Jacques Becker

[DarkImbecile]

Jacques Becker (1906 - 1960)



"When you direct, you write dialogue sparingly because you look to give the most of life and truth possible to the direction and acting."

Filmography

Feature Directing
L'Or du Cristobal AKA Cristobal's Gold (1940) [Becker left the film, completed by Jean Stelli]
Dernier atout AKA The Trump Card (1942)
Goupi Mains Rouges AKA It Happened at the Inn (1943)
Falbalas AKA Paris Frills (1945)
Antoine et Antoinette (1947)
Rendez-vous de julliet AKA Rendezvous in July (1949)
Édouard et Caroline (1951)
Casque d'or AKA Golden Marie (1952)
Rue de l'Estrapade AKA François Steps Out (1953)
Touchez pas au grisbi AKA Honour Among Thieves (1954)
Ali Baba et le Quarante Voleurs AKA Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954)
Les Aventures d'Arsène Lupin (1957)
Montparnasse 19 AKA The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958)
Le Trou AKA The Hole AKA The Night Watch (1960)

Shorts
"Tête de turc" (1935)
"Le Commissaire est bon enfant, le gendarme est sans pitié" (1935)
La vie est à nous (1936) [collectively directed with seven others, including Jean Renoir]

Books
Jacques Becker by Claude Naumann (2000) [French]

Web Resources
Senses of Cinema "Great Directors" page on Becker

Forum Discussion
270 Casque d'or
271 Touchez pas au grisbi
Montparnasse 19
129 Le trou

[senseabove]

My local rep is doing a Becker retrospective right now. I haven't been able to get to all of it, unfortunately, but Falbalas was the highlight of all the movies I saw last month. The screening was a DCP, so I'm hoping its in the pipeline for BD release, though it didn't appear much if any work had been done to clean it up.

[Stefan Andersson]

Interesting info about the new SC Le Trou blu:

"the Studiocanal blu-ray edition of Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960) includes a 180-page book, Explorer 'Le Trou' de Jacques Becker, with texts by Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Antoine de Baecque, Bernard Benoniel and Olivier Père. The second part of the publication offers archival documents, reviews and interviews, and it concludes with the first 32 pages of the orginal film script, including the minutes that were cut by the producer right after the release." (my bold)

Source: https://sabzian.be/note/new-book-releases-winter-2021

Related info here: https://seances-speciales.fr/wp-content ... ignant.pdf - see p. 4

[domino harvey]

Earlier this year, Kino released Becker’s Lupin film in a three pack with two other adaptations. I’ve only seen the Molinaro one in this set with Cassel and Brialy and it’s awful, hopefully Becker’s is better

[senseabove]

Ooh, good shout. There's an interesting essay on Becker and Sautet in the Summer issue of Cinemascope where brief but unequivocal praise for his Lupin entry made me curious about it.

[domino harvey]

Well, having now seen it, it is better than the serial-aping Molinaro mess, but it's still not a good movie. Becker's entry here reminded me of his Ali Baba film with Fernandel-- obvious mainstream entertainment with close to zero artistic merits (though that movie was nowhere near as lethargic as this is). I have nooooooo idea what levels of cognitive dissonance gripped the Cahiers crew when they praised this well after Truffaut led the charge against popular French films of this nature. Auteurism run amok yet again!

Becker's film is, however, better than the lame (and endless) Yves Robert-directed Lupin sequel also included in the Kino set, so there's some meager praise for ya-- it's the clear winner of the three (the real winner would, of course, be whoever doesn't pick this set up at all, but I already lost that one)

[nowhereisaplace]

I always thought this was the film that started to sour the Cahiers' team unequivocal praise of Becker... I seem to remember a negative Truffaut review, maybe in Arts. Which stands out, as he was not usually one to go back on initial judgments of filmmakers, especially someone of Becker's stature.

[domino harvey]

Truffaut indeed gave it one star in the Conseil, but Rohmer was the only other of the ten who joined him in a rating that low. It remained the second-highest rated film covered that month. Haven't read Truffaut's take down (is it in one of his collections?), but Doniol-Valcroze wrote the review in Cahiers, which is pretty interesting, actually. He argues that you can't defend it by saying it's a for-hire work for Becker because he wanted to make it, so you have to find another way to excuse it and still follow the auteur theory... which he proceeds to attempt (not too convincingly, but it's an interesting read for the hoops these guys sometimes had to jump through to justify their dogmas)

Fereydoun Hoveyda also wrote a very, very long open letter to Jacques Becker AS Arsene Lupin in the same issue!