Irresistible views of the occupation

By Kevin Thomas

May 1, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

The occupation of France by the Germans during World War II remains a painful, complex memory for the French 60 years after D-day. Just who joined the Resistance, who collaborated and who simply struggled to survive under German rule can never be sorted out to anyone’s satisfaction. The number of those who lived through the era as adults or even as teenagers diminishes remorselessly, but what endures unchanged are the films made during the occupation, often under the most difficult and dangerous conditions.

While some filmmakers produced welcome escapist fare, as did Hollywood at the time, others took on adversity in its myriad aspects, even daring to create films that could be taken as allegories of the occupation itself. The Germans established a film industry policy dedicated to quality and creativity, within limits subject to whim and not always clearly defined, yet allowing inspired work to emerge.

In a 1975 French documentary, made when many major filmmakers who had worked during the occupation were still alive, the renowned screenwriter Charles Spaak went so far as to say that the occupation was “beneficial” to French filmmakers in that it forced them to concentrate on the French character, nourishing audiences that might be willing to watch French films made under German control but that would reject German films outright.

LACMA’s “French Cinema and the Occupation” will provide a rare opportunity to see a selection of these films. Several of the films have been chosen by the master director Bertrand Tavernier, whose tense and enthralling 2002 “Safe Conduct” closes the series June 4. An exciting homage to those French filmmakers who managed to maintain their integrity and professionalism under the most repressive circumstances, the film is also loaded with suspense, for its central figure, an assistant director named Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) displays the same unflappability on the set as in his activities in the Resistance.

Tavernier drew his consistently engaging picture from the reminiscences of both Devaivre and Jean Aurenche, whose career was revived when Tavernier hired the veteran screenwriter on his earliest films.

Taking the long view

The series, incidentally, includes two films that dealt with the occupation decades after it was over, and two Hollywood films on the topic that were made during World War II. Although most of the selections are regarded as classics, many are rarely shown in the U.S. and therefore are virtually unknown outside cinema history books.

“French Cinema and the Occupation” rightly opens with “Children of Paradise,” which screens both Friday and Saturday. The passion, vitality and grandeur of Marcel Carne’s 1945 classic is so overwhelming that it makes one reevaluate all the other films considered masterpieces. It has the solid construction, flesh-and-blood characters and wealth of incident and detail of a great 19th century novel.

With the elusiveness of love -- and also the relationship of life and art (which here become one) -- as its theme, it creates its own glittering world of backstage life, peopled with performers who discover in themselves the heroes, villains and clowns in the tragicomedy of their own lives.

The opening sequence is breathtaking. As the camera pulls back to reveal the vast, crowded Boulevard of Crime lined with sideshow attractions, it sweeps us into a carnival in the Paris of 1840. As the camera moves down the street, it introduces us to the beautiful Garance (Arletty), who appears naked in a barrel of water, and some of the men who will enter her life: the young actor Frederic Lemaitre (Pierre Brasseur) and the talented mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault).

This unforgettable, one-of-a-kind film was written by poet Jacques Prevert; the superb production design was by the masterly Alexandre Trauner, who as a Jew was forced to live and work in hiding. “Children of Paradise” is an instance of filmmakers who carried what could pass as escapist entertainment to a level so sublime that the film is a staple of all-time-great film lists.

Although available on DVD, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ruthlessly mordant, tense and timeless “Le Corbeau” (“The Raven”), from 1943, is not nearly as familiar as “Children of Paradise” yet could well be the definitive occupation film allegory. Taking his inspiration from a celebrated 1922 poison-pen case, Clouzot depicts a picturesque French provincial community caught up in the thrall of an unknown epistolary tormentor who signs his -- or her -- letters as “The Raven” and seems to know a goodly share of the town’s secrets.

At the center of the tense drama (screening May 20 with Jacques Becker’s 1943 “Goupi Mains Rouges”) is a handsome, widowed physician (Pierre Fresnay), beset by a vampy married hypochondriac (Ginette Leclerc) and the discreet young wife (Micheline Francey) of a suave, elderly doctor (Pierre Larquey).

The unknown writer of the poison-pen letters can easily be seen as representative of the occupation in spreading paranoia and suspicion and inspiring betrayals and accusations. Ferociously controversial at the time of its release, “Le Corbeau” was condemned on the right for being pro-abortion and antireligious -- the physician chose not to attend church -- and on the left for being anti-French.

Ironically, while the Germans insisted that the film be shown, after liberation it was banned, and Clouzot was temporarily forbidden to work, until the plight of the filmmaker and his film became a cause celebre among artists and intellectuals.

War’s impact on children

Easily as famous as “Children of Paradise,” and perhaps even more so, is Rene Clement’s unforgettable 1952 “Forbidden Games,” written by the legendary team of Jean Aurence and Pierre Bost (screening May 29 with Claude Miller’s 1992 “The Accompanist”).

