Jericho (1946)
Directed by Henri Calef

Film Review

It is probably no great surprise to learn that, in 1946, five of the ten most viewed French-made films at the box office in France were wartime dramas, each attracting an audience in excess of three and a half million.  Of these, only René Clément's La Bataille du rail is widely known today, but some of the others - Le Père tranquille, Jericho and Un ami viendra ce soir - are all of interest as they provide a valuable record of how ordinary people in France were affected by the Nazi Occupation.  Like Clément's film, Jericho has an obvious propaganda subtext - namely to support the manufactured de Gaulle narrative that France had been a nation of brave résistants during the Occupation - but it is nonetheless a compelling piece that achieves its aims without resorting to the full-on glorification of the Resistance and Allied forces depicted in many subsequent French WWII films such as Alexander Esway's Le Bataillon du ciel, the box office topper of 1947.

Jericho takes as its starting point a real historical event - an RAF raid on a French prison in northern France in February 1944, aptly named Opération Jericho - but develops a fictional drama around this involving the rounding up and detention of hostages from a wide cross-section of the population.  Through a combination of great writing (from Charles Spaak at his best) and superlative acting (from an impressive ensemble comprising many established character actors) the film provides a harrowing and true-to-life depiction of how different individuals cope with the prospect of impending death.  Admittedly, the demarcation between the courageous stoical types and the snivelling cowards is a little too starkly drawn, but director Henri Calef and his cinematographer Claude Renoir keep things suitably restrained and sombre, without allowing the film from ever descending to the level of a miserabilist melodrama or trite propaganda piece.

Pierre Brasseur's gradual disintegration from cynical wartime spiv to abject dribbling invertebrate is memorably horrific, particularly as it is counterbalanced by the good-natured submission to the inevitable by nobler specimens of humanity played by Pierre Larquey (needlessly robbed of one of his legs) and Louis Seigner.  A Resistance operation led by Raymond Pellegrin provides the film with its rivetting action set-piece, but even this is overshadowed by the moving sequence that follows as the hostages are assembled in a church and forced to accept that there is now no possibility of a reprieve.  Jericho may not be as showy as La Bataille du rail but it has a much greater emotional resonance as it focuses less on grand heroic exploits and more on the quiet heroism of ordinary people.

Film Synopsis

In February 1944, the Germans still occupy the town of Amiens in northern France.  The tide of the war is rapidly turning but the town's inhabitants continue to live in fear of what Fate has in store for them.  To dissuade the Resistance from blowing up a vital train loaded with fuel the Nazis order the town's administrators to draw up a list of fifty people who will be taken hostage and shot in the event of the attack happening.  The fifty individuals selected include detainees in a prison, who face up to the prospect of the impending execution in different ways.  Some remain stoical, others try to hide their fear, a few give way to abject terror.  Undeterred by the threat of the executions, the Resistance attacks the train as planned and the hostages are duly taken away to a church, to face a firing squad the following morning.  Meanwhile, across the channel in England, the Royal Air Force is preparing to launch a precision strike on the prison with the aim of galvanising support in France for the impending Allied invasion...