Le Dernier tournant (1939)

Frank, a young drifter, arrives at a remote service station on a mountain road near to Marseille.  Here, the kindly old owner, Nick, offers him a job which he readily accepts.  Frank is instantly attracted to Nick’s young wife, Cora, and it is not long before they are pursuing a passionate affair.  The two lovers plan to kill Nick so that they can start a new life together.   Having made Nick’s death look like an accident, they are acquitted of his murder.  However, fate has a cruel twist in store for them...
© filmsdefrance.com 2012

Within five years of the first publication of James M. Cain’s pulp fiction crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, film directors were lining up on both sides of the Atlantic to turn it into a film.  French director Pierre Chenal was the first to make it to the starting block, although his adaptation, despite being the first, is not well-known and is massively overshadowed by the subsequent versions by Luchino Visconti and Tay Garnett, respectively titled Ossessione (1942) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).  In 1981, Bob Rafelson directed another notable American version, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.  Although it is overlooked, Chenal’s adaptation is interesting if only as a prime example of French film noir and drives home the extent to which European cinema influenced the American thriller genre in the 1940s.

Whilst it may lack the sordid earthiness of Visconti’s film and the simmering sensuality of Garnett’s, Chenal’s Le Dernier tournant powerfully evokes the gruelling bleakness of James M. Cain’s classic novel and the dark inner forces that propel the story to its shocking denouement.  It achieves this primarily through its distinctly noir lighting and camerawork, which clearly show the influence of German expressionism (a feature also of Chenal’s previous noir thriller L’Alibi and his superlative Crime et châtiment), but also through the intense performances from its lead actors Fernand Gravey and Corinne Luchaire.  Incredible to think that Luchaire was just 18 when she starred in this film, and how tragic that she would die ten years later from tuberculosis having made just two further films.  With her brooding persona and sultry beauty, Luchaire appears to embody everyone’s notion of the femme fatale, and her on-screen rapport with Gravey, who was at the time far better known for his much lighter, comic portrayals, is so intense, so tangible, that you might easily think they were lovers off-screen as well as on.    

Michel Simon, another actor better known for his comedic roles, is surprisingly convincing as the third member of the ill-fated love triangle, although his star status inevitably resulted in substantial changes being made to Cain’s story to give him more screen time, at the risk of weakening the dramatic thrust of the narrative.  Charles Spaak’s screenplay is not much to write home about - it lacks polish and underscores some of the flaws in the original novel, although Chenal’s skilful direction and the quality of the acting easily make up for this.  The budgetary and technical constraints are painfully evident in a few scenes (nothing dates a film of this era more than over-ambitious use of back projection) but overall the film grips the attention and stands as a highly respectable example of 1930s French film noir.

Le Dernier tournant deserves to be better known than it is, although its comparative obscurity is easily accounted for.  In 1940, at the start of Occupation, the film was banned by the Nazi censors because its director happened to be a Jew.  (Chenal fled to South America in 1942 to avoid being arrested by the Nazis, where he continued making films until his return to France after the war).  After the Liberation, the film was again censured, this time because two members of its cast had Nazi associations - Robert Le Vigan (who plays a small but memorable part) had been branded a Nazi collaborator, whilst Luchaire was the daughter of a high profile newspaper publisher who was executed for his support of the Vichy régime.  It was this double whammy that led the film to be overlooked for many years, whilst apparently vindicating James M. Cain’s assertion that the postman always does ring twice...

© James Travers 2012

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