Rage & Reason - André Cayatte

The fifties are represented as a golden age for French film, the period of La nouvelle vague, when filmmakers in their twenties could get up a feature film with comparative ease and have it widely admired. A dominant proportion had been “Children of the Cinémathèque”, critics sitting next to their mates at Langlois’ screenings. They were going to get attention in the influential serious movie magazines of the day. With Francois Truffaut, who was leading the charge, married to a producer’s daughter, the path became even smoother. 

Truth was that veteran French stars, writers and directors were often flagging - Gabin & Daniele Darieux in La verité sur Bébé Dongé anyone? They were an easy knock off.

 Claude Autant-Lara, who was shaping up for distinguished veteran status (Le diable au corps, Le traversé de Paris) published a sharp letter about the contempt with which his generation was treated, leaving him stuck with a lumpen sex comedy like La jument verte. This was the situation which would be repeated with the Chinese Fifth Generation. People who had been waiting for their moment suddenly found it had passed.

Another casualty was anyone like myself, who had been relishing the work of Autant-Lara,  Henry George Clouzot, René Clement, André Cayatte and a few more, who now found they were missing in action. I revere Agnes Varda but really - how many times does anyone need to see Cléo 5 a 7?

Though the career articles and retrospectives, which sustain reputations, were nowhere to be found, there was still a tradesman’s entrance. Clouzot, Autant Lara, Duvivier and (sort of) René Clair were recruited to knock out vehicles for their industry’s great star - Brigitte Bardot. Also consider the case of popular writer Sébastien Japrisot, whose contribution added box office clout to Costa Gavras’ Compartiment tueurs, René Clement’s Passenger dans la pluie,  Jean Herman’s Adieu l’ami and Anatol  Litvak’s The Girl in the Car, With the Glasses & the Gun - kind of like a sharper James Hadley Chase.

Consider particularly André Cayatte, who was variously a lawyer, a journalist, a filmmaker and a polemicist, these sometimes mixed in ways where the seams vanished. He mastered his director's film craft starting in wartime French Boulevard features - a couple of Tino Rossi musicals, the Middle Version of Au bonheur des dames and (better) Les amants de Veronne from a Jacques Prévert script. His endangered youth movies Justice est fait and Avant le déluge were an indication of the more serious work of which the impressive anti-capital punishment Nous sommes tous des assassins remains his peak achievement. This would be followed by films as imposing as Le Passage du Rhin, Les Risques du métier, the Annie Girardot Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu & Mourir d'aimer, along with Le Verdict with stellar leads Jean Gabin & Sophia Loren. They were spaced by often misjudged efforts, though Les chemins de Khatmandu (Jane Birkin on the hippy trail) was enjoyably preposterous, Barbara Streisand liked La miroir a deux faces enough to do it over in English, and the better, two-part Jean-Marc et Françoise ou la vie conjugale resurfaced as Divorce His / Divorce Hers. I rated myself a fan and sought out the director's work, though its subtitled distribution was gappy.

  André Cayatte.  

I’m plunged back into that world by finding a nice (even with the odd flash) disk of Cayatte’s 1965 hit La piège pour Cendrillon/A Trap for Cinderella, a polished, original, noirish suspense piece, with one of Japrisot’s perverse twisty plots classed up with sharp dialogue by then-admired Playwright Jean Anouilh (“L’alouette”, “Becket”). Coming directed by the creator of Nous sommes tous des assassins, hopes were high.

 In La Piège pour Cendrillon, the heir to a shoe-making fortune has been killed in a fire, survived by her lookalike companion and one-time playmate. Both are played by not-quite-stellar Dany Carrel. This is made more sinister by placing the remaining burn scarred girl in the care of the heir's vicious lesbian secretary, Madeleine Robinson. 

 

Piège Pour Cendrillion - Carrell

Flashbacks fill in preceding events. Dany the companion was living in poverty, doing the books in Robert Dalban’s parking garage, and involved with worker lover Jean Gaven. Dany, the heiress goes through the motions of rescuing her but is mainly intent on humiliating the girl - with a bit of wrestling in itsy-bitsy bikinis thrown in. Both find themselves involved with the other’s admirers.

