Made in U.S.A. (1966)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

Having pretty well deconstructed the American crime thriller in Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard goes even further with his next policier outing, driving the genre to its absolute limits of abstraction and, in doing so, effectively ending his career as a mainstream film director. Guns, gore and gangsters are just some of the familiar film noir trappings which are woven, or rather flung, into this singular offering to the cult of série noire, a film which has just about everything, except a plot and dialogue you can make sense of.  Made in U.S.A. is an anarchist intellectual's attempt to reconstitute film noir in bold primary colours - a film that is both endlessly fascinating and utterly bewildering.

Although it was inspired by an American thriller novel (The Jugger by Richard Stark, a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake), Made in U.S.A. is unlike any other crime film made before or since.  It has some superficial similarities with Godard's earlier film Alphaville, but, having only the sketchiest of plots and lacking an objective viewpoint, it is altogether a very different cinematic beast.  From the start, the film sets out to alienate its audience.  There is no reassuring title caption, the characters are abstract representations of film noir stereotypes, not real people,  dialogue is frequently drowned out by ambient sounds or inexplicably muted, and what dialogue is audible is mostly devoid of any intelligible meaning.  You might easily think that the script was something the PG Tips chimps knocked out one lazy afternoon after a liquid lunch (the liquid being something considerably stronger than tea).  Godard has never placed such demands on his audience before and it is not too hard to see why Made in U.S.A. is regarded as one of his least accessible films.

So what are we to make of this film?  Indeed, does it have any meaning at all?  The recurrent use of the word liberté perhaps gives some clue as to what Godard may have had in mind when he made the film.  One interpretation is that this is a film about freedom and the power that freedom confers on the individual.   The film's title appears to support this: the U.S.A. is the self-proclaimed Land of the Free; it is also the most powerful nation on Earth.  And of course, the concept of freedom is intimately bound up with existentialist notions of free will and identity - matters which underpin much of Godard's work.  To be free is to exist.

For Godard (and also many of his New Wave contemporaries), the crime investigator, personified by such trench-coat wearing sleuths as Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and Lemmy Caution, represent an idealised kind of individuality, the true free spirit - superior moral beings who serve the law but who are not bound by its constraints.  Perhaps the nearest thing to the private eye is the artist who has the freedom to express himself in any way he wishes, unfettered by moral, economic or societal constraints.  From his work, it is evident that Jean-Luc Godard aspired to this vision of the pure artist, and many would argue that he is indeed the living embodiment of such a creature, the true auteur.

The origin of Made in U.S.A. is almost as intriguing as the film itself and helps to shed some much needed light on the film.  Whilst Godard was working on Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle in 1966, he was approached by his former producer Georges Beauregard, who was experiencing financial difficulties when Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse was banned by the Gaullist Minister of Information.   Beauregard hoped that Godard would make a low budget film for him which would help him to finance his next film.  Godard agreed, and started work on Made in U.S.A. whilst he was still engaged on Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle.   For the subject of Made in U.S.A., Godard was influenced by Howard Hawke's classic noir thriller The Big Sleep, and originally envisaged a re-make of that film, in which Anna Karina would play a female version of Humphrey Bogart trying to unravel an insoluble mystery.

The fact that Godard made Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle in parallel with Made in U.S.A. is significant, because cross-fertilisation between the two films was inevitable.  The former film was an abstract montage of familiar modern day images, intended as a sociological essay reflecting the breakdown of modern society and the unstoppable power of consumerism.  The political ideas that this film fermented in Godard's mind would contaminate Made in U.S.A. in a profound way. One has only to compare this latter film with Godard's earlier Pierrot le fou to see that political concerns had now begun to overtake the director's earlier romanticism.  Made in U.S.A. is consequently a far more complex and abstract work than it might have been - a crazy mélange of film policier and film politique, although it also clearly merits another epithet: film poétique.

Film Synopsis

Paula Nelson, a young journalist, arranges to meet up with her ex-boyfriend, Richard Politzer, in Atlantic City.  Shortly after her arrival in this most ordinary of French towns Paul learns that Richard is dead, the victim of an unknown assassin.  Her journalistic instincts aroused, Paula begins an investigation into her friend's murder, convinced that he may have been implicated in some shady political intrigue.  Her enquiries bring her into contact with a strange collection of individuals, including a talkative stranger named Typhus.

It is Typhus who dies next, his body making a suitably macabre adornment to the writer David Goodis's apartment as he labours on his next crime novel in the company of his girlfriend, Doris Mizoguchi.  Doris is the killer's next victim and neither Paula nor the police seem to be any closer to unmasking the mysterious assassin.  The investigation still has many more unexpected turns to take, and if Paula isn't herself mistaken for the killer she may well end up his next victim.  Or she might even become a killer herself!  As any devotee of pulp fiction will know, anything is possible...