Parky at the Pictures (DVD 14/2/2013)

Danielle Darrieux has run up so many debts that she has to sort through her belongings to find something to sell. As she suspects general husband Charles Boyer of having an affair with socialite Lia Di Leo, she alights upon a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that he bought her as a wedding present and sells them to jeweller Jean Debucourt. When Boyer asks after the earrings, Darrieux insists she lost them at the opera and speculation in the press that they might have been stolen prompts Debucourt to inform Boyer that they are in his legitimate possession.

Angry with his wife for duping him, Boyer purchases the earrings and presents them to Di Leo as a parting gift, as she is leaving for Constantinople. While there, she has a losing streak at the casino and sells the earrings, which are acquired by diplomat Vittorio De Sica, who has just been appointed to the city in which Boyer and Darrieux reside. With Boyer away on campaign, Darrieux attends a ball unchaperoned and De Sica immediately falls in love with her. A sublime montage sequence showing their passion intensifying as they dance at various functions is amusingly ended an ageing admiral and his wife teetering across the floor as a reminder of the fate awaiting all lovers. But Darrieux's hopes of keeping her new love a secret are dashed when Boyer returns and she passes out in front of him on hearing that De Sica has fallen from his horse while hunting.

Darrieux has long been renowned for her fainting fits, but Boyer recognises the genuine emotion that prompted her distress and his suspicions are confirmed when De Sica gives her the earrings as a token of his esteem and she goes through an elaborate charade of pretending to find them in a glove so that she can wear them in her husband's presence. He waits until they are at a ball to take the earrings from Darrieux and explain their origins to the mortified De Sica. As a gentleman, he agrees to sell them to Debucourt so that Boyer can acquire them once more. However, he chastises Darrieux for her treachery and instructs her to give the earrings to his niece, Mireille Perrey, who has just given birth to her first child.

Grateful for the gesture, but more in need of cash to pay off her husband's debts. Perrey sells the earrings to Debucourt, who dutifully informs Boyer that they are once again available for purchase. But Boyer is tired of the pantomime and spurns the offer, prompting Darrieux to sell a host of valuables to meet the asking price. When she tells Boyer, he realises that she now treasures the earrings because of their connection to De Sica and he challenges him to a pistol duel. Knowing her spouse to be an excellent shot, Darrieux pleads with De Sica to back down. But he insists it is a matter of honour and, while she leaves the earrings in a church having prayed for her lover's safety, De Sica arrives in the woods at dawn and is informed that Boyer will have the first shot as the offended party.

As Darrieux rushes to the spot hoping to make the men see sense, she hears a retort and collapses in terror. Having failed to rouse her, a servant rushes for help and the scene fades to reveal the earrings in a glass case before an altar with a card explaining that they were a bequest from an unknown woman.

Initially, Ophüls included an epilogue, in which a nun gave the earrings to a young woman about to marry a general. However, he decided this echo of La Ronde diminished the tragedy of the denouement and, as always, his judgement proved sound. Few directors could invest superficiality with such subtextual significance. Thus, while it is a treat to look at Jean d'Eaubonne's sets, Georges Annenkov and Rosine Delamare's costumes and Christian Matras's agile camerawork, don't allow yourself to be seduced by their beauty. Each and every image reveals something about the characters that is not being spoken and this mastery of using setting and gesture to expose psychological truth is why Ophüls is so revered by cineastes.

The performances of Boyer, Darrieux and De Sica (who had been a matinee idol in Italy before becoming a neo-realist pioneer) are outstanding. But they are given additional depth and complexity by Ophüls's insistence on delving beneath the elegant façade of the fin-de-siècle fairytale to expose the ugly truth about both the characters themselves and humanity in general. Without this delicate cruelty, the crushing of Darrieux's spirit on the realisation that she is merely a possession rather than an emancipated woman would be merely melodramatic. Similarly, Boyer (who had co-starred with Darrieux in Anatole Litvak's Mayerling in 1935) would simply be a cad had he not let slip a flicker of genuine pain on discovering he had been cuckolded, while De Sica's suppression of his own feelings owes as much to his decency as his desperation to retain his status.

