Blast of Silence

While I recently felt a certain degree of long buried nostalgia upon re-watching the classic Xmas TV movie special Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977)—an inordinately cute, clever, and shockingly kindhearted production courtesy of none other than great muppet auteur Jim Henson—as it is one of my earliest film memories and something I probably have no seen in well over twenty years, I would be lying if I tried to pass it off as reflecting my current mentality or how I feel about the so-called holiday season. Surely, it is keeping with my current cynicism that I was not at all that surprised to just learn that the film’s 1971 source children’s book of the same name was penned by chosenite Russell Hoban (which explains the film's somewhat grating ‘class consciousness’) and mischling hack Frank Oz had to taint the film with his voice, but I digress. Feeling like I might be able tap into a smidgen of Xmas spirit with a quasi-arthouse slasher featuring a bunch of Warhol Superstars in the quite fitting roles of mental patients, I decided to re-watch Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), but it reminded me more of hokey Halloween hijinks than jingle bells and red-nosed reindeer. Hell, I even gave Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) a re-watch after two decades or so, but I was distracted by its odd neo-Orientalism and the fact that the recent PSYOP-like emergence of ‘Baby Yoda’—a sad unintentional symbol of Werner Herzog's strange newfound Hollywood whore status (though, to be fair, the Bavarian auteur started heading into this direction with his soullessly sentimental Spielberg-esque shoah shit show Invincible (2001))—has forever tainted the memory of the film in my mind. Indeed, I am somewhat ashamed to admit it, but the only film that could get me into the Christmas spirit—or, more specifically, the anti-Christmas spirit—is the nasty little neo-noir Blast of Silence (1961) directed by one-anti-hit-wonder Allen Baron who also acted as the film’s writer and antihero.

Despite being a relatively obscure figure that was mainly involved in doing completely irrelevant hack directing for popular (and not so popular) TV shows including The Brady Bunch, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Charlie's Angels, and The Love Boat, Baron was recently a casualty of the yeast-infected Me Too campaign at the ancient age of 91 after being exposed by his former personal assistant Anna Dey who not only accused him of doing disgusting things like throwing cum-rags at her, but also curiously accused him of the following in a July 2018 lawsuit: “Baron is a person of Jewish faith and expressly discussed his disdain for [Dey’s] Christian religion.” Of course, any non-pozzed thinking person that has seen Blast of Silence will see this as no big surprise as the film is devoutly anti-Christmas in a sort of marvelously mean-spirited and misanthropic fashion as if the writer-director fantasizes about a sort of semitic (anti)Santa Claus using his magical Kabbalah-charged sleigh with evil Golem-like Reindeer to drop a nuke on happy Christmas carolers. Indeed, Baron’s debut feature offers the viewer the opportunity of spending Christmastide with a half-crazed coldblooded hitman killer of the absurdly alienated and perverted sort who glorifies solitude and ultimately achieves a perennial sort of solitariness with his much-warranted grisly demise. In short, there is no doubt in your mind that Baron absolutely loathes Jesus Christ's b-day and the great joy, happiness, and spirituality associated with it, thus making the film a must-see film for ‘spiritual Ebenezer Scrooge’ types. Like a more morbidly mental Melville movie for sleazy American philistines created years after the release of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) when film noir had already more or less died, the film is no immaculate masterpiece yet it manages to bleed alienation, despair, and a certain hardboiled nihilistic fervor that makes this film an apt experience for those less than jolly beings that can’t get into the Christmas spirit but don’t necessarily want to blow their brains out.  Whereas sadistic sod gutter auteur Andy Milligan's proto-slasher Seeds (1968) offers the ultimate depiction of family dysfunction where hate epitomizes the holidays, Blast of Silence wallows in a lethal sort of loneliness where murder is merry, at least for the absurdly aberrant antihero.

 Aside from obvious racial and cultural reasons, I have always been counter-kosher for largely aesthetic reasons because I cannot stand the innate artificiality and overall phoniness that plagues Judaic artists, especially filmmakers ranging from Mel Brooks to Steven Spielberg to Darren Aronofsky to J.J. Abrams. Indeed, as Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in a more articulate fashion, to be kosher is to be cosmopolitan and, in turn, completely culturally bankrupt which leads to soullessly ‘universalizing’ the art of the people of their host nation, hence the oftentimes obnoxious Judaic propensity towards satire and parody where an artistic model is manipulated and subverted for (at least partly) comedic (but more often subversive) ends. Over the years, I have realized that the Hebraic filmmakers that I actually do like, quite unlike softboys like Spielberg or Abrams, tend to come from rougher backgrounds where their art comes from the rather organic source of the streets. Indeed, even in their big budgets films, the street smarts of tough jews like William Friedkin and Michael Mann is quite apparent (whereas Spielberg's films reek of a certain insipid suburban soullessness and sapless artificiality).  Before switching to artless Zionist propaganda, streetwise semite Peter Emmanuel Goldman almost made the desperation and nihilism of gutter-dwelling counterculture types seem cool in underrated films like Echoes of Silence (1965) and Wheel of Ashes (1968) in between whoring himself out for sexploitation trash like The Sensualist (1966). Indeed, it is hard to imagine that early Martin Scorsese flicks, especially his first feature Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), would exist were it not for Goldman’s largely unknown influence. Similarly, Actors Studio co-founder Jack Garfein—a supposed shoah survivor that had a certain glaring contempt for white America—demonstrated with his two fictional features The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961) a certain singularly scathing depiction of human psychology and abnormal behavior that makes the films of John Cassavetes seem like sentimental children’s films by comparison. Needless to say, Baron does for film noir with Blast of Silence what Goldman did for underground arthouse cinema and Garfein did for adult drama in terms of bringing a certain uncompromising vehemence and viscerality to the medium. As to the defining trait of Baron’s first and only worthwhile feature—a film that makes The Lady from Shanghai (1947) seem quite campy and Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) seem humanistic by comparison—it is its pure and unadulterated venom as if the filmmaker needed to create it lest he commit a mass murder spree. 

 Just judging by the opening scene of Blast of Silence, one might suspect it would be more fitting for the film to have the Cioranian title The Trouble with Being Born as a nasty and nihilistic virtual antinatalist film noir where the strangely angsty antihero ‘Baby boy Frankie Bono’ (writer-director Allen Baron)—a covert wop character that is, somewhat believably, portrayed by a Jew—immediately begins narrating his great displeasure with being born juxtaposed with a train emerging from a pitch black tunnel like a bastard baby being violently blasted out of its mother's monstrous womb.  Indeed, as Frankie narrates (by way of blacklisted kosher card-carrying commie Lionel Stander), “Remembering, out of the black silence…you were born in pain […] You were born with hate and anger built in.” Needless to say, Frankie will also die in pain with his hatred and anger still intact as if it was a fate he instinctively understood all along. A deranged hitman that, unfortunately for him considering the particularly perturbed state of his psyche, largely lives in his own mind as highlighted by the film’s exceedingly effective and superlatively sleazy narrated ‘internal monologue’ (notably, celebrated screenwriter Waldo Salt of Midnight Cowboy fame wrote the narration under the pseudonym ‘Mel Davenport’) where fucked Frankie boy practically seems like his head might explode at any moment. Indeed, Frankie is a virtual ticking time bomb, but some other gentlemen do him the honor of extinguishing him before he can explode on his own in what ultimately proves to be a pathetic end to a patently pathetic life.

