High-priced art

Marcel Carné and the cost of filmmaking

French film director Marcel Carné, who died last month at age 90, was the mostly unacknowledged father of "film noir." His shadowy, subterranean tales of doom, Le quai des brumes (1938) and Le jour se lève (1939), both starring hardboiled Jean Gabin, were released several years before the first American "noir" cycle featuring The Maltese Falcon.

But Carné is most famous and beloved for Les enfants du Paradis (1945), high-culture melodrama starring Jean-Louis Barrault, the last respected sensitive mime. That's also the picture that got Carné forever into trouble at home, for it was shot under compromised circumstances during the Occupation. Many of the extras were Vichy types. And, as Edward Turk, the MIT-based Carné expert, has written, "by the time Les enfants du Paradis was completed, seventy-five thousand Jews had been deported from France to extermination camps in Poland."

It was a decade and a half ago that Carné, exhausted of being attacked as traitorous in France, arrived in Boston to speak of his career, and to deposit his archives, at our French Library. Would anyone here care about what he did in World War II?

Through a translator, he talked of the shooting of Les enfants du Paradis and the sad day when the Gestapo appeared on the set and asked one of the actors to go away with them. The actor was "disappeared," yet the filming marched on. Today, he said, many consider Les enfants du Paradis among the masterpieces of cinema.

By this point in his French Library memory sharing, Carné was smiling. "Monsieur Carné would like to say how, out of adversity, great art can be made," his translator told the gathered.

That's when, from the audience, I ruined Carné's trip to America.

"Ask Monsieur Carné," I instructed his translator, "whether it was worth it, with Les enfants du Paradis, to make one of the greatest films of all time if he needed to sacrifice an actor to the Nazis to do it."

The translator nervously put my question to him in French. Carné flushed and, well, practically fainted. J'accuse! "Monsieur Carné did not mean that! You didn't understand him! etc., etc.," pleaded the translator. The Q&A was kaput.

Says Turk in the estimable (still in print) 1989 Harvard University Press study Child of Paradise: "His sizable creative output since Les enfants du Paradis -- 14 films -- has been subject to a degree of critical neglect unprecedented for a director with the standing Carné once enjoyed. . . . Since 1961 none of his pictures has been distributed theatrically in the United States."

There will be an all-day tribute of five Carné classics at the French Library November 24. Call 266-4351.

WITH CARNÉ'S DEATH, who remain as candidates for the greatest living film directors? My list of the world's "magnificent seven" are all (sorry multiculturalists) heterosexual males 65 and older, and, with one exception, Western-born: Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, born in 1918), Robert Bresson (France, 1907), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1912), Billy Wilder (USA, born in Vienna in 1906), Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1910), Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1930), and Stanley Kubrick, (USA-England, born in New York in 1928).

Can anyone in Phoenix land offer his/her alternative list? Mail it in.

DESOLATION ANGELS, which is playing this weekend (November 22 and 23) at the Brattle, is a sprawling, sometimes forceful Gen X Othello about a seething young man, Nick (Michael Roderick), who implodes and explodes because his girlfriend, Mary (Jennifer Thomas), has had sex with his womanizing, Iago-like pal Sid (Peter Basset). She claims she was forced into it, though she can't quite voice the word "rape."

Should she have resisted more? Sleazy Sid claims no responsibility. "If someone comes to your apartment, wouldn't you fuck her?" he asks her wounded boyfriend.

The film alternates scenes that don't go anywhere with powerful ones, and it gets at bruised males, who can't escape their own self-destructive need to retaliate. But there's also no escaping the unpleasantness of practically all the characters. Probably that explains why Desolation Angels, despite winning a major critics prize at Toronto, has had difficulty attracting a distributor.

Still, director/writer/editor/cameraman Tim McCann is a talent to respect for this serious, uncompromised first feature.

HOLLYWOOD LOVES post-Communism. According to Variety, 93 percent of films on Hungarian screens are USA-made . . . A major hit across Europe is the Eddie Murphy-starring The Nutty Professor. It's doing fabulously even in France, where the 1963 Jerry Lewis version has been beatified . . . Trivia time. The five biggest box-office successes in America by a first-time director are, in descending order: Kevin Costner's Dancing with Wolves (1990), Peter Faiman's Crocodile Dundee (1986), Randal Kleiser's Grease (1978), John Pasquin's The Santa Clause (1994), Joe Johnston's Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989).