L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941)

L’Assassinat du Père Noël is a French thriller film first released in 1941, directed by Christian-Jaque.  The film is based on a novel by Pierre Véry and stars Harry Baur, Renée Faure, Marie-Hélène Dasté, Raymond Rouleau and Robert Le Vigan.  It has also been released under the title: The Killing of Santa Claus.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


High up in the French Alps, the inhabitants of a small mountain village are busy preparing for Christmas.  The toymaker Cornusse is occupied making presents for the children of the village, unaware that his beautiful young daughter, Catherine, is being courted by a mysterious baron.  Having recently returned to the village after an absence of several years, the baron lives alone in his chateau and refuses to see anyone, until Catherine visits him out of pity.  On Christmas Eve, the baron fails to keep a dinner date with Catherine, at the same time that a priceless diamond is stolen from the church.  A short while later, two children from the village discover the body of Father Christmas lying dead on the snow-covered mountain slope.  With the police prevented from arriving because of bad weather, the villagers attempt to resolve the mystery themselves and discover who killed Father Christmas...

With its claustrophobic account of a close-knit community being torn apart by fear, suspicion and malicious denunciations, L’Assassinat du Père Noël has much in common with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943).  The plots may differ but the two films powerfully evoke the mood of the time in which they were made, conveying the sense of mistrust and paranoia that was widely felt in France during the Occupation.  The similarities between the two films are more evident when we realise that they were both made for the German-run company Continental Films.  Many of the screenwriters and directors who worked for Continental were far from sympathetic to the Occupation and would salve their consciences by introducing an allegorical subtext into their films - one which their German supervisors would miss but which would be easily picked up by the average French cinemagoer.  L’Assassinat du Père Noël is one of the most blatant examples of this - its depiction of an idyllic mountain community becoming unsettled by a series of sinister events would have had an immediate resonance with most French people in the early 1940s as they adjusted to life under Nazi rule.  The killing of Father Christmas would appear to symbolise the loss of cherished ideals, but, as is later implied in the film, such ideals prove much harder to expunge than it might be supposed.  A contemporary audience would most probably have viewed the film as a statement of defiance.  Father Christmas is after all not a man but an idea, and ideas cannot be killed.

L’Assassinat du Père Noël is an historically significant film, since it was the first to be made in France after the country’s capitulation to the Germans in 1940.  It was the first film that was made by Continental and it set a very high standard for all subsequent films produced by the German-run company.  Although the Occupation is often characterised as one of the darkest periods in the history of France, a time when the nation was humiliated and most ordinary people experienced real hardship, it was also undeniably a period in which French cinema flourished, thanks in no small measure to the resources that the Germans threw at it in a bid to distract a conquered nation (the old panem et circenses routine).  Through a combination of coercion and bribery, the bosses at Continental managed to tap the creative juices of the most talented artists in French cinema (excluding those who had already fast-footed it to Hollywood), and so it is perhaps not surprising that an unusually high proportion of the company’s films are now held in high esteem.

L’Assassinat du Père Noël is a particularly good example of Continental’s output, excelling in virtually every department (except possibly its plot, which resolves the mystery far too casually and hurriedly).   For one thing, the film has an impressive cast which includes some titans of 1940s French cinema: Harry Baur, Raymond Rouleau, Robert Le Vigan and Fernand Ledoux, not forgetting the stunning Renée Faure in her first screen role.  Baur, a giant of both stage and screen, dominates the film with one of his customary bravura turns, dripping pathos and understated menace by the bucket-load.  Tragically, this would be his penultimate film appearance.  Shortly after completing his final film in Germany, Sinfonie eines Lebens (1942), Baur was arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to torture which, it is believed, led to his premature death in 1943.  In a similarly ironic vein, Robert Le Vigan, who plays the character who tries to denounce an innocent man to the authorities, was himself branded a collaborator after the war and was driven into exile in South America.

Before he directed this film, Christian-Jaque was known primarily for his low-grade comedies, most of which featured the popular comic actor Fernandel.  He had yet to acquire the reputation of a serious filmmaker that he later earned through his lavish period productions, but he had made one notable film, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938), an atmospheric comedy-thriller which is now considered a classic of French cinema.  L’Assassinat du Père Noël is similar to this film, offering a comparable mix of mystery, suspense and dark humour, but is much darker in tone, thanks largely to Charles Spaak’s bitterly tongue-in-cheek screenplay and Armand Thirard’s exceptionally moody cinematography.  The camerawork and lighting on this film are particularly striking, bringing a fluidity and brooding intensity that is quiet unusual for this era of French cinema.  The one sequence that stands out as being particularly inspired is the one in which the camera pans around the apparently jilted Catherine, revealing her sense of desolation by showing us the flurry of revelry that surrounds her, the scene building to a climax of euphoria which suddenly collapses when two children appear from nowhere and timorously announce the death of Father Christmas.  The scene could have been shot by Hitchcock.  Armand Thirard would employ similarly inspired use of the subjective camera on his films for Clouzot, notably Le Salaire de la peur (1953) and Les Diabolioques (1955).

As on his earlier Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, Christian-Jaque manages to coax some incredibly convincing performances from his child actors, thereby investing the film with a playful innocence which beautiful complements its darker elements.  Whilst they are somewhat peripheral to the central plot, the scenes with the lame boy Christian (the uncredited Bernard Daydé) deliver a real emotional punch and remind us what Christmas is really meant to be about - a time when children should be allowed to believe in fairytales and see the world as a place where hopes can be fulfilled.  By juxtaposing the innocent realm of childhood fantasy with an adult world that is mired in fear and corruption, Christian-Jaque transforms a whimsical murder mystery into a cogent morality tale, one that shows us the virtue of holding onto our beliefs, however fanciful they may be.  A world without Santa is a dark place indeed.

© James Travers 2002-2010

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