Lettres d'amour

Odette Joyeux and François Périer review the Révolution nationale

Claude Autant-Lara's Lettres d'amour is one of the director's better films, a lightweight romantic confection released to appease the filmgoers of Vichy and occupied France when it was released just before Christmas in 1942. The picture was Mr. Autant-Lara's first collaboration with screenwriter Jean Aurenche who based his script draft on his own novella. Messrs. Autant-Lara and Aurenche, along with co-writer Pierre Bost, would go on to work together on a number of films such as Douce, Devil in the Flesh, and The Red and the Black. Aurenche and Bost would emerge as France's leading screenwriting team, penning such acclaimed films as Forbidden Games and Gervaise. Lettres d'amour also is the second of four films directed by Autant-Lara that starred Odette Joyeux, films which first brought him renown as a director.

That said, I have been nonplussed by Mr. Autant-Lara's work after barely staying awake watching The Red and the Black in French class four decades ago. This was before I knew about the director's odious politics or grokked les politiques des auteurs. In fact, the first blast of the auteurs, in 1954, was François Truffaut's essay decrying the work of Aurenche and Bost. In the privacy of my own home, I observe the cultic rites of the auteurist and burn incense to the memories of Murnau, Renoir, Ford, and Mizoguchi, but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy the occasional film by a metteur en scène. I believe it is important regarding aesthetics not to be too doctrinaire. Autant-Lara's direction in Lettres d'amour does little to heighten any mood of romance or anything else, it merely functions to present his, admittedly first class, actors as they declaim. A good example are the not quite whip pans he employs in the courtroom scenes. Shots that ping pong from speaker to speaker. However, I suspect that the director was not fully responsible for what we see on the screen. Lettres d'amour feels like it was severely truncated in post-production. There are omissions and leaps in the narrative which unnecessarily confuse an already tangled plot.

The picture is set in 1855 during the reign of Napoleon III. The emperor is depicted having a chaste assignation with the film's heroine, Zélie (Odette Joyeux), while visiting the rural town where she works as a postmistress. The film primarily tells the story of the romance of Zélie and a young district attorney named François (François Périer). François has been having an affair with the wife, Hortense (Simone Renant), of the local prefect. A love letter between the two is unearthed during a legal proceeding and Zélie is wrongly branded with the scarlet A. François visits Zélie to thank her for her discretion, but is soon smitten and vice-versa. The road to true love has many obstacles, of course, but the goal is achieved. The film climaxes with a ball which reconciles the film's romantic conflicts, but also that between the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Reconciliation occurs as the characters check out that new dance craze, the quadrille. 🎀 I am a sucker for any film that concludes with a dance off.

Odette Joyeux

What ultimately won me over was the romantic byplay, full of thrust and parry, between Ms Joyeux and Mr. Périer. In her previous film for Autant-Lara, Le Mariage de Chiffon, Ms. Joyeux was miscast as a sixteen year old. ✂ Zélie, a young widow, is a much more suitable and knowing vehicle for her talents. Zélie is smart and attractive enough to be a coquette, but is too scrupulous to toy with a lover. Joyeux and Périer have that irresistible it in Lettres d'amour, a spark of romantic attraction that enables the hackneyed script to work. I associate Périer with the middle aged functionary roles I first saw him in (as in Le Samouraï and Z), so it was fun seeing him display some youthful charm and ardor. One of the other virtues of Lettres d'amour are the splendid costumes. Autant-Lara started in the film biz as a costume designer and performed that function on a number of the films he directed, so I'm sure he deserves some of the credit. I've never seen a woman look as graceful in a hoop skirt as Ms. Joyeux does when she is hurrying to her tête-à-tête with Napoleon III. The lion's share of the credit must go to the actual costume designer of Lettres d'amour. A gentleman named Christian Dior.

🎀 Mary Todd Lincoln danced the quadrille with Stephen Douglas at her husband's first Inaugural Ball in 1861.
✂ In three of the four films Joyeux made with Autant-Lara during the Nazi Occupation she plays a teenager. 

 

Islands

                 Sam Riley               

Jan Ole Gerster's Islands is a slow burn mystery set at a resort in the Canary Islands. Sam Riley plays Tom, a tennis instructor at the resort. Tom is an over aged tennis bum who responds to his utter boredom with his job by going out and getting blitzed every night. His depressive cycle is broken by the arrival of Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), two fellow Brits with a seven year old would be tennis prodigy in tow named Anton. Anne and Dave, both seemingly bored and entitled, soon monopolize Tom's time. He is wary of the duo, though attracted to Anne (who is vaguely familiar to Tom), but manages to be a good mentor to Anton. However, Dave's disappearance after a night of revelry throws Tom's life into turmoil.

