Hollywood

Irving Thalberg

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing. - Michelangelo Antonioni

When I think about Hollywood, and what better occasion than the closing of the latest Oscar ceremony, I am often reminded of an important date in its history: April 17, 1924. It was on that date that the biggest movie studio in Hollywood, MGM, was born. How it happened was that a theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg appointed as the head of production. 

You might call the date fateful, because at that very moment a film director named Erich von Stroheim was struggling to arrive at a compromise in the laborious editing process of a film that was produced by Samuel Goldwyn that he had finished in 1923. Because of the merger that created MGM, his finished film was now the property of MGM, and its fate was in the hands of its head of production, Irving Thalberg. 

The year before, Stroheim and Thalberg had a confrontation in the offices of Universal Pictures, where Thalberg was then head of production. Stroheim’s work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Thalberg due to its going too far over budget. Thalberg fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. 

Despite this, and despite his reputation as a spendthrift, Stroheim managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. Stroheim showed a select group of people a cut of the material that is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Some of the people who saw Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, called it the greatest film they’d ever seen. But even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. 

But then Goldwyn Pictures was absorbed into MGM, and once again Irving Thalberg was there to decide the film’s fate. He took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child." So the birth of Hollywood’s biggest studio presided over the destruction of what was rumored to be a cinematic masterpiece. 

Hurray for Hollywood.

Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution

“His films are interesting. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. He taught films how to use disorder.” Robert Bresson (1)

No other filmmaker, living or dead, is as big a bone of contention among film critics as Jean-Luc Godard, who, now 90 years old, is the last of the Nouvelle Vague, hanging in there – as my Army drill sergeant put it – like a fifty-pound booger. That contention was a whole lot fiercer in the 1960s, when, arguably, his work mattered more. More than fifty years after the event, there are still a few holdouts who maintain that Godard is not just the greatest filmmaker of the French New Wave, but one of the most important artists who ever lived. Not surprisingly, the critics who hold such views are also diehard "auteurists." 

Nearing the end of his very long life (97 years), Stanley Kauffmann confessed that one of the things he most wanted to do was to watch the early films of Godard again so that he could reassess their value. It was his way of admitting – one supposes – that he regretted having failed to take Godard seriously in the ‘60s, when it would’ve mattered. The most surprising thing about Kauffmann’s second thoughts about Godard is that he was one of a bulwark of critics in the 60s who unilaterally dismissed Godard – Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, Vernon Young, and Charles Thomas Samuels. 

As for the other critics, among whom I count such mortal enemies (though they are both dead) as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, Kael set the tone of incoherence in her review of Alphaville, Godard's ninth film, with the line, “The picture is brilliant, yet it's no good.” But awhile later (1998), Sarris claimed that “To understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard, and vice versa.” 

So, not being a fan of either science fiction or Godard, I took a good look (on my device of choice) at Alphaville. The plot goes something like this: Lemmy Caution, under the alias Ivan Johnson, a reporter for the newpaper Figaro-Pravda, arrives by night in a metropolis called Alphaville from the Outer Countries and checks into a hotel. The bellboy who takes him to his room is a young blonde who promptly takes off her clothes and gets into the tub. An assassin appears in the bathroom out of nowhere and attacks Caution, who beats him down but the intruder escapes after smashing through three glass doors. The girl turns out to be a “level three seductress”. Soon after he sends her away, Caution is visited by Natasha Von Braun, who is at least a flesh and blood woman – even if you wouldn’t know it from her heavy makeup. She is the daughter of Professor Von Braun, who is the creator of Alphaville’s super-computer and the man Caution has been sent there to kill. Caution falls in love with Natasha, but she has no understanding of such emotions. 

Caution meets a fellow agent, Henry Dickson, just in time to watch him die in the arms of another seductress. Dickson's final act is to show Caution a book beneath his pillow, which Caution reads in a taxi moments later. It is Eluard’s Capitale de la Douleur. The text takes on great significance as Caution teaches Natasha that poetry is the supreme expression of freedom.