This would be Ophüls's penultimate picture and his last unqualified success, as the critics were divided on the merits of Lola Montès (1955), which many felt had been ruined by the inert performance of Martine Carol. She would be paired with Boyer in Christian-Jaque's adaptation of Émile Zola's Nana (1955). Yet, while this lavish costume drama contains nothing to match the cinematic brilliance of the divine dance sequence choreographed to Oscar Strauss's lilting Viennese waltz, it deserves better than the obscurity into which it was cast by the disdainful iconoclasts at Cahiers du Cinéma, who would go on to launch the nouvelle vague. 

Celebrated for his propriety, Comte Muffat (Charles Boyer) wishes to resign as the Grand Chamberlain of Napoleon III (Jean Debucourt) because the court over which he presides with the Empress Eugénie (Jacqueline Plessis) is becoming increasingly decadent. The Emperor pleads with Muffat to remain in office and asks him to escort the visiting Prince de Sardaigne (Nerio Bernardi) to the theatre that night, as his support is vital for French diplomacy in Italy.  Muffat agrees and returns home to tick off daughter Estelle (Luisella Boni) for wearing a dress with an unsuitable neckline and question why wife Sabine (Elisa Cegani) is entertaining such a gossip monger as the reporter Fauchery (Dario Michaelis).

By the time Muffat and Sardaigne arrive at the theatre managed by Mignon (Jacques Tarride), the show has already started and his wife Rose (Dora Doll) has not only enchanted the audience with her performance, but also the banker Steiner (Noël Roquevert), who is prepared to do a deal with Mignon and rival stage door johnny Bordenave (Paul Frankeur) to make her his official mistress. The negotiations are interrupted, however, by Nana (Martine Carol) taking to the stage and Sardaigne is so taken by her beauty and effervescence that he insists on going backstage to pay his respects. Nana is flattered to have a prince flirting with her, but, as the company celebrates the 30th birthday of her co-star Fontan (Walter Chiari), she finds herself attracted to the reticent Muffat, who is embarrassed to discover he has taken the handkerchief Nana had used to mop the champagne she had so deliberately spilt on his shirt.

Next day, Muffat sends a bouquet to Nana's rooms and pays her a visit just as her maid Zoé (Marguerite Pierry) is trying to deal with the various trades people representing their overdue bills. Feeling uncomfortable, Muffat leaves by the backstairs and bumps into Nana returning from an assignation with the Duc de Vandeuvres (Jacques Castelot), who is a client of the society madam known as La Tricon (Germaine Kerjean). Nana tells Muffat she has been attending a cousin's funeral and he awkwardly offers his condolences before using the arrival of Napoleon's paramour, Marguerite Bellanger (Nicole Riche) as an excuse to take his leave. Nana follows him on to the landing and kisses him, as she is as smitten with his reserve as he is by her exuberance.

Much to the frustration of his moral guardian Venot (Palau), Muffat sneaks out at night to see Nana. But she has already left the theatre to keep a rendezvous with Steiner, who has agreed to show her the contents of his safe if she contracts to become his mistress. However, on learning that Muffat is besotted with her, Nana snubs Steiner and arranges a private dinner party in her dressing-room. They talk until dawn and Muffat takes her to a farm in the Bois de Boulogne when she has a craving for some fresh milk. Unfortunately, they are spotted by Vandeuvres, who is a sworn enemy of the Second Empire and knows he can exploit the liaison between a key minister and an actress to his advantage. But Muffat is so blinded by love that he fails to see the danger in which he is placing himself and tells Venot to mind his own business when he returns home convinced that Nana will keep her word when she promises to forget her other beaux.

The news of the affair soon reaches Sabine, however, and she goes to see Nana perform. Yet she is prepared to give him a second chance after they dance together when Estelle is received at court and betrothed to a handsome fiancé. But Muffat has already arranged to meet Nana for supper and he is furious when she refuses to break a date with Vandeuvres, who has encouraged her to fleece Muffat for every penny after she discovers that Steiner is no longer worth pursuing because he has lost much of his fortune by investing in Algerian phosphates. Stung by being jilted, Muffat challenges Vandeuvres and they are only stopped by the secret police and Nana accuses Muffat of being a coward for not fighting to defend her honour.

