Le Trou (1960)

Jacques Becker deserves to be considered one of the most important French filmmakers of the generation that immediately preceded the New Wave.  Indeed, his last film, Le Trou (a.k.a. The Hole), was heavily influenced by the arrival of the Nouvelle Vague and shows a radical shift from Becker’s previous, commercially orientated films.  Sadly, this was to be Becker’s last film - he died just a few weeks after filming on Le Trou had been completed.  At the time of its release, the film was generally ill-received and fared poorly at the box office, although some (notably the directors of the French New Wave) hailed it as a masterpiece.  In desperation, the distributors resorted to trimming the film by around twenty minutes, but this did little to improve its popularity.   It was some time after its first release that Le Trou acquired its present status as one of cinema’s greatest prison escape movies, to be held in the same high regard as other shining examples of the genre such as Robert Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956) and Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz (1979).

Le Trou is certainly a very different beast from Jacques Becker’s previous films and might easily be mistaken for the work of an altogether different director.  There is little to connect this film with his crowd-pleasing melodramas Falbalas (1945), Édouard et Caroline (1951) and Casque d’or (1952), and the only film that even vaguely resembles it in Becker’s oeuvre is the landmark film noir policier Touchez pas au grisbi (1954).  What sets Le Trou apart from all of Becker’s other films and makes it his one true masterpiece is its uncompromising realism.   Becker is not content merely to retell a real-life episode as authentically as possible; he actually wants his spectators to feel as if they are participating in the prison escape, to feel something of the protagonists’ physical and mental anguish as they commit themselves body and soul to realising a fantastic goal.  Watching Le Trou is a gruelling but viscerally satisfying experience.  We forget completely that the protagonists are hardened criminals who probably deserve to be locked up.  Their unwavering single-minded dedication to their task and their unbreakable bond of friendship confer on them a kind of heroism, and we dare not imagine that their adventure will end in failure.  

Inevitably, we are drawn to make comparisons with Robert Bresson’s similarly themed Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (a.k.a. A Man Escaped), released just four years previously.  Both films depict a prison escape in meticulous detail, adopting a low-key realist style which conveys not only the strenuous physical effort involved but also the accompanying psychological strain.  Bresson’s film is generally considered a more poetic piece than Becker’s, and yet Le Trou does have a certain poetry to it, albeit one of a darker, far less comforting kind than we find in Un condamné à mort.  What most distinguishes the two films is the harrowing physicality of Becker’s film.  In Bresson’s film, the primary struggle is spiritual - once the hero has overcome his doubts and his fears, his escape becomes a certainty.  In Le Trou, the challenge is predominantly a physical one, a battle between sinew and stone, epitomising man’s endless struggle to assert his mastery over the implacable world that bore him.  This isn’t so much a film about a band of convicts trying to break out of prison, but rather a powerful statement of the dauntless indomitability of the human spirit.

Le Trou owes much of its gritty realism to the fact that it was co-scripted by José Giovanni (adapted from his novel of the same title), a one-time prison detainee who was himself involved in an attempted break-out from the Santé Prison.  Giovanni’s firsthand familiarity with the criminal underworld and the harshness of the French judicial system allowed him to become a bestselling crime writer and also a much sought after screenwriter.  Shortly after the release of Le Trou, Jacques Becker’s son Jean would work with him on an adaptation of another of his novels, Un nommé La Rocca (1961).  Not long after this, Giovanni became a very successful film director in his own right, winning acclaim for such films as Deux hommes dans la ville (1973) and Le Gitan (1975).

Le Trou’s razor-sharp realist edge is further accentuated by Becker’s decision to employ non-professional and inexperienced actors.  One of the cellmates involved in Giovanni’s real-life prison break-out, Jean Keraudy, was even given a leading role in this film.  Some of the other actors - Michel Constantin and Philippe Leroy - went on to pursue long and successful acting careers, often cast in sympathetic tough guy roles.  The casting of Marc Michel for the role of the outsider Gaspard is interesting.  With his boyish good looks and aura of innocence, Gaspard initially appears to be the most sympathetic character.  His more roughly hewn cellmates are far less easy to engage with, but it is they who ultimately earn our respect and sympathy, whilst Gaspard is revealed to be weak, selfish and unreliable, someone we couldn’t care less about.   Marc Michel is obviously more at home in the artificial world of Jacques Demy, in such films as Lola (1961) and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964).  In Le Trou, he is so out of place that we immediately see through him.  In what was a bold move for the time, Becker deliberately casts a likeable and photogenic young actor (the archetypal matinee idol) in the most antipathetic role.  As he does so, he directs his audience’s sympathies to a gang of unprepossessing roughnecks whose only virtues are their loyalty to one another and their devotion to a shared cause.  Such is the conviction (no pun intended) that the actors bring to their performances that Becker achieves his aim and gets us to see beyond our blinkered pre-conceptions, to judge his characters according to their moral strength rather than the label that society pins on them.

