L’Enfer des anges (1941) - film review

Since leaving a reformatory, a young man named Jean has found it impossible to find work, but he perseveres, determined to make a fresh start.  One day, he meets Lucette, a homeless teenage girl, and 12-year-old Lucien, who was dumped on some waste ground after having been beaten unconscious by his drunken father.  Lucette and Lucien fall in with a band of street urchins who are employed by the unscrupulous Max in his drugs trafficking activities.  When Lucien is implicated in a robbery, Lucette steals money from her employer in a desperate bid to save him...

One of the most surprising French films to have been made in the late 1930s is this grim social realist drama which is years ahead of its time in its uncompromising portrayal of child abuse and juvenile delinquency.  The film’s stark neo-realist style instantly calls to mind the Italian neo-realist masterpieces that would be made in the following decade, particularly Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).   The film was directed by Christian-Jaque, one of the most productive and versatile of French filmmakers, best known for his historical adventure classics such as Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) and La Tulipe noire (1964)

Christian-Jaque had made an earlier film about the trials and tribulations of childhood, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938), and three of the actors of that film appear in L’Enfer des anges:  Serge Grave, Marcel Mouloudji and Jean Claudio.  As well as being an actor, Mouloudji would also have a hugely successful career as a singer-songwriter.  Other notable actors to appear in this film are Bernard Blier, who, over the next three decades, would become one of the most familiar faces in French cinema, and Fréhel, one of the most well-known French chansonniers of the 1930s, most famous for her rendition of La Java Bleue.  Another face that should be familiar to French film aficionados is Jean Tissier, who, as the venal Fagin-like child exploiter, gives one of his most memorable and chilling performances.

L’Enfer des anges was very much a film of its time, accurately portraying the miserable existence that many abandoned youngsters had to endure in the 1930s.  However, it is a film that still strikes a chord today, since much of what it show us is still sadly relevant – the breakdown of families, the abuse and rejection of children, the social exclusion of those who fail to make their way in so-called civilised society, etc.  The film was chosen to represent France at the first Festival de Cannes in 1939, which was cancelled when war was declared.  The film’s release was put back until 1941, when it was ill-received, mainly because it then lacked the relevance and immediacy it had when it was made. 

There have been several other notable French films depicting the childhood traumas of the unloved and socially excluded – these include Jean Delannoy Chiens perdus sans collier (1955), François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959) and Marcel Carné’s Terrain vague (1960). However, none of these can match the bleakness and realism of  L’Enfer des anges, a poignant film about an issue that never seems to go away.

© James Travers 2009

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