Les Disparus de Saint-Agil is a French comedy thriller film first released in 1938, directed by Christian-Jaque.  The film is based on a novel by Pierre Véry and stars Erich von Stroheim, Michel Simon and Armand Bernard.  It has also been released under the title: Boys’ School.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


In the college of St-Agil, three boys, Baume, Sorgue and Macroy, form a secret society "Les Chiche-capons".  Each night, they sneak away from their dormitory and meet up in the science room to have an illicit smoke and plan a clandestine voyage to America, under the watchful gaze of their mascot, Martin the Skeleton.   One day, Sorgue mysteriously disappears and a fortnight later his friends receive a postcard from America in his handwriting.  Baume and Macroy agree that they must follow him to America, but a few days later Macroy also goes missing.  When the art teacher, Lemesle, is killed in mysterious circumstances, Baume decides that desperate measures are needed to uncover the truth.  No one can be trusted, least of all the sinister English teacher, Monsieur Walter, who is known to have had a grudge against Lemesle.  Then Baume also disappears...

Les Disparus de Saint-Agil is one of the weirder examples of 1930s French cinema, a uniquely quirky blend of mystery thriller and black comedy that appears to have been made with the sole purpose of traumatising a nation of schoolboys and turning them into bedwetting neurotics.  With its moody expressionistic design and abundance of über-creepy adult protagonists, it looks like something that Fritz Lang may have knocked up as an alternative to his mortuary-scented thriller M (1930) after being force-fed on a diet of Enid Blyton and Erich Kästner stories for several months.  This is what passed for family entertainment in France in the 1930s, good wholesome terror in which the subtle distinction between teacher and scary psychopath was pretty well wiped from the consciousness of a generation of French school children.  Today’s youngsters, with their fluffy bunny cartoons, pink dinosaurs and cuddly extraterrestrials, don’t know what they’re missing.

Skewed childhoods and resultant lifelong psychological traumas aside, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil is a film that continues to have an enduring appeal in France.  A cult classic par excellence, it is one of those rare films which engages both an adult and a child audience, albeit in drastically different ways.  Children naturally identify with the film’s schoolboy characters and enjoy an exciting adventure story in which the courage and initiative of the pre-pubescent hero thwarts the nasty machinations of the wicked grown-ups.   Adult spectators, by contrast, will relish the film’s tongue-in-cheek humour whilst delighting in the nostalgia trip that it supplies.  How easily it reminds us of those halcyon days of innocence and asphyxiating chalk dust which remain indelibly imprinted on our memories like the strawberry jam stain on the white tennis shirt which led to those unforgettable moments of vomit-inducing terror in the headmaster’s study.   How can you not like a film that floods your head with memories of such happy days?  

Coming at a time when French cinema was dominated by doom-laden melodramas and frivolous comedies, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil was well-received both by critics and audiences because it offered a pleasing alternative (namely a doom-laden comedy).  It brought considerable acclaim to its director Christian-Jaque, who had previously spent much of his career turning out fairly undistinguished comedies, including several Fernandel features such as (yawn) François Premier (1937).   Les Disparus de Saint-Agil demonstrated that not only was Christian-Jaque a competent filmmaker who had something of the flair of his more highly regarded contemporaries (Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, etc.), but he also knew how to make distinctive films that would appeal to a mass cinema audience.  In the decades that followed, he would deliver some of French cinema’s biggest successes, popular films of exceptional quality that are now considered classics, such as Boule de suif (1945), Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) and Si tous les gars du monde (1956).

Les Disparus de Saint-Agil was adapted from a well-known novel of the same title by Pierre Véry, a successful writer of crime thrillers and children’s fiction.  Véry’s novels were distinguished by their subtle blending of fantasy and reality, by their distinctive atmosphere and a slightly warped sense of humour.  Christian-Jaque and Jacques Becker would later adapt two of Véry’s other novels, and in doing so deliver two of the most important French films of the Occupation, L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941) and Goupi mains rouges (1943).  It was through the ambiguity and humour of Véry’s novels that Christian-Jaque and Becker were able to comment on the prevailing social and political concerns of the day without incurring a backlash from their detractors or those who held a contrary view.

