Les Amours de minuit (1931)
Directed by Augusto Genina, Marc Allégret

Film Review

It is widely acknowledged that American film noir of the 1940s and '50s had its origins in German expressionism of the 1920s, but what is less well understood is how the aesthetic developed in French crime dramas of the 1930s.   Films such as Jean Renoir's La Nuit du carrefour (1932), Maurice Tourneur's Justin de Marseille (1935) and Pierre Chenal's Le Dernier tournant (1939) (to name just three) show how the familiar film noir motifs came together, presaging the classic doom-laden dramas that were to dominate the American B-movie of the 1940s.  Augusto Genina's Les Amours de minuit is another important example of French proto-film noir, one of the earliest, made shortly after the transition from silent to sound cinema.  With its seedy settings and imaginative use of lighting to create a stifling mood of oppression and predestination, the film is astonishingly near to the American film noir classics that we know and love.

Today, Augusto Genina is best remembered for his silent Louise Brooks vehicle Prix de beauté (1930), which was scripted by two other notable filmmakers of this era, René Clair and Georg Wilhelm Pabst.  Heavily influenced by German expressionism, many of Genina's films employ noir-like stylisation (particularly high contrast lighting) to create tension, atmosphere and an aura of fatalism.  Les Amours de minuit is a particularly good example of this, using Genina's recurring train motif to symbolise the unstoppable forces that are propelling the protagonists to their inescapable destinies - just as Jean Renoir would do (even more effectively) in his subsequent La Bête humaine (1938).

Jean Renoir is not the only prominent filmmaker who may have been influenced by this film.  Les Amours de minuit has a distinctly Hitchcockian feel to it throughout and could easily be mistaken for one of Hitchcock's middle period crime films.  The film begins with a scene (two men meeting in a railway compartment, one an innocent, the other an obvious bounder) which appears to be a carbon copy of the scene in Strangers in a Train (1951) in which Robert Walker tries to corrupt Farley Granger, and has a similar homoerotic charge.  Equally, the sequence near the end of the film where the main protagonist frantically runs to catch the train that will save him from ruin would not be out of place in a Hitchcock suspense thriller.  And, to cap it all, the heroine is the quintessential Hitchcock blonde - desirable, duplicitous and possibly doomed!  It is also interesting to note that cast in a minor role is a young Jacques Prévert, who would in a few years' time become one of the architects of the French poetic realist tradition through his collaborations as a screenwriter with director Marcel Carné.  There is much in Les Amours de minuit to evoke Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Hôtel du Nord (1938).

Although Augusto Genina receives the sole directing credit on the film, he actually directed it in close collaboration with Marc Allégret, an aspiring young filmmaker who had previously made a documentary - Voyage au Congo (1927) - with his lover and mentor André Gide, and a few short films, including La Meilleure bobone (1930) with Fernandel.  Allégret's younger brother Yves also worked on the film, as an assistant - it would be almost two decades before Yves Allégret would emerge from his brother's shadow and find acclaim with his intensely gloomy melodramas Dédée d'Anvers (1948) and Une si jolie petite plage (1949).  The film was produced by Pierre Braunberger, who regarded Marc Allégret as a protégé and gave him not only moral support but also the space to develop his own artistic style in his early films.  Braunberger was not just a successful businessman (he was head of the Cinéma du Panthéon for sixty years and produced films for just as long), he was always an avid supporter of new talent - evidenced by his willingness to finance the early films of the French New Wave directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

Les Amours de minuit was made in parallel with a German version entitled Mitternachtsliebe, which was twenty minutes shorter and was directed by Augusto Genina and Carl Froelich.  Both films have the same cast, with one notable esxception: the part of the central villain is played by Jacques Varennes in the French film and by Hans Adalbert Schlettow in the German version.  The lead male role in both films was taken by Pierre Batcheff, a Russian born actor who came to prominence in the silent era and achieved immortality as the male protagonist in Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929).  Batcheff had the Valentino good looks and everyman charm to have been a major film star of the 1930s, but his promising career was tragically cut short when, aged 30. he took a fatal overdose of Veronal, shortly after starring in Rex Ingram's disastrous final film Baroud (1933).   Batcheff appeared in several important films of the 1920s, from Raymond Bernard's Le Joueur d'échecs (1927) to Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), but no film reveals what a loss to cinema his premature death was more than Les Amours de minuit.

The film's other two main roles are played by Jacques Varennes and Danièle Parola, who are equally well suited for the parts of the utterly loathsome villain Gaston and the seductive cabaret performer Georgette Lajoie.  Varennes, a character actor of remarkable versatility, is at his best when he is playing shady rogues and here he makes a perfect contrast with Batcheff's guileless juvenile - their first meeting on the train is superbly well played and effectively establishes the ambiguous relationship between their two characters (who turn out to be far similar than we might think).  Whilst not a great actress, Danièle Parola is a delight to watch, particularly in the raunchy cabaret scenes, which are strikingly similar to those in Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (1930), with Parola every bit as sensual and alluring as Marlene Dietrich in her tight corset and black stockings.  

Les Amours de minuit may be virtually forgotten today but it clearly represents an important stage in the evolution of classic film noir from the stylised fantasies of German expressionism to the cordite-scented crime dramas that best characterise full-blown American film noir.  The plot may be a tad pedestrian by today's standards and the characters little more than roughly hewn archetypes, but such is the artistic flair with which Augusto Genina and Marc Allégret approach it that the film can hardly fail to please.  Admittedly, the ending feels like a lazy concession to early 1930s melodrama, but in every other respect this is film noir pure and simple, and if you are a dedicated Hitchcock aficionado, the sense of déja-vu is overwhelming, if not scary.

Film Synopsis

Marcel and Gaston are two men who are on the run, although when they meet on a train bound for a seaport they do their best to conceal the fact.  Gaston, the older man, engages Marcel in conversation, and cannot help noticing that he is carrying a wallet stuffed with bank notes.  Once he has reached his destination, Gaston accosts his former mistress Georgette and coerces her into stealing Marcel's wallet.  Georgette has no choice but to play along, but when she meets Marcel she cannot help falling in love with him.  She leaves the young man after they have had dinner together, refusing to have any part in Gaston's plan.  Downhearted, Marcel wanders the streets and comes across the cabaret where Georgette works.  He cannot resist going in to watch her act and return the handbag she left behind at the restaurant.  Unfortunately, Gaston is still in the vicinity.  To knock Marcel out and rob him of his money is the work of a moment.  When he comes to his senses, Marcel is a broken man.  He tells Georgette that he stole the money from the bank where he works, intending to catch a boat to another country.  Unless he can get the money back and return it to his bank, he will be an outlaw for the rest of his life...