"When you direct, you write dialogue sparingly because you look to give the most of life and truth possible to the direction and acting."
Filmography
Feature Directing L'Or du Cristobal (1940) Becker left the film, completed by Jean Stelli Dernier atout (1942) Goupi Mains Rouges AKA It Happened at the Inn (1943) RABC France Falbalas (1945) RB Studio Canal Antoine et Antoinette (1947) RABC Gaumont Rendez-vous de julliet (1949) ABC Gaumont Édouard et Caroline (1951) RB Studio Canal Casque d'or (1952) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RB Studio Canal Rue de l'Estrapade (1953) Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RA Kino / RB Studio Canal Ali Baba et le Quarante Voleurs (1954) Les Aventures d'Arsène Lupin (1957) RA Kino Lorber Montparnasse 19 AKA The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958) RB Arrow (OOP) Le Trou (1960) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RB Studio Canal
Shorts
"Tête de turc" (1935)
"Le Commissaire est bon enfant, le gendarme est sans pitié" (1935) La vie est à nous (1936) [collectively directed with seven others, including Jean Renoir]
Books Jacques Becker by Claude Naumann (2000) [French]
My local rep is doing a Becker retrospective right now. I haven't been able to get to all of it, unfortunately, but Falbalas was the highlight of all the movies I saw last month. The screening was a DCP, so I'm hoping its in the pipeline for BD release, though it didn't appear much if any work had been done to clean it up.
"the Studiocanal blu-ray edition of Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960) includes a 180-page book, Explorer 'Le Trou' de Jacques Becker, with texts by Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Antoine de Baecque, Bernard Benoniel and Olivier Père. The second part of the publication offers archival documents, reviews and interviews, and it concludes with the first 32 pages of the orginal film script, including the minutes that were cut by the producer right after the release." (my bold)
Ooh, good shout. There's an interesting essay on Becker and Sautet in the Summer issue of Cinemascope where brief but unequivocal praise for his Lupin entry made me curious about it.
Well, having now seen it, it is better than the serial-aping Molinaro mess, but it's still not a good movie. Becker's entry here reminded me of his Ali Baba film with Fernandel-- obvious mainstream entertainment with close to zero artistic merits (though that movie was nowhere near as lethargic as this is). I have nooooooo idea what levels of cognitive dissonance gripped the Cahiers crew when they praised this well after Truffaut led the charge against popular French films of this nature. Auteurism run amok yet again!
Becker's film is, however, better than the lame (and endless) Yves Robert-directed Lupin sequel also included in the Kino set, so there's some meager praise for ya-- it's the clear winner of the three (the real winner would, of course, be whoever doesn't pick this set up at all, but I already lost that one)
I always thought this was the film that started to sour the Cahiers' team unequivocal praise of Becker... I seem to remember a negative Truffaut review, maybe in Arts. Which stands out, as he was not usually one to go back on initial judgments of filmmakers, especially someone of Becker's stature.
Truffaut indeed gave it one star in the Conseil, but Rohmer was the only other of the ten who joined him in a rating that low. It remained the second-highest rated film covered that month. Haven't read Truffaut's take down (is it in one of his collections?), but Doniol-Valcroze wrote the review in Cahiers, which is pretty interesting, actually. He argues that you can't defend it by saying it's a for-hire work for Becker because he wanted to make it, so you have to find another way to excuse it and still follow the auteur theory... which he proceeds to attempt (not too convincingly, but it's an interesting read for the hoops these guys sometimes had to jump through to justify their dogmas)
Fereydoun Hoveyda also wrote a very, very long open letter to Jacques Becker AS Arsene Lupin in the same issue!
Caught up with Rendez-vous de julliet , famously singled out as potentially influential on or even presaging the New Wave. But while I enjoyed it, this is just basic studio filmmaking with younger stars in it. This is a spiritual precursor to the Affairs of Dobie Gillis, not A bout de souffle. Perhaps there's also some wish fulfillment in the central Jean Rouch-type character, but his efforts to get a film crew together resemble Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney assembling a barn dance more than la Nouvelle Vague. It's also hard to not once again be struck by the Cahiers crew embracing a moralistic story that puts a woman who strays in her place...
