Nous les gosses (1941)
Directed by Louis Daquin

Film Review

Louis Daquin made his directorial debut in 1938 with Le Joueur, the French version of a film directed by Gerhard Lamprecht.  Prior to this he had worked as an assistant to some of the most distinguished French filmmakers of his time - notably Jean Grémillon, Abel Gance and Julien Duvivier.  Daquin's burgeoning film directing career was almost throttled at birth by the outbreak of WWII and during the Occupation he directed most of his energies to supporting the Communist branch of the French Resistance.  Being an active filmmaker was a convenient cover for Daquin's clandestine activities and he continued making commercial films, the best known being his eerily atmospheric adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, Le Voyageur de la Toussaint (1943).  Immediately before this, Daquin directed one of his most inspired and humane films, Nous les gosses, a film that appears completely out of its time and is unlike any other made in France during the darks days of the Occupation.

Nous les gosses predates Yves Robert's La Guerre des boutons by more than two decades but it is astonishingly similar, an amiable comedy with a gently social realist edge, featuring predominantly pre-teen children (mostly boys) playing at being adults.  It is a film that offers both family friendly entertainment (a welcome change from the facile comedies that were around at the time) and a politically-minded morality tale in which Daquin's communist sympathies are readily apparent.  With its heart-warming depiction of youngsters clubbing together to help out a friend in distress, the film also serves as an appeal for national solidarity at a time when France was bitterly divided (between the pro- and anti-Pétanists) and morale at its lowest ebb.

Nous les gosses is a modest but extremely likeable film, hilarously funny in places, and it is hard to account for its comparative obscurity today.  Of all the films made during the Occupation, this is one that surely deserves to be remembered.  Filmed mostly in exterior locations, it has a naturalistic quality and modernity that many films of this era lack - indeed, it feels like a fledgling attempt at neo-realism, even presaging the early films of the French New Wave (it is possible that François Truffaut was inspired by the film for his similarly intimate portraits of childhood - Les 400 coups and L'Argent de poche). 

The film's one noticeable flaw is an obvious disconnect between the polished performances of the professional actors (Gilbert Gil, Louis Seigner, Raymond Bussières) and the more genuine and spontaneous contributions from the cast of (non-professional) child performers.  It helps that there is a superb character actor to bridge the gap between the two camps - Pierre Larquey, a grown-up actor with a child's innocence who is perfectly cast as the 50-something news vendor who relishes the chance to go a-sleuthing (dressed as Bertie Wooster with a beard).  For his efforts, Larquey is honoured with an on-screen credit in the course of the film - his name being clearly visible on the poster for Les Filles du Rhône, a film released just a few years previously.

Nous les gosses is loosely based on the popular children's novel Emil and the Detectives, written in 1929 by the German writer Erich Kästner.  This is in itself an act of provocation on the part of the film's authors, as Kästner was a renowned pacifist and high profile opponent of the Nazi regime.  The German censors obviously didn't make the connection with Kästner's novel and merely regarded Daquin's film as a quaint comedy about good natured French schoolboys working together for the good of their community, honouring Maréchal Pétain's endlessly repeated mantra of 'Travail, famille, patrie' as they did so.  How tempting it is to read another meaning into the last line of the film: "Plus on les connait, plus..." Innocence can be so deceptive.

Film Synopsis

Nicolas is playing football with his classmates in the school playground when he accidentally kicks the ball through a windowpane. The headmaster insists that the damage be paid for by Nicolas's parents, but they are too poor to stump up the money. The boy's friends club together and raise the money by various means during their Easter holidays - some take odd jobs, some sell their treasured possessions, others go begging in the streets.  Eventually, the boys have enough money to pay for a new window, but before they can hand it over to their headmaster it mysteriously disappears.  With the help of a friendly newsvendor who fancies himself as an amateur detective, the boys set about finding the stolen money and bringing the thief to justice.