Cet homme est dangereux 1953

Cet homme est dangereux (This Man Is Dangerous) is a 1953 French thriller directed by Jean Sacha and the second film in which the American-born singer and actor Eddie Constantine played Lemmy Caution, the hard-drinking, wisecracking federal agent created by the British novelist Peter Cheyney. Lemmy goes undercover on the French Riviera to bring down the international gang of a crime boss called Siégella, posing as an escaped convict and offering to help kidnap a rich American heiress. It followed La Môme vert-de-gris (1953), the film that launched the character on French screens, and it was also a box-office success. It is not a great film, but it is a lively example of a very French fascination with American pulp fiction in the 1950s, and the start of a long screen career for Lemmy.

The story

Lemmy Caution is given the job of neutralising Siégella's network, played by Grégoire Aslan. To get inside, he pretends to be on the run from prison. On the Riviera he crosses paths with Constance, played by Colette Deréal, a beautiful woman connected to Siégella.

He persuades the gang that he can help them kidnap Miranda Van Zelden, the daughter of an American millionaire, played by Claude Borelli. While he plays along, he gathers evidence. Once he has enough to have Siégella convicted, he sends the documents to Interpol. His cover is then blown, and he has to fight his way out.

Lemmy Caution in France

Peter Cheyney's Lemmy Caution novels, written in a racy imitation of American slang, were enormously popular in France after the war, published in Marcel Duhamel's Série noire collection at Gallimard. Duhamel himself wrote the dialogue for this film.

Eddie Constantine, born in Los Angeles, had come to Paris as a singer and was encouraged by Édith Piaf. As Lemmy he was rough, charming and self-mocking, with a battered face and a habit of punching first. French audiences took to him at once, and he played the character in a string of films through the 1950s and early 1960s.

Style and pleasures

Sacha keeps things moving: fistfights, cars, nightclubs, women in evening dresses and gangsters in good suits. The tone is half serious, half parody, with Lemmy's sarcasm and the gang's menace pulling in different directions. The sets were designed by Jean d'Eaubonne, who worked on many of the period's best-looking French films.

The supporting cast includes Guy Decomble, later the strict schoolteacher in Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups.

Lemmy's strange afterlife

The most famous film with Constantine as Lemmy Caution is not one of these thrillers. In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard cast him as Lemmy in Alphaville, a science-fiction film in which the agent travels to a city ruled by a computer. Godard used the actor's tough-guy image precisely because audiences already knew it from films like this one.

If you enjoy crime films of the period, start with stronger examples such as Le Salaire de la peur and Les Diaboliques, then come back to Lemmy for fun. See also the best French thrillers and the best French films of the 1950s.