Issue #351: Where does Le Doulos rank among the most difficult film titles to translate into English?
The Gratitude Fanzine/Paradox Newsletter film screenings are becoming the stuff of legend. Tonight we screened The Mission (1999) to a sold-out crowd (based on my judgment, not the maximum capacity of the screening room). Along with the film, we showed trailers for Noroi (2005) and Junji Yasuda’s GISM film, as well as a pre-movie cartoon, a Popeye episode from 1940, “Shakespearian Spinach.”
The Mission is a great movie. Johnnie To flexes every filmmaking muscle to create a film that is brilliant in its simplicity and rich in moment to moment character drama.
Also, basketball is back. It’s going great!
Banner 19 on the way.
Twists and Contradiction in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos
The “Melville et Cie.” series at the Harvard Film Archive has come to an end after months of glorious film programming. In that time, I saw six Melville features. More or less all of his crime films. Over the weekend, Le Doulos (1962) was the final work I saw. It is yet another early work, but perhaps the most unusual relative to the other five I saw over the course of the series and have been writing about over the past few issues.
Le Doulos is unique in the way it uses suspense and surprise. In typifying suspense as a formal quality of film, Hitchcock says in his 1966 book length conversation with François Truffaut:
[S]uspense … is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention. It can be either the suspense of the situation or the suspense that makes the public ask itself, “What will happen next?” … In the usual form of suspense it is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all of the facts involved. Otherwise, there is no suspense. … To my way of thinking, mystery is seldom suspenseful.
In Hitchcock’s view, a necessary condition for suspense is the viewer knowing “all of the facts involved,” making suspense something that can spawn only from dramatic irony. He goes on:
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”
Hitchcock does go on, however, to make an exception for the twist, “whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”
Looking at an example from one of Hitchcock’s own films, Psycho (1960) utilizes both suspense and surprise. There are a number of elements that Hitchcock uses to surprise. Not only the final twist of the film, where it is revealed Norman’s (Anthony Perkins) mother has been dead all along, but also the early killing of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). From Hitchcock/Truffaut:
In the average production, Janet Leigh would have been given the other role. She would have played the sister who’s investigating. It’s rather unusual to kill the star in the first third of the film. I purposely killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that’s why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theaters once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she has disappeared from the screen action.
There is a knowingness of the audience that Hitchcock plays upon with Psycho, necessitating the use of the plot twists:
You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.
Nonetheless, there is also suspense generated by questions where all the cards are more or less on the table. Will Marion Crane’s thievery be discovered? Will Norman be caught in what appears to be the covering up of a murder perpetrated by his overbearing mother?
The primary element between suspense and surprise, in Melville’s films, is usually suspense. His plots are usually more complex than those of Hitchcock, but rarely is there hidden information to be uncovered that changes the texture of the film. In so many words, Melville is not a filmmaker of twists. Le Doulos, however, introduces surprise to the aesthetic of Melville and revises the valuation of the film’s events with repeated shocking turns.
In Psycho, the steady revelation of new knowledge changes the audience’s relationship to the characters. Marion is redeemed by her choice to return the money she steals and made a proper sympathetic victim for the forthcoming murder. Norman is transformed from a fellow victim of his mother into a perpetrator in his owns right. In Le Doulos, the same operation takes place reversing the position of Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Maurice (Serge Reggiani), turning a repulsive villain into a more sympathetic figure and the film’s well-intentioned hero into a hapless clown.
Though Hitchcock’s anatomy of surprise and suspense is useful for understanding Le Doulos, Hitchcock and Melville’s cinematic investments are vastly different. The characters may be the most archetypal in Le Doulos, but Melville always comes back to the deeply held convictions of his heroic hood characters. North by Northwest (1959) is, perhaps, the most Melvillean of Hitchcock’s works. It is an existential meditation as much as it is a kinetic spy thriller, with the question of Roger Thornhill’s (Cary Grant) very being thrown into disarray because of when he chooses to stand up from his seat.
North by Northwest also shows just how unimportant surprise is for suspense. Every element of the film is telegraphed. One of the more groan inducing plot contrivances is the final turn that a sculpture Vandamm (James Mason) purchased earlier in the film turns out to contain state secrets in microfilm. The very introduction of the sculpture seems to be only to facilitate Cary Grant’s hilarious outbursts at the auction where Vandamm obtains it.
One might infer from the idiosyncratic nature of Le Doulos that Melville shared Hitchcock’s preference for suspense over surprise. But a well executed twist, as M. Night Shyamalan can’t let modern filmgoers forget, can also serve to resolve suspense — as is the case in his best film, The Visit (2015). In the case of Melville, the withholding of information goes against the vérité quality of some of his work. Structuring a film without dramatic irony means to wield a camera judiciously, so much so that the intent behind what the camera captures becomes obvious in retrospect. Melville’s eye isn’t one that can be reverse engineered in Bob le flambeur (1956), Le samouraï (1967), or Le cercle rouge, but the logic of his gaze is governed by the hidden plot details in Le Doulos.
If Hitchcock works to control the audiences’ thoughts by directing their prediction in Psycho, Melville is utterly unconcerned with what the audience anticipates in every work but Le Doulos. However, there is one element of the film that subverts the conventional twist. Belmondo’s Silien, if not for the twist, would be one of the greatest villains ever committed to film. Surely, his performance is on par with the most enormous of cinematic heels. To transform his character through a plot twist introduces a near irreconcilable contradiction for the viewer.
Indeed, if the twist resolves contradiction in the plot, Le Doulos’s twist introduces contradiction into the film’s symbolic universe. It is yet another installment into a body of work that is optimistic at its core, despite the grisly fate principal characters meet within it.
Weekly Reading List
I wrote about Vintage Cube Live, the Magic Worlds side event, a few weeks ago:
Now, the day has arrived. Luis and BK streamed the draft and their commentary. It was a really, really cool event. You can read more about the competitors here, but the biggest story is the father/son duo, Rex and Luca Jakobovits, qualifying.
The draft is already must see TV, but they present a nice storyline to follow.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/26/fandom-has-toxified-the-world-watchmen-author-alan-moore-on-superheroes-comicsgate-and-trump — Alan Moore doesn’t mince words in his new editorial for The Guardian:
I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.
Like Moore, I am not a fan of uncritical “stan” culture. His analysis comes from the point of view of an author whose work has been most distorted by rabid fans.
I watched bits of this actual legal artifact from the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Capcom against Data East. Capcom alleged that Fighter’s History (1993) had infringing similarities to Street Fighter II (1991). This video is meant to support Data East’s claim that there is no such infringement. The court found in Data East’s favor, but the video does more to convince me that Data East did take inspiration from Street Fighter II, even if their inspiration didn’t contravene copyright laws.
Sami and I both publish on Mondays, so I don’t always get the opportunity to spotlight his latest issue. This week, his topic is Coke cans in Live Auctioneers listing photos:
you can’t buy the Coke. No one can. It belongs to the auction. You have to get it yourself. Again, I don’t want to get too deep here. I just love it when they put cans in the picture. I’m glad they’re doing it again. If you see any photos of these, please send them to me. It’s the auctions that have cans in them that are the most permanent and important. Can we say that about anything else?
Until next time.