Film Review
Valjean's private war against Javert begins when he comes to the aid of a
dangerously ill prostitute named Fantine. Before the unfortunate woman
dies, Valjean promises to safeguard the future of her daughter Cosette, who
is presently in the care of the Thénardiers, a couple of despicable
rogues who manage a country inn. As he collects Cosette to escort her
to a convent, Valjean narrowly escapes capture by Javert. By the time
Cosette is 17, she and Valjean have settled in Paris. Here, she attracts
the attention of Marius, a student who is mixed up with a gang of insurrectionists
committed to the return of the French Republic. Marius is also loved,
but in vain, by Éponine, the grown-up daughter of the Thénardiers,
who now live in cheap lodgings adjacent to his.
Valjean comes to Éponine's rescue when she is caught stealing some
bread. Thénardier sees an opportunity to extort money from his
daughter's rich benefactor, but when Valjean refuses to pay up he threatens
to betray him to Javert. Valjean evades Thénardier's trap but,
fearing that his old enemy is on his tail, he decides to flee to London with
Cosette. This is the crucial moment at which Marius and his revolutionary
cohorts take their stand against the monarchy. In the ensuing street
battle, Javert is taken prisoner by the rebels, Thénardier's son Gavroche
is shot dead and Marius receives a near-fatal gunshot wound. Having
allowed Javert to flee to safety, Valjean carries the barely conscious Marius
into the sewers, but escape seems impossible...
Of the many big screen adaptations of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel
Les Misérables,
few have achieved anything like the success of Paul Le Chanois's 1958 lavish
epic. With its startling production values and prestigious cast, this
vivid retelling of Hugo's classic fable on the conflict between morality
and justice was a worldwide hit and it is still highly regarded. The
film attracted an audience of just under ten million in France on its first
release and for half a century afterwards it remained one of the ten most
successful French films ever made. It may not have the sublime
artistry of Henri Fescourt's 1925
silent version or the mind-blowing ambition of Raymond Bernard's
1934 epic, but Le Chanois's film
cannot fail to impress with the quality of its acting and some striking visuals,
both promoting mainstream French cinema of the 1950s at its best.
In an era when television was starting to pose an existential threat to cinema,
super-productions of this kind were becoming quite prevalent, and
Les
Misérables was a bold attempt by a European consortium (which
included Pathé and Deutsche Film) to keep up with Hollywood.
This kind of
cinéma populaire was hardly groundbreaking, however,
and bloated monoliths such as this supported François Truffaut's thesis
that French cinema was desperately in need of new blood. Truffaut would
supply just that the following year, with his debut film
Les 400 coups (1959).
Le Chanois's
Les Misérables feels like a desperate last hurrah
for the so-called 'quality tradition' in French cinema before the French
New Wave blasted its way onto the scene and tried to rewrite all the rules.
Anyone familiar with the plot of Hugo's novel - specifically the revolutionary
uprising in which a gang of hot-headed students take on the monarchist militia
- can hardly fail to be struck by the irony of this. Ten years on,
the same incident would be played out on a larger canvas across France, in
the public protests of 1968. Le Chanois's film may be a product of
its time, but it is spookily prophetic.
Interestingly, Paul Le Chanois was not the kind of journeyman film director
that Truffaut and his colleagues on the
Cahiers du cinéma would
make a habit of savaging. One of the most politically engaged French
filmmakers of his generation, Le Chanois was himself something of an individualist,
often dealing with contemporary themes that few other directors in France
were interested in, including state education (
L'École buissonnière),
single motherhood (
Sans
laisser d'adresse) and modern birthing methods (
Le Cas du docteur Laurent).
Le Chanois first made his mark with
Au coeur de l'orage (1949),
an eye-opening documentary on the French Resistance, and he also directed
one of France's best war films,
Les
Évadés (1955).
Papa, maman, la bonne
et moi (1955) was his first major box office hit - a comedy on one
of the hottest topics of the time: the scarcity of housing for the young.
A literary adaptation made on a colossal budget,
Les Misérables
is highly atypical for Le Chanois but the director regarded it as one of
his finest achievements.
The film certainly looks impressive. Presented in widescreen and colour,
it is the kind of glossy production that was a thousand times more likely
to be made in Hollywood than France. Massive sets were constructed
at two major studios in East Germany, where most of the location exteriors
were shot (many were also filmed in France, at huge expense).
For the film's two standout action sequences - the flashback to the Battle
of Waterloo and the anti-monarchist Paris uprising of 1832 - soldiers in
the East German army were drafted in as extras to add verisimilitude.
