‘Lady Killer’ and ‘The Strange Mister Victor’ Review: A Golden Age

Compared to different heavy hitters from the golden age of French cinema — suppose Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”) or Marcel Carné (“Children of Paradise”) — historical past hasn’t been form to Jean Grémillon. This is particularly the case within the United States, the place the director’s work continues to be mentioned amongst cinephiles like a particular secret. It’s a disgrace. His movies are among the many most modern and expressive from a interval stretching roughly from the early Nineteen Thirties via the ’50s — and in some ways they look forward to the rule breaking of the French New Wave.

Newly restored in 4K, “Lady Killer” and “The Strange Mister Victor” are primarily Grémillon’s breakthrough movies, the midpoints between his early documentaries and experimental dramas and his biggest hits (“Stormy Waters,” “Lumière d’été”), which he made in the course of the German occupation of France.

“Lady Killer” stars the leonine Jean Gabin as Lucien, a womanizing legionnaire. Suave and horny in his uniform, Lucien attracts the feminine gaze like moths to the flame. Enter the femme fatale Madeleine (Mireille Balin), a stupendous socialite certain to a rich benefactor. Lucien falls onerous for Madeleine and takes up a job at a print store in Paris in order that they are often collectively. Then comes betrayal and homicide, although Grémillon dietary supplements the awful fatalism and noirish intrigue with bursts of quivering melodrama that enrich and broaden the story past its ostensible fatal-attraction framework.

In his early days, Grémillon was a violinist who performed with an orchestra that supplied accompaniment for silent movies. He applies this musical sensibility to his development of drama. His movies transfer between small, seemingly uneventful moments and ones that hit like a reverberating gong. What begins out as a placid relationship between Lucien and his meek physician pal, René (Réne Lefèvre), strikes on to new, devastating terrain. Their bond is capped by a startlingly intimate scene of male camaraderie that performs like a fever dream.

Working within the custom of poetic realism, Grémillon intermingled documentarylike visions of working-class milieus with stylized interludes of psychological stress. “The Strange Mister Victor” begins like a panoramic drama concerning the socially numerous inhabitants of Toulon, within the south of France, and ultimately reveals an moral disaster concerning the entanglement of two males. Victor Agardanne (Raimu) is an upstanding businessman with spouse and little one, although he secretly consorts with a band of crooks. When he kills one in every of them for threatening to blackmail him, he makes use of a software that belongs to his cobbler, Bastien (Pierre Blanchar), because the homicide weapon, which ends up in that man’s arrest. When Bastien escapes imprisonment, the responsible Victor goes out of his method to harbor the unsuspecting fugitive.

There’s maybe extra to chew on in “Mister Victor,” bolstered by an professional efficiency from Raimu that straddles real ethical anxiousness and self-interested desperation. Yet one specific scene from “Lady Killer” continues to stay in my head rent-free.

Midway via the movie, a mirror captures Lucien as he spots Madeleine from a distance after which steps again into the shadows when she meets his gaze. The plots of Grémillon’s movies are meaty and sociologically probing, however what units him aside from the administrators of his time — the vast majority of them narrative-focused artists who got here from a theater background — are moments like these: transient, wordless, however throbbing with need and despair.

Lady Killer
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.

The Strange Mister Victor
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.