The Five Forty Eight

When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her.


In the autumn of 1979, WNET in New York, one of the oldest and most successful public television stations in America, aired a trio of programs for its Great Performances series called 3 Cheever Stories. Three different directors and three different script-writers adapted the John Cheever stories "The Sorrows of Gin," "O Youth and Beauty," and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Despite their presentation on television, the three episodes are three films, shot on celluloid, conceived as stand-alone films, each one an hour in length. The stories were written in the 1950s, "a long-lost world," wrote Cheever in the preface of The Stories of John Cheever, "when the city of New York was filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." The stories are dated, but in that sort of dating that never impedes the ongoing lives of their characters. They live and breathe, perhaps forever, through Cheever's prose. "The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being."

Cheever was offered a chance to adapt the stories for television himself, but he declined. According to Ralph Tyler, in his New York Times notice of the programs, 'An attempt to mount some of his New Yorker magazine short stories on Broadway, under the title “Town House,” flopped in 1948. Each of his four novels has been optioned by Hollywood, including his 1977 best seller “Falconer,” but no film has yet appeared; the 1968 movie “The Swimmer,” based on one of his short stories, made no great box‐office splash despite scattered applause from the critics’ bleachers. Mr. Cheever, himself, has said: “It's my belief that no really first‐rate novel can be filmed. Literature goes to where the camera is not.”'(1) Cheever's objections aside, he wrote an original teleplay that was eventually produced as "The Shady Hill Kidnapping" in 1982 for WNET's American Playhouse.

The television adaptations, however, updated the three stories to the present - 1979 - which has had the strange effect, forty years later, of making them seem more dated than the stories themselves. Another problem is the films, though not quite feature-length, required some padding - additional material not in the stories. The best of the 3 Cheever Stories is The Five Forty Eight,(2) which was directed by James Ivory, scripted by Terrence McNally, and photographed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. The ambient aspect of film (which barely exists any more) that can ease the viewer into a sense of a character's life as it is lived, is used well by Ivory. For instance, Blake, an ad executive, spends some time in the film doing nothing but gazing through his office window at attractive women working in offices in the next building. One of them watches him watching her. At one point, Blake even mentions this to his wife when she calls to tell him that an old friend has had a heart attack, contributing to our sense of the creepy stage at which his marriage has arrived. This is Ivory's contribution - also that Blake has a stack of dirty magazines in his desk, which he keeps covered (a nice touch) with a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Blake takes advantage of his secretary, Miss Dent, a damaged, emotionally needy young woman. Then, the very next day, he fires her, without explanation. Something to do with her history of eight months in a Catholic institution, but also because something that Blake meant so casually - having sex with her - is taken far too seriously by her. So, after trying to see him in his office - to no avail - she lays in wait for him with a pistol in her purse, rides with him on the train to Shady Hill, Cheever's beautifully imagined Westchester train stop where so many of his stories are set. They wait until the platform is deserted, then she takes him into the rough underbrush away from the station where no one will see, orders him at gunpoint onto his knees, then on his belly, and pushes his face in the mud with her foot. After waiting awhile for the gun to go off, but hearing nothing, Blake looks up and she has gone. "He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen [in the film, instead of his hat it's his briefcase] and walked home."

Cheever opens his story like a thriller - a man is being followed through the streets of Manhattan by a woman who may want to harm him. Ivory's film opens with the story's climax - a woman (Mary Beth Hurt) pointing a gun at a man (Laurence Luckinbill) and ordering him to lie down on the ground. But then the film reveals it was a nightmare that the man is having.(3) It puzzles me why the dream was used, since it suggests that Blake has such a guilty conscience for what he did to Miss Dent that his unconscious mind punishes him for it (which would be out of character) or that Blake can see the future.

But this film, on its own merits, is an overlooked gem. Laurence Luckinbill has the dubious swagger of a ladies man, his conceitedness, but he also shows us his fear of a scorned woman, his helplessness when the tables are turned on him and Miss Dent is in control. The look on his face on the platform, when he finds there's no way out, captures the pang of this beautiful Cheever sentence: "The last man looked at his watch, looked at the rain, and then walked off into it, and Blake saw him go as if they had some reason to say goodbye - not as we say goodbye to friends after a party but as we say goodbye when we are faced with an inexorable and unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart."