Another departure from cinematic norm is the complete absence of music from the film (except for the closing titles).   One of the strengths of Le Trou is how familiar sounds are used to create its unremittingly oppressive atmosphere and to drive home the extreme physical effort involved in the prison break-out.   The prisoners’ feeling of confinement is underscored by the never-ending clamour of prison routine that takes place outside their cell - the constant clanging of metal doors, the purposeful tread of the guards patrolling the walkways, keys and locks screeching mockingly, food trolleys trundling along mournfully.  To this constant tapestry of noise, the prisoners add their own cacophony of sound, the frenzied smashing of iron into concrete - a howl of desperate anticipation for a freedom that must be grasped with primal savagery.  Not only does this ear-pummelling din add to the dramatic tension, it expresses, more powerfully than words ever could, the intense emotions of the protagonists.  Freedom is not a prize that is easily won.  It can only be snatched by a fantastic exertion of the body and the mind, and this is precisely what Le Trou conveys with its relentless pounding of metal on stone, a pounding that sounds uncannily like the heartbeat of liberty.

© James Travers 2001-2011

Jacques Becker is among the minor glories of French cinema.  While in his twenties he began as an assistant to Jean Renoir, working on, among others, the (brilliant) communist film La vie est à nous (1936) and the most famous P.O.W. and prison-escape film ever made, La grande illusion (1937).  In the mid-1930s he also began directing his own short films; in the following decade, feature-length films.  He didn’t hit his stride, though, until the 1950s, with three works each showcasing a magnificent performance: Casque d’or (1952), starring Simone Signoret, Touchez pas au grisbi (1953), starring Jean Gabin, and Montparnasse 19 (1958), about the painter Mondigliani, starring Gérard Philipe, a project passed on to Becker upon the death of Max Ophüls. His next film, his last, was released just a month before his own death, by heart attack, at 53: Le trou (called The Night Watch in the U.S.), which focused on a group--in this case, five incarcerated men planning their escape--and which featured no major star in a galvanizing role.  (The cast in fact consists of nonprofessionals.)

Based on an actual postwar incident (Becker had begun work on the script in 1947), Le trou--literally, The Hole--is regarded by many as the director’s best.  It is certainly an exceptionally fine, if distinctly minor, piece of work.  It’s a strange film, in which a boy, Claude Gaspard, awaiting sentencing for shooting his wife in the shoulder is moved in Paris’s Santé prison from one cell block, which is "undergoing repairs," to another, his new cell being already occupied by the normal limit of four men, in this case, four hardened, long-term criminals.  Gaspard forms an interesting contrast with the others: at 27, he is the youngest of the five; unlike theirs, his background is privileged; and he is the best looking of the group--indeed, almost too handsome.  His intrusion invites both hearty befriending and testy suspiciousness from the others.  One must add that the warden himself has taken a sufficient shine to the boy--at times he seems as fixated on Claude as does Becker’s camera--that an aura of Billy Buddism begins pervading the atmosphere.  Becker’s symbol for the "appeal" that Gaspard has for the warden is the boy’s fuelless gold cigarette lighter, which, in the warden’s hand, rivets the latter’s attention.

Gaspard is weak--and a betrayer.  The quarrel with his wife that resulted in her getting shot by the gun he claims she brandished and he was trying to wrestle away from her was over his affair with her younger sister, who was living with them.  Thus we know from the start, as probably the warden knows and as his cell-mates, reasonably, must come to know, that this soft-looking boy lacks the capacity to regard either marriage or family relations as sacrosanct.  In the end, when the warden informs him that his wife has withdrawn charges against him and the state will be momentarily closing the case, Gaspard informs on his cell-mates, revealing their escape plans--on one level, an act so shameful that Becker proceeds with a cut that hides the revelation from view, requiring us to interpolate it.

Practically, the boy could do nothing else; once released, he would draw new charges against himself if his silence helped his former cell-mates to escape.  But Becker permits no pause for our realizing this.  Rather, he devises a conversation between warden and Gaspard that blurs the line between the former’s paternalistic concern for the young prisoner and his homoerotic attachment to him; the warden, to say the least, is most solicitous of any disclosures by Claude that might somehow unburden the boy, who seems oddly pensive, even troubled by the news of his imminent release from detention.  In a move highly suggestive of Melville’s Captain Vere, the warden sends the boy back to the same cell, this time as an accomplice in ensnaring the other four prisoners.  Claude Gaspard will betray the group and its members as easily as he betrayed his wife.

