Film Review
If there is one film that confounds the popular misconception that Jean Dréville
was merely an adept journeyman rather than a gifted contributor to the seventh
art that film is surely
La Ferme du pendu. Dréville's
incredible productivity (he had helmed almost thirty features before this),
together with his willingness to turn his talents to cheesy crowd-pleasers
as well as more serious fare, made him an easy target for the critics on
the
Cahiers du cinéma on the eve of the French New Wave.
It was largely down to the barrel-loads of contempt heaped on him by the
future directors of the Nouvelle Vague in the 1950s that led Dréville
to being written off as little more than a competent hack, with the result
that even today (many decades after his misguided detractors altered their
views) most of his best work languishes in obscurity. It is an injustice
that still remains to be corrected.
Dréville's achievements were in fact recognised at the mid-point of
his career, when he received the Prix Louis Delluc for his film
Les Casse-pieds (1948).
Just a few years before this, he had achieved a massive box office hit with
La Cage aux rossignols
(1945), which was subsequently remade as
Les Choristes (2004). Throughout
the 1930s and '40s, Dréville was one of the standard bearers of French
cinema's quality tradition (a term that had contemptuous connotations for
Truffaut and his pals), his output including some stunning big budget productions
(
Le Joueur d'échecs
(1938)) and sharp-toothed satires (
Les Affaires sont les
affaires (1942)).
It was during the Occupation, that Dréville's artistry reached its
zenith with the epic melodrama
Les
Roquevillard (1943).
La Ferme du pendu came after this,
a similar kind of naturalistic rural drama that has the same outstanding
visual impact, achieved by some highly imaginative use of lighting and camerawork.
With its unusual camera positions (sometimes at or below waist-height), undulating
tracking shots and smooth slow zooms into powerful big close-ups, the film
is pictorially stunning in parts, almost totally unlike anything seen in
French cinema at the time. Panoramic shots of the austerely picturesque
Vendée setting, with roughly-hewn peasant folk in the distance visible
through long grass in the foreground, provide other flashes of cinematic
genius, fleetingly evocative of such marvels as Kenji Mizoguchi's
Ugetsu monogatari (1953).
At the end of the film, an achingly beautiful sequence depicting the main
character struggling to plough a field looks as if it might have been lifted
from a John Ford film of the 1940s. Such moments of sublime poetry
punctuate a film that is so visually expressive it scarcely needs dialogue
to tell its story. Dréville's use of the camera somehow manages
to endow the raw rural landscape with a soul of its own, one of ever-changing
moods that holds the fate of the protagonists in its unforgiving hands. What
Zola does with words in
La Terre Dréville
accomplishes with images in his magnum opus.
La Ferme du pendu differs markedly from other rural dramas made in
France around this time, not only in its daring fluidity and stark visual
compositions, but also in its relentlessly pessimistic tone. After
a sombre opening depicting a funeral, the mood brightens for a short time
with a lively wedding party sequence, the sense of joie-de-vivre heightened
by camera motion and skilful editing that are perfectly synchronised with
the movement within the frame. After this, the mood takes an ever downwards
trajectory into the abyss, a series of calamities leading to a tragic conclusion
that is all too predictable - although the film does finally end on a note
of optimism.
In its bleak assessment of country life,
La Ferme du pendu echoes
Jacques Becker's
Goupi mains rouges
(1943), but without the thriller plot contrivances and scurrilous
caricaturing that this earlier film resorts to for comic effect. It
also calls to mind another popular rural drama of the time, Pierre de Hérain's
Monsieur des Lourdines
(1943), although this offered a far more romanticised take on working the
land, one that was in line with Maréchal Pétain's patriotic
philosophy encapsulated in his slogan
'Travail, famille, patrie'.
On the face of it, Dréville's film would appear to take a distinctly
anti-Pétainist line, with its central character - a frighteningly
authoritarian landowner (with Nazi overtones) - prepared to sacrifice not
only his family, but also the line of succession, simply to prevent his farm
from slipping from his grasp in his own lifetime.
Arguably, it is Charles Vanel's lead performance that makes this such a powerful
and gripping piece of film drama. Barely halfway into his remarkable
eight-decade spanning acting career, Vanel was at the height of his powers,
and as on Dréville's earlier
Les Roquevillard he grabs both
our attention and our sympathy with what must surely rate as one of his greatest
performances (surpassed only by his gut-wrenching turn in H.G. Clouzot's
Le Salaire de la peur
a decade later). As the eldest of the three Raimondeau brothers, the
ardent traditionalist who governs his household along lines that a contemporary
audience would have regarded as Fascistic, Vanel's character would seem to
have nothing to endear us to him. His tyrannical behaviour results
in the gradual dismemberment of his family and almost leads him to kill an
innocent victim, and yet Vanel somehow compels us to pity him. In the
film's final segment, you can hardly help but be moved by François's
fumbling attempts to connect with his estranged sister, and when the cruel
Hardy-esque denouement finally strikes it is with a profound sorrow that
we witness the character's hard-earned comeuppance.