A resentful ex-orphan that seemingly spent his entire childhood in an orphanage and thus never received critical things like love and affection as a childhood, Frankie naturally has mixed emotions about traveling all the way from Cleveland to his hometown in Manhattan to execute a hit on a mid-level goombah gangster. As Frankie gloats to himself in a self-deluding manner upon first arriving via train while suavely sucking on a cigarette, “You’re alone. But you don’t mind that. You’re a loner. That’s the way it should be. You’ve always been alone. By now it’s your trademark. You like it that way.” Unfortunately for Frankie, he won’t be alone for long as he bumps into some old childhood friends by mere chance, including an old love interest, thus leaving him vulnerable and warping his plans in an ultimately rather pathetic scenario that underscores the angst-ridden antihero’s incapacity to completely connect with other people on any meaningful level. In that sense, it is surely fitting that splenetic psycho Frankie meets a miserable end on a cold and rainy day in a scenario that hardly inspires lachrymose in the viewer.  Like a rabid dog that is begging to be put down, Frankie's somewhat predictable yet nonetheless delicious demise ultimately acts as a source of solace for the viewer.  In short, Frankie is a sick animal and his great suffering finally ends when he is put down.

 Although Frankie would certainly agree with Baron’s racial kinsman Heinrich Heine words, “Sleep is good, death is better but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all,” his boastful street philosophy of misanthropy and self-isolation are clearly the defensive psychological tools of a forsaken literal and figurative bastard that has no good reason to be happy about life as a poorly socialized lapsed orphan that is ill-equipped to deal with life, hence why he has dedicated his career to taking the lives of others as if he is unwittingly offering his victims the sweet sort of death that his sick self-destructive subconscious is driving him towards. Before executing his murder contracts, Frankie likes to channel all of his internalized hatred into these forsaken fellows. Indeed, when first mentioning his target Troiano (Peter Clune), Frankie states while practically dripping vile, “You know the type. Second-string syndicate boss with too much ambition…and a mustache to hide the fact he has lips like a woman…the kind of race you hate.” While stalking Troiano, Frankie also rationalizes the murder he is about to carryout by hatefully stating of his target, “He runs the girls and the dope and the books and the numbers. There’s a guy you could really learn to hate.” Although not his initial intention, Troiano is not the first scumbag that Frankie wastes as he impulsively yet still rather sneakily brutally beats and strangles to death an ‘old friend’ named ‘Big Ralph (Larry Tucker)—a fiercely foul and seemingly fecally unsound fat fuck that owns multiple pet street rats—that dares to attempt rip him off for a “thirty-eight with a silencer” after already agreeing to a contract. Indeed, while being a contract killer is technically Frankie’s job, one certainly gets the sense that he simply chose the career as an opportunistic outlet for his overwhelming bloodlust. Needless to say, a woman also helps inspire Frankie’s homicidal rage after temporarily softening his cold black heart during a moment of weakness that clearly contributes to his demise. 

 While incessantly complaining about his need for solitude, Frankie somewhat changes his tune upon being reunited with an old female friend named Lori (Molly McCarthy)—a hot dame that is able to have a rare ataraxic effect on the seemingly impenetrable antihero—and instantly falls for her. When Lori invites Frankie over for Christmas out of what seems to be nothing more than an altruistic sense of pity, he more or less attempts to rape her, but not before going on an insane rant that exposes him as a perturbingly pathetic whack-job that cannot even hold a conversation with a woman without it ending in disaster of the mutually embarrassing sort. Undoubtedly, Lori is right when she recommends that Frankie get a girlfriend as it would at least warm his seemingly half-rotten heart and give him a temporary relief from his hate-ridden psychosis, but he seems to be too hopelessly socially alienated and emotionally retarded to maintain any sort of sane love interest. Aside from killing Big Ralph, Frankie also makes the mistake of attempting to renege on his contract and is immediately threatened by the guy that hired him with the carefully expressed words, “All right. Now listen careful, Cleveland. Item one: For just thinkin’ what you just said…you’re in real trouble…and they’re gonna hear about this call. Item two: You made a contract with us, so you’ll do the job and you’ll do it right. Then we’ll listen to your problems. You’ve got till New Year’s Eve. And remember, you’re in trouble now.” While Frankie manages to commit the contract hit on Troiano with a certain savagely sadistic gusto that involves shooting the mobster while he is carrying a plush panda for his mistress and then kicking over his corpse while on the way out the door, he does not manage to escape from NYC alive as the men that hired him decide to assumedly cover their tracks by executing him. Indeed, despite being clearly threatened over the phone by the mobster that hired him, Frankie does not think twice about meeting him at a secluded pier outside the city where he is jumped by two hoods that, rather fittingly, look just like him. After being shot by the two doppelgängers and failing from a pier into the sea, Frankie tries in vain to climb out of the water by grasping for mud as the two killers continue to blast him into silence, or as the now-dead-narrator states at the very end of the film, “’God moves in mysterious ways,’ they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases…wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again. Back in the cold, black silence.” 

 For whatever reason, I recently decided to re-watch Dan Gilroy’s somewhat overrated Nightcrawler (2014)—a film that seems to have made with the objective of petrifying tech industry dorks and other spiritually neutered types—and was amazed at how much more unlikable Jake Gyllenhaal’s exceedingly effete sociopathic ‘gutter capitalist’ character is compared to the crazed contract killer of Blast of Silence. Indeed, while Allen Baron’s film is a singularly dark and nihilistic neo-noir that ends in a fittingly dejecting fashion, there’s at least a certain underlying humanity to the proceedings whereas good goy Gilroy’s film is almost as sterilely cynical as its sociopathic antihero as if it is a (pseudo)arthouse film made specifically to remind long-suffering office bureaucrats that they might not actually be autistic automatons after all despite all evidence to the contrary. In short, Baron’s film is sympathetic towards its aberrant antihero to the extent that, unlike Gyllenhaal’s stone cold yet sapless character, he wants to love and fuck just like anyone else despite his comments to the contrary.  Additionally, Hebraic hack Ariel Vromen’s superlatively shallow hitman flick The Iceman (2012) seems like an insipidly stylized piece of shit by comparison despite feeble attempts at pathos and poignancy. In short, most contemporary film villains, especially in neo-noir, are unsympathetic garbage that are rarely worthy of even being described as caricatures as they lack more substance than a Looney Tunes cartoon character and Baron’s film—where an exceedingly erratic ex-orphan expounds on his perturbing primitive prole philosophy in a manner worthy of Panzram—arguably underscores this better than any films of its era.  While English auteur John Boorman's masterful Point Blank (1967) is certainly the superior tragic hitman flick in almost every regard, Baron’s dementedly daring directorial debut is certainly on another level in terms of tapping into the almost-evil essence of a damned dude that lives for death and personifies the Christian phrase: “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

 Despite being an irreligious film with an anti-Christmas spirit as directed by a racially conscious Jew, Blast of Silence ultimately has a certain strange spiritual dimension if we listen to Emil Cioran, or as the Franco-Romanian philosopher once wrote in a piece entitled ‘Annihilation by Deliverance’ featured in his classic book A Short History of Decay (1949): “A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation ‘existence equals suffering.’ It is neither a sudden realization, nor a series of reasonings which lead us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of ‘wisdom.’ But, supposed we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts—what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection.” Indeed, in his own sick sad way, Baby boy Frankie Bono—the most lonely of god’s losers and a virtual spiritual brother to Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver (1975) fame—achieves salvation and, in turn, total transcendence in the end. Speaking of Scorsese, the famous guido filmmaker apparently once described Blast of Silence as, “my favorite New York City movie,” which says a lot considering the filmmaker once directed a cocaine-fueled musical entitled New York, New York (1977) and later a slightly better film entitled Gangs of New York (2002).  Additionally, the camera operator for Baron’s film, Erich Kollmar, acted as the cinematographer of Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes’ jazzy debut feature Shadows (1958). 

