DERNIER AMOUR (LAST LOVE) is the last of the three films featuring Jeanne Moreau that will screen at the Roxie Theater a week from today (Monday, April 1st). It is, symmetrically enough, Moreau’s first-ever appearance on film, released in 1949 when she was just 21.
Those of you who join us on this evening—and we’re hoping that Bay Area filmgoers, who’ve been starved for Moreau screenings in the seven years since her death, will come out in force to the “Big Roxie” where our “film club” constraints will have been freed from our wrists—and who watch Louis Malle’s LES AMANTS (THE LOVERS) and Orson Welles’ THE IMMORTAL STORY (our concession to “mainstream” repertory programming) will, I hope, stick around to see the very young Moreau go through her paces for the very first time in DERNIER AMOUR, where you’ll see a pointed preview of what was coming.
That, of course, is MCP’s prime mission—to excavate the hidden past within mid-century cinema (particularly, but not limited to, French film) and change the temperature of film history as Jeanne Moreau was so good at doing whenever she appears on a movie screen.
SO it’s a given that film lovers who’ve extended their passion to films made around the world will be aware of Moreau—but is there more to Moreau’s story than her emergence via (and transcendence from) the Nouvelle Vague insurgency? Did the MCP gremlins stumble onto something buried away about her when they tripped over the 500+ still-mostly overlooked French films noirs that have been relentlessly recovered since 2014 at our FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT festivals?
The answer to that question follows, though it takes us into territory that’s just adjacent to our April 1st triple feature. There are details and information in the forthcoming paragraphs that may be too abstruse or specialized for some of you, so let me warn you ahead of time! For those who decide to stop here, we hope that the ongoing allure and mystery of Jeanne Moreau will entice you into joining us on April 1st (I’m talking to you non-passholders now!).
For those who aren’t concerned about possible rabbit holes, here goes…
RECALL above that I mentioned that Bay Area cinephiles have been starved of Jeanne Moreau. That’s because, outside of New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, there are no full-service repertory cinemas outside the “museum circuit” operating in America. (That circuit would include Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive in its latter-day incarnation, aligned organizationally with academia. The Castro Theater was the closest thing San Francisco had to such an entity, but it was less likely to partake of the “museum circuit” or create its own version the way that Film Forum, the AFI theater group, and the American Cinematheque do.)
When I tweeted on X recently to promote the Moreau evening, I shot from the hip, pointing out that she’d made well in excess of a hundred films, and yet we only get to see three of them. That was meant to be provocative, of course, and I thought it was approximately true: but I hadn’t done enough research. Noted Bay Area cinephile Brian Darr promptly chimed in with a response that made it clear that I needed to dig deeper: he noted that he’d seen 23 Moreau films, and felt that at least six of them should be on the tips of people’s tongues whenever her name came up.
So I went to the Internet, and discovered that in 2023, there was a Jeanne Moreau retrospective that had completely eluded my attention. (Actually, two: but as you’ll see, one was a pale copy of the other.) The Film Forum, energetically programmed by the legendary Bruce Goldstein for nearly a generation, brought eighteen Moreau films to their patrons in March 2023 (while we were preparing our own eighteen-film series: the first OTHER SIDE OF THE LOST CONTINENT festival, spearheaded by the research zeal of Phoebe Green).
Goldstein’s series, as always, are ambitiously plural in nature: there were a total of sixty-eight screenings for the films, some much more than others. This extravaganza was followed the next month by a much more modest reprise in Los Angeles, where just 13 of the films were screened, each once and once only.
As I looked over the Film Forum schedule, I remembered that my unwritten response to Brian Darr would have suggested the three films I thought repertory cinemas would “let us see” under ordinary circumstances (in rotation, as opposed to a special event). I’ll give you a moment to think about what three films you think would be the trio that rep houses would play over and over again, in search of a stable turnout. (!)
THE three films that I identified were: ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS, JULES ET JIM and LA NOTTE. And then I went back to the Film Forum site, and counted up the number of times each of the 18 films in the Moreau retrospective were screened:
THERE was nothing miraculous in having correctly named the three films that the pre-eminent repertory film programmer had decided were the most noteworthy titles in Moreau’s filmography. But it did reinforce the notion that, under “ordinary circumstances,” these three films would be the ones that would be brought out to screen in some form of “classics” formulation.
(Of course, that in itself would bother me personally, as I really only consider LA NOTTE to be a film deserving of such a designation, but that’s another story. What’s also significant here is that Goldstein had LES AMANTS and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK nearly as highly placed as the top three—two films, not surprisingly, from Nouvelle Vague directors.)
WHICH brings us to my most important point: on this list of eighteen films, there is only one film that pre-dates ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (1958), the film that is now seen as Moreau’s “coming out party,” lifting her from complete obscurity into world-wide renown within five years of its release. (That would be TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, one of twenty films Moreau made from 1949-1958, many if not most of them, like GRISBI, examples of French film noir.)
