On the list of the Unworthily Obscure, films that, for whatever reason, have been forgotten or simply overlooked, Andre Cayatte’s An Eye for an Eye (Oeil pour Oeil - 1957) is a standout for me. (1) Despite its showing in New York (almost four years after its release in France), where it was reviewed somewhat favorably in the Times, it hasn’t turned up in any retrospective that I know of, nor has it been rediscovered, restored, and/or re-released to any commensurate fanfare. Cayatte never inspired much enthusiasm, despite his mastering and domesticating - in Justice Is Done and We Are All Murderers - the pièce-á-thèse. Cayatte’s Wikipedia page includes An Eye for an Eye on its selected filmography list of 24 films, but it is the only title without a link to a page of its own. In 1961, A. H. Weiler of the Times wrote “this unrelievedly grim study proves to be an exotically fascinating affair with a starkly surprising dénouement that holds a viewer's attention despite its basically funereal pace.” He concludes that “It's a terribly somber view minus romance or happiness. It makes for a serious, professional drama of limited appeal.” (2)
Based on a novel by Vahé Katcha, with dialogue written by Pierre Bost, the plot of the story is simple but inexorable: in Syria, a European doctor named Walter is visited at his home late at night by a man whose pregnant wife is having a difficult delivery. Having already drunk a few cocktails and not having any instruments, Walter tells his concierge to tell the the man to take the woman to the hospital where Matik, whose shift it is, can attend to her. Enroute to the hospital in the morning, Walter passes the man’s old car, apparently broken down some distance from the hospital. At the hospital Matik explains to him that the man carried his wife several kilometers and that the pregnant woman died because her pregnancy was ectopic, or extrauterine. Matik wasn’t skilled enough to save her. But how was Walter to know all this? He assures the emotional Matik that there was nothing they could’ve done.
However, Bortak, the dead woman’s husband, blames Walter for her death. The film shows us his elaborate revenge on him. Bortak seems to follow him everywhere. When the doctor’s home phone rings repeatedly, with no one on the other end of the line, Walter opts to stay at the hospital. Walter even has to have Bortak’s jalopy towed when it conks out inconveniently right outside the window of his room. Walter spends his evenings boozing in the local dives. In one of them he is paying his bill when he finds he is out of pocket. He intends to write out an IOU when the manager informs him that Bortak, who has been sitting at the bar sucking Coke through a straw, has paid his bill. When Walter crosses the crowded dance floor to the bar, Bortak has slipped out.
Whether it is indeed Bortak whom Walter can’t shake or his own guilty conscience doesn’t actually matter.
Cayatte paces the film with the precision of a legal brief. He eases us into a game of cat and mouse without informing us of which is which. Finally finding Bortak driving his car one night, Walter intercepts him and discovers his little daughter (who speaks French) is a passenger. Since Bortak’s engine is dead Walter feels suddenly obliged to give him a lift home. His own car out of gas, Walter spends the night in Bortak’s home. The following morning he acquires the gas he needs but he learns of an old man in a farther village who needs medical attention. When he arrives in the village, all whitewashed adobe (and familiar to anyone acquainted with spaghetti Weaterns, the villagers Arabs instead of Mexicans), Walter is prevented from administering to the injured old man an antiseptic injection by the hostile Arabs gathered in his house. He contemptuously empties the life-saving hypodermic into the air and leaves the house.
Returning to his car, Waltet discovers its front wheels are missing. His angry reaction arouses the ire of the locals and he takes refuge in the most preposterously apportioned cafe-hotel on earth. Unable to sleep and leery of intruders, Walter finds Bortak in the adjacent room. He tries to explain to Bortak his condolences for his dead wife, but that he was not responsible for her death. Bortak is unmoved.
Having missed the bus to Damascus, Walter stoically packs what provisions he thinks he will need into a sack and starts to hike back to the city. But to his surprise, if not entirely ours, he finds that all roads don’t necessarily lead to Damascus and that Bortak is somehow always several steps ahead of him. Bortak tells him he knows the shortest way, so Walter joins him. For the remainder of the film, they are the only people in view in a landscape that grows increasingly like that of Mars. When Walter figures out that Bortak has been leading him farther away from Damascus, he takes Bortak's shaving razor and slashes his arm, assuring him that he won’t bleed to death as long as he leads him the right way. So Bortak points him in a different direction, assuring the doctor that Damascus is just beyond the next ridge. As he plods away from the camera, it ascends to reveal to us what Walter cannot see: desolate hills and gullies all the way to the horizon.
Curd Jürgens, a familiar villain for English-speaking audiences, is excellent as the reasonable doctor Walter, stuck in a place where reason is no use to him. Folco Lulli, whom I remember from several Italian films, especially Monicelli’s undeservedly neglected masterpiece I Compagni (The Organizer), is a perfect bull for the bullheaded Bortak. Cayatte makes no concessions to our expectations. His subject is the grim facts of the ultimate failure of human empathy – the usual reason why justice eludes us.
I suppose the reason why critics greeted the film so coolly was because it failed to provide them with “wider implications.” Vernon Young called the film an allegory:
To this injured, obdurate man [Bortak], Walter’s guilt is irrevocable: he shirked his professional obligation and the patient died... At the rational altitude of human response, Walter’s dereliction, suavely depicted as unavoidable, is patently justified by the detailed circumstances to which the audience bears agreeable witness. Nonetheless, asks Cayatte, when a man evades an appeal to his moral instinct, no matter how temporizing a case he can make out for himself, is he not likely to initiate a chain of reprisal out of all proportion – as we conventionally see it – to the innocence of his evasion? Cosmic response to human frailty is seldom relevant. The civilized doctor does in truth refuse humanity, and an oaf, Bortak, is the instrument invoked to avenge – terribly – this refusal. (3)
Cayatte particularizes Walter’s fate beautifully enough for the viewer to fail to see the imposition of a universal rule. No court of law would’ve convicted Walter of the “wrongful death” of Bortak’s wife. But Bortak doesn’t care about the law. In his occluded mind, Walter is fully responsible for making him a widower. If the film illustrates anything it’s the stupidity of the proverb in the title, which is said to have originated in the Code of Hammurabi. As Gandhi pointed out, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
(1) The film was shot in Almeria, Spain with the VistaVision process, but the Gaumont print I saw was standard aspect ratio. Although the picture was sharp, at times the color fluctuated wildly. Cayatte probably wanted to exploit the widescreen to drive home the enormity of desolate landscape into which Walter is lured by Bortak.
(2) A. H. Weiler.
(3) “A Condemned Man Escapes: Five Films on the Subject,” The Hudson Review, Winter 1959-60.
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