Le Polar and Cinema du Look

The French have a word of their own for the crime film: le polar, short for roman policier (police novel). It is a genre French directors loved and reshaped, borrowing from American film noir and handing the result back to Hollywood. This chapter follows the polar from the gangster films of the 1950s, through Melville's cool, ritualised thrillers, to the glossy, image-driven cinéma du look of the 1980s. As elsewhere in the course, dates and titles are from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Where the Polar Came From

Two sources fed it. One was the American crime film and the hard-boiled novel, which French readers and critics adored (the Série noire paperback imprint, started after the war, made American crime fiction popular in France; check). The other was the French poetic realism of Chapter 3, with its doomed men and shadowy streets, in which Jean Gabin had already played the criminal who cannot escape his fate. The polar put the two together.

The 1950s: Gangsters and Heists

• Touchez pas au grisbi (1954). Jacques Becker's film about an ageing gangster, with Jean Gabin in a comeback role. It is the model for the weary, honour-bound French criminal (check).
• Du rififi chez les hommes (1955). Directed by Jules Dassin, an American exiled from Hollywood in the blacklist era (check), it contains a half-hour burglary scene played almost without dialogue or music. It was hugely influential on later heist films.
• Clouzot. The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), mentioned in Chapter 4, belong to the suspense side of the same appetite.

Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville, who took his name from the American novelist Herman Melville (check), is the central figure. He made small, tightly controlled thrillers in which men in trench coats and hats follow private codes of honour, with little dialogue and an almost ceremonial air. He had already appeared in Chapter 4 as the independent maker of Le Silence de la mer.

Melville's influence is wide. Later directors in Hong Kong, Japan and the United States have cited Le Samouraï (check), and Japanese crime films appear in Japanese Film & Television 1.

The 1970s: Cops, Politics and Stars

In the 1970s the polar moved onto the street and into politics. Stars such as Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo made a stream of commercial thrillers, and directors used the form to attack corruption.

• Henri Verneuil and Costa-Gavras. Verneuil made big-star crime films; Costa-Gavras, a Greek-born director in France, made political thrillers such as Z (1969) about the killing of a politician in a military-ruled country (check).
• Claude Chabrol. The New Wave director of Chapter 5 turned to cool, ironic crime stories about the provincial middle class, which he went on making for decades.
• Bertrand Tavernier. His police films mixed the genre with social observation (check).

The Cinéma du Look

In the 1980s a group of young directors made films that were fast, stylish and visually bold, with neon colours, pop music, advertising techniques and very little interest in realism. The label cinéma du look was applied by critics, some of them hostile (check). It names a loose tendency, not a formal movement, and its directors did not always accept it.

Besson and the Export Model

Besson matters beyond the label. He built a production company and studio complex outside Paris (check) and made English-language action films with French money, a model of a French industry competing with Hollywood on its own ground. Whether that is a triumph of French cinema or an escape from it is an old argument that returns in Chapters 9 and 10.

Exercises

Next chapter: Television: From ORTF to Canal+, which moves to the small screen.