For years a frequent art theater revival, “Forbidden Games,” set in the countryside in the wake of the occupation, is one of the most haunting films ever made on the impact of war upon children; in it, a 5-year-old orphan (Brigitte Fossey) and a boy from a peasant family (Georges Poujouly) create a graveyard for animals, stealing crosses from a churchyard to serve as grave markers. Miller’s elegant, ironic film stars Romane Bohringer as a naive young Frenchwoman hired as a piano accompanist for a famous singer during World War II.

In his 1956 “A Man Escaped” (May 14, followed by Jean Renoir’s “This Land Is Mine,” made in Hollywood in 1943), Robert Bresson, with immediacy and economy yet great attention to detail, tells of an imprisoned member of the French Resistance (played by Francois Leterrier, who went on to an acting and directing career), who puts into action his intricate and resourceful plan of escape once he learns he is condemned to die. He is like all of Bresson’s heroes: sober, essentially solitary figures subject to severe tests through which they attain a state of grace or, barring that, some greater truth.

Romance and melodrama

It’s no wonder that Marcel L’Herbier’s enchanting 1942 “The Fantastic Night” (May 13, with Claude Autant-Lara’s “Le Mariage de Chiffon” (also 1942) was such a success when it premiered. It’s a fanciful yet poignant tale about a man (debonair Fernand Gravet) who believes he must be dreaming when the girl of his fantasies (beautiful, very young Micheline Presle) suddenly materializes.

An ideal escapist diversion, it is a work of inspired artifice, shot entirely on elaborate, whimsical sets. “The Fantastic Night” is one long night’s amazing adventure as Gravet pursues Presle. It may be feather-light, but in remembering the times in which this film was made, it’s hard not to be moved by its final line, “Give us this day our daily dream.”

Jean Gremillon’s 1941 “Remorques” (“Tugboats”), which screens May 21, is a strong romantic melodrama, perhaps more poetic and fatalistic than Hollywood counterparts but otherwise similar. Jean Gabin, who was to France what Spencer Tracy was to America, plays a rugged Brest tugboat captain with an adoring but fragile wife (Madeleine Renaud). He rescues a ship in a storm only to become caught up in a romance -- with radiant, fiery passenger Michele Morgan -- that is as tempestuous as the weather.

Playing with it is Morgan’s next film, “Joan of Paris” (1942) -- her first during her Hollywood exile -- in which she plays a barmaid who derives courage from her devotion to Joan of Arc.

Autant-Lara’s 1943 “Douce” (May 28), written by Aurenche and Bost, is an intense and romantic drama of class differences set in Paris in 1887, mainly in the mansion of the formidable but witty Countess de Bonafe (Marguerite Moreno, the grandest of grandes dames), whose lovely, headstrong but noble-minded granddaughter (Odette Joyeux) falls in love with her father’s estate manager (Jean Debucourt), who has been spurned by his lover (Madeleine Robinson), Joyeux’s ambitious governess.

This handsome studio production is not unlike Hollywood women’s pictures of the era. Playing with it is another Autant-Lara film, considered one of his best, “La Traversee de Paris” (1956), starring Gabin, Bourvil and Louis de Funes.

Concluding the series on June 3 are two outstanding films, Francois Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” (1980) and Claude Chabrol’s “Story of Women” (1988). With “The Last Metro,” Truffaut remarked that he had fulfilled three long-cherished dreams: “to take the camera backstage, to evoke the climate of the occupation and to give Catherine Deneuve the role of a responsible woman.”

In what Truffaut called his “film of love and adventure,” Deneuve, with the advent of the occupation, is determined to keep her Montmartre theater open and running; her husband (Heinz Bennent), a celebrated theater director who happens to be a German Jew, safely hidden; and the mutual attraction between her and an actor (Gerard Depardieu) in denial.

Chabrol’s beguiling yet mordant “Story of Women” takes the viewer into the demoralized heart of occupied France. In a drab port town near Dieppe, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for an ambitious yet naive and impoverished young mother, Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), who, in coming to the aid of a neighbor, embarks on a career as an abortionist.

“Story of Women” is based on a true incident and reflects Chabrol’s nearly half-century-long obsession with bourgeois hypocrisy. Rarely, if ever, has he had such rich, complex material with which to express it.

Chabrol clearly favors women having control over their bodies, but as timeless and scathing as “Story of Women” is regarding abortion and women’s rights, it is above all a terse, tragic yet exhilarating evocation of the most painful period in modern French history.

‘French Cinema and the Occupation’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through June 3

Price: $6 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000

Schedule

Friday and Saturday: “Children of Paradise”

May 13: “The Fantastic Night,” “Le Mariage de Chiffon”

May 14: “A Man Escaped,” “This Land Is Mine”

May 20: “Le Corbeau,” “Goupi Mains Rouges”

May 21: “Remorques,” “Joan of Paris”

May 27: “Douce,” “La Traversee de Paris”