Les Héros sont fatigués (1955) - film review

A former war-time pilot Michel Rivière arrives in the African town of Free City, hoping to find a buyer for some diamonds he found hidden in his aircraft after it crash-landed.  He stays at the town’s only hotel, which is run by an alcoholic Frenchman named Séverin, a one-time Nazi collaborator.   Séverin’s vicious racism is fuelled when he learns that his wife Manuella has been having an affair with a black man.  In a desperate bid to escape her tyrannical husband, Manuella allows Rivière to take her as his mistress.   After a tense few days, Rivière finds someone willing to take the diamonds off his hands - Wolf Gerke, an ex-Luftwaffe fighter pilot who has been sent to recover the missing jewels.  Rivière initially rejects Gerke’s offer but, realising that he has much in common with him, comes up with an unexpected business proposition.  The two men will sell the diamonds for the highest price they can get and create their own aviation company.  No sooner has Gerke agreed to this proposal than Séverin absconds with the precious jewels.  Unless Rivière can recover the diamonds, all his dreams will be shattered...

A superb cast and some top-notch production values make Les Héros sont fatigués one of the most striking examples of French film noir of the 1950s.  The international success of Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), released a few months previously, brought a new impetus to film noir in France and films such as this proved immensely popular with French audiences, laying the foundation for the classic polar which would come to dominate French cinema in the following decades.  The influence of 1940s American film noir is evident both in the grimly fatalist tone of the story and in its expressionistic presentation, the brooding, high contrast monochrome photography conveying a stifling sense of confinement and ineluctable doom.

Les Héros sont fatigués was, arguably, the creative highpoint of Yves Ciampi’s career as a filmmaker, although much of the credit for the film’s success should go to his cinematographer Henri Alekan and lead actors.  Alekan achieves a perfect pastiche of classic film noir, in the unlikely setting of a sweaty African ex-colony, inviting some obvious comparisons with Michael Curtiz’s  similarly themed Casablanca (1942).  Whilst the plot is a little too formulaic and offers few, if any, surprises, intense performances from the principal actors - notably Yves Montand, Jean Servais and Curd Jürgens - keep the audience hooked from the film’s slow beginning to its dramatic, and surprisingly vicious, denouement.

Jürgens is particularly good in this film as the one-time fighter pilot struggling with a crisis of conscience and was justly rewarded with the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival in 1955.  María Félix is also effective as the feisty femme fatale, her torrid tumble on the beach with Yves Montand being an obvious nod to Deborah Kerr’s famous clinch with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953).  Montand’s combat physique and introspective persona ensure that he is perfectly suited for the role of the hard-as-nails outsider, the archetypal noir hero that he had previously portrayed in H.G. Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la peur (1953).  The distinguished supporting cast includes Gert Fröbe, now immortalised as the ultimate Bond villain Auric Goldfinger, and Gérard Oury, who would later become one of France’s most successful filmmakers, helming such popular hits as La Grande vadrouille (1966).

Whilst Du rififi chez les hommes is still highly regarded, consistently rated as the definitive French film noir, contemporary films of its kind, such as Les Héros sont fatigués, are too easily overlooked.  Ciampi’s direction may not be as slick and daring as Jules Dassin’s, but his film is nonetheless a highly respectable pastiche of classic film noir which is all the more memorable for its atmospheric art design and extraordinary ensemble of acting talent.  The film’s ending is both poignant and prophetic - a potent visual metaphor for the Franco-German reconciliation that would lay to rest bitter memories of WWII and result in the creation of the European Economic Community just a few years after the film was released.

© James Travers 2011

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