And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (38 page)

At the end of 1943, with the Germans now controlling all of France, the couple decided to leave Megève. “We learned there was a fellow who made false papers and we had some made under the names of Denise and Pierre Robira, so as not to change our initials because his initials were on his elegant suitcases,” Darrieux recalled. With a well-known race-car driver at the wheel, they headed north and settled under their new names in Darrieux’s country home at Septeuil, west of Paris. “There was always food in the countryside. It was the people in Paris who suffered. I was able to buy eggs just to wash my hair,” she said. But now the war was also far closer. At one point, Darrieux and Rubirosa were forced to provide accommodations to a German officer, although after the D-Day landings in June 1944, he suddenly disappeared. On another occasion, a Canadian air force plane crashed near their garden and they helped to bury the six victims. Darrieux recalled, “Two days later, the mayor’s daughter said we should hide because the Gemans wanted to shoot forty people, so we fled into the woods with our dog and stayed with a French family for eight or ten days.” Soon afterward, American troops arrived in Septeuil.

Other leading lights of the French movie world had a less agitated time. A few actresses would be seen in Paris nightclubs on the arms of German officers. Of these, Arletty was the best known: she was the mistress of a Luftwaffe officer, Hans Jürgen Soehring, throughout the occupation. While making seven movies during the occupation, she was also seen at social events at the German embassy or the German Institute. She was no less careless in her choice of French friends, who included the collaborationist writers Drieu La Rochelle and Céline and the pianist Alfred Cortot.
¹¹

Mireille Balin, who in 1941 was featured on the cover of
Vedettes
with her then lover, the popular singer Tino Rossi, fell for a Wehrmacht officer, Birl Desbok, with whom she spent the rest of the war. Corinne Luchaire, a star in the 1930s whose newspaper editor father, Jean Luchaire, was one of Abetz’s close friends, had a child with her Austrian lover, a Luftwaffe captain named Wolrad Gelrach. But the line defining collaboration was often blurred. Suzy Delair, who
joined Darrieux on the trip to Berlin, helped protect two Jewish actors; and Michèle Alfa, whose lover was an officer at the Propaganda Staffel, obtained the release of the veteran actor Charles de Rochefort from an internment camp and hid some resistance leaders. In reality, most actors and directors were glad just to have work and, with sixty films made in 1941, sixty-seven in 1942 and another sixty in 1943, this was usually possible.

Micheline Presle, who was only seventeen when Paris fell, had left for Saint-Jean-de-Luz during the exodus and then joined Louis Jourdan, her fiancé, in Cannes. She spent the first two years of the occupation untroubled in the south, making three movies in Nice, two of them with Jourdan,
Parade en 7 nuits
and
Félicie Nanteuil
, both directed by Marc Allégret. In late 1942, she moved back to Paris and made three more movies, albeit none for Greven’s company. But she never became part of the Paris nightlife. “I detested the Germans and did my best not to see them,” she recalled. “It wasn’t an act of heroism, it wasn’t active resistance, it was an attitude. I’d play cards at a friend’s house or I’d meet a group of young people like myself at cafés. We’d talk, but we were careful. A very good friend of mine, Joël Le Tac, was in the resistance, but I didn’t know. He’d go away for a while—only later did I learn he often traveled to London—and then he’d come back. No questions. Only when he was arrested did I understand. I managed to get some food to him at La Santé prison, then he was deported to Dachau. But he survived.”

By early 1944, such were the power shortages that only late at night was electricity made available for movie productions. “I was making
Falbalas
with Jacques Becker and we’d take the
métro
home in the morning,” she said. “There were often members of the
milice
on the
métro
, and one in particular struck me. After the war, I found myself standing in line for something and he was in front of me. I said to him, ‘I remember you very well.’ He didn’t reply.”
¹²

