Macadam (1946) - film review

The Hôtel Bijou in Montmartre, Paris, shares the seedy reputation of its owner, Madame Rose, a woman who killed her husband because he was too honest.  Rose’s daughter, Simone, disapproves of her mother’s shady dealings and tries to live a more honest life.  One of Rose’s less reputable accomplices, a crook named Victor, arrives at the hotel, accompanied by his mistress Gisèle.  Victor is looking for a quiet hideout after pulling off a jewel robbery in which he murdered a man.  Although Victor once meant a great deal to her, Rose has no qualms over betraying him to the police so that she can help herself to his stolen booty.  When he is arrested, Victor suspects that it was Gisèle who informed on him, so that she could pursue an affair with another man.  Having escaped from the police, Victor returns to the hotel, intent on revenge...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

In this, his second feature, director Marcel Blistène was heavily influenced by American film noir and exploits the familiar noir motifs - atmospheric lighting and skewed camera angles - to great effect, delivering a convincing portrayal of the Parisian underworld amid post-war austerity.  Blistène had previously worked as a film journalist before making his directing debut with Étoile sans lumière (1946), a vehicle for the legendary chansonnier Edith Piaf.   Blistène’s subsequent career would be short and pretty undistinguished, Macadam probably being his most inspired and most memorable work.

There are strident echoes of poetic realism in this film, the plot, the characters and the setting instantly recalling Marcel Carné’s equally grim and sordid Hôtel du nord (1938).   The film owes its distinctive stylisation to Jacques Feyder, one of the great pre-WWII filmmakers who contributed to the development of the poetic realist style in the 1930s.  Feyder is credited as assistant director on this film but most probably had as much creative input as Blistène.  This is the last film that Feyder worked on before his death in 1948.

Macadam is a moody and stylishly crafted piece of French film noir which excels in both its design and its performances.  A distinguished cast is headed by Françoise Rosay, Jacques Feyder’s wife and frequent collaborator.  By this stage in her career, Rosay had become pretty well typecast as the redoubtable villainess, excelling as Catherine de Medici in Jean Dréville’s La Reine Margot (1954) and the evil serial killer in Claude Autant-Lara’s L’Auberge rouge (1951).  In Macadam, Rosay plays an unscrupulous hotel proprietor with evident relish, wallowing in the character’s complete lack of morality and yet still managing to evoke sympathy from her audience.  Few actresses can play undiluted venality with as much charm and pathos as Françoise Rosay.

Cast opposite Rosay is Paul Meurisse, another superlative actor who is just as well-known for playing villains, often elegant gangster-types in the classic Hollywood mould.  Meurisse’s intense portrayal of a psychopathic hoodlum is arguably the best thing about this film, particularly as it captures something of the sadism and uncontrolled inner rage that Edward G. Robinson brought to his early gangster portrayals.  Here Meurisse is partnered with Simone Signoret, a stunning newcomer who had yet to make her film breakthrough but who steals every scene she appears in with her barely contained sensuality and charisma, the archetypal femme fatale.   Meurisse and Signoret complement one another perfectly and would subsequently appear together in three other notable examples of French film noir: Maurice Tourneur’s Impasse des deux anges (1948), H.G. Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres (1969).

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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