Suddenly unable to afford her rooms, Nana moves in with Fontan. But he beats her for her excessive spending and she is arrested during a sweep of streetwalkers after he orders her to leave his digs in a disreputable part of Montmartre. Despite promising Sabine that the relationship is over, Muffat comes to her rescue and a slick montage sequence shows them dancing and riding in the park when Muffat is not buying Nana new jewels and a mansion where they can finally be alone. Typically, however, she quickly tires of the luxury and isolation and accepts an invitation from Bordenave to headline his next show. Moreover, she cannot resist the persistent charm of Vandeuvres, who names a racehorse in her honour and not only bets his fortune on it winning the Grand Prix, but also has a side wager with Nana that she will abandon Muffat and become his mistress if he triumphs.

No longer in control of his emotions, Muffat defies the Emperor when he warns him that he is jeopardising everything for a worthless hussy. He even seems oblivious to the fact that Sabine has left him and that Estelle has been humiliated by her broken engagement. Thus, he comes looking for Nana after Vandeuvres commits suicide in a blazing stable on being caught doping his horse. However, she refuses to bow to his demands and taunts him that she had never loved him and had simply exploited his folly. Driven to distraction, Muffat throttles her on the mansion staircase and staggers in a daze towards his inevitable fate.

Although he was a fine craftsman, Christian-Jaque was never in the same league as Max Ophüls. Thus, even though he collaborates effectively here with cinematographer Christian Matras, the imagery lacks the poetry and poise a Zola adaptation deserves. The story is compelling and Boyer and Carol deliver marvellous performances, with the laconic charm he perfected in Hollywood complementing the brassiness that made her such a popular pin-up, even though she was never particularly respected as an actress.

Robert Gys's production design, Marcel Escoffier and Jean Zay's costumes and Georges Van Parys's score are all accomplished, as is the support playing. The dialogue penned by the director in conjunction with Jean Ferry, Henri Jeanson and Albert Valentin is occasionally florid and the narrative meanders in places. But there are numerous neat touches, including the throwaway climactic gag of Zoé using her savings to take over La Tricon's sordid enterprise and drive many more hapless waifs into the beds of countless undeserving roués whose misuse of place, power and privilege would eventually undermine the Bonapartist regime itself.

Politics and sex find themselves in an even unholier alliance in Christian-Jaque's Lucrèce Borgia (1953), a tale of intrigue set in Rome in 1498 that bears a marked resemblance to the kind of Technicolor pageants depicting Ye Olde England that were being produced in Hollywood around the same time. For audiences struggling with the realities of a postwar world, spectacle mattered much more than historical accuracy or character depth, especially when it was presented in the ravishing hues that they had not witnessed on a cinema screen since the long-distant era of hand-tinting. Thus, the director can be forgiven for prioritising Christian Matras's luxuriant views of Robert Gys's evocative interiors and the Marcel Escoffier costumes that make the characters look as though they had leapt out of a Renaissance painting. Even the matte and model shots have a quaint charm and, if Martine Carol's acting limitations are a little more apparent in the title role, this still makes it abundantly clear why she was considered the French equivalent to Marilyn Monroe.

On the eve of her wedding, Lucrèce Borgia (Martine Carol) sneaks away from the pampering handmaidens in her apartments at the Castel San'Angelo and consults a fortune-teller, who predicts that she will find solace in a mysterious man in a mask  Tired of her brother César (Pedro Armendaríz) using her as a pawn in his Machiavellian machinations, Lucrèce is set against marrying Alphonse d'Aragon and hurries through the streets filled with peasants dancing and carousing as they enjoy the carnival atmosphere preceding her nuptials. However, on overhearing a volley of insults about herself and her brother, as well as their Spanish father, Pope Alexandre VI, she faints and has to be carried to some nearby ruins in order to recuperate. As she wakes, Lucrèce looks deep into the eyes of a masked stranger and they kiss passionately before spending the rest of the night together until she has to return to the fortress at dawn.

Having witnessed César terrorising the citizens during a nocturnal horseback ride and using his soldiers to arrest malcontents like Paolo (Christian Marquand), one can understand why Lucrèce would accede to his wish for her to marry Aragon in a bid to prevent a war with Naples. However, her eyes light up when she discovers at the formal betrothal that her husband-to-be is her companion from the previous evening (Massimo Serrato) and she cannot understand why he is so furious at the prospect of their union when they had been so intimate. The camera surveys the cityscape before craning down to the nave of a magnificent chapel as the couple kneel to take their vows. But Aragon scowls at his bride and she is reduced to pleading tears in their bedchamber as she seeks to reassure him that the rumours she is a harlot are baseless and that God has brought them together.

