Le Crime de Monsieur Lange

 

[I’m using the original – French – title of this film not because I’m being pretentious but because it contains a pun - “l’ange” – angel – that is lost in the translated The Crime of Mr. Lange.]

The salvation and preservation of films, which was a foreign concept until the 1930s, can sometimes be miraculous. Too many great films are officially designated as “lost”. Some of them are lost intentionally, but most of them are consigned to oblivion by mistake or by some unforeseen accident, such as a fire. 

In the credits of the copy of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange that I have, the first words that appear are “Une restauration.” Released in 1936, in a France far different from the France of a decade later, led by governments with similar objectives, but with vastly different motives, Lange is a rapturous snapshot of a fleeting moment in French history when the working class was in the driver’s seat. 

As far as I’ve been able to discover, Lange wasn’t exported at the time of its initial release. It was successful in France, but perhaps because it was inspired by the political atmosphere of a moment in time that was doomed not to last, it was given an unearned “niche” status and enjoyed no posterity. The lamentedly late John Simon saw it in New York 1964 at the now legendary 57th Street Normandie Theater. Despite its obscurity, Simon was evidently delighted by its reappearance:

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is a film that is absolutely fine. It is a poetic parable written by that most marvelous of minor poets, Jacques Prévert. It is a completely touching, lyrically simple plea against simplicity, decency, and socialism. And true love. Every word and gesture in it is a balm for all the crimes against mankind. It makes you weep and laugh and proud to be alive. 

Aside from this obscure screening, the film was otherwise never released in the U.S. until the restored version was shown at the 55th New York Film Festival in 2017, to the general surprise and delight of critics, none of whom had seen it before. Just why it had to wait so long, more than 80 years, for everyone to be entranced by it is another of the bizarre miracles of world cinema distribution. 

The basic plot of the film’s story was laid down by Renoir and Jean Castanier (spelled Castanyer in the credits), who also served as the film’s designer. A local gendarme reads a news bulletin at the bar of the Café Hotel de la Frontiere about a man, Amédée Lange, wanted for a murder in Paris. A car races to the front of the hotel where the driver, Meunier, has brought Lange and his lover, Valentine. Meunier tells them the food is good and just over the hills is the frontier with Belgium, to which they intend to escape when night falls. They ask for a room and a maid shows them there. Immediately, the men in the cafe begin to speculate about the strangers’ identity and wonder what they will do about him. Valentine enters the cafe and sits down. She tells them that the man she is with is indeed the wanted man, but she asks for their patience as she tells them his story. The rest of the film is an extended flashback. The film closes with Lange and Valentine walking away from the camera across a windy beach toward safety. 

Jacques Prevert’s work as a film script writer is mostly restricted to one director, Marcel Carne. The films Le Quai des Brumes, Le Jour se Leve, and especially the magnificent Les Enfants du Paradis are works that shed what I consider to be undeserved light on Carne, whose best work without Prevert isn’t at all up to the same standard.

When Prevert wrote the script for one film by Jean Renoir, a much finer filmmaker at his best, the result was predictably beautiful, and one of Renoir’s best films. Everything about Lange is infused with an enthusiasm whose source has been overtaken by history. The Popular Front in France had been a direct response to the events in Spain, from the optimism of the early months of the Republic to the rise of fascism that would eventually crush it. Hence, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange has a romantic aspect, unaffected by subsequent events. After the war, the French blamed the doomed Third Republic for the fall of France and the Occupation. They were demoralised, they said. But the French learned a different lesson from WWI - about the absolute folly of war.

Renoir’s actors are all so concentratedly within their roles in every scene of Lange. I will single out three: Sylvia Bataille’s Edith, hopelessly in love with Batala, the look on her face when she sees him off at the train station knowing it’s the last she will see of him; Nadia Sibirskaïa’s Estelle, in love with Charlie, an acrobat, but impregnated by Batala, she tells Charlie who the father is and he forgives her so simply and so beautifully; and the concierge, played by Marcel Lèvesque, who always sings a maudlin Christmas song when he’s drunk, and who screams “A PRIEST!” repeatedly – hilariously – as Batala, dressed as a priest, dies in the courtyard. 

Jules Berry is marvelous as Batala – irresistible to women, who know what a scoundrel he is; he is loathsome and unstoppable, but extremely charming. Like Valentin in Le Jour se leve (another Prevert script), his villainy is all the more deplorable because he is so convincingly human.

