Marcel Carné | Drôle de drame | Le Jour se lève | Thérèse Raquin

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Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné is a French film director.

Drôle de drame

Drôle de drame (1937) is an ingenious farce, richly plotted, and with the good acting found in the best Tradition of Quality French films. Sweet and recommended.

In a_film_by, Jean-Pierre Coursodon pointed out how French films traditionally restricted themselves to French-speaking locales: France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, French-speaking areas of the Caribbean. There are exceptions, such as Max Ophuls. Drôle de drame is another exception: most of it takes place in Victorian England.

Le Jour se lève

Is This a Film Noir?

Is Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939) a film noir? This is a tricky question. It has many similarities with the later American genre, which mainly ran from 1941 to 1958. Similarities: But Carné's film also has many important differences from later noirs. Chiaroscuro lighting is rarely employed, although many scenes do take place at night. While crime is prominent at the beginning of the film, the bulk of the movie focuses not on crime, but l'amour. Carné develops an elaborate four sided love triangle that anticipates the complex romantic entanglements of his later classic, The Children of Paradise (1943 - 1945). It is this fatalistic love drama that drives the film, not any crime elements.

Crowd Scenes

Another difference: the many crowd scenes in the film. Film noirs tend to occur In a Lonely Place. Even when they involve larger numbers of people, the hero tends to be an alienated urban individual, lost in the crowd.

Not here in Le Jour se lève. Many of the people in the crowd know the hero, and they struggle to reach out to him, and help him. Even when they are strangers, they are focused on the hero, watching his every move. This gives a very different feel to the film than from later noirs.

Crowd scenes were a specialty of Carné. They show up with great vividness in The Children of Paradise, where they are both on the street, and in the theater back stage.

In Le Jour se lève the crowds are both on the street, and every floor of the hero's apartment house. They are lively and alert, and form a great portion of Carné's mise-en-scène.

Overhead Shots

The overhead angles in Carné tend to be a little more "justified" than in many later film noirs. A Siodmak or an Aldrich will just cut to an overhead angle when he feels like it. But Carné tends to show an overhead angle when it is the Point of View of a character looking down from a high window, or when it becomes dramatically necessary to show several floors of the apartment at once.

This is not always true: an overhead POV of the street now is followed by a flashback overhead shot of the street empty. This gives a dramatic contrast. But it is close to being an overhead shot for the sake of an overhead shot, something the director does because he finds it a better movie.

Carné has a good eye for architecture, especially a Lang-like fondness for staircases.

Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse Raquin (1953). Generally disappointing, not up to pre-1945 Carné. The second thriller half is livelier than first soap opera half.

This film plays a lot like a John Waters parody, such as Polyester. Just as Divine kept having trouble with obnoxious men she married or dated, here the hapless heroine copes with her stupefying eunuch of her husband. And the two sexy men she meets ... turn out to be sadists.

The blackmailer (Roland Lesaffre) at least looks good in his leather motorcycle outfit. This was a year before The Wild One, but the mystique of The Biker seems to be underway. They Caught the Ferry (1948), made by another gay European director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, also built up the image of the leather-clad motorcyclist.