Un homme marche dans la ville (1950)
Directed by Marcello Pagliero

Film Review

Of all the films made in France in the aftermath of WWII, perhaps none catches the mood of the time more effectively than Un homme marche dans la ville, the standout piece in a modest collection of films directed by Marcello Pagliero.  Greatly influenced by Italian neo-realism (through his many collaborations with Roberto Rossellini as a screenwriter and actor in the mid-1940s), Pagliero brought a similarly trenchant realist edge to his own films, and by doing so he gets far closer to life as experienced by most ordinary people than most other filmmakers of his period.  In this, the first of around half a dozen films he made in France, Pagliero takes a fairly routine plot - the kind admirably suited for film melodrama of this era - and uses this as the basis of a blisteringly honest record of the grim reality of post-war austerity in a country that would take many years, if not decades, to live down the humiliation of Nazi occupation.

Un homme marche dans la ville is an inspired adaptation of a posthumously published novel of the same title by Jean Jausion, who drew on his experiences as a dock worker in Le Havre during the Occupation.  In the mid-to-late 1930s, Jausion was fast gaining a reputation as one of France's most promising young poets and he could well have been as famous today as Jean Cocteau if it hadn't been for the vicissitudes of war.  After his Jewish wife-to-be was arrested and deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis, Jausion became an active member in the French Resistance and was tragically killed in action during the Liberation of Paris in 1944, aged 27.

Marcello Pagliero's social concerns and realist approach to cinema made him the ideal person to write and direct a screen version of Jausion's powerful novel.  In the years immediately prior to this, he had risen to prominence as an actor in France, distinguishing himself with his portrayals of the romantically doomed hero in such films as Jean Delannoy's Les Jeux sont faits (1947) and Yves Allégret's Dédée d'Anvers (1948).  He had already directed a handful of films in Italy, most notably Roma città libera (1946) and Desiderio (1946).  The neo-realist style that he had cultivated for his Italian films allowed Pagliero to take his Jausion adaptation to the limits of social realism for late 1940s French cinema, although in doing so he would earn himself no end of criticism.

Although Un homme marche dans la ville received some highly favourable reviews, it was fiercely lambasted by the Communist press, which condemned it for its perceived portrayal of the working class as promiscuous, alcoholic and loutish.  The CGT, a leading workers' union, and the Catholic Church were equally forceful in their condemnation of the film, and in the face of such a vitriolic onslaught the film was banned in Le Havre not long after its first release.  It was most likely the hostile reaction to this film that led its director to stick to safer, less controversial subjects for his subsequent films.  These include a somewhat more conventional slice-of-life melodrama Les Amants de bras-mort (1951) and a creditable Sartre adaptation, La Putain respectueuse (1952).

Marcello Pagliero was by no means the first director to bring a more realist style to French cinema.  Jean Renoir had experimented with neo-realism as early as 1935 with Toni, his assistant on this film being a man who would make the aesthetic his own in his early Italian films, Luchino Visconti.  Throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s, there was a trend towards a more naturalistic approach to film drama, which was in no small measure assisted by the scarcity of resources immediately after WWII.  Although neo-realism never gained the level of acceptance with French audiences that it had enjoyed in Italy (through the work of Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittoria De Sica), there were several notable French films with a similar approach - good examples being René Clément's Au-delà des grilles (1949) and Paul Carpita's Le Rendez-vous des quais (1955).

Un homme marche dans la ville has many obvious similarities with Henri Calef's La Maison sous la mer (1947).  The two films have virtually the same plot and similar central characters, both make effective use of their industrial setting, and both employ a similar boldly realist style.  As impressive as Calef's film is both visually and dramatically, it lacks the sincerity and depth of genuine human feeling that Pagliero brings to his film.  The endless grind of daily life, the constant gnawing worry over losing your job and not being able to obtain food to feed your family - these are the sobering realities of the time that Pagliero's film gets across with such devastating power.

It's true that the film's portrayal of ordinary folk is far from flattering.  Cast as the lead protagonist Madeleine is an actress renowned for playing 'bad women' - Ginette Leclerc.  Ever since Marcel Pagnol's La Femme du boulanger (1935), Leclerc had pretty well been typecast as the woman of easy virtue - the unfaithful wife or seductive femme fatale.  Here she is just as contemptible, in the role of a selfish wife who is all too willing to cheat on her brutish husband André (a remarkable Robert Dalban) and force herself on the most desirable man in the neighbourhood, Jean (Jean-Pierre Kerien) - a man she subsequently betrays to the police when he rejects her.  The two male protagonists are just as ignoble, by no means heroic examples of the proletariat class.  The husband André is an archetypal loser - resentful of his employers' treatment of him, he vents his anger by getting blind drunk and beating his wife and infant child.  No tears are shed when he is sent to meet his maker.

