Film Review
It is probably no great surprise to learn that, in 1946, five of the ten
most viewed French-made films at the box office in France were wartime dramas,
each attracting an audience in excess of three and a half million.
Of these, only René Clément's
La Bataille du rail
is widely known today, but some of the others -
Le Père tranquille,
Jericho and
Un
ami viendra ce soir - are all of interest as they provide a valuable
record of how ordinary people in France were affected by the Nazi Occupation.
Like Clément's film,
Jericho has an obvious propaganda
subtext - namely to support the manufactured de Gaulle narrative that France
had been a nation of brave
résistants during the Occupation
- but it is nonetheless a compelling piece that achieves its aims without
resorting to the full-on glorification of the Resistance and Allied forces
depicted in many subsequent French WWII films such as Alexander Esway's
Le Bataillon du ciel,
the box office topper of 1947.
Jericho takes as its starting point a real historical event
- an RAF raid on a French prison in northern France in February 1944, aptly
named Opération Jericho - but develops a fictional drama around
this involving the rounding up and detention of hostages from a wide cross-section
of the population. Through a combination of great writing (from Charles
Spaak at his best) and superlative acting (from an impressive ensemble comprising
many established character actors) the film provides a harrowing and true-to-life
depiction of how different individuals cope with the prospect of impending
death. Admittedly, the demarcation between the courageous stoical types
and the snivelling cowards is a little too starkly drawn, but director Henri
Calef and his cinematographer Claude Renoir keep things suitably restrained
and sombre, without allowing the film from ever descending to the level of
a miserabilist melodrama or trite propaganda piece.
Pierre Brasseur's gradual disintegration from cynical wartime spiv to abject
dribbling invertebrate is memorably horrific, particularly as it is counterbalanced
by the good-natured submission to the inevitable by nobler specimens of humanity
played by Pierre Larquey (needlessly robbed of one of his legs) and Louis
Seigner. A Resistance operation led by Raymond Pellegrin provides the
film with its rivetting action set-piece, but even this is overshadowed by
the moving sequence that follows as the hostages are assembled in a church
and forced to accept that there is now no possibility of a reprieve.
Jericho may not be as showy as
La Bataille du rail but
it has a much greater emotional resonance as it focuses less on grand heroic
exploits and more on the quiet heroism of ordinary people.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
In February 1944, the Germans still occupy the town of Amiens in northern
France. The tide of the war is rapidly turning but the town's inhabitants
continue to live in fear of what Fate has in store for them. To dissuade
the Resistance from blowing up a vital train loaded with fuel the Nazis order
the town's administrators to draw up a list of fifty people who will be taken
hostage and shot in the event of the attack happening. The fifty individuals
selected include detainees in a prison, who face up to the prospect of the
impending execution in different ways. Some remain stoical, others
try to hide their fear, a few give way to abject terror. Undeterred
by the threat of the executions, the Resistance attacks the train as planned
and the hostages are duly taken away to a church, to face a firing squad
the following morning. Meanwhile, across the channel in England, the
Royal Air Force is preparing to launch a precision strike on the prison with
the aim of galvanising support in France for the impending Allied invasion...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.