by Allan Fish
(France 1956 116m) DVD1
The Sins of the Fathers…and Mothers
p Agnes Delahaye d René Clément w Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost novel “L’Assommoir” by Emile Zola ph René Juillard ed Henri Rust m Georges Auric art Paul Bertrand
Maria Schell (Gervaise Macquart), François Périer (Henri Coupeau), Suzy Delair (Virginie), Armand Mestral (Lantier), Mathilde Casadesus (Mme.Boche), Jany Holt (Mme. Lorilleaux), Odette Florelle (Maman Coupeau), Lucien Hubert (Poisson), Micheline Luccioni (Clémence), Jacques Harden (Goujet), Chantal Gozzi (Nana),
Despite winning several awards at the Venice Film Festival, there has always been something about René Clément’s Emile Zola film that has invited accusations of old-fashionedness and of miscasting of the central part. Leaving the latter aside awhile, it’s true that it’s very much a traditional piece of film-making, but was the same not true of the masterworks of Raymond Bernard or of Claude Berri’s Pagnol films?
Zola’s novel was the seventh in his Les Rougons-Macquart series detailing life in France in the 19th century. In this case, Paris in the 1850s and 60s, and the fate of Gervaise, a crippled laundress married to a serial philanderer who is deserted by said husband and left to fend for herself and her two kids. She marries again, to a seemingly nicer fellow, but he has an accident, withdraws into selfish bitterness and becomes and alcoholic with no thoughts but quenching his thirst. Those who know Zola will think of how Gervaise’s children will go on to their own misery in turn, and it’s hard not to think of little Jacques growing up into Jean Gabin to drive his train in La Bête Humaine, of little Etienne taking up the miners’ cause in Germinal, and, of course, of little Nana. And that is perhaps exactly what makes Gervaise still such a truly formidable achievement. L’Argent and Humaine were updated into the present by l’Herbier and Renoir and, as such, though the dramatic intensity remained, the social concerns did not. Gervaise shows us, like no other film before or since, the Paris of Zola’s world. You can really feel you’re there, amongst the tall garrets and slum tenements often surrounded by wasteland following decades of revolution and counter-revolution. It creates the world with absolute sincerity and detail, the world of a century earlier and, in so doing, justifies Leslie Halliwell’s calling it the French equivalent of David Lean’s Dickens films. It might not quite be of their standing but they belong to the same school of prestige film-making. (more…)
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