Godard isn’t optimistic for the future as long as the world keeps going down the current track it’s on. He foresees an anti-human scientific authoritarianism, the world run by a super computer. When Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey, he wanted to depict a time when space travel is as commonplace as air travel on earth. He wanted to make strangeness (things like walking and eating in zero gravity) seem familiar. Godard, abetted by a small budget, accomplishes the opposite: he makes the familiar seem strange. He asks us to look at the world (Paris, circa 1965) with new eyes. The ugly steel-and-glass buildings Godard uses to depict his futuristic Alphaville are modernistic, and by now totally out of date. 

Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution in Alphaville. It was his eighth appearance in the role, created by English crime writer Peter Cheyney. Constantine seems to spend half his time playing with his Zippo lighter (he once even lights it with a bullet fired from his .45). Apparently, Godard insisted that he wear no makeup, and the raw features of his face present a stark contrast to Anna Karina’s heavily lacquered beauty. 

It isn’t very difficult for an old filmgoer like me to pinpoint the attraction of Alphaville. Film is not at all what it was in 1965, and not simply because I am not what I was. (I was just 7 when the film was first shown. It would be another decade before I even heard the name Godard.) Perhaps the only attractive aspect left of Godard’s early films, from Breathless to Masculin, Feminin isn’t just their playfulness. In Godard’s case, it’s anarchic – if rather strained – inventiveness making up for the absence of form. Whatever Godard may have achieved in his work, the sheer aplomb with which he blazed his own trail is fascinating today. 

Praise Raoul Coutard’s luminous cinematography (the second opening credit of the film reads “PHOTOGRAPHIÉ EN ILFORD HPS PAR RAOUL COUTARD”), Eddie Constantine’s honest, pockmarked face, Akim Tamiroff’s turn as an undercover agent, and a mostly nocturnal Paris doubling as Dystopia (impossible!), but don’t take the rest too seriously. It was somewhat typical quasi-art in the mid-60s, something for film club members to love or to hate.  

Despite having a quasi-plot that can be followed, I found Alphaville to be little more than a clumsy attempt at surrealism. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, which some critics mistakenly labelled “Kafkaesque.” In his review of the novel, James Wood called it “a five-hundred-page dream-narrative.” He also warned that “The danger of using an unreliable narrator is that the narrator is always reliably unreliable, and thus a little unreal, a fake, since his unreliability is manipulated by the writer. Indeed, without the writer's reliability we would not be able to read the narrator's unreliability.” Jean-Luc Godard is probably the most unreliable filmmaker who ever lived. 

(1) Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Peter Yates (1929-2011) was a British film director who was “brought over” by Hollywood to direct Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968), a film that has since taken on a cult status. His stay in the US resulted in a few film successes and a few failures. In the former category are Breaking Away (1979) and Eyewitness (1981), both based on Steve Tesich scripts. But his best American film is The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). 

Based on a novel by George V. Higgins published in 1970, a novel Elmore Leonard called “the best crime novel ever written”, the film is set in Boston and explores the same territory as the Martin Scorsese film The Departed, made thirty years later, populated by crime syndicates, law enforcement and police informants. It also occupies the same grey area in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad and who we’re supposed to root for. There are only subtle gradations of grey. 

Eddie wants to retire somewhere south, where all hoods in a cold climate dream of retiring. The title is ironic. We’re visiting a world where there’s a thin line between a handshake and a bullet. When the film opens a group of men are following a bank manager from his home to the bank, gathering information for an upcoming heist. We first meet Eddie in a diner working out the details of getting some guns for the bank robbery. Eddie is already facing time for possession of stolen goods in New Hampshire. He’s also working as an informant for Dave Foley, an ATF agent. The film draws its way along methodically until about halfway through, when things start to go bad. A second bank robbery ends up with the shooting of a bank employee. Picking up more guns from his supplier, Eddie notices some M16s in the guy’s trunk. (They’re for a pair of IRA-looking hippies.) Eddie seizes his opportunity to get on Foley’s good side by telling him about the M16s. The gunrunner is caught, and poor Eddie, who thinks he’ll get off on the charges in New Hampshire, gets a contract out on him instead. 