I have a couple more Becker films to take in, but I cannot escape my feeling that this is a minor director raised to pantheon status by the crew at Cahiers for reasons that I may never be able to fully be on board with. I was recently reading the obits for Becker from Cahiers, and one of the critics (it might have been Godard?) noted that they considered Becker the most French of all French directors. And maybe that's where the disconnect will always be. Andrew Sarris claimed that Preston Sturges' inherent Americanism prevented the French critics from ever fully getting what he was doing, and perhaps a similar cultural barrier exists for me with Becker. There's also of course the Renoir connection and the fact that Becker was the first big directorial interview Cahiers landed in the early days of the journal, so there may be other subjective factors I or anyone else cannot replicate in revering him
For the record, I think Le trou is a masterpiece, but it's also unlike any of Becker's other films and I also like it far more than any of those I've seen
Falbalas is my second favorite Becker after Le Trou and his influence on the Godard-Karina films is pretty apparent in the first, apartment-bound section of Édouard et Caroline. I do think he’s a pretty interesting and varied filmmaker even if it seems like he didn’t have/take many chances to fully stretch out in ambition and style until his final film. IIRC part of why Cahiers took him on as a role model was, like Melville, his status as semi-independent figure who made popular films.
domino harvey wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2024 12:42 am
Truffaut indeed gave it one star in the Conseil, but Rohmer was the only other of the ten who joined him in a rating that low. It remained the second-highest rated film covered that month. Haven't read Truffaut's take down (is it in one of his collections?), but Doniol-Valcroze wrote the review in Cahiers, which is pretty interesting, actually. He argues that you can't defend it by saying it's a for-hire work for Becker because he wanted to make it, so you have to find another way to excuse it and still follow the auteur theory... which he proceeds to attempt (not too convincingly, but it's an interesting read for the hoops these guys sometimes had to jump through to justify their dogmas)
Fereydoun Hoveyda also wrote a very, very long open letter to Jacques Becker AS Arsene Lupin in the same issue!
I am only just seeing this now, so apologies for responding so late but wanted to close the loop on this. Yes, Truffaut dedicated a long review to it in Arts, which was collected in Chroniques des Arts-Spectacles (which is a great collection and is the true evidence of his critical prowess, in my opinion. When Godard called him one of the greatest critics, I didn't agree with him at all until after reading this book). I will have to go back and read that Doniol-Valcroze text, it sounds very interesting and shows how as a whole they struggled with approaching this film vis-a-vis the politiques des auteurs, especially as Doniol never seemed to be a huge torch waver for the auteur theory to begin with.
Although I also see this reaction as a bit of an early indication of the path the review would take in the early sixties, when they seemed to question some of their more long held beliefs and you started seeing reappraisals of guys like Ford appear. Anyway, don't want to get too far off topic in the Becker thread!
Rue de l'Estrapade is a terrifically lively romantic comedy, and easily the best of Becker’s three comic explorations of deteriorating/rejoining couples. Anne Vernon is impossibly wide-eyed as a wife who gets a quasi-bohemian revenge on her cheating husband Louis Jordan by leaving him to rent a room in a shithole. Daniel Gelin as her chanteur neighbor presses his charm as far as it will go with his character here, and indeed the film would not work at all if he couldn’t convince an audience of his innate tenderness amidst all of the tres aggressive wooing he does of Vernon.
nowhereisaplace, I’m actually in the middle of reading Truffaut’s book now. I thought the intro essay was one of the best things I’ve ever read about the love of films
Red Screamer wrote: Thu Nov 07, 2024 3:34 pmFalbalas is my second favorite Becker after Le Trou
Sadly, it was my second least-favorite behind Dernier atout. I found practically every character deeply unlikable, and def never bought any of the psychotic motions the main character goes through over what amounts to a fling. Goupi mains rouges fared better for me. Certainly its focus on a clan of rural farmers seems deeply French, to bolster my earlier argument that there's something untranslatable in the appeal of Becker's films, but I found it a fine if unexceptional quasi-mystery that nevertheless lacked the kind of wit and verve that Pagnol brings to this kind of rustic material-- and Becker is certainly no Pagnol.
So, that's it. I've seen them all. And nah, I don't think he's a great director. Sorry Cahiers!
