Primal Screen

I didn’t particularly enjoy THE ANGEL’S LEAP but this image is nice, and neatly illustrates that thing Luis Bunuel was just saying:

Octavio Paz has said, “But that a man in chains should shut his eyes, the world would explode.” And I could say: But that the white eyelid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames. But for the moment we can sleep in peace: the light of the cinema is conveniently dosified and shackled.

I chose to watch this Marseilles-based thriller because I wanted some distraction as my favourite aunt just died from Covid-19, under the most miserable circumstances. It’s not director Yves Boisset’s fault that his film is full of death, hospitals, funerals, making it not perhaps the best distraction you could have. But it’s fairly mindless so it had that in its favour.

It’s a bit more visually attractive than Boisset’s Manchette adaptation, FOLLE A TUER, but much less involving. Basic revenge stuff. Jean Yanne, a good actor, is a rather doughy action hero, Sterling Hayden struggles to express himself in French, but Senta Berger is great as ever and Gordon Mitchell is an interesting screen presence. The only Italian muscleman star with an interesting rather than bland face, and (and this is a surprising thing to find) he wears clothes really well.

The main villain has a preposterous Bondian lair and keeps vultures as pets. Idiot. He gets slung off his balcony and lands on some power lines in front of a drive-in screen, all pretty preposterous (every aspect of it: why would a rich man live over a drive-in?). Boisset’s main visual trope is to track around his characters in a half-circle, which is nice enough but it’s the only thing of note the camera ever does. Like they had a length of curving track and they wanted to get the most out of it.

THE ANGEL’S LEAP stars Jean-Paul Marat; Elisabeth Sibelius; General Jack D. Ripper; Napoleon Bonaparte; Maciste; Victor Maigrat; Eurylochus; Alessio Karenin; and Louise Danton.

Kidnapping, murder and plagiarism

I plonked the top image on Twitter because I thought it was a striking line, and Fredrik Gustaffson immediately spotted where it was stolen from and posted the original.

FOLLI A TUER and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. They don’t really have anything to do with one another so I’d call it a swipe rather than a hommage. But swipes are, in a way, more admirable: the filmmaker is simply trying to make his film better than he’d be able to do using his own imagination alone. Hommages are a bit masturbatory.

So, follow Fredrik, you are unlikely to regret it.

Yves Boisset, the swiper in question (unless he got the line from his source novel, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s O Dingos…O Chateaux), seems unable to frame an attractive shot, and crams his compositions with ugly sets, costumes and a few ugly people, but this is in fact a very good thriller with a little extra philosophy/character.

 

Marlene Jobert, last seen (by me) in René Clement’s RIDER ON THE RAIN, always seems to be having rather a hard time of it. She’s released from a psychiatric hospital some years after killing a man in (as yet) unexplained circs, goes to work for millionaire Michael Lonsdale (seems nice enough, what could go wrong?) as nanny to his disturbed charge, Thomas Waintrop. A terrific little actor but a bit of a handful. Plus, all of Lonsdale’s domestic staff seem to have been recruited from the asylum or the penitentiary: his elevator boy was a cat killer, and his chauffeur a serial rapist. What’s going on here?

Then Jobert and Waintrop are kidnapped by Tomas Milian and things get really bad. I can’t offhand recall a child or child actor being put through so much slapping and threatening in a film. The movie seems misanthropic (and opens with a quote from WC Fields) but has a lot of heart, too. Diseased heart, possibly.

 

Worth a peek.

FOLIE A TUER stars Mélancolie Mau; Tepepa; Hugo Drax; Gustave Dominici; Warok; and Col. Günther Reza.