Billy Wilder directed 1934’s Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) more out of necessity than desire. He’d never directed a film before, in spite of having been quite a big wheel as a writer in the German film industry (the Nazis put paid to that). But he was in a tight spot and so had to add a string to his bow. He wouldn’t direct another film for eight years, in Hollywood, where 1942’s The Major and the Minor became the first of a remarkable run lasting nearly 40 years.
Alexander Esway also gets a director’s credit, but he was little more than a gracious front man whose name helped Wilder’s movie get financed. What’s clear watching Bad Seed debut is that it’s clearly a Wilder film. It’s all here: the wit, the pace, the sexual transgression and the wild-card plotting introduced to audiences almost with a cheeky shrug to camera and an “only in the movies” smirk.
The Wilder name had been on 23 screenplays in the previous five years. Some were foreign language remakes of films originally made in German, but even discounting a few it’s a hell of a work rate. In short, Wilder at this point knew what he was doing.
The plot: Henri (Pierre Mingand), a womanising French playboy, loses his mojo after his irritated father decides to sell his son’s prize possession. Henri’s Buick was the lure he’d been using to hook women. Incensed, aggrieved, kicking flagstones at the unfairness of it all, Henri petulantly strikes back by stealing a car… and winds up in the company of a gang of professional car thieves, one of whom turns out to be Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux) the very woman he had most recently ensnared with his fancy vehicle (and he thought she wanted him for his “eight cylinders…”).
Wilder mixes the boy-meets-gang with boy-meets-girl and boy-meets-car stories together brilliantly, throws in some action sequences – driving at night in those cars without windscreens looks hellish – and rounds things off with a cops/cars/guns finale demonstrating he knows exactly what audiences want.
Mingand makes a perfectly slappable Henri, as it should be, and Darrieux (who’d live to be 100 and was still working aged 99) is an engaging and attractive Jeannette, while Michel Duran plays the gang boss as a man who might easily lose faith in Henri (which is exactly what happens), and there’s a very likeable performance by Raymond Galle as Jean-la-Cravate, a gang member with a sideline in pilfering ties, as the name suggests.
It’s all done on the cheap – Wilder later joked that out of necessity he’d invented new wave techniques 25 years ahead of Truffaut, Godard, Varda and the gang – shot mostly silent and with sound post-dubbed (and often quite badly synced). He’s even in there somewhere as an extra, apparently (I didn’t spot him).
Franz Waxman, another exile from Nazi Germany who’d go on to Hollywood glory, happened to be staying at the same hotel as Wilder and he provides a jaunty, jazzy, ragtime soundtrack that keeps things motoring.
You can see foreshadowings of Some Like It Hot if you screw your eyes up a lot – the gang, the jazziness, the strange sexual tension between Henri and Jean-la-Cravate – and it bounces along in the way the best Wilder movies do, even though it’s clearly technically way off the piste.
Good luck watching it, if you decide to. The only version that we still have is a copy of a copy and there are sound and vision issues. They’re not bad enough to obscure the brilliance of Wilder and there is a good reason why this movie has been remade twice, as The First Offence in the UK in 1936 and again in France as La Voyageuse Inattendue in 1950.
Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
