Drôle de drame (1937) - film review

England, circa 1900.  The unassuming botanist Irvin Molyneux has a dark secret: he earns his living by writing lurid crime novels under the pseudonym Felix Chapel.  His books are condemned by his cousin, Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford, who considers such works morally corrupting.  Molyneux’s wife is thrown into a panic when Soper invites himself to dinner one day.  Her cook has just given notice and so she must take her place in the kitchen to avoid social disgrace.  When Molyneux fails to give a convincing reason for his wife’s absence, the Bishop suspects he has murdered her and immediately calls Scotland Yard.  As the police and a pack of newspaper reporters descend on the house, the Molyneux couple go into hiding and end up in a cheap hotel.  The room next to theirs is occupied by William Kramps, a psychopath who specialises in killing butchers.  Kramps blames Felix Chapel for making him a criminal and has sworn to murder him.  Anxious for the well-being of his plants, Molyneux returns to his house, posing as Felix Chapel.  He soon regrets this when he finds William Kramps in his living room, in a particularly homicidal frame of mind...

Director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert planned to follow up their successful first collaboration, Jenny (1936), with a hard-hitting drama entitled L’Île des enfants perdus about a children’s prison on the Breton island Belle-Île-en-Mer.  The intervention of the censors put paid to this project, although it would later resurface as La Fleur de l’âge, the film that Carné abandoned halfway through production in 1947.  It was Carné’s producer Édouard Corniglion-Molinier who suggested the team should adapt the novel His First Offence by the English crime writer Storer Clouston.  The novel had been previously adapted as The Mystery of No. 47 (1917) by the American director Otis Thayer.   Taking their inspiration from British and American burlesque comedies of the 1930s,  Carné and Prévert embellished Clouston’s story and made it into an outrageous farce that poked fun at the bulwarks of French society - the police, the church, the press and, especially, the bourgeoisie.  Although this film - Drôle de drame - is now considered one of the comedy masterpieces of French cinema, it was very poorly received on its first release, savaged by the critics and ignored by the cinema-going public.  It was not until the film’s re-release in 1951 that it came to be appreciated as a great cinematic achievement.

The initial unpopularity of Drôle de drame is hard to account for.  At the time of its release, film comedies attracted large audiences in France (providing a welcome distraction from the country’s economic and political woes) and most of these had nothing like the production values and volume of gags that Carné’s film offered.  With such big name actors as Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Françoise Rosay and Jean-Pierre Aumont, you’d have thought the film was an irresistible proposition.  One reason that is often given for the film’s failure was that its humour was too Anglo-Saxon, but a more plausible explanation is that it was just too sophisticated for its time.  Most French film comedies of this era adhered to a low-grade Feydeau formula, tedious farces with the same stock situations and oft-repeated gags.  Drôle de drame is quite different - a feisty melange of farce, barbed satire and black comedy that is several notches above the standard French comedy.  The fact that audiences and critics failed en masse to get the joke says far more about them than it does about the film.  No one who watches Drôle de drame today can fail to find it hilarious.  It is one of the funniest films ever made.

And not only is Drôle de drame funny, it is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of cinema.  Marcel Carné was just 29 when he made the film but already, with just one feature under his belt, he appears to have the skill and confidence of a seasoned professional, using the camera not merely to tell a story but to draw us into the world that he projects onto the screen - on this occasion, a fairly convincing recreation of Edwardian England.  In this, he is ably assisted by a remarkable team of technicians, of whom the most distinguished was the great German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan.  A former collaborator of Fritz Lang (for whom he invented a process which combined live action with model sets), Schüfftan would subsequently work with Carné on Le Quai des brumes (1938), contributing much to that film’s doom-laden atmosphere.  It was on Drôle de drame that Carné began his association with two other great creative talents: the composer Maurice Jaubert and art designer Alexandre Trauner, who would have a significant impact on many of his subsequent films.

As excellent as the film is from a technical and artistic point of view, what sells it is the quantity of humour that Prévert packs into his screenplay and the sheer unbridled eccentricity of the performances from the principal cast.   If Marcel Carné had made up his cast from the inmates of a lunatic asylum he could not have ended up with a more unhinged collection than what we have here - Michel Simon as the potty botanist posing as a morbid crime writer, Louis Jouvet as the stony-faced bishop with an unseemly taste for tarts and tartan, and Jean-Louis Barrault as a madman who plays Casanova to women of a certain age when he’s not slicing up butchers.  And that’s not to forget Jean-Pierre Aumont, the lovelorn milkman who delivers half of his dairy’s output to one particular household every time he pays a call on his sweetheart (when clearly one box of Milk Tray would have sufficed).  Simon and Jouvet may not have seen eye to eye (which is a polite way of saying they loathed each other) but their scenes together are the funniest the film has to offer.  For the famous Bizarre, bizarre sequence, they both ended up becoming totally inebriated as a result of a bet - it took a full day to shoot the scene and on each take they insisted on drinking real champagne.  Jouvet came off worst as he had to appear on stage in a play later that same day.  Neither performance suffered as a result. 

It was the commercial failure of Drôle de drame that undoubtedly dissuaded Carné and Prévert from attempting another comedy together.  In fact Carné would only direct two other comedies in his entire career - Le Pays, d’où je viens (1956) and Du mouron pour les petits oiseaux (1962) - neither of which is particularly well thought of.  Carné’s forte was romantic drama, and it was in this genre that he would excel and deliver some of the greatest of all French films, assisted by his formidable screenwriter Jacques Prévert.  Carné’s next film Le Quai des brumes (1938) would prove to be both a commercial and critical success and was the first in a series of extraordinary cinematic monuments that would confer immortality on their director and accompany France through her darkest hour.  Imagine what we might have lost if Drôle de drame had been a success...

© James Travers 2011

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