My life-long experience of Jean Renoir’s films started, I think, with The Rules of the Game, a film that gives me something new every time I see it.  Grand Illusion was probably next, and within another decade, Boudu Saved from Drowning, A Day in the Country, Toni, The Human Beast, Picnic on the Grass and The Elusive Corporal. Although I longed to see Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, in all this time – 45 years – I only managed to find it this past month. Now that I’ve finally seen it, I’m glad that the wait was so long. It has reawakened my love of cinema in these uncertain times.

Running for Cover

Though I wasn’t expecting fireworks, I found the Danny Boyle film, Yesterday, disappointing. Among the many conceivable parallel universes, I never conceived of one where there never was a pop group called The Beatles. But that’s where Richard Curtis takes us in Yesterday. Jack Malek (played gamely by Himesh Patel), is riding his bike one night when a mysterious worldwide blackout occurs, causing him to be hit by a bus. Jack is released from hospital and, sans two of his front teeth, celebrates his survival with friends at an outdoor party. His girlfriend has bought him a new guitar for the occasion and he quietly strums it and sings the Lennon/McCartney song “Yesterday.” His friends are amazed and ask him when he wrote such an exquisite song. 

The comic potential alone of such a premise is substantial. Curtis could’ve gone the way Frank Capra had done in It’s a Wonderful Life – but for laughs – by imagining how terribly the world would be affected if John, Paul, George and Ringo had never been bandmates. But Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis decided, instead, to play it straight. The result raises some unavoidable questions. 

What was it that made The Beatles so successful? The film suggests that it was the quality of the songs themselves, the words and music, that made the Liverpool lads household names. This seriously short changes the performances, the voices of Paul and John, and their contributions as musicians. It also ignores the contributions made by George Martin, now regarded as the “fifth Beatle,” who was their producer from November 1962, who helped craft every one of their recordings – because it was the records themselves that made The Beatles world famous, that, by now, everyone has heard. I must have listened to some of the recordings, like “Penny Lane,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Let It Be” scores of times in my life. I was 5 years old when I watched The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in January 1964, and I was 12 when the band broke up in 1970.

But even with so shaky a premise, Yesterday might have succeeded, if only it weren’t so uninspired in its execution. I was unconvinced by Jack’s attack of conscience at his sold-out Wembley Concert at the climax of the film, when he confesses to the fans that, despite the fact that he was performing as many Beatles songs as he could remember (and the performances themselves are presentable, but hardly memorable) for the very first time, he didn’t in fact write any of them. The only really moving moment in the film comes when Jack discovers a 78-year-old man named John Lennon (played by the uncredited Robert Carlyle) living in a remote seaside house. He is utterly bewildered by Jack’s outpouring of emotion. (He tells him that he should seek psychiatric treatment.) The scene inadvertently suggests that Lennon was better off never having been a Beatle. 

It's Sometimes Better to Fade Away

Always grateful to make a first acquaintance with a word, I was reading John Simon’s second book, Private Screenings, and I found on page 134 a word with which I was unfamiliar. Reviewing the John Frankenheimer film Seven Days in May, Simon remarked about the performance of Ava Gardner, “Granted that she is meant to enact a woman left too long on the bough, the fine line between overripeness and marcescence proves too fine for her.”(1)

Leave it to John Simon to point out an actress’ declining beauty so delicately (he once described an actress’ exposed breast as “uberous,” i.e., copious, abundant – a word you can’t find in most dictionaries). But the word I didn’t know was marcescence. 

Looking the word up online, I found an excellent article on the subject, “Winter Leaf Marcescence” from the Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service Home & Garden Information Center:

Have you noticed the persistent brown leaves still hanging on some deciduous trees long after their foliar companions have fallen? This usually becomes very apparent after normal leaf drop in early winter. These brown leaves may remain attached until spring bud growth pushes them free.

Complete leaf drop (abscission) may not occur on some trees until spring, or they may drop from all but lower limbs on other tree species. This is foliar marcescence, which comes from the Latin, marcescere, and means “to fade”. The persistent leaf does not readily form an abscission layer at the base of the leaf petiole (leaf stalk), where it attaches to the twig. This allows these brown leaves to remain attached on trees much longer.