César tries to reinforce the bond with his new brother-in-law by staging a series of entertainments. However, Aragon is so appalled by the sight of an old man falling into a bonfire during a joust on a wooden scaffold that he compares César to Nero and his mood scarcely improves after the hunt he had requested culminates in the cornering and killing of its human quarry. Even Lucrèce is shocked to see her brother dispatch Paolo with a spear, as he begs her to remember they had once been lovers. But she is more distressed that this revelation convinces Aragon to seek an annulment and she implores him to listen to her story so that he can see that she has been more sinned against than sinning.

Lucrèce explains that César had been so corrupted by the power bestowed upon him by their father that he had sought to use her to bolster his position. Thus, he had married her off to Janse Sforza of Milan (Gilles Quéant) and had his trusted lieutenant Michelotto (Arnoldo Foà) spy on them to ensure their fealty. However, Sforza was keen to break the alliance and tried to smuggle a message to France requesting military assistance. Bored by her husband's indifference, Lucrèce had taken a lover, Perotto (Maurice Ronet), and he had advised her to convince César to seek a separation from Sforza on the grounds of non-consummation rather than murder him and bring the whole of Europe down upon the Romagna. Initially livid at having his plan thwarted, César accepted that Sforza would be humiliated by the publication of his sexual failure. But his gratitude did not extend to Petotto, whom he had assassinated and tossed into the Tiber for leading his sister astray.

Convinced that Lucrèce would be safer at the court of Julie Farnese (Valentine Tessier), César sent his sister into effective exile. However, his enemies discovered her whereabouts and bribe a dwarf who detests his mistress to lead the kidnappers to the bathhouse where Lucrèce could be found unguarded. She was only rescued after a breakneck gallop through the forest by Paolo and she had repaid him by becoming his mistress. But it didn't take long for César to find another purpose for Lucrèce and she urges Aragon to accept that she had forgotten Paolo almost as soon as he had started rising through the ranks of César's army.

Having listened to her account, Aragon takes pity of Lucrèce and a series of 360° shots showing a tree changing with the seasons helps convey their growing closeness. However, while on a mission to France, César determines to end the marriage, as the Neapolitan alliance has become an inconvenience. He tells Lucrèce that she will be offered to the D'Este family and sends Michelotto to court with a hunting glove for Aragon whose fingertips have been laced with poison. He refuses to try it on and, when a dog perishes after chewing it, Lucrèce colludes with a courtier to smuggle Aragon back to Naples. He is waylaid during a torrential downpour, however, and left for dead in the gutter. But he survives and César receives the news during an orgy he is hosting to ensure D'Este support.

Returning to Rome, César tries to convince Lucrèce that he is delighted her husband is still alive. But he is under the impression that she betrayed him and he accuses her of being a whore when he finally emerges from a coma. Distraught, Lucrèce takes a dagger and seeks out her sibling. Yet, in so doing, she leaves Aragon unprotected and he is murdered by Michelotto. Filled with hatred for César, Lucrèce proclaims him dead to her and she follows the funeral procession with an impassive expression that contrasts strongly with the look on César's face as he looks down on the chapel from a high balcony and realises that the sister he adores will never forgive him and that he is now alone and vulnerable in his efforts to build upon his father's legacy. As the camera pulls away through a high window, it pans the rooftops of Rome and slowly closes in on the Borgia crest in a wrought iron gate.

Christian-Jaque made five films with Martine Carol and they married shortly after the completion of this picture. However, they began to drift apart just as Roger Vadim started making an icon of his own future wife, Brigitte Bardot, and Carol drifted off to Hollywood shortly after the lukewarm reception of Lola Montès seemed to confirm that her star was on the wane. She struggled to make the grade in Hollywood and died at the age of 46, some five years after finishing her 17th and last screen outing, I Don Giovanni della Costa Azzurra (1961).