 As a film that makes the grittiest of Sam Fuller flicks seem about as hardcore as a transman's neo-penis and features a fiercely foreboding fatalism that might inspire suicide in less psychologically sound viewers, Blast of Silence—a minor masterpiece of misery and misanthropy where hate manages to effortlessly metastasize as the film progresses—is probably the ultimate anti-Xmas trip and a fittingly aesthetically abrasive testament to the soul-sucking power of solitude, especially when you are a lonely individual during what is supposedly the happiest time of the year. In short, Black Christmas (1974) seems like director Bob Clark’s later Fellini-esque classic A Christmas Story (1983) when compared to the stark and dark spiritual decrepitude that engulfs Baron’s virtual cinematic bomb. Considering that Baron spent the rest of his career being a for-hire hack that only managed to direct a couple mostly worthless films, including the uncharacteristically anti-cosmopolitan Foxfire Light (1982) where a rich city slut is tamed by a Southern rancher, one can only assume that Blast of Silence is the filmmaker’s sole auteur work and a true reflection of his seemingly twisted soul.  Aside from apparently bragging about various dubious sexual conquests, including scamming his way into then-Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett’s panties, the July 2018 lawsuit filed against him by his ex-assistant alleges that, “Baron also claimed to have forced numerous Cuban women to have sexual intercourse with him in exchange for roles in the 1959 movie CUBAN REBEL GIRLS.”  Needless to say, for better or worse, the recent allegations against Baron only add to the creep factor of Blast of Silence where the completely socially sick antihero seems to absurdly believe that dancing with a girl somehow immediately leads to aggressively trying to fuck them.

 While I don’t really believe in New Year's resolutions and can never deny the raw aesthetic power of Blast of Silence, I think my goal for next year is to make sure that I have no desire to watch the film ever again, at least not during the Christmas season. Indeed, I am perfectly fine with making Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) my reliable Christmastime favorite lest I succumb to a ‘schism of the heart,’ or as Cioran once so pitilessly described, “We are doomed to perdition each time life does not reveal itself as a miracle, each time the moment no longer moans in a supernatural shudder […] And it is not the miracle which determines tradition and our substance, but the void of a universe frustrated of its flames, engulfed in its own absences, exclusive object of our rumination: a lonely universe before a lonely heart, each predestined to disjoin and to exasperate each other in the antithesis. When the solitude is intensified to the point of constituting not so much our datum as our sole faith, we cease to be integral with the whole: heretics of existence, we are banished from the community of the living, whose sole virtue is to wait, gasping, for something which is not death. But we, emancipated from the fascination of such waiting, rejected from the ecumenicity of illusion—we are the most heretical sect of all, for our soul itself is born in heresy.” In fact, I think I am going to spend Christmas day re-watching Ronald Neame’s classic Charles Dickens adaptation Scrooge (1970) starring British screen legends Albert Finney and Alec Guinness and just try be grateful that my ancestors derive from the Western European countryside instead of dreary Eastern European shtetls which clearly provided a sort of atavistic spiritual influence on a film like Blast of Silence where man is completely deracinated and an abstracted slave that is no longer in tune with nature.

Needless to say, re-watching Carroll Ballard's Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)—a near-masterpiece of sight and sound that is like the 1980s Christmas equivalent of classic Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger productions like The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)—helped to cleanse my soul after watching Baron's gleefully seedy celluloid bomb and it also reminded that the right film can help even the most Scrooge-esque of individuals find some small glimmer of the yuletide spirit.  Indeed, despite the virtually malefic message a film like Blast of Silence might communicate, it is important to remember that the world is not a shtetl and that Christmas can even be enjoyed be spiritually and/or seasonally sick niggas that, despite hating Hollywood in general, can still enjoy Clive Donner's Dickens adaptation A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott without succumbing to the figurative wizard of poz that is hollyweird.  Still, I have more faith in someone that prefers Baron's film to fiercely phony crypto-kosher Christmas crap like mischling hack Jon Favreau's Elf (2003)—a radically retarded film that was written, directed, and largely starring members of the tribe—where Santa Claus is portrayed by Ed Asner who, not coincidentally, could easily pass for Baron's brother.  After all, there is something innately sinister about a world where Will Ferrell is considered funny and Blast of Silence—an inordinately metaphysically aggressive film that acts like acid on the psyche in terms of completely wiping away what might have previously been on your mind—acts a sort of ideally corrosive antidote to such mesmerizingly moronic crypto-anti-Xmas insipidity.  After all, better a Christmastide cynic than a buffoonish shabbos goy fairy like Ferrell.

-Ty E

The Woman on the Beach

Just like with goombah giallo flicks, I tend to prefer classic film noir films that completely break the conventions of the ‘style’ by being set in the country (as opposed to the stereotypical shitty city) and feature femme fatales that are not necessarily fatal like in Nicholas Ray classic films They Live by Night (1948) and In a Lonely Place (1950) and Edgar G. Ulmer’s magnetically melancholic filmic road-to-nowhere Detour (1945), so naturally it came as no surprise to me that I absolutely loved French master auteur Jean Renoir’s much maligned final Hollywood film The Woman on the Beach (1947).  A rare example of ‘beach noir’ featuring surreal and phantasmagoric imagery in a cinematic work that might be best described as an ‘allegorical ghost story’ as the main characters are haunted by a perturbing past that has resulted in a forsaken present, the film is undoubtedly my second favorite Renoir flick and certainly an eccentric entry in his oeuvre as a decided downer of the delirious dream-like sort where the prospect of death almost seems like a great gift from the gods. Indeed, aside from his poetic realist masterpiece La Bête Humaine (1938) aka The Human Beast—a deathly dark picture where suicide ultimately acts as the greatest of permanent reliefs for the foredoomed protagonist—the film is the only one that Renoir directed that bleeds misery, misanthropy, and just downright meanness, which were certainly not innate characteristics of a good goofy and jolly humanist like Monsieur Renoir. With that said, it should be no shock that Renoir was not particularly fond of the flick to the point where he was even bored during its pre-production, even complaining to his older actor brother Pierre, “My agents have stuck me with a film, at RKO, a studio where I’m dying of boredom.”

In fact, in his autobiography My Life and My Films (1974), Renoir, like a good little idealistic humanist, expresses his innate philosophical discomfort for the subject matter, stating, “It was a story quite opposed to everything I had hitherto attempted. In all my previous films I had tried to depict the bonds uniting the individual to his background. The older I grew, the more I had proclaimed the consoling truth that the world is one; and now I was embarked on a study of person whose sole idea was to close the door on the absolutely concrete phenomenon which we call life. It was a mistake on my part which I can explain only by the relative isolation enforced upon me by my limited knowledge of the language of the world in which I now lived.” In short, not unlike La Bête Humaine, The Woman on the Beach is a film where Renoir demonstrates his majesty as a cinematic auteur by directing a great gloomy and doomy film that was completely at odds with his own personal Weltanschauung and overall personal human spirit and in that sense, more than any other, one truly comes to understand the cinematic artist’s genius for his chosen artistic medium.

Based on the novel None So Blind (1945) by Stella Adler’s physicist-turned-novelist hubby Mitchell A. Wilson and originally plagued with the terribly unfitting title Desirable Woman, The Woman on the Beach was actually originally a project of great horror producer-auteur Val Lewton, but he abandoned the project not long after disagreeing with female lead Joan Bennett’s demand that Renoir direct as he felt that Fred Zinnemann, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, Lewis Allen, and Edward Dmytryk would make for more suitable directors. In fact, although the producer quit the film long before it began shooting, it oftentimes feels more like a Lewton flick than a Renoir one (which might be partly explained by the producer’s possible (co)writing of the screenplay, which was soundly theorized by Pascal Mérigeau in Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012)). Interestingly, Renoir’s description of Lewton in his autobiography is more or less in tune with the spirit of the film, as the auteur states of the producer, “Then he too died, alone or nearly so. His solitude certainly did not surprise him: he had often said that the closet groups were nothing but solitudes brought together.” Speaking of Lewton, The Woman on the Beach certainly has much more in common with Curtis Harrington’s favorably Lewtonian debut feature Night Tide (1961), which is also a darkly romantic film with a gothic beach setting where the oceanic becomes oneiric, than any of Renoir's other films. Indeed, I honestly cannot think of any other films aside from these two that seem inspired by the spiritually essence of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem ‘Annabel Lee,’ especially the final line, “In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

