Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turning)

Cora and Frank

Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turning) was the first screen adaptation of James M Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The novel, a best-seller and a critical hit, was published in 1934 and Pierre Chenal got his hot, fast and lyrical interpretation of it into cinemas in 1939. There have been many other versions since. Luchino Visconti made his directorial debut in 1943 with Ossessione, his unacknowledged adaptation of the story. And Michelangelo Antonioni made his directorial debut with Cronaca di un Amore (Story of a Love Affair), which lifted plot elements from Cain’s novel. Most famously there’s the 1946 Lana Turner and John Garfield version, which stuck with Cain’s title, and … Read more

La Chienne

Maurice (Michel Simon) at his easel

La Chienne. It translates as The Bitch, literally. But if it ever goes by an English title it’s usually Isn’t Life a Bitch?, which kind of misses the point. It was made by Jean Renoir in 1931 in France and then remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood in 1945 as Scarlet Street, with Edward G Robinson and Joan Bennett in the lead roles. Here it’s Michel Simon who plays the silly old duffer, Maurice, who falls for a prostitute, without realising what she is, and is then systematically cleaned out by her and her pimp. Foolish Maurice on one side, cool, calculating Lulu making the big eyes on the other, with Dédé the … Read more

La poison

Paul (Michel Simon) gets his moment in court

The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more

Panique

Monsieur Hire and Alice

How’s this for grim! The atmospheric and technically superb Panique, released in 1946, one year after the war ended, gave the French people an image of themselves at their worst. What the domestic market wanted at the time was sugar-coated triumphalism, stories about the nobility of the Resistance to the German occupation and the endurance of the indomitable French spirit etc. Unsurprisingly the film bombed. An adaptation of one of Georges Simenon’s “romans durs” (the tougher novels that didn’t feature Simenon’s decent detective Maigret), it opens with the death of a woman and closes with the death of a man. In between director/co-writer Julien Duvivier gives us one of the most relentlessly depressing … Read more