But the highest praise must go to Mary Beth Hurt, who gives Miss Dent a vital presence that Cheever, for all his art, only hints at. When Blake asks her if she might have a drink with him after work, we have a genuine sense of her loneliness when she boldly tells him, "I have some whiskey at my place." When Blake accompanies her to her apartment, we know from their first embrace how lost she is, and how a rotter like Blake is going to treat her. She suffers from her emotions because she doesn't know how to control them. Blake's world is one of façades, of polite inhumanity, and he is perfectly suited to it.

One is left wondering at the end of the film if Blake has learned anything from the lesson that Miss Dent has given him. She, however, has triumphed over an ultimately shallow egoist, and got the better of her own heart. "Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you," she tells him when they're alone in the coalyard. "Look at your poor face. But you don't know what I've been through. I'm afraid to go out in the daylight. I'm afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I'm like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself when it begins to get dark. But still and all I'm better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and tbe brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you." Yes. She does.


(1) "How a Trio Of Cheever Stories Made It to TV" by Ralph Tyler, The New York Times, October 14, 1979.
(2) Cheever hyphenated the spelled-out numbers in the title. The film does not.
(3) Significantly, in Blake's dream we hear the gun go off just before he awakes.

Leap Year

Lord Chief Justice. Your means are very slender, and your waste is
great.
Falstaff. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater
and my waist slenderer.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


Mack Sennett, the father of American film comedy, had an eye for talent. He made millions of dollars with his one-reelers that were shown everywhere that films could reach. But he could never hang on to his talented performers because he refused to pay them more than he was making. One by one, his most successful comics, including Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, left Sennett for more lucrative contracts with other movie studios.

In his groundbreaking essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era" (1949), James Agee concentrated on the Big Four - the four most dominant silent film comics, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Walter Kerr's book The Silent Clowns (1976) does the same, while granting additional space to the silent films of Laurel and Hardy, as well as a forgotten clown named Raymond Griffith, whose reputation failed to benefit from Kerr's attempt at rehabilitation. One silent clown, however, has been in desperate need of rediscovery since he suffered a catastrophic fall from stardom in 1921. The standard texts on the subject of silent film comedy mention the name Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle only in connection with Chaplin, who worked with him in a handful of Mack Sennett one-reelers in 1914, and Buster Keaton, who first appeared in Arbuckle's films from 1917. For a short time, once he escaped from Sennett, Arbuckle was as popular as Chaplin, writing and directing several films a year. His physical size was matched by his value to producers when Paramount enticed him away from Sennett in 1914 with a $1,000 a day contract and 25% of the profits from his films. He was teamed with Mabel Normand for a string of comedies of which he had total creative control. In 1916 he formed his own company, Comique, and his fame continued to soar. In his two-reeler The Butcher Boy (1917), Arbuckle introduced to the world a Vaudeville performer named Buster Keaton, and when, in 1918, Paramount offered Arbuckle a $3M contract for three feature films, he gave Keaton controlling interest in Comique.

Arbuckle was one of an old tradition of rotund comic figures. Shakespeare's Falstaff is one of the oldest examples, and John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley are a few of the newer ones. Arbuckle was certainly aware that his size had something to do with his fame, but he bristled at being called "Fatty", insisting that "I have a name." But his size would become a part of the undoing of his career, when a false accusation and three outrageous trials, accompanied by a torrent of unsubstantiated gossip, ruined his reputation and convinced the powers in Hollywood to never allow him to work again in front of the camera. A young woman named Virginia Rappe turned up at a party that Arbuckle threw in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, and she died three days later. Evidence from her autopsy suggest that she must've died of peritonitis brought on by a botched abortion. But none of this evidence emerged until much later. Within days of her death, a friend of Rappe went to the police with a manufactured story accusing Arbuckle of raping Rappe. Tabloid news took this slander against Arbuckle and ran with it, and before long they were printing the story that it was Arbuckle's heavy girth that had crushed Rappe, causing the peritonitis by rupturing her internal organs. None of it was true.

Charged with manslaughter, Arbuckle's first two trials ended with hung juries. The third, however, ended with a unanimous verdict of acquittal and an apology from the jury foreman. But the tabloid circus had already done its damage. An enormous moral backlash was sweeping America since the passage in 1920 of the notorious Volstead Act, which brought about the Prohibition era. The intolerable rumors about Arbuckle's wild party, as well as other high profile Hollywood scandals, caused such concern among movie moguls that it led to the formation of the Hays Office, headed by former congressman Will H. Hays, a self-censorship organ that cracked down on sexually explicit and even suggestive content in movies. Despite Arbuckle's vindication, six days later Hays ordered that he be permanently banned from working in the American film industry, and that his previous films should be suppressed. This led to the wholesale destruction of every print of an Arbuckle film that every company and distributor had in their possession. Virtually broke, Arbuckle had already sold his house and automobiles to pay for his legal defense. To help support him, Buster Keaton, who stood by Arbuckle at the risk of own career, signed over 35% of all profits from his own production company. In December 1922, the ban was lifted, but Arbuckle worked thereafter under an assumed name (William Goodrich) and only as a director.

