L'aîné des Ferchaux

I saw this at London's National Film Theatre a couple of nights ago. The print, the best they could lay their hands on, was scratched and the colour had faded to the extent that much of it was a pinky sepia. Also, I could find very few reviews to read beforehand (zero on the IMDB). So I wasn't expecting much.

And I was therefore very pleasantly surprised. The tale of an old crooked banker who absconds to the US with a young male golddigger really works. Charles Vanel (who was so brilliant in The Wages of Fear) and Jean-Paul Belmondo are a wonderful team, as a very spiky and spiteful Father/Son relationship grows between them.

As a travelogue of a journey from New York to the Deep South it's fascinating, and reminded me, of all things, of Easy Rider, which I very much suspect it may have influenced.

There's a few problems with it, mainly due to the fact the Jean-Pierre Melville never really got the timing right when it came to editing emotional scenes (especially at the end).

But if you're a fan of the early Melville movies, Le Doulos in particular, then check it out.

This film is more notable for the way it punctuates 1962 and the performance it teases out of Jean-Paul Belmondo than for being a typical Melville masterpiece. We can't help but lean into the real urban street scenes - Paris here, New York there, New Orleans towards the end of the journey - and feel ourselves being absorbed into a reality most of us know of but never experienced: One Rochechouart diner's newspaper headlines the precarious health of Edith Piaf, the neon signs of Broadway reference the Cuban Naval Blockade on one side of the street and West Side Story on the other, black & white segregation becomes plain as day as we draw closer to the American South, and so on.

Why are we taking this journey? Because disillusioned boxer Michel Maudet (Belmondo) has taken a job to help cunning, corrupt banker, Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel) evade French justice. The banker couldn't fit the sociopath archetype better and - to him at least - Maudet seems like a naive apprentice. It quickly becomes apparent however that he has met his match and a power struggle ensues. Belmondo sidelines us with a performance that breaks the mould almost as much as his lead in that other Melville film, Léon Morin, Prêtre. Vanel is more intense and menacing than I've seen him in any other film, and that is quite something given his advanced years.

Interestingly, the film heads toward a sentimental conclusion that is somewhat out of character for Melville, and although his Direction is notably flawed here and there (I suspect due to language barrier issues with American actors), there's plenty to make up for it. Recommended? Absolutely.

"Magnet of Death" is a very unusual film from writer/director Jean-Pierre Melville. While the plot involves a crook, which is pretty typical of Melville, the plot itself is most unusual as the film is a meandering road picture--one with a scant plot and plenty of quiet moments.

When the story begins, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is fighting his last boxing match. He just hasn't got what it takes and he needs to find a new job. He soon learns about an unusual job...being the traveling secretary and body guard for a rich man, Mr. Ferchaux. As for Ferchaux, he's a rich and well respected crook...a banker who soon is bound to be arrested for his many misdeeds. His plan is to skip the country and live out his life abroad...and so Michel has to be willing and able to travel with him.

The pair head to the United States because much of Ferchaux's ill-gotten wealth is in banks in America. The plan, then, is to collect his money and head to South America where there is no extradition treaty with France. However, this is all easier said than done....banks in America keep delaying him and a could FBI agents seem to be following the two men. Instead of being a gangster picture, which it seemed to be at first, it becomes a road picture...and a meandering one at that. It was as if Melville didn't have a script at times and the pair just aimlessly travel the roads of America as they head south.

While the film is an interesting character study, it also meanders too much. Overall, an odd sort of picture...and one I mildly enjoyed but nothing more.

