The Man Who Walked Through Walls

This book of exquisitely written short stories was published in Occupied Paris in 1943. Marcel Aymé (1902-67) has been compared with Kafka and the Surrealists but his subversive fantasies lack the menace of the former and the mania of the latter. His parallel universes are always convincing and constructed with a delicate touch. An unexpected air of geniality prevails but there’s no space for sentimentality. A few streets away from Sacré-Coeur there is a Place Marcel Aymé with a sculptural tribute of a bronze figure emerging from a brick wall. The title story was filmed in 1951 as Le Passe-muraille – it launched the career of the quintessentially Gallic comic actor, Bourvil, and the female lead part was played by Joan Greenwood in the same year as she flirted with a manic Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit. Bourvil’s last film would be Le Cercle rouge, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1970. The Man Who is a popular formula for titling books when imagination fails to come up with anything better and I quickly located these examples lurking on my shelves. 

Charles Laughton, actor and drinker

In this ad for Pabst beer we see the great Charles Laughton squinting into the California sun, holding a glass of chilled Blue Ribbon. It’s 1949 and Laughton has just turned fifty – and recently played the part of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (released in 1950). Filmed on location in somewhat dishevelled post-war Paris in Ansco Color, the production had been fraught with difficulty. The original director had been replaced halfway through, after much internal conflict, by one of the cast (Burgess Meredith). Unsurprisingly the finished movie lacked coherence and consistency of tone – a curious combination of suspense and flippancy. The cinematographer was Stanley Cortez whose excellence was squandered on a meandering narrative and some mediocre acting. Laughton himself seemed uninspired and disinclined to take it at all seriously. But Cortez and Laughton would collaborate to infinitely greater effect five years later when Laughton directed his only film, the incomparable Night of the Hunter. Laughton had become a US citizen and at his first attempt made what would come to be regarded as “one of the masterpieces of American cinema” (David Thomson). When Laughton died in 1962 the critical standing of his film was basically unchanged from the initial indifference – the subsequent reassessment and rise to greatness would take place after his lifetime. Previous posts on Laughton here and here. 

With Eric Rohmer in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Eric Rohmer’s films sharply divide critical opinion. Those with a taste for leisurely exposition, extended dialogues and philosophical complexity find much to commend. Others find them to be without equal when it comes to pretentious tedium. I can see both sides of this but the visual quality is the one I most appreciate - the sense of place and the curious intensity of observation in the way the camera is directed to record and scrutinise the surface of reality.


When filming La femme de l’aviateur in 1982, Rohmer selected the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as the scene for the central encounter between the naive and emotionally confused twenty-something François and the precociously self-assured, articulate and animated fifteen year-old Lucie. François follows the aviator (with whom he suspects his girlfriend is deceiving him) and his female companion from Gare de l’Est to rue La Fayette where the three of them board an eastbound 26 bus. Unnoticed by François, Lucie also got on the bus and in order to keep the aviator under observation he moves to a seat opposite her. All four leave the bus at the Botzaris entrance to the park where Lucie and François collide with one another and strike up a conversation. What follows is a comedy of errors in which François, desperate not to disclose the secret object of his pursuit, tells his new companion an elaborate sequence of contradictory untruths.


The orbital meandering pathways in the park mirror the convoluted dialogue that results from François’s obfuscations. As his subterfuges unravel under Lucie’s spirited cross-examination she becomes his accomplice and takes the lead after they exit the park on to the rue Armand-Carrel and follow their target to the nearby office of a lawyer. Lucie weaves a web of deceit that in terms of invention easily surpasses the modest efforts of François. They sit at a café table in an attempt to maintain observation on their target where Lucie continues to baffle and befuddle the increasingly exhausted François to the point where he simply falls asleep. The film concludes with an interminable exchange between François and his neurotic girlfriend, Anne, that feels like the very worst of Rohmer and comes as a serious disappointment.



Rohmer’s fascination with Buttes-Chaumont began in 1964 when he made a short film of 13 minutes, Nadja à Paris in which the camera of Nestor Almendros follows a young overseas student across Paris as she exchanges the superficial pretensions of Saint-Germain des Près for the dependable working-class values of Belleville and the peace of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The brief scene in the park is soon after the start of the second section of the film. There’s a melancholy epilogue of tragedy and unfulfilled promise to La femme de l’aviateur. Of the two young actors at the centre of the drama, Philippe Marlaud (François) would be killed in a campsite fire less than 6 months after the premiere and Anne-Laure Meury (Lucie) would go on to appear in no more than handful of movies (including another for Rohmer) before virtually disappearing from view in 1989.

Finally, my thanks go to Chris Mullen who brought this to my attention.