It seems that, despite being made for a Hollywood studio, even Renoir regarded the film as a sort of artsy horror flick as indicated by his words, “To conclude, THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH was the sort of avant-garde film which would have found its niche a quarter of a century earlier, between NOSFERATU THE VAMPIRE and CALIGARI, but it had no success with American audiences.” Of course, as a fiercely foreboding, moodily morose, and paranoia-plagued film that flirts with a sort of ‘Liebestod’ involving a bizarre love triangle between a damaged Coast Guard officer with PTSD, a cold cunt proto-goth whore, and her blind resentment-ridden ex-artist husband, the film was doomed to fail on all fronts. Totally devoid of any phony ‘good guy’ and ‘good gal’ types, the film is also notable for having a trio of ‘broken’ characters that are almost equally unlikeable yet, somewhat paradoxically, somehow similarly sympathetic in terms of all-too-human failings and tragic characters (or, as the famous quote from The Rules of the Game goes, “everybody has their reasons”). In that sense, the film feels more European than America and it is no surprise that such a romantically moribund movie would be an abject failure with the Tinseltown-narcotized American audiences of that time. As Renoir wrote in regard to these ‘solitary’ characters, “There is a race of genuine solitaries, but they are rare. Those born to be solitary contrive to isolate themselves in a world entirely of their own making. Most solitaries only appear to belong to this category, having been born to play a part in the world around them. It is only after what is as a result a deeply hurtful event that they have become solitaries. If they fight against it, it is generally at the cost of fearful inward turmoil. This drama of isolation is for the artist an episode in the tragedy of which we are all actors and which ends only with our departure into eternity. The artist is simply a man endowed with the gift of making these inward conflicts visible. Art is the materialization of an interior and often unconscious dream.” Naturally, Renoir utilizes nightmarish dream-sequences to expressionistically underscore the inwardly infernal metaphysical hell that plagues the haunted protagonist in what ultimately proves to be a practical use of avant-garde techniques.  In short, no one can watch The Woman on the Beach without being reminded that they have been plunged into the dark despairing abyss that is the perturbed protagonist's mind.

When Camille Paglia wrote, “At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts,” she certainly could have been thinking of The Woman on the Beach where the quest for love, or even just maintaining a thoroughly necrotic love with a person that used to love you but now hates you, reeks of a sort of grotesque desperation comparable to the theft of items from half-rotten corpses on a bloodstained battlefield. Indeed, the film’s pathetic protagonist Scott (Robert Ryan)—a tall, dark, and handsome would-be-hunk that, aside from suffering from bad dreams, is absurdly all-American, like a figuratively puss-filled parody of the banal American military type—is engaged to marry a classically beauteous blonde named Eve Geddes (Nan Leslie) but he soon finds himself considering murdering a blind (ex)painter named Tod Butler (Charles Bickford) after falling for his cold cunt wife Peggy (Joan Bennett) who dreams of of escaping her miserable life with her all the more miserable husband. Of course, as as half-crazed military bro that is having reoccurring nightmares involving romantically embracing a ghostly underwater ‘siren’ of sorts resembling his fiancée that lurks inside a quasi-apocalyptic oceanic realm of the creepy chthonic sort full of skeletons and wrecked ships, Scott—a Coast Guard officer that, rather inconveniently, is now afraid of the mere sight of a busted up boat—is probably in the ‘right’ frame of mind to fall for a proudly whorish femme fatale that wants to free herself from the obsessively jealous husband that she was responsible for blinding during a drunken row.

A man that lived to paint and did his best work in the form of nudes of his wife just before he lost sight at the hand of his greatest source of inspiration, Tod—an unconventionally charming chap with a name that, not coincidentally, means ‘death’ in German—is now a resentment-ridden shell of a mensch that lives hopelessly in the past and both literally and figuratively cannot see the present.  In fact, Tod is so obsessed with holding onto the past that he refuses to sell his last paintings despite their great value as the final creations of a painter that can no longer paint.  While Peggy feels some guilt for blinding Tod and, in turn, ruining his life be leaving him incapable of doing what he does best, she is also a calculating cuckolding cunt and thus cannot help lust after Scott as soon as they meet.  Naturally, Peggy eventually realizes it might be wise to kill her husband and sell his valuable paintings, which she hates, so that she can start a new life and Scott makes for the perfect pawn for such a scheme as the two both dream of a better life.  Unfortunately, Scott is too unhinged and Peggy to emotionally erratic and scatter-brained for the pernicious plot to work.

Although Scott will be discharged from his dreaded Coast Guard position in a week and thus will soon get his dream of leaving the seaside area for good as it reminds him of a past monstrous maritime tragedy that has haunted him with nightmares ever since, his life is completely changed one day while riding on the beach with his horse and unexpectedly encountering gorgeous proto-goth bitch Peggy—a drop-dead gorgeous dark-haired dime-store diva that, due to her almost delectably demonic essence, seems like she has had her fair share of eclectic dick—as she curiously scavenges from the ruins of a shipwreck (which is surely symbolic as the protagonist’s fiancée Eve is the total opposite as a blonde beauty that builds ships at a shipyard). As the sight of the ruined ship clearly incites his PTSD, Scott somewhat irrationally berates Peggy for gathering the rather crappy wood and she responds by noting his quite glaring spiritual unease, even stating, “You even looked at me as if I were a ghost.” While Peggy is not a phantom in the literal sense, she might as well be as she lives a static ghostly existence in a quaint shack with her husband in a lackluster life of mutual stagnation and (self)hatred. While Scott takes an instant liking to Peggy to the point where he seems to instantly forget about his fiancée, he feels somewhat annoyed when the older and wiser Tod attempts to befriend him and even begins to question whether he is actually blind or not as if he cannot bear to have sympathy for the man whose wife he so desperately wants to fuck. In fact, Scott intentionally puts Tod is a precarious situation where he almost dies after falling off a cliff in the hope it would prove that the retired artist would be revealed to be faking his own blindness. While the incident proves that Tod is not a fraud, Scott is still not interested in being his pal, especially after he discovers the ex-artist physically abuses Peggy and comes to the conclusion that he will commit his life to freeing the poor little harlot from her rather repressive husband.  Rather sickly, Scott's sexual desire for Peggy seems to be largely intertwined with the degree of misery and abuse that plagues his lover's disharmonious marriage, as if he gets a hard-on just thinking about her being brutalized by her husband.  In that sense, this is a beachside bizarre love triangle that only sad sickos would find romantically.

Needless to say, when Scott starts pounding Peggy’s pussy (despite her openly admitting to him her lack of virtue by boasting, “I’m a tramp. You just finding that out?”), it does not take much for the protagonist be motivated to murder Tod so that he can start a new life with his femme fatale lover, but he is such a sad self-destructive sack of shit that he uses borderline suicidal means to accomplish this decidedly demented task. Indeed, in what is the biggest of two major climaxes of the film, Scott takes Tod on a fishing trip where he rather absurdly attempts to drown his blind rival by piercing a hole in the boat during a nasty storm, thereupon causing both men to be swallowed up by the waves. In a scenario that contradicts the protagonist’s reoccurring nightmare of an Eve-like virtual sea witch seducing the protagonist in a skeleton-ridden underwater hell, Scott and Tod are saved by a small group of Coast Guards that includes the protagonist's long-suffering fiancée Eve.  Of course, Tod is not happy after barely surviving Scott's murder plot, so he decides to take his revenge against his scheming wife despite the fact that, unbeknownst to him, she tried to stop it at the minute and ultimately saved both men's lives by alerting the Coast Guard of the situation.  In the end in what is ultimately the second and final climax, Tod goes completely berserk and not only burns his remaining paintings—art pieces that are apparently worth tons of money due to being created by a famous ‘dead artist’—but also his beach house, as he no longer wants to be a prisoner of his past and finally plans to move on with his life. Of course, that also includes letting Peggy go, or as he tells Scott as they watch the house burn down, “I had to do it. Those paintings meant everything to me. But they became an obsession. They had to be destroyed. Now I’m free. I’ve new work to do. I’ve things to say. Many things. And Peggy’s free. I clung to her as I did the paintings. To the past. I made her live in it with me. I had no right to do that.”  Somewhat ironically considering the circumstances, Tod and Peggy seem to reconcile in the end despite the ex-painter’s promise to let her go. As for pathetically forlorn protagonist Scott, he literally walks away with nothing, which is even less than he started with as his fiancée Eve has even left him.  Since Scott is a psychotic prick and Tod is at least a man of wisdom that learns something in the end, I would have to say the film concludes on a relatively happy note.

