After repeated efforts to gain the approval of Jean Bruller to make a film of his novel, which had become a best-seller in France after the war, Melville informed him that he would make the film without acquiring the official rights, but would submit the finished film for the approval of a tribunal of judges, all former members of the Resistance. If it failed to gain their approval, Melville vowed to destroy the negative and all positive prints of the film. Bruller agreed to Melville's proposal. However, examination of the film's shooting script, which fell into the possession of the Cinémathèque Francaise, reveals that Bruller was closely involved in the production.
Howard Vernon (born Mario Lippert, Swiss father, American mother) plays Werner von Ebrennac, and he has just the sort of classical ugliness that the role needed. When he looks entreatingly at Nicole Stéphane (born Baroness Nicole de Rothschild [1]), it's intended to make our flesh crawl. This German officer, whose ridiculous speeches about a "marriage" of Germany and France, gradually becomes hateful to himself. He emphatically quotes to his captive audience a speech from Macbeth (Act V Scene 2):
Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
He's trying to apply this speech by Angus to French president Laval, but he neglects to add the very next speech in the play (by Menteith) that bears directly on himself:
Who then shall blame
His pester'd senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?
As he slowly learns what the German occupation of France is really about - the complete destruction of French culture, Hitler's revenge on Versailles - Ebrennac grows to despise his role in the occupation, and eventually volunteers for combat duty (though I wonder of what use a lame lieutenant would be at the front).
The turning point comes when the Frenchman has to visit the Kommandatur to turn in a routine fire report when Ebrennac sees the old man's reflection in the mirror. Ebrennac has a look of almost panicked guilt on his face, like he's been caught in the act - a Hitler functionary going about his daily routine of occupation and oppression. He bows to the old man and turns to leave the room.
What impact do the extreme strictures of Melville's budget have on the film? In other words, does his economy of means translate into an economy of ends? There are a few moments in which Melville covers a missing shot (of the Lieutenant's staff car, for instance) with a sound effect. Or when Ebrennac stands waiting for the arrival of a train that we never see. One could argue that the shots are unnecessary, but they call attention to themselves. To some extent, Melville was anticipating Bresson's elisions.
The scenes in which Ebrennac relates his visit to Paris on leave seem strange at first. Like a tourist travelogue, we see him standing against various Paris landmarks, cleverly intercut with newsreel footage of German soldiers in Paris. At one point a soldier in a newsreel salutes someone off camera and Ebrennac returns his salute. The fellow Wehrmacht officers he meets are suitably monstrous, with one of them telling him how Treblinka has become obsolete and how future death camps will accommodate the killing of 2,000 prisoners per day.
Melville handles the monotony of the narrative extremely well, developing a rhythm that captures the suffocating routine of life under the Occupation. Edgar Bischoff's music is overwherlming at times, but it reflects the great emotional undercurrent that the images can't show. For ordinary Frenchmen, the saying "life goes on" was especially galling from 1940-44. The decision was made by a traitorous French leadership that surrender was preferable to defeat in battle, to the physical destruction of France.
What a unique, one-off film; like all great films, a one-off. Made with no money - apparently. Shot in Bruller's own house outside Paris. Three characters (two of them aren't even named). I counted five interior sets. We never hear the voice of the niece - the one time she speaks, her uncle's narration drowns her out. Melville was a member of the Resistance, and no other film that I've seen, save Marcel Ophuls's Le chagrin et la pitié, captures something, the feel, of what it must have been like to be a Frenchman under German occupation.(2) The silent treatment that the old Frenchman and his niece give the Wehrmacht Lieutenant is a strange game at first - an odd condition, really. Carrying on their daily routines: him with his pipe, her with her sewing and knitting - carrying on as if nothing were wrong, nothing had changed: it was how all Frenchmen behaved - even those enlisted in the Resistance had covers, day jobs. It wasn't as if there was an active front, to which uniformed fighters marched away to war. The front was, as it were, everywhere.
(1) The Baroness was instrumental in Melville's career, even after a car crash forced her out of acting. She turned to producing independent films by Georges Franju and Melville. Late in her life she was Susan Sontag's lover.
(2) Losey's Monsieur Klein effectively conveys nightmarish, Kafkaesque aspect of the Occupation.
[A personal note that intrigued me is when the Uncle tells us how he drinks coffee in the evenings because it helps him to sleep. Perhaps it's my own advancing age, buy I, too, find that coffee is an excellent soporific.]
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