Portrait d'un assassin (1949)
Directed by Bernard-Roland

Film Review

On its release in November 1949, Portrait d'un assassin was well-received by both critics and audiences, its popularity helping to rehabiliate the actress Arletty after her spectacular fall from grace after the Liberation.  So well thought of was the film that it received the highest award available to a French film at the time, the Grand Prix du Film d'Art Français, awarded by a body (the Comité d'organisation de l'industrie cinématographique or COIC), which had been created by the Vichy government in 1940 to control and protect France's film industry.  This award was the precursor to the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was given only to films of the highest quality.  When you watch Portrait d'un assassin today you can only conclude that the quality of French films released in 1949 must have spectacularly low.

The film is a hangover of poetic realism, the doom-laden film aesthetic which had been phenomenally successful in France of the late 1930s (thanks to the efforts of Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier and Jean Grémillon), but which by the late 1940s was looking decidedly passé.  Audiences of the time, still struggling with post-war austerity, wanted something more cheerful and poetic realism stank of the pre-war fatalism which people wanted to forget.  It is hard to account for the popularity of Portrait d'un assassin.  The story makes absolutely no sense and is inhabited by characters that are the thinnest of archetypes.  It is the shallowest, most inept kind of film noir, one which strains credibility to the point that you end up wondering if it was made as some kind of joke.

Let's begin with the plot.  A stunt motorcyclist named Fabius (Pierre Brasseur) decides he has had enough of his adoring partner (Arletty), so he shoots her dead.  He then realises he has shot the wrong woman, and not only that, the woman he thinks he has killed (Maria Montez) is uninjured and shows up on his doorstep a short while afterwards to persuade him to take part in a show stunt (le double looping) that will almost certainly result in his death.  The impresario's embittered ex-lover (a suitably sinister Erich von Stroheim, with a limp) then turns up and tries to dissuade the motorcyclist from going through with the stunt, in vain.  One woman kills herself in the most dramatic way she can devise, for no apparent reason, Fabius kills the other woman, again for no apparent reason, Erich sheds buckets, ditto with nobs on, and Fabius - well, suffice it to say that it doesn't get any better.

An asinine, intelligence-insulting, badly cobbled together script doesn't automatically result in a bad film, but in the hands of a director as gauche and talentless as Bernard-Roland a Grade A disaster is almost guaranteed.  The only aspect of the film that is not truly awful is Roger Hubert's atmospheric cinematography, which does succeed in endowing some scenes (particularly the moody opening sequence) with that familiar oppressive fatalism of earlier poetic realist masterpieces.  The hideously overdone score, by contrast, does everything it can to destroy the mood of the piece, being as welcome as a passing brass band at a poetry reading.

You'd have thought that with such a distinguished cast (which includes no fewer than six screen legends) Portrait d'un assassin could hardly fail, but, sad to say, the great actors who get thrown into this melodramatic misfire are lazily cast according to type and end up giving the blandest (and in some cases, the most egregious) of self-caricatures.  Heaven knows what Jules Berry is doing in this film - his character is peripheral to the plot and all that Berry does is chew up every bit of scenery he comes across.  Erich von Stroheim is completely wasted in a lamentably underwritten role and just seems to wander through the film like a stray amnesiac wondering where the Hell he is (as well he might).  Arletty and Pierre Brasseur look as if they have forgotten how to act and neither evokes any sympathy from the spectator, their dialogue being so excruciatingly bad that you wish some kind soul would come along and put them both out of their misery, preferably with an axe.

Marcel Dalio is the only cast member who seems to be enjoying himself, probably because he has a gigantic Meccano set to play with, and the comic relief provided by the Fratellini clowns in the final act is so welcome that you feel like applauding.  Riding high above this muddled mire of moronic mediocrity is a mesmerising Maria Montez at the height of her seductive powers.  However unforgivably bad the rest of the film is, Montez's sultry presence makes it all worthwhile in the end.  How sad that what could have been a truly great film is nothing more than a toe-curlingly bad curiosity piece, one that really does deserves its place in the dimmest and deepest oubliettes of French cinema.

Film Synopsis

Jean, nicknamed Fabius the Foolhardy, is a circus acrobat whose act involves driving a motorcycle up a near-vertical incline, the Wall of Death.  Tired of his girlfriend, Marthe, he decides to kill her.  One evening, he takes a shot at a woman who resembles Marthe but who in fact is someone else, Christina.  A well-known impresario, Christina decides to take her revenge by persuading Jean to undertake a death-defying stunt that has never yet been accomplished.  Christina's former lover, Eric, visits Jean and reveals how she once talked him into performing a stunt that left him scarred for life. In spite of Eric's warnings that Christina is an evil woman who has driven another man to his death, Jean decides to go ahead with the stunt...