From the archive: "Casque d'Or"

Since taking over the UK's Optimum Releasing, the French-owned distributor StudioCanal has done its very best to restore the films and reputation of Jacques Becker, one of the directors all but swept away by the New Wave, after which he came to be regarded - somewhat sniffily - as a poor man's Renoir. First to emerge on DVD was Becker's granite-hard prison-break movie Le Trou from 1960 - prosaic Bresson, to adopt the Godard party line. There now follows 1952's Casque d'Or, itself staking out a criminal underworld of some kind, which ventures that even during the Belle Époque, les citoyens were still capable of some ugly, cutthroat behaviour. What distinguishes the film is the balance Becker finds between masculine and feminine elements. On one level, this is a semi-conventional love story, with Simone Signoret as the moll in the process of working out where she fits in Parisian society. Arriving on the scene on the burly arm of possessive thug Roland (William Sabatier), she soon catches the eye of the honest, dependable Manda (Serge Reggiani), an ex-con carpenter who represents the emergent petite bourgeoisie. All three characters will have their fates decided by Félix (Claude Dauphin), the gang boss who hides his dirty deeds behind the respectable façade of an import business, and treats everyone around him as items to be bought and sold. The latter's presence suggests how the film also functions as a crime story, filling its frames with monobrows in sharp hats, jostling and screwing over one another to get their hands on this world's money and women.

It's true Becker was no soaring visual stylist - that foremost New Wave criterion - but then his feet were always very firmly on the ground. Rejecting, say, the opulence of his contemporary Max Ophüls, he instead took his camera to cobbled working-class neighbourhoods, enabling Signoret and Reggiani to take a memorable waltz around a beer garden where the patrons turn their noses up at these louts with flick-knives, and their tarts, who don't appear to know their place. These lovers prove to be every bit as trapped by their circumstances as the prisoners looking into the deep, dark hole of Le Trou; the narrative motor is a series of heartbreaking breaches of the honour code that now look like both a continuation of the romantic Carné/Prévert tradition, and a glimpse of colder-blooded Melvillian betrayals to come. (Conclusion: Becker was bang in the middle of 20th century French film.) This one is a form of heritage cinema, as the Cahiers critics spotted and (in part) decried, but it's also more modern and broader-minded than that description/dismissal implies - a sort of cinéma de papa, fils et fille. Bonuses are that rueful, reflective worldliness that came as standard in French romances of this period - and in which Becker here proves very nearly the philosophical equal of Renoir - and the fact this is the movie in which every lighting choice has been engineered to make one fall head over heels in love with Signoret: the high watermark of the knowing, mocking, utterly sensual courtesan, the kind of woman absolutely worth fighting over so as to spend even one evening with.

(May 2013)

Casque d'Or returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow, ahead of its 4K Blu-Ray reissue on Monday.