And this is the salient fact about Moreau’s career: her pre-ELEVATOR work, aside from her appearance in GRISBI, had been totally cast aside by those folk fortunate enough to be writing the “official” history of cinema. And, as we’ve all found out to our chagrin over time, culture—unlike nature—does not abhor a vacuum. Folks have been happy to be blissfully ignorant of the extent of Moreau’s early career—and she herself tended to disown it. (How could she not? She had reached a plateau within the French film industry, and it was LES AMANTS that made her into an erotic sensation: when one is so dramatically reinvented that way, it’s both easy and prudent to take out a broom and sweep one’s past under the rug.)
OF course the problem with all this is that, some sixty years later, a certain upstart begins to poke around into the buried legacy of the films made in the cinema de papa period—and strikes gold. As more of these films become available to him, he notices that one Jeanne Moreau was a “go-to gal” for spicy, often “transgressive” females who either caused trouble or got into it in more than a dozen French noirs from 1950 to 1958. She had a hidden past that was far more than an apprenticeship—it was as rich and varied a career as any in what was expanding into what we’ve taken to calling “the lost continent” of classic French film noir.
And our journey to that “other” Jeanne Moreau, undertaken while ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS became the pre-eminent French noir that wasn’t yet another heist film (the critical cul-de-sac that even French critics circled around in endlessly), began in 2015, when we screened THREE DAYS TO LIVE (1957) and BACK TO THE WALL (1958), where (in the former) Moreau is menaced by Lino Ventura and (in the latter) is a straying wife about to be “revenged” by her methodical-but-mad-as-a-hatter husband.
Two years later, we screened three more Moreau noirs—her turn as a good girl in GAS-OIL (1955), where she is reunited with Jean Gabin in one of his “trucker” noirs; as a gangster’s moll who makes a mouse (Philippe Lemaire) into a man in the very underrated STRANGE MISTER STEVE (1957); and a femme fatale for all seasons in MADEMOISELLE (1966), amped up by the psychoexotic erotics of Jean Genet. (This film subsequently gained arthouse cred, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Film Forum lineup last year.)
And, the next year, in FRENCH 5, two more distinctive performances from Moreau were put on display: her steely turn as mob informant Raymond Pellegrin’s girlfriend in UNTIL THE LAST ONE (1957), and her sexy clairvoyant who isn’t quite omniscient enough to sense that she'll be a murder victim in Luis Saslavsky’s tensely coiled THE SHE-WOLVES (1957), the best of the unknown Boileau-Narcejac adaptations.
The reoccurrence of 1957 and 1958 as release dates should tell you that significant momentum was building up in Moreau’s career, and that it was really just a matter of the right circumstances to take her from co-starring roles to something much more spectacular and notorious. That progression really began with the notorious LES AMANTS; LA NOTTE rinsed and repeated it for all of Europe two years later; and Truffaut anointed her as a Nouvelle Vague avatar two years after than in JULES ET JIM.
WHAT should be clear, though, is that Moreau was always Moreau, right from the start—as you’ll see if you join us on April 1st. More youthful, certainly, maybe a little green (as in inexperienced), but, as our compatriot Phoebe Green once remarked, even before Moreau’s great fame ensued she had a special skill at changing the temperature of a film: and you’ll see that in DERNIER AMOUR, too. She’s a lively bohemian with a sense of romantic dread—and it’s that last part which seems to cohere over so many of her later, more famous roles, often manifested in boredom followed by rebellion (LES AMANTS!) or in a kind of jaundiced skepticism (THE IMMORTAL STORY).
And note that we plan to have three more Moreau films in store for you in the fall as part of FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT ‘24—one repeat from the list of “lost Moreau noir” performances we’ve just shared with you, and two of the films that Bruce Goldstein included in his ‘23 tribute. (That Film Forum screening list is back up the page a bit: see if you can guess which ones I’m talking about.)
Remember, too, that despite the renewed interest in international noir shown at Noir City this year, their adventures in French noir remain limited to what we term “the currently accepted canon,” which partakes of roughly 10% of the actual total of noirs made in France from 1932-1966. And the only Jeanne Moreau film that’s been shown there is—yes, that’s right: ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS.
BUT let’s not end on a polemical note. Here at MCP we’ve reveled at being on the cutting edge, where we’ve operated as the proving ground of an astonishing discovery—a discovery that, due to many forces at work and the slow, grinding change in cultural thinking that seems to plague the world in so many vexing ways, will likely remain on the periphery for some time to come. Our time at bat in bringing you these astonishing revelations is moving into the late innings, so please come out swinging on April 1st (and this fall) so as to not miss the cinematic curve balls we still have in store for you.
[For more info and tickets for our Jeanne Moreau triple feature on April 1, please visit its special page within the Roxie listings for THE OTHER SIDE ‘24. Plenty of tickets are still available as of 3/25: here’s hoping we see you at the Roxie a week from today!]