Le passage du Rhin

As a teacher and serious student of film, I regard Passage du Rhin among the dozen best films I've ever seen. It is sad that it is no longer available to us. Fortunately in the years it was available on 16mm I was able to show it often to classes and small groups. I became so familiar with the film I could passably re-write the screen play.

Sandwiched,in Cayatte's filmography between "Le Miroir A Deux Faces" which tackled cosmetic surgery long before it was trendy and "le Glaive et La Balance" a film desperately in need of reassessment,"le Passage du Rhin" occupies a particular place .It was the first time he had broached WW2,and he did it in a very interesting way :ambitious but not always successful film.

On the plus side: Cayatte shows everyday's life in both countries (Germany and occupied France);he was one of the first to tell that French people were not all Resistance fighters (see also "Avant le Deluge" :1952).Two of his characters are collaborators (the newspaper's owner) or they sleep with a Gestapo officer (Jean's mistress).Jean himself is not a true virtuous hero:not only he dishonors and ruins the German girl's life ,but he also wants to marry his French colleague although he knows everything about her racy past in the war years.On the other hand,Aznavour's character ,who might pass for a coward cause he does not want to try to escape from Germany comes back to his new friends when the war is done.

On the minus side: the screenplay is badly written,the scenes lack focus,intensity ,and do not hang well together.Sometimes the absence of transition between the sequences is infuriating .It is sometimes as messy as Cayatte's earlier "le Dossier Noir" (1955).

"Passage du Rhin" is interesting but it lacks a firm screenplay ,like in his great works "Justice est Faite" "Nous Sommes Tous des Assassins" "Avant le Déluge" or "Les Risques du Métier"

It is difficult to enthuse unreservedly about this film but at the same time it cannot be dismissed. As one would expect from director Andre Cayatte it is a story told in a matter-of-fact manner and in common with all of his films deals with 'moral responsibility'. During the years of Occupation in France people made choices or had choices forced upon them which were not without consequences, to put it mildly! The actions of Jean, played by Georges Riviere, have a devastating impact on lovely Helga, beautifully portrayed by Cordula Trantow whilst Jean's relationship with the fascinating Florence of Nicole Courcel is damaged irreparably when he learns that she is guilty of 'horizontal collaboration'. The pace of the film is slow but it is strangely absorbing and holds ones attention. The diminutive stature and soulful gaze of Charles Aznavour would always limit the roles he could play and here he exhibits his natural sensibility as a decent chap who survives in his own way. In an ideal world his character would settle down with Helga but Fate has decreed otherwise. On the other side of the coin we have Jean, well played by Riviere. Typically of Cayatte he has cast an attractive leading man type as a character whose moral compass is decidedly defective. It is however the performances of Courcel and Trantow that leave the deepest impression. Not very well received at the time and disparaged by the New Wavelet brigade this film still managed to win the Golden Lion at Venice.

This title is now available on DVD in France (StudioCanal). The only problem is that there are no subtitles. I generally try to get French DVDs with subtitles in French (for the hard of hearing) as that helps if they speak too fast for me or have difficult accents. Nonetheless I enjoyed this very much and although I missed some of the dialogue it was always clear what was happening. I saw this when it came out in the 60s and it has stayed with me ever since. I have been looking for it on DVD for a long time and bought it as soon as I saw it on a French website. I now find it a very thoughtful anti-war film, which acknowledges the widespread collaboration with the Nazis, which, together with the ending, must have been shocking to French opinion at the time. Charles Aznavour is excellent as the believable everyman, and the rest of the cast are fine. Georges Riviere plays a character that I remembered as quite unsympathetic, but interestingly I now see as much more complex and in his own way, principled. Recommended.