Jacques Becker

Casque d’Or

by
Manda and Marie aka Casque d'Or

Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or perfectly illustrates why old-school Becker was held in such high regard by the tyros of France’s New Wave, who generally dismissed all French moviemakers before themselves as “vile” and “grotesque”. Becker was one of a very select band (including Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati) who escaped unscathed and with reputations intact, if not enhanced. Made in 1952, the antediluvian era if you were Truffaut or Godard, Becker’s story concerns itself with Marie (Simone Signoret), a whore with a heart of gold, who winds up caught between two men – ex-con carpenter Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani) and local crime boss Félix Leca (Claude Dauphin), a threeway that will eventually end … Read more

Le Trou

by
Claude behind a wire screen

How about this for authenticity – Le Trou opens not with music or credits but with a camera pan across to a man working on a car. Noticing the camera, the man gets up and says, (translated) “Hello. My friend Jacques Becker has recreated a true story in all its detail. My story. It took place in 1947 at the La Santé prison.” The man is Jean Keraudy, who led an attempted escape from the notorious Parisian prison, and he appears as himself in Becker’s dramatisation of it, perhaps the greatest prison escape movie ever made. Becker made the movie in 1960 and was dead within weeks of finishing shooting, which did wonders for … Read more