Menschen am Sonntag 1929

I’ve watched this exhilarating and fascinating film three times in the last week and shall do so again before long. There is no colour, no sound, no actors and no plot. Instead we have much invention and cinematic audacity all served up in dazzling black and white. A group of young and experimental film-makers in 1920s Berlin have taken the intoxication of youth and framed it with the energy and dynamism of modern city life to create an artistic triumph in terms of technique and sensibility. Four young friends, all in employment, escape from the daily routine to spend Sunday flirting and frolicking in the suburban parklands on the edge of the city. Their adventures may be modest in scale but they explore the complications and ambiguities in relationships expressed in the visual language of documentary realism enhanced by stunning extreme close-up photography inspired by narrative cinema.

The city of Berlin is presented as a place of perpetual motion where vectors of vehicle traffic continually intersect, combine and disperse at ever accelerating velocity. Trams, trains, trucks and taxis slice across the screen on diagonal trajectories while the populace swarms in whatever space remains to them. Street frontages, kiosks, advertising columns and overbridges are dressed in Schutzmarken style super-charged graphics in bold shouty fonts – consumer culture Weimar style. Early in the film there’s a mesmerising sequence where two young people slowly and gradually register one another’s presence as they circle around an island in the traffic enclosed by chains of passing vehicles. Eventually they meet and as a couple they depart the security of the island and stroll off through the maelstrom of traffic, unconcerned and miraculously unharmed. This scene is later inverted when their relationship takes a turn for the worse when swimming in a lake and they separate to opposite corners of the screen as the airborne camera observes the growing distance between them.

The great Billy Wilder as screenwriter reveals his beady eye for human frailty. The young men’s boisterous charms cannot conceal a selfish disregard for the feelings of their female companions as they switch their affections as the fancy takes them. The working girls (one is a film extra, the other a sales assistant in a record store) are more reserved and rather emotionally needy – their search for commitment is certain to end in disappointment. There is a third female character. She works as a model and is something of an indolent sensualist, preferring to stay in bed all day in the confines of a stuffy apartment rather than accompany her chubby cab driver partner on a plein-air expedition. The acting is consistently fresh and spontaneous and never lacking conviction. Remarkably so given that they’re all amateurs and in real life follow the occupations they have on screen. The camera gets right in their faces but there’s never an instant when anyone steps out of character. The close-ups are compelling for their emotional intensity and the care with which they are composed. In an extended sequence we see a portrait photographer at work. His subjects are shown in close-up as a gallery of gurning grotesques, each in turn freezing into a single still photographic image.

Six of the young film-makers involved in this project would later enjoy varying degrees of success in Hollywood as directors, writers, producers and photographers. Billy Wilder was the most successful but Edgar Ulmer had the distinction of making what must be the most extraordinary of all film noirs, Detour. Robert Siodmak would also contribute to the film noir genre and Wilder directed one of the greatest of them all, Double Indemnity.

Douglass Crockwell’s Double Life

On the day that America celebrates Thanksgiving we give our thanks for Douglass Crockwell (1904-1968), one of the most singular characters in the world of American illustration. Crockwell led a double life and while submitting to the demands of full-time editorial and advertising illustration, in his spare time he pursued his passion for avant-garde film-making. Among his friends, and occasional collaborator, was the great American sculptor of the Abstract Expressionist era, David Smith. The meticulously painted images above were produced for the United States Brewers Foundation as part of an extended campaign that ran for years in the late 1940s and well into the 1950s. The message is that beer is the all-American drink and in every way preferable to the pretensions of wine drinking. Nobody knew the geography of the American dinner table better than Douglass Crockwell and very few even attempted to express the air of unease and social anxiety that he explored below the surface bonhomie. The glances that never quite meet, hands that flutter in empty nervous gesture and smiles that threaten to rupture the face, all convey a sense that an unspoken truth or a hideously transgressive secret is about to break the surface. Every element in a Crockwell composition was rendered with equal attention giving rise to a claustrophobic flatness that contradicted the careful observance of perspectival conventions. There was never a hint of the ingratiating sentiment that undermined the vision of his near namesake, Norman Rockwell.

Chris Mullen (at VTS) correctly compares Crockwell’s mise-en-scène to that of Douglas Sirk, acknowledging his mastery of cinematic composition. Yet when Crockwell himself turned to film-making his ideas ran in entirely the opposite direction. Figuration was discarded as he plunged into a universe of surrealism-inflected abstraction. Absorbed in technically demanding and time-consuming frame by frame endeavour, Crockwell created a body of work of surpassing strangeness. A variety of biomorphic forms collide, mutate and transform on screen. Cell-like creatures parade in formation, do battle with one another and even get crucified. There’s an illuminating essay (Machines That Give Birth To Images: Tom Gunning) that can be read by following this link. A modest selection of Crockwell’s commercial illustration is displayed here. The free and luminous touch in the earlier work (Camel cigarettes) gave way to intense concentration on surface values as he voyaged through Suburbia as a servant of the United States Brewers Foundation. For the definitive Crockwell experience a trip to the cabinet of enchantment at Visual Telling of Stories is essential.