At no point here does Carol convince as a 15th-century temptress, even though she briefly appears naked. However, she is hardly helped by the cumbersome dialogue concocted by the triumvirate of Christin-Jaque, Cécil Saint-Laurent and Jacques Sigurd, who always seem to have a firmer grasp of glossy soap opera than medieval history. At no point, for example, do they place the Borgias in a wider continental context that might have explained why Lucrèce felt so compelled to go along with César's schemes. The characterisation is also frustratingly weak, with Pedro Armendaríz being required to do little more than snarl, while Massimo Serrato was merely asked to look lovestruck or peevish. Carol acquits herself rather better, while Christian-Jacque turns the forest hunt and the stormy ambush into rousing set-pieces. But it is much easier to see why this would have been branded part of the Tradition of Quality by the Cahiers crew than Gervaise (1956), René Clément's outstanding adaptation of the seventh novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, L'Assomoir.

New Wavers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard did wonderful things for French cinema. But the assault on the domestic mainstream in the mid-1950s led to the wholesale dismissal of numerous literate and meticulously produced pictures that would have been the envy of most other industries around the world. Clearly these young mavericks had to announce their arrival on the scene and castigating older directors seems as good a way as any to make headlines and draw attention to their subversive alternative style. Musicians have been exploiting these tactics for decades. But rarely has a conquest been as conclusive as that of the so-called `cinéma du papa'.

Such was the seismic impact on world cinema of the nouvelle vague that French film history was rewritten in accordance with Truffaut and his cohorts. Not only did critics cease to take seriously the later works of their bêtes noirs, but they also started downplaying the significance of their earlier achievements because they failed to meet the auteur criteria that had suddenly became the sole benchmark of worthwhile film-making. This means that dozens of perfectly acceptable features were consigned to oblivion and it says much for the laziness of screen historians that so little effort has been made to kick against the Cahiers orthodoxy and re-examine titles that performed more than adequately at the box office and gave many future stars their first roles.

Credit must to to Studio Canal, therefore, for releasing four films by René Clément, who was hailed as an innovative talent in 1946 when he used non-professional actors from the  Résistance-Fer group tomake The Battle of the Rails (1946), a neo-realist account of the activities of the Maquis that earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. Indeed, so high was his stock that he was hired by Jean Cocteau to co-direct the acclaimed fantasy La Belle et la Bête (1948), while the thriller Les Maudits (1947) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and he received a second Best Director nod at Cannes for The Walls of Malapaga (1949). Yet, within three years of Forbidden Games (1952) scooping a second Oscar and the Grand Prix at Venice, Truffaut had denounced Clément as a journeyman, in spite of the fact that he shared a fascination with technique with the abrasive critic's hero, Alfred Hitchcock. Cahiers editor André Bazin attempted to defend Clément when he brought Monsieur Ripois to Cannes in 1954, but the knives were out and, following Gervaise (1956) and the Patricia Highsmith noir Purple Noon (1960), he spent the remainder of his career churning out mediocre Italian and American co-productions.

It's slightly disappointing that two of these have been included in this quartet at the expense of such vastly superior titles. But it would be nice to think that these will follow in due course and that Studio Canal is about to do for postwar French film what it is currently doing for so many equally unjustly neglected Ealing pictures.

Frustrated that her philandering partner Lantier (Armand Mestral) has been out all night while she tends to their sons, Étienne (Christian Denhez) and Claude (Patrice Catineaud), Gervaise Macquart (Maria Schell) goes to do her laundry and tries to find out from concierge Madame Boche (Mathilde Casadesus) who he has been consorting with. When the children rush in to tell her that Lantier has packed a bag and left, Gervaise takes out her frustration on Virginie (Suzy Delair), the sister of Lantier's paramour, and they fight with buckets of water before Gervaise spanks Virginie's bare behind with such humiliating force that she vows to wreak her revenge.

Even though she is lame, Gervaise is a beautiful woman and she is not alone for long, as roofer Henri Coupeau (François Perier) defies his mother (Florelle) and sister Madame Lorilleux (Jany Holt) to propose to her and they invite Goujet the blacksmith (Jacques Harden) to the reception in a backstreet tavern. The wedding party moves on to the Louvre, where Gervaise and Goujet admire a painting depicting Liberty, even though have precious little of it in their hardscrabble lives. But things seem to be improving for Gervaise, as she gives birth to a daughter named Nana and makes plans with Coupeau to start their own business. However, everything changes when he falls from a roof and Gervaise spends their savings on nursing him at home rather than taking him to the free hospital.