Fortunately for all of us, the effects of the scandal didn't reach Europe, where Arbuckle was still considered the equal of the Big Four and his films were preserved. In Leap Year, completed just prior to that fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, nephew of tightwad millionaire Jeremiah Piper, who is in love with the old man's nurse, Phyllis Brown, who has a "sanitary hair-cut" that predates Louise Brooks's by a few years. Jeremiah fires the nurse and sends Stanley to Catalina Island to get him away from women. Of course, Catalina is crawling with women and Stanley, who still wants to marry Phyllis, finds that he has to fight them off.

As played by Arbuckle, Stanley isn't at all like the useless rich guy played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator, who can't even shave himself. Stanley's weaknesses are a stammer that can only be relieved by a drink of water, and women, most of whom find they can't resist him - when they know what he stands to inherit. When three women on Catalina, to whom he turns for love advice, mistake his confidences for marriage proposals, his response is the same: he jumps up and down like he's standing on hot coals and he runs away like Seabiscuit. The film varies his avenues of escape. The first time, he's on a golf course with a tiny black kid as his caddy. When the girl tries to embrace him, he grabs the kid by the hand and makes a mad dash across the green, with the kid hanging on to the golf bag. Mercifully, in mid-course, Stanley stops, grabs the kid, deposits him in the golf bag and drags it the rest of the way to the hotel. On the second occasion, he runs away from another girl straight into the ocean. When he swims past a yacht anchored offshore (his straw hat still affixed to his head), a third girl invites him aboard. When he confesses his love for nurse Phyllis and the girl thinks it's a proposal to her, Stanley dives overboard and swims back toward shore.

Back at Piper Hall, just when the plot begins to grow tedious, Stanley feigns fits to scare away his three fiancées, and Arbuckle gets to show off his skills at physical comedy - pratfalling and back-flipping like a landed fish. But none of his stunts succeed in scaring the girls away. After a climax involving his rejuvenated uncle, his butler becoming a Lord, multiple magistrates, marriage licences, and a chase in and around Piper Hall, all's well when the film ends, with Stanley and Phyllis shaking hands at their engagement.

Leap Year (a meaningless title) isn't up to Arbuckle's best work, which can be seen in his two-reelers like Love and The Hayseed. The problem wasn't Arbuckle but the script, credited to Sarah Y. Mason and Walter Woods. Arbuckle was formerly cast as a working class character, not as a silly heir to a tightwad millionaire. Despite his size, his performance is tightly controlled. Arbuckle's agility - his strength - was remarkable for a man his size. His movements often have the grace of a dancer, and in Sennett's knockabout comedies he became a virtual acrobat, since knowing how to fall was half the battle. But he simply doesn't look at ease in riding boots or golfing togs. And the business of Stanley's stammer (cured with a glass of water) becomes tedious after its third or fourth appearance.

All this is academic, however, when you consider that Leap Year was never released in the U.S. It finally premiered in 1924 - in FINLAND. Considered lost for decades, a print was found in the 1980s and the film was finally given its first American theatrical release in 1981, 60 years after its completion. In the November 1920 issue of Screenland magazine, Arbuckle wrote of his Paramount "five-reelers": "I am satisfied and hope everybody else is satisfied,and that I am on the right track. And I hope the public is going to devour these new five-reelers as a small boy devours jam. They are clean and wholesome, just as my pictures always were. They are made for the whole family - and that's what is needed in these days of the silent drama."(1) A year later, embroiled in a legal fight for his reputation and his freedom, Arbuckle's words perhaps came back to haunt him.


(1) "FROM SLAPSTICK TO LEGIT: Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle tells how it feels to work in Five Reelers," Screenland Magazine, November 1920.

