A Tale of Two Coras...

FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR's FIRST DOUBLE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 11

[NOTE: News about pass sales for A RARE NOIR IS GOOD TO FIND 3 will be dispensed later in the week. In short: they’ll be on sale SOON…]

FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR is a concept whose time is long overdue. We need to sweep away a lot of cobwebs about the two national cinemas that contributed the most to film noir, that protean form so many of us still celebrate and return to for its dark, moody comfort. Doing so won’t be an easy task, however, since those cobwebs have grown thick: American exceptionalism lives on in so many ways—and, alas, the historical context of film noir is one of them.

So what better way to tackle the problem than to smash together the two major manifestations of such darkly alluring cinema and let their similarities and differences emerge? That’s the premise behind FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR, which will screen nine double features in 2023—three next month (August 11/12), three more in mid-October, and—yes—three again at the beginning of December.

We think that will provide a good start in making a case for our notion that audiences raised on American film noir will “vive la difference” when these two variants collide.

AND what better place to start than with a noir tale that was actually first filmed in France? James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was an incendiary text when it appeared in 1934, raising hackles and eyebrows simultaneously, even banned (in Boston, no less!). It took twelve years to emerge as a Hollywood film; by that time, two European versions had already appeared (which puts a different spin on the notion of American exceptionalism).

But since most of us here are, indeed, Americans, we will cede some turf and begin most every FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR with the Hollywood film. MGM—the least noir-infused studio in the 40s efflorescence of American noir—somehow brought Cain’s novel to the screen, displaying Lana Turner for all she was worth (a white outfit that still makes glamour-hound’s hearts go aflutter), featuring a quavering voiceover from John Garfield (strangely at odds with his usual tough-guy delivery which remained rather rote until he hooked up with Abraham Polonsky for BODY AND SOUL and FORCE OF EVIL).

It’s also the only noir photographed by Sidney Wagner, who’s best remembered for how he died (a heart attack while driving a year after POSTMAN was released; he was only 46) than for his solid but mostly unspectacular efforts for three studios.

Back to Lana, though. Her Cora ranges from the standard “hush” that she’d patented as a starlet (reserved mostly for her scenes with the almost cartoonish Cecil Kellaway, playing her much older husband) to a raspy rage when she’s being given the New York once-over by Garfield or when any man other than Kellaway tries to take over. It’s a baffling performance even by Hollywood’s “on the wing” conception of the femme fatale. Wagner’s glamour lighting and Turner’s peak-of-beauty presence manage to cover a multitude of sins.

The 1946 version of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE continues to cast a long shadow, and probably always will: Cain’s works are simply too iconic for it to be otherwise (recall that POSTMAN is the third in the 1-2-3 punch of glossy-but-tough films that appeared in 1944-46, with DOUBLE INDEMNITY and MILDRED PIERCE preceding it).

BUT it’s time to rescue Pierre Chenal’s LE DERNIER TOURNANT (in English: THE LAST TURNING) from its position on the bottom rung of the films adapting Cain’s novel. Chenal was there first in 1939, but his film was banned in America due to the lingering notoriety of the novel; he would soon be exiled to South America when the Nazis invaded Paris, as his birth name was Pierre Cohen—sticking around was simply not an option. (We’ll cover Chenal’s incredible life and career when we discuss his other film in our first troika of double bills, RAFLES SUR LA VILLE, made after his second return from exile. Yes, you read that right…)

Chenal succeeds with casting in a way that takes the film into a provincial world compatible with the poetic realism surrounding it (Cinema Ritrovato stalwart Ehsan Khoshbakht takes this tack in his pioneering look at the film from 2009). Fernand Gravey, playing Frank the drifter, is an actor especially good with slow takes; he takes time to register, as if he is a bit mentally impaired—which makes him much more convincing than Garfield, who simply cannot jettison his New York street smarts.

And the great monstre sacré Michel Simon is sui generis in any role requiring a ramshackle quality: so all the better that we find him in the provinces, as Nick Marino—a tippling salt-of-the-earth entrepreneur who has stumbled into a strange marriage with a young girl. His ability to remain steadfastly oblivious to his teen-aged wife’s feelings about him adds a quietly escalating pathos to the proceedings.

BUT it is Corinne Luchaire who ultimately drives the action of the film as a mystical, teen-aged cauldron of pure emotion. (Chenal has taken credit for sensing this unique quality in her, but the truth is that he was turned down by Viviane Romance, the reigning “slut” of 30s French film, who found the role too repetitive: in desperation, he remembered Luchaire—a natural blonde—who as a seventeen-year-old ingenue had unveiled a powerfully intriguing long stare in PRISON SANS BARREAUX and JE T’ATTENDRAI. So Chenal slapped a black wig on her, and ostensibly said many Hail Marys despite actually being Jewish.)

Luchaire swims and simmers in her emotions, from hatred to deep gloom to brief moments of incandescent joy—the whole astonishing range of it calibrated perfectly to ensnare Gravey’s drifter into a murder plot he most clearly does not want any part of, but is ultimately unable to resist.

She does not prevail in this via a standard form of sex appeal, but by the implacable depressive logic that many late-year teenagers display as they discover the facts of the world. The power of her spell comes from a seemingly bottomless well of intensity that coalesces wholly via her facial expressions, via a pair of eyes that both promise and demand a kind of love that leads to death pacts (in France as well as in America...).

OF course a face like that is destined for tragedy in real life as well…but we’ll save that part of Luchaire’s story when we revisit FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR’s opening night double bill a week or so before it plays at the 4-Star (remember, that’s Friday, August 11). On that night you will see two vastly and profoundly different Coras, even if their stories are virtually the same. It will be the beginning of a process by which we hope you will all “vive la difference” vis-a-vis film noir and these two national cinemas.

FRANCO-AMERICAN NOIR opening night: THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946, USA)/LE DERNIER TOURNANT (1939, France) 4-Star Theater, 2200 Clement St., San Francisco) first show: 7:15pm