Le grand jeu

A playboy is forced to leave the country after plunging his father's business into financial problems after using company funds to support his lifestyle with his high maintenance girlfriend. He joins the Foreign Legion as a means of forgetting his past. When in North Africa he meets a woman who is a look-a-like for his former fiancé and so begins a romantic obsession.

This French movie could quite easily be described as a proto-noir given its early release year, yet unmistakable film-noir aspects. The story has a gloomy feel and atmosphere and it focuses on a down-on-his-luck anti-hero and femme fatale. Alfred Hitchcock's later revered movie Vertigo (1958) shares (or borrowed) the pretty specific idea of a man obsessed with a woman who closely resembles a past love, to the point that he treats her not as a person but as an ideal. I thought the film as a whole had a very daring and quite modern sensibility in its approach to sexual content which no doubt was a French characteristic and certainly isn't something you would associate with Hollywood films of the period. The film after all is set almost entirely within the confines of a brothel with a very sleazy owner overseeing events and who quite clearly sexually abuses the women who work there as his 'entitlement' as their boss. It's quite commendably difficult material and adds quite a bit to the depth the drama mines. The wife of this appalling individual is the one with the strength and personality to hold all the other characters together and has a skill in reading Tarot cards, which is referred to in the title. Her predictions come to bear in the story, an impressive tale of doomed characters and dark obsession.

This is a fine film from the golden age of french cinema, directed by the now nearly forgotten Feyder who was among other things the spiritual father of Marcel Carné (who contributed to several of his films). As usual, his wife Francoise Rosay has one of the leading roles. The somewhat melodramatic plot involves a yeuppie joining the foreign legion when he can no longer entertain the girl he loves. We get a femme fatale double as our hero meets a honky tonk temptress who reminds him of the girl he is trying to escape. The atmosphere is thick with sand, booze, sex, violence and Tarot cards. See this one if you have the chance, it is probably quite rare.

The screenplay of Jacques Feyder is very modern:in its own way,it predates , by 25 and more than 40 years respectively Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Bunuel's "object of desire" .

A man has to join the legion étrangere to avoid a scandal.He leaves his lover,a selfish spoiled woman he is always in love with and heads for the desert:there ,in the brothel,he meets a hooker who extremely resembles her former woman.Is she THE ONE?Sometimes it seems she is and sometimes she isn't.Marie Bell's voice was dubbed for the part of the prostitute,so there were actually two actresses almost like in Bunuel's last film.

However,it seems to me that when you watch the movie some 70 years after something is lacking and it is madness.The silent era could create it and whereas we would need folie à deux,amour fou,we're left with melodrama.Pierre Richard-Wilm was a rather bland handsome actor while Marie Bell had not enough presence,not enough ambiguity.Françoise Rosay ,the madam who draws cards ("the major arcana" is the meaning of the title)and discovers very strange things about the future,-which does nothing but accentuates the melodramatic side-,and Charles Vanel as the "house"'s owner easily outstrip both of them.There is one scene Luis Bunuel would not have disowned: Marie Bell,taking flypaper down with Vanel's lustful eye on her legs.

The Légion Etrangère as a way out when you were threatened in your native country was a permanent feature in the years before WW2:that was also the subjects of "Beau Geste" and Duvivier's "la bandera" .But whereas the two other works focus on every aspect of a Légionnaire's life,in Feyder's movie ,we almost never move out of the brothel.I hardly exaggerate.It's not surprising it was stigmatized by the Catholic Office of Cinema :what else could they do? Marcel Carné was influenced by Jacques Feyder.Not only he was his assistant,but he also met his favorite actress Arletty while they were making "pension mimosas".And Feyder's wife Françoise Rosay starred in Carné's first real movie "Jenny".

Robert Siodmak made a remake in 1954,Jean-Claude Pascal,Gina Lollobrigida and Arletty taking on Richard-Willm's ,Bell's and Rosay's parts.It was a disappointment.

Pierre Richard-Willm has gone through his money keeping mistress Marie Bell and himself happy. His family agrees to clear his debts, but only if he leaves the country. Mlle. Bell makes excuses, so he does what anyone else does. He joins the Foreign Legion. There he distinguishes himself, turning down a promotion to sergeant, he also meets a prostitute played by Mlle. Bell in a brunette wig. She has a wonky memory and falls for him. He slowly convinces himself she is the same woman.....

Jacques Feyder tries his hand at poetic realism, with all the standard tricks, but without Gabin or Duvivier's misogyny. The result is a far more straightforward movie, propelled by the director's skilled story tellin, about two people in love who torment each other.

Very few movies for me have captured the tragedy and pageantry of life in one fell swoop, the other two are Les Enfants du Paradis and The Satin Slipper, supernatural titles which must be uttered only in awe. These are decidedly Promethean movies, which beg a thunderbolt from above for their creators. Such movies through their genius seem sacrilegious.

Exuberant, blithe and foolish, Belle Époque nitwit Pierre lives a pampered lifestyle with a sinecure at the family bank. Innocently in love with a man eater, he throws more and more "borrowed" money into the fire of her greed in the hopes of putting it out. Years of disgrace follow where Pierre must learn to be a man like other men, to silently put up with being un raté, to watch his life slide out of view, to take his pleasures where he can in exile with the Foreign Legion. The Book of Ecclesiastes suggests that the only solaces in life are those provided by hard work and immediate pleasures such as eating and drinking, if so then Pierre's exile is something of an unlooked-for gift, a release from perpetual childhood.

Le Grand Jeu is a film that makes one to wonder if God didn't conflate lust and love when He created the world. The filmmakers create their own world in miniature here, a world where people live with the ghouls of their pasts sat on their shoulders, loving without being loved back, cursed by lust unattainable, or attainable and consuming, damned one way or the other. It was a refreshingly raunchy movie with quite the most triple-x-rated cabaret song, from La môme Dauville (Lyn Clevers), recalling Minnie Cunningham (an English tease immortalised by the painter Walter Sickert). Whilst lust does seem to inhibit the possibility of true love, male lust in particular is treated as something natural and not to be ashamed of.

So the world is a casino and our fortunes dictated by Fortuna (the great game of the title). One's only weapon against all this seems to be morale. That seems the key message of what is I would say, a perfect movie (it's probably also pretty similar in that regards to Les Enfants Du Paradis, and no surprise to find out that Marcel Carné was an assistant on this movie). Marie Bell and Pierre Richard-Willm act their hearts out here.