THOUGH it's Couch Potato who says it as shouldn't, most of the movies
(even the good ones) that drop by for a few stiff drinks in this
last-chance saloon of the motion picture arts are well within our
critical scope -- or, come to that, almost anyone else's -- and if Couch
Potato generally errs a little towards generosity, it's partly because a
video column that erred towards meanness would be pretty depressing for
everyone involved, not least the companies who furnish the raw
materials.
The downside of this critical benignity, unfortunately, is that every
lucky once in a while a film comes along that exposes the shocking rate
of inflation of the currency of praise. Such a film is Marcel Carne's
magnificent Les Enfants Du Paradis (retail, #15.99/1945, b. and w.;
subtitled; cert. PG), a tender lowlife fantasy and metaphor for wartime
France that reminds us forcibly just what movies should be about:
exhilaration, magic, and joy.
Set among the raffish theatrical and underworld characters who throng
nineteenth-century Paris's Theatre Des Funambules in the Boulevard du
Crime, Carne's ''tribute to theatre'' is basically a love story. The
beautiful and free-spirited actress Garance (Arletty, the aloof and
ethereal leading lady of several French films of the moody-romance
school) has four beaux to her string in the persons of mime artist
Jean-Louis Barrault, leading man Pierre Brasseur, aristocrat Louis
Salou, and vicious but suspiciously redeemable-looking professional
criminal Marcel Herrand.
They all live and move and have their being in a world of unofficial
people on society's shadiest margins, the frequenters of the cheapest
and rowdiest seats in the theatre (in the gods, actually: hence The
Children of Paradise), and it is these highly unrespectable types whose
vitality and humanity Carne celebrates in contrast to the film's several
mean, buttoned-up authority figures; the parallel with the Nazi
occupation is clear, but never forced.
The film's structure is dreamlike and impressionistic rather than
linear, and the correspondences between the story of the film and the
stories enacted on the stage of the Theatre des Funambules drift
tantalisingly in and out of relevance as Arletty's lovers jostle for
supremacy. Pictorially, to quote the Woody Allen feature we reviewed
last week, it's a thing of shadows and fog, but for all that it's the
fastest-playing three-hour movie we ever saw. By the end, almost every
character's life is more or less a shambles, but we have the feeling
that they've truly lived, and that most of them will live to live
another day.
''When I started out'', actor and cult director John Cassavetes once
said, ''I wanted to make Frank Capra movies''. Frankly, we'd have been a
long time guessing that one: somehow one just doesn't see James Stewart
or Cary Grant in harsh, loud-mouthed toughies like his finest and most
commercial (though that isn't saying very much) hour, The Killing Of A
Chinese Bookie (1978/retail, #12.99; cert. 15). Ben Gazzara stars as the
owner of an up-market Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West, to
which he has a sentimental but unprofitable attachment that makes life
very difficult for the Mob boys who want him to see sense and accept an
offer he'd be very unwise to refuse. This oddly skewed little
gangsterama packs a punch and a sense of humour that many conventionally
''better'' crime pictures lack, and if your taste in villainy runs to
the style of vintage 1940s B-crimmies, it might be just your can of
safety stock.
Competition Corner! hits the stage again with a double-feature
giveaway: top of the bill is Les Enfants Du Paradis, with which the mecs
at Artificial Eye have kindly provided us three copies for lucky people
who can remind us who was Arletty's leading man in Marcel Carnes classic
1939 gloomerama Le Jour Se Leve. Plus which: courtesy of Electric
Pictures, we have one set of three John Cassavetes reissues (Killing Of
A Chinese Bookie, plus his 1977 backstage-Broadway melo Opening Night,
and the compulsively unpleasant 1974 unhappy-family drama A Woman Under
The Influence. To win these, name the former Busby Berkeley musicals
star with a leading role in Opening Night. Answers, as ever, to Couch
Potato (Cult Movies Prizes), The Herald, 195 Albion Street, Glasgow G1
1QP.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article