Femme Immortelle du Cinéma
Don Malcolm's MidCentury Productions will kick off its 5th festival of French film noir at San Francisco's venerable indie house, the Roxie Theater, on November 15. Each year the festival has grown, building on the excellence and success of the previous year, and so in 2018 the film schedule will, for the first time, span six days, all featuring eclectic, obscure and exciting French noir. Each festival has had a particular focus, and this year the spotlight will shine on twenty films made in France between 1949 and 1959, "The Frenetic Fifties." Click here for the full schedule, including program details, times and ticket information.
Elevator to the Gallows (1968)
Several great stars of French cinema appear in the films included on this year's "French Noir 5" program: Jean Gabin (of course), Simone Signoret, Danielle Darrieux, Arletty, Anouk Aimee...and Jeanne Moreau. Moreau, who passed away in July 2017 at age 89, will be honored at the festival on Friday night, November 16, with screenings of two of her pre-New Wave pictures, Until the Last One/Jusqu'au Dernier and The She-Wolves/Les Louves. Both were released not long before she shot to prominence in young Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows.In an era long past, when art and revival movie houses littered urban centers and university towns across the USA, I saw my first Jeanne Moreau films. The very first was Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), the story of a doomed romantic triangle revolving around the ravishing and enigmatic Moreau. Next came Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, in which a bride whose groom is killed on their wedding day methodically tracks down his killers, one by one. And then came the film that initially launched Moreau and helped launch the French New Wave, Louis Malle's downbeat crime thriller Elevator to the Gallows. I found her moody intensity riveting and from then on kept an eye out for her films.
Jeanne Moreau in the mid-1990s
Many years and many films later, Jeanne Moreau made a rare appearance on American television. It was November 27, 1994, when the 67-year old legend's conversation with veteran reporter Mike Wallace aired on 60 Minutes. The segment was aptly titled, "Femme Fatale." I'd love to watch that episode again, or read the transcript, but so far haven't been able to find either. I remember enough, though. I remember that she wore something feminine, if memory serves it was an elegant, silky dress, possibly with a wrap draped across her shoulders. She looked her age and she looked as though she'd lived, so I doubt there had been very much if any "face work" yet. She was worldly, charming, entirely self-possessed, and very attractive. I was profoundly impressed. And so was Mike Wallace who, during the course of their conversation, fell completely and openly under her spell. By the time the segment ended he was starry-eyed and all but drooling.~
Moreau's biographer Marianne Gray went through a frustrating wrangle with the actress when she set out to write La Moreau. Moreau would cooperate with the writer and then withdraw, return to the project and retreat again. "What is this woman about?" Gray wrote in bewilderment, "She sheds characters like snakeskins..."
Jeanne Moreau, born in Monmartre in January 1928 to a French hotelier/restaurateur and a British-born Folies-Bergere dancer, began to don and shed characters long before she came of age. She'd decided to be an actress at 15 and, though her father violently disapproved, she never looked back. In 1946 she would audition for and be accepted into the France's venerated Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique. A serious student, she avidly dove into the classics. But Moreau was not only dedicated, she was also gifted. The following year, in 1947, she was chosen by Jean Vilar to make her debut at his inaugural Festival d' Avignon in Provence. Not long after Avignon, she was invited to become a member of the prestigious Comedie Francaise and so she left the conservatoire without graduating.
Moreau and Lino Ventura in Touchez pas au grisbi (1954)
Jeanne Moreau would later turn down a long-term contract offer from the Comedie Francaise and move on to the Theatre Nationale Populaire, a repertory company. Eventually the ever independent Moreau, on the advice of Gerard Philipe, France's great leading man of that time, went freelance. Meanwhile, she'd been involved in radio work, made her first television appearance and continued to appear in a string of mostly secondary roles in French films. Though she would become an international screen legend, Moreau did not break through on film nearly as quickly as she did in the theater. Within the film industry, her looks were deemed "plain," "unattractive" and worse. Essentially, her slightly puffy, less that perfectly symmetrical face was not considered photogenic. And so, though her film roles grew to be more and more substantial, Jeanne Moreau would linger just short of film stardom for years.In 1956 Moreau met with great success on the Paris stage as "Maggie the Cat" in a production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. One night, Fate in the form of a budding filmmaker in the theater audience named Louis Malle, stepped into her life. They would meet and she would accept a lead role in his first feature film, Elevator to the Gallows (1958). As her biographer Marianne Gray would write of the impact and importance of the actress's role in this film, "Louis Malle...allowed her to move into the role of a woman rather than a girl, and a woman who had lived intensely and intelligently. Almost overnight their first film together made her the emblematic new woman of European cinema, a woman who could express universal emotions just through her face looking into the camera." The film would receive widespread acclaim and bring the same to both Moreau, then 30, and Malle, who was 25. The pair would make two more films together, The Lovers (1958) and Viva Maria! (1965).
Moreau married just twice, and briefly. Her first husband was Jean-Louis Richard, whom she knew at the conservatoire. They married in September 1949, a day before their son, Jerome, was born. The marriage lasted two years and the pair would remain lifelong friends. She was involved with Louis Malle, Pierre Cardin and Tony Richardson - who was prepared to leave his wife, Vanessa Redgrave, for her - among others, before marrying director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) in 1977; the two divorced in 1979. Of amour Moreau would wisely observe, "Age does not protect you from love, but love, to some extent, protects you from age." Is it any wonder that even in 1994, at 67, La Moreau could so completely enrapture a hard-nosed investigative reporter like 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace?
~
On Friday night, November 16, The French Had a Name for It 5 at San Francisco's Roxie Theater will bow in tribute to La Moreau with two films noir of hers from 1957, Until the Last One/Jusqu'au Dernier and The She-Wolves/Les Louves. Both films were made as her reputation was expanding and make plain how ready she was for the fame that was on her near horizon. Until the Last One, a "Big Top noir," features Moreau as the dancer in a bedraggled circus who takes off with a thief on the run; everyone on this seedy scene is out to get their hands on the loot he stole from his fellow thieves. The She-Wolves induces both chills and the creeps, with Moreau enticing a soldier who's escaped a German POW camp and taken on another soldier's identity and his through-the-mail romance - with her sister.
Jeanne Moreau and Raymond Pellegrin, Jusqu'au Dernier, French noir from 1957
References
La Moreau by Marianne Gray (Donald I. Fine, 1996)
The Washington Post, obituary for Jeanne Moreau, July 31, 2017