Rue des Prairies (1959)
Directed by Denys de La Patellière

Film Review

Rue des Prairies was based on a novel by the well-known French actor, René Lefèvre, and gave Claude Brasseur his first significant film role.  It was released just a few months after François Truffaut's Les 400 coups.  Both films deal with similar themes - the conflict between the generations and the rebelliousness of an unloved adolescent.  Yet, in terms of cinematic approach and impact, the two films could hardly be more different.

Rue des Prairies is very much in the mould of a conventional French film for its time, with a big name lead actor (and they didn't come much bigger than Jean Gabin) and an ensemble of highly stereotypical characters (in this case, a grotesquely bourgeois view of the working class).  Truffaut's film is something completely fresh and groundbreaking, with believable characters and realistic situations, written, directed and acted with a sense of spontaneity and genuine engagement with its subject.  It's not hard to see which is the better film and why the other has been all but forgotten.  (A propos, the actor who played the harsh schoolmaster in Les 400 coups, Guy Decomble, has a small role in Rue des Prairies...)

Rue des Prairies is a film that cries out for a serious social realist approach, but what it gets is the bog-standard, take-no-chances, overly sanitised pro forma which defined mainstream cinema in France in the 1950s (regarded by many French film enthusiasts as the "grey decade".).  For its time, it's not a particularly bad film - the script is bland but not awful, there's an engaging performance from Jean Gabin, and it does get across some important social messages (for example, the extent to which parents are to be held responsible for their children's actions).  The trouble is that the approach is just too pedestrian, too uninspired for the film to make any impact  - particularly when you put it next to the kind of film the directors of the Nouvelle Vague were starting to make.

Film Synopsis

Released from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, Henri Neveu returns to his modest Parisian apartment to learn that his wife has just died giving birth.  Knowing he is not the father of the new-born, Fernand, Henri brings him up as his own, along with his two children Louis and Odette.  Seventeen years later, Henri's happy household is about to break up.  Louis is now a professional cyclist and Odette wants to start a career as a cover girl and marry an older man.  The youngest, Fernand, is the biggest worry.  Rebellious and undisciplined, he manages to get himself expelled from school.  Try as he might, Henri finds it increasingly difficult to understand his grown-up children...