Elina Labourdette, another young actress (she was twenty-one in 1940), also steered clear of the social scene. “I didn’t know one German during the whole war,” she recounted much later. Initially, she stayed in the south—her parents owned a house in Opio, north of Cannes—and appeared in a play,
Les Jours heureux
, which toured the unoccupied zone. Even after she returned to Paris, she had no difficulty in obtaining a permit to cross the demarcation line to the south. The two movies she made during the occupation—
Le Pavillon brûle
in 1941 and
Des jeunes filles dans la nuit
in 1943—were both shot in
Paris for French producers, not Continental Films. In
Le Pavillon brûle
, she recalled, she was the fiancée of a miner played by Marais, Cocteau’s boyfriend. “I already knew Cocteau through my parents, and he invited me to dinner,” Labourdette said. “He told me that Jean was very nervous about the love scene we would shoot the following day. Well, I was nervous, too. I can’t tell you how many times we shot the scene. The director said we were behaving like at a first communion. In the end, we hardly kissed.”

One good friend was Bresson, who cast Elina in
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
in 1944. “Once I was dining with Bresson at home—I lived on the Île de la Cité overlooking Notre-Dame—and a friend of my parents’, an Austrian Jew, called in a panic. She’d heard there would be a
rafle
of Jews the following day. Both Robert and I had an
Ausweis
to be out during the curfew. We went to pick her up with her luggage, and she spent the next two years in our maid’s room. Later we got her out of Paris, and she spent the rest of the war hiding in the south.”
¹³

Harry Baur, in contrast, did not survive the war. Born in 1880, he was a giant of French theater and cinema in the interwar years, with more than seventy movie roles, including memorable performances in Raymond Bernard’s
Les Misérables
and Tourneur’s
Volpone
. During the occupation,
Je suis partout
and collaborationist weeklies accused him of being a Freemason and a Jew, attacks that led him to accept roles in two of Greven’s movies—
L’Assassinat du Père Noël
and
Péchés de jeunesse
(Sins of Youth)—as a form of protection.

In 1942, Baur also agreed to return to Germany, where he had shot several movies in the 1920s and 1930s, to appear in the German-speaking lead role of Hans Bertram’s musical comedy
Symphonie eines Lebens
(Symphony of a Life). While in Berlin, he was also invited to Goebbels’s dinner for Darrieux and other French stars. Yet almost simultaneously, Baur’s Jewish wife was arrested in France on suspicion of being a British agent. When he protested loudly, he was in turn arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Finally, after four months in the Prison du Cherche-Midi, on Paris’s Left Bank, Baur was released, ailing and reduced to half his normal weight. On April 8, 1943, he died at home, but the cause of death was never established. As word of his death spread, the consensus was that he had been murdered. Only his family and close friends dared to attend his funeral at Saint Vincent Cemetery in Montmartre.

The Baur case was nonetheless something of an exception, since the movie industry and show business in general were not targets of Nazi repression. Still odder, then, was the case of Robert Hugues-Lambert, who was chosen to play the title role in Louis Cuny’s movie
Mermoz
only because he resembled Jean Mermoz, a famous French aviator. Near the completion of filming, in 1943, he was arrested in a gay bar, Le Sans-Soucis, and sent to Drancy, where he is said to have recorded his last lines for the movie through the barbed-wire fencing of the camp. He was later deported to the Gross-Rosen camp, in Germany, where he died of exhaustion in March 1945. What seemed puzzling about this case was that, while homosexuality was officially prohibited, many in the literary and artistic world were gay, not only Cocteau and Marais but also infamous collaborationists like Brasillach and Abel Bonnard.
^*
Further, numerous gay bars in occupied Paris were popular with German soldiers. In fact, one explanation offered for Hugues-Lambert’s arrest is that he was denounced by a jealous German lover.

As a rule, however, the relative freedom enjoyed by the French movie industry meant that its key players had little motivation to join the resistance. And if they wanted to play an active role, what exactly could they do? It was a question that Carné contemplated. “I have never handled a gun in my life,” he recalled. “Also, I’m very sensitive to physical pain and I thought, If I am caught and tortured, I’m likely to tell everything I know. So I found a way of working.”
¹⁴

Nonetheless, in 1943, when the prospect of a German defeat was spawning new resistance groups across France, a handful of directors, actors and screenwriters formed the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français. Among them were the directors Becker, Louis Daquin and Jean Painlevé, the assistant director Jean-Devaivre, the screenwriters Charles Spaak, Bernard Zimmer and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, the critic Georges Sadoul and the actor Pierre Blanchar. In the main, they saw themselves as preparing cinema for after the war. They also singled out those thought to be collaborators, criticizing them in
L’Écran Français
, which they first printed in mimeograph form in December 1943 and then, from March 1944, was included in
Les Lettres Françaises
.