Alternately called in English, "Magnet of Doom" or "An Honorable Young Man"--neither title doing justice to the French "L'Aîné des Ferchaux" (The Eldest of the Ferchaux Brothers), a phrase uttered in the film by Charles Vanel. Well, none of those titles is very good, but the film is pretty decent. Often seen as a detour in Jean-Pierre Melville's output, it does conform to a few of the director's themes. As a matter of fact, it could be seen as prefiguring the LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE (1966) in a number of ways. Vanel plays a corrupt financial partner who has to flee France ASAP--he's about to be arrested in connection with deaths of three men and is also in deep financial trouble. He hires a failed welterweight boxer--Jean-Paul Belmondo-- as a "secretary" to accompany him to the United States, where a safe deposit in his name will take care of his money problems. With a big wad of cash, the pair start off from NYC, heading south, ending up in New Orleans. Vanel is in charge all the time for the first half, but after Belmondo stops the car to pick up a female hitch hiker, he takes over, relegating Vanel to the back seat. Vanel's weaknesses become more evident as the situation becomes more and more hopeless: he's aging fast, has no real social support and his cash won't last forever. The film uses US back-roads and highways effectively and the New Orleans sequences have a noirish sense of decadence and doom. As the relationship between the two men devolves quickly into contentiousness, it's pretty seedy and unpleasant, but Melville's energetic direction--never a dull scene--should keep anyone interested. Both Vanel and the ever-watchable Belmondo are in good form and keep it all very convincing. Not one of Melville's masterworks, but a must-see for his fans.

I must confess I was terribly excited at the prospect of Jean-Pierre Melville tackling the road movie. If a director was ever suitable for taking on his back the existential baggage usually associated with that particular sub-genre, that's old Jean-Pierre. But in the same time, nine out of ten times there's a reason why certain films of a director's ouevre receive all the plaudits while others tend to languish in obscurity. Simply put, Magnet of Doom is not among Melville's finest - probably not his worst either. It's just too awkward and clumsy to ever be truly successful from an artistic or technical standpoint and even though fans of the director will take pleasure in witnessing the early nurturing of those same ideas, themes and moods that would later transform into what became his signature style, Magnet of Doom lacks the singularity of purpose and stylistic confidence of something like Le Samourai.

Melville weaves the plots of two characters, an amateur boxer scraping to get by after his boxing career goes down the drain and the stalwart, rich businessman on the run from the law (presumably for someone's murder) who hires the first as his secretary and travel companion, into a road movie that takes us all the way from the petit bourgouisie cafes of France to Manhattan to the Deep South and bayous of New Orleans. If you can forgive the wooden delivery and stilted dialogue American non-actors are saddled with, the choppy editing, the occasionally clumsy and haphazard camera-work, there's quite a few things to appreciate. Melville's guerilla tactics as he samples New Orleans nightlife with a camera shooting from the open car of a moving vehicle, the documentary style of his footage of empty highway stretches, slick diners, smoky bars and neon motel signs, small parts of a puzzle that in clicking together form a different kind of Americana. One seen through the eyes of a European not necessarily fascinated with what he sees. If the boxer's fixation on Frank Sinatra, the son of Italian immigrants much like himself, symbolizes the mythic quality of the New World, a motley assortment of thieving hitchhikers, soldiers spouting racial slurs and opportunist, murderous bar owners reveals the seemy underbelly of the American Dream.

Behind the slow-burn atmosphere however, behind the minimalism of the plot, the sparse dialogue, the intimacy of the monologues, all typically Melvillesque ideas and themes that would later resurface in a more refined, surefooted form, there's not much of a story to speak of. Not only is the plot stretched pretty thin, not only does it suffer from one too many improbabilities (not plot holes necessarily but little distractions that accumulate in the course of time) but it's handled in a somewhat awkward manner. The gradual shift of power in the duo's relationship, as one learns to experience freedom and the other comes to term with solitude, is not enough to carry the dramatic weight of the plot and beyond that there's not much of anything. And if Belmondo's character redeems himself in the finale for being a conniving, self-serving scoundrel for most of the film, he has the show stole from right under his nose by by the great Charles Vanel (Les Diaboliques, Wages of Fear, To Catch a Thief) who gives another terrific performance.