Violence in the Fog

A big Frenchman awakens on a barge in California, wondering if he killed someone in last night's drunken haze. 1942's Moontide never really clears that up completely, one of the things that make it such a fascinating film noir.

The Frenchman is played by French star Jean Gabin in his first Hollywood role. He's introduced stumbling into a dockside tavern with a big angry dog between his legs.

There's definitely a lot of symbolism in this movie, most conspicuously during the sequence of Bobo's (Gabin) bender, which was partly designed by Salvador Dali. The most striking image is of a prostitute, Mildred (Robin Raymond), fading in and out of existence but leaving her immodest dress behind.

This dress and its supposed sluttiness play a big role in the film. Sadly, the Hays code prevented the dress from being more risque than showing a little triangle of skin below the breasts. It's worn much later in the film by Ida Lupino, who plays Anna.

Bobo rescues her from suicide and brings her home the barge where he's stopped his life of drifting to settle down with a job of selling fish bait. He has a friend called Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), though, who keeps trying to get him to hit the road with him. It's hinted pretty heavily that Tiny is gay and in love with Bobo, which is part of the reason the film later tries to implicate Tiny in the murder Bobo committed. Intriguingly, though, the film still makes more sense if you see Bobo as the murderer.

Claude Rains is in the film, too, as a night watchmen, oddly taken to wearing a big Boss of the Plains hat. Maybe these two details are to show him as a moral authority of enough gravity to absolve Bobo of the sins that are never spoken of directly.

Director Arthur Mayo heads a nicely gloomy production after taking over for Fritz Lang, who departed early in production. Gabin and Lupino are terrific together.

Moontide is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Length of an Escape Tunnel

The logic of war tends to break down on the personal level. 1937's La Grande Illusion uses a German prisoner of war camp to illustrate this. It doesn't find it necessary to make some direct, impassioned argument about how all these people have their humanity in common, it seems to just let events play out along the natural lines of human sympathy. So it's quite subtle and lovely.

A lot of credit has to go to Jean Gabin. Although it's really an ensemble film, Gabin plays the closest thing the film has to a central lead, a French lieutenant called Marechal. His charisma makes him a focal point even when he isn't framed that way in a scene.

He has a sense of honour and decency but he's not a hero or a paragon. The film resists making any of its characters too pure. One of the central relationships of the film is between the prison commandant, Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), and a captured French aristocrat, Boeldieu (Pierre Fresney). Rauffenstein, also an aristocrat, feels an immediate kinship with his French counterpart. In his courteous treatment of the prisoners and of Boeldieu in particular he expresses a belief that war is antithetical to the polite society of the ancient European ruling class. The camaraderie between some of the German prison guards and the prisoners shows a discord between the war and the lower classes as well. The motivation for war is almost totally invisible. One prisoner remarks on how he hates how the German newspapers exaggerate events in the war to which Marechal points out the French papers do the same.

The movie's set in World War I, a particularly useful war for this story as the motivations behind it are infamously vague and complicated contrasted with the real, visceral suffering endured by millions of people.

Marechal eventually plans an escape with a Jewish inmate called Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a character whom director Jean Renoir evidently included to argue against the rising antisemitism in Europe at the time. One wonders if Renoir could have made such a film about World War II in which war crimes made the purpose of military engagement much clearer. Though, of course, in Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, he eloquently explored the differences in how that war came about.

Le Grande Illusion is available on The Criterion Channel.