This is a sturdy premise for a film and can go in a number of directions. The hangdog Tom, well sketched by a taciturn Riley, could be a patsy for a femme fatale or the mystery could remain unresolved as in L'Avventura. Gerster opts to go with the shaggy dog story option and, thus, the slow burn fizzles. The answer to the "real" mystery is obvious to the viewer by the midway point, though it remains beyond the dim Tom. Gerster is able to conjure the tenuous nature of relationships at a resort destination, but doesn't give his characters enough dimensions for the viewer to care. Stacy Martin is a cipher instead of a sphinx as Anne, but Farthing is quite good as the sleazy Dave.

Bombshell

Jean Harlow and Lee Tracy

Victor Fleming's Bombshell, released by MGM in 1933, is a lively comedy, part Hollywood satire, part antic screwball. Michael Sragow's excellent biography of Fleming gives a good précis of its genesis. Bombshell was based on a play about an actress beset by the perils of stardom that ends with a tragic suicide. Thankfully, Fleming and producer Hunt Stromberg wanted to shift the material's tone and concoct a vehicle for Jean Harlow who had collaborated with Fleming on Red Dust, a hit the previous year. What emerged was a boisterous comedy with the ratatat dialogue of The Front Page. Jules Furthman wrote a first draft, then frequent Fleming collaborator John Lee Mahin, a protege of Ben Hecht's, took a whack at it. When Lee Tracy replaced John Gilbert (thankfully) in the co-lead role of a wisecracking press agent, Norma Krasna was brought into beef up his part.

Tracy had played the part of Walter Burns in the smash Broadway production of The Front Page and is a perfect fit for the cynical flak monikered Space Hanlon. In general, Bombshell succeeds because it was concocted expressly for its crack cast. Mahin, who was Fleming's closest friend, knew of Clara Bow's romance with Fleming and used that for fodder. However, Bombshell is even more about Harlow and her persona. The opening montage presents Harlow under the guise of Lola Burns as a product of the star making machinery of her studio which makes her a target to be brought down by the tabloids. This was as true for Harlow as it was for Bow. Both women were perpetually linked with scandal once they attained fame. Both starlets also had family members who leeched from them along with the usual Hollywood hangers-on who inflict themselves on film icons to this day; like the Church of Scientology. These weasels bear the brunt of the satire in Bombshell including an underused Una Merkel as Lola's Gal Friday, Ted Healy as her degenerate gambler brother, and Frank Morgan as a pixillated papa. They are all excellent and superbly cast, but the amount of unrepentant drunkards (Morgan, Tracy, and Mahin were all eminent tankard-men) on this flick is startling.

Pat O'Brien, the onscreen Walter Burns of 1931, plays a director named Jim Brogan who is a virtual stand-in for Fleming. Brogan and Lola have a romantic past, just like Fleming and Bow, and are giving each other the eye through the picture. Fleming even has O'Brien and Harlow recreate the bath in a barrel sequence from Red Dust for old time's sake. How post-modern! Lola always has a bevy of potential lovers hounding her during the course of the picture including Brogan, Ivan Lebedeff as a foreign aristocrat of dubious provenance (Hollywood had a lot of those in its early days), and Franchot Tone as a preppy scion. Nobody in Bombshell, however, is who they seem. The biggest four flusher of them all is Space, Lola's true twin and nemesis. Whenever Lola is about to have a tryst or a meeting with a respectable personage, like a reporter from the Women's Home Companion or some biddies from an adoption league, Space sabotages her plans by calling in favors from the police or the press or both. All heck breaks loose in the foyer and Temperance League members brush shoulders with tipplers and other oddballs. Humanity in all its screwball glory is unleashed.

Some have cited Bombshell as the first screwball comedy, but this is not so. There are plenty of other films from this period (like Three-Cornered Moon) and even earlier, like The Coconuts, that equally fit that rubric. Certainly, the anarchic antics of the Marx brothers and other vaudevillians brought a new energy to the American sound film. I think the genre really got its start with Oscar Wilde whose work poked fun and eventually upended the conventions of the drawing room comedy. This cocking a snoot at convention and the screwball's embrace of the common man made it very audience friendly to a beleagured American in the Depression.

Every little character role in Bombshell is perfectly cast and delivered. Of those I haven't mentioned, there are plum bits by Louise Beavers, Isabel Jewell, Leonard Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith. Fleming gives the action flow, it moves but not haphazardly. A flood of innocent merriment is always threatening to burst. It is this feel of fluid spontaneity that help Harlow and Tracy give their best film performances. The picture is also greatly helped by the expert editing of Margaret Booth. She emulates the frisky rhythms Fleming finds in his choral scenes giving the film a burbling and winning perkiness. I find the last reel of the film a bit mechanical, but the self-mocking tone of the dialogue is a continuous delight. Franchot Tone manages to keep a straight face while telling Harlow, "Your heart is like a gardenia open to the sun." Harlow intones "You might get leprosy or something" with just the right amount of emphasis on the last two words. A fun flick.