Fièvre (1921)
Directed by Louis Delluc

Film Review

Louis Delluc only directed seven films in the course of five-year long career as a filmmaker but he is nonetheless considered one of the founding fathers of French cinema, belonging to a group of avant garde pioneers that includes Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier and Germaine Dulac.  Delluc earned his reputation as a critic, one of the first and arguably most important of the silent era, and he is credited with first coining the word cinéaste.  Whilst few of his films are regarded as masterpieces, Delluc's work had an enormous influence on directors of his generation, and had he not be struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, his impact on cinema would undoubtedly have been far greater.  Each year, he is honoured with the prize that bears his name, the Prix Louis-Delluc.

Fièvre is one of Delluc's best-known films, and whilst it is a short, running to just over half an hour in the more widely available version without inter-titles, it is a defining work in French cinema.  Set mostly in a Marseille bar crowded with debauched sailors and their eager-to-please floozies, it contains the seeds of both the Provençal slices-of-life that Marcel Pagnol would serve up in the 1930s and the moody poetic realist melodramas of Jean Grémillon, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné.  Jean Renoir was visibly influenced by the film for his hauntingly sordid Simenon adaptation La Nuit du carrefour (1932), which is considered one of the foundation stones for film noir.  Fièvre is very much a film of its time, a conventional melodrama employing all the familiar tropes of its genre, but it also has a realism, immediacy and lyrical quality that few such films of this era possessed.  The film was originally called La Boue (meaning The Mire), but the title was changed at the insistence of the censor, who deemed it too immoral.

As in every film he made, Delluc cast his wife Ève Francis in the lead role, and was wise to do so because she had a formidable screen presence and was one of the most capable screen actresses of her time.  Once the muse of the playwright Paul Claudel, Francis became a favourite with avant garde filmmakers Marcel L'Herbier and Germaine Dulac, and she even worked as an assistant on many of L'Herbier's films.   In Fièvre, Francis impresses as the classic femme fatale (earthy but alluring), but she is also readily identified with the heroine in many a poetic realism drama - a passionate woman trapped in a mediocre life whose one possibility of escape is cruelly snatched from her.  Likewise, in Edmond Van Daële's Militis we glimpse more than a shadow of the doomed proletarian heroes played by Jean Gabin in the later half of the 1930s.

Judged on its own merits, Fièvre could never be regarded as a masterpiece.  The plot lacks substance and originality and whilst Delluc's mise-en-scène has an intimacy and sur le vif spontaneity that lend the film a distinctive mood, it lacks the inspired touch of his subsequent La Femme de nulle part (1922), another hugely influential film.  Fièvre is far less important as a film in its own right than as one that would impact a generation of filmmakers, those who would shape the landscape of French cinema in the 1930s and, in doing so, play nursemaid to one of cinema's most enduring aesthetics, film noir.

Film Synopsis

In the busy French port of Marseille, a rough Corsican named Topinelli runs a popular bar with his wife Sarah.  A party of sailors recently returned from the Far East invade the bar, intent on an evening of carousing and dancing with the women of the town.  Sarah recognises one of the sailors as Militis, a former lover of hers before she married Topinelli.  It is apparent that they still have feelings for one another and the bar owner's jealousy is aroused when he sees his wife dancing with the sailor.  When his own wife, a young Oriental, is threatened, Militis comes to her defence, but in doing so he provokes a violent brawl in which he is killed by Topinelli.  As the latter flees with the sailors, Sarah is left to mourn the loss of her one true love...