Biography: life and films
But Carné's achievements were spat upon, even repudiated by certain outspoken critics after the war, most vociferously those on the influential review magazine (or rant rag) Les Cahiers du cinéma. This relentless onslaught, combined with a succession of failures at the box office, made Carné something of a laughing stock in his later years. He was no longer the master craftsman and poet who had created some of France's most enduring films. He was a second rate helmer incapable of moving with the times. The criticism of Carné's later films by such revered critics as André Bazin and François Truffaut was partly justified, but the wholesale character assassination that they perpetrated against the director was not.
Even in his less honourable period, Carné still enjoyed some commercial success and his later work is by no means as bereft of artistry as Truffaut et al. would have us believe. Truffaut's dumb thesis that the power of Carné's finest films derives mainly from Jacques Prévert's screenwriting is easily challenged, as is his ludicrous assertion that Carné was never an auteur. The man who helped to fashion poetic realism, the most distinctive aesthetic of 1930s French cinema, and who gave us some of the most beautiful works of film art deserves to be held in much higher regard than the members of the intellectual lynch mob who destroyed his reputation because of their all too narrow appreciation of what constitutes great cinema.
Marcel Carné was born in the Batignolles neighbourhood of Paris on 18th August 1906. Although he was destined to be one of France's most prominent filmmakers, he was originally set for a completely different career, following his father's trade as a cabinet maker. His mother died when he was five and so it would have been easy for him to have been guided into this profession, were it not for his burning passion for cinema. As an adolescent he was a rampant cinephile and he took on a whole range of jobs to pay for this obsession and also his burgeoning interest in photography. At the age of 25, he made his first film, the all but forgotten documentary short Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929). Around this time, he began to make a name for himself as a critic and became a contributor to several publications including Cinémagazine, Cinémonde and Film-Sonore.
A chance meeting with the actress Françoise Rosay at a dinner party in 1928 brought Carné into contact with the film director Jacques Feyder, who offered him work as a second assistant director on his next film, Les Nouveaux messieurs (1929). After completing his military service, Carné worked as Feyder's assistant on Le Grand jeu (1934), Pension Mimosas (1935) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935). He also worked in this capacity for René Clair and Richard Oswald. When Feyder left for England to direct Alexander Korda's production of Knight Without Armour (1937), Carné was entrusted with taking over the direction of Jenny (1936). The film is significant not only for being Marcel Carné's first feature as a director, but because it was his first of many collaborations with the legendary screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Together, they created a style of poetic realism that would become Carné's trademark in the late 1930s, a variation of film noir in which atmospheric lighting and set designs would suggest a mood of inescapable doom. The first notable example of this was the director's early masterpiece, Le Quai des brumes (1938), starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in their most memorable screen pairing, he the disillusioned deserter desperately in search of a new life, she the plastic coat wearing femme fatale who would lead him to death rather than freedom. Before this, Carné and Prévert had had far less success with an attempt at a British-style black comedy, Drôle de drame (1937), the film in which Louis Jouvet famously wears a kilt and utters that immortal line 'Bizarre, bizarre...'
The fact that Carné's next poetic chef d'oeuvre was scripted by Henri Jeanson and Jean Aurenche, rather than Prévert, somewhat disproves the notion promulgated by the director's detractors after the war that Carné's early achievements were entirely down to Prévert's talents as a writer. Hôtel du Nord (1938) is among the grimmest of Carné's films, a bleak existential poem inhabited by deadbeats and losers that is one his most skilfully crafted and involving works. The film gave Arletty her most famous line 'Atmosphère! Atmosphère! Est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'atmosphère?' and required the construction of one of the largest sets ever built for a French film, a reconstruction of a hotel exterior on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin.
Carné and Prévert then renewed their partnership with Le Jour se lève (1939), their most pessimistic work and one that stands as the apotheosis of poetic realism. There is probably no film in French cinema as crushingly bleak as this, and it is no coincidence that it was made when France's future prospects were at their grimmest. Carné continued working during the Nazi Occupation and, again with Prévert, he came up with an apparently innocuous fantasy set in the Middle Ages, Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) - the German censors could not have seen the subtle message of defiance contained within it - symbolised by the beating of a human heart inside a stone statue. Immediately after this, the director embarked on his most ambitious film at the Victorine Studios in the South of France. Ignoring a German-imposed law that forbade the employment of Jews, Carné availed himself of the services of several Jewish artists, including set designer Alexandre Trauner and musician Joseph Kosma. The fraught production was threatened by numerous costly setbacks but the film that Carné ultimately delivered was to be his most revered, Les Enfants du paradis (1945), a tale of impossible love set on the most colourful street in Paris, the Boulevard du Crime.
After the war, Marcel Carné struggled to remain in sympathy with the cinemagoing public and his career was soon locked on a downwards trajectory. It all started to go wrong with Les Portes de la nuit (1946), a return to the poetic realism of the late 1930s that was now ill-received by audiences who wanted to escape from the penury of post-war austerity rather than to be solemnly reminded of the fact. The film's huge production cost made it an easy target for the critics and so began the mudslinging and mockery that would soon decimate Carné's standing as a serious cineaste. When their next film, La Fleur de l'âge, fell through, Carné and Prévert parted company and the director's next two films - La Marie du port (1950) and Juliette ou la Clé des songes (1950) - are clearly the work of an inferior filmmaker. In both of these films, Carné gave minor roles to Roland Lesaffre, an up-and-coming young actor who would feature in many of his later films and with whom the director would enjoy a close personal relationship that endured until his death in 1996.
Carné returned to form with Thérèse Raquin (1953), an inspired adaptation of an Émile Zola novel that won him the Gold Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival. In L'Air de Paris (1954), Carné subtly alludes to his own discrete homosexuality through the relationship between an ageing boxing coach (Jean Gabin) and a young amateur boxer (played, significantly, by the director's real-life partner Roland Lesaffre). In his first colour film, Le Pays d'où je viens (1956), Carné joins up with the high-voltage chansonnier Gilbert Bécaud to deliver a sprightly musical comedy that is the most atypical of his films. Just when the critics had written him off, the director had his biggest box office hit with Les Tricheurs (1958), the first in a loose trilogy of films in which he attempted, with varying degrees of success, to engage with the issues of juvenile delinquency and youth disaffection - it was followed by Terrain vague (1960) and Les Jeunes loups (1968), which provided plenty more ammunition for the critics.
Carné's reputation was further shot to pieces when he released his light comedy Du mouron pour les petits oiseaux (1962), even though it still managed to draw a sizeable audience. After this amiable comic digression, the director returns to more typically darker territory with Trois chambres à Manhattan (1965) and Les Assassins de l'ordre (1971), the first a melancholic study in solitude (in which Robert De Niro makes his first screen appearance in a walk-on role), the second an early example of the néo-polar that would become phenomenally successful in France in the late 1970s. Carné had tremendous difficulty finding the wherewithal for his next film, an adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel entitled La Merveilleuse visite (1974). Despite being a thoughtful fable on the dangers of religious dogma, the film was lampooned by the critics and the director's reputation was by now pretty well destroyed. Carné managed to complete one further film, the documentary La Bible (1977), but his final work Mouche (1991) was unfinished. He passed away at the grand age of 90, on 31st October 1996, in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre, Paris, where he now lies in peace alongside his devoted companion Roland Lesaffre, who died in 2009.
© James Travers 2015
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Filmography
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The life, career and films of Marcel Carné are presented in detail on this excellent website: www.marcel-carne.com.The silent era of French cinema
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