André's buddy Jean may at first appear to be a more decent sort, showing a comradely loyalty to his friend, but it isn't long before he starts to look like a skunk, fending off boredom by drinking heavily and indulging in one-night stands with buxom floozies instead of getting hitched and starting a family.  There isn't anything sympathetic or honourable about the secondary characters either - just a gruesome assortment of brutes, drunkards and contemptuous employers.  The point is that whilst not one member of the dramatis personae endears him- or herself to us, none of them is the kind of two-dimensional caricature audiences would have been used to seeing in film melodramas around this time.  Visibly flawed they may be, but the protagonists each occasionally shows a better side - even the seemingly psychopathic Madeleine.  Her maternal concern for her young child is keenly felt, and whilst her despicable betrayal of Jean at the end of the film is unforgivable we can readily see what led her to this desperate act.  Through some astute writing and incredibly subtle performances, the three main characters encapsulate the predicament of those stuck in the lowest stratum of society.  By condemning the film for its unflattering representation of one social class, Pagliero's detractors would seem to be totally oblivious to the ugliness and injustice that is inherent in the world around them.

One of the most laudable aspects of Un homme marche dans la ville is how its location is used, not as a mere backdrop, but as a crucial part of the narrative.  The film begins and ends with a series of long panoramic tracking shots across the sea port of Le Havre, a stunning montage that is so intensely expressive of the penury and weariness that weighs down every character in the drama.  During the Occupation, the town had been a crucial Nazi stronghold and it took three days of continual bombardment by the Allies in September 1944 to liberate it.  Over 2000 civilians died in this onslaught from sea and sky and the scale of the Operation Astonia bombing is at once apparent in the shattered remnants of a once thriving town.  Apartartment blocks stand precariously in a landscape strewn with the sorry detritus of war, adjacent buildings half-demolished or else totally reduced to dusty rubble.

Yet amid this stark post-apocalyptic vista life goes on - the port is still a hubbub of activity, the din of machinery and manual labour fills the air.  The Le Havre that Pagliero's film paints is very different to the more romantic (but equally grim) depiction we find in Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Julien Duvivier's Le Paqueboat Tenacity (1934).  Here we see the port as a living, thriving entity.  Like the people who inhabit it, it is visibly damaged by its recent past, there is a sadness and desolation that clings to it, and yet it goes on, despite the weariness and the pain and the loss.  At the end of the film, it is not pessimism that you feel, but rather a sense of the indomitable resilience - not just of one town, but of a nation, bruised but not defeated.  The fact that Marcello Pagliero was assisted on the film by the writer-director Pierre Léaud is itself of interest.  The latter was the father of a young actor named Jean-Pierre Léaud who, within a decade, would become emblematic of the French New Wave, a driving force in France's cultural renaissance of the 1960s.

Film Synopsis

In the late 1940s, Madeleine and André Laurent live in Le Havre, a town that appears as grimly desolate and battle-scarred as their marriage. A dock worker, André barely earns enough money for the two of them and their small child to live on, and he has a habit of taking his frustrations out on his wife, particularly when he is under the influence of alcohol. Things are so hard that André begs his friend Jean Sauviot to ask their employer for a pay increase on his behalf - in vain.  A short while later, André loses his job when he causes an accident that injures one of his co-workers.  Madeleine is as fed up with her miserable life as her husband is, but in the more good-natured Jean she sees an opportunity for a fresh start.

Even though he has become sick of his solitary existence, Jean is reluctant to get emotionally involved with his friend's wife, but in the end their mutual attraction proves too strong for either of them to resist.  The first sign that André has that his wife is having an affair is when he sees their infant son hanging about outside the place where they live.  Realising that he has been betrayed by the two people closest to him, André is driven to a frenzy of anger and swears he will get even. His chance comes one evening when he sees his enemy standing on the docks.  André attacks the man, not knowing that he is a complete stranger - an American sailor who just happens to look like his friend. The sailor hits back and in the violent tussle that follows André accidentally falls from a great height to his death.

Madame Laurent does not shed many tears when she learns that her husband is dead.  Her overly romantic nature convinces her that her lover murdered him so that they could be together.  Already she is planning her future life with Jean, but Jean will have none of this.  The sudden death of his unfortunate friend makes it impossible for him to continue the love affair with the dead man's wife.  Embittered by this rejection, Madeleine betrays him to the police, insisting that her lover confessed his crime to her immediately after killing André.  Fortunately, Jean is able to provide himself with an alibi for the night of the supposed crime, so he is cleared of the charge of murder.  Realising that Madeleine's seemingly heartless reaction to her husband's death was motivated by love of him, Jean returns to her to ask her forgiveness.  When he receives no reply after knocking on her door, he leaves Madeleine a note asking to see her and then walks away, not knowing that she has committed suicide.