The film's other stand-out performance is provided by Alfred Adam, another
prolific character actor who is just as well-suited for his role as the more
odious of the three brothers - his loathsome behaviour (particularly his
abhorrent treatment of the fair sex) amplified ten-fold when set beside the
unwavering goodness of the youngest brother, played by an almost saintly
Guy Decomble. Unlike Vanel's stony-faced patriarch, who retains a certain
nobility throughout, Adam's Grand Louis is a detestable villain to his core,
a fact that is shockingly borne out by his barbaric rape of the servant girl
Marie. It is curious that Dréville chose to underplay the brutality
of the implied assault by following it with the film's most serene sequence,
the camera slowly panning across a deserted farmyard, finally fixing our
gaze on the prostrate form of Marie, lying like abandoned rags on a pile
of straw. 'It's all part and parcel of country life', seems to be what
the film's author is implying - a newly violated young girl lying in abject
disgrace among farm animals who are going about their business in total ignorance
of the horror that has taken place.
La Ferme du pendu was the first screen adaptation of a series of regional
novel by Gilbert Dupé (others include Christian Stengel's
Le Village
perdu (1947) and Jean Stelli's
La Foire aux femmes (1956)).
At the time, Dupé was married to the actress Lucienne Laurence, who
played the role of Marie, the ill-used servant girl, in the film. Another
notable cast member is Bourvil, the first time the actor was credited under
this name, although he had made a few film appearances prior to this as an
extra. Although he is on screen for just a few minutes, Bourvil makes
his presence felt, particularly in the euphoric wedding sequence where he
gets to sing
Les Crayons, the song that became a national hit and
made him a household name in France. The runaway success of later films
such as André Berthomieu's
Pas
si bête (1947) quickly established Bourvil as the leading French
comic actor of his time.
As for Jean Dréville, by 1950 his best work was behind him, although
he did go on to direct a few more interesting films. He worked with
rising star Jeanne Moreau on
La Reine
Margot (1954) and Orson Welles on the stylish historical blockbuster
La Fayette (1962), whilst still
churning out more brazenly populist fare such as
À pied, à
cheval et en spoutnik (1958), although the less said about this risible
comedy the better. If there is to be a serious retrospective of Dréville's
work, we can expect his rural masterpiece
La Ferme du pendu to figure
prominently in it.
© James Travers 2022
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
The scene is the Vendée, an agricultural region of
France in the 1930s. After the death of his father, François
Raimondeau has one thought in mind - to prevent the family farm from being
broken up and sold. To that end, he coerces his two younger brothers
- Grand Louis and Bénoni - and sister Amanda into agreeing never to
get married. It isn't long before Amanda reneges on her promise.
When her eldest brother refuses to hand over her share of the inheritance,
she turns her back on the farm and heads off to Nantes to open a café
with her husband-to-be. Realising he needs a woman to replace his sister
and take on all the household chores, François engages a timid orphan
girl Marie as a servant.
Marie carries out her duties with the utmost diligence but she is ill-rewarded
for her efforts when Grand Louis, a notorious womaniser, decides to add her
to his long list of amorous conquests. On hearing that Marie has got
herself pregnant, François is driven to desperate measures.
His attempt on the young woman's life ends with Marie losing her unborn child
and sustaining an injury that results in her being dismissed. The brothers'
abominable treatment of Marie reaches the neighbouring villagers, who turn
on Grand Louis with a vengeance just as he is about to bed another woman.
With the mob heading his way, the philanderer tries to defend himself with
his rifle and is then driven to hang himself. Bénoni, the most sympathetic
of the three brothers, is so appalled by François's actions that in
the end he can take no more. He too leaves the farm to start a new
life elsewhere, leaving François alone and childless to persevere
with the running of his farm.
Eleven years later, Marie returns to the farm, desperate for her brother's
support after being abandoned by her husband. It is with genuine fondness
that François receives his sister and her ten-year-old son.
Increasingly aware of his mortality, the ageing farmer is anxious to have
an heir to whom he can pass on his land, so he hopes he can persuade Amanda
and her son to stay on the farm and take it over after his death. Unfortunately,
Amanda has no appetite for country living and intends taking her son with
her when she returns to the city. François accepts his abandonment
with calm resignation and continues his old life, not knowing that his time
is fast running out. At the moment of his passing, Amanda's son suddenly
appears on the farm, an eager successor to his Raimondeau forebears.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.