La Bête à l'affût (1959)
Directed by Pierre Chenal

Film Review

La Bête à l'affût was the last of four noir-styled crime dramas that director Pierre Chenal put his name to after his return to France in the mid-1950s.  Before fleeing to Argentina during WWII, Chenal was well-regarded in France, particularly for his moody dramas which include the early film noir L'Alibi (1937) and the suspenseful thriller Le Dernier Tournant (1939), cinema's first adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.  By the time Chenal resumed his career in France after the war, his thunder had been stolen by other directors who had cultivated a more stylish and realistic flavour of film noir - Jules Dassin (Rififi chez les hommes), Jacques Becker (Touchez pas au grisbi) and Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur).  Chenal's final noir offerings looked somewhat bland and dated in comparison and attracted far less attention, but they are well worth rediscovering.

Chenal's noir swansong, La Bête à l'affût (1959) is one of the director's most pessimistic films and makes a companion-piece of sorts to his earlier La Foire aux chimères (1946), his one unequivocal masterpiece.  In both films the main protagonist appears to suffer from a severe case of delusion, of the kind that can only end in tragedy via a startlingly gloomy finale.  La Bête à l'affût may lack the dream-like atmospherics and expressionistic flourishes of the earlier film, but it is still a haunting piece of cinema, made memorable by its claustrophobic cinematography and Maurice Jarre's demonically eerie music, which is almost as frightening as his subsequent score for Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visages (1969).  The final sequence, set within the suffocating confines of a lighthouse amid a misty wasteland, provides a suitably grim and spectacular conclusion to Chenal's association with film noir.

The film is based on a pot-boiler novel Forests of the Night by the American author Day Keene, whose Joy House would later be adapted for French cinema by René Clément as Les Félins (1960), another respectable thriller.  Michel Audiard apparently had a hand in the script, not long before he emerged as one of France's most revered screenwriters and author of such classics as Les Tontons flingueurs (1960) and Le Pacha (1968).  Having played one hard-bitten and dynamic detective in Chenal's earlier noir tour de force Rafles sur la ville (1958), Michel Piccoli returns in an almost identical role, although he receives third billing after the film's two glamorous stars, Françoise Arnoul and Henri Vidal.  The casting is excellent and, more than anything, it is the intense and edgy performances from the three leads that makes the film so darkly compelling.  Chenal was never the showiest of film directors but he had an unerring knack of getting the best from his performers - providing he was given the right actors.

At the time, Françoise Arnoul was just about the hottest thing in French cinema (she had yet to be eclipsed by Bardot), and Chenal was by no means the first director to exploit her obvious sensual beauty, which combined a unique gamine charm with the irresistible sex appeal of an experienced temptress.  In one scene, Arnoul casually removes all of her clothes in full view of her co-star and as she enjoys a hot shower her fulsome profile is held by the camera for a full five seconds - it's probably the most unashamedly erotic shot of any mainstream French film up until this point.  Arnoul wasn't just a stunner, she was also a supremely capable actress, and as the innocent who apparently falls for a shifty-looking criminal who is clearly not what he pretends she is as convincing as she is mesmerising.  We can never be entirely sure whether Arnoul's character is just wilfully blind or whether she is consciously playing the part of the seductress - there is a strange, dangerous ambiguity to the character that precisely mirrors that of the one played by Vidal.  This is after all film noir, and obscuring the truth so that we cannot tell black from white is what the aesthetic is all about.

The film's title translates as 'The Beast Lying in Wait' - but who is the beast and who is the prey?  Arnoul could just as easily be the tiger waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting fawn as Vidal.  It's curious that we should sympathise more with Vidal's character than Arnoul's, even though his attempts to convince us he is the victim of circumstances never ring true for a second.  Arnoul is presumably won over by Vidal's rugged masculinity, but we take to him because he fits the bill of the doomed hero.  We know that as soon as he comes within lassoing reach of Arnoul and places his trust in the sultry siren his hours are numbered.  In one of his better performances, Vidal brings depth and humanity to his portrayal, so that we are absolutely compelled to feel for his character - you can't help wondering if the actor had some inkling that his time was fast running out in real life.  Henri Vidal died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of forty, just six months after the film's release - how could this not lend a cruel sting of poignancy to the film's final scene?

Film Synopsis

At the home of Elisabeth Vermont, a wealthy young widow, an auction is held to benefit the orphans of the local police department.  Not long after the close of the proceedings, the notary Darcet is waylaid whilst he is carrying the proceeds of the auction, and his attackers flee with the loot.  Inspector Guimard begins an investigation into the theft, but at the same time he has a more serious crime to deal with: the murder of a warder by a prisoner named Daniel Morane, who has just escaped from the central prison at Melun.  Injured, Morane takes shelter in Elisabeth's house, where the kind widow nurses him back to health.  Morane tries to persuade his benefactor that he is a victim of circumstances, wrongly imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and only killed the warder in self-defence.  Convinced of Morane's innocence and that his feelings for her are genuine, Elisabeth makes up her mind to help him escape, unaware that things are not quite what they seem...