Casque d'Or (1951) is an unusual film noir set in the Belle Epoque. Although there are some gritty back-alleys in the movie, much of the action takes place along verdant riverbanks, outdoor dance halls of the kind that Renoir painted, and picturesque country farmhouses. Instead of neon reflected in puddles of water on urban mean streets, we see flowery vistas that could be the subjects of Impressionistic paintings. Nonetheless, the crucial elements of film noir are present in Casque d'Or: we have an ex-con trying to go straight, a blonde femme fatale who seems to be a prostitute, and a grim sense that destiny is against these characters and will doom them -- the film famously ends with the hero going to the guillotine, a notable sequence shot in the blurred, uneasy grey of early morning. Although some of the scenes are airy and bright, and everyone dresses in elaborate costumes, (this is a film in which there is a credit to Marie Rose de Bigot for corsets), a premonition of doom hovers over the narrative. Although a box-office flop when premiered in Paris, the movie was an international sensation and has grown in critical renown with each passing year. For decades, the movie's director, Jacques Becker (pronounced Bey-KAR), was underestimated, thought to be a mere imitator of Jean Renoir with whom he worked in the 1930's. After a 2016 revival of his works in New York City, some critics went so far as to consider the disciple greater than his master, proclaiming that Becker was the real talent behind the string of masterpieces made by Renoir before World War Two. This is an over-statement and, in fact, Renoir's form of poetic realism is quite distinct from Becker's more clinical approach to his material. However, there are interesting overlaps and Becker, for instance, relies upon Margaret Renoir (Jean's girlfriend -- she took his last name) as his editor.
Casque d' Or was initially misunderstood as a crime movie. In fact, it's an underworld love story. An ex-con named Manda encounters a beautiful blonde girl, Marie (Simone Signoret) at a river-side dance-hall in Joinville. The girl is the moll of an abusive gangster named Roland. Marie and Manda fall in love at first sight. Roland is jealous and there's a brawl at the plein-aire dance-hall and the thug gets knocked-out. It turns out that Roland is part of a nattily dressed gang of mobsters who work for a bigger, meaner version of Roland, a sadistic crook named Felix Leca. Leca has aspirations toward Marie who is the most glamorous of the various impressively coutured courtesans bar-girls hanging around with the criminals. Leca sets an assignation with Marie at a hoodlum bar called The Angel Gabriel. Manda, who is working as a carpenter, is betrothed to his boss' scrawny and sharp-featured daughter. When Marie finds out about the other woman, she slaps Manda's face and stalks angrily away. (There is lots and lots of face-slapping in this film -- in Becker's films, slaps in the face are what trills are in late Beethoven; the gesture obviously has a some kind of extra-narrative significance to the director and seems to be fetishized.) Manda, who loves Marie, plans to break-up with the daughter of the cabinet-maker, and comes to the Angel Gabriel to look for her. Three men, accordingly, are vying for Marie's favor -- the film is named after her tightly coiled blonde hair, her casque (or helmet) of gold. The evil Felix Leca incites a knife-fight between Roland and Manda. After a brutal struggle with much eye-gouging, Manda stabs Roland to death. Callously, Leca offers Manda a job in his mob -- "there's a vacancy," Leca says. The next day, Manda leaves his job as a cabinet-maker, ending his relationship (whatever it was) with his boss' daughter. He goes on the lam, receiving a message to go down to the river-side in Joinville. Marie appears in a row boat and they make love. Then, the couple hide-out in a farmhouse nearby, supervised by a cynical old lady. Leca plots to rape Marie. The gangster has a corrupt cop in his pocket and pins the death of Roland on Manda's prison-buddy, Raymond. When Manda learns that his chum, Raymond, is facing charges for a killing that he committed, Manda sneaks out of Marie's bed and goes to the corrupt cops to confess to stabbing Roland. Raymond has been caught in possession of Roland's pocket-watch and switchblade and so he isn't released but, instead, held as an accomplice. Marie decides to have sex with Leca to get Manda out of the jam. She goes to Leca's place where he rapes her. But Leca isn't a reliable guy. He doesn't lean on his corrupt police chief buddy to get Manda out of stir. Instead, he's more than happy to possess Marie himself and let Manda rot in jail. "You're a louse," Marie tells him angrily, earning (you guessed it) a slap in the face. She takes matters into her own hands and aids Manda and Raymond in escaping from a paddy-wagon that is transporting them to prison. (Marie's beauty is posited to be so great that her mere appearance creates a distraction so that the prisoners can overcome their guards. As one of the guards chases the two fleeing men, Marie throws herself in his way and literally tackles him.) Raymond is shot and dies. Manda discovers that the mob boss, Leca, has raped Marie and framed Raymond, presumably to entice Marie to approach him and offer herself as assistance to Manda. This doesn't sit well with Manda. He hunts down Leca and shoots him in the police station in front of the crooked cops. Manda is condemned to death for this shooting (it would seem to me that the killing of Roland which has triggered the whole mess would be excused as self-defense). In the film's famous finale, Marie rents a dismal room overlooking the prison yard where Manda will be executed; she watches her lover as he is guillotined and, on this grim note, the film ends.
