La Traversée de Paris (1956)
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara

Film Review

In the decade that followed the end of the Second World War, French cinema was curiously reticent when it came to the most significant event in French history in living memory - the four years of Nazi occupation (1940-1944). The handful of French films that did broach this most sensitive of subjects - René Clément's La Bataille du rail (1946), Raymond Bernard's Un ami viendra ce soir (1946) and Alexander Esway's Le Bataillon du ciel (1947) - were effectively propaganda pieces intended to glorify the role of the resistance.  No one was yet willing to challenge the myth that General de Gaulle had created to restore his country's honour, namely that France had been a proud nation of resistance throughout its period of occupation.

One of the first films to set the record straight and expose the unpalatable truths about the Occupation was Claude Autant-Lara's La Traversée de Paris, which was based on a short story by Marcel Aymé, first published in 1947.  If anyone was going to shatter the De Gaulle myth in the mid-1950s, it was going to be Autant-Lara, the most non-conformist and provocative French filmmaker of his generation.  He had previously stirred up a hornet's nest in the rightwing press with his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps (1947) and would subsequently incur the wrath of the Catholic Church with L'Auberge rouge (1951).  This was followed by the scandalous Le Blé en herbe (1954), which attracted death threats for both the director and his lead actress, Edwige Feuillère.  La Traversée de Paris was to be Claude Autant-Lara's most provocative film, the first French film to portray the Occupation in a realistic and unbiased way, and naturally it was a massive box office hit.  Critical reaction to the film may have been mixed (Autant-Lara's reputation had suffered after François Truffaut's vitriolic attacks on him in Les Cahiers du cinéma) but it attracted an audience of 4.8 million, making it the second most successful French film of the year after Jean Delannoy's Notre-Dame de Paris.

Given that La Traversée de Paris paints a picture of the Occupation that could not be further removed from the readily accepted De Gaulle fiction it is hard to account for its popularity.  Could it be that those who saw it recognised the truth it presented and were merely indulging in some kind of cosy national catharsis?  As successful as the film was, it would still be many years yet before the Occupation ceased to be a no-go area in French cinema.  It was only after Marcel Ophuls had comprehensively blown the lid off the subject with his controversial documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) that the sorry truths of the Occupation came to be accepted and De Gaulle's fabricated version of history rejected.  A more likely reason for the success of La Traversée de Paris is Autant's-Lara's inspired decision to bring together Bourvil and Jean Gabin, two actors who could hardly be more different, in what is one of the earliest examples of what we would now term a 'buddy movie' (a mainstay of French comedy in later years).  Gabin and Bourvil had never worked together before, and they would never do so again, yet their pairing in this film is pure genius.  And then there's the icing on the cake: Louis de Funès...

Jean Gabin was perhaps the obvious choice for the part of the bourgeois idler Grandgil.  By now, Gabin's wilderness years of the 1940s were beyond him and the actor was back in the saddle, enjoying the status of one of French cinema's biggest stars for the second time in his career.  Gone were the heroic roles of his youth.  Gabin's new screen persona was far less romantic, the bourgeois cynic representing a world turned sour by lost illusions.  Bourvil was just as well-suited for the part of Martin, the sympathetic but far from heroic everyman character, although Marcel Aymé objected strongly to his casting, preferring Bernard Blier for the part.  Aymé's concerns were perhaps justified at the time.  Early in his film career, Bourvil quickly became typecast as the likeable country bumpkin, exemplified by his Planchet in André Hunebelle's Les Trois mousquetaires (1953).  Autant-Lara was the first film director to recognise his potential as a more serious actor and by offering him the lead in La Traversée de Paris he gave him an opportunity to prove he was a great actor as well as a great comedian.  Bourvil did not disappoint - his performance here is one of his most authentic and most nuanced, one for which he received the Coupe Volpi for the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 1956. (The film was also nominated for the Golden Lion at the same festival.)  Aymé later admitted that he had been wrong about Bourvil and described La Traversée de Paris as the best screen adaptation of his work (even if it discards the grim ending of his original story, in which Martin kills Grandgil.)

