Oct. 14--To come across the films of classic French filmmaker Jean Gr魩llon is like discovering another country, at once familiar and unaccountably new.
Familiar because the greatest of the director's films, the ones made in the 1930s and 1940s, made expert use of well-known French stars like Jean Gabin and Mich謥 Morgan, and it's a pleasure to experience them doing what they do best.
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As displayed in "Jean Gr魩llon: Le Ciel Est ... Vous," a new UCLA Film and Television Archive series starting Saturday at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater, the man's pictures also share the poetic and realistic character-driven strengths of the works of such better known filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carn
Yet despite all these virtues, Gr魩llon's work has consistently resisted reaching a wider public. When British critic Hazel Hackett wrote in 1947 in the film journal Sight Sound that Gr魩llon "deserves to be better known," she could not have forecast that that sentiment would be as true almost 70 years later as it was then.
When you see Gr魩llon's films in a bunch, as the UCLA series gives you the rare opportunity to do, you understand why that happened. It's not that they aren't good -- the best ones, like the Gabin-Morgan pairing in "Remorques," are knockouts -- it's that they defy expectations and refuse to fit tidily into any one aesthetic box. Surprisingly modern and iconoclastic, there is often a twist to them, a whiff of emotional danger that puts them outside the norm.
Though he was very interested in expressive visuals, Gr魩llon and his writers (including Jacques Pr鶥rt but most often Charles Spaak) had an instinct for the complexities of psychological truth and the sense that expressing feelings on screen was what the cinematic experience should be about.
Making Gr魩llon's work even more unusual was the accident of fate that led to his key films coming out during the World War II period when France was under German occupation. He was, French critic Georges Sadoul wrote, "practically the only one who had the courage to make absolutely contemporary films" at that time. One of those pictures, "Lumi貥 d'ɴ鬢 opens the series Oct. 17 at 7:30 p.m., while another gives the series its title.
"Lumi貥 d'ɴ鬢 which translates as "Summer Light," was made in 1943 and then banned by the collaborationist Vichy government. It is a decidedly strange film, filled with twisted emotions and tortured relationships and best appreciated as the allegory it obviously was, a kind of sour version of Renoir's "Rules of the Game" about the corruption of those in power and the fortitude of the working class.
Much more approachable is 1944's "Le Ciel Est ... Vous," translated as "The Sky Is Yours," a surprisingly feminist film for its time starring Gr魩llon's muse, actress Madeline Renaud, as a working-class woman who gets it into her head to break a world distance flying record. Based on a true story, its "why shouldn't we dream?" theme gave the proceedings a hopeful energy that occupied French audiences readily responded to.
One of the most interesting films in the series (which, sadly, is not showing Gr魩llon's first major success, the Gabin-starring "Gueule d'Amour") is the director's first sound film, 1930's "La Petite Lise."
Technically adventurous and visually impressive, this early proto-noir tells the story of a pardoned convict who returns to Paris only to find his beloved daughter in desperate straits. Among its unusual aspects are the realistic treatment of Africans in Paris and the opposite, the caricatured portrait of a Jewish pawnbroker.
Also dealing with racial, sexual and class politics is the disturbing "Daﮡh la M鴩sse," set entirely on an ocean liner and starring Laurence Clavius as a multiracial woman who is troubled by her life. Exactly why is unclear -- the film was severely cut by its distributor and disowned by the director -- but the story offers a voyage into uncharted territory that is never less than fascinating.
"L'ɴrange Monsieur Victor" (The Strange Mr. Victor) is, as its title indicates, unusual but in a different way. It stars the inimitable Raimu, one of France's most formidable actors, as a middle-class shopkeeper by day who runs a criminal enterprise by night. The film's mixture of sunlight and shadow, the dark and the comic, is more unsettling than you might expect.
Then there is 1941's polished "Remorques" (Stormy Waters), begun before the war but released during the occupation. A moody, atmospheric love story, emotionally nuanced and visually vivid in its glimpses of men at work and storms at sea, it stars Gabin as the intensely masculine captain of a salvage tug torn between the frail wife he loves (Renaud again) and a mysterious woman (Morgan) he rescues from a failing ship. Complex, adult, rich in full throttle emotions, this makes a powerful case for insisting on Gr魩llon's place among the masters.
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'Jean Gr魩llon: Le Ciel Est ... Vous'
Where: Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood
When: Oct. 17-Nov. 21; all screenings at 7:30 p.m. except as noted
Schedule:
Oct. 17 -- "Lumi貥 d'ɴ鬢 preceded by "Les Charmes de l'Existence"
Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. -- "Maldone," preceded by "Chartres"
Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. -- "La Petite Lise," "Daﮡh la M鴩sse"
Nov. 6 -- "Remorques," "L'ɴrange Monsieur Victor"
Nov. 18 -- "Le Ciel Est ... Vous," preceded by "Haute-Lisse"
Nov. 21 -- "Pattes Blanches," preceded by "Andr頍asson et les Quatre ɬ魥nts"
