Symphonie pour un massacre

Jean Rochefort

Jacques Deray's Symphonie pour un massacre is a tightly constructed and cold eyed crime drama from 1963. Derived from Alain Reynaud-Fourton's novel, Les Mystifiés, the adaptation was written by Deray with help from Claude Sautet and one of the film's actors, José Giovanni. The flick centers on five gangsters who band together as partners in a narcotics deal. However, we are clued in from the start that there is no honor among these thieves. The nominal protagonist, Jabeke (Jean Rochefort), is revealed within the first reel to be having an affair with the wife of one of his criminal cohorts, Claude Dauphin's Valoti. Jabeke is also keen to rip off his brothers in crime. He stalks the gangster Moreau (Giovanni) who is taking a large satchel of cash to Marseilles in order to initiate the narcotics deal. Jabeke murders Moreau on the train to Marseilles and steals the cash. Needless to say, Jabeke's plan eventually goes awry and the film ends in a cascading wave of violence promised by its title.

The film is firmly entrenched in the shady milieu of bars and gambling clubs seen in the films of Jacques Becker who had adapted Giovanni's first novel, Le Trou, in 1960. Deray shoots his players from a low angle conveying the menace of an underworld in which no one can be trusted. Symphonie... is unhurried in showing us the machinations of its plot. The audience is fully clued in to the perfidy of the characters. Deray percolates his drama at a slow boil never resorting to jump scares or concocted suspense. The fact that we can see the dénouement of this film a mile away does not lessen its fascination, but works to tighten the snare Deray has fashioned for his characters. The tightness of the movie's construction, particularly its editing, results in marvelous moments of ironic counterpoint. 

Symphonie... is a feast of Gallic film acting. Rochefort, known primarily up to that point as a light comedian both on stage and in films like Cartouche, was given a career boost by showing he could be equally equally effective as a dramatic lead. His stoic mien is the focal point of the film. Claud Dauphin is affecting as the cuckolded Valoti and Charles Vanel, most famous for The Wages of Fear, is equally superb. Claude Renoir's vivid black and white cinematography of Paris, Lyon, and Brussels is reason enough to see the film. Léon Barsacq's art direction hips us the personality of the characters more, unfortunately, than some of the performers do. Deray's use of space is tightly controlled and largely static. When he does move his camera, whip pans and tightly coiled dollies, it is a cold smack to the viewer. 

I will conclude with a bit on José Giovanni because it will be the proper chilly end note for this short review. Giovanni wrote over twenty noir novels and many film scripts, including Melville's Le deuxième souffle. He had a real life appreciation for crime and moral depravity. Before assuming the pen name Giovanni, he was born Joseph Damiani, a French citizen of Corsican descent. The son of a gambler, Giovanni was twenty when he began collaborating with the Vichy government and its Gestapo henchmen. He belonged to the German Schutskorp which hunted camp escapees and dodgers. When not capturing Jews and other undesirables and pilfering their loot, Damiani would blackmail Jews in hiding. And there was more, including murder. After liberation, Damiani narrowly escaped the hangman's noose and ended up serving eleven and a half years in stir. He was unrepentant when he died a Swiss citizen in 1986.

The Devil and the Daylong Brothers

Three Brothers: Jordan Bolden, Brendan Bradley and Nican Robinson

I could pick nits with it from now till Doomsday, but Brandon Mccormick's The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is bold and inventive. A Southern Gothic musical set in the pre-cellphone era, the film function as an update of Supernatural  with the addition of an extra brother. The songs are serviceable country blues pastiches, but writer Nicholas Kirk, the co-auteur of this flick, imbues them with doom and propulsive energy appropriately leading us to the inexorable climax. Mccormick frames the pitiless violence and songs with handheld immediacy sometimes lapsing into hysterical overkill. On the whole, though, this approach bears fruit as Mccormick and Kirk have constructed a narrative of superior craft that all comes together like a fine timepiece

