Les Misérables (1958)
Directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois

Film Review

Valjean's private war against Javert begins when he comes to the aid of a dangerously ill prostitute named Fantine.  Before the unfortunate woman dies, Valjean promises to safeguard the future of her daughter Cosette, who is presently in the care of the Thénardiers, a couple of despicable rogues who manage a country inn.  As he collects Cosette to escort her to a convent, Valjean narrowly escapes capture by Javert.  By the time Cosette is 17, she and Valjean have settled in Paris.  Here, she attracts the attention of Marius, a student who is mixed up with a gang of insurrectionists committed to the return of the French Republic.  Marius is also loved, but in vain, by Éponine, the grown-up daughter of the Thénardiers, who now live in cheap lodgings adjacent to his.

Valjean comes to Éponine's rescue when she is caught stealing some bread.  Thénardier sees an opportunity to extort money from his daughter's rich benefactor, but when Valjean refuses to pay up he threatens to betray him to Javert.  Valjean evades Thénardier's trap but, fearing that his old enemy is on his tail, he decides to flee to London with Cosette.  This is the crucial moment at which Marius and his revolutionary cohorts take their stand against the monarchy.  In the ensuing street battle, Javert is taken prisoner by the rebels, Thénardier's son Gavroche is shot dead and Marius receives a near-fatal gunshot wound.  Having allowed Javert to flee to safety, Valjean carries the barely conscious Marius into the sewers, but escape seems impossible...

Of the many big screen adaptations of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables, few have achieved anything like the success of Paul Le Chanois's 1958 lavish epic.  With its startling production values and prestigious cast, this vivid retelling of Hugo's classic fable on the conflict between morality and justice was a worldwide hit and it is still highly regarded.  The film attracted an audience of just under ten million in France on its first release and for half a century afterwards it remained one of the ten most successful French films ever made.   It may not have the sublime artistry of Henri Fescourt's 1925 silent version or the mind-blowing ambition of Raymond Bernard's 1934 epic, but Le Chanois's film cannot fail to impress with the quality of its acting and some striking visuals, both promoting mainstream French cinema of the 1950s at its best. 

In an era when television was starting to pose an existential threat to cinema, super-productions of this kind were becoming quite prevalent, and Les Misérables was a bold attempt by a European consortium (which included Pathé and Deutsche Film) to keep up with Hollywood.  This kind of cinéma populaire was hardly groundbreaking, however, and bloated monoliths such as this supported François Truffaut's thesis that French cinema was desperately in need of new blood.  Truffaut would supply just that the following year, with his debut film Les 400 coups (1959).

Le Chanois's Les Misérables feels like a desperate last hurrah for the so-called 'quality tradition' in French cinema before the French New Wave blasted its way onto the scene and tried to rewrite all the rules.  Anyone familiar with the plot of Hugo's novel - specifically the revolutionary uprising in which a gang of hot-headed students take on the monarchist militia - can hardly fail to be struck by the irony of this.  Ten years on, the same incident would be played out on a larger canvas across France, in the public protests of 1968.  Le Chanois's film may be a product of its time, but it is spookily prophetic.

Interestingly, Paul Le Chanois was not the kind of journeyman film director that Truffaut and his colleagues on the Cahiers du cinéma would make a habit of savaging.  One of the most politically engaged French filmmakers of his generation, Le Chanois was himself something of an individualist, often dealing with contemporary themes that few other directors in France were interested in, including state education (L'École buissonnière), single motherhood (Sans laisser d'adresse) and modern birthing methods (Le Cas du docteur Laurent).

Le Chanois first made his mark with Au coeur de l'orage (1949), an eye-opening documentary on the French Resistance, and he also directed one of France's best war films, Les Évadés (1955).  Papa, maman, la bonne et moi (1955) was his first major box office hit - a comedy on one of the hottest topics of the time: the scarcity of housing for the young.  A literary adaptation made on a colossal budget, Les Misérables is highly atypical for Le Chanois but the director regarded it as one of his finest achievements.

The film certainly looks impressive.  Presented in widescreen and colour, it is the kind of glossy production that was a thousand times more likely to be made in Hollywood than France.  Massive sets were constructed at two major studios in East Germany, where most of the location exteriors were shot (many were also filmed in France, at huge expense).   For the film's two standout action sequences - the flashback to the Battle of Waterloo and the anti-monarchist Paris uprising of 1832 - soldiers in the East German army were drafted in as extras to add verisimilitude.

In contrast to the interior scenes, which appear static and theatrical by today's standards and scarcely do justice to the widescreen format, the exterior location sequences are composed with startling artistry, and often match the expressive power of Hugo's writing.  There is surely nothing as bleak and stark in 1950s French cinema as the scene of Javert's suicide, a scene that drives home the central moral of the novel with the steely determination of Van Helsing dispatching a vampire.  Of the studio work, the sewer scenes that follow the bloody street battle have the greatest visual impact, thanks to some superb design work and equally inspired lighting.