In contrast to the interior scenes, which appear static and theatrical by
today's standards and scarcely do justice to the widescreen format, the exterior
location sequences are composed with startling artistry, and often match
the expressive power of Hugo's writing. There is surely nothing as
bleak and stark in 1950s French cinema as the scene of Javert's suicide,
a scene that drives home the central moral of the novel with the steely determination
of Van Helsing dispatching a vampire. Of the studio work, the sewer
scenes that follow the bloody street battle have the greatest visual impact,
thanks to some superb design work and equally inspired lighting.
And then there's the cast - one of the finest ever assembled for any French
film of this era. The casting of Jean Gabin as Jean Valjean was a no-brainer
- the part demands an actor of extraordinary range and charisma - but even
Gabin manages to impress with the subtlety of his performance, which makes
convincing his character's gradual development over a period of many years
from a conscienceless petty criminal to a gentleman of impeccable morality.
Valjean's spectacular process of redemption is measured against the seeming
inability of his rival Javert to develop as a human being. Bernard
Blier's portrayal of Javert, as a man fatally welded to a false idea of justice,
is more pitful than villanous. Indeed, Javert becomes the film's most tragic
character, a man who is incapable of resolving the moral dilemma that fate
presents him with.
The private war between Gabin and Blier takes up a substantial portion of
the narrative and makes compelling viewing, but as in the original novel,
there are numerous subplots which elaborate on the story's central theme,
and these are no less memorable, thanks to the astonishing acting talent
on offer. Bourvil is probably the least likely actor you'd expected
to find in the role of Thénardier, the most contemptible and irredeemable
of Hugo's characters. At a time when he was pretty well stereotyped
as the naive but likeable country bumpkin, Bourvil surprised audiences with
his graphically roguish portrayal of Thénardier.
It's a gift a part for any actor, but the character's sheer nastiness means
that he is often played as a stock villain. Bourvil avoids this mistake
and makes his Thénardier a far more interesting creature by investing
him with just a smidgen of his own habitual charm. There is a subtle
humanity to Bourvil's Thénardier which is rarely found in other screen
adaptations of the novel, and which compels us to see something more than
just the monstrous hypocrite he tries to be. It is with frightening
ease that Bourvil steals each one of his scenes with Gabin - just as he had
done in their previous collaboration on Claude Autant-Lara's
La Traversée de Paris
(1956).
The female character who is brought to life most vividly is Thénardier's
tragically fated daughter Éponine - and this owes far more to Silvia
Monfort's captivating performance than it does to the script or even Hugo's
original conception. Monfort first made her mark in the Théâtre
National Populaire and soon became one of France's most highly regarded stage
actresses; she devoted only a modest portion of her career to film and television.
She appeared in several films by La Chanois (her real-life partner at the
time), but rarely in a starring role. Her appearance in
Les Misérables
is arguably the highpoint of her screen career - and as you watch her you
wonder how it was that an actress with such a magnetic presence could have
made so few films. The answer is simple: she preferred the stage.
Another piece of inspired but far-from-obvious casting was Giani Esposito
for the part of the troublesome idealist Marius. With his odd mix of
boyish innocence and Byronic allure, Esposito was perfect for the role, and,
like Monfort, you wonder how he managed to avoid becoming a major film star.
His impact on cinema was modest, although he did flourish in another arena,
as a singer-songwriter. The main reason why he is all but forgotten
today is because he died far too young, at the age of 43.
Les Misérables
shows what a capable performer Giani Esposito was - his scenes with Monfort
are among the most poignant and truthful the film has to offer.
Making up the supporting cast is a host of talent that includes established
stars like Serge Reggiani and Danièle Delorme, and esteemed character
actors of the calibre of Lucien Baroux and Jean Murat. Perfectly at
home in the role of the benign Monseigneur Myriel is Fernand Ledoux, who
would later play Gillenormand in Robert Hossein's
1982 version of Les Misérables.
The connection with other adaptations of Hugo's novel do not stop there.
In the role of Mademoiselle Gillenormand we have Suzanne Nivette, who played
Éponine in Fescourt's 1925 version, and Émile Genevois, Gavroche
in Bernard's 1934 version, shows up briefly as a coach driver.
Although Jean-Paul Le Chanois originally conceived his
Les Misérables
as a five hour long epic split into two films, it ended up being released
as a single film, with a runtime varying between three and four hours depending
which country you saw it in. Today, the film is most readily available
in two parts, with a total duration of just over three hours. Even
in its most abridged form, Le Chanois's film is a compelling adaptation of
a great work of French literature. Perhaps it is a tad sluggish in
parts, a little too aware of its own grandeur maybe, but ultimately its artistic
strengths win through. Who needs the French New Wave when you can immerse
yourself in such luxurious 'fodder for the masses' as this?
© James Travers 2016
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Next Jean-Paul Le Chanois film:
La Française et l'amour (1960)