Notably, The Woman on the Beach was such a disastrous flop that it resulted in Renoir having to abort a planned adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (which, interestingly, he had already adapted in 1934 with less favorable results) that he already had in pre-production. In fact, the film put a complete end to Renoir’s career in Hollywood, or as the auteur stated in his autobiography, “I was under contract to make two films for that company. A few days after the premiere I had a visit from my agent, Ralph Blum, who reported that they were ready to buy me out for a fixed sum. I am no fighter; I accepted, and that was the end of it. But it was the end in the widest sense. The failure of THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH marked the finish of my Hollywood adventure. I never made another film in an American studio. It was not only that particular failure that was held against me. Darryl Zanuck, who knew something about directors, summed up my case to a group of film-people. ‘Renoir,’ he said, ‘has a lot of talent, but he’s not one of us.’” Of course, the fact that Renoir was not a for-hire-hack-whore type like so many in Hollywood is why The Woman on the Beach is such a great film as not even subversive mavericks like John Huston or Howard Hawks would ever dream of directing such an unsettlingly dark and experimental film. As for Renoir, he was not really fond of any of his Hollywood films except for The Southerner (1945) aka L'Homme du sud, which he once described as “really the only thing that justifies my trip to America.”  Personally, I cannot agree with Renoir's assessment of his own work, as The Southerner—a sort of proto-neorealist film clearly informed by the auteur's idiotically idealistic leftist politics—is certainly worth a watch yet ultimately seems like like a prosaically patronizing experiment in proletarian fetishization when compared to deep dark aesthetic and emotional extremes of a rare arcane aesthetic object like The Woman on the Beach.

Notably, it was not until the film was rediscovered by film critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma that would later become major filmmaker of the La Nouvelle Vague that The Woman on the Beach finally received some positive praise, or as French film critic Pascal Mérigeau explained his massive text Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012), “Éric Rohmer would make the film the touchstone for his admiration of Renoir. Truffaut would cite a certain scene showing Joan Bennett crawling on all fours as one of the ten most erotic in the history of film. Jacques Rivette would speak of ‘pure cinema’; and, with the hindsight of years, he’d call the film ‘the first in a trilogy of great masterpieces.’ All such loving protests are also a defensive reaction to the extent of the rejection to which the film was subjected, and all of them are perhaps justified and accurate. However, they would be more convincing if Renoir’s name on the credits hadn’t contributed to steering the vision of the film and constructing opinions about it.” Personally, I could not disagree more with Mérigeau as I found the film to be great in part because it is rarely Renoirian unless one compares it to the auteur’s similarly unconventionally dark and morbid La Bête Humaine. In short, it is no surprise that the film had its genesis with Val Lewton—the great producer-as-auteur that even managed to overpower a great filmmaker like Jacques Tourneur with his almost devilish esoteric influence.

Despite Renoir's supposed apathy for the subject matter, the film has certain undeniable autobiographical elements, especially in regard to the filmmaker’s famous painter father. Indeed, not unlike Renoir’s Impressionist painter padre Pierre-Auguste Renoir who painted nude portraits of his mother Aline Charigot, the eponymous femme fatale is the subject of her husband’s much beloved nude paintings. Strangely, neither Renoir nor his biographer Mérigeau reference this seemingly obvious connection between the film and auteur's famous family. Interestingly, whereas Renoir would once state of his father's paintings in his book Renoir, My Father (1962), “His nudes and his roses declared to men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature,” the nude paintings of Tod in the film are such a source debilitating internal sickness that he must burn them so that he can get on with his life. Of course, on a more personal level, the subject of an artist that becomes blind is a visceral fear that should appeal to any serious filmmaker (notably, the character Tod more or less described himself as a ‘dead’ painter due to his blindness), which probably partly explains why the auteur drastically changed the storyline from its source material (in the novel, Tod just pretends to be blind). As to what a filmmaker might create if they went blind, Gay English auteur Derek Jarman provided at least one example with his AIDS-addled swansong Blue (1993). Notably, Renoir would never again direct anything so serious and instead would stick to virtual celluloid confections before fizzling out like a weak old fart. While the auteur directed one or two more notable films after his failed career in Hollywood, I am certainly more than tempted to see The Woman on the Beach as Renoir’s virtual artist obituary as a film that is not only consumed with doom and gloom that features a retired artist that no longer wants to live life but also because it was the consequence of artistic compromise on the filmmaker’s part. On the other hand, I believe the film probably greatly benefited from artistic compromise as apparently the dream-sequences were not added until late into the film’s production after Renoir was forced to reshoot a good portion of the picture (according to the filmmaker’s own varying statements, between 1/3 and ½ of the flick had to be reshot).

As someone with artistic inclinations that is somewhat haunted by the past and grew up with a close blind relative, I probably found The Woman on the Beach more relatable than most people would to the point where it at least partly inspired me to write this review. As a goofy man motivated by humanistic impulses and, for a time, shallow leftist idealism, Renoir is certainly not an artist I can seriously relate to on any innate personal level, so to me it proves his artistic genius that he was able to somewhat successfully take a poesy Poe-esque approach to such uncharacteristic material, as if he was temporarily haunted himself. Of course, Renoir had his own objective with the film, or as he once wrote in regard to his first version of the flick, “This is a film in which I wanted to proceed more by suggestion than by demonstration: a film of acts never carried out.” In the end, The Woman on the Beach is largely about the (in this case, negative) influence of a female lover on an artist, as Tod is virtually metaphysically magnetized to Peggy before and after she caused his blinding (and, as the viewer assumes at the end of the film, her influence enters a third and more positive phase at the end of the film). Notably, in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s classic modern romance Betty Blue (1986) aka 37° 2 le matin—another frog-helmed film depicting the perturbing perils of l’amour fou that is (at least partly) set on the beach—the male lead ‘loses’ his eponymous lover once he finally achieves his artistic dream of penning a successful novel, as if such self-destructive vaginal venom has already completely served its purpose and thus he can finally move on. Notably, even the non-artist protagonist of The Woman on the Beach is driven to action by Peggy in an almost magical fashion as he self-deludes himself into believing that it is his mission to ‘save her’ from her ostensibly sinister husband and not because he has a fetish for fiendish femme fatales, hence his loss of interest in good girl Eve.  As the film demonstrates, women tend to inspire both the best and worst in men as if the so-called fairer sex is god's greatest curse.

Of course, as Luis Buñuel and his Surrealist comrades believed, “desire is the one true motor of the world,” hence why the ‘ship sunk’ in the end when it comes to Scott and Peggy as the latter has finally achieved reconciliation with her husband. It is also no coincidence that Scott (ex)fiancée Eve tells him “I finally realized you’re sick” as he is consumed with the sort of l’amour fou that causes an otherwise rational man to degenerate into a Dionysian dildo that lives to fuck a void of a hole. Undoubtedly, only in a fantasy flick like Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson (1935)—a truly idiosyncratic film based on a story by George du Maurier that, not unlike Renoir’s flick, is a rare example of a Hollywood movie with dream-like avant-garde elements—does l’amour fou lead to something truly eternally heavenly as The Woman on the Beach so ruthlessly reminds the viewer in a somewhat ambiguous ending where a lovelorn young man loses his great love to a defeated old fart that has finally decided to let her go free as if the truest way to a woman’s heart is getting over her. Needless to say, Tod probably had the better idea when he was following a path more in tune with the Marquis de Sade’s words, “The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.” In fact, Tod, who is easily the most intriguing character in the film, is certainly a sort of low-key Sadean of sorts and his misguided abuse towards Peggy assuredly reflects the Marquis’ words, “Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.”

