And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (37 page)

Naturally, the Germans hoped that the French would embrace German movies. Indeed, in 1941, some 20 percent of movies in Paris theaters were German. But very few drew French audiences. One that did was Josef von Báky’s lighthearted fantasy
Münchhausen
, an early color film about a baron granted immortality, which Goebbels commissioned to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of UFA. More disturbingly, also popular with some French was
Jud Süss
, or
Le Juif Süss
, a grotesquely anti-Semitic adaptation of a novel by the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger; it was directed by Veit Harlan and featured the veteran German actor Heinrich George. Such was its success that when George came to Paris to perform at the Comédie Française, French movie figures joined in fêting him at Maxim’s.

Otherwise, apart from a German-made short documentary,
Le Péril juif
, distributed in France in 1941 to coincide with the exhibition Le Juif et la France,
^*
the Nazis left propaganda to their own newsreel,
Actualités mondiales
. These weekly bulletins, which were made in Germany for distribution in the language of each occupied country, brought social and cultural news from the Third Reich, mockery of Germany’s “Jewish-dominated” enemies and triumphant images of the Wehrmacht’s fighting machine. Watching a German newsreel soon after he arrived in Paris, Ernst Jünger was struck by the violence of the images. “They showed our offensives in Africa, Serbia and Greece. The mere display of these tools of destruction provoked cries of horror.” He even added a note to remind himself to study where “propaganda blends with terror.”
⁶
Until November 1942,
Actualités mondiales
were shown only in the occupied zone; after November 1942, a new version of
France actualités
, combining German and Vichy propaganda, was shown across the country.

Greven himself showed little interest in propagating the Nazi message, although he organized a splendid reception at Ledoyen on May 20, 1941, to welcome Zarah Leander, a Swedish-born actress
who was then the toast of Germany. Even the Referat Film and Dr. Diedrich were often surprisingly tolerant in authorizing movies that left audiences feeling good about France. For instance, one line in Delannoy’s historical drama
Pontcarral, colonel d’empire
would often prompt applause from audiences: “Under such a regime, monsieur, it is an honor to be condemned!”

Such laxity did not please Goebbels. In his private journal, he complained bitterly about another film,
La Symphonie fantastique
. This romantic screen biography of the French composer Hector Berlioz, directed by Christian-Jaque, with Jean-Louis Barrault in the lead role, was even made by Continental Films. “I am furious,” he wrote on May 15, 1942, “because our Paris bureaus are showing the French how to portray nationalism in their films. I have given very clear orders that the French should produce only films that are light, empty and if possible kitsch. I think they’ll find it enough. There is no need to develop their nationalism.”
⁷
He need hardly have worried. Most of the French movies of this period were indeed light comedies, costume dramas, fantasy films, love stories or thrillers. Indeed, one-third of them were adaptations of novels and plays: seven were borrowed from Balzac and no fewer than nine from the Belgian-born writer Georges Simenon, who spent the war in Vendée, in western France. A good many were also set in the past, like Guitry’s
Le Destin fabuleux de Désirée Clary
, Autant-Lara’s
Lettres d’amour
and René Le Hénaff’s
Le Colonel Chabert
.

That said, one of the most popular films of the occupation years, Carné’s
Les Visiteurs du soir
, or
The Devil’s Envoys
, as the film was later called in English, ended with a scene that could easily be interpreted as a nationalist gesture. Even before its release, there was a buzz of excitement that France’s best-known director after Renoir was making his first movie in three years. After walking out of Continental Films, Carné had signed up to make three films for André Paulvé, but the first,
Juliette, ou La Clef des songes
, based on the Surrealist play by Georges Neveux, fell through after Greven vowed to keep it out of theaters. Paulvé then urged Carné to contact Prévert, who had written four of Carné’s prewar hits and who was living on the Côte d’Azur. Prévert teamed up with Pierre Laroche to write
Les Visiteurs
. Seeing the chance to rebuild his prewar team in Nice, Carné then recruited the designer Alexandre Trauner, a Hungarian Jew, who was hiding in Tourrette-sur-Loup, near Vence, also in the unoccupied zone. To make this possible, a non-Jewish designer,
Georges Wakhévitch, agreed to “sign” Trauner’s work. Joseph Kosma, another Hungarian Jew who was living discreetly outside Cannes, was then invited to compose the score, although in the end much of it was written—and all of it signed—by Maurice Thiriet. Finally, for his lead roles, Carné chose the ever-popular Arletty, who starred in his
Hôtel du Nord
and
Le Jour se lève
, as well as Marie Déa, Jules Berry and Alain Cuny (the actress Simone Signoret and the director Alain Resnais, two future pillars of French cinema, were among the extras).

