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 (1940) Becker left the film, completed by Jean Stelli
Dernier atout (1942)
Goupi Mains Rouges AKA It Happened at the Inn (1943) RABC France
Falbalas (1945) RB Studio Canal
Antoine et Antoinette (1947) RABC Gaumont
Rendez-vous de julliet (1949) ABC Gaumont
Édouard et Caroline (1951) RB Studio Canal
Casque d'or (1952) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RB Studio Canal
Rue de l'Estrapade (1953)
Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RA Kino / RB Studio Canal
Ali Baba et le Quarante Voleurs (1954)
Les Aventures d'Arsène Lupin (1957) RA Kino Lorber
Montparnasse 19 AKA The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958) RB Arrow (OOP)
Le Trou (1960) R1 Criterion (OOP) / RB Studio Canal

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!

[domino harvey]

Caught up with Rendez-vous de julliet , famously singled out as potentially influential on or even presaging the New Wave. But while I enjoyed it, this is just basic studio filmmaking with younger stars in it. This is a spiritual precursor to the Affairs of Dobie Gillis, not A bout de souffle. Perhaps there's also some wish fulfillment in the central Jean Rouch-type character, but his efforts to get a film crew together resemble Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney assembling a barn dance more than la Nouvelle Vague. It's also hard to not once again be struck by the Cahiers crew embracing a moralistic story that puts a woman who strays in her place...

I have a couple more Becker films to take in, but I cannot escape my feeling that this is a minor director raised to pantheon status by the crew at Cahiers for reasons that I may never be able to fully be on board with. I was recently reading the obits for Becker from Cahiers, and one of the critics (it might have been Godard?) noted that they considered Becker the most French of all French directors. And maybe that's where the disconnect will always be. Andrew Sarris claimed that Preston Sturges' inherent Americanism prevented the French critics from ever fully getting what he was doing, and perhaps a similar cultural barrier exists for me with Becker. There's also of course the Renoir connection and the fact that Becker was the first big directorial interview Cahiers landed in the early days of the journal, so there may be other subjective factors I or anyone else cannot replicate in revering him

For the record, I think Le trou is a masterpiece, but it's also unlike any of Becker's other films and I also like it far more than any of those I've seen

[Red Screamer]

Falbalas is my second favorite Becker after Le Trou and his influence on the Godard-Karina films is pretty apparent in the first, apartment-bound section of Édouard et Caroline. I do think he’s a pretty interesting and varied filmmaker even if it seems like he didn’t have/take many chances to fully stretch out in ambition and style until his final film. IIRC part of why Cahiers took him on as a role model was, like Melville, his status as semi-independent figure who made popular films.

[nowhereisaplace]

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!

I am only just seeing this now, so apologies for responding so late but wanted to close the loop on this. Yes, Truffaut dedicated a long review to it in Arts, which was collected in Chroniques des Arts-Spectacles (which is a great collection and is the true evidence of his critical prowess, in my opinion. When Godard called him one of the greatest critics, I didn't agree with him at all until after reading this book). I will have to go back and read that Doniol-Valcroze text, it sounds very interesting and shows how as a whole they struggled with approaching this film vis-a-vis the politiques des auteurs, especially as Doniol never seemed to be a huge torch waver for the auteur theory to begin with.

Although I also see this reaction as a bit of an early indication of the path the review would take in the early sixties, when they seemed to question some of their more long held beliefs and you started seeing reappraisals of guys like Ford appear. Anyway, don't want to get too far off topic in the Becker thread!

[domino harvey]

Rue de l'Estrapade is a terrifically lively romantic comedy, and easily the best of Becker’s three comic explorations of deteriorating/rejoining couples. Anne Vernon is impossibly wide-eyed as a wife who gets a quasi-bohemian revenge on her cheating husband Louis Jordan by leaving him to rent a room in a shithole. Daniel Gelin as her chanteur neighbor presses his charm as far as it will go with his character here, and indeed the film would not work at all if he couldn’t convince an audience of his innate tenderness amidst all of the tres aggressive wooing he does of Vernon.

nowhereisaplace, I’m actually in the middle of reading Truffaut’s book now. I thought the intro essay was one of the best things I’ve ever read about the love of films