Old Yorker

  • Hôtel du Nord

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marcel Carné (1938)

    The names on the screenplay don’t include Marcel Carné’s usual film-making partner of the time, the poet and scenarist Jacques Prévert.  The two of them are seen by some as virtual co-auteurs of classics of ‘poetic realism’ in French cinema.  Does Prévert’s absence from the credits explain why Hôtel du Nord is rather less well known than other Carné films of the late 1930s – Drôle de drame, Le quai des brumes, Le jour se lève?  Whatever the reason(s) for this, I preferred Hôtel du Nord to Drôle de drame – maybe even to Le quai des brumes, impressive though the latter often is.  Carné was remarkably productive in the years up to and including 1939; the four films mentioned were released in France in the space of less than two years, Le quai des brumes and Hôtel du Nord only a few months apart in 1938 – a reflection not just of their director’s creativity and industry, but also of a widespread expectation that war in Europe was imminent.  There was no movie-making time to lose.

    Le quai des brumes (English title Port of Shadows) is steeped in fatalism about impending conflict and catastrophe.  The Wikipedia page on Hôtel du Nord explains that ‘After the controversy over the army deserter in Port of Shadows, Carné wanted to steer clear of anything with political implications for his next film. With Hôtel du Nord, Carné reduced any politics to that of the romantic relationships’.  That’s a bit misleading.  At the start, Carné introduces his dramatis personae, and the Paris title location they share; we learn that the Hôtel du Nord’s proprietors, a married couple, have recently adopted a young Spanish boy, a traumatised orphan refugee from the Civil War taking place in his own country.  The film’s climax is set amid Bastille Day celebrations in the street outside the hotel.  I don’t think it’s only hindsight – the knowledge that Paris street-parties wouldn’t be happening for much longer – that gives this episode a carpe diem quality.

    The ‘romantic relationships’ involve three pairings and one temporary rearrangement among them.  The hotel proprietors, Louise and Émile Lecouvreur (Jeanne Marken and André Brunot), are simply described – happily married and good-hearted.  One of their resident guests, prostitute Raymonde (Arletty), has a room upstairs where her pimp, Edmond (Louis Jouvet), is also a frequent visitor.  A young couple, Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), engaged to each other, are new arrivals in the room next door.  They’re in love but despairing that they can’t afford to marry, so much so that they’ve decided to end their lives without further delay.  Pierre makes a hash of this, shooting Renée before failing to kill himself.  By now, Raymonde has gone out to work for the evening; hearing the gunshot, Edmond enters the next-door room; after telling Pierre to flee, Edmond picks up the pistol used to shoot Renée.  She’s rushed to hospital and, after emergency surgery, recovers.  Although Edmond holds on to the pistol, Pierre is arrested for attempted murder.  His fiancée tells the police, but in vain, that this was a botched suicide pact.

    Renée returns to the hotel, where the Lecouvreurs offer her bed, board and work as a chambermaid.  As well as proving good for business – her pretty face has appeared in all the newspapers – she attracts the attentions of Edmond.  Two criminals he’s mixed up with are, as Edmond knows from Raymonde, on his trail and planning to kill him.  He confides in Renée, who agrees to run away with him to Marseille, from where they’ll board a ship bound for Egypt.  Renée then changes her mind.  She feels compelled to return to Paris and the Hôtel du Nord, where she learns that the charges against Pierre have been dropped and he’ll soon be a free man.  As the locals enjoy Bastille Day, Renée spots Edmond near the hotel and warns him that his would-be assassins are waiting for him upstairs.  Confronting one of the pair, Edmond presents him with Pierre’s pistol.  Another gunshot is heard, though not in the noisy street outside.