If you’ve seen enough 70s movies, you’ll recognize almost every face: Alex Rocco, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Joe Santos. All fine actors, adept at portraying mugs. But in front of them all is Robert Mitchum, who plays Eddie “Fingers” Coyle, a longtime crook with a double set of knuckles, no ambition and even less luck who’s getting old and doesn’t want to do more time in prison. He’s a good enough actor that we forget he was a Hollywood headliner for twenty years. You can even hear him aiming, if not exactly hitting, a Boston accent in some scenes. Mitchum shows us just enough of Eddie’s humanity to make us sorry – if not at all surprised – when his number comes up. 

If I were to compare The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed, it is to the former’s extreme detriment in terms of entertainment. I looked for and only momentarily saw any of the typical trappings of a crime thriller in Peter Yates’s film: a frenetic style, that encompasses the acting, framing and pacing of shots, that aggrandizes moments of violence, that exercises your eyes while benumbing your brain. (There are plenty of guns on display in Yates’s film, but they are fired only twice, along with one shotgun blast.) The Scorsese film is, in this narrow sense, far more watchable. In fact, the people who thrilled to the violence of The Departed would be bored to death by Eddie Coyle. But, of course, we aren’t looking at a character vaguely modelled on Whitey Bulger or at the FBI. (Nor are we looking at questionable casting choices, like Jack Nicholson doing another turn as Tim Burton’s Joker without the makeup or Leo DiCaprio striving valiantly to seem like a tough guy or Mark Wahlberg mistaking a permanent scowl for acting.) And in terms of that elusive element called art, Yates’s film is far more substantial than Scorsese’s. Eddie Coyle wants us to believe that we’re looking at the world. The faces of all the “extras” in the film are convincingly real and human. Filmed in and around Boston, it has the look and feel of lived-in actuality. The bar in which Eddie meets Foley for the last time made me thirsty. The period cars, the bad haircuts, the clothes, along with the autumn trees and people exhaling steam all add up to the here and now – of 1973 or forever. 

But there is a funny story from behind the scenes of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. When Robert Mitchum arrived in Boston for the shoot, he is said to have requested a meeting with Bulger. George Kimball, sportswriter for the Boston Herald, claims that the meeting took place, despite George Higgins’s warnings against it. As Kimball wrote in a piece for the Irish Times: 

Mitchum, who had in 1949 served time in a California prison – an experience he likened to “Palm Springs without the riff-raff” — on a marijuana possession charge, reminded Higgins that it was actually Bulger who was imperiling himself, by associating with a known criminal. 

Everyone in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a realist. Since the only way to survive in the place and time where they live is to double-deal, betray friends and in extreme cases even shoot them in the head, they adapt to it and accept it. But not entirely without protest. The last scene in the film is on the Commons between Dillon, who has just killed Eddie, and Foley. As they walk along, Dillon says, 

I heard a guy on television the other night. He was talking about pigeons. Called them flying rats. I thought that was pretty good. He had something in mind, going to feed them the Pill or something, make them extinct. Trouble is, he was serious, you know? There was a guy that got shit on and probably got shit on again and then he got mad. Ruined his suit or something, going to spend the rest of his life getting even with the pigeons because they wrecked a hundred-dollar suit. Now there isn’t any percentage in that. There must be ten million pigeons in Boston alone, laying eggs every day, which will generally produce more pigeons, and all of them dropping tons of shit, rain or shine. And this guy in New York is going to, well, there just aren’t going to be any of them in this world any more.

The speech is in the novel, but then Paul Monash, who adapted the novel and produced the film, jumps forward in Dillon’s speech and he concludes: 

You see what I mean? Man gets desperate, he does a few things, he knows it won’t work, pretty soon he quits, just packs it all in and goes away somewhere. Only way there is. 

