The Prettiest of the 1960s Pretty Boys

The French cinema has produced many stars that Hollywood producers sought to borrow and bottle, almost always with abysmal results – if not career suicide, then career stasis or diminishment. Blame Maurice Chevalier, whose enormous popularity at the outset of the sound era briefly buoyed the fortunes of Paramount until the Production Code put the kibosh on charming impropriety. His dire 1950s revival (“Gigi” excepted) proved no less seductive and illusory. Almost every other Gallic import came a cropper, settling for studio crumbs (Marcel Dalio) or acceding to hilarious miscasting (Yves Montand as Faulkner’s corncob rapist Popeye). The women, from Michele Morgan to Jeanne Moreau, fared no better. Most returned home and flourished, though many of the pictures that sustained and enriched their Continental standing never crossed the pond.Consider Alain Delon, the prettiest of 1960s pretty boys, the yang to Jean-Paul Belmondo’s yin. His career soared with a quartet of French and Italian triumphs – “Purple Noon” (as the most convincing of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleys), “Rocco and His Brothers,” “The Eclipse,” and “The Leopard” – then motored past several Anglo distractions and into a steady cruise of crime pictures, including two middling international blockbusters (“The Sicilian Clan” and “Borsalino”) and two neglected, butchered Jean-Pierre Melville epics, “Le Samourai” and “Le Cercle Rouge.” In the 1970s, Mr. Delon began producing films, often working with “Borsalino” director Jacques Deray. Kino has released three of them, which prove strangely complementary: “Two Men in Town” (1973), “Borsalino and Co.” (1974), and “Flic Story” (1975).All involve cops and robbers, but they take place in three different decades and allow Mr. Delon to straddle the divide, playing, respectively, a rehabilitated criminal martyred by his past, a ruthless gang chief who is less ruthless than his rival, and a preening detective tracking down an escaped psychopath. There are no lost masterpieces here (in that regard, keep an eye out for Criterion’s fall release of “Le Samourai”), but each film is worthy and interesting in a different way. They all register Mr. Delon’s peculiarly vacant yet insinuating understatement.“Two Men in Town” is a loaded brief against capital punishment, specifically the guillotine, which is depicted in the same grueling detail as the gas chamber is in Robert Wise’s “I Want To Live!” (1958) – it’s barbaric but a whole lot faster. Indeed, this film is something of a companion piece to Camus’s “Reflections on the Guillotine,” complete with existentialist postmortem. Chance is the real culprit, the rumpled Jean Gabin concludes: “Some pray, but that’s no solution.” The film was written and directed by Jose Giovanni, a Resistance fighter who later fell in with criminal gangs, was himself scheduled for the headsman, and upon reprieve wrote several notable films (including Jacques Becker’s “Le Trou”), before turning to directing; he died last year at 80. Anecdotal details, including a chilling jailhouse suicide, are presumably drawn from life, but the story is drawn from Victor Hugo. A hardened criminal, brought to salvation by parole advisor Gabin (who is as understated as Mr. Delon yet projects a lot more of the mental gears) is persecuted, tricked, and framed by a Javert who provokes him to murder. Designed as tragedy, it plays as irony.“Borsalino and Co.,” directed by Deray, is the commercially disappointing but superior sequel to “Borsalino.” The sequel part – avenging the murder of the Belmondo character in the 1970 film – is achieved in the first few minutes with a murder that triggers a grotesquely violent and giddily stylish gang war that at times suggests the sadistic pleasures of “The Abominable Dr. Phibes.” That comparison is underscored by the fastidious 1930s setting, though plot points owe more to Dashiell Hammett (gang war as in “Red Harvest”), Raymond Chandler (forced addiction as in “Farewell My Lovely” and “The Blue Dahlia”), and especially Fritz Lang (Nazi sympathizers, sponsored by capitalists, plan to conquer major cities by getting the liberal or decadent elements addicted to heroin). In order to make Mr. Delon’s gangster – who, left to his own designs, is on good terms with the police and is content to run a brothel and a musical theater – sympathetic, he is confronted with the enemy from hell: an Italian fascist gangster named Volpone who, as played by Riccardo Cucciolla, is a dead ringer for