its best in the intersection between Hollywood studio crime movies and the onrushing French New Wave. Bob le flambeur shows Aug. 19.
Melville and Becker didn’t exactly invent film noir. Various sources trace both the brand name and the films’ bleak view of post-World War II society to the Série noire line of popular crime novels released beginning in 1945 by Parisian publisher/writer/actor Marcel Duhamel, who introduced the work of Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and other authors to European readers.
That French series didn’t publish Patricia Highsmith, but she probably didn’t need the plug. The American writer (1921-1995) of some of the most disturbing pieces of fiction in the 20th century concocted her own strange brand of make-believe about that same time, in New York.
Highsmith’s landmark novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and its sequels have been adapted for numerous films. The BAMPFA retrospective visits director René Clément’s version, Purple Noon (1960), a sexy French Riviera update/redo starring Alain Delon as everyone’s favorite psychopathic American tourist. It plays Aug. 27. The film’s screenplay, adapted by Clément and Paul Gégauff, precludes any further depredations by our hero, but don’t mind that. Ultra-colorful—shot by the aforementioned Decaë—and seductively performed by its suntanned actors, Purple Noon provides the ideal “perennial-midnight” snack.
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Now through Aug. 28 at BAMPFA
