Le mura di Malapaga

A criminal, played by Jean Gabin is on the run, and no spoilers but he gets stranded in Italy, in Genoa which is still coming to terms with the aftermath of the war. Rene Clement who had not yet directed ' Les Jeux Interdit ' arguably his masterpiece, with ' Le Mura di Malapaga ' which uses both the Italian language and the French language. Visually it is stunning and full of people coming to terms with the inevitable desolation around them. He meets Isa Miranda, an abused wife, and a relationship begins. Their struggle to attain happiness in the ruins around them is the core of the film, and although I do not count this as particularly Neo-Realist or Film Noir it is ultimately a dark vision of life set in dark times. Isa Miranda stands out as being one of Italy's finest actors and gives a performance which will linger in my mind for a long while. There is one superlative scene where she is bought a glamorous dress that is deeply moving, because probably this is one of the few times in her life that she looks and feels literally transformed by happiness. I am not so happy about Jean Gabin as I feel he going through the acting motions, having played fairly similar fatalistic parts before, and does not quite inhabit his role as Isa Miranda does. A very good film, and well worth seeking out.

The copy of this movie that I watched on TCM was a poor one. It looked like a bad 16 mm. print; the subtitles were hard to read because they were fuzzy and the portion of the frame might have a white or black background. Given that this won the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, it seems strange that Criterion, the print's source, would be satisfied with a bad print.

The story of this French-Italian co-production is a simple one: Gabin is a fugitive from France, where he has murdered a woman. He gets off ship in Genoa because he has a toothache and has his wallet stolen, meets Isa Miranda and her daughter, Vera Talchi, and they all fall in love. Miss Talchi is a fugitive herself, from Marseilles. Her wife-beating husband has just gotten out of jail and wants his punching bag back.

In broad, this movie could have turned out like one of the movies Gabin had made with Duvivier back in the 1930s, full of Poetic Realism. Now, however, the Second World War has destroyed the world,and there is no poetry left, just bombed-out buildings for people to live in, and dentists who pull your teeth for 450 lire -- 800 if you want anesthesia. Director Rene Clement and DP Louis Page give us a tired, ugly world where people are hungry for a little kindness, simply because it has grown so rare. It's a great movie and I hope someone locates and makes available a good copy before it is forgotten.

Just watched it o0n TCM and the Janus Films copy they showed was terrible and barely watchable in HD. Someone, somewhere need to a restoration. Nonetheless, it was a good film with Gabin being Gabin, and I mean that with all the respect and accolades he deserves. But the real star performance (IMHO) is by Vera Talchi as Chechina. Sadly she has only four other films on her resume'. 8/10.

Coming just after "les maudits" ,perhaps René Clément's best film -and of course totally overlooked-,"Le mura di Palapaga" aka "Au-delà des Grilles" displays the same respect for the audience as far the languages are concerned.Italians speak Italian between them,and Gabin speaks French with Isa Miranda.There the comparison ends.

For "Au Delà-des Grilles" highly praised at the time, lauded far beyond its station,and incomprehensibly awarded at the Festival de Cannes ,has not worn well.The screenplay borrows lots of ideas from "Pépé le Moko" ,Duvivier's masterpiece (1937) and the atmosphere tries to capture that of the Italian neo-realism .Gabin does not seem to be interested in his part -he had played this kind of role of the good-guy-with-policemen-hot-on-his-heels many times before ;outside "Pepe" there 's also "La Bandera" "Quai des Brumes" "Le Recif de Corail" ,etc.Isa Miranda is the stand-out but in that context,it does not mean much.Try to see "les Maudits"!

It's hard to know how good "The Walls of Malapaga" may or may not be, because the print I saw (which aired on TCM and which I'm assuming therefore is the best one available) is so horrible that it almost makes the film unwatchable. Most of the time the actors' faces are so washed out that you can't see them, and 50% of the subtitles are unreadable because they're in white font against frequently white backgrounds.

But the film is good for a peek at post-WWII Europe and the daily reminders of desperation and devastation from which America was largely spared. I happened to watch a couple of Susan Hayward melodramas that came out on either side of this film around the same time I watched it, and I was struck by the huge difference between what American audiences were being sold in their movies vs. what Europeans were seeing. In American films, it's like the war never happened, and the wealth and privilege is hard to stomach, whereas European films from the same time period seem to be about nothing but the war and the legacy it left behind.

"The Walls of Malapaga" received the annual Honorary Foreign Language Film Oscar that the Academy bestowed for a decade before introducing the competitive Foreign Language Film category that exists today.

Grade: B