Carne de gallina

I re read the Chase's novel ten days ago, so I will be able to compare. I rememeber that, back in 1978, I already read the book whilst watching the film, then aired on a French channel. I read in real time, in front of the TV set and the film, scene after scene. I got great and strange feeling to match the book and the movie...I never tried the same experience again. Anyway I did not do it during the whole ninety nine minutes. That said, this is my second or third viewing and an still satisfied, very close to the book atmosphere. Robert Hossein was hired for another Chase's novel adaptation: MEFIEZ VOUS FILLETTES. Bleak, downbeat, as in many Chase's novels. My favorite's Julien Duvivier's film.

Even though every day, you may walk past countless hordes of folk, you may even interact with a huge number of people, often-times in this era, and definitely in my time and place, and in the movie, one's psychological community, the people you have substantial interaction with, is less than a handful of people, and in the end maybe you are simply alone. I think that's brought out by the location of Chair de poule, the "relais du col", an isolated service station high in the mountains. People pass through all the time, but they're customers, cruel and spoilt (I can testify to the bad behaviour of people passing through service stations, having worked at one during my university holidays). So the horde just want things from you, but here so do your "intimate" associates. Like many french crime films of the time, Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), being an example, or actually all of Jacques Becker's great movies, the prospect of male friendship / solidarity is tantalisingly present and seen as far more fulfilling than romantic love. It's perhaps the only escape in a cruel world. The movie's beautiful scenes are when Daniel (Robert Hossein) and Thomas (Georges Wilson) meet on the col road. A particularly wonderful and wistful tune by Georges Delerue plays here. Later, when the crapola has contacted the proverbial rotary device, a trumpeter on a passing coach-trip is there to taunt Daniel, with another wistful tune, this time mockingly so. Duvivier's is a cruel eye.

I deliberately didn't start with the a plot outline, because it's the psychology, symbolism, and the atmosphere of the movie, rather than what's a rather generic plot that is what it's all about. The plot is, as has been pointed out, a simple noir one of ordinary people being tempted by crime, the middle section has elements of The Postman Always Rings Twice (overtly, and also covertly - there is commentary on where lust ends and love begins). Chair de poule does rise above cliché, and you can genuinely feel how stifled the two Parisian friends, Paul and Daniel are. How long can one stand in the cold? Women aren't perhaps as misogynistically portrayed as in many noir. Throughout the movie men are controllers of safes, from the initial mark, a rich man whose safe is up for robbing, and who therefore counts far more beautiful women as habitual accessories, to the proprietor of the relais du col, and Paul and Daniel, who hitherto worked in a safe-makers factory. It's a world defined by men, where every woman needs a man. Daniel's warm words about Thomas to his wife are instantly sneered at for being a, "man's opinion". Ultimately Maria (Catherine Rouvel) is a character that can be sympathised with, a character with a back story, neither an angel nor a harlot, but a woman. She is still with us and acting in movies at the time of writing! Her face at times in the movie reminded me of a cheetah's at points, she comes across as wild but snared in the world's man-trap.

Top marks for pure villainy go to Lucien Raimbourg as Roux, who had all the shameless rapacity of that great French character from Les Misérables, Thénardier.

Chair de poule is darkly satisfying.

In France ,nobody did film noirs like Duvivier.They say he invented the genre with his "Pepe le Moko" (1937).Duvivier's films noirs are as pessimistic as it can be.His characters are pitiful at best or evil.All along his brilliant career,from "Poil de Carotte" to "La fin du Jour" to "voici le temps des assassins",Duvivier was the poet of the blackness of the human soul,he used to paint the inmost depths of greed and perversity.Chabrol has sometimes equaled him ,never surpassed.Along with Clouzot,he reigns over the French film noir.

