Le Crâneur (1955)
Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff

Film Review

When he started making films in the 1920s, Dimitri Kirsanoff readily earned himself a place amongst the Parisian avant-garde that included Jean Epstein and Abel Gance.  His early films - notably Ménilmontant (1926) and Brumes d'automne (1929) - are sublime examples of cinematic expression, but in common with most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Kirsanoff ended up prostituting his talents for commercial cinema - "not to live", as Abel Gance once famously put it, "but so as not to die."  Le Crâneur was one of Kirsanoff's last films, made just a few years before his death in 1957.  It's about as formulaic as a French film of this era could be - a classic polar or French film noir - but Kirsanoff's inventiveness and flair for visual drama ensure that it is far from mundane.

Le Crâneur takes a fairly routine plot - of the kind you've already seen in over a hundred American films noirs - and gives it an original spin by employing a succession of flashbacks whereby the story is told in three parts from the perspective of the three main characters.  This was not the first film to employ this narrative structure - Claude Autant-Lara had used it very succesfully on his recent film Le Bon Dieu sans confession (1953) - but it works well and makes Le Crâneur more involving than it might have been had it gone for the linear approach.  It also adds a measure of depth to the three protagonists, who would otherwise struggle to be more than the familiar noir archetypes.

Even when his career started to take a nosedive not long after this film, Raymond Pellegrin was always a compelling proposition, whether he was playing the good guy or the villain.  In Le Crâneur he is the good guy (well, good-ish), a lugubrious stuntman with a fatal attraction for the ladies and a nice line in petty fraud involving pins.  It is Paul Frankeur who gets to play the villain, although the extent of his villainy isn't apparent until the very end of the film and it is with his creepily avuncular charm that he lures an unsuspecting Pellegrin into his nefarious and ultimately murderous affairs.  Frankeur and Pellegrin are evenly matched, both superb at playing ambiguous characters in a way that makes them appear both sympathetic and sinister.  There is one scene in this film when Frankeur is at his most terrifying, his distinctive features arranging themselves into a mask of pure satanic delight as he - (to say any more would be to give away too much of the plot).

No self-respecting film noir is complete without a smouldering femme fatale and Le Crâneur spoils us with two of the best: Dora Doll and Marina Vlady, a startling contrast of female pulchritude.  Next to Doll's earthiness, Vlady appears more ethereal than unusual and has rarely looked more alluring - you'd never guess that she had only just achieved stardom through her role in André Cayatte's Avant le déluge (1954).  Doll gets the best lines (hers being by far the most interesting character in the film) but Vlady steals the show with her rendition of La Chanson pour l'Auvergnat, a song written for the film by the legendary Georges Brassens.   Le Crâneur is a modest offering compared with Dimitri Kirsanoff's early cinematic achievements but it delivers what any decent film noir should - a twisted intrigue that is prevented from being stale and predictable by the artistry of its composition.

Film Synopsis

One-time stuntman Philippe finds his goose well and truly cooked when his girlfriend Betty Ball is found dead in a telephone kiosk at the chic Pigalle nightclub where she works as a dancer, Le Toboggan.  Philippe is the obvious suspect for the murder and, unable to furnish an alibi, he is likely to be picked up by the police at any moment.  The nightclub's owner, Monsieur Georges, offers to help Philippe escape arrest, assisted by his talented cabaret singer Juliette.

These three end up in Georges's private residence, and as they wait a suitable moment for Philippe to make his getaway, they piece together the bizarre sequence of events that led to Betty's surprising death.  It isn't long before Juliette realises that Georges is the real killer.  It seems that he has contrived the most ingenious plot to have Philippe arrested for murder, thereby drawing attention away from his drugs trafficking operations.  The ruse may have worked - if Juliette hadn't fallen in love with Philippe...