Shot near Nice, the film is an entertaining romp set in the Middle Ages in which good narrowly defeats evil. As Anne and her fiancé, the chevalier Renaud, preside over a prenuptial banquet,
^*
they are joined by two minstrels, Gilles and Dominique, who are in fact envoys of the Devil. Gilles sets about seducing Anne, while Renaud and Anne’s father, the Baron Hugues, court Dominique. Learning that Gilles has inconveniently fallen in love with Anne, the Devil arrives to forestall a happy outcome by depriving Gilles of his memory. When Gilles again sees Anne and his memory returns, an angry Devil turns them into stone statues. The film’s final scene would become its most famous: although the lovers now seem lifeless, their hearts can still be heard beating. It took no great leap of imagination to understand that the Devil was Hitler and, yes, France’s heart was still beating. “I would not swear that Jacques and I had thought of that,” Carné conceded in his autobiography,
La Vie à belles dents
. “But in any event we accepted that interpretation since it responded to a real need on part of the public when the film was released in late 1942.”
⁸

A more political movie was
Le Corbeau
(The Raven), which Clouzot made for Continental in 1943. His first film for the studio,
L’Assassin habite au 21
, had been well received and Greven was eager for another film noir. Clouzot chose a 1937 screenplay by Louis Chavance called
L’Oeil du serpent
(The Eye of the Snake), inspired by the story of a woman who for five years sent poison-pen letters around the town of Tulle. Clouzot then reworked the screenplay and cast two popular actors, Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc, in the lead roles.

In the screen version, anonymous letters signed “Le Corbeau” are
sent to a village doctor and other prominent locals, accusing the doctor of having an affair with the wife of the hospital psychiatrist and of carrying out illegal abortions. Other people are also targeted by letters, feeding ever-mounting distrust, jealousy and paranoia. Before the troublemaker is identified, one letter provokes a suicide and another prompts the doctor to leave the village. However, what might in normal times have been a straightforward thriller carried a darker message in 1943. At the urging of both the Germans and Vichy, some French citizens had taken to sending anonymous letters to the authorities denouncing members of the resistance, Jews, black marketers or simply detested neighbors. But instead of applauding this exposé of the moral turpitude of informers,
L’Écran Français
, the clandestine newspaper of the small movie resistance group, saw it differently, complaining that it fueled the Nazi view that “the inhabitants of our towns are nothing but degenerates, ripe for slavery” and implied that the French should follow “the moral rules of the virtuous Nazi.”
⁹
Clouzot was not easily forgiven. After the liberation,
Le Corbeau
earned him a two-year ban from filmmaking.

Yet just as Clouzot would go on to make numerous acclaimed films, not least
Le Salaire de la peur
(The Wages of Fear), other directors who shaped postwar French cinema also made impressive debuts during the occupation. The most gifted was Robert Bresson, who in the 1950s would direct
Pickpocket
and
Journal d’un curé de campagne
(Diary of a Country Priest). Having spent a year as a German prisoner of war, he was immediately noticed in 1943 with his first feature film,
Les Anges du péché
(Angels of Sin). With a screenplay by Bresson and the playwright Jean Giraudoux, the movie tells of a secluded order of nuns who dedicate themselves to rehabilitating women from prison. (Before that, Giraudoux wrote his first screenplay for
La Duchesse de Langeais
, a film directed by Jacques de Baroncelli.)

Others less new to cinema also made films noted for their originality, among them Becker’s
Dernier atout, Falbalas
and
Goupi mains rouges
and Autant-Lara’s
Douce
. Jean Grémillon’s
Le Ciel est à nous
(The Sky Is Ours) managed to warm the hearts of both Vichy and the resistance with its true-life story of Andrée Dupeyron, a French aviatrix who in 1938 had participated in the Paris-to-Baghdad air race in a plane built in her auto mechanic husband’s garage.
^*
In the same
issue as it denounced
Le Corbeau, L’Écran Français
said Grémillon’s film presented “characters full of French vigor, of genuine courage, of moral standing, where we find a national truth that does not wish to and cannot die.”
¹⁰

Another movie that merited its immense popularity was
L’Éternel retour
(The Eternal Return), a gripping modern rendering of the legendary love story of Tristan and Isolde, which united the talents of Delannoy as director, Jean Cocteau as writer and Georges Auric as composer. Even Cocteau’s enemies recognized the many qualities of the movie, which was presented in a gala performance in Vichy attended by Pétain himself. After the war, though, there were some who saw the triumph of Aryanism in the two striking blonds, Jean Marais and Madeleine Sologne, cast in the lead roles of Patrice and Nathalie.