The plot is nothing much, a standard film noir narrative involving a good-time girl and an ex-convict trying to go straight. The gangsters are a little pathetic --they steal from one another (triggering another bout of face-slapping) and Leca, although vicious, isn't really intimidating. Simone Signoret is like a French version of Marilyn Monroe, vehemently blonde but not child-like, rather somewhat cold and calculating -- she's the focal point of the film, the object of desire that everyone wants to possess. In the final scenes, she watches the death of her lover dry-eyed with a kind of feverish intensity -- the squalid execution is something that she must witness. In the film's opening scene, we see the mobsters with their girls rowing in four boats down the Seine. The men are rowing the boats except for the one carrying Marie and Roland -- Roland is a bully and we think that Marie is rowing the boat because Roland is lazy and has forced her to do so. But, in fact, Marie is rowing the boat as a representation of the fact that she is an independent woman, the mistress, as it were, of her own fate. Later, we see her row the same boat to the landing place where Manda is waiting for her -- he's asleep on the river bank and she teases him into waking; then, Becker gives an ecstatic close-up of her face ringed in golden hair backlit against the radiant sky. But Becker's particular directorial touch is epitomized in the scenes before Marie wakes Manda on the river-bank. We see Marie very carefully tying up the boat, not in any particular haste, but looping the rope three times around a stake on the bank and, then, putting the end of the tether in a crack in the stake. Then, the camera follows her as she carefully sets the oars inside the boat. The essence of Becker's film making lies in his patient observation of small, seemingly inconsequential details. Even though Marie is hastening to an encounter with her lover that will be decisive in her life, Becker shows her taking extreme pains to make sure the rowboat is properly beached and tethered -- this is not a woman who makes mistakes: everything she does is carefully calculated. The genius of the film resides in these sorts of details. When Manda first dances with Marie, he keeps one arm hangings stiffly at his side -- as if he's hesitant to put his arms around her. (This is compared with other dancers who tightly hug their partners or put their hands boldly on their asses.) An old woman cuts bread for the lovers, handing them the slices and, then, scooping up the crumbs which she crams in her mouth. A gangster raises his hand instinctively to protect his face when Leca, who is slap-happy, threatens him. When Marie and Manda watch a wedding in a church, a glimpse of a respectability that they will never enjoy, Becker's camera slides along the wedding party to show the bride and groom: it's an older man with a smug look on his face and a young woman who seems totally terrified. When Manda leaves the cabinet-maker's shop, the boss, who has a bad limp (probably a war injury) says that he doesn't want him to leave on account of his daughter. Then, he offers Manda money which he hasn't earned to tide him over on his trip into the country. Manda, at first, refuses the money but, then, is pressed to accept it. As he walks away, the two men exchange forlorn goodbyes -- suddenly, a minor character, the cabinet-maker, who has maybe four lines in the film, has become the still center of Becker/s attention. There are innumerable felicities of this kind -- the implacable Manda chases Leca into the police station where the hoodlum jumps through a window into a small closed courtyard. Manda jumps into the courtyard too having seized a cop's gun. Leca tries pathetically to hide behind a little concrete pier before Manda shoots him to death. The whole thing is staged with a sense of eerie determinism -- these things have to happen. Becker's Paris looks like a small village -- I think the action is supposed to be taking place in the suburbs which have a rural flavor. The scene where Manda is forced into the knife fight at the Angel Gabriel is complicated by a group of aristocrats who are slumming in the gangster-haunted tavern. The women, elegantly dressed as if they are coming from the opera, swagger as they enter the bar. The men are more circumspect and timid. One of the gangsters dances with one of the high-society women -- the gentlemen are only too accommodating to encourage her to dance: they don't want any trouble. Later, they are obviously embarrassed after the homicide occurs and they are questioned about what they have witnessed.
For me, the film is impressive and fascinating, but the plot is uninteresting despite Becker's ornamentation of the story's bare bones with poignant or closely observed vignettes. The movie doesn't generate for me any intense sense of involvement -- there's something faintly schematic about the narrative and the final scenes, which have been widely imitated, don't have the force that they apparently possessed in 1951. Nonetheless, the film is on-par with most of Renoir's lesser-known pictures -- that is, excellent but, perhaps, not a masterpiece.
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