While Renoir originally intended for The Woman on the Beach to be “a story about love in which the reasons for attraction between the different parties were purely physical, a story in which sentiment would play not part at all,” he ultimately assembled something much more insanely intricate and metaphysically infernal where love becomes more or less one and the same with the Todestrieb and where artistic obsession and the abject desperation associated with a premature ‘artistic death’ compels a desperate ex-artist to virtually keep his favorite artistic subject prisoner. While the film certainly led to the death of Renoir’s career in Hollywood and, in turn, his artistic decline in general, the film is unequivocally the most enigmatic, preternatural, and esoteric film that the auteur ever created, not to mention one of the most radically recherché film noir flicks of all-time. Indeed, the film is arguably the unintended artistically fruitful consequence of Renoir being forced to endure a sort of Bressonian method of filmmaking as demonstrated by French master auteur Robert Bresson’s words, “These horrible days—when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles—are part of my method of work.” Undoubtedly, a lack of suffering causes an impoverishment of spirit, especially artistic spirit, and Renoir—a man that had a fairly privileged bourgeois bohemian upbringing—rarely suffered until he was forced to flee his homeland in May 1940 after Germany invaded France and relocated to Hollywood where he worked under artistically unfavorable circumstances. Had Renoir suffered even more and earlier in life, one can only speculate the sort of masterpieces he might have churned out as a sort of potential frog Bergman.  Speaking of the great Swedish auteur, The Woman on the Beach certainly shares aesthetic and thematic similarities with Bergman flicks like Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968), among others.  In terms of strange seaside cinematic works that helped to sink the career of a once-respected European auteur, the film is also comparable to Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick's uneven yet somewhat underrated Don't Make Waves (1967)—a rather idiosyncratic late entry in the ‘beach party’ sub-genre that benefits from a rather nubile Sharon Tate—which Tarantino recently paid tribute to in his latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

As Renoir stated himself in regard to how the conquering of his homeland effected the film, “It was natural that I should look for themes having nothing to do with a motherland who was no longer herself. I had a horror of sentimental images of pre-war France. Better a void than the pointed bear of the film Frenchman. But a void offers no solid foothold. Realizing the fragility of the thing I was making, I tried to change the story while the film was being shot. The result was a confused scenario leading to a final work which I consider interesting but which is too obscure for the general public.” Of course, nowadays the totally dumbed-down and obscenely aesthetically retarded general public would find most of Renoir’s films to be totally inexplicable, thus allowing a film like The Woman on the Beach a more notable place in the auteur’s singular oeuvre as an ostensible oddity that underscores the filmmaker’s unexpected eclecticism and capacity to embrace the entire range of human emotions. Indeed, I certainly never expected that it would be a cheap RKO B-movie that finally enabled me to fully appreciate the Gallic greatness of Monsieur Renoir. In short, fuck the totally trying Technicolor xenophilia of The River (1951) aka Le Fleuve, evil wanton white bitches on the beach are forever.

-Ty E

Classe Tous Risques

Admittedly, the older I get, the more François Truffaut’s classic film Jules and Jim (1962) seems like phony bullshit as dreamed up by an effete poser that has never had a genuine masculine friendship and I recently discovered that I was not the only one with this canon-contradicting opinion after reading a tribute to Gallic auteur Claude Sautet (Max and the Junkmen, Mado) by fellow French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville. Indeed, in the short yet superlative tribute entitled ‘The Quiet Courage of a Great Filmmaker’ featured in the March/April 192 issue of Présence du Cinéma, Melville soundly argued when comparing the masculine friendships of Sautet’s masterful second-feature Classe Tous Risques (1960) aka The Big Risk aka Consider All Risks to Truffaut’s film, “People often speak of films where the relationships between men, their friendships, have an enormous importance. I believed in the friendship of Abel Davos and Stark absolutely. It is interior, and does not appear by means of dialogue. The two men’s behavior makes explicit their feelings, without either of them having to speak of their friendship. On the other hand, I was not able to believe in the friendship of Jules and Jim, even though they speak of it often.” While Melville opens his tribute by confessing, “I offer my friendship rarely,” Sautet’s film had such a huge impact on the filmmaker that he not only gave his friendship to the fellow frog auteur but also somewhat copied his singular gangster film style, which is somewhat ironic when one considers the source material of the film. Indeed, despite being a French Jew that famously fought with the French Resistance during WWII as he would so painstakingly pay tribute to in his film Army of Shadows (1969) aka L'armée des ombres, Melville would (somewhat unwittingly) take imperative influence from a film based on a 1958 crime novel about real-life French Gestapo agent Abel Danos (alias ‘le Mammouth’ due to this robust/muscular build)—a bodacious bad ass that refused to wear a blindfold upon being confronted with the firing squad that would execute him—as penned by Corsican-blooded card-carrying-fascist collaborationist José Giovanni (real name Joseph Damiani) who was involved in the torture, blackmail, and murder of various French Jews and resistance fighters. In fact, gentleman Giovanni was, not unlike Danos (who he befriended in prison), even sentenced to death himself for three premeditated murders but luckily (and unlike Danos) he escaped the guillotine when his sentence was commuted by President Vincent Auriol and instead he served eleven and a half years of an initial twenty years of hard labor. Fierce fascistic source aside, I suspect that Melville, himself part of a criminal underground, could sense a certain intrinsic authenticity to the less than glamorous crime and grime of Sautet’s film. 

 While Melville arguably had an imperative influence on the filmmaking of French master auteur Robert Bresson with his debut feature Le Silence de la mer (1949) aka The Silence of the Sea—a more or less avant-garde chamber piece featuring a reluctant Nazi officer apparently partly inspired by German Conservative Revolutionary movement intellectual and supposed Nazi-fellow-traveler Ernst Jünger—there is no question that Classe Tous Risques was a crucial influence on the filmmaker’s legendary gangster flicks, including Le Doulos (1963), Le deuxième souffle (1966), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970).  In fact, I would argue that Sautet’s film is more immaculate and enthralling than all of Melville’s flicks aside from possibly Le Samouraï (1967) and apparently I am not the only one that thinks so as source writer José Giovanni himself would once say, “CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is the best film adaptation of any of my books. It doesn’t have any nightclub scenes. It doesn’t treat the subject as folklore. And it has more heart than LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE.” Indeed, Melville’s Le deuxième soufflé is also a Giovanni adaptation that stars Lino Ventura, but it spends about an extra 40 minutes to do what Sautet’s film accomplishes more effortlessly in terms of sheer underworld pathos, paranoia, and pessimism. As someone that experienced much of Melville’s oeuvre long before ever even hearing of Sautet, I can safety say that watching Classe Tous Risques felt like the result of the mastering of the Melvillian universe as if all of the ‘excess fat’ and static plodding that sometimes plagues the Judaic auteur's films was carefully cut with the carefully calculated precision of a seasoned Fleishmaster.

Indeed, whereas most of Melville’s films are something I might be inclined to revisit every couple of years, Sautet’s second feature is a seemingly flawless flick of the good and hearty sort that demands to be re-watched regularly and can be re-watched when you’re in any sort of mood despite its rather bleak and pessimistic subject matter. Of course, being the kind of person that prefers Once Upon a Time in America (1984) to all of Sergio Leone’s other films combined, The Fire Within (1963) aka Le feu follet to any of Malle’s other films, Taxi Driver (1976) to Scorsese’s later Goodfellas (1990), La Bête Humaine (1938) to Renoir’s purported magnum opuses La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), and even Luca Guadagnino’s ostensible Suspiria (2018) remake to Dario Argento's 1977 original, Classe Tous Risques is like the cinematic equivalent of ‘cold comfort food’ as a rare gangster flick of almost Spenglerian pessimistic proportions that dares to question humanity as a whole in its delightfully despairing depiction of a foredoomed gangster on the run that quickly loses everything that makes life worth living.  Indeed, if any film acts as an apt eulogy for the gangster genre, it is Sautet’s underrated black-and-white masterpiece.

