Drôle de drame
Marcel Carné (1937)
My tastes must have changed since the mid-1980s, when I first saw and enjoyed Drôle de drame. I’m going to use the original French title for this note because it’s slightly less irritating than Bizarre, Bizarre – even though the latter conveys well the movie’s roguish tone, and bizarre is the word to describe Marcel Carné’s film in respect of its English setting and characters. Carné’s and Jacques Prévert’s screenplay is adapted from His First Offence, a 1912 novel by the Orcadian writer J Storer Clouston. His First Offence is referred to on the writingthenorth.com website as a ‘slapstick thriller’ and IMDB terms Drôle de drame ‘a French farce set in Victorian London’. In fact, it’s Edwardian London but the IMDB description gets across the thoroughgoing Frenchness of the movie – this comes through not only in the characters (although they’re supposedly English) but also in the look of the London streets, in the prettiness of the interiors and a mimosa garden behind the house where the main action takes place. There’s even accordion music of the kind that’s so often been used by English-speaking film-makers to cue the audience into a Parisian setting. Pauline Kael calls Drôle de drame ‘a satirical comedy of the English mania for detective fiction’ but the satire seems to extend into territory covered in George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’ – territory, that is, in which British newspaper coverage of the leading murders of the day effectively blurred the boundaries of fiction and true crime. The crowd behaviour in the closing stages of Drôle de drame somewhat recalls the climax to Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger.
Carné opens with a public meeting of the ‘League of Virtue’, at which a sternly impassioned cleric inveighs against the morally corrupting effects of the detective novel – specifically the work of one Félix Chapel. The cleric is Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford; Félix Chapel turns out to be the nom de plume of Soper’s cousin, the mild-mannered botanist Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon). The bishop (Louis Jouvet) invites himself to the Molyneuxs’ home for dinner; when their cook (Jenny Burnay) suddenly walks out, Irwin’s wife Margaret (Françoise Rosay) has to take over in the kitchen. Irwin explains his wife’s absence from the dinner table by telling Soper she’s away for a few days. The bishop’s temperament keeps him always on the lookout for nefarious deeds by others; he suspects that Irwin has done away with his wife and goes to the police. The farce plot of Drôle de drame is well constructed and the pattern of concealments by the middle-class characters is clever. Mrs Molyneux can’t be seen dead (as it were) doing her own cooking. The bishop, needless to say, is a moral hypocrite: he’s had a liaison with a music-hall performer. Irwin Molyneux is really Félix Chapel; it’s Irwin’s daughter, Eva (Nadine Vogel) who gives her father the ideas for his whodunits; and Eva gets these ideas from Billy (Jean-Pierre Aumont), the Molyneuxs’ milkman, who adores her but whose feelings Eva can’t bring herself to admit to reciprocating. But the film got on my nerves this time around: like last year’s Frank (a very different piece in other respects), Drôle de drame revels so much in its off-the-wall humour that the effect is excluding rather than infectious.
Most of the high-powered cast give performances that are more accomplished than enjoyable but a few performers manage to be both things. Jean-Pierre Aumont is delightfully funny and charming as the romantically determined Billy. Aumont is well partnered by Nadine Vogel as Eva: she has a lovely, hard-to-read quality that’s distinctive in this company. As the censorious, increasingly rattled bishop, Louis Jouvet has the look of an exophthalmic bird of prey; he gives his lines an amusing incantatory rhythm and a profoundly sepulchral tone. Pierre Alcover, as the blustering Scotland Yard detective who becomes the bishop’s antagonist, repeatedly works himself into a fine choleric lather. But I’ve a blind spot as far as Michel Simon is concerned; and Jean-Louis Barrault, in spite of his extraordinary appearance, left me cold as the young man turned serial killer by reading Félix Chapel (unlike in Les enfants du paradis, Barrault’s mime-inspired movement doesn’t connect here with the role that he’s playing). There are plenty of busily theatrical turns in the smaller roles.
2 October 2015
