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Penitentiaries and factories, "elsewhere, life is a melody." The escape is remembered by Melville in Le Deuxième Souffle, the convict (Raymond Cordy) hops on a bicycle and crosses the finish line at a local race. Music can be imprisoned, he learns, the business of phonographs and records is a booming one, the escapee turns impresario. (Bowler-hated, bow-tied and striped-suited, he's a ringer for Jean Hersholt.) The cult of labor from childhood on ("Le travail est obligatoire car le travail c'est la liberté"), smokestacks in the distance like bars on a cell window. Into it stumbles the boss' old jail chum (Henri Marchand), the scrambling romantic now a speck on the conveyor belt, in love with the secretary (Rolla France) who looks suspiciously like the blonde mediator from Metropolis. "Want to start a scandal?" René Clair and the new industrial epoch, just the era for such mysterious contraptions as moving images with recorded sound. Punch the clock, turn the screw, a cog in the system. A Georges Auric lilt for Lang's geometric masses, marching along in cavernous sets for the clear benefit of Chaplin and Orwell. "Ami, l'ombre de la prison a cédé la place au soleil." Painted wooden horses and lip-syncing ingénues, pumping pistons and floral chorales, a Fernand Léger welter. Kennedy's From Soup to Nuts figures in the dinner soiree, with pierced painting and spilled cake (cf. Edwards' The Party). Plutocrats and criminals were meant to meet, a bag of loot and a bit of wind are all it takes to have dignitaries spinning madly around the courtyard. Let machines take care of machines, says Clair, there are rivers for fishing and ballrooms for dancing. "So here's to us and liberty." Gilliam's Brazil darkens the dream. Cinematography by Georges Périnal. With Paul Ollivier, André Michaud, Germaine Aussey, Léon Lorin, and Alexander D'Arcy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |