French Comedy on Screen

A Cinematic History

R. Lanzoni

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230338425
• eBook ISBN: 9781137100191
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

French comedy films occupy a specific cultural space and are influenced by national traditions and shared cultural references, but at the same time they have always been difficult to classify. This book investigates the different methods in which these comedies textually inscribed and exemplified a variety of cultural and historical landmarks.

CHAPTER 1

The Early Comedies of the Sound Era

If the 1920s heralded and developed many new artistic currents in France, the 1930s were not a revolutionary period per se on a cinematic level, but rather a decade of transition confirming the advent of sound and its impact on mass audiences in France. The sudden venue of the talkies with The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the first French talkie a couple of years later ­created a disruption and ultimately a revolution in the world of music and its relation to the seventh art. In France, more than a year later, Aubert Franco-Film Gaumont produced Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel’s Le collier de la reine (The Queen’s Neckless, 1929). Intended to be a silent movie, it included a recorded music soundtrack and a dialogue scene, which was the first scene with dialogue in a French long feature film. A few days later André Hugon’s Les trois masques (The Three Masks, 1929), produced by Pathé-Natan, was released and is to this date considered the first “talkie” in French film history (though shot near London due to the better equipment available at Elstree Studios). This newfound situation, emblematically represented by the end of an era giving birth to a new one, can be best epitomized by the popular song on Parisian nostalgia “Où est-il donc?” rendered by national icon Fréhel in Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1936). The song evoked a certain melancholy about the popular district of Montmartre, which was already undergoing an identity transformation, starting in the famous “années folles” (the Golden 1920s in English). The popular singer deplores the end of an era, not only weeping about her lost glory days, but also missing a mythical Paris, which seems to have vanished for good in this new decade just as the impending fate of silent cinema.

I. Forerunner Comedies in the 1930s: Chansonniers and Musical Comedies

While official historical accounts of French cinema rarely leave any space for comedies in their anthologies, or for their authors and directors, the inclusion of several actors promoted to the rank of national stars is a clear testimonial of the importance of the genre. Without this generation of comic actors, much of an entire decade of filmmaking would have fallen into oblivion. Saturnin Fabre, Raymond Cordy, Jules Berry, Julien Carette, Pauline Carton, and Elvire Popesco, among others became movies stars thanks to comedy but more importantly they all came from a common artistic background—the music hall. In the initial years of the sound era, traditional comedies were not top-ranked by producers of the film industry, the reason being that attention was focused on the spoken word and the so-called films chantés like Tino Rossi’s Marinella (1936), which became the title of a musical comedy directed by Pierre Caron. Theatrical repertoire being similar in essence, producers gave priority to theatrical adaptations rather than original comical scenarios, in particular to the vaudeville and military comedies. In order to satisfy the public’s enormous appetite for musical comedies, the decade of the talkies began with the domination of the music hall, the café concert, and of course the predominance of the most powerful medium of the prewar era—the radio. In conjunction with the rise of popular songs was the appearance of the TSF (transmission sans fil or wireless transmission), which began in 1921, and resulted in the use of half a million radio sets by the end of the decade, one million by 1932, and eventually five million by 1935. Paris, for instance, hosted several radio stations such as le Poste Parisien, Radio 37, Radiola (later Radio Paris), Tour Eiffel, Paris PTT, and so on. . . . The domination of recorded music (phonographe électrique) or live broadcast, interrupted occasionally by a speaker or announcer, was the norm. Radio became not only the main source of information for the daily news, but also the source of entertainment with a predilection for popular hits. The chansons populaires became the essential element of popular mythology, landscape, and leisurely weekends as illustrated by Jean Gabin with the famous song “Quand on se promène au bord de l’eau” in Julien Duvivier’s La belle équipe (They Were Five, 1936) for which the music was composed by Maurice Yvain.

With the support of radio broadcasts, which gave priority to popular music, a myriad of songs became national icons, such as Berthe Sylva’s “Frou Frou” and Joséphine Baker’s “J’ai deux amours” in 1930, Charles Trenet’s “Prosper youpla Boum” in 1935 and “La Romance de Paris” in 1941, Marie Dubas’s “Mon Légionnaire” in 1936, and Edith Piaf’s “L’accordéonniste” in 1940. These so-called chansonniers from the café concert along with other stars of the music hall were all of a sudden propelled to the rank of movie stars. Capitalizing on their celebrity status, producers began to contract out acting roles to most of these already established singers. Consequently, many of them (also known as chanteurs-interprètes) with a national ambition had to make an immediate and delicate transition from singer to actor, such as Ray Ventura, Maurice Chevalier, Fréhel, Charles Trenet, Jean Gabin, Tino Rossi, Albert Préjean, Georges Milton, Josephine Baker, and Mistinguett among others (Edith Piaf made a brief appearance in Jean de Limur’s La garçonne (The Tomboy) in 1936). On the other hand, some already established actors had to learn how to sing in order to further their acting career, as in the case of Danielle Darrieux, Arletty, Annabelle, Jules Berry, Gaby Morlay, Paulette Dubost, Pierre Dux, Françoise Rosay, Michel Simon, Fernandel, and Charles Boyer.