The Getaway

Every film has its own history. From the completion of the post production, when positive prints are made from the original negative, to initial release when the prints are distributed to a certain number of theaters in a certain number of cities, to the end of the film's first run, when the prints are returned to the production company. The only difference between now and then is that instead of reels of 35mm film to be mounted on a projector, special multi-layered digital discs are distributed to theaters. The reels of film or the discs are returned to the production company, they are destroyed and the negative is stored in a vault.

Such was the fate of the 1972 film The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was the second-highest grossing American film in release in 1973, and was the biggest hit for its director, Sam Peckinpah. But it received unfavorable reviews from the critics. The Getaway started out as a novel by Jim Thompson published in 1958. Steve McQueen, who owned the rights to a film adaptation, brought Jim Thompson on board to write a script that was to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but disagreements led to the exit of both Thompson and Bogdanovich. McQueen was a big enough star at the time that he could call the shots. Walter Hill was hired to write a screenplay and Sam Peckinpah, who had worked with McQueen on Junior Bonner the year before, was the director. Only McQueen had approval of the final cut, which bothered Peckinpah enough, on one occasion, for him to take out a full page ad in Variety thanking Jerry Fielding for the music he wrote for the film, which didn't satisfy McQueen. Quincy Jones replaced him.

Sam Peckinpah was no studio stooge. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of him: "He is not an oblique puritan, he is a talented maniac who loves his bloody work. And the work is significant."(1) But that was The Wild Bunch. Something as yet undefined inspired Peckinpah to go above and beyond conventional expectations of an American film. Ride the High Country, his second feature film, is a classic of its kind, but it's still well within the boundaries of the Western genre. The Wild Bunch, his fourth film, vivisected the genre and found its beating heart. Kauffman noted that its use of violence called to mind Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Pauline Kael was evidently so overwhelmed by Straw Dogs, Peckinpah's 6th film, that she was moved to write, "The siege is not simply the climax but the proof, and it has the kick of a mule. What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art."(2)

In The Getaway, Steve McQueen plays Doc McCoy, whom we first see not adapting very well to life in a Texas prison. His wife Carol, played - improbably - by Ali MacGraw, visits him and he tells her, from his side of the cage, to do whatever she has to do to get him out. She succeeds, on condition that he pull off one more heist for Jack Beynon, a San Antonio crime boss (Ben Johnson, a crime boss who wears a cowboy hat). The heist is put together so mechanically by Peckinpah (it reminded me of Kubrick's equally overwrought heist at the heart of The Killing), in such preposterous detail that it comes as no surprise when almost everything goes wrong. When it's over, with only Doc and Carol surviving (Rudy is left for dead), Doc goes to Beynon's house to give him his cut. What he doesn't know is that Carol is then supposed to shoot him in the back, as arranged by Beynon. She shoots Beynon instead, which justifies the remainder of the protracted "getaway."

The bank robbery takes up far too much time - its planning and execution are so carefully laid out for no appreciable reason. It isn't Fort Knox - it's only a savings & loan with one old security guard. There is a genuinely suspenseful sequence aboard a train. And the garbage truck scene is somewhat scary, but only because delicate Ali MacGraw is inside it. Watching her and McQueen together makes one wonder what the attraction was - I mean, other than sex. And not just from her perspective. What was McQueen doing with this beautiful girl who belonged on top of a Christmas tree, not in a heist movie? Sally Struthers, before All in the Family made her immortal, is just another excuse for Peckinpah to show us his misogyny. I mean, who wasn't relieved when, screaming "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!", McQueen knocked her out with a left jab?

When location shooting started, MacGraw was married to the producer Robert Evans. She and McQueen hit it off during shooting, and it shows onscreen. Although McQueen was known to be physically abusive, MacGraw's vulnerability brings out an unexpected tenderness in McQueen in other scenes, like the one in which they make love after McQueen's release from jail, and he finds that not being with a woman in three years has made him momentarily impotent. MacGraw's patience patience in the scene is touching.

Clearly, Peckinpah wasn't inspired when he made The Getaway. Even the violent scenes feel puffed up - the slowing down of the action that seemed to contribute another dimension to The Wild Bunch seem here to be nothing but highlighting. McQueen slaps Ali MacGraw repeatedly and knocks Sally Struthers out cold, just like a hardened criminal like his character should. But Peckinpah was angered by McQueen's choice of shots, showing him off from his best angles. Two scenes in particular, one inside a garbage truck trash-masher, and the final shootout in an El Paso hotel (or was it a motel?) are utterly gratuitous. And the sickly sweet happy ending, with the couple shuffling off to Mexico - some kind of ultimate sanctuary for Peckinpah's heroes - is unearned by these unlikely partners in crime.