It is, therefore, not to La grande illusion that we must compare Becker’s film, but to the celebrated prison-escape film--Robert Bresson took for it the directorial prize at Cannes, and François Truffaut called it "the most crucial French film of the past ten years"--which only recently preceded it: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent souffle oú il veut (A Man Escaped, 1956).  Based on an autobiographical story by André Devigny, a French Resistance fighter imprisoned by the Gestapo, A Man Escaped finds Lt Fontaine having either to trust or to kill his new cell-mate, a teenaged boy who has already worked for the Germans, in order to proceed with his plans for escape.  Fontaine decides to trust the boy: a stunning act of will for which he is prepared to accept the consequences.  The boy does not betray him; instead, it turns out that the boy’s help is absolutely necessary to effect the escape of both.  The final shot at night of the two on their path to (still danger-fraught) freedom, as the world lies open before them, is among the most thrilling images in cinema.  It is to be compared, inevitably, to the close of John Milton’s seventeenth-century epic poem Paradise Lost--only here, in its modern context, it celebrates the prospects of existential humanity.

Becker’s Le trou might be interpreted as a sour, even cynical answer to Bresson’s A Man Escaped but for the shame assigned to Gaspard’s disloyalty and the solidarity of the other four prisoners.  Their individual and collective humanity are what most impress us; Gaspard withers away in our consciousness to mere nothingness.  We couldn’t care less about his fate.  Indeed, Becker’s film may be viewed as a coda to Bresson’s film, compelling us to reflect backwards and celebrate afresh the boy’s proof of his moral mettle there.  Gaspard’s self-interest is outshone by the boy’s trustworthiness in A Man Escaped.

There are three principal differences to the two black-and-white films, apart from the different outcomes of risky trust already addressed.  While Becker’s film is secular, Bresson’s is deeply religious; Léonce-Henry Burel’s subtly inflected cinematography helps Bresson to suggest a spiritual presence accompanying Fontaine that enables him to trust (where he might otherwise kill) and to prevail in no small measure because of this trust.  Also, there is no homoerotic element in Bresson’s film.  Thirdly, condemned to death and repeatedly brutalized by his captors, Fontaine’s situation is the more dire--all the moreso for its identification with national purpose.  Unlike Fontaine, Becker’s cell-mates are ordinary criminals, not political prisoners.  They are treated (until they make their foiled attempt at escape) decently, not harshly.  Indeed, the only brutality we see prior to the film’s inevitably violent finish is their own when, a vengeful mob, they beat up two other prisoners for stealing some money of theirs and material items.

Still, it would be a mistake to discount the seriousness with which Becker’s film also pursues the theme of humanity’s love of freedom.  For in fact their seeming lack of a pressing need to escape focuses our attention on how important freedom is to all but one of these prisoners.  (One of the original four is ambivalent about joining in the escape.)  Why not simply serve one’s time rather than invite the risk of being caught, even killed, or at least ending up serving even more time in prison?  The answer, of course, is freedom’s call.

The "hole" to which the film’s title refers is not the modern prison that holds the men or even their Spartan cell; it’s the hole they dig in their cell for the escape.  Much of the film’s visual fascination revolves around the painstaking process, using a file, by which a hole is dug through concrete to the sewer underneath the prison and, once this is accomplished, the images of men slipping through the hole with astonishing speed and grace.

A splendid shot occurs on the occasion of the hole’s inauguration, when the two men on the digging detail that night--each night the men would work in two’s--pass through the sewer and poke their heads up a manhole cover, drinking in a draught of the city street: freedom.  Becker and his cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, achieve a graciousness and poetic loveliness in this glimpse by the men of the everyday outdoors.  Most remarkable is this application, to city sights, of feelings generally identified with the country.  Becker succeeds in an instant in making Paris a place of the mind and the spirit.

It is often said that while Bresson in A Man Escaped stresses objects, Becker in Le trou stresses faces and bodies--the human element.  (The film is also notable for its heightened use of sounds, especially during the chipping of concrete and filing of metal in preparation for the escape, and culminating in a discordance suited to the disastrous result of the escape attempt.)  Regardless, Bresson achieves the more powerful vision of humanity and its possibilities; Le trou is a film of smaller aims.  It doesn’t help that Becker seems at times to be picking a gratuitous quarrel with a masterpiece.  One is saddened by the degree of petty envy that must have been motivating him.

I first saw Le trou as a teenaged boy with my parents.  It says something for the film’s universality, surely, that on this rare occasion a film drew our unanimous approval.  It’s too bad, though, that some have turned this good little film into a bone of contention by making extraordinary claims for it.  Le trou stands short and sturdy, while Bresson’s A Man Escaped is a towering example of transcendental cinema.

© Dennis Grunes 2003

Write a review for this film...