The other casting miracle was Louis de Funès in the small but totally unforgettable part of Jambier, the blackmarket butcher.  It is incredible to think that by this time De Funès had already appeared in over ninety films, invariably in minor supporting roles or bit parts - including an earlier appearance with Bourvil in Gilles Grangier's Poisson d'avril (1954).  For the brief time he is on screen, in the two memorable cellar scenes, De Funès steals the film (as the comedy victim to Gabin's merciless teasing: "Monsieur Jambier, 45 rue Poliveau...!") and leaves us in no doubt that his time would come.  And of course it did.  Ten years later, he was the biggest star in French cinema, his subsequent appearances with Bourvil - Le Corniaud (1965) and La Grande vadrouille (1966) - being two of the most successful French films ever. 

Autant-Lara's determination to exert complete control over the casting of his film came at a cost: the provisional budget was reduced by half and he had to abandon his original plan to shoot it in colour.  This proved to be a blessing in disguise (as the subsequent colourised version of the film, made in the mid-1990s, amply bears out).   The main reason why La Traversée de Paris is so intensely evocative of the Occupation years is because it was made in black-and-white.  This allowed the night-time street sequences to be convincingly realised in the studio (by the legendary set designer Max Douy), thereby creating a real sense of danger as the main characters make their way across the city, traversing what looks like a vast urban desert draped in oppressive blackness.  Had it been made in colour, the film would have been denied its most cinematographically inspired sequence, the one in which Martin and Grandgil are finally arrested by German soldiers.  We see the arrest only as a terrifying shadow-play through the windows of a Paris bistro, whose owners, two loathsome informers, cower in the foreground like infants.  The sheer naked horror of the moment is powerfully conveyed, even amplified, by this overt homage to 1930s German expressionism - and you feel that by shooting the sequence in this way Autant-Lara is mocking his audience's reluctance to face the truth of the Occupation.  Like Perseus, they dare not look directly into the face of the gorgon...

What makes La Traversée de Paris such an important film is the accuracy with which captures the mentality of the French during the Occupation.  Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost's brilliant screenplay contains no heroes, just a collection of ordinary individuals coping with the hardships of the Occupation in ways that reflect their failings.  Martin, the main protagonist, is an out-of-work taxi driver who is just trying to survive.  He epitomises the typical man in the street, driven by necessity to work on the black market.  Grandgil is a very different proposition, a member of the privileged middle-class who regards the Occupation as a minor convenience and who is disappointed to find that the black market is less black than he had imagined.  He is protected by his status as a well-known painter and uses this to lambast others with his hypocritical moralising.  He is not a bad man and is capable of genuine human feeling, shown by his concern for Martin when they are arrested.

Jambier, by contrast, is an outright scoundrel, the archetypal wartime profiteer who cashes in on the misery of others.  How we delight in his torment when Grandgil turns the tables on him and bleeds him dry in the famous cellar scene.  Then there are the Thénardier-like bistro owners, who not only employ Jews illegally for menial tasks, but also act as police informers, happily betraying anyone who places their trust in them.  The Nazi soldiers, interestingly, are portrayed in a neutral light, not as sadists or mindless thugs but as mere functionaries carrying out an unpleasant business.  One of the German officers (the one who comes to Grandgil's rescue) even appears to be conflicted by his duties.

And what of the brave heroes of the French resistance...?  They are conspicuous by their absence.   The only character who comes close to resembling a résistant is Martin's wife.  She alone is capable of taking small risks to help others, slipping Grandgil a bar of soap to wash his dirty hands when she fears he (a total stranger) may be arrested for stealing coal.  Everyone else is too preoccupied with looking after Number One to show the slightest interest in anyone else.  This may well be the real reason why the French felt so much shame over the Occupation.  It wasn't the fact that their country crumbled under the might of Nazi Germany in June 1940, but that, for the four long years that ensued, most French people just carried on living as they had done before.  Not everyone is cut out to be a hero.

Film Synopsis

In Paris, during the Nazi occupation, Marcel Martin is forced to give up his job as a taxi driver, and makes a modest living as a blackmarket delivery boy.  When his partner is arrested he recruits another man, Grandgil, in his place.  Having conned the meat supplier Jambier out of several thousand francs, Grandgil reluctantly agrees to assist Martin and the two men set out on their dangerous errand.  They must carry four suitcases stuffed with pig meat across the city during the night-time curfew.  To Martin's chagrin, things do not go according to plan.  They are constantly trailed by hordes of hungry dogs and Grandgil deals with a policeman by knocking him unconscious.  Then it turns out that Grandril is actually a famous and fairly well-off artist who agreed to help Martin only out of a morbid sense of curiosity.   Finally, the two men  run into a squad of German soldiers and are taken back to their headquarters. It appears that Martin's luck has finally run out...