Les Deux verités (1951)
Directed by Antonio Leonviola

Film Review

One of the first films to be directly inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) is Les Deux verités (a.k.a. Le Due veritá), a compelling courtroom drama directed by Antonio Leonviola who is perhaps best known for his sword and sandals epics such as Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops (1961).  As in Kurosawa's film, the events leading up to a murder are presented from more than one point of view (in this case two), each showing the protagonists in a completely different light.  In the first account, related to us by the prosecuting counsel, the accused man - a suitably morose Michel Auclair - is portrayed as a loathsome skunk driven by lewd desires and wild jealousy.  The woman he allegedly murdered (an angelic Anna Maria Ferrero) is a blameless virgin who is driven to her death by a cruel, unfeeling sex fiend.   Things are completely turned around in the second half when Michel Simon (incredibly powerful as an impromptu defence lawyer) presents what he believes really happened - the corruption of an innocent man by an unscrupulous schemer, the archetypal femme fatale.

Neither of the two versions of what happened is entirely convincing and, as with Kurosawa's film, we are left contemplating how hopelessly ill-equipped any judicial system is in dealing with something as elastic as the so-called 'truth'.  As it turns out, the legal system is let off the hook by a lazy narrative sleight of hand that leads you to scream out the first expletive that comes to mind.  If we overlook this 'cop out' ending, the film is well-scripted and Auclair and Ferrero are never less than compelling throughout.  The one let down is Leonviola's workmanlike direction, which fails to make as much as it should of the film's dramatic premise.  At a time when Michel Simon was struggling to get decent roles (were it not for Sacha Guitry, who revived his career with such films as La Poison (1951) and La Vie d'un honnête homme (1953), the 1950s would have bee a very fallow decade for him), he put his body and soul into every decent part that came his way, and whilst he only appears in Les Deux verités in a handful of scenes, he has an extraordinary impact.

Film Synopsis

In Milan, a young Italian man, Loris, is on trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Marie-Louise.  The prosecution portrays him as an outright scoundrel who forced the young woman, a homeless orphan, to live with him in a boarding house against her will and then drove her to her death when she tried to escape from him.  Just as the defence lawyer is about to present his case the proceedings are interrupted by a man resembling a tramp.  The man reveals himself to be Cidoni, a former lawyer who has been following the trial with interest and has concluded that Loris is innocent.  When the defence lawyer withdraws, Cidoni takes over the defence and offers an alternative account of the events leading up to Marie-Louise's death...