MARCEL CARNE RECALLS DAYS BEFORE ‘PARADIS’

The great period of French films was 1936-45 according to director Marcel Carne, whose finest works, not coincidentally, span those years: “Drole de Drame,” “Hotel du Nord,” “Quai des Brumes,” “Le Jour se Leve,” “Les Visiteurs du Soir” and a film that is on many people’s Top 10 lists, “Les Enfants du Paradis.”

The last major survivor of his generation, Carne, who won’t reveal his age but is about 80, is plump, prickly and, to his mind, insufficiently appreciated in France, although he’s covered with honors, including the rosette of Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur and a newly released film of homage, “Marcel Carne, l’Homme & la Camera.”

The film celebrates Carne’s 50 years of film making and, while grateful, Carne thinks it would have been better had he given its veteran director, Christian-Jacque, a hand.

In speaking of the old days, Carne is critical of other directors with the exception of his mentor, Jacques Feyder, and the now-forgotten Jean Gremillon (1902-59).

“Jean Renoir always spoke ill of me, I think he was jealous. Then there was Rene Clair, but I never got along with him and his films have aged badly. I thought Gremillon’s films very fine, but the public didn’t like them.”

Carne, a painstaking and expert craftsman, says he got his taste for hard work from his father, a Paris cabinetmaker. After a year studying his father’s craft, young Marcel, dapper in spats and slicked-back hair, alighted briefly in the business world before talking himself into a vague assistantship with Jacques Feyder, whose wife, the fine actress Francoise Rosay, kindly starred in Carne’s first feature film, “Jenny.”

That was in 1936, and the screenwriter of “Jenny,” the poet Jacques Prevert, collaborated on most of Carne’s films for the next 30 years. The decline in Carne’s work is usually traced back to the end of their collaboration after a flop called “Les Portes de la Nuit” in 1946. Carne understandably bridles at Prevert’s being given too much importance, just as, since he continued to direct feature films until 1973, he does not like it thought that his career ended with “Les Enfants du Paradis” in 1945.

He feels there was a distinct plot to bring him down, a cabale he calls it, and that it was led by the nouvelle vague .

“They were critics before they became directors and they systematically destroyed everyone who came before them in order to take their place. They were little arrivistes , Truffaut and Godard, people who wanted to arrive and who destroyed others to do so. Chabrol, too.” The atmosphere was not lightened when Carne was quoted in Le Figaro as calling the nouvelle vague “congenitally impotent.” Carne says he said no such thing.

Ironically, he was himself a one-man nouvelle vague in his time. His first film was a short called “Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche,” which was cinema verite before the word existed. When he began making features, French film was all tinsel. “Then I came along,” he says, “with my fog and lamp posts and streets glistening with rain.” He is talking about the extraordinarily atmospheric “Quai des Brumes,” with Michele Morgan and Jean Gabin (1938). From then on, he was dogged with the label poetic realism, a term he does not like, preferring fantastique sociale (social fantasy).

“Hotel du Nord,” which Prevert did not write, gave new resonance to the word atmosphere as uttered by Arletty, the great actress who is Carne’s favorite.

“I never use the word atmosphere ,” Arletty writes in her memoirs, “for it belongs now to the public.”

The dingy Hotel du Nord has been preserved as a monument although the Canal St. Martin area of Paris is newly gentrified. In fact, Carne did most of his shooting in studios.

“The equipment was so heavy you couldn’t even film in a hotel room. If the nouvelle vague made the cinema more mobile, the merit belongs not to them but to the engineers who came out with lightweight equipment and more sensitive film. If they’d had the material I had to work with, they would never have been able to use natural decors.”

If they were studio-bound, Carne’s classic films had a reality and fatalism that reflected the mood of the time.

“One felt it was the end of something, it was a melancholy time. In 1936, the Front Populaire gave great hope, but one knew quite well that the Spanish war was the start of the world war. To make happy films in those days? No, I think one has to let the climate of the time come through.”

The day after the invasion of Poland in 1939, a government-inspired article came out headlined, “Attention, producers! Make films that are healthy and optimistic.” Carne and Renoir, it was warned, would have to change their style and become happy and light.

During the war Carne, unlike many colleagues, avoided working for the Vichy-backed Continental film company. To escape government interference he and Prevert decided to set their next film in the distant past. They chose the Middle Ages. Arletty starred, the extras included Simone Signoret and Alain Resnais, and the film, “Les Visiteurs du Soir” was, in the Carne vein, another tale of ill-starred love.

The Devil, played by Jules Berry, figures in the film and there are lines that seem to allude to the Occupation, but Carne says there was no such aim.

“There are lines that could be taken as attacks on Vichy but quite sincerely I don’t remember that we thought of any such thing at the time. You must remember that we had been humiliated, shamed. There was in all of us--without our being aware of it--a surge to recapture by the spirit what we had lost by arms.”

The next film was “Les Enfants du Paradis,” shot in the Victorine studios in Nice and Paris. Again, to escape from interference, Carne and Prevert set their film in the past--in the colorful early 19th-Century Boulevard du Crime, the Parisian center of theater and lowlife, later swept away by Baron Haussmann to make room for the Place de la Republique.

The stars were Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Louis Barrault (in a moment of panic, when it seemed Barrault might not be free, Carne nearly signed a new mime named Jacques Tati), and a newcomer, Maria Casares, with clandestine help from the composer Joseph Kosma and the designer Alexandre Trauner, both Jews in hiding.

“For me, it was an act of friendship. I never imagined it would have that success, none of us did,” Carne says. “I never thought people would still be talking about it 40 years later. When I’m filming,” he adds, “I’m not that much aware of what’s going on around me, I’m in a sort of trance.” Arletty has said that anyone who filmed Carne while filming could make a fortune.

Carne tried to slow up post-production so “Les Enfants du Paradis” would be France’s first postwar film, but it came out just before the war’s end.

It was a confused and deadly time. During the Occupation, the collaborationist critic Lucien Rabatet had written that while Carne was not Jewish, he was Jewish-influenced, which was nearly as bad, and that he should watch his step. After the Occupation, Carne found himself accused of collaboration by an ad hoc tribunal simply because he had continued to film. “It is a period no one can understand who didn’t live through it,” he says.

He was given a public rebuke and his name was posted on the studio door. Arletty, who had loved a German officer, was put into prison. To post-synch “Les Enfants du Paradis,” Carne had to ask the police to send him Arletty.

“She arrived at the studio in handcuffs with two gendarmes and everyone turned their backs on her, even Brasseur. I was very disappointed by Brasseur.

“She has terrific guts,” Carne said. “She had to do her first scene with Brasseur, very lively and cheeky and gay. And she did.”