Casque d'or (1952)
Directed by Jacques Becker

Film Review

Of the dozen or so films that Jacques Becker made, only a few have managed to withstand the test of time, but it is on these few, undisputed masterpieces, that his reputation as a film auteur of the first rank rests. Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) is a landmark crime drama which helped to establish the policier as a major genre of French cinema in the mid-1950s.  Le Trou (1960), Becker's final film (released after the director's death), feels so modern and so brutally realistic that it could easily be mistaken for the work of one of the French New Wave directors.  Casque d'or, Becker's best-known work, could not be more different from these two films.  A melancholic period melodrama, it initially appears to come from an earlier era, untainted by the cynacism and bitterness that poisoned the French psyche during the years of Nazi Occupation.  Yet the film does not feel dated - it has a timeless quality, an immediacy that makes it supremely easy to engage with.  This is surely one of cinema's most perfect evocations of the delicacy and transience of romantic love, a film that wreathes its sharp splinters of cruelty in a garland of exquisite tenderness.

Improbable as it may seem, given the film's fanciful plot and brimming poetry, Casque d'or is based on a true story, although Becker and his co-writers did exercise considerable poetic licence in bringing it to the screen.  The real-life counterpart of the central character Marie was the celebrated Parisian prostitute Amélie Hélie.  In the early 1900s, Hélie associated herself with a gang of rough Parisian criminals who were dubbed 'Apaches' by the city's newspapers because their savagery was perceived to be on a par with that of the North American Apache tribes.  The real-life Manda (Joseph Pleigneur) could hardly have been further from the romantic hero of Becker's film. The vicious leader of gang of notorious thieves, his relationship with Amélie Hélie was violent and tempestuous.  It was to Leca, the leader of a rival Apache gang, that Hélie fled, resulting in a protracted urban war between the two gangs which was widely reported in  the newspapers of the day.  Hélie later sought to profit from her notoriety by playing herself in a stage musical of her gangland adventures entitled Casque d'or et les Apaches, although this was banned by the city's police chief after the play's premiere re-ignited hostilities between Manda and Leca's gangs.  

Although Casque d'or is now held in the highest esteem and is considered one of the highpoints of French cinema of the 1950s, it met with a distinctly lukewarm reception on its initial release.  The film's critical and commercial failure came as a severe blow to its director and may have contributed to his willingness to take on inferior, more populist subjects, such as the crass Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs (1954), in later years.  Not all the criticism was bad however.  The enlightened reviewers on the Cahiers du cinéma recognised the artistic merits of Casque d'or immediately, and its influence can be felt in some of the films that François Truffaut directed a decade later.  One of the film's most ardent defenders was Lindsay Anderson, the future director of This Sporting Life (1963) and If... (1968), who was greatly impressed by the sheer expressive power of the close-ups and the subtle way that the characters revealed their most intimate feelings through their interaction with their surroundings. 

Casque d'or brought international fame to it leading actress Simone Signoret, who burns the celluloid like no other actress since Greta Garbo in her most famous role, that of the sympathetic prostitute Marie.  Signoret had made her screen breakthrough a few years previously in Dédée d'Anvers (1948), a memorable film noir melodrama directed by her first husband Yves Allégret.  Casque d'or raised Signoret's international profile considerably - it won her a BAFTA and led her to be offered her Oscar winning role in Room at the Top (1959) - although it also served to limit her repertoire.  It was many years before the actress was able to demonstrate her versatility through roles which were not exclusively fallen women.  Casque d'or may not be the film in which Signoret gives her greatest performance (this accolade would come much later in her career) but it is assuredly the one in which she is at her most sensual and jaw-droppingly beautiful.  Rarely has the camera been so kind to an actress, and rarely has an actress looked so radiant on the screen.  The retina-searing close-ups of Signoret in this film have an unreal, iconic quality, feminine pulchritude at its most stunning.

The film also provided an immense career boost to Signoret's co-star, the Italian-born actor Serge Reggiani.  Previously, Reggiani was noted for playing seedy villainous types, such as the loathsome informer in Marcel Carné's Les Portes de la nuit (1946) and the black marketeer in H.G. Clouzot's Manon (1949).  Max Ophüls's La Ronde (1950) revealed a more sympathetic screen persona, in a touching little vignette in which he played alongside Simone Signoret.  It was presumably this that led Jacques Becker to cast him as the male lead in Casque d'or, an inspired decision which allowed the actor to give one of his most memorable screen performances.   Not only is Reggiani physically right for the part, a far more roughly hewn specimen of humanity than the perfectly formed Signoret, he also brings great depth to his portrayal, exposing a fragility and sensitivity beneath a touch macho exterior.  Reggiani's love scenes with Signoret are among the most romantic of any French film, the subtle gestures of the artists and the poetry of the mise-en-scène conveying far more to the spectator than any amount of dialogue.  What else needs to be said is adequately expressed by the haunting tune to Le Temps des cerises, a familiar air which accompanies the lovers on their tragic idyll and which would later be popularised by Signoret's future husband Yves Montand.

Casque d'or is the most visually alluring of all Jacques Becker's films.  There is nothing elaborate in the design or photography and yet the film has an immediate visual impact, far more so than most films of this era.  The authentically created Belle Époque setting, in particular the sun-drenched location sequences, are powerfully redolent of the impressionist paintings and instantly call to mind the films of another great filmmaker for whom Becker had previously worked as an assistant, Jean Renoir.  The opening scenes on the river and at the guinguette have the same impressionistic vitality, the same harmonious fusion of light and life, as Renoir's Partie de campagne (1936), on which Becker had been the first assistant director.  Indeed, Casque d'or is so evocative of Renoir's films that it can hardly fail to qualify as an affectionate tribute by Becker to his close friend and mentor.  At the same time, Becker manages to impose his own auteur vision on the film.  In the hands of a less rigorous, less passionate filmmaker, Casque d'or could have ended up as a dry, inconsequential melodrama, of the kind that was all too prevalent in French cinema in the 1950s.  Instead, Becker pours everything he has into this film and gives it a soul of its own.  The result is a compassionate hymne à l'amour which, despite its tragic ending, consoles us with the thought that whilst we may be mortal, love is enternal.  Death does not separate Georges from his beloved Casque d'or - rather, it is the means by which the couple are united for eternity, to dance the waltz that has no end.

Film Synopsis

The setting is the Belleville district of Paris circa 1900.  At a riverside guinguette, carpenter Georges Manda meets an attractive young woman named Marie and immediately falls under her spell.  Known as Casque d'or, on account of her helmet of beautiful blonde hair, Marie is a prostitute who is ill-treated by her lover Roland, a member of a gang of Apache criminals.  Angered by Marie's flirtations with Manda, Roland challenges him to a knife duel one night.  Manda wins the contest and, having stabbed his rival to death, takes flight to avoid being arrested for murder.  Marie goes after him and the two enjoy an idyllic romance in the countryside for a few days.  But then Manda discovers that his close friend Raymond has been arrested as Roland's murderer, betrayed by Félix Leca, an associate of Roland.  Manda has no choice but to give himself up to the authorities.  When Raymond is killed in an attempted escape, Manda decides that he must take revenge on Leca, knowing that he risks losing his beloved Casque d'or...