The essence of Véry’s novel, particularly its clear distinction between the way in which children and adults see the world, is beautifully rendered in Christian-Jaque’s faultless adaptation.  This is essentially a film about the painful passage from childhood to adolescence, in which the child protagonists are snatched from their fantasy world and forced to confront the brutal nastiness of the real world.  The film’s heavily expressionistic design, which prefigures American film noir with its bold stylistic touches (harsh lighting, threatening shadows and slanted camera angles), lends a darkly oppressive mood, which is amplified by the confined setting of the school and the complete absence of female characters.  With the adult protagonists so frequently shot from low angles and lit menacingly so that they resemble gargoyles, naturally we are forced to take the child’s point of view and align our sympathies with the schoolboys who look so helplessly like cute little baa lambs being led unsuspectingly into a Halal butcher’s shop.  Of course the menace is exaggerated to a ludicrous extent (we are given advance warning of this by the hideously overblown title sequence, which might well have inspired the person who created the titles for the Star Wars films), but its impact can still be felt - a lumbering, louring sense of evil, the distillation of our worst nightmares.  As dark as the film appears to be (wilful murder, child abduction and private education are, after all, pretty dark subjects), humour is not too far beneath the surface.  It is an odd thing that scenes which appear calculated to freeze the blood of impressionable youngsters and afflict upon them the curse of recurring nightmares can hardly fail to reduce an adult audience to hysterics.  (It is the phenomenon of the children’s entertainer, in reverse.)

Among the more macabre delights offered by this film is Erich von Stroheim’s spinechilling portrayal of an English schoolmaster with a mysterious past and nice line in Norman Bates-style creepiness.  As he reads the opening lines to H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, you could swear he is taking a black mass, invoking the forces of Hell with every last syllable he utters (well, he is an English teacher...).  His own filmmaking career behind him, Von Stroheim had recently experienced a sudden boost to his acting career through his leading role in Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion (1937) and would find ready work in France before the outbreak of World War II, often as not cast as the villainous German aristocrat or the tragically fated fugitive from Nazism.  His role in Les Disparus de Saint-Agil is interesting because of its ambiguity and double-edged impact.  When we first see him, Monsieur Walter appears to be nothing more than the stereotypical Germanic-accented villain, but gradually he is revealed to be something far more complex.  Helped by the same austere features and piercing eyes with which he once commanded his own actors, Von Stroheim revels in the opportunity to scare the wits out of the little ones, but for the grown-ups he provides a character portrayal that is both poignant and scurrilously funny. Without labouring the point, the film allows Von Stroheim’s character to drive home one if its central messages, which is that we should be wary of judging others by our first impressions.

Von Stroheim’s is not the only stand-out performance the film offers.  Michel Simon lives up to his reputation as a monstre sacré of French cinema with his gloriously over-the-top portrayal of a stroppy Dürer-loving art teacher who is too fond of the grape for his own good.  The subtle art of pedagogy is the one thing that appears to have been left off the syllabus of Saint-Agil.  Whilst Von Stroheim’s character instils discipline in the classroom merely by looking like Hannibal Lecter’s Germanic older cousin (the one who roasts live schoolboys on a spit), Simon’s goes for the more orthodox approach, beating everything that annoys him into submission with his tongue.  Fortunately, not every member on the staff of Saint-Agil is a dipsomaniac thug or closet child eater.  Some of them are real villains, although to say any more than that will give away the ending.  As the man who can apparently walk through walls (a skill he no doubt wished he had in real life when he was exposed as a Nazi collaborator), Robert Le Vigan completes the quaint little menagerie à la perfection, not quite matching Von Stroheim in the sinister stakes but definitely earning his place as one of the last people in history you would hire as a babysitter.  

Just as in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933), the decade’s other notable swipe at the failings of the French private school system, the adults are very much the villains of the piece here and the children the shining heroes.  It is no coincidence that the only sympathetic adult character is one from the lower orders, a good-natured caretaker played with aplomb by the incomparable Armand Bernard.  One of the funniest French comic actors of his time, Bernard’s comedic talents are put to good use and he comes dangerously close to stealing the film.  However, just as a star-struck collie once stole the limelight from Elizabeth Taylor, the real stars of this film are the main three child actors, Marcel Mouloudji, Serge Grave and Jean Claudio, who all have the advantage of not looking like the outcome of a ghastly biological experiment.  Even though Claudio and Grave give the more convincing performances here, only Mouloudji would rise to stardom, more as a singer than an actor, in the years that followed.  Watch very closely and you may just spot two bright-eyed youngsters who were destined for even greater things - Charles Aznavour and Serge Reggiani.  Even Martin the Skeleton had a life after this film - he inspired the children’s opera Martin squelette, written by Isabelle Aboulker in 1996.  The film itself had the honour of being remade for French television in 1990, featuring Micheline Presle and Michel Galabru.  No doubt about it, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil is in a class of its own.

© James Travers 2002-2011

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