Once a man faces the fact that he can’t kill all the flying rats in the world, he has to accept getting shit on, maybe even get into the dry cleaning business.

Everything about the last ten minutes of the film is so heartbreakingly sordid: Eddie getting plastered, happily watching the Bruins beat the Blackhawks in the old Boston Garden (fittingly, none of the players, not even Bobby Orr, is wearing a helmet), passing out in the front seat of the car that's supposed to drop him off wherever it was he parked his own car, and Dillon giving the kid driving careful instructions about where to drive until he pulls out the .22 and carries out Eddie's quietus. Parked in front of a bowling alley is where they leave the car, with Eddie deposited inside. At least they locked the doors so the "volunteers" don't find the body first. Poor Eddie never got his place in the sun. 

Round Midnight

Since his death on March 25, tributes to the French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier have been pouring forth, some of them very personal, and others unintentionally backhanded. Tavernier could turn a pulp novel by Jim Thompson into Coup de Torchon, an entertaining (and proudly contrived) tour-de-force, but only because he had already proved he was an artist. 

Last week I examined Tavernier‘s affectionate portrait of an old painter, A Sunday in the Country, and wished that that Tavernier were not so much in love with his subject. It proved that love, which is expansive and uncritical by nature, can cause an artist to go off the rails. Then last week The New Yorker published a tribute to Tavernier's Round Midnight (1986), “The Film That Jazz Deserves,” by Howard Fishman, a “writer, performer and composer,” that singles out one of his least effective films for high praise: 

The French auteur’s career included such stylistically disparate films as “A Sunday in the Country” and “Death Watch,” but his signature work may be the moody, impressionistic “ ’Round Midnight,” from 1986, about an aging American jazz musician in nineteen-fifties Paris and the admiring fan who befriends and helps him. It’s ironic (and maybe fitting) that it took a foreign director to do justice to a quintessential American art form. “ ’Round Midnight” is the film that jazz deserves. (1)

Putting aside for the moment the question of what jazz deserves, Tavernier, who evidently loves jazz, left a lot of space in the film for the music. As a jazz lover myself, I enjoyed these scenes in which Dexter Gordon and the other musicians Tavernier cast in the film that included Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Billy Higgins, played, but when you notice how little attention their music attracts in the club in which they play, even in ultra-cool Paris, it made me wonder how many new jazz fans Tavernier hoped to find. I would never argue for a resurgence in the popularity of jazz – at the same level it enjoyed in the 1950s. Those days are long gone. As Auden wrote, “the wind has changed,” and jazz has lost its audience. In the whole history of jazz recordings, only eight have sold more than one million copies, and only one has sold more than two million. (2) 

The story is presented in linear terms: Dale Turner is a jazz saxophone player who, in 1950, is driven from New York to France in search of performance gigs. There, at the Paris Blue Note Café (where Bud Powell performed and was recorded), Turner meets Francis, a young Frenchman who designs movie posters. Francis idolizes Turner and involves himself in his precarious life, watches as his fondness for red wine gets out of hand, frees him from the clutches of a manipulating woman, takes him into his own home and helps him get clean. But Turner has a teenaged daughter in New York and wants to see her again. Francis, by now Turner’s caretaker, accompanies him to New York, arranges for his reunion with his daughter. But upon his return to France, while watching his home movies of Turner, a telegram is pushed under his door notifying Francis of Turner’s death. 

The Round Midnight script is credited to Tavernier and David Rayfiel, “inspired by incidents in the lives of Francis Paudras & Bud Powell.” (It is also “respectfully dedicated” to Bud Powell and Lester Young.) Francis Paudras was as much of a jazz impresario as he was an aficionado of the music. He not only had great enthusiasm for the music but took an active part in the troubled life of Bud Powell. Powell was an extraordinary practitioner of be-bop on piano. The choice of the song “’Round Midnight” written by Thelonious Monk is apt, if a touch ironic. Powell’s style of playing was much more like Charlie Parker’s and Dizzie Gillespie’s than Monk’s minimalism. Powell played on the very first recording of the song in 1944. He suffered from mental breakdowns, alcoholism, didn’t enjoy the same breaks as Monk, didn’t record as much and spent most of his later years in France. It was there that Paudras found Powell and his intervention in his life is the basis of Tavernier’s film. (3) Paudras wrote about Bud Powell in a book, Dance of the Infidels, published in French in 1986, but in English only until 1998, shortly after Paudras’s suicide. 