 Notably, Jules and Jim is not the only obnoxiously overrated La Nouvelle Vague film that would eclipse Classe Tous Risques—a film that still has not completely gotten its due despite now being regarded as a masterpiece among certain cinephiles and film historians—in terms of sheer popularity. Indeed, as French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (Death Watch, Coup de Torchon)—a loyal protégé of both Sautet and Melville—explained in a tribute to the film entitled ‘Beautiful Friendships’ in regard to its unfortunate history, “Sautet’s film was also eclipsed by BREATHLESS, released just a few weeks before; all the credit for bringing out the talent of Jean-Paul Belmondo went to Godard, despite the fact that in CLASSE TOUS RISQUES, Belmondo shows us a completely different side of his great gift as an actor, his remarkable versatility, by making credible an authoritarian character with radiant charm, by stunningly fusing virility and childlike innocence, in a performance that is in a totally different register from the one he gives in BREATHLESS.” Admittedly, due to my general loathing of Godard’s debut feature and especially the lead character, I initially disliked Belmondo and would not really realize his brilliance and effortless charisma until seeing him in relatively mainstream films like Georges Lautner’s The Professional (1981) aka Le Professionnel and against-type arthouse roles like in Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest (1961). In short, Godard neutered Belmondo in films like Breathless and Pierrot le Fou (1965) as if to make the actor more autobiographically autistic. In Classe Tous Risques, Belmondo does what Belmondo does best by being both the ultimate man’s man and lady’s man as a suave young cocksman that knows exactly how to fight and fuck (despite the film technically not depicting much of either). 

 Not surprisingly, both Melville and Sautet were completely unaware of the covert fascist flavor of Classe Tous Risques, which is probably a good thing as the film probably would not exist otherwise. Indeed, as Sautet stated in an interview featured in the book Conversations avec Claude Sautet (1994) by Michel Boujut when asked if he know that the film’s lead was based on an infamous fascist, “If I had known, I might not have made the film. I was not aware that Abel Danos—Davos in the film—had belonged to the Bony-Lafont [collaborationist] gang during the occupation. It was only after the film was released that one day, in a bistro, some underworld types tipped me off: ‘It’s great that you made a film about Abel!’” In fact, apparently Sautet did not even realize that his screenwriter, José Giovanni, who he described having “got along perfectly” with, was also an (ex)fascist as the novelist (and, later, filmmaker) was not revealed to be a collaborationist until October 1993 after being exposed by two trashy Swiss dailies. Undoubtedly, Giovanni’s experiences as a once-condemned man certainly informs the decidedly desperate and even sometimes downright nihilist tone of Classe Tous Risques, which ultimately concludes with the lead antihero passively accepting his date with death despite technically getting away with his crimes as the character has been condemned by fate after losing virtually everything that meant something to him, not least of all his pride and dignity. 

 Although his crimes are never made clear, French gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) has been tried in absentia and sentenced to death, so he is now hiding in Italy with his wife and their two little boys after being forced to flee Switzerland. After committing a successful holdup on a busy Milan street with the help of his rather agile accomplice Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol)—a completely fearless fucker that demonstrates complete loyalty to his comrade—that concludes with an insane getaway that involves motorcycles and carjackings, the group decides to, somewhat curiously, head back to France. Rather tragically and quite unexpectedly both Raymond and Abel’s wife are gunned down by custom agents just as they arrive at a deserted beach cove in the middle of the night in an almost surreally nightmarish scenario that marks the beginning of the end for the seemingly forsaken antihero. Virtually trapped in Nice, France with his two extremely young sons, who are clearly scarred for life as they witnessed the coldblooded murder of their mother and family friend Naldi, Abel is seriously screwed in more ways than one, but luckily some people owe him a “debt,” or so he naively assumes as a man of honor that seemingly never heard the timeless sentiment that there is, “No honor among thieves.”  Indeed, Abel might be a violent crook, but he has a strict moral code that gets put to the test when his old comrades break said moral code.

Abel expects to have good help from his old underworld buddies as Henri ‘Riton’ Vintran (Michel Ardan) owes him a big favor for funding his successful bistro and Raoul Fargier (Claude Cerval) practically owes him his life for somehow getting him out of prison, but unfortunately it never occurred to the antihero that his old pals are nowhere near as honorable, grateful, or respectful as he is. While a third friend, Jean ‘Kid Jeannot’ Martin (Philippe March), wanted to promptly arrive in France with a machinegun and ambulance to smuggle him back to Paris, he is talked out of it by Riton and Fargier as he is on parole and cannot risk such a precarious move. Since Fargier is a self-centered coward and Riton has been emasculated by his nagging barmaid wife, the ‘old friends’ decided to do what amounts to the bare minimum and reluctantly agree to hire a young stranger, Éric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo), to pick up Abel and his sons. Needless to say, Abel is highly offended to the point of feeling deeply betrayed when a total stranger as opposed to his old friends arrives in Nice, but, unbeknownst to Fargier, who hired him, Stark is actually an old comrade of Raymond Naldi or as he confides to the protagonist while trying to alleviate his worries, “I had a friend named Raymond Naldi. They don’t know in Paris. I didn’t want to tell you either, but with what you’re thinking, it’s better if I did.”  While technically a mere hired mercenary, Éric ultimately proves to be the only real friend that Abel can count on in a relationship where the young up-and-comer learns to respect and protect an old pro in decline.

 It is immediately apparent that, despite their age difference, Abel and Éric have great chemistry and become immediate friends despite not saying much to each other as if the two have an instinctive understanding of one another. While Éric acts as a phony ambulance driver as Abel pretends to be an injured patient, he happens upon a beauteous beauty named Liliane (Sandra Milo of Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965)) being beaten on the side of the road. Naturally, Éric promptly knocks out the pathetic woman-abuser and then boasts to Liliane, “The nice thing about me is my left.” After Éric tells her a phony story in regard to their ambulance masquerade, Liliane agrees to join the group as a phony nurse and even maintains the charade after noticing a hidden machinegun inside the vehicle. Needless to say, Éric has not only found a new friend but also a new lover, as Liliane immediately starts a hot and heavy romance with the young gangster despite her quite different background as a theater actress.  As for Abel, he may have acquired a new young friend, but he has lost two old ones as he ruthlessly berates both Riton and Fargier upon being reunited with them.  Indeed, as Abel states to his old comrades with a certain visceral intensity, “But who sent a total stranger to Nice for me? It was you. And you. You two are pretty sly. You figure I didn’t have much of a chance. So it starts off with a driver you hope not to find, and it ends with a cousin in Brittany.” While Fargier remarks “He hasn’t changed a bit” after Abel throws a violent fit that concludes with him smashing a large mirror and then storming out of his ex-pal's bistro, both he and Riton have become bourgeois bitches of the superlatively soft and pathetically self-centered sort. When Éric tries to comfort Abel by remarking, “You know…Riton and Fargier…you should forget them,” the antihero calmly replies, “I already have. They don’t exist any more.” Since there is no way that he can provide a safe or healthy life for his poor now-motherless children, Abel decides to give them to his friend Chapuis’ sister and then he proceeds to live a lonely life where he spends most of his time silently brooding in a tiny maid’s room located inside the same apartment building where Éric lives.  Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before Abel cracks or, more specifically, completely gives up on life altogether.