    ‘Grand Hotel – people coming, going – nothing ever happens’, says a character, most inaccurately, at the start of Edmund Goulding’s all-star melodrama Grand Hotel (1932).  At the other end of the film, someone else says, ‘There are Grand Hotels everywhere in the world’.  The Hôtel du Nord is far from grand – a small, downmarket place, in a working-class district of Paris – but it’s no less microcosmic than its Hollywood predecessor, and its characters’ stories are more involving.  Hôtel du Nord’s screenplay, by Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeanson, is adapted from a popular 1929 novel of the same name by Eugène Dabit, who was, according to Wikipedia, a ‘socialist writer’ (a friend and political associate of André Gide).  Carné’s treatment of Dabit’s material is suitably democratic:  nearly everyone in the film is worthy of audience interest and sympathy, regardless of their flaws or foibles.  There are startling tonal changes as the narrative switches between romantic agonies and existential acts, but Carné handles these adroitly.  The film’s mood is coherent.  BFI’s handout for this screening comprised a Sight and Sound (March 1999) piece on Hôtel du Nord by Ginette Vincendeau, who does well to quote Graham Greene on the film:

    ‘… we believe in the desperate lovers and the suicide pact on the brass bed in the shabby room, just because of the bicyclists on the quay, the pimp quarrelling with his woman in another room, and the First-Communion party [for a young girl, which takes place in the Lecouvreurs’ quarters downstairs].’

    The ‘filmmakers wanted to shoot quickly to avoid any delays that could be caused by the outbreak of war … Carné and his producer Joseph Lucachevitch thought that it would be too difficult to shoot the film … on the Canal Saint-Martin [location of the actual Hôtel du Nord].  Instead, they reconstructed the hotel and canal at the Billancourt Studios. …’  (Wikipedia again).  The art director, Alexandre Trauner, did a great job.  The main setting is so intensely convincing that the short Marseille interlude feels almost dislocating.

    A terrific cast features actors already familiar from other Carné films, like Jean-Pierre Aumont and Louis Jouvet.  They’re among the best things in Drôle de drame, and standouts in Hôtel du Nord too, as two men – in different ways and at different stages of the story – at the end of their tether.  There are others here best remembered for their appearance in the film generally considered the apotheosis of Carné and Prévert’s poetic realism – Les enfants du paradis (1945).  Marcel Pérès, a chauffeur in Le quai des brumes and a restaurant customer here, would go on to play the anxiously irritable manager of the Funambules theatre in the later film; Jeanne Marken would be Madame Hermine, Frédéric Lemaître’s comically flirtatious landlady, in Les enfants.

    And then there’s Arletty, the star performer in Hôtel du Nord and whose Garance is perhaps the most memorable of all characters in Les enfants du paradis.  The contrasts between the roles of Garance and Raymonde, and Arletty’s performances in them, are fascinating.  Both women can be termed sex workers, but Garance has evolved from streetwalker into high-society courtesan.  She’s solemnly worldly-wise, calmly cynical, whereas Arletty’s volatile, coarsely vivid Raymonde has a harsh voice, often raised.  One of her angriest utterances – ‘Atmosphère!  Atmosphère! Est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?!’  (‘Atmosphere!  Atmosphere!  Do I look like an atmosphere?!’) – rather mystifyingly became one of French cinema’s most celebrated one-liners, much more famous than the film in which it’s delivered.

    Hôtel du Nord’s Bastille Day climax, with a busy street oblivious to Edmond’s death in the nearby hotel room, also anticipates Les enfants du paradis, whose tragic romantic finale takes place on the ‘Boulevard du Crime’:  the street is swarming with people enjoying the Paris carnival, unaware of Baptiste Deburau’s heartbreak as he tries and fails to attract Garance’s attention in the crowd before her carriage drives away.  Those street celebrations in Les enfants du paradis are, in cinema mythology, linked to the recent liberation of Paris following the Nazi Occupation (though in fact they were shot in Nice, on a huge outdoor set that Carné had constructed).  In Hôtel du Nord’s quieter closing sequence, it’s early next morning, and a fine day.  Pierre has been released from custody and is reunited with Renée; they sit on the same canal-side bench by the hotel where they sat in their opening scene.  He remarks that ‘Le jour se lève’ .  The words are doubly resonant, as the title of the next entry in Marcel Carné’s filmography and because, only a few weeks after Le jour se lève arrived in cinemas, World War II began.

    4 August 2026

     

     

     

  • The War Game

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Watkins (1966)

    Peter Watkins’ The War Game was scheduled for TV screening in the Wednesday Play slot in October 1965 but withdrawn at short notice.  An official statement at the time explained that ‘the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.  It will, however, be shown to invited audiences …’  The BBC thus implicitly took responsibility for pulling The War Game; Cabinet papers since released indicate the decision was the government’s, whom the BBC had consulted.  As well as being ‘shown to invited audiences’, the film was shown in 1966 at festivals and in the United States, winning a special prize at Venice and an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.  The War Game made its belated first BBC appearance in the summer of 1985 to mark, with several other programmes, the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.  Not having seen Watkins’ film until now, I guess I’ve always thought of it as cause célèbre rather than screen reality.  Watching it has certainly changed that.

