Mammy (1951)
Directed by Jean Stelli

Film Review

Mammy is a film that suffers from a severe case of split identity.  It starts out as the worst kind of melodrama (effectively a horrible pastiche of its superior Hollywood counterpart), flirts with light-hearted comedy-drama, has a brief dalliance with film noir of the bleakest and bloodiest kind, and then wraps things up with a typical melodramatic finale. 

The film begins with Dr André Pierre (a typically amiable Pierre Larquey) being summoned to a tiny apartment to attend to a young couple who have apparently attempted suicide by gassing themselves.  Fortunately, he arrives in time and the couple - Maurice and Marthe - are soon making a complete recovery in hospital.  André and his wife, affectionately known as Mammy, are expecting the return from Canada of their wayward grandson, who, coincidentally, is also named Maurice.  From a newspaper report the good doctor learns that the aeroplane on which his grandson was travelling has crashed, killing everyone on board.  Realising that the shock of this would kill his now blind wife, André decides to enlist the help of the young couple he saved earlier in a harmless deception.  They will spend some time at his house, passing themselves off as his grandson and his wife.  It seems that the real Maurice was a good-for-nothing louse who has become mixed up with crooks and gamblers, whilst André deceived his wife into believing he was a reformed character.  Moved by the old man's story, the young couple agree to set aside their differences (Marthe hasn't yet forgiven her lover for having an affair with another woman) and play along with the charade.  All goes well until the real Maurice shows up unexpectedly and demands of his grandfather a huge amount of cash to pay off his gambling debts.  The doctor knows that the only way he can raise such a sum is to sell his house, and he fears the shock of this will surely be the death of dear Mammy.  Cue the violins.

By this late stage in her career, Gaby Morlay has become a virtual parody of herself, and far from making you weep her performance is as comfortable to watch as a meerkat feasting on its own internal organs.  Ten years previously, when she was at the height of her powers as an actress, Saint Gaby managed to fill cinemas all across Nazi occupied France with her hit Le Voile bleu (1942), which is French melodrama at its absolute ickiest, the kind of film which today is recommended only for chromic insomniacs or diehard masochists (proving that things really were tough for the French during WWII).  Jean Stelli was the man who directed this unpalatable dose of industrial strength schmaltz, and he also directed Morlay in Mammy, committing all the same sins a second time (aided and abetted by Morlay at her most merciless), and a few more besides.

Even more surprising than the film's bizarre conflation of popular genres is its castlist, which sees promising newcomers Françoise Arnoul and Philippe Lemaire teaming up with old timers Morlay and Pierre Larquey.  Needless to say the result looks like a tug-of-war contest between two actors you can't help loving (Arnoul and Larquey) and two that you wish would get on a fast rocket to the outer reaches of the solar system and never return (Morlay and Lemaire).  Then there is Michel Jourdan, who momentarily steals the film in a few notable scenes as the evil prodigal son - although by wanting to put Madame Morlay out of the way his vile nastiness loses its edge - some would argue that by attempting such a thing he is merely doing humanity (or good taste at least) a profound service.

There's some amusement in the fact that Jourdan and Lemaire, two inveterate carpet chewers, are passing themselves off as the same character - the identity mix-up both echoes and mocks that of the film in its entirety.  Jourdan's lip curling pantomime villainy is infinitely preferable to Lemaire's manically gesticulating histrionics.  It has to be said that without the delightful Arnoul and superb-as-ever Larquey Mammy would be impossible to sit through.  Their benign presence doesn't completely distract us from all the bad acting that goes on elsewhere but it does at least make it endurable.  Mammy is perhaps the weirdest and most inept melange of soap, farce and gangster film you can imagine, but it has its good points, albeit in homoeopathic doses.