Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (1944)
Directed by Léo Joannon

Drama

Film Review

Abstract picture representing Le Carrefour des enfants perdus (1944)
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.


Film Credits

  • Director: Léo Joannon
  • Script: André-Paul Antoine (dialogue), Jean-Georges Auriol, Maurice Bessy, Stéphane Pizella
  • Cinematographer: Nikolai Toporkoff
  • Music: Louis Pasquier, Roger-Roger
  • Cast: René Dary (Jean Victor), Raymond Bussières (Marcel), Jean Mercanton (Émile Ferrand), Janine Darcey (Andrée Denolle), A.M. Julien (Joseph Mallory), Serge Reggiani (Joris), Robert Demorget (La 'Puce'), Nicolas Amato (Le cafetier de Marseille), Michel Barbey (Rougier), Jacques Berlioz (Le juge), Georges Bever (L'huissier), Michel de Bonnay (Un jeune du centre), Jean-Marie Boyer (Un jeune du centre), Jean Buquet (Un jeune du centre), Myno Burney (Germaine), Pierre Chartier (Un jeune du centre), Max Dalban (Pierre, le cafetier), Michel Dancourt (Un jeune du centre), Paul Demange (Le greffier), François Dupriet (Un jeune du centre)
  • Country: France
  • Language: French
  • Support: Black and White
  • Runtime: 108 min

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