    There’s a lot to unpack from the bare facts in the paragraph above.  A fair amount to say, too, about the context of this BFI screening, and I’ll start with that.  Peter Watkins died last year, on the day following his ninetieth birthday.  This month’s BFI programme – ‘System Critical: The Radical Films of Peter Watkins’ – is the most extensive Watkins retrospective yet, according to its co-curators, James Bell and William Fowler.  The War Game was the programme’s opening event, in conjunction with ‘an extended conversation’ about Watkins’ career more generally, chaired by the broadcaster Samira Ahmed, who put questions to Kevin Brownlow, venerable documentarian and film historian; Kodwo Eshun, an academic at Goldsmiths; and Kristofer Woods, a film researcher based in Belgium.  This four-way conversation – punctuated by illustrative clips, either from Watkins’ work or, in one case, from a filmed interview with him – turned out to be not just ‘extended’ but discursive, despite Samira Ahmed’s best (at times, understandably bossy) efforts to keep it on track.  James Bell and William Fowler’s introduction to the conversation was rather leisurely, too: the NFT1 audience was informed, almost as an afterthought, that we were sitting in the theatre where the very first screening of The War Game, for an invited audience of politicians and press, had taken place in April 1966.

    The film clips, one chosen by each of Ahmed and the three other contributors, were from Watkins’ amateur short The Forgotten Faces (1961), a reconstruction of the 1956 Hungarian revolution; his relatively mainstream Privilege (1967); and his marathon La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000 – original running time 345 minutes).  All three clips were interesting, but not even the excerpt from the reconstructed violence in Budapest prepared you for The War Game.  Nor did the eight-minute curtain-raiser that followed the extended conversation:  Watkins’ The Controllers (1963), made through the Central Office of Information (and for the Ministry of Aviation), unremarkably dramatises the process of arranging an emergency landing at Gatwick Airport for a plane with a sick passenger on board.

    How did a piece originally intended for The Wednesday Play, famously the home of mid-1960s original TV drama on the BBC, go on to win a Best Documentary Academy Award?  The War Game depicts a hypothetical nuclear attack on South-East England:  how could the Academy have thought it was presenting ‘real’ events?  They can’t have done, so was The War Game’s cinéma vérité treatment of real, urgent issues in contemporary Britain (and internationally), enough to qualify the film as documentary?  Surely not on its own (that description applies equally to, for example, Cathy Come Home, perhaps the most famous of all Wednesday Plays), but there’s no doubt that Peter Watkins’ film is, in formal terms, very unusual.  A paragraph by William Fowler, which began the BFI handout for the screening, describes The War Game as a ‘documentary report from the future’.  Wikipedia terms it a ‘pseudo-documentary’ and IMDb a ‘docudrama’.  None of these labels is simply wrong.  None captures the forty-six-minute film’s complex construction.

    The War Game begins with maps showing British military airfields and V-bomber bases, with voiceover explanation of how these clustered targets, and dense population centres, make Britain especially vulnerable to the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack.  The viewer assumes this information is factually accurate.  The same voice then describes a developing political crisis that would have been plausible, but which is invented.  US forces in South Vietnam, faced with an invasion of the country by Communist China, have been authorised to use tactical nuclear weapons.  The Soviet Union and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin unless the American government withdraws this authorisation.  Before the situation escalates into nuclear conflict, there are interviews with citizens of the Kent towns where Watkins shot The War Game, to illustrate how much – or, as soon emerges, how little – they understand of nuclear war issues and terminology:  the purpose of the V-bomber deterrent, the effects of thermal radiation, and so on.  Amid a cluster of don’t knows, one woman’s description of Strontium-90 – ‘I think it’s a sort of gunpowder, or something, that blows up’ – stands out.  You assume these vox pops are spontaneous reality, but nearly all the citizens who feature in subsequent sequences and tell an unseen interviewer about the horrors of living and dying in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, are just as believable.

