Le mura di Malapaga

Le mura di Malapaga (1949) is a Italian/French movie directed by René Clément. It stars Jean Gabin as Pierre Arrignon, a French criminal who escapes to Genoa, Italy.

René Clément was a famous French director in the mid-20th century. He is sometimes called the father of French New Wave Cinema, although the directors in the New Wave were younger than Clément.

Jean Gabin was the leading French male actor of his day. Clément and Gabin made a great team, and what resulted was a great movie. As others have pointed out, this film is a mixture of film noir and neorealism. We see film noir touches everywhere--shadows, steel bars, crimes. Neorealism was easy if you were shooting in 1949 Genoa. The rubble left behind by WW II was everywhere. People speak of "living in the rubble" or "playing in the rubble" is if this is just part of everyday life. (I assume it was part of everyday life.)

The movie also stars Isa Miranda as Marta, the Italian woman who falls in love with Pierre. She's easy to distinguish--the beautiful, slender woman with high cheekbones. (That's a joke, because it describes every French movie star of her day. However, she really was beautiful, and she really was a great actor.)

However, for me, acting honors go to Vera Talchi, as Cecchina, Marta's daughter. At age 15, it couldn't have been easy to play alongside Gabin and Miranda, but she managed it extremely well.

This film won the Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film in 1950. We saw it in 35mm at Rochester's wonderful Dryden Theatre in the George Eastman Museum. However, it will work almost as well on the small screen. If you love film noir and 1940's neorealism, it's a must see. Even if those are not your favorite type of films, it's still worth seeking out and seeing.

P.S. The Walls of Malapaga in Genoa still exist. It was hard to get information about them, because my search brought up either the movie or a restaurant in Genoa. However, I finally tracked down the fact that Malapaga was a terrible debtor's prison for centuries. It's these walls that physically keep Pierre from getting away. Of course, there are emotional walls as well.

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

Although highly regarded at the time, it also has to be one of the most easily forgotten French films of the late 1940Õs.

This gritty, neo-realist tale set in post-war Genoa is a vehicle for the two stars, Isa Miranda and Jean Gabin , but is bereft of compelling dialogue or dramatic content.

The story line is sparse: Gabin, on the run for murdering his lover in France, disembarks at the port of Genoa seeking treatment

for a toothache. He encounters a young girl, Vera Talchi, who helps him find a dentist. After being pick pocketed, he meets, Miranda, the girlÕs mother, who serves him a meal at the trattoria where she works.

Quickly they become attracted to each other, she takes him home and they fall in love. The daughter becomes jealous of the new relationship. Meanwhile, the police began to close in on Gabin.

Rene Clement, better known for Purple Noon and is Paris Burning, scored not only the Best Director award at Cannes in 1949 but also an honorary Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1950. In addition, Isa Miranda was named Best Actress at the Cannes Festival..

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.

I have to agree with the reviewer who saw "The Walls of Malapaga" recently on TCM. It was really almost unwatchable; only because I speak Italian and have a passing knowledge of French did I continue. The subtitles were impossible to read and the whole movie had a washed out, unbalanced look which didn't add atmosphere to the Neorealism, but instead distracted from it. As for the story, this is the second time I've seen this film and I do love the post-war depiction. Marta (Isa Miranda) and her daughter (Vera Talchi) live in the ruins of a bombed out building in Genoa and Gabin is Gabin. It's shameful that this film has not been restored; hopefully, someone will take it on and release a print that is worthy of it.