"Chair de poule " :those were the days of the Nouvelle Vague and Duvivier's work was dismissed as cheesy "cinema de qualité".Those were the days.But Duvivier's work survived.Hadley Chase's book resembles "the postman always rings twice" but Duvivier manages to take its noir side to new limits.In Cain's work,love did exist between the two leads.Here greed ,rapaciousness.Nothing else.Welcome to Duvivier's world.

As I wrote above ,Duvivier's characters are either pitiful and meek (Daniel,Thomas) or pure evil(Maria,the old man and his ugly offspring ,Paul).The odd couple (the not-so-handsome hubby and his sexy wife) was already in "Voici le temps des assassins"(1956).The only living being we can trust seems to be a dog ,an animal that plays an important part in both movies.Maria (Catherine Rouvel) recalls often Catherine (Danielle Delorme) but her sensuality is more aggressive .

Duvivier 's directing is perfect :he treats one of his scenes like a true western:"this is the Wild West" Paul says while entering the eating-house.And Rouvel ,trying to learn the combination of the safe from a wounded Hossein,reminds me of Von Stroheim's "greed". Duvivier avoids all the easy way outs ,all the Hollywood tricks, and his movies are among the few we can call "genuine" film noirs.The last part,which drags all the characters towards doom,culminates in an apocalyptic scene ,with the final pictures depicting Hell's antechamber.

Although not looked upon as one of Duvivier's best,"Chair de poule " was great ,coming from a sixty-something who had perhaps never made a truly bad film.

A remake was filmed in Thailand.

Robert Hossein and Jean Sorel are locksmiths who decide to rob a rich man whose safe they have recently repaired. But the man and his wife return unexpectedly and they kill the man. Sorel gets away, but Hossein is convicted of murder. Two years later, he escapes from prison and meets Georges Wilson in the Maritime Alps. Wilson takes him to his truck stop and diner where his sluttish young wife, Catherine Rouvel....

Sounds like THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, doesn't it? For half the movie it looks like it it. But this is from a novel by James Hadley Chase, and the director is Julien Duvivier. Duvivier's movies were one of the sources of film noir, but it's not the world that is corrupt, it's the people in the story he is telling. In the 1930s, his brand of poetical realism was tempered by having Jean Gabin in his movies,. Now, however, the principals are not doomed through the workings of fate, but by their weakness and evil. Sometimes society will exact the price. If not, then there is always the universe.

Locksmith Daniel Boisett (Robert Hossein) and his co-worker Paul Genest (Jean Sorel), friends since childhood, supplement their income with the occasional burglary until life spins wildly out of control one rainy night after Paul kills a man who catches them robbing his apartment. Paul manages to escape but Daniel's wounded by police and, taking the fall alone, is later sentenced to 20 years in prison but, enroute to the big house, he escapes and hitches a ride with the middle-aged Thomas (Georges Wilson) who offers him a job at his roadside restaurant. Daniel quickly accepts but soon finds out that Thomas' sexy young wife, Maria (Catherine Rouvel), has had her eye on the nest egg in her husband's safe for a long time and could use a man like him...

Julien Duvivier's classic French noir, based on a ripe piece of pulp fiction by James Hadley Chase ("Come Easy -Go Easy"), careens into THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE territory at this point but the story takes so many breathless twists and turns, any comparisons are ultimately unfair. All kinds of complications ensue when Maria's husband ends up dead and Paul pops up again but "no good deed goes unpunished" in this perverse universe where greed, lust, and self-preservation trump decent human emotions like love and friendship every time. Daniel's the quintessential noir anti-hero, caught in a vortex of nightmarish cause and effect, and the femme fatale's a feral sex kitten who double-crosses anyone who crosses her path. Like MGM's version of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, much of HIGHWAY PICKUP takes place in broad daylight, giving the film an "evil under the sun" aura and even though a stylistic shadow world, hallmark of the American Film Noir, is absent here, thematically the film's as bleak and as black as they come. The bitterly ironic ending, reminiscent of both Robert Siodmak's CRISS CROSS and Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING, is a memorable one.