And then there's the cast - one of the finest ever assembled for any French film of this era.  The casting of Jean Gabin as Jean Valjean was a no-brainer - the part demands an actor of extraordinary range and charisma - but even Gabin manages to impress with the subtlety of his performance, which makes convincing his character's gradual development over a period of many years from a conscienceless petty criminal to a gentleman of impeccable morality.  Valjean's spectacular process of redemption is measured against the seeming inability of his rival Javert to develop as a human being.  Bernard Blier's portrayal of Javert, as a man fatally welded to a false idea of justice, is more pitful than villanous. Indeed, Javert becomes the film's most tragic character, a man who is incapable of resolving the moral dilemma that fate presents him with.

The private war between Gabin and Blier takes up a substantial portion of the narrative and makes compelling viewing, but as in the original novel, there are numerous subplots which elaborate on the story's central theme, and these are no less memorable, thanks to the astonishing acting talent on offer.  Bourvil is probably the least likely actor you'd expected to find in the role of Thénardier, the most contemptible and irredeemable of Hugo's characters.  At a time when he was pretty well stereotyped as the naive but likeable country bumpkin, Bourvil surprised audiences with his graphically roguish portrayal of Thénardier. 

It's a gift a part for any actor, but the character's sheer nastiness means that he is often played as a stock villain.  Bourvil avoids this mistake and makes his Thénardier a far more interesting creature by investing him with just a smidgen of his own habitual charm.  There is a subtle humanity to Bourvil's Thénardier which is rarely found in other screen adaptations of the novel, and which compels us to see something more than just the monstrous hypocrite he tries to be.  It is with frightening ease that Bourvil steals each one of his scenes with Gabin - just as he had done in their previous collaboration on Claude Autant-Lara's La Traversée de Paris (1956).

The female character who is brought to life most vividly is Thénardier's tragically fated daughter Éponine - and this owes far more to Silvia Monfort's captivating performance than it does to the script or even Hugo's original conception.  Monfort first made her mark in the Théâtre National Populaire and soon became one of France's most highly regarded stage actresses; she devoted only a modest portion of her career to film and television.  She appeared in several films by La Chanois (her real-life partner at the time), but rarely in a starring role.  Her appearance in Les Misérables is arguably the highpoint of her screen career - and as you watch her you wonder how it was that an actress with such a magnetic presence could have made so few films.  The answer is simple: she preferred the stage.

Another piece of inspired but far-from-obvious casting was Giani Esposito for the part of the troublesome idealist Marius.  With his odd mix of boyish innocence and Byronic allure, Esposito was perfect for the role, and, like Monfort, you wonder how he managed to avoid becoming a major film star.  His impact on cinema was modest, although he did flourish in another arena, as a singer-songwriter.  The main reason why he is all but forgotten today is because he died far too young, at the age of 43.  Les Misérables shows what a capable performer Giani Esposito was - his scenes with Monfort are among the most poignant and truthful the film has to offer.

Making up the supporting cast is a host of talent that includes established stars like Serge Reggiani and Danièle Delorme, and esteemed character actors of the calibre of Lucien Baroux and Jean Murat.  Perfectly at home in the role of the benign Monseigneur Myriel is Fernand Ledoux, who would later play Gillenormand in Robert Hossein's 1982 version of Les Misérables.  The connection with other adaptations of Hugo's novel do not stop there.  In the role of Mademoiselle Gillenormand we have Suzanne Nivette, who played Éponine in Fescourt's 1925 version, and Émile Genevois, Gavroche in Bernard's 1934 version, shows up briefly as a coach driver.

Although Jean-Paul Le Chanois originally conceived his Les Misérables  as a five hour long epic split into two films, it ended up being released as a single film, with a runtime varying between three and four hours depending which country you saw it in.  Today, the film is most readily available in two parts, with a total duration of just over three hours.  Even in its most abridged form, Le Chanois's film is a compelling adaptation of a great work of French literature.  Perhaps it is a tad sluggish in parts, a little too aware of its own grandeur maybe, but ultimately its artistic strengths win through.  Who needs the French New Wave when you can immerse yourself in such luxurious 'fodder for the masses' as this?

Film Synopsis

France, 1815.  Sentenced to five years' hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread, Jean Valjean escapes from prison in Toulon and goes on the run.  Necessity drives him to steal again, but he decides to turn over a new leaf when a clergyman, Monseigneur Myriel, shows him an unexpected kindness.  Some years later, Valjean, now known as Monsieur Madeleine, has become a respected industrialist and benefactor in the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer.  Valjean's certainty that he has put his criminal past behind him is shattered when Javert, the town's chief of police, recognises him as the former convict of Toulon.