The reason for Tavernier’s insistence on casting Dexter Gordon as Dale Turner in the film was because he was tired of seeing actors pretend to play an instrument, a piano or a trumpet, in movies when it was so obvious that they couldn’t play a note. But the reason why real musicians weren’t cast in such roles was simple enough: they couldn’t act. Tavernier sacrificed art for verity, which is a surprising thing for any artist to do. 

The most moving part of the story, for me, is when Dale finds that he can no longer remain in France and must return to his racist, segregationist home. How many jazz artists went through this? Jazz may have been celebrated in Europe, but it lives in America. Francis goes with him, but the ghosts of Dale’s old life – in the form of a drug dealer – come back to haunt him. There is an odd and picturesque montage at the film's close of some of the ruins of what must've been Brooklyn. 

Only someone unfamiliar with Tavernier’s finer films – unfamiliar with The Clockmaker, The Judge and the Murderer, and It All Begins Today – could find things to praise in Round Midnight. Sadly, Round Midnight is much better known than his other films simply because it had an American producer (Irwin Winkler) and much wider distribution in the US through Warner Brothers. I remember being thrilled when Bobby McFerrin came onstage to perform the titular song (written by Thelonious Monk) when the film’s soundtrack, produced by Herbie Hancock, was nominated – and won – an Oscar. But, then, the music in Round Midnight is irreproachable. Everything else – Alexander Trauner’s art direction, Bruno de Keyzer’s camerawork, and Jaqueline Moreau’s costumes – is window dressing. 

(1) "The Film That Jazz Deserves," Howard Fishman, The New Yorker, April 21, 2021.

(2) ”Kind of Blue” with the Miles Davis Quintet is 4X Platinum. 

(3) There is a coincidence of sorts between Paudras’s accounts and a story by Julio Cortázar that was brought to my attention by Thomas Beltzer in an essay published in Senses of Cinema: In both stories, a white Frenchman attaches himself to an African-American saxophone genius in Paris who is struggling with several addictions and a precarious hold on his own reality. In both stories, the sycophantic Frenchmen escape their own sterility by riding on their jazzmen’s instinctive transcendence while desperately attempting to delay their idol’s self-destruction, sensing that somehow their own survival is dependent on the survival of the musicians. ("La Mano Negra: Julio Cortázar and his Influence on Cinema," Thomas Beltzer, Senses of Cinema, April 2005.) 

A Sunday in the Country

Making a good film about a subject one loves is extremely difficult. When Bertrand Tavernier, who died on March 25 at the age of 79, made the film ‘Round Midnight in 1986, his love of jazz music was preponderantly clear – so clear, in fact, that it was a pity he didn’t love jazz a lot less than he did: it would have probably resulted in a better film. 

Looking back on Tavernier’ films, two of which I reviewed on this blog, there is always one that draws me back to it, even if I know it isn’t as good as it could’ve been. I first saw A Sunday in the Country in Denver in the mid-‘80s when it opened at one of the city’s art houses – either The Vogue or The Esquire. I saw it at a matinee, with the theater almost empty. What struck me most about it was its exquisite sensuality – like an overripe fruit. The buzzing of flies seemed to permeate it. 

Twenty years later I got the Kino Lorber DVD of the film, only because it featured Tavernier’s commentary in English. Initially he spoke about how he and his cinematographer, Bruno de Keyser, had experimented in the lab and discovered that leaving the silver on the film by skipping the bleaching bath resulted in the whitest of whites and the blackest of blacks. The colors were altered as well, with reds turning purple and dark reds, like the wine in a decanter, turning black. 

