Voici le temps des assassins (1956)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

Voici le temps des assassins is the darkest and most cynical of Julien Duvivier's films, an even more pessimistic assessment of human nature than his previous noir-tinted dramas Panique (1947) and L'Affaire Maurizius (1954).  Duvivier's bitter misogynism, first evident in La Belle équipe (1936) and Un carnet de bal (1937), receives its fullest expression in this film, which the critic François Truffaut cited as the director's best work.  The film bears more than a passing resemblance to Yves Allégret's equally gloomy Manèges (1950), although Duvivier succeeds in making his femme fatale a far deadlier creature, a calculating monster in the form of an angelic Danièle Delorme.   The film and its inappropriately jaunty theme song take their title from Illuminations, a collection of poems by the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud, specifically the last line of Matinée d'ivresse.

Voici le temps des assassins was the last of seven films that Julien Duvivier made with the actor Jean Gabin.  Their most recent collaboration prior to this had been The Impostor (1944), made during the director's brief spell in Hollywood during the war, and before this they had worked together on a number of films that are now considered classics of French cinema: Maria Chapdelaine (1934), La Bandera (1935), Pépé-le-Moko (1937) and La Belle équipe (1936).  As in most of his films for Duvivier, Gabin once again plays the noble innocent who is lured to his doom by a woman of questionable morality.  On this occasion, Gabin is far more of a force to be reckoned with - a tougher, more resilient character, very different from the fragile romantic of his pre-war years.  As a result, the film's denouement is far more dramatic that in any previous Duvivier film, and the evil temptress gets much more than she deserves.   What is most shocking about Voici le temps des assassins is not the central crime, as horrible as that may be, but the brutality of its retribution.  What Duvivier offers us is the grimmest portrait of a society that has totally lost its moral bearing and fails to recognise the value of human life; we really are living in the age of the killer.

Duvivier's mise-en-scène is as slick as ever, particularly in the last few reels which derive the maximum dramatic impact from the horrific conclusion.  Armand Thirard's cinematography adds greatly to the tense, brooding mood of the film, achieving a similarly noirish effect to that of Thirard's previous work on H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955), a similarly dark study in deceit and depravity.  The film's strongest selling point, however, has to be its cast, principally the inspired casting of Jean Gabin and Danièle Delorme.  With Gabin old enough to be Delorme's father, the casting was provocative but highly effective, albeit nowhere near as scandalous as Gabin's subsequent pairing with Brigitte Bardot in Claude Autant-Lara's En cas de malheur (1958).

Delorme first found fame as Gigi, not in the Vincente Minnelli musical but in the original French adaptation of the Colette novel directed by Jacqueline Audry 1949.  Since that film, the actress had become pretty well typecast as the innocent ingénue, so the role of the murderous Catherine in Voici le temps des assassins came as a welcome escape for an actress seeking to broaden her repertoire.  Delorme's performance in this film is one of her finest.  Even though her character's uglier side is revealed to us at an early stage, she somehow manages to retain our sympathy.  Catherine is as much a victim of circumstances as the men she chooses to destroy.  It is easier to pity the young woman who is driven to commit a terrible crime than those who foolishly fail to see through her lies and allow themselves to be led to the slaughter like sheep.  The death cries she utters in the film's savage climax cut through the spectator like a knife, far harder to endure than the sight of the murder she is driven to commit.

Jean Gabin turns in another solid performance, providing the film with its deceptive moral centre as the seemingly unimpeachable restaurant owner.  Gabin still retains a vestige of his pre-war romanticism, but he had by this stage in his career acquired a far more down-to-earth persona, a patriarchal toughness that is only just tempered by his Gallic charm.  The actor had already become accustomed to playing heavies, in films such as Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955), and it is this new, tougher, more cynical Gabin that we see in Voici le temps des assassins.  The role of the earlier Gabin - the naïve romantic - is taken by Gérard Blain, an actor who would later become associated with the French New Wave, through his collaborations with François Truffaut (Les Mistons), Jean-Luc Godard (Charlotte et son Jules) and, most importantly, Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins).

The other notable name in the cast list is Lucienne Bogaert, who is superbly well cast as Catherine's grotesque, drug-addicted mother Gabrielle.  With her severe features and fiercely matriarchal persona, Bogaert was particularly well suited for the role of the overly protective mother, as she demonstrated in Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) and Jean Delannoy's Maigret tend un piège (1958).  Here, Bogaert's character Gabrielle is more pathetic than evil; her role is simply to provide a mirror in which the wicked nature of Delorme's character is revealed to us - the soul of the daughter reflected in the face of the mother, a face that could not be more revealing of Julien Duvivier's cruel, unforgiving antipathy towards women.

Film Synopsis

André Chatelin manages a popular restaurant in Paris, adjacent to the busy Halles market.  His is an uneventful but contented life, until the fateful day when he is visited by Catherine, the daughter of his ex-wife Gabrielle.  When Catherine reveals that her mother has recently died, André takes pity on her and invites her to live with him.  He even offers her a job in his restaurant, which she accepts gratefully.  André's mother cannot help seeing something of Gabrielle in her daughter and suspects that Catherine has an ulterior motive.  Her fears seem to be confirmed when André decides to marry the young woman.  This development upsets Gérard, the restaurateur's adopted son, who has himself fallen in love with Catherine.  What neither of the men realises is that Catherine's mother is still alive and that her daughter has only married André for his money.  Catherine believes that by seducing Gérard and poisoning his mind against André she can persuade him to murder her husband.  The scheme does not go quite as expected...