This movie opens with the epitome of Noir; EXT. Street. Night. Rain lashing down, light dappling the cobbles. A woman walking away from camera. Cut to: Man waiting up ahead. He takes out a gun as the woman approaches and puts a slug where it will do the most good. The woman crumples the man walks away. We stay with him as he enters a Carney and makes for a trailer attached to Le Mur de morte, the Wall of Death. If you shot something like that today you'd probably be satirising Noir but in 1949 it was right on the money. That Wall of Death link pegs the time with almost pin-point accuracy because in the immediate post-war years ex-servicemen were eking out livings riding motor bikes up and down the walls of small enclosed circular arenas as the crowds waited for them to get it wrong - one of the three main characters in Nevil Shute's novel The Chequeur Board takes it up and the novel was published in 1947, a few years later the game was finished. The man with the gun made no attempt to conceal his identity and we recognise leading man Pierre Brasseur, but there's something wrong here, Brasseur wasn't leading man material; his face shouted 'heavy' and he was right at home as the gangster humiliated by Jean Gabin in Quai des Brumes, who later shoots Gabin in the back, he wasn't much nicer as Frederic Lemaitre in Les Enfants du paradis - both Marcel Carne movies - and even his JoJo in Porte des Lilas wasn't that simon pure. So, where were we, oh yes, Fabius (Brasseur) begins to pack when his wife Martha (Arletty) comes in. He's a little nonplussed given that he's just killed her but she's the forgiving sort and he agrees to keep on riding. Now top-billed actress Maria Montez enters the picture as an impresario interested in promoting Fabius as the star of a circus owned by Jules Berry. This involves him performing a loop-the-loop in a specially designed car after hurtling down a ramp designed by Marcel Dalio - YEAH, it IS a great cast if we don't count Montez and I STILL haven't mentioned Eric Von Stroheim as a badly disfigured ex-stuntman employed by Montez. Henri Decoin - no mean director himself - and the brilliant Charles Spaak weigh in with a classy script and you're in for a swell time if you catch this. For me the selling point had to be Arletty in her first film since Les Enfants du paradis four years earlier. They didn't do right by our Bess; accused of collaborating - she had an open relationship with a German officer during the war but that's a long way from collaboration - she was arrested at Carne's house and not allowed to attend the premiere of Les Enfants or work again for a while. It's not for me, a non-Frenchman who wasn't around at the time, to discuss French policies on sensitive issues but as a lover of French Cinema perhaps I can wonder out loud what Great performances have possibly been lost by that Greatest of French actresses in those years between 1945 and her return here in 1949. The price she paid is clearly etched on her face but she still acts joke 'actress' Montez off the screen.
Review of Portrait of a Killer
