Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 100

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Popular Culture Review

worth any attention. Since the question of quotas still has not been resolved,'^
American distributors simply content themselves with re-releasing old movies.
Almost all new films are therefore French. Two years after the Liberation, the
public paradoxically finds itself in a situation more or less similar to the one it
experienced during the Occupation: a neat cinematic monopoly. The partial
elimination o f the competition may have advantages—the quality of French
production between 1940 and 1944 proves this—but only if it does not last too
long and, even more important, if the film industry has the means to take advantage
of this “intermission."’
Alas, our industry doesn’t seem to have those means, since it can no
longer do without either the importation of brand-new equipment or the exportation
of its product, which is not financially viable when limited solely to its own national
market. Your average twenty-million-ffanc film can no longer pay off on the French
circuit. This explains why more and more films are being made under drastic money
saving conditions that are absolutely incompatible with minimum artistic standards;
perhaps the few million that are thus being saved will help balance the producer’s
budget. The complexity and the seriousness of the problems that are today facing
the French filmmaking industry require a specific, consistent policy that the proper
authorities seem unable to conceive and implement. This is why the French cinema
is slowly dying in studios that get their equipment from local flea markets, studios
where some of the most qualified technicians in the world must hurry about playing
the maddening role of Mr. Fix-it.
The delay that the publication rhythm of a journal imposes on me will
perhaps explain why I won’t talk this month about the half-dozen recently released
films that could barely be called decent: i.e., I have little to add to what has already
been written. Despite its dialogue, Henri Calef’s Jericho (1946) is doubtless the
most respectable among the new crop. Georges Lacombe and his screenwriter Pierre
Very, for their part, have come close to success in The Land without Stars (1945),
but in the end they have missed their mark. By contrast, the modesty of Barbizon's
Temptation (1945; dir. Jean Stelli), its lack of pretentiousness, could serve as a
sympathetic explanation for the pleasure it gives us. In any event, there’s a good
side to the re-release of American oldies: we get to see The Green Pastures (1936;
dir. Marc Connelly and William Keighley) and Scarface (1932; dir. Howard Hawks)
again. The latter has produced in me the only strong emotion of the last five or six
weeks, so the reader will excuse me for elaborating on my rediscovery of this film.
Its qualities emerge with extraordinary relief from a distance of fourteen years.
What’s so remarkable about Scarface is that we realize today that it would
William Faulkner just another writer of gothic fiction. Everything that will later
become the inevitable rhetoric of the genre is barely touched on by Howard Hawks
in this film; it’s all consciously rejected in favor of psychology and social realism.