Casque d'Or

With Valentine’s Day safely behind me, I turn to a love story: not a romance by any means, but tough, grown-up love between two hardened people who never expected it. Someone, I think it was Stanley Kauffmann, once observed that in the films of François Truffaut love affairs never seem to work out. Jacques Becker made five films that are classifiable as love stories. The greatest – and the most brutal – is Casque d'Or (1952). 

 

Enjoying an enviable apprenticeship as assistant to Jean Renoir from 1932 to 1938, Jacques Becker made thirteen feature films (as many, significantly, as Robert Bresson) and they represent a challenge to critics too attached to the idea that filmmakers are in total control of their material. His career lasted less than two decades. He was just 53 when he died during post-production of his last, great, film, Le Trou in 1960. 

Casque d’Or opens on a sunny day. A group of men and women are approaching in boats rowing to the riverbank, singing cheerily. The men are members of a criminal gang and the women are prostitutes. The period is late 19th/early 20th century, also known as La Belle Époque, but Becker is showing us the demimonde. All but one of the boats is rowed by a man. That one is rowed by Marie (Simone Signoret), who alone wears, instead of a hat, her abundant blonde hair piled up on her head in a style called “casque d’or,” or golden helmet. 

They disembark and make their way to an establishment called A L’ANGE GABRIEL, one of the principal attractions of Joinville (Renoir Père often painted in such an establishment). The clientèle is various: some bourgeois customers (who complain about the entrance of the hookers and crooks) and a military officer who asks for the music to commence. A pair of carpenters is working inside the dance hall, the youngest of whom is Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), an ex-con and friend of Raymond, one of the gang of men who just arrived. Raymond recognizes Manda, who used to be called Jo when they were in prison together. 

Marie’s boyfriend is Roland, a dandy, whom she treats with obvious disdain. She refuses to dance when he snaps his fingers, until everyone in the group insists that she does. Watching them dance to a waltz, Raymond yells to her “Attagirl, Marie!” She looks over at Raymond and notices Manda beside him. Manda notices back. The electrical connection is made and they can’t take their eyes off each other. That little drama of interlocked eyes, back and forth, is all the more noticeable because Becker makes no effort to linger over it. It simply happens and, from that moment forward, our attention is held by Marie and Manda. 

Marie has also attracted the attention of Felix Leca, the gang leader (played with glutinous charm by Claude Dauphin). He hears about a fight between Manda and Roland at A L’Ange Gabriel and decides to use it to his advantage by eliminating Roland. Leca makes a great mistake, however, when he tries to frame Raymond for the killing of Roland, and he rouses Manda’s loyalty to his friend. When Raymond is killed after he escapes from jail with Manda, Leca runs until Manda corners him at the police station and, borrowing a gendarme's pistol, he fires every shot in the cylinder into Leca's body. 

The film is crowded with so many living details that seem to be incidental, but are part of a larger design, like the old woman making idle conversation while emptying her waste buckets into the gutter in Belleville or another woman feeding her little pigs on the morning when Manda meets Marie by the river in Joinville. La Signoret’s closeups are always diffused, but that was to be expected. She was 31 when the film was released and was never more radiant than she is here. The moment when Manda awakes and looks at her beside him in bed is the first time in the film that we see her with her hair down. 

But what, above all, Casque d’Or exudes is a toughness whose source is nothing less than the truth about human beings. There is a certitude that underpins every action and every word of the principal characters that provokes shocks of recognition in the viewer. Between them, Leca and Marie, there are four scenes in which they are slapped or are slapping someone. Marie gets the brunt, but the two men who slapped her are dead by the film’s end. And the one man whom she slapped – Manda – is executed by guillotine. 

More than one observer has pointed out that the film’s final scene is shocking, and yet its brutality is entirely in keeping with everything that comes before. The demimonde was an underworld, in more than one sense. It operated according to its own codes of inhumanity. Manda is the film’s hero, yet we watch him kill two people. According to the strange logic of the time, the penalty for murder is murder. How could it come as a shock when the ultimate inhumanity – capital punishment – is visited on Manda? 

Once we see the view from the window of the apartment where Marie has come just before dawn – the boulevard outside a prison where a guillotine has been erected – the end is followed through with haste, as all such executions were. It is purposely shocking because we, like Manda, are given very little time to prepare ourselves for this final blow. 

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know. Now I had to admit it seemed a very simple process, getting guillotined; the machine is on the same level as the man, and he walks toward it as he steps forward to meet somebody he knows. In a sense, that, too, was disappointing. The business of climbing a scaffold, leaving the world below, so to speak, gave something for a man’s imagination to get hold of. But, as it was, the machine dominated everything; they killed you discreetly, with a hint of shame and much efficiency.  (1)

But Becker can’t let go of Manda and Marie’s story cleanly. When Marie lowers her head from the spectacle below, Becker gives us a gift that is perhaps superfluous, but nonetheless heartbreaking: the two of them, now all alone on the dancefloor in Joinville, waltzing, the sun shining down through the overhead trellis onto the floor as they turn in their dream dance.

(1) Albert Camus, The Stranger, Part Two, Chapter V (Stuart Gilbert translation).