A question that arises, though, does this marcescence benefit the trees or is it a detriment? Indeed, strong winter winds and snow may have a more harmful effect on a tree possessing foliage by causing more branch breakage. However, several theories proposed by plant ecologists suggest that leaves that drop later in the spring will provide a fresh layer of leaf mulch around the tree that helps conserve soil moisture, and these leaves decompose later during springtime to recycle and provide additional nutrients for growth. Another theory that seems to make sense is that lower limbs holding onto these dry unpalatable leaves may deter browsing by deer, who prefer to feed on the more tender and nutritious buds and twigs, not on the bitter, fibrous old foliage.

Whatever the reason for the marcescence, it is an interesting characteristic to see, and if you listen closely, you can hear these noisy, rattling leaves during the winter breezes.(2)

What a lovely description of a natural phenomenon. My thanks to John Simon for once again expanding my vocabulary, even if was at the expense of Ava Garner. 

(1) Private Screenings (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1967).

(2) Winter Leaf Marcescence 

Julia

In the final chapter of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is sitting in the Chestnut Tree Cafe drinking gin and awaiting an imminent news bulletin about the outcome of a decisive battle in Africa in Oceania’s neverending war with Eurasia. He has survived weeks, perhaps months of torture in the Ministry of Love, but he knows that his release is only a reprieve. He knows that, sooner or later, he will be executed. He is simply waiting. He is a broken, depleted, hollow man. He betrayed Julia, his lover – with whom he had found what he believed was a place where he was safe, hidden from the omniscient eyes of Big Brother. He loved her and he promised not to betray her when they were arrested. But at the end of his tortures, physically shattered, but still clinging to the one thing that had personal meaning for him – his love for Julia – they managed to get him to betray her. He begged that she should take his place, that she should be facing what terrified him more than anything else, that she be devoured by ravenous rats, and not he.  

Sitting in the cafe, a drunken, sad shadow of himself, his thoughts returned to Julia.  

‘They  can’t  get  inside  you,’  she  had  said.  But  they  could get  inside  you.  ‘What  happens  to  you  here  is  FOR  EVER,’ O’Brien  had  said.  That  was  a  true  word.  There  were  things, your  own  acts,  from  which  you  could  never  recover.  Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.  
 

He  had  seen  her;  he  had  even  spoken  to  her.  There  was no  danger  in  it.  He  knew  as  though  instinctively  that  they now  took  almost  no  interest  in  his  doings.  He  could  have arranged  to  meet  her  a  second  time  if  either  of  them  had wanted  to.  Actually  it  was  by  chance  that  they  had  met.  It was  in  the  Park,  on  a  vile,  biting  day  in  March,  when  the earth  was  like  iron  and  all  the  grass  seemed  dead  and  there was  not  a  bud  anywhere  except  a  few  crocuses  which  had pushed  themselves  up  to  be  dismembered  by  the  wind.  He was  hurrying  along  with  frozen  hands  and  watering  eyes when  he  saw  her  not  ten  metres  away  from  him.  It  struck him  at  once  that  she  had  changed  in  some  ill-defined  way. They  almost  passed  one  another  without  a  sign,  then  he turned  and  followed  her,  not  very  eagerly.  He  knew  that there  was  no  danger,  nobody  would  take  any  interest  in  him. She  did  not  speak.  She  walked  obliquely  away  across  the grass  as  though  trying  to  get  rid  of  him,  then  seemed  to  resign  herself  to  having  him  at  her  side.  Presently  they  were  in among  a  clump  of  ragged  leafless  shrubs,  useless  either  for concealment  or  as  protection  from  the  wind.  They  halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted  the  occasional,  dirty-looking  crocuses.  He  put  his arm round her waist.  

There  was  no  telescreen,  but  there  must  be  hidden microphones:  besides,  they  could  be  seen.  It  did  not  matter,  nothing  mattered.  They  could  have  lain  down  on  the ground  and  done  THAT  if  they  had  wanted  to.  His  flesh froze  with  horror  at  the  thought  of  it.  She  made  no  response whatever  to  the  clasp  of  his  arm;  she  did  not  even  try  to  disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face  was  sallower,  and  there  was  a  long  scar,  partly  hidden by  the  hair,  across  her  forehead  and  temple;  but  that  was  not the  change.  It  was  that  her  waist  had  grown  thicker,  and,  in a  surprising  way,  had  stiffened.  He  remembered  how  once, after  the  explosion  of  a  rocket  bomb,  he  had  helped  to  drag a  corpse  out  of  some  ruins,  and  had  been  astonished  not only  by  the  incredible  weight  of  the  thing,  but  by  its  rigidity and  awkwardness  to  handle,  which  made  it  seem  more  like stone  than  flesh.  Her  body  felt  like  that.  It  occurred  to  him that  the  texture  of  her  skin  would  be  quite  different  from what it had once been.  

