L'Homme de Londres (1943)
Directed by Henri Decoin

Film Review

The Dark Years (Les années noires) is a suitable epithet for the years during which France was under Nazi occupation, 1940 to 1944, but it could equally well apply to the early middle period in the career of director Henri Decoin which delivered one murky, doom-laden drama after another.  It is no accident that these two periods of time coincided.  The director who was at first associated with light comedies (most featuring his wife Danielle Darrieux) took a deliberate turn towards the darker side of human experience once France had succumbed to the might of Nazi Germany.  The films that Decoin made during the Occupation and its austere aftermath were not exclusively pessimistic - Je suis avec toi (1943) is among the director's most exuberant comedies - but most have a grimness and sour solemnity that leave no doubt as to the era in which they were made, perhaps none more so than L'Homme de Londres, a film noir of the bitterest kind.

This was Decoin's second adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, the first being Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942), arguably the best film produced by the German-run company Continental Films.  Simenon was a popular source for French filmmakers at this time, with no fewer than nine of his novels being adapted in France between 1941 and 1944.  Of these only one manages to evoke the famous atmosphere of the Belgian writer's justly celebrated work, and this is Decoin's relentlessly brooding L'Homme de Londres, a penetrating study in guilt that is among the director's bleakest films.  Apart from this, the only other film that is so intensely evocative of Simenon's oppressive world, where the traumas and psychoses of the protagonists are projected outwards and become deeply ingrained in the setting, is Jean Renoir's subtly expressionistic La Nuit du carrefour (1932).

L'Homme de Londres begins with what is almost certainly the most striking sequences in Decoin's entire oeuvre, a montage of tracking shots which take us across a deathly still harbour after dark and into the fog-wreathed streets of a busy sea port.  The night and the mist cling to the town like some malevolent entity, and as anonymous individuals drift through the streets, like lost souls in purgatory, the only sound we hear is the haunting lament ("L'aventure aime la nuit...") of a solitary street singer (an uncredited Nila Cara).  It's a haunting, totally beguiling overture which the rest of the film has difficulty living up to, although Decoin gives it his best shot, aided by some fantastic set design by Serge Pimenoff and some moodily noirish cinematography from Paul Cotteret.

So visually expressive is the film that it hardly needs any dialogue.  Indeed, its one fault is Charles Exbrayat's bombastic script, which, overladen with trite Biblical references and reams of needless verbiage, undermines the impressions that Decoin strives to create in more subtle ways, through his mise-en-scène, lighting and camera angles, all showing the influence of early American film noir.  The scenes in which Fernand Ledoux wrestles with his conscience are chilling to watch - particularly as the actor appears to change before our eyes as the lighting adjusts to bring to the surface his darker persona - but even these are marred by a surfeit of words.  Is it necessary for Ledoux to talk to himself, and at great length, for us to see his inner conflict?  On the scripting front at least, the 'less is more' principle appears to have been disregarded, to the detriment of the film.

It's a shame that the script is so over-written, because in every other department L'Homme de Londres is pretty well flawless.  What impresses most is the quality of the acting, especially the contributions from the principals Fernand Ledoux and Jules Berry, who have rarely given such enigmatic performances as they do here.  It was not long before this that Ledoux had his most celebrated role as the poacher in Jacques Becker's rural thriller Goupi mains rouges (1943), an ambiguous portrayal that has some degree of overlap with the corrupted railway worker that the actor plays in Decoin's film.   In the latter, Ledoux's character is described as being en légitime défense contre la vie; the same could be said of his character in Becker's film.

Despite Exbrayat's efforts to drown the final scene of the film in imprudent verbosity, Ledoux carries it magnificently, and who can fail to be moved when his character finally finds the courage to live up to the consequences of his actions, after being virtually consumed by bitterness and remorse?  Jules Berry has a far less substantial role in the proceedings but he is no less impressive than Ledoux.  Arguably, he has never given a better dramatic performance, quietly sinister as the shady man from London (sans English accent) who seems to come and go like a phantom.  Only in the scene where Berry is probed by Suzy Prim (another character searching for that elusiveness happiness, in the place she is least likely to find it) do we get a fleeting glimpse of who he is, and it comes as a shock to realise that he is more than just a vague shadow of Ledoux's supposedly more upright character.  It is the strange but inescapable duality between Berry and Ledoux's protagonists that is the most interesting aspect of the film, and if screenwriter Exbrayat had made more of this instead of playing the preacher  L'Homme de Londres could well have been Decoin's finest achievement.  Having been cruelly despatched by Ledoux in this film, Berry later allowed himself to be immured by the same actor in a later film, Jean Faurez's Histoires extraordinaires (1949).  Evidently, not every scalded cat fears cold water.

Film Synopsis

A port swathed in dense fog sees the coming and going of boats all day.  During the night, Maloin is the man who controls the trains that transport goods to and from the port.   One evening, he sees a man get off the boat from London and hand his suitcase to another man who has been waiting for him.  Unaware that Maloin is watching them, the two men get into a fight, which ends with one of them falling into the water with the suitcase.  As the other man flees, Maloin dives in and recovers the suitcase.  To his surprise, it is full of money.  Back home, he tells nothing about this to his wife and daughter but hints that they will soon have a better life.  What follows will prove otherwise...