L’Auberge rouge (1951) - film review

In the Ardèche region of France in 1883, Marie Martin and her husband manage a remote rural inn.  The hostelry is unfortunately situated and the Martins have difficulty attracting customers, so they decide to make their living by less honest means, by murdering their guests and robbing them of their valuables.  One winter’s night, the Martins have a stroke of good fortune when a coach laden with wealthy gentlefolk arrives at their door.   As they make preparations to dispatch their latest guests, adding to the 102 bodies already buried in the environs of their inn, the Martins receive another unexpected visit - from a monk and his young novice, Jeannou.  Whilst the Martins’ daughter begins to take an amorous interest in Jeannou, Marie Martin feels compelled to confess her crimes to the monk.  Naturally, the monk is appalled by what he hears, especially when he realises he will be one of the Martins’ next victims, but what can he do?  He is bound by his sacred vows never to betray Marie’s confession...

The oeuvre of Claude Autant-Lara exemplifies the quality tradition of French cinema which the directors of the French New Wave were quick to condemn as stillborn art, gloss without substance.  Before he became a director, Autant-Lara was a very accomplished set and costume designer, and it was through this work that he acquired the keen visual sense which would later allow him to craft films of exceptional quality.  But Autant-Lara was far from being a conventional filmmaker.  There is a darkly subversive quality to most of his films, and some can even be seen as outright attacks on the institutions for which the director had a personal loathing - the Church, the army, and, in particular, the bourgeoisie.  The fact that Autant-Lara is far less well-known and less well-regarded than other great filmmakers of his day is largely down to the adverse criticism which his films garnered, largely in the popular rightwing press.  Contrary to what his Nouvelle Vague detractors would have us believe, Claude Autant-Lara was one of the great mavericks of French cinema, as much a franc-tireur as a master craftsman.

One of the films that most perfectly illustrates Autant-Lara’s skill as a filmmaker and his reputation as an agent provocateur is L’Auberge rouge, a black comic masterpiece which is now considered a classic of French cinema.  Autant-Lara had originally intended to make an adaptation of one of Honoré de Balzac’s works, L’Auberge des Adrets, to celebrate the centenary of the death of the writer, but the project collapsed through lack of finance.  Instead, his writers - the legendary team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost - proposed a macabre comedy inspired by a real-life story.  In 1833, the owners of an inn in the Ardèche were publicly guillotined, along with their servant, for having murdered 53 of their guests.  The story offered enormous comic potential, which Aurenche and Bost tapped, with scant regard for good taste, in what would be their darkest and funniest screenplay.

One precondition that was imposed on Autant-Lara by his producer was the casting of Fernandel for the lead role, which, at the time, was about as likely as Eddie Izzard being foisted on Ken Loach.  Whilst it was true that, by the early 1950s, Fernandel had become a major star of French cinema, few rated him as a serious actor.  His straight performances in such films as Richard Pottier’s Meurtres (1950) and La Vache et le prisonnier (1959) would gradually alter his public perception, but when he walked onto the set of L’Auberge rouge it was evident that he and Autant-Lara belonged to completely different universes - even if they had previously worked together on Fric-Frac (1939), an inconsequential comedy.  At first, Fernandel was keen to work with Autant-Lara on one of his prestige productions, and his presence in the cast-list would virtually guarantee that the film would be a box office success.  Unfortunately, it was not long before Fernandel and Autant-Lara realised that their union was not to be a match made in heaven.  The director’s patience was stretched to breaking point as he struggled to overcome his star’s innate tendency to hog every scene, whilst Fernandel resented having to share the limelight with Françoise Rosay and Julien Carette, two veterans of the French quality tradition and extremely talented performers who were unwilling to be eclipsed by a mere vaudevillian.