Lucky Luciano. He gets his just deserts, following a wonderful minute-long silent pan of a train, in a scene worthy of Dr. Phibes.The most interesting and resonant of the films is Deray’s “Flic Story,” based on the memoirs of the egomaniacal police detective Roger Borniche. It concerns the 1947 hunt for Emile Buisson, played with a sneering malevolence by Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose hair-trigger keeps the film pulsing despite the director’s often too deliberate pacing. It opens with a touch of Hollywood parody: We hear Borniche’s voice-over and see his lower legs climbing several stories to his office, where he is shown as the perfectly trench-coated and coiffed Mr. Delon, who is made visibly uncomfortable by his partner’s rough interrogation technique. The film ends with a longer voice-over, by which time we half expect another explosion from Buisson, despite the calm narration – no anti-capital punishment argument here. Instead, we get a late-arriving doppelganger connection between cop and killer. For all his cool demeanor and ultimate success, Borniche rocks the film’s stability with several instances of incompetence and his willingness to put others, including his fiancee, at risk. The details and supporting characters are richly observed, as is the underworld milieu. Mr. Delon’s best line comes near the end, when the apprehended Buisson says he would like to take a hacksaw to an informer’s throat and stop every once in a while to hear his screams. Borniche listens blankly and responds almost consolingly, “You won’t get the chance.”***Kino also released, a while back, the two main sound films of Josephine Baker, “Zouzou” (1934) and “Princess Tam Tam (1935). I hadn’t seen them in over a decade, and while time hasn’t made the films any better than they are, it may have increased the erotic pleasures of Baker, a woman so comfortable in her own skin that watching her makes you nostalgic for an age of natural breasts, natural hair, and a dancing style so naturally effervescent that anyone could do it if anyone had the curious genius of Josephine Baker.So many of the early legends of black entertainment disappeared without leaving filmed records – Buddy Bolden, Will Marion Cook, Florence Mills, Bert Williams (except for a silent film plus a great many recordings). Baker’s films, though dimly conventional when she isn’t on camera, are vivid enough to let us see what it was that enabled this chorus girl to leave Broadway and become the queen of Parisian nightlife. Still, when it came to the movies, even French movies created by her husband and intrepid manager, Peptio Abatino, she couldn’t get a man.Sentimental ideas of artistic purity and alienation invariably undo her. Like most of Al Jolson’s or Elvis Presley’s movies, Baker’s provide re-enactments of her own conquest of show business. Zouzou is a circus-bred orphan who works in a laundry and gets her big chance when a lovesick music-hall star (“I am a woman who vibrates like a cello”) runs off. The plot is strictly “42nd Street,” with the musical numbers delayed until the end, but director Marc Allegret’s vision of life in and around the theater is sanguine and candid (including casual nudity), with little of the dance-your-heart-out ordeal associated with the genre. Zouzou, like Baker, is a natural, and Paris falls at her feet. Yet she cannot win the love of her childhood companion, Jean (Gabin again, just out of the music halls and beginning his long cinematic reign, underplaying in direct proportion to Baker’s extravagance); she remains a caged songbird, adorned in feathers and singing of distant shores.The more portentous “Princess Tam Tam” borrows its plot from “Pygmalion,” and presents Baker as a Tunisian servant (there is marvelous location footage of Morocco) who is turned into an exotic princess by a visiting French novelist. He wants to embarrass his wife, who is reportedly having an affair with a sleek maharaja. In a climactic dance sequence that pays homage to Busby Berkeley, she once again conquers sophisticated Paris. But the writer, with whom she has fallen in love, is reconciled with his wife, and Baker returns to Tunis to marry another servant. For all the talk of adultery and some mild satirical pokes at upperclass social mores, it’s a chaste film that might have been made in Hollywood except that the star is black and proud and everlasting.Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.

The Prettiest of the 1960s Pretty Boys

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