Joel Brouwer

This is a very strange movie which absolutely could not be made today, a French New Wave film made by an Englishman in California. Its narrative head games, its druggy swings from hysteria to Weltschmerz, its boredom with both sex and violence, and above all its conviction that no amount of revolutionary individualism can put a dent in the fortress of capitalist hegemony all work together to provide a devastating critique of the sixties even as “the sixties” was in the deepest throes of its self-regard. Watching this, you’d guess it had been made in 1974, not 1967. It rivals Didion’s White Album in its prescience. There are lots of moments you might use to mark the end of the dream of the sixties: Kent State, My Lai, the assassinations of King and Kennedy in 1968, etc. Add to the list the moment in Point Blank when the girl at the psychedelic dance club goes around behind the screen and discovers the bad guy Lee Marvin’s beaten to a pulp. He’s buried under a pile of film! And the girl’s screams of horror harmonize with the soul singer’s screams of ecstacy. I find it both liberating and terrifying that an aesthetic moment can be that perfectly rendered and this completely forgotten.

So very tiresome to experience, yet you’re so glad it exists. And it looks so beautiful. I’d be happy to have almost any frame of this film hanging framed on my wall.

Bernard Tavernier says Melville wanted more than anything to be the French William Wyler, which makes a great deal of sense, but of course that could never happen, because Melville, however much he admired and even imitated the great bread and butter Hollywood directors like Wyler, had a talon d’Achille: he was the Frenchest Frenchman ever. That’s what makes these gangster pictures of his so weird. All the Hollywood noir tropes are in place–dive bars, brassy molls, trench coats, double crosses, stool pigeons, big cars, cigarettes–but the– what, soul? core? mien? there’s probably a French word for it–of the characters is completely different than that of the characters in an American noir. They all come across as incredibly vulnerable, sensitive artistes playing the roles of tough guys. I mean really, Belmondo? Robert Mitchum could eat him in one bite. (Remember too that this is made in 1962, by which time noir was already being parodied and deconstructed in Hollywood.) Anyway, I’m not complaining that this is a failed noir, since I don’t think it was intended to be a noir at all. It’s a kind of pseudo-nouvelle vague take on noir, maybe. A very curious picture.

Nice chemistry, some charming scenes, fun travelogue of Paris, but it’s no Roman Holiday. It’s Grant’s third to last movie, and he seems a little tired.

Melville’s chilly formalism has turned me off in the past, but it works quite brilliantly in this account of a French resistance cell’s wartime activities. There are scenes of great drama, action, daring, cunning, etc., but they’re all conveyed with stony austerity, so the effect isn’t one of excitement but of grim duty and honor. I should have thought of this before, but Melville’s style recalls not so much that of the American noir directors with whom he’s said to have been obsessed, but rather the Japanese pictorialists like Ozu or Mizoguchi, who like Melville are always conscious of the relationships between every figure in the frame.

A particularly tragic, and I imagine sadly accurate aspect of the story is how focused the resistance fighters must need be on the potential for one of their own to betray them. An early scene where a miserable, terrified turncoat must be executed speaks elegantly to the deadly and ironic pathos of the resistance fighter who finds himself having to harm one of his own in order to strike at his enemy.

Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Tuesday Weld, Rip Torn, Karl Malden, Cab Calloway, and Ann-Margret. Playing poker. In New Orleans. Music by Lalo Schifrin. Title song sung by Ray Charles. And cock fighting! What more could you possibly want from a movie! Well, OK, less cockfighting.

A strange, stylish, maudit mob picture from the assistant director on Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. (That’s saying something, by the way, since secondary scenes in that movie are perhaps the most brilliant ones.) The picture feels like it could be a Cassavetes; things move either in brisk shorthand or in emotional wrenched and wretched slow burns. Incredible cast includes Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Gena Rowlands, and Peter Falk; how that happened I have no idea. Another “but for the grace of TCM” reason to have cable.