Fernandel also had great misgivings over the content of the film.  A conservative and god-fearing man by nature, always mindful of his responsibility to his family audience, the actor was extremely unhappy with the way in which the film portrayed the Church and he found it difficult to play his character, a monk, as a hypocritical coward.  Fernandel’s eagerness to play the part of a more sympathetic priest in Le Petit monde de Don Camillo (1952) can be read as a conscious attempt by the comic actor to redeem himself after what he considered an aberration.  Fernandel’s concerns about the film were soon borne out.  On its initial release, L’Auberge rouge was met with a barrage of negative publicity, mainly from the same quarter that had savaged Autant-Lara’s previous anti-bourgeois offerings Douce (1943) and Le Diable au corps (1947).  The film was like a red rag to a psychopathic bull for the Catholic Church, which vehemently condemned it for its humorous assault on the sacraments (they were evidently far less bothered with the notion of hotel guests being bumped off for their money).  Despite the extremely hostile reaction it ignited, L’Auberge rouge still managed to draw a respectable audience of 2.7 million - a modest result for Fernandel, who would attract almost five times as many cinemagoers with his first Don Camillo outing a year later.

The film was remade in 2007 by Gérard Krawczyk, with Gérard Jugnot struggling to fill Fernandel’s shoes as the unfortunate monk.  Even with Christian Clavier and Josiane Balasko valiantly lending their support to Jugnot, the film proved to be a spectacular misfire that bears scant resemblance to Autant-Lara’s timeless classic.  The original L’Auberge rouge may have provoked controversy and barrowloads of hate-filled invective when it was first seen, but today it is considered one of the highpoints of 1950s French cinema.  Not only does it stand as one of Claude Autant-Lara’s best made and most enjoyable films, it also features Fernandel at his most unrelentingly hilarious, ably supported by the magnificent Françoise Rosay in her most memorable villainess role.  An added bonus is the blood curdling song which accompanies the opening and closing credits, sung by none other than Yves Montand:  C'est de trois monstres inhumains / Leurs crimes sont épouvantables / Il y a bien environ vingt ans / Qu'ils assassinaient les passants...  Brrrr, I think I’ll stick to Holiday Inn in future.

© James Travers 2003-2010


It is perhaps best to draw a discreet veil over the ill-advised remake a couple of years ago, which even with class acts like Gérard Jugnot and Josie Balasko on board failed to reach even the perimeter fence let alone eclipse Autant-Lara’s classic entry.  Any movie that begins with Yves Montand - the only person who may be compared to Frank Sinatra as a singer-actor working in the 20th century - singing over the credits is off to a flying start.  And when you throw in a screenplay by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, direction by Claude Autant-Lara and a cast to die for (Fernandel, Francoise Rosay, Julien Carette...) you really have to work at it to screw it up.  

Much has been made of the off-screen tensions between Fernandel and Autant-Lara plus Fernandel’s insecurity when pitted against ’real’ actors, but this is irrelevant.  What matters is what’s up there on the screen and what’s up there is one of the most original, unclassifiable movies that ever came down the pike. 

Carette and Rosay have a nice thing going in offing overnight guests at their remote inn and lifting their valuables.  It starts to go pear-shaped when a peripatetic monk, Fernandel, turns up at more or less the same time as a coach-load of prospective stiffs.  Rosay feels the urge to confess, knowing that Fernandel can’t let out a squawk to the travellers on account of his vows, so the fun lies in waiting to see how he can circumvent this and prevent some wholesale mayhem.  One of the all-time Greats of French cinema - which is saying something.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010  

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Dans un autre ton et après La Belle et la Bête, un des meilleurs films fantastiques ou horreurs français.
Pedro Godfroid (Sevilla, Spain) 

Fantastic – one of the greatest classic French comedies of all time - or non-French as well – only matched in greatness by the insanely great Voyage Surprise.
Lucille Krasne (NYC, USA)  

I do not understand why this wonderful black comedy starring Fernandel, probably the most popular French film comedian of his time, in what must be his best performance, isn’t available on DVD or even VCR.  I saw it in college and have never forgotten it.  It is timeless and wonderfully twisted.  It deserves a reissue in a quality DVD, with the original French soundtrack (re-mastered) and subtitles.  There is a remake of the story available, but the original is irreplaceable in its own right.
R. E.  Stannard Jr (Bellingham, washington, USA) 

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