In the case of Le Chanois and Spaak, their very cover was that they were writing for Continental. In fact, Spaak adapted Simenon’s novel
Les Caves du “Majestic”
for Greven from jail. Devaivre, who also worked for Continental, was among the very few in the industry to participate actively in armed resistance, ending the war in a Burgundy maquis. Le Chanois, who was both a Communist and a Jew, left the most important legacy of the cinema resistance when he spent several weeks in early 1944 filming the Vercors maquis in southeastern France—and its fiercest battle with German forces—for
Au coeur de l’orage
(Heart of the Storm), a documentary released after the liberation. Le Chanois’s unit, which was called the Réseau de Résistance du Cinéma Français, or French Cinema’s Resistance Network, then filmed the insurrection in Paris in the days before Allied troops entered the city.
La Libération de Paris
, as the documentary was entitled, was in Paris theaters barely one week later.

More by accident,
Les Enfants du paradis
opened many months after the liberation. The idea for the film was nonetheless born in early 1943, during a visit Carné made to Nice to discuss his next movie with Prévert. While walking along the city’s elegant promenade des Anglais, Carné bumped into Jean-Louis Barrault, the actor-director. When Prévert joined them on a café terrace, Barrault then entertained them with theater stories. One was about the great nineteenth-century French mime Baptiste Debureau, who accidentally killed a drunk with his cane, prompting
le tout Paris
to show up for his trial: at last, they would hear him speak.

Carné immediately saw a movie idea, although he worried that if Barrault played Debureau, audiences would not be surprised to hear his all-too-familiar voice. Carné decided to pursue the idea anyway, ignoring Prévert’s lack of enthusiasm. He returned to Paris and went to the Musée Carnavalet to gather material on Debureau’s Théâtre des Funambules and the nearby boulevard du Temple or, as it was appropriately known, the boulevard du Crime. With that, Prévert finally started writing and, as before, Trauner was brought in to design the set (this time Léon Barsacq agreed to “sign” his drawings), and Thieret and Kosma composed the score. At one point, Barrault’s involvement seemed in doubt because he was also directing and acting in Claudel’s
Le Soulier de satin
, scheduled for the Comédie Française in December 1943. Carné even considered replacing him with the still uncelebrated mime Jacques Tati. But then Barrault
became available, the boulevard du Crime was built at Nice’s Victorine studios and, in August 1943, filming began on what was then France’s most expensive movie ever.

The central role of Garance was given to Carné’s screen darling, Arletty, who, in her mid-forties, remained as seductive as ever. In the story, four men are vying for her affections: Baptiste Debureau, played by Barrault; Frédérick Lemaître, a struggling actor played by Pierre Brasseur; Pierre François Lacenaire, a sleazy crook played by Marcel Herrand; and Édouard de Montray, an aristocrat played by Louis Salou. In the role of Nathalie, who pines for Debureau, Carné cast the Spanish-born Maria Casarès, who was just twenty-one at the time. The film, which runs three and a quarter hours, is divided into “Boulevard du Crime” and a second episode, “L’Homme blanc,” which takes place six years later. The same characters appear in each, although in “L’Homme blanc” Debureau and Lemaître are now the stars of their respective theaters, one for mime, the other for traditional theater. The plot involves Garance in every possible permutation of love and betrayal as her various suitors fight for her favor. The film is also an homage to theater, celebrating the emotion and drama of life on and off the stage, with a particular tribute to the magic of mime. Indeed,
paradis
refers here to the cheaper balcony seats—“the gods” in an English theater—where the poorest and most devoted theater lovers sit. Yet in the end, it was the combination of Prévert’s powerful screenplay and Carné’s skillful direction that made
Les Enfants du paradis
so beloved a movie.