    Almost needless to say, very few of the residents of Tonbridge, Gravesend, Rochester and elsewhere used for both forms of interview were professional actors:  Peter Watkins’ achievement in getting these people to behave so naturally and powerfully on camera is remarkable.  As for the ‘action sequences’ (for want of a better phrase):  Watkins’ realisation of the consequences of air bursts caused by the detonation of nuclear warheads near Canterbury and in Rochester – the physical effects on individuals, a firestorm that sets Rochester ablaze – is brilliantly and horribly credible.  (The cameraman was Peter Bartlett and the editor Michael Bradsell.)  Emergency services are overwhelmed and civil order breaks down.  Essential supplies and medical treatment are hopelessly inadequate to the demand for them.  Dying people are left to die or, in some cases, shot dead by armed police – a kind of violent euthanasia.  Police firing squads also execute those who’ve exacerbated the breakdown of law and order.

    These scenes are punctuated by, as well as a few fragments of newsreel from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actual, official words of the time, which take the form of quotes both from official British government pamphlets and from politicians, churchmen and others.  These snippets of advice to households and establishment reassurances, although often grimly comical in effect, are delivered straight.  The film’s main narrator, who has what sounds like a generic BBC voice, was Dick Graham, who worked principally for Anglia Television.  But the quotes are read by a voice that I knew from childhood and still recognised today:  it’s Michael Aspel, one of the BBC’s regular team of daily newsreaders in the 1960s – in other words, a voice both familiar and authoritative to television audiences of the time.

    Peter Watkins plays fair.  Although The War Game sometimes describes itself, through Dick Graham, as ‘documentary’, Graham’s voiceover also occasionally makes clear that the events on the screen are not actuality, but what could happen in the very near future.  Even so, the mixture of real and imagined elements, in combination with the frightening impact of The War Game’s sustained momentum, is disorienting for a BFI audience even now – and would surely have been overwhelming sixty years ago to a mass television audience settling down to watch a piece of fiction.  Orson Welles’ legendary radio version of H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds in 1938 had already provided a notorious example of the deceptive power of inventive broadcast drama.  Many viewers of Cathy Come Home, directed by Ken Loach from a script by Jeremy Sandford, would believe, when the piece was first shown in the Wednesday Play slot (a year on from the War Game controversy, in November 1966), that they were watching a news report rather than a play.  It’s unsurprising, to put it mildly, that The War Game wasn’t shown by the BBC as originally planned.

    Once the government became involved in the discussion, the outcome was inevitable.  That government was Harold Wilson’s first administration, and the decision to pull the plug on The War Game was specifically that of the Postmaster General, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he then was).  Labour had only returned to power following the General Election of October 1964, after thirteen years of Conservative governments.  Although The War Game’s scathing criticism of Britain’s civil defence arrangements and education of the public on matters nuclear could hardly therefore be laid at Wilson’s government’s door, it’s clear that Peter Watkins didn’t expect anything to change with the change of party in power.  Most of the handout for the screening comprised an interview with Watkins that he gave even before completing The War Game and which appeared in the Fall 1965 issue of the US publication Film Comment.   The interview includes an accurate prediction:

    ‘It’s not that facts are deliberately withheld from people as there being a gentleman’s agreement not to tell people – and this is why my film … will really curl the eyeballs of a lot of higher ups.  They will have to decide that it is not right for people to know these things, because ‘this will affect the war morale of Britain’, and that’s going to be a hell of a thing to decide.’

    That pre-screening clip of a much later interview with Watkins, in the early 2000s, made clear that his anti-establishment fury only increased with the passing years.  Despite retaining a strong desire to communicate with a mass audience, it seems that he moved increasingly towards work of interest to decreasing numbers of potential viewers.  Watkins blamed this entirely on the ‘thugs’ responsible for the broadcasting trends that developed in the last decades of the twentieth century – but you couldn’t help feeling he was kidding himself about this.  Even before the thugs got to work in degrading public taste, it’s hugely unlikely that the BBC in the 1960s would, for example, have commissioned a five-hour-plus dramatised documentary about the Paris Commune; even more unlikely that the average Wednesday Play audience of six to eight million viewers would have tuned in; inconceivable that most of those who did start watching would have stayed watching to the end.  The filmed interview with Peter Watkins left an unfortunate aftertaste, but only until the main event of the evening got underway.  Because The War Game is a truly extraordinary piece of filmmaking.

    2 August 2026

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