Tavernier complained that so many critics mentioned that the film evokes impressionist painting. He denied this and countered that he was consciously imitating the early color photographs of the Brothers Lumière. But there is a scene near the end of the film set on a dance floor near a river that is immediately reminiscent not just of Renoir, but of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or. 

Tavernier confesses in his commentary a number of things, but what comes across most powerfully is his reverence for Pierre Bost, one half of the legendary French script-writing team that included Jean Aurenche. Tavernier and his wife, Colo, adapted A Sunday in the Country from a novel by Bost. When Bost died in 1975 Tavernier had difficulties acquiring the rights to adapt the novel from Bost’s son, whose approval, once the film was finished, was crucial to Tavernier. Tavernier supplied the film with a narrator and did it himself, which is yet another personal stamp on the film. The music throughout the film is Faure’s late 2nd Piano Quintet. It’s understated loveliness perfectly underscores the action in the film. One reason for this was that Tavernier actually played the music while his long takes were being shot to help the actors and his camera operator fall into the rhythm of the piece. 

But Tavernier spent a great deal of the Kino DVD commentary talking about the actor, Louis Ducreux, whom he had chosen to play the lead character, the old painter Monsieur Ladmiral. Ducreux was in his seventies and had done it all – writing plays, acting on the stage, writing songs (the words to the song Max Ophuls used in La Ronde were written by him). He had also been a painter, and Tavernier even shows us one of his canvasses in A Sunday in the Country when Irène finds it in a trunk. 

Problems arose, however, when Ducreux’s inexperience of film acting caused him to forget his lines, lose his place and miss his cues. Tavernier’s design of the film called for very long takes with a moving camera. Ducreux sometimes became disoriented about the focus of his performance and he didn’t seem to understand film directing. So Tavernier sometimes asked the other actors in the scene, Sabine Azéma and Michel Aumont, to physically place him where he was supposed to be in the shot. This is a little funny in the beautiful dance scene near the end of the film in which Sabine Azema is leading Louis Ducreux in the dance. 

The film was shot entirely on location and, despite constant problems with the weather, exudes a luxurious autumnal glow. Interior scenes, for example, are striped with sunlight shining through windows and shutters. Three of the actors are marvelous: Monique Chaumette, who is Philippe Noiret’s wife, is such a strong presence as Mercedes, Ladmiral housekeeper; Michel Aumont, Ladmiral’s son, who, even in middle age, cannot stop trying – and failing – to earn his father’s praise; and Sabine Azema, as Irène, Ladmiral’s beautiful, passionate (and unhappy) daughter. When she arrives at the house, she upsets everything and excites everyone with her perpetual motion. She is her father’s favorite child, as his son knows too well. 

But A Sunday in the Country is weak at its center – Tavernier’s choice of Louis Ducreux to play Monsieur Ladmiral. The choice of Ducreux is almost as bad as that of Dexter Gordon in ‘Round Midnight. Gordon, himself an old veteran of the jazz circuit, was an exceptionally dignified presence on screen (the role was modelled on piano player Bud Powell). But when it came to acting or delivering his lines, Gordon was as sadly insubstantial as his sandpapered voice. Louis Ducreux presented the opposite problem: while he was capable of acting, he has the presence of a shadow. He is as insubstantial on the screen as the two little girls Monsieur Ladmiral sees playing at various moments throughout the film. And it isn’t because of his advanced age. Many actors grow old and continue to give commanding performances. Louis Ducreux seems frail and drawn in all of his scenes, which perhaps illustrates the title of Bost’s novel, Monsieur Ladmiral will soon die. (1) There is even a flash-forward showing us the old man on his death-bed with his family gathered around it. A producer balked at a film title with the word “die” in it, and Ducreux himself suggested the title that Tavernier used. 

Despite this (or is it because?), A Sunday in the Country occupies a special place in my cinephilic heart. Au revoir to dear Bertrand Tavernier. 

(1) Pierre Bost, Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1945