Keen to see Gervaise settled, Goujet lends the couple 500 francs and they open a laundry. Once more, Gervaise seems to be prospering and even befriends Virginie, who has married a policeman named Poisson (Lucien Hubert). However, she mistakes Goujet for Gervaise's husband and seeks to atone by bringing her a goose to mark her name day. Gervaise is hardly in the mood to celebrate, however, as Coupeau has started drinking and flirting with her assistant Clémence (Micheline Luccioni) and she accuses him of stealing the coins she had saved to repay Goujet. He warns Gervaise against becoming too preoccupied with money and encourages her to cook the goose and make a night of it.

As the guests assemble, Coupeau has to be dragged from an inn and refuses to be the thirteenth person at the table. He returns with a stranger to dine with them and asks Gervaise to sing a song. However, she stops abruptly when she see Lantier peering through the window and is surprised when Coupeau (who has threatened to kill him if he ever returned) welcomes him in and offers him a bed for the night. Goujet is also dismayed to learn of Lantier's return and throws himself into a strike calling for a five cent pay rise. However, he is falsely accused of rabble-rousing and is sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment.

While he is inside, Lantier makes himself at home and dupes Coupeau into giving him money. When Goujet is released, he is so appalled by Gervaise's circumstances that he leaves the neighbourhood and she is sufficiently vulnerable to end up in Lantier's arms after she breaks down in tears at the sight of her husband snoring drunkenly in their bed. Next morning, she reassures Étienne (now 13 and played by Christian Férez) that nothing happened between them, but confesses all to Goujet when she meets him for a drink and chastises him when he tries to kiss her. But, even though Goujet makes Étienne his apprentice, Gervaise's troubles keep mounting, as Coupeau has pawned sheets belonging to her customers and her employees are complaining about payment arrears. Yet, when Lantier and Virginie plot to take over the shop, Gervaise throws them out and devotes herself to caring for her husband.

Coupeau refuses to reform, however, and trashes the place in a drunken fury that culminates in him being taken away in a cart. Distraught at the carnage and having wasted so much time on worthless companions, Gervaise takes to drink herself and the drama concludes with Nana (Chantal Gozzi) searching for her widowed mother in the shop now run by Lantier and Virginie. The latter gives Nana some bonbons and a ribbon and she takes them to the tavern to show Gervaise. She is too stupefied to notice, however, and the little girl ties the ribbon around her hair to make herself look pretty and skips towards the boys chasing birds down the street and the doomed future that has already been chronicled above.

This closing shot is all the more poignant knowing the fate that will befall Nana, but it is more than matched by the railway station sequence in which Goujet and Étienne fail to notice Gervaise when she comes to wave them off. This seems to condemn her to the despair that eventually drives her to drink, although her habit of trusting the wrong people, making bad decisions and falling foul of vindictive foes proves just as fatal. Yet, while Gervaise is a deeply flawed character, Maria Schell succeeds in making her highly sympathetic without turning her into a melodramatic victim and her selection as Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival is entirely justifiable. Jacques Harden similarly prevents Goujet from being two-dimensionally decent, with his union activity and readiness to seduce Gervaise lending his performance an uncompromising manliness that French audiences had come to expect of Jean Gabin.

The supporting turns of Armand Mestral as the feckless Lantier, François Périer as the alcoholic Coupeau and Suzy Delair as the pitiless Virginie are also superb, thanks in no small part to the earthy screenplay by Jacques Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who would be singled out for special ire by Truffaut for their association with the detested Claude Autant-Lara before being rehabilitated by a member of the second generation of Cahiers autuers, Betrand Tavernier. But what makes this such an affecting picture is the poetic realist depiction of 1850s Paris, which is brought to vivid life by Paul Bertrand's sets and Robert Juillard's lowering monochrome photography, which compare to anything in David Lean's Dickens pictures of the previous decade. Clearly, the French mainstream was not as moribund as the angry young men would have us believe and further evidence is provided in another collaboration between Clément and Aurenche and Bost, Jeux interdits/Fobidden Games.