But all this would've been academic had it not occurred to a team of idiots to remake The Getaway in 1994. When a different team of idiots remade the Charles Bronson film, The Mechanic, in 2012, I wrote: "Contemporary American movies are so uniformly execrable that they make even the trashiest movies of the past seem splendid." The remake of The Getaway didn't make Peckinpah's film seem splendid, but it did give it almost iconic status among critics anxious to show off their comparative cinema skills. Alec Baldwin can't even act tough convincingly. Perhaps worried about his image, it's Kim Basinger, as Carol, who knocks out Rudy's girlfriend in the hotel scene. Compared to the remake, Peckinpah's The Getaway is what it always was - a competently-made heist movie. Trash, but skilfully made.

Peckinpah needed a hit when he made The Getaway and he got one. Just as the critical attention that his TV production of Noon Wine led to his contract to make The Wild Bunch, The Getaway gave Peckinpah a new lease on his directing career in 1973. He used it to make Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia the following year, which his fans admire so much but which goes to even greater depths than The Getaway in depravity. The only real difference is there is no sweet ending tacked on to the end of Garcia to carry the viewer out of the theater. Peckinpah managed to pull one more good film out of his hat - Cross of Iron (1977), the cumulative violence of which left me trembling, forty years ago, as I walked back to my car. John Simon was moved to admit that Peckinpah had a "Wagnerian sense of violence." Coincidentally, the heroes of Cross of Iron are Wehrmacht soldiers retreating on the Eastern Front.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 180.
(2) Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 29, 1972.

The Judge and the Murderer

Bertrand Tavernier's The Judge and the Murderer was his third film (his third masterpiece), after The Clockmaker (1974) and Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). It is set in the 1890s - Zola's era (Zola is denounced from a pulpit in an early scene) - and yet it feels magnificently modern. The settings and costumes sometimes resemble the subjects of French painters of the period, like Georges Seurat, the inventor of pointillism. And Tavernier's style also seems pointillistic, applying countless details, like colored dots, that, when we step back from them, take on the shape of real people and places.

Based on an account of the murderer ("assassin" in French means "murderer") Joseph Vaché (called Bouvier in the film), The Judge and the Murderer concerns an egocentric judge named Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) who seizes the opportunity to make a name for himself in his Provence town by catching and prosecuting a man who has made his progress from Normandy all the way to the southeast corner of France, leaving behind him a trail of grisly murders, mostly of young girls and boys. But the man in the film who commits these terrible crimes, Bouvier (Michel Galabru), obviously cannot help himself since he has to live with two bullets in his brain that, when they move around in the non-solid brain tissue, give him seizures and drives him momentarily insane. This diagnosis may sound glib, but it was never admitted as evidence in the man's defense.

Bouvier's life is set on its unfortunate course when he is kicked out of the army because of a suicide attempt. Still wearing his uniform, he pursues an attractive maid named Louise, with whom he has become infatuated. But his increasingly erratic behavior, like following Louise into a church during Sunday service to impress on her, even as she is taking communion, to accept his advances, become intolerable. Louise spurns him, and in retaliation, Bouvier shoots her three times and himself twice in the head. He is placed in an asylum where an attempt is made to operate on his head wounds, but the attempt is abandoned when the doctor is confronted with an apoplectic patient, screaming obscenities and anarchist slogans. Bouvier is released as "cured," despite his protestations that he is not. As soon as he is released, he begins his long trek south and his murders commence. Upon his capture, the actual killer, Vaché (both Bouvier and Vaché are common names for a "shepherd") confessed to eleven murders, but may have killed more than twenty-seven. His name became associated with Jack the Ripper, as "the French Ripper" and "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("the South-east Ripper").

Tavernier has a taste for detective fiction, which was reflected in his choices of novels by Simenon and Jim Thompson, but also in his narrative structure. In The Judge and the Murderer, Rousseau becomes obsessed with solving the murder cases (which often included rape and sodomy) that led to the capture of Bouvier. He catalogs their forensic details with a thoroughness that was unprecedented. In fact, the solving of the Vaché case is often credited with the creation of forensic science. 