Then as now, of course, most moviegoers were drawn less by directors than by well-known actors. And keeping track of the lives and loves of screen celebrities were new movie magazines like
Vedettes, La Semaine, Ciné-Mondial
and
Toute-la-Vie
. In the nightlife of Paris, too, the stars were more important than their movies. None caused a greater stir when she swept into Maxim’s than Danielle Darrieux, at the time unchallenged as France’s biggest female star. After her marriage to Decoin had ended in late 1940, she had fallen in love with a dashing Latin diplomat, Porfirio Rubirosa, who was appointed the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to France after the breakdown of his marriage to the daughter of the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónides Trujillo. In theory, Rubirosa was posted to Vichy, but he spent most of his time in Paris. In fact, he and Darrieux met because they had apartments in the same building in Neuilly. “He was divine, he was as good as a god,” she recalled almost seven decades later. “We’d go out every night. He’d say, ‘Put on your evening dress,’ and we’d go dancing at Jimmy’s. Django Reinhardt’s orchestra would play, Henri Salvador would sing. Shéhérazade was another favorite place. Then we’d have dinner at Maxim’s or at the Ritz. He liked the bar at the Ritz before lunch. Were there Germans in uniform? I don’t know and I didn’t care. It was such a crazy period.”

Darrieux’s carefree life ended abruptly. After Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Trujillo also declared war on Hitler and ordered the arrest of German diplomats in Santo Domingo. Within days, German officers came for Rubirosa and sent
him to a special concentration camp for foreign diplomats at Bad Nauheim, north of Frankfurt in Germany. Darrieux was heartbroken, but a few months later Greven offered her a chance to visit her lover.
Premier rendez-vous
, Darrieux’s first movie for Continental, was a romantic comedy about a pretty girl in her late teens who escapes from her orphanage to meet a man who has placed an ad in a newspaper.
^*
The movie was to open in Berlin and Greven wanted Darrieux’s glamorous presence to draw attention to the film—and to Franco-German cultural collaboration. “I told him, No way,” she recalled. “But he said, ‘You should think of your family.’ My mother had a Polish grandfather and he seemed to be suggesting there were Jews in my family. It was blackmail. I said I’d go on one condition: ‘I’ll stay one day in Berlin and go and see Rubi.’ He agreed, and that’s what happened.” To accompany her, Greven then organized a delegation of movie stars, among them Viviane Romance, Suzy Delair, Junie Astor and Albert Préjean. Photographs in both French and German newspapers and magazines showed the actresses in jaunty hats and fashionable attire as they left the Gare de l’Est on the overnight train for Berlin on March 18, 1942. Movie magazines noted that only Darrieux was not required to share a compartment.

After the opening of
Premier rendez-vous
, Goebbels hosted an official dinner for his French guests, which was also attended by leading German actors. The following morning, as the other French actors began a tour of various German cities, Darrieux was taken by car to meet Rubirosa. “When I saw my Rubi arriving in his cashmere overcoat looking very smart, it was marvelous,” she remembered. “We were left alone, but we were together for a short time. Did we make love? I presume so, or else what was the point of going there?” A few months later, Rubirosa was freed, and he tracked down Darrieux in Perpignan, where she was making
La Fausse maîtresse
, her third film for Continental. On September 18, 1942, they were married at Vichy’s city hall. “Greven sent Cayette and Clouzot down to tell me I had to return to Paris because I had a contract to make one film a year for Continental,” Darrieux said. “I told them I was finished, I would make no more films, I was going to stay in the ‘free’ zone. They said I’d be in trouble, but I said I didn’t care. I was staying
with Rubi.” They were sent to the Alpine resort of Megève under a form of internal exile called
résidence surveillée
, although Darrieux recalled that it was not unpleasant since the region was under Italian control: “We had a chalet, we gave parties, we drank, we ate, we played bridge, we were completely relaxed.”