Film Review
Le Carrefour des enfants perdus
occupies a fairly unique position in French cinema. Not only was
it one of the few films made in France during the Occupation to dwell
on an important contemporary issue - teenage delinquency - it was also
pretty well the only such film to have been wholeheartedly endorsed by
the Vichy government. The latter's tight control over France's
filmmaking industry ensured that cinema was exclusively a medium of
harmless escapist entertainment, as often as not promoting the
traditional values which the Chief of State Philippe Pétain
believed would restore his country's honour and prestige, values that
were enshrined in the Vichy slogan
travail,
famille, patrie.
Le Carrefour des enfants perdus
is a rare example of a Vichy propaganda film that confines itself to
its central social theme, without reference to the war or labouring
Pétainist ideology (although a vein of Pétainist
sentiment clearly runs through the film, not quite managing to pass
itself of as humanist concern). For a time when delinquents were
routinely locked up in what were effectively prisons, often for the
most trivial of offences, it is surprising that the overtly Fascistic
Vichy government would come out in favour of a more humane alternative,
in which young offenders were admitted to what more closely resembled
boarding schools, to learn a trade and acquire a basic education as
part of their rehabilitation. The film would lead us to think
that, in some areas of social provision, the Vichy régime was
more progressive than we might have thought possible.
Le Carrefour des enfants perdus
was the second of two films that director Léo Joannon made for
Vichy's propaganda film unit MAIC (Maîtrise artisanale de
l'industrie cinématographique), after being appointed its
managing director by Alfred Greven, head of the German run
Continental-Films. (The other film was
Le Camion blanc (1943), a lesser
work that has been all but forgotten.) Given the nature of the
film's subject matter and its topicality, Joannon had no difficulty
securing funding from the government - directly, via the Secretary of
State for Youth, and indirectly, via the COIC (Comité
d'organisation de l'industrie cinématographique), an
organisation that was set up by Vichy to regularise and protect
France's film industry.
Although the film is often compared with Léonide Moguy's
Prison sans barreaux (1938), which
is set in a girl's reform school run on similar lines to that of
the one in Joannon's film, a more likely influence is the American film
Boys
Town (1938), which has a virtually identical plot inspired
by the true story of a Catholic Priest who founded a home for
delinquent boys in 1917. Jean Vigo's
Zéro
de conduite (1933) is clearly referenced in the dramatic
middle section in which the rebellious boys run amok, whilst the later
sequence in which the juvenile penitents club together for their mutual
benefit, driven by a spirit of solidarity (or a desire to create havoc
on the Paris metro), is an obvious retread of Louis Daquin's
Nous
les gosses (1941).
Le Carrefour des enfants perdus
attacks its controversial subject matter with commendable honesty and
realism, although it lacks conviction in one or two scenes which paint
perhaps too rosy a portrait of human nature. The film owes its
charm and authenticity to the central performances from René
Dary and Serge Regianni, who effectively replace Spencer Tracy and
Mickey Rooney in
Boys Town,
and make a somewhat better fist of it. This was Dary's finest
hour, in the brief period in the early to mid-1940s when he was set up to
replace Jean Gabin after the latter's 'defection' to Hollywood.
Dary began his screen career at the age of three when he starred in the
Bébé series of
short films (around eighty in total) directed by Louis Feuillade.
His comeback in the 1940s was brief but it landed him in some
interesting films, of which
Le
Carrefour des enfants perdus is the most memorable. Dary's
muscular presence prevents the film from slipping into gushing
sentimentality and lends it a sober, hard-edged reality that the far
better known
Boys Town
patently lacks.
Serge Regianni is no less impressive than Dary and in only his second
important role - after Louis Daquin's
Le Voyageur de la Toussaint
(1942) - he already impresses as a future star of French cinema.
Few other French actors of this era could as convincingly negotiate the
transition from vicious thug to a totally reformed character (a model
Vichy citizen). Regianni's performance not only resonates with
truth from the first scene to the last, it can hardly fail to bring
tears to your eyes. It was on this film that the actor met Janine
Darcey (she has the thankless task of playing the one noticeable female
character) - they married just a few years later. It is
interesting to note that Serge Reggiani made his screen debut as a
schoolboy in Christian-Jaque's
Les Disparus de Saint-Agil
(1938) and was to have to starred in Marcel Carné's aborted
La Fleur de l'âge (1947), set
in the notorious boys' reformatory on Belle-Ile-En-Mer.
If Dary and Regianni shine with virtue (or potential virtue), the same
cannot be said of Raymond Bussières, who gets to play the
central villain of the piece - something he was inestimably good
at. Bussières' aimiable persona (to say nothing of his
uncanny resemblance to Buster Keaton) makes him an unusual kind of
villain, not one who is ever consciously evil, but rather one who just
happens to do bad things because of an unfortunate morality
bypass. Here, he comes across as a
Gallic Arthur Daley, a conscience-free wheeler-dealer who just cannot
understand why anyone would object to someone making easy money through
prostitution and profiteering. Bussières' character is
everything that the Vichy
régime despised and, likeable as he is at first, the film goes
out of its way to ensure that, by the final reel, we despise him just as
much. It's amazing that the actor's career survived such a fierce
onslaught.
Even though its status as a piece of Vichy propaganda is fairly
evident,
Le Carrefour des enfants
perdus was enthusastically received by both the critics and the
cinema-going public. Released just over a month before the Allied
Invasion in June 1944, the film performed well at the French box
office, before and after the Liberation. It would be over a
decade before the problem of juvenile delinquency would feature as
prominently in a mainstream French film, the best examples being Jean
Delannoy's
Chiens perdus sans colliers
(1955), François Truffaut's
Les 400 coups (1959) and Marcel
Carné's
Terrain vague (1960).
Léo Joannon returned to the subject of delinquency late in his career
in
L'Homme aux clés d'or
(1956), one in a series of films on the theme of redemption that now
appear crass compared with his earlier film.
© James Travers, Willems Henri 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Léo Joannon film:
Atoll K (1951)
Film Synopsis
Marseille, 1940. In the chaotic aftermath of France's
capitulation to Nazi Germany, three former inmates of a reform school
meet up by chance. They are Jean Victor, a journalist,
Émile Ferrand, a recently demobbed solider, and Joseph
Malory. All three are moved by the plight of a homeless young
orphan boy, La Puce, whom they save from the hands of the police.
Victor suggests that they open a home for abandoned youngsters like La
Puce, a home that provides its inmates with hope and an educations,
instead of iron bars and beatings. With the support of a local
notable, Monsieur Gerbault, Victor obtains the authorisation to go
ahead and he converts an old hotel into what will be called
The Crossroads for Lost Children.
Meanwhile, Ferrand, Malory and Andrée Denolle, a social worker, manage to
get the juvenile courts to release a few hundred children into their
care and the home soon becomes a success. But not all of
the youngsters appreciate the kindness they are offered. Some of
the boys, in particular a rebel rouser named Joris, are determined to
cause trouble and threaten the home with closure...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.