The quite modern problem presented by the story of Joseph Bouvier is one of responsibility. Is Bouvier responsible - legally, mentally, and morally - for his crimes? Legally, there wasn't much room for such a question in late 19th-century France. Insanity pleas were a novelty, but mental incompetence was an obvious factor, because of the brain damage, albeit self-inflicted, that Bouvier suffered as a result of the two bullets he shot into his head. Bouvier confesses to eleven murders, and even cooperates with the investigation, somehow confident that his insanity plea will save him from the gallows. Rousseau, however, is determined that it shall not, and orders that Bouvier be examined, but only so that he should be declared competent. Tavernier gives Bouvier various opportunities to shout political slogans that establish his anarchist allegiances. When his conviction and sentence become clear to him, he vows that he will not take part in his execution. Accordingly, he is dragged by his guards to the gallows. Joseph Vaché was guillotined on New Year's Eve 1898.

The character of Rousseau, magnificently played by Philippe Noiret, becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the drama proceeds and his cynical treatment of the prisoner in his charge becomes clearer. Two characters, Villedieu, an attorney, and Rose, a village girl who is Rousseau's mistress (Rousseau is unmarried and lives with his mother), offer the viewer some contrast to the limitations in Rousseau's character - although he bullies both of them. Villedieu is beautifully played by Jean-Claude Brialy, and his reasonable objections to Rousseau's determination to make justice do only what he wants drives him to despair and, for this and undisclosed reasons, he kills himself. Rose, though initially passive, grows so intolerant of Rousseau's abuses (there is a scene in which Rousseau, perhaps inspired by Bouvier's crimes, sodomizes her), she leaves him and, at the close of the film that returns us to history, visits Bouvier's first victim, Louise, and joins a village strike, singing the words of a popular Communard song, as soldiers arrive to suppress the strike.

The script for The Judge and the Murderer is credited to Jean Aurenche and Tavernier, from an original idea developed by Tavernier and Pierre Bost. Aurenche and Bost, a legendary script-writing team in France, were unfairly black-balled in 1954 by then-Cahier du Cinéma critic François Truffaut. Attempting to perhaps correct this injustice, the two were coaxed out of retirement by Tavernier in 1974 to help him write The Clockmaker, which was based on a Georges Simenon novel. Bost died in December 1975, before the script for The Judge and the Murderer was completed. Aurenche would assist Tavernier one more time, co-writing Coup de Torchon (1981). And in loving tribute to Bost, Tavernier adapted his novel Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir for his film A Sunday in the Country (1984).

The Judge and the Murderer, like other Tavernier films, has been especially difficult to get hold of since its initial release. I first saw it (twice) on Telefrance in the early '80s, and I've since managed to locate it online, but aside from a Conoisseur Video version and a Laserdisc, it remains unavailable on DVD. This is a problem because the film is not only one of the best French films from the 1970s, but it was met with respectful incomprehension, with notable exceptions, by American critics. For example, in her New York Times review, Janet Maslin was obviously confused: "Judge Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) takes on the task of deciding whether the murderer, Sgt. Joseph Bouvier (Michel Galabru), is a madman or a fraud." Nonsense. Rousseau is not only convinced that Bouvier is a homicidal maniac, he is determined that the detail of his insanity will not save him from the guillotine. The sensational details of the murders (which he coolly relates to his unfazed mother) made national headlines in France, and Vaché's story gripped readers. Later, Maslin states: "after Bouvier is apprehended, the Judge examines him over and over, trying to determine whether the man's claims of insanity are to be believed." (1) Rousseau knows that Bouvier must be insane, but he doesn't care. He tricks Bouvier into convincing everyone else that he is sane so he can condemn him.

Tavernier evokes the period brilliantly, especially through the virulent anti-Semitism that provoked the Dreyfus Case. Bouvier, in fact, emerges as a strange kind of hero of the story, since he is the victim of the injustice forced on him by Rousseau. Incredibly, he arouses in the viewer more sympathy than Rousseau does. Noiret and Galabru become adversaries in the grim struggle over Bouvier's "insanity" defense. The level of acting between them is peerless. Philippe Sarde supplied the film with music that is movingly passionate, especially the ballads written for the film and sung by Jean-Roger Caussimon. This multi-layered and powerful film leaves the viewer with much to ponder about justice and responsibility. 


(1) Maslin also makes an incomprehensible statement regarding the film's "period": "Mr. Tavernier's 'The Clockmaker' and his 'Let Joy Reign Supreme' belong to the same period as this 1975 film". Does she mean that the three films were made at the same time or set in the same period? The Clockmaker is set in contemporary (1974) France, while Let Joy Reign Supreme is set in the 18th century.