Impasse des deux anges (1948)

Impasse des deux anges is a French romantic film drama first released in 1948, directed by Maurice Tourneur.  The film stars Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, Jacques Castelot, Marcel Herrand and Danièle Delorme.  It has also been released under the title: Impasse of Two Angels.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Marianne is about to give up her successful career as a stage actress so that she can marry a wealthy aristocrat and live the life she has always aspired to.  On the eve of her wedding, her fiancé gives her a priceless diamond necklace, a rare piece of jewellery which immediately draws the interest of a gang of professional crooks.  Jean, a specialist in jewel theft, is hired by the gang to steal the necklace.  During a reception to celebrate the forthcoming marriage, Jean insinuates his way unnoticed into Marianne’s house and helps himself to the jewels.  Before he can leave, he runs into Marianne, who instantly recognises him as the man she once loved with an undying passion.  Believing that Jean has come back to see her and rekindle their former romance, Marianne goes out for a walk with him.  They revisit the modest little street where they enjoyed happier times, only to find it has fallen into dereliction.  Unbeknown to Marianne, two of Jean’s accomplices are trailing them, determined to get their hands on the stolen necklace...

In what would be his final film, director Maurice Tourneur delivers one of his most lyrical and visually alluring works, a melancholic ode to lost love that exemplifies the poetic realist style for which he had a particular affinity.  Tourneur was one of cinema’s great stylists, a director who used lighting and camera positioning to create tension and atmosphere with the confidence and keen visual sense of a true artist.  The imprint of German expressionism can be felt in much of Tourneur’s later work, but rarely more so than in Impasse des deux anges, where it is particularly appropriate.  

The lush black-and-white chiaroscuro which Tourneur employs here has an almost hypnotic quality. imbuing the film with both a haunting Cocteau-sque poetry and a brutal sense of impending disaster, such as we would find in a classic film noir thriller.   The dark past of the film’s central male character, Jean, is evoked by the menacing shadows that hang around him like huge birds of prey, implacable, inescapable harbingers of doom.  At the same time, through Marianne’s eyes, we also see beauty in this twilight world, one that enchants us with the fading echoes of a distant romantic idyll.  The solemn dance of light and shade both mourns the passing of happier times and makes us aware of the horrors that are yet to come.

Impasse des deux anges, like Tourneur’s previous film Après l’amour (1948), appears to have been heavily influenced by American film noir.  Indeed, there is one protracted sequence in this film (the one where Jean and Marianne are pursued around a derelict housing block by gun-toting gangsters) that is pure film noir, reminiscent of a similar sequence in Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, which was (coincidentally) made the same year.  The film’s tragic denouement is an obvious homage to the American gangster film and is surprisingly visceral for a French film of this era.  Since American film noir had its origins in French poetic realism and German expressionism, it is gratifying to see all three of these important stylisations represented in this film, each used in a way that enhances the narrative and lends depth to the characterisation.  The icing on the cake is Yves Baudrier’s dramatic score, which has a distinctly American film noir feel to it, and you could almost swear that it was composed by Bernard Herrmann.  

Impasse des deux is not only visually stunning, directed and photographed with immense flair, it is also exceptionally well scripted, by Jean-Paul Le Chanois (who later proved to be a director of no mean talent), and memorably performed by two of French cinema’s finest actors, Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret.  Maurice Tourneur may have had a reputation as a hard task master but he had a knack for getting his actors to perform at their best.  Meurisse is particularly good in this film, combining the romanticism of the classical romantic lead with a much darker persona, that of the hardened criminal - chilling one moment, sympathetic the next, yet always remaining something of an enigma, the classic film noir anti-hero.   In one of her earliest roles, Signoret makes a superlative femme fatale, stunningly beautiful and yet conveying an inner toughness and moral ambiguity which makes her far more interesting than a conventional romantic heroine.  The film is also well served by an impressive supporting cast that includes Jacques Castelot, Marcel Herrand and a young Danièle Delorme, all impeccable.

Whilst many of his equally talented contemporaries (Duvivier, Carné, etc.) faded away towards the end of their careers (often helped into oblivion by those bloodthirsty hacks on the Cahiers du cinéma), Maurice Tourneur went out on a high.  His last film, Impasse des deux anges shows both the experience of a mature cineaste and the vitality of a much younger filmmaker.  It is indeed tragic that, not long after he completed work on this film, Tourneur was badly injured in a car accident and forced to retire from filmmaking.  For the remainder of his life, he preoccupied himself with painting and translating English crime novels into French, whilst his son Jacques pursued a flourishing career as a film director in Hollywood.  The man who, in the silent era, was often likened to D.W. Griffith, is too easily overlooked these days, but anyone who sees a Maurice Tourneur film today will have little difficulty placing him alongside the greatest of French filmmakers.

© James Travers 2010

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