As German forces sweep across France in June 1940, the Luftwaffe strafes a column of refugees on a country road and the Parisian parents of young Brigitte Fossey are killed on a bridge as she chases after her frightened dog, Jock. The animal also perishes and Fossey wades into the river after a woman tosses away its carcass. Back on dry land, she bumps into farmer's son Georges Poujouly, who is pursuing a runaway cow and takes her home to aska parents Lucien Hubert and Suzanne Courtal if Fossey can stay with them. Realising that the child has been orphaned, they agree and Poujouly and his brother Jacques Marin try to calm her when she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.

Having overheard someone saying that her parents will probably have been buried like animals, Fossey goes in search of a hoe next morning and begins digging a grave for her dog. Passing priest Louis Saintève teaches her how to pray and she is delighted when Poujouly erects a cross behind the little mound of earth and tells her that cemeteries are nice places as they ensure that the dead don't get lonely.

This notion hits home when Marin dies suddenly and Poujouly steals a couple of crosses from the hearse, while his sister, Laurence Badie, runs the risk of annoying her father by flirts with returning soldier Amédée, who is the son of loathed neighbour,André Wasley. Yet, even though he gets into trouble with both Hubert and Saintève, he continues to acquire crosses at every opportunity, as he and Fossey have started their own graveyard for everything from insects, worms and butterflies to birds, moles and vermin. Indeed, as Amédée and Badie take refuge in the hayloft during an air raid, Fossey and Poujouly take a wheelbarrow from the barn and gather as many crucifixes as they can while the adults are distracted.

When Sunday comes, the family goes to lay flowers on Marin's grave and Courtal is greatly distressed to see the cross has been stolen. Having been convinced by Poujouly that Amédée had been responsible for the earlier thefts, Hubert damages one of his family's monuments in revenge and a fight breaks out with the furious Wasley that has to be stopped by Saintève, who explains what Poujouly and Fossey have been upto.

Poujouly runs away and Badie asks Fossey where he might be hiding. However, he returns to threaten to snitch to Hubert about her romance with Amédée if she dares to betray the secret of their cemetery. But, with 14 crosses having disappeared from the churchyard, the police are called in and Hubert promises Poujouly that he will make Fossey a permanent member of the family if he shows him where he is keeping his contraband. Poujouly tells his father about the burial ground in the old mill, but feels so betrayed when a policeman starts questioning Fossey that he runs ahead and destroys the cemetery and throws the crosses into the river. As the film ends, Fossey has a name card placed around her neck by a nun who tries to reassure her that everything will work out for the best. But Fossey pulls away from her and disappears into the crowd of displaced persons looking for her only friend.

Once again designed and photographed with authenticity and discretion by Paul Bertrand and Robert Juillard, and sensitively enacted to Narciso Yepes's exquisite guitar score, this heartbreaking pacificst tracts owed much to the art of Dutch masters Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer and the neo-realist screen style that had become common in postwar Italy. But its chief strength lies in the wondrously natural performance of six year-old Brigitte Fossey and 11 year-old Georges Poujouly, whose blend of corrupted innocence and macabre gravitas still has the power to move 60 years on. In later years, Fossey compared her character to Lady Macbeth and, for all its poignancy, this could never be claimed as a harmless first love fairytale. Indeed, it could almost be seen as a rustic film noir, with a porcelain femme fatale duping a palookaish peasant into doing her bidding.

The action may seem a little calculated in places, as even Aurenche and Bost were unable to eradicate entirely the coyness that had prompted numerous producers to reject François Boyer's script before he reworked it as the 1947 novel, The Secret Game. Indeed, Clément himself had originally only envisaged the story as one segment in a portmanteau on recent French history. But, when this project collapsed due to lack of funding, he came to see Boyer's narrative as more than a vignette, especially as its darkly comic treatment of death could help a nation still coming to terms with the bereavements, treacheries and complexities of the Occupation. Perhaps this was why he decided to jettison whimsical bookending sequences, in which Poujouly sits down with Fossey on a giant tree trunk and reads her a story that has a much happier ending, as he wished to highlight the more sinister side of the juvenile psyche and pay a more honest tribute to the girl he met while making The Walls of Malapaga, who acted with her hand in her pocket as she didn't want anyone to see the injury she had sustained in the war.

