Landru (1963) - film review

During World War I, a seemingly respectable middle-aged man Henri Landru has devised an ingenious means of obtaining money to supplement his dwindling income.  Adopting various assumed names, he lures middle-class women to his villa at Gambais just outside Paris, where he kills them and burns their bodies.  He then helps himself to his victims’ bank accounts so that he can keep his wife, his mistress and his four children in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.   Having murdered ten women and one boy, Landru is finally captured and placed before a court of law.  Eloquent in his protestations of innocence, he is confident that no jury will condemn a man of such intellect and breeding...

Ophélia and Landru (released within a month of one another early in 1963) brought a decisive end to the first, most inspired phase of Claude Chabrol’s career and very nearly ended his filmmaking career for good.  A string of box office failures, of which Landru was one of the most spectacular, made it virtually impossible for Chabrol to find financial backing for the films he wanted to make and in the end he was compelled to direct vacuous potboilers like Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) just to stay in the business.  Watching Chabrol’s early films today, you cannot help wondering how this came about.  Just how could audiences and critics fail to warm to such diverse and interesting film as Le Beau Serge (1958), Les Bonnes femmes (1960) and L’Oeil du malin (1962)?  The explanation probably had far more to do with Chabrol’s overt anti-bourgeois agenda than the inherent quality of these films.   Something was rotten in the state of French society, but French audiences did not wish to be reminded of the fact.

Landru is certainly one of Chabrol’s most scathing assaults on the well-heeled middle-classes and is a virtual prototype for many of his subsequent anti-bourgeois pieces.  The film’s almost theatrical stylisation, with its garish set and costume designs, exposes the superficiality and stifled vulgarity of the bourgeois milieu more brilliantly than any subsequent Chabrol offering.  The film is based on the true story of a notorious serial killer of the WWI era, Henri Landru, who was ultimately guillotined for murdering eleven people and disposing of their bodies in his kitchen stove.  Landru’s story had previously been adapted for cinema as Monsieur Verdoux (1947) by Charlie Chaplin (interestingly, this film was also a spectacular failure and almost ended Chaplin’s career).  Like Chaplin, Chabrol approached the subject as a black comedy, in a way that makes the character Landru appear both monstrous and humane, the archetypal sympathetic villain.  The film’s main strength is a deliciously ironic screenplay by Françoise Sagan, the celebrated author of Bonjour tristesse - this was her one and only original screenwriting credit (although she did write several plays for the stage).  Sagan’s distinctly feminine perspective brings credibility to what is a fairly incredible story, convincingly portraying all of Landru’s victims as vulnerable women who are so desperate for love that they become blind to their seducer’s faults and the dangers they risk.

Landru has an exceptional cast that includes two of the great icons of French cinema, Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan, oddly chosen to play two of Landru’s victims.  In  his first major screen role, Charles Denner gives an extraordinary performance as the seductive murderer Landru - how easily does he succeed in humanising a character who, initially, appears to be an abject grotesque.  Like his victims, we grow to see beyond Landru’s troll-like appearance and observe the soul of the frustrated poet beneath - just as his veneer of bourgeois respectability conceals his murderous intent.  It should be noted that the deceptive nature of surface impressions is one of the central themes, if not the main theme, of Chabrol’s oeuvre.  The casting of Stéphane Audran as Landru’s nubile mistress perhaps reveals something of how Chabrol regarded himself - he was romantically interested in the actress at the time and would marry her the following year (having divorced his first wife, whose money had helped launch him on his filmmaking career).  Audran would feature in many of the director’s subsequent films and perfectly encapsulated the contradictions of the bourgeois milieu which would underpin much of Chabrol’s later work.  Landru is both an end and a beginning.  It marks the end of its director’s experimental period but it contains many of the ingredients that would come to predominate in his subsequent films.   Although sadly overlooked today, it is one of Claude Chabrol’s most entertaining and chilling films.

© James Travers 2011

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