The mythology of The Devil and the Daylong Brothers is Satanic gobbledygook. Three brothers from different mothers are paying off their Dad's debt to his satanic majesty by dispatching those whose time it is to pay for their Faustian bargains. Last on their list is Dad who sold his soul to be the ultimate blues singer. Now that said father is played by a veteran actor/singer most famous for crooning the excruciating "I'm Easy" to various femmes in Nashville is problematic to say the least, but I'm not going to pick the nit of the white bluesman here and Keith Carradine acquits himself extremely well. Most of the acting is quite good for a B movie, though Jordon Bolden seems to be doing a bizarre Rami Malek impression. The best vocals are provided by Rainey Qualley, Margaret's sis and the sole femme (fatale) here, better known in music circles as Rainsford. The Devil and the Daylong Brother has opened to little fanfare by streaming on Apple TV, but it is vigorous cinema for those who don't mind an impaled eyeball or two.

La bestia debe morir

Narciso Ibáñez Menta and Laura Hidalgo

Román Viñoly Barreto's La bestia debe morir (The Beast Must Die), released in 1952, is a terrific melodramatic mystery from Argentina. The screenplay, by Barreto and leading man Narciso Ibáñez Menta, is adapted from Nicholas Blake's novel. Blake was the pen name of English poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis who concocted mysteries, usually following the exploits of detective Nigel Strangeways, in order to earn the income his poetry could not generate. The book was also adapted in 1969 by Claude Chabrol for his film This Man Must Die. The two films are an interesting contrast. The Chabrol film is shot in color in a realistic fashion with many outdoor sequences. Chabrol marshals his characters like chess pieces in an essay on determinism. La bestia debe morir is in black and white and shot on soundstages. Barreto stresses the traumas of the characters by expressionistically heightening the claustrophobia of the interiors, which contain a nest of vipers.

Barreto and Menta stress the inevitability of the film's tragic denouement by rejiggering the story's structure. The story is a revenge tale in which a bereaved father, author Felix Lane (Menta), vows to take retribution for those responsible for the demise of his son, who died in a hit and run accident. La bestia debe morir starts off by having the killer, a rich landowner named Jorge (Guillermo Battaglia), be poisoned in the first reel, though we do not know by whom. The main part of the narrative, Felix's search for his son's killer, is told in flashback, a device that helps the film's plot seem as foredoomed as its look. Lane finds his son's killer through Linda (Laura Hidalgo), Jorge's sister-in-law and a film actress, who was with Jorge when Felix's son was run over. Felix initially uses Linda to get at Jorge, but finds himself falling for the saucy, but troubled dish.

His relationship with Linda gains Felix an invitation to Jorge's estate, a sick house with secrets like in many works of horror, Poe's ...Usher for example. Jorge is a domineeringly sadistic host, truly a beast. He beats both his wife and her child from a previous union mercilessly with a belt. He openly pursues Linda and has installed a former, and perhaps current, mistress as the wife of his business partner. The manse is presided over by Jorge's aged mother, a tart tongued and self-righteous biddy played with sulphuric majesty by Milagros de la Vega. Barreto and cinematographer Alberto Etchebehere's camera usually regards these grotesques from a low angle, at knee level. The perfect angle to warily regard serpents.

                            

However, Barreto is up to more than prodding the snakes in his terrarium. In this film, Barreto shows and evokes how traumatic events smack into people and leave their mark. When Jorge's auto is about to smash into Felix's son, the camera does a quick dolly into the frightened lad from the car's point of view. At the moment of impact, Barreto cuts to a shot of waves crashing on the rock coast. The surreal charge of this carries over into the sequence recording Felix's memories of the aftermath of the accident: distorted images superimposed on one another as an expression of mental distress (see above). This is audacious cinema poised at the point of hysteria.

Hysteria is also what most of the acting skirts, but I find it appropriate to the melodramatic excesses of the scenario. The exception is Menta playing a character willing to watch and bide his time before striking. Menta deftly underplays his role, which is accentuated by all the eye rolling and lip quivering going on around him. Menta was a Spaniard who became the equivalent of Vincent Price to a generation of Latin American moviegoers. A devotee of Lon Chaney Sr., Menta would subsequently appear in scores of Latin horror films. I relished his performance here and will seek out both more of his and Barreto's work. La bestia debe morir and Barreto's El vampiro negro (a remake of M) are both available on spiffy Flicker Alley discs. I commend them to all.