The way it's made is impressive - Armand Thirard’s gleaming Black and white wide screen photography, mirrors, elevator cages, material where it's not clear whether they are in studio or location interiors - impeccable split screen - until you notice that they keep on putting cushions in the middle of the shot to get a clean matte line and the camera is always locked down when there are two of Dany on screen. She was always decorative. This is probably her most demanding role and she gives her all but I can't help feeling that wearing revealing outfits - or taking them off - was her special skill. Robinson and Gaven show up the others.  

As with the other Japrisot movies, it pivots on another enigma that I'm not all that curious about. We never see the fire and we sit there thinking we’ve outguessed the writers on the identity of its survivor. A key plot contributor shows up at the last minute to further complicate expectations.

Like Girl in the car With the Glasses & the Gun, there's a recent remake of this one  - with Tuppence Middleton. I wonder about that. There’s also a Russian TV series with the same name, which acknowledges no connection.

My curiosity revived, I went looking for the other missing Cayatte movies. YouTube, my number one source, produced a list but closer examination revealed these to be mainly trailers or TV discussion clips. The only complete films were Justice est fait, which I didn't much like when I had an old sixteen millimeter print and 1978's La Raison d’état in a quite good copy, with subtitles only on material set in Italy, which they had translated into French - just as well, as my Italian is even rougher than my French.

We are coming to the end of André Cayatte with this handsomely mounted A Feature. It immediately gets our sympathy with an Edmond Rostand quote - "If the money spent on armaments went to medicine, we would all live to 120 and have youth for 90 years."

La raison d’état is another of its maker’s message pieces, lining up with the anti-war content of his (better) Le Passage du Rhine. Government Minister Jean Yanne is first seen being waved through by the gendarmes outside the palace, where his discreet honours ceremony is being conducted - no more than a hundred guests. His triumph is a massive arms deal placing munitions with a (fictional) African country, despite legal prohibitions. However, François Périer, the scruffy editor of a French Pacifist journal, is on his case and has assembled an incriminating dossier, which includes photos of crated munitions with official French SNR stencils being unloaded at the African airport.

Périer has an ally in Italian physicist Monnica Vitti, who makes a duplicate of his research, anticipating the intervention of Yanne’s enforcers and, sure enough, after the briefing with Michel Bouquet in Yanne’s private pistol range and a scene driving in Paris traffic, where Yanne in his open roof limo, listens to his opponent's phone call, action shifts to the motorway. Cars box in Périer's old Renault and force it off the road and down a cliff - disturbingly plausible Remy Julienne stunt work with full-size vehicles. In the wrecked car, with Périer’s body, the drivers place a substitute for the damning file

This leaves the question of Vitti’s copy -and the heart of the film. Yanne has her taken into custody and conducts the session in person. The film’s best passages are those between the two stars alone. Yanne, notably a comic performer, manages his shift into imposing and Vitti is right in her element, rounding her anguished Twentieth Century woman. He lays out temptations which rapidly move to four hundred million dollars - an Island Villa, a New York Penthouse - against her confronting the opposition of La Gouvernement de France. He breaks out newspapers headlined with hostile stories of her as a foreign agent and outlines the hollowness of any success - “ We will be replaced by others ... You will be attacked by the Unions when munitions factories close.”  We are doing Christ in the Desert here.

When her two-day Guarde a Vue expires, Monica turns to young associate Jean-Claude Bouillon for protection but he is left beaten in the gutter by the grim-faced security detail that takes her away.

This segment does communicate the “grand peur” that it describes but eventually the film is minor. The red-tinted montages of warfare and the depiction of corruption at the highest level, as board rooms of suits, opposed only by bearded hippies with a movable type printing press, all lack conviction. A guest- shot by the admirable Jesse Hahn, as the obligatory C.I.A. agent, doesn’t help. The reappearance of Cendrillon's incriminating chloroform is more effective. Raisons d’État was pretty much Cayatte’s last major production. I hadn't heard of it, despite its ambitions and my interest.

The film does retain interest as a snapshot of serious European film in an era some of us remember intensely but seen now, the clunky surveillance technique and locating inserts (a silver helicopter catches the sun as it flies past the Twin Towers) date the film and erode its courage and relevance. We can’t help remembering that this all anticipates the  Railbow Warrior affair.  Today we live uneasily in a period where the  Macron government seems to be the one sane voice in World Affairs and André Cayatte is largely forgotten. I don't see too much comfort in that.

Are We All Murderers?

Barrie Pattison