Gervaise

Maria Schell and Suzy Delair in Gervaise

Rene Clément's Gervaise, from 1956, is a quality adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, L'Assommoir. Set during the reign of Napoleon III, Zola's novel is a melodrama concerning a laundress (Gervaise) and the three men her life is intertwined with. The term l'assommoir derives from a noun that roughly means stunned or hammered. The expression became a euphemism for working class taverns that served home brewed rotgut in 19th century Paris. During the course of the novel both Gervaise and her husband succumb to alcoholism as a way to escape the misery of their impoverished lives. If you have read any of Zola's novels, the squalor and deterministic tragedy of Gervaise will come as no surprise.

The film is a condensed version of the novel, but it maintains the seamy feel of the original. So much so that all prints that circulated in the United States in the 1950s suffered from snips by censor boards. I don't know why anyone would spare us the delectation of Suzy Delair's derriere exposed and paddled on by Gervaise (Maria Schell) during an epic catfight. The film was received by American critics as the height of realism and daring at the time. A glimpse of the vomit and blood on a character's pillow after a bender must have seemed plenty real in the cinemas of the 1950s. Certainly mainstream American cinema would wait until the dismantling of the Production Code ten years later before opening the floodgates to such scatological effluvia.

Clement and his scriptwriters also preserved the socialistic tenor of Zola's work. Gervaise's noblest suitor, a blacksmith who mentors her eldest son, is sent to prison for organizing a strike. Gervaise does experience moments of joy in her life, a trip to the Louvre after her wedding and getting to serve a goose to her friends on her name day, but Zola portrays her as unable to escape the traps and snares of poverty. I agree with Arlene Croce who found Maria Schell to be an overly romantic Gervaise. Her luminous beauty lights up the screen, but Gervaise needs to have a little bit of fishwife in her, something Suzy Declair has in spades as Gervaise's frenemy, Virginie. Schell, who was born in Vienna, had appeared in a number of German films and Sascha Guitry's Napoleon. Gervaise made Schell an international star. Her appearance in Visconti's White Nights, a role that suited her talents perfectly, further raised her profile and Hollywood, for worse rather than better, soon beckoned.

Clement makes one change to the novel that I rather liked and which again displays his masterful direction of children, as in Forbidden Games. In the book, Gervaise dies and her corpse molders for days before her neighbors notice the stench. In the film, we last see a disheveled and unhealthy looking Gervaise drinking in a saloon. Her young daughter, Nana, visits her and tries to rouse her, but Gervaise is unreachable. Nana skips outside where the beautiful child is hailed by a large group of urchins. Students of Zola's oeuvre will know that the child will grow into the man-eating prostitute immortalized in Zola's 1880 novel, Nana. Gervaise stands as a portrait of the sordid milieu that would forge such a hard-bitten character.