According to film historian Pierre Billard, French cinema “revitalized the plebeian format of several entertainment shows such as the revue, operetta, vaudeville, melodrama, café concert, all of them reinforcing its vocation for popular art.”1 In theater comedy, singers who combined song and comedy on stage were legion. Bach (born Charles-Joseph Pasquier), who was a very fashionable star at the beginning of the talkies, managed to entertain French crowds with his famous jostling in Henry Wulschleger’s Gargousse (1938). The other actor who rose to fame in the theater singing bawdy verses and silly songs was Dranem (born Armand Ménard), provoking laughter with a touch of madness. Thus, popular music finally penetrated the seventh art offering a new dimension to the talkies. Surprisingly it pervaded all stratas of French society, from popular working classes to intellectual and poetic artistic circles like the so-called cinéma d’avant-garde. Composers like Vincent Scotto, Armand Bernard, Raoul Moretti, Maurice Yvain, Jean Wiener, Joseph Kosma, Maurice Jaubert, Jacques Ibert, and Georges Auric included popular songs as part of their registry for the musical scores of long feature films and happily embarked on the musical comedy trend as many of them had received contracts to write numerous scores for the big screen. So it was in this context that a new type of artistic career was born—that of the studio musician—and film composers, to the dismay of former silent film orchestras, saw their future jeopardized. Once a song was written, recorded, and featured in movie productions, it quickly and almost systematically became a national success thanks to the predominance of radio broadcasts, local balls, and street singers such as those featured in René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (Under The Roofs of Paris, 1930). The song “Y’a de la joie,” written by a little known singer, Charles Trenet, in 1936, was first performed by Maurice Chevalier in his show “Paris en joie,” at the Casino de Paris and became a hit. The song would also be featured in Julien Duvivier’s L’Homme du jour (The Man of the Hour, 1937).

In this early period of the new decade and soon after the revolution of sound, the controversy about its value and potential negative consequences became a source of contention and confusion for many directors of the French film industry. Ironically, amidst this theoretical quarrel, Jean Renoir, an early enthusiast of the talkies who was aware of the new artistic promise this medium could generate, did not direct long feature films between 1929 and 1931, a time when talkies were breaking new grounds, while filmmaker Clair, who begrudged the talkies to the point of calling them a “redoutable monstre,” was one of the first to use sound efficiently in his first talkie Sous les toits de Paris in 1930. With the rapid national success of this pseudo romantic musical comedy, Clair never looked back, despite his previous position against the predominance of sound in the seventh art. He directed A nous la liberté (Freedom for Us, 1931) and Quatorze juillet (Bastille Day, 1932) and went on to become one of the most eminent French directors during the years of conversion from silent films to sound pictures and is still considered one of the most significant auteurs of the twentieth century. Beginning as an assistant to filmmaker Jacques de Baroncelli, Clair developed a visual inquisitiveness for the surrealist experience while maintaining an unadulterated awareness for the more popular musical comedy genre, as well as a real panache for social satire. Clair’s contribution to the comedy genre of the early talkie period was Le million (The Million, 1931), starring René Lefèvre and Annabella in a musical comedy about two unfortunate artists persecuted by an unsympathetic destiny who one day win a lottery and unexpectedly become millionaires. Alas, the lottery ticket is left in a coat that was taken to a local pawnshop and is found after much trouble at the opera house, winding up in an unusually happy conclusion. The story, adapted from a vaudeville sketch written 20 years earlier by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud, triggered Clair’s curiosity with its attractive combination of traditional burlesque and avant-garde character. During the shooting, however, the director’s preference tilted toward the musical adaptation rather than the theatrical representation. The musical element, expressed by popular animated songs, corresponded to the “operetta,” and thus The Million became a permanent reference for French musical comedies at the beginning of the sound era. The very same year Clair reiterated his popular success this time with an ingenious social satire, A nous la liberté, which reportedly may have served as the stimulation for Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Following his escape from jail, Louis (played by Raymond Cordy) develops a phonograph production technique that uses a highly mechanized assembly line where workers are reduced to mere robots—an oppressive universe that is just as tyrannical as the prison he just fled. Eventually, caught up by his past, he decides to join his comrade Emile, an old cellmate, and both embark on a new journey on the roads of France. Thanks to its futuristic sets, A nous la liberté suggested a social significance charged with the notion of modernity and its possible consequence in the workplace. Clair’s innovative foresight, at the same time remote and extraordinarily progressive in its poetic sensuality, seduced many contemporary artists.

Spectatorship and Genre: The Question of Filmed Theater

Is filmed theater possible? Can it truly be something other than a hybrid product, borrowing elements from film and theater, but never able to offer the viewer a real and authentic experience? These questions have indeed been at the center of many debates among historians of cinema, the majority of whom have argued in favor of the exclusive incompatibility of the media. The fact is that in the 1930s the large majority of theater spectators felt indirectly linked to the fate of the characters they observed on stage. In order to draw the same popular attention, cinema needed to better represent the process of identification. Does “filmed theater” take its source from the playwright, as opposed to a live stage performance? Or is the written play the common denominator between theater and cinema, leading each medium to interpret and present the written material to audiences by means of their own respective assets? The 1930s were the age of the so-called théâtre filmé (“filmed” or “canned” theater), which was highly criticized by intellectuals for its deliberate entertainment value, yet successful among popular audiences in France and abroad. Motion pictures no longer monopolized the image; the charm of the script was uncovered, and the public now related to famous quotes in order to remember their favorite films. Among the lucky actors were Michel Simon, Harry Baur, Raimu, Gaby Morlay, Jules Berry, and Arletty.

From the early days of cinematography, whether in the fictions of Méliès or the comedies of Max Linder, the question of adaptation was always in doubt and constantly debated among film critics and filmmakers, mostly in terms of literary honesty, intellectual ethics, and artistic aesthetics. The central question, as exposed by French film theorist André Bazin, was to explicitly articulate if cinema had to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Early Comedies of the Sound Era
• 2 The Comedies of Postwar France
• 3 Comedy in the Modern Era
• 4 French Comedy Today
• Appendix: Box Office in France (in Million Entrances)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index