 Since he needs escape money and future funds for the care of his children, Abel decides to do one more job that involves robbing a sleazy fence named Arthur Gibelin (Judaic Renoir regular Marcel Dalio), but unfortunately the miserable miser makes the ultimately fatal mistake of getting Fargier and, in turn, the police involved in a desperate attempt to get his stolen money back. Indeed, a certain police officer named Inspector Blot (Jacques Dacqmine) begins making threats against Riton and Fargier and they know they are next after Abel kills Gibelin. Leading a revenge campaign the begins with the murder of Gibelin after discovering that he hired a private investigator to follow Éric (whose identity he got from Fargier), Abel then kills Fargier by shooting him outside of his house in what proves to be a fittingly anticlimactic shootout between a virtual rabid bull and a bitch. Unfortunately, Fargier’s wife Sophie (Michèle Méritz)—a beloved figure among the gangsters—dies in shock of a heart attack upon finding her husband’s corpse, thus inspiring Abel to stop his revenge campaign just before he kills Riton. Aside from Sophie’s shocking demise, Abel is also demoralized after Éric is shot in both his legs by Inspector Blot and arrested while in the process of warning the protagonist about the cops. Completely consumed with guilt and seemingly wishing for death, Abel tells his old friend Kid Jeannot that he is done for good because, as he states with a certain manic intensity, “… I’m calling it quits. This is goodbye, Jeannot. Thérèse. Naldi. Sophie. And now Stark. I can’t do anything for him. Understand? […] Abel’s gone. There’s nothing left. Get the hell out, Jeannot. Do me a favor. Get out of here.”  In fact, Abel's proclamation of defeatism is so decidedly unbecoming and uncharacteristic that it even deeply disturbs a hardened criminal like Kid Jeannot who scampers out of his friend's hideout like a shocked child.  Indeed, in the end, Abel disappears into a crowd of people on the street just as he once appeared at the beginning of the film.  As the narrator notes in regard to Abel’s patently pathetic and ultimately uncharacteristically passive acceptance of total defeat, “A few days later, Abel Davos was arrested. He was brought to trial, sentenced and executed.”  As for Éric, one can only hope that his love affair with Liliane works out and that he quits organized crime as the last honorable gangster, Abel, is dead.

 While regarded as both a classic and masterpiece among many Francophile film fans today, Classe Tous Risques was such an abject failure upon its initial release that its auteur decided to give up filmmaking altogether, or as Sautet scholar N.T. Binh once explained, “That CLASSE TOUS RISQUES turned out to be a commercial failure was such a bitter disappointment to Sautet that he announced the abandonment of his career as a film director. But only two years later, when the film was discovered by a group of young cinephiles (including future director Bertrand Tavernier) and was rereleased on the art-house circuit, it had a spectacular reception and quickly became a cult favorite. Meanwhile, Sautet had returned to another career—as a clandestine adviser and script doctor on other directors’ projects (including films by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Louis Malle, Alain Cavalier, and Robert Enrico).” Speaking of Malle, although quite different aesthetically as a pastoral war drama, his film Lacombe, Lucien (1974) certainly makes for a great double-feature with Classe Tous Risques as a rare piece of cinema that dares to ask the hard questions and brings unexpected nuance and inordinate empathy in terms of depicting the desperate decline of an underworld collaborationist that eventually finds death in the end (notably, neither film depicts the execution of its antihero, as if it would be in ‘bad taste’ to depict the state-sanctioned murder of a strangely likeable fascist thug).

Despite its age, Classe Tous Risques also deals with timeless themes that still inform the philosophical essence of film and television today, not least of all The Sopranos (1999–2007) where one soon discovers that, typically, the only way out of a life of organized crime is either prison or death. Indeed, as Abel attempts to warn Éric, “Let me tell you something else, if you ever decide to do something else, something where you’re sure to sleep in your bed every night, I’ll be glad to hear it, wherever I am. I’m telling you because we always think we’re clever. But if you stop standing your ground, you’re nothing. You slip a little more every day…until…until you’re nothing. Like today.” Of course, the lead antihero of the hit HBO show spoke similar words and that is why it would not be a stretch to describe Abel Davos as the (proto)Tony Soprano of French (ex)Gestapo agents, albeit slightly less sociopathic (of course, it does not hurt that guido lead Lino Ventura has a bull-like build comparable to Amero-wop James Gandolfini). Undoubtedly, my only complaint in regard to Classe Tous Risques is that it does not conclude on a similar note of disconcerting ambiguity as The Sopranos, even if it is not hard to predict what Abel's fiercely foredoomed future might be like. 

 In a somewhat recent review of Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s Befrielsesbilleder (1982) aka Images of a Relief, I expressed my interest in films depicting the misery and desperation that typically haunted fascist types after World War II and I would certainly argue that Classe Tous Risques is one of the greatest of these films despite the director apparently having no clue it was based on a real-life French Gestapo hood. Additionally, I would argue that the novels of José Giovanni—a man that remained vocally ‘right-wing’ his entire life and clearly paid tribute his fascist comrades via his books—are a sort of wonderfully lowbrow post-fascist continuation of the grand frog tradition of so-called ‘literary fascism’ as associated with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lucien Rebatet, and Thierry Maulnier. After recently re-watching Classe Tous Risques, I was certainly reminded of an unforgettable quote from P.P. Pasolini’s swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) when the fascist ‘Duke’ played by Paolo Bonacelli declares, “We fascists are the only true anarchists.” And, of course, such an innately anarchic spirit explains how José Giovanni could have a successful artistic career after prison without anyone initially realizing his less than kosher background, hence why a Jewish (ex)Resistance fighter like Jean-Pierre Melville—a self-described “right-wing anarchist”—could so thoroughly identify with and deeply respect a work dreamed up from the mind of a man from the opposing fascist side. As for commies, they apparently were not interested in Sautet’s deceptively meaty masterpiece or any of the great frog gangster flicks of the era as they preferred soulless social realist twaddle, or as Tavernier once explained, “Yet CLASSE TOUS RISQUES’s strength and orginiality were underestimated upon its initial release. It is true that gangster films had never been particularly popular with a whole segment of the French critical establishment. Journalists loyal to the Communist cause followed Georges Sadoul’s lead in routinely panning them, even those like NIGHT AND THE CITY and TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, directed by filmmakers close to the party, insisting it was better to take an interest in workers and tradesmen than in criminals.” 

 Of course, as a film that puts a premium on true masculine friendship, honor, respect, loyalty and masculine virtues in general, the film would certainly be considered ‘fascistic’ by today’s exceedingly effete and self-destructively feministic film critics who despise any male character that is not a virtual eunuch. In that sense, Classe Tous Risques is not only a sort of crypto-fascist film noir, but also—in the Peckinpahian sense—a visceral Gallic celluloid ‘death poem’ on the twilight of French masculinity, so it is only nature that Sautet would go on to direct lavish arthouse dramas like A Heart in Winter (1992) aka Un cœur en hiver and Nelly and Mr. Arnaud (1995) aka Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud featuring exceedingly emasculated and broken (yet ostensibly ‘misogynistic’) proto-nu-male protagonists that have less testosterone in both their entire bodies than the technically-defeated Abel Davos has in his dehydrated piss. Of course, it is also no coincidence it is effeminate guys like Fargier and Gibelin that betray Abel as they are symbolic of a new spiritually neutered post-Vichy frogland where hos and dough come before true bros.  Luckily, Sautet at least had an eclectic collection of friends including Giovanni, Tavernier, and Melville that supported his film and ultimately got him out of early retirement as a cinematic auteur. Although Sautet would go on to more ‘highbrow’ material like A Heart in Winter about the perils of being a romantically-retarded autistic introvert and receive much warranted critical acclaim for such films, Tavernier was probably right when he once wrote during his pre-auteur days as a film critic, “People say CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is a B Movie. Better B like Boetticher than A like Allégret.”  Likewise, better a männerbund than a mangina, hence the difference in quality and testicular fortitude of the gangster films of Sautet and Melville to those of an overly-intellectualized autist like Godard who even managed to make Über-bro Belmondo seem like a buffoonish bungling bitch that probably dreams of blowing Bogart.   Of course, Abel Davos would have thought old ‘Bogie’ was a dick-downing queer.

-Ty E