Released some two decades later, La Maison sous les arbres/The Deadly Trap (1971) is by no means a bad film. However, this take on the Arthur Cavanaugh novel, The Children Are Gone, clearly lacks the artistry of the aforementioned  At its core is the crumbling marriage of American ex-pats Faye Dunaway and Frank Langella. She is devoted to their children, Patrick Vincent and Michèle Lourie, while he is a careerist who is becoming increasingly concerned by the efforts of a body known only as The Organisation to coerce him into becoming a member. Seemingly unaware of the predicament facing her husband, Dunaway grows increasingly forgetful and friend Barbara Parkins frets about her when she fails to remember borrowing an umbrella and crashes the car while the kids are playing up in the back seat. But Dunaway's growing sense of paranoia seems to be entirely justified when Vincent and Lourie disappear and she has to work out whether she has let their whereabouts slip from her mind or whether they have been abducted in order to force Langella into betraying some industrial secrets.

Clément was not alone in letting his standards slip in his later years. Alfred Hitchcock struggled to produce any truly memorable work between Psycho (1960) and Frenzy (1972) and The Deadly Trap and La Course du lièvre à travers les champs/And Hope to Die (1972) have more in common with Torn Curtain (1964) and Topaze (1969) than The Birds (1963) or Marnie (1964), although it is tempting to compare Dunaway's display of creeping alienation wth Tippi Hedren's interpretation of psychotic frigidity.

Despite an evocative opening set on a barge drifting along the Seine, much of the action takes place inside Langella and Dunaway's cluttered apartment that enables Clément and production designer Jean André (who makes evocative use throughout of yellows and purples) to capture both the couple's personalities and the problems at the heart of their relationship. But it is once Clément ventures into the forbidding boulevards of the usually photogenic Paris that the tension begins to mount and Dunaway and Langella not only seem to be a long way from home, but also terrifyingly distant from each other. Andréas Winding's prowling camerawork and Gilbert Bécaud's melancholic score reinforce the air of unease, but the resolution feels forced and a little inconsequential after such a disconcerting, if occasionally melodramatic preamble.

Released the following year, And Hope to Die was Clément's penultimate picture and it completes this set produced to mark his centenary. Based on David Goodis's 1967 pulp novel, Black Friday, the action opens with a cat in a shop window watching a boy being bullied as he moves into a Marseilles neighbourhood before a quotation from the prologue of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (`We are all but older children, dear/Who fret to find our bedtime near') gives way to a frantic cross-country chase that sees Jean-Louis Trintignant fleeing from some pursuing gypsies and ingeniously using a speeding train to get him across the Canadian border. While lingering near the Montreal Biosphere, however, he witnesses Aldo Ray and Daniel Breton murder a man who hands him a wad of banknotes and whispers the baffling phrase `Toboggan committed suicide' Trintignant just about manages to hide the cash about her person before he is bundled into a car and driven to the lakeside headquarter of kingpin Robert Ryan, who threatens to kill him unless he reveals where he has hidden the loot.

Trintignant insists he knows nothing and hunkers down as Ryan, Ray and Breton try to pass the time by balancing cigarettes on end and Ryan's girlfriend Lea Massari competes with Tisa Farrow for Trintignant's attention. But, in between experiencing disconcerting flashbacks to childhood terrors, Trintignant realises that Ryan is planning a major operation that involves a fire engine ladder, a talking doll and a hospital ward. However, he is just as keen to survive as he is to fathom what is going on and the combination of banter, ennui, recollection and anticipation gives proceedings a feel of Quentin Tarantino striving to pay homage to Alain Resnais. 

Well served by a fine ensemble, Clément almost seems to be showing the nouvelle vaguers who had written him off that he is still full of ideas, while some of them have drifted into creative or political cul-de-sacs that would detain them for the remainder of the decade. Thus, this is an ambitious mélange of visual styles that are knowingly photographed by Edmond Richard and nimbly edited by Roger Dwyre. However, much of the running time is devoted to the bickering between the members of Ray's gang, as they lounge around Pierre Guffroy's claustrophobic sets to the accompaniment of Francis Lai's unsettling score. It says much for Clément and screenwriter Sébastien Japrisot's confidence in the cast that they make this downtime between heists so engaging and the frantic finale almost feels like overkill as a consequence. But most of the pieces slot into place, with even those hewn from the dark recesses of Trintignant's mind involving a bag of marbles eventually making some sort of sense. Moreover, there's no denying the bloody Peckinpahian combustibility of the denouement. Yet, while this often makes for intriguing viewing, the surrealism and the suspense never quite gel.