He  did  not  attempt  to  kiss  her,  nor  did  they  speak.  As  they walked  back  across  the  grass,  she  looked  directly  at  him  for the  first  time.  It  was  only  a  momentary  glance,  full  of  contempt  and  dislike.  He  wondered  whether  it  was  a  dislike  that came  purely  out  of  the  past  or  whether  it  was  inspired  also by  his  bloated  face  and  the  water  that  the  wind  kept  squeezing  from  his  eyes.  They  sat  down  on  two  iron  chairs,  side  by side  but  not  too  close  together.  He  saw  that  she  was  about to  speak.  She  moved  her  clumsy  shoe  a  few  centimetres  and deliberately  crushed  a  twig.  Her  feet  seemed  to  have  grown broader, he noticed.  

‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.  

‘I betrayed you,’ he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike.  

‘Sometimes,’  she  said,  ‘they  threaten  you  with  something  you  can’t  stand  up  to,  can’t  even  think  about. And  then  you  say,  ‘Don’t  do  it  to  me,  do  it  to  somebody else,  do  it  to  so-and-so.’  And  perhaps  you  might  pretend, afterwards,  that  it  was  only  a  trick  and  that  you  just  said  it to  make  them  stop  and  didn’t  really  mean  it.  But  that  isn’t true.  At  the  time  when  it  happens  you  do  mean  it.  You  think there’s  no  other  way  of  saving  yourself,  and  you’re  quite ready  to  save  yourself  that  way.  You  WANT  it  to  happen  to the  other  person.  You  don’t  give  a  damn  what  they  suffer. All you care about is yourself.’  

‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.  

‘And  after  that,  you  don’t  feel  the  same  towards  the  other person any longer.’  

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’  

There  did  not  seem  to  be  anything  more  to  say.  The  wind plastered  their  thin  overalls  against  their  bodies.  Almost  at once  it  became  embarrassing  to  sit  there  in  silence:  besides, it  was  too  cold  to  keep  still.  She  said  something  about  catching her Tube and stood up to go.  

‘We must meet again,’ he said.  

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must meet again.’  

He  followed  irresolutely  for  a  little  distance,  half  a  pace behind  her.  They  did  not  speak  again.  She  did  not  actually try  to  shake  him  off,  but  walked  at  just  such  a  speed  as  to prevent  his  keeping  abreast  of  her.  He  had  made  up  his  mind that  he  would  accompany  her  as  far  as  the  Tube  station,  but suddenly  this  process  of  trailing  along  in  the  cold  seemed pointless  and  unbearable.  He  was  overwhelmed  by  a  desire not  so  much  to  get  away  from  Julia  as  to  get  back  to  the Chestnut  Tree  Cafe,  which  had  never  seemed  so  attractive as  at  this  moment.  He  had  a  nostalgic  vision  of  his  corner table,  with  the  newspaper  and  the  chessboard  and  the  everflowing  gin.  Above  all,  it  would  be  warm  in  there.   

The  next moment,  not  altogether  by  accident,  he  allowed  himself  to become  separated  from  her  by  a  small  knot  of  people.  He made  a  halfhearted  attempt  to  catch  up,  then  slowed  down, turned,  and  made  off  in  the  opposite  direction.  When  he had  gone  fifty  metres  he  looked  back.  The  street  was  not crowded,  but  already  he  could  not  distinguish  her.  Any  one of  a  dozen  hurrying  figures  might  have  been  hers.  Perhaps her  thickened,  stiffened  body  was  no  longer  recognizable from behind.  

‘At  the  time  when  it  happens,’  she  had  said,  ‘you  do  mean it.’  He  had  meant  it.  He  had  not  merely  said  it,  he  had  wished it.  He  had  wished  that  she  and  not  he  should  be  delivered over to the—— 

His reverie is interrupted by the news bulletin on the telescreen.