Le Schpountz (1938)
Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Film Review

Of the 17 films written and directed by Marcel Pagnol the one that is perhaps most readily accessible to today's audience is Le Schpountz, an affectionate but occasionally cruel satire of the film industry in the mid-1930s.  This was one of the first occasions in which cinema dared to turn the camera on itself and reveal the backstage pandemonium that is only ever seen by those who are mad enough to work in the industry.  There have been a few similar films since - most notably Luchino Visconti's Bellissima (1951), François Truffaut's La Nuit américaine (1973) and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976) - but Pagnol's is perhaps the most revealing, and probably the most important as it was made at a time when filmmaking enjoyed a certain mystique, which was only lost with the advent of glossy magazines and upsurge of celebrity culture in the 1950s.  Le Schpountz lampoons not only the film makers, but also star-struck cinema-goers who see themselves as the next Greta Garbo or Douglas Fairbanks.  It is reassuring to find that the craze for instant stardom is not a modern phenomenon.

Pagnol's motivation for making Le Schpountz, his least typical film (certainly his funniest), was primarily to get back at the troublesome so-and-sos who had frustrated his early efforts, principally those actors, directors and producers who were reluctant to make the transition from silent to sound cinema.  Marcel Pagnol was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of sound when it came in in the late 1920s and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he saw it as a massively positive development, a means to achieve far greater realism in the portrayal of ordinary life.  Unfortunately, the prevailing view amongst a large section of the acting and directing fraternity was that the introduction of sound was a regressive step that would undermine the purity of the cinematic art.  Many of the characters in Le Schpountz were directly inspired by people Pagnol had crossed swords with early in his career, including a prima donna actor who is prone to flare up at the least provocation, a manic director who chews the script in desperation whenever something gets in the way of his artistic vision, and a producer whose only interest is making loads of money.  At first it appears that the main target of Pagnol's satire are simple-minded film fanatics who see themselves as star actors, but the real target is the unlikely assembly of lunatics and parasites who miraculously manage to come up with something worth putting up on a cinema screen.

The idea for Le Schpountz came to Pagnol whilst he was making an earlier film, Angèle (1934).  During the location filming on that film, the production team were repeatedly hassled by member of the public who believed he was destined to become a great film actor.  In the end, Pagnol's film crew became so exasperated with this annoying individual that they gave him a bogus contract in which it was stated he would take over the role of Charles Boyer in a film.  If this incident gave Pagnol the starting point for a film scenario, the title was provided by his cinematographer, Willy (William Faktorovitch), who first coined the word 'schpountz' to describe a naive person who sees himself as a great film star.  (Nowadays, Schpountz is more often used as an unflattering term to describe someone of German nationality, the French equivalent of Kraut).

And who better to play the part of the Schpountz than Fernandel, a popular comedic actor who had a particular aptitude for playing naive, often deluded, characters in a sympathetic vein?   Pagnol had previously worked with Fernandel on Angèle and was keen to cast him in the leading role in another naturalistic rural drama, Regain.  Fearing that the actor would decline the part because it was so different from the comic roles he had grown used to, Pagnol offered him the far more attractive part in Le Schpountz on condition that he also agreed to star in Regain.  As it happened, the two films were shot in parallel, with mostly the same cast and crew.  On the fine days, Pagnol would shoot Regain out of doors in his beloved Provençal countryside; on the days when the weather was less accommodating, the team would decamp to Pagnol's Marseille studios to knock out the odd scene for Le Schpountz.

The two principal hallmarks of Pagnol's very distinctive brand of cinema are the authenticity of the characterisation and the quality of the screenwriting, which has a rhythm and lyricism of its own.  Both of these are very much in evidence in Le Schpountz.  Not only is this one of Pagnol's best written films, it is also the one in which Fernandel gives his finest performance, in a part that was so evidently custom built for him.  Throughout much of his long career, Fernandel was content to play the amiable fool in a series of mediocre and now largely forgotten comedies and it was only when he was in the employ of certain, particularly demanding directors (Marcel Pagnol, Claude Autant-Lara, Henri Verneuil) that he proved that he was also a very talented actor as well as a great comic.  As the wannabe thesp in Le Schpountz, Fernandel has ample scope to be funny, but he is equally adept at handling the film's more serious passages.   There is an exquisite poignancy to the scenes in which the clown's mask slips from his face and we are confronted with the insecure and intensely human individual that lies beneath.  It is hard to imagine another film which allows Fernandel to run through his entire dramatic range and be so thoroughly convincing throughout.  Who can forget the iconic scene in which the Schpountz shows off his histrionic versatility to the Mickey-taking film crew?  So as not to detract from the purity of his performance, he insists on reciting an article of French Law: 'Tout condamné à mort aura la tête tranchée' ('He who is condemned to death will have his head cut off').  Only Fernandel could wring so much infectious hilarity and poetry from such a bleak, prosaic phrase.

Fernandel may be the star of the film, but he doesn't entirely monopolise our attention.  Orane Demazis turns in a fine performance (one of her best), perfectly chosen to play Fernandel's love interest.  For the most part Demazis is little more than a stooge for the film's charismatic lead actor, but she gets her moment of triumph in a memorable scene that makes the most powerful defence for the role of comedy in cinema.  Improbable as it may seem, it is left to Demazis to convince Fernandel's character of the importance of comedy, concluding with one of the most beautiful and most oft-quoted phrases in French cinema, which roughly translates as: "Whoever manages to make those laugh who have most reason to cry should be considered a saint."  Just as pleasing to watch are Pagnol regular Charpin, magnificent as the small-minded grocer who tries in vain to put the Schpountz in his place, and Léon Belières, who delights as the archetypal cinema mogul, evidently modelled on Louis B. Mayer.

In common with several of his films, Marcel Pagnol subsequently turned Le Schpountz into a popular full-length novel, and the film was remade (not very successfully) by Gérard Oury in 1999, with Smaïn in the lead role, supported by Sabine Azéma and Ticky Holgado.   Le Schpountz may have started out as a satire on filmmaking, a chance for Pagnol to settle a few old scores, but it is actually far more than that.  It is one of the first films to pay tribute to cinema and celebrate its diversity and social importance in the modern age.  An undisputed classic of French cinema, Le Schpountz has a surprisingly modern feel to it and has as much to say in our present celebrity obsessed era as it did when it was first seen, back in the dark days of the late 1930s.  Its central moral is one that cannot be repeated too often: there is no shortcut to fame.  If you want something badly, you've gotta work at it.

Film Synopsis

Casimir and Irénée work in their uncle's grocer's shop in a Provençal village.  Whilst Casimir sticks to his job, Irénée only dreams of becoming a film star.  When a film company arrives in the area, Irénée seizes the opportunity and asks for a job as an actor.  The film production team are amused by the pretensions of this "schpountz" (a naïve fool who sees himself as a film star) and they offer him a false contract with a studio in Paris.  Believing that stardom awaits him, Irénée sets out for Paris...