Chair de poule (1963) - film review

Daniel and Paul are two hard-up factory workers who supplement their income by some nocturnal safe-cracking.   However, it isn’t long before their luck runs out.  Caught red-handed during a robbery, Paul kills a man before fleeing whilst Daniel is shot and arrested.  A while later, Daniel manages to escape as he is being transferred to a prison and goes into hiding in Haute-Provence.  Here, he befriends the owner of a remote petrol station, Thomas, who invites him to live with him and his wife, Maria, in exchange for doing odd jobs.  When she discovers that Daniel is an escaped criminal, Maria coerces him into breaking open her husband’s safe, so that she can run off with his substantial nest egg.  Daniel is reluctant to betray his new friend but gives in when Maria threatens to hand him over to the police.   Thomas turns up just as Daniel opens the safe.  Incensed, he turns on his wife, but she shoots him dead in the ensuring struggle.  Once they have disposed of Thomas’s body, Maria and Daniel continue to run the petrol station as if nothing has happened, although Maria still hopes to abscond with the money which remains locked up in the safe.  Then Daniel’s friend Paul makes an unexpected appearance.  When she realises that the newcomer is in the same line of business as Daniel, Maria suddenly finds him very attractive...

Chair de poule is among the most overlooked and underrated of Julien Duvivier’s films and yet, whilst clearly not the director’s greatest work, it has many commendable features and serves as a highly respectable homage to the American film noir thrillers of the 1950s.  The film is based on James Hadley Chase’s popular thriller novel Come Easy, Go Easy (first published in 1960), which has some obvious plot similarities with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (as becomes quite evident by watching the film).  The novel was adapted by René Barjavel who subsequently acquired the reputation of  one of France’s leading science-fiction writers, best known as the originator of the grandfather paradox in time travel.

In common with many of Duvivier’s post-WWII films, Chair de poule is drenched in pessimism, a sombre study in treachery which makes the bleakest assessment of human nature.  The unrelenting nihilism of the story is emphasised by Léonce-Henri Burel’s oppressive cinematography, which creates a stifling sense of confinement and impending doom.   This was one of the last films that Burel worked on; he had made his name early in the silent era long before Abel Gance hired him to work on La Roue (1923) and Napoléon (1927); in later years, he worked on several of Robert Bresson’s films, notably Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) and Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956).

Whilst Chair de poule adopts many of the conventions of classic film noir, it is a surprisingly modern film for its era.  It touches on (albeit fleetingly) some important social issues of the time - notably the lack of affordable housing - and embraces the youth culture with its young and highly photogenic cast (Robert Hossein, Catherine Rouvel, Jean Sorel and Nicole Berger), whose sex appeal is exploited to the maximum.  Before making this film, Duvivier had been on the receiving end of some harsh criticism from some film commentators who considered him dépassé and irrelevant.  Chair de poule looks like an all-too obvious attempt by Duvivier to counter this criticism and show that he can still hold his own against the upstarts of the French New Wave.  Not only does he begin the film with some Godardian jump-cuts, he also has the cheek to finish it with a shot that virtually replicates the ending to Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958).  He even hired Georges Delerue to score the film, conscious that the composer had recently worked on  François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) (another B-movie homage).  Duvivier also appears to have been influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, most visibly in the horrific shoot-out sequence, which combines the thrilling suspense of Psycho (1960) with the sheer visceral nastiness of The Big Heat (1953).

Catherine Rouvel’s Maria perfectly epitomises the venal femme fatale of Duvivier’s later period, a truly vile specimen of humanity who uses seduction as a weapon to achieve her selfish ends.  Rouvel’s portrayal was quite shocking for its time and still manages to send a chill down the spine, so utterly lacking in conscience is her character.  The other characters are hardly much better and, almost without exception, they turn out to be much worse than we might initially suppose (you can never accuse Julien Duvivier of looking on the bright side).  The most frightening character (after Rouvel’s) is the creepy parasite Roux, played with a sinister relish by Lucien Raimbourg (a cousin of the famous comic actor Bourvil).  Robert Hossein just about qualifies as a sympathetic character, but this offers small comfort in a world in which everyone appears to be out for what he can get.  It is hard to think of an American film noir that is as unremittingly grim and cynical as the aply titled Chair de poule.  Be warned, this is a darker shade of noir.

© James Travers 2003-2011

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