Les orgueilleux

I saw this movie when it first came out, have not seen it since, but have remembered it vividly all these years. Seldom, if ever, has a film held me riveted the way this one did. Of course, I would have paid to see Michele Morgan read the Manhattan phone book, especially attired in a slip (no, I am not a lezzie). The mood created by the meningitis epidemic in Mexico and the sexual tension, created mostly by Morgan, are more enveloping than real life. This remains one of my top 10 - perhaps top 5 - favorite movies of all time. For the life of me, I cannot understand why there is neither a VHS nor a DVD version available, apparently anywhere. What can be done to rectify this situation? For years, I moaned about the lack of a DVD of The Informer. Now, one is available but only as part of the overpriced John Ford collection of some of his lesser films.

Jen

`Les Orgueilleux' is one of a constellation of worthy French movies of this era that the French stopped making for two reasons: the complete lobotomy of the intellect that was the so-called New Wave and the premature death of Gérard Philipe, one of the century's finest actors. His pairing with Michèle Morgan here is inspired. (They also starred in René Clair's `Les Grandes Manoeuvres'.) In order to describe Philipe's charm, one has to evoke equal parts Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurence Olivier and imagine them cast as romantic leads in the kind of challenging narrative that is not even conceivable today, except for the odd exception. `Les Orgueilleux' is set during a typhus epidemic in a remote Mexican village and is based on Jean-Paul Sartre's novel `L'Amour rédempteur' (`Redeemed by Love', aka `Typhus'). The oversimplification of the novel's themes is compensated by Allégret's penchant for realism and his attention to details, like the long scene of Morgan enduring the discomfort and perils of a lonely hotel room during a heat wave in a third rate Mexican hotel, which is part striptease (daring for the time) and part psychological analysis. In other words, a perfect blend of commercialism and intelligence, both qualities sadly lacking from the aforementioned so-called New Wave.

Jean-Paul Sartre did not have much luck with his screenplays for French Pathé as only two of eight saw the light of day, one of which, 'Les Jeux sont faits' was directed by Jean Delannoy whilst the other, entitled 'Typhus', eventually surfaced some ten years later as 'Les Orgueilleux' which retained distant echoes of the original. Ironically Sartre was nominated for an Academy Award but unsurprisingly withdrew his name.

Directed and adapted by Yves Allégret with contributions from the legendary Aurenche and Bost, it is set in a fly-blown harbour town during a meningitis epidemic and stars two of France's finest, Gérard Philippe and Michele Morgan, both of whose class enables them to rise above the grubby milieu. Philippe both excels and engages one's sympathy in a role that could so easily be a caricature. Mlle Morgan's innate sensuality is singularly sweaty here and Martin Scorcese admits that the sight of her lying on a bed in her lingerie whilst cooling herself with ice cubes 'troubled his adolescence'.

Cinematographer Alex Phillips has brillianty captured the seedy surroundings and oppressive heat but the soundtrack of yelping musicians becomes rather tiresome.

The final Hollywood-style clinch is not the ending that Allégret would have chosen and was apparently shot by an operator in the Boulogne studios against a painted sky.

Allégret had reached his peak with three 'noirs' in the 1940's and this work from 1953 is generally regarded as his last film of note.

Story of a land more than story of characters. Admirable performance of Michelle Morgan. And sure, Gerard Philipe. You feel the heat and the poverty and the air. And, sure, the traits of love. A film like the picture of a world. And a love story as root of hope.

I sat through this movie this evening, forcing myself to stick with it even though I never cared about any of the characters or what happened to them, because the two leads, Gérard Philippe and Michèle Morgan, were major film stars of their era and I wanted to see them in "something different," which this certainly was. They both gave fine performances, but of distasteful characters.

Indeed, the whole movie is about a shabby little town in Mexico inhabited by almost uniformly distasteful characters (the doctor is, of course, the major exception). What Michèle Morgan ever sees in Philippe to fall in love with him is never explained.

This is supposedly based on a work by Jean-Paul Sartre. All I could think was that, if Sartre's work is anything like this movie, it must be a very mediocre attempt at imitating Camus' masterful novel The Plague, which dealt with a plague in North Africa.

A well-acted but uninteresting movie.