Il colore della pelle

Not one person sexually assaulted or any balls cut off!

I Spit on Your Grave is a French film about the problems of crime and race in America. It seems to be made by people who have learned about crime and race strictly by watching other movies. Is this a bad thing? Not if one watches I Spit on Your Grave in the right frame of mind.

Joe Grant (Christian Marquand) is a (very) light-skinned African-American from Mississippi who finds his brother dead from a lynching. He decides to go to Trenton (presumably N. J.), pass for white, and avenge his brother. Trenton is a crime ridden city under the influence of a bike gang led by a smooth-talking scoundrel who plans to marry the local rich girl, Elisabeth Shannon (Antonella Lualdi). Joe goes to work for a bookseller (Fernand Ledoux), promptly upturns the criminal status quo, and falls for the rich girl.

The script is somewhat hard to swallow at times. It seems that every hot looking, young woman wants to go to bed with Joe. He constantly obliges in spite of the fact that he supposedly loves the rich girl. Also, the film wears its references rather loudly. Joe is dressed similarly to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. The bike gang is out of The Wild One or some juvenile delinquent B-picture. The rich girl's fancy estate suggests a Southern melodrama. The climatic run to the Canadian border (from Trenton, N. J.?) suggests a lot of westerns and gangster films. It is clear the filmmakers have watched many other movies.

At its best, I Spit on Your Grave has an in-you-face energy that reminds me of Samuel Fuller. I enjoyed the film for that reason. As a pulpy crime movie, I Spit on Your Grave is a lot of fun. As some sort of statement about race and crime in America, the film misses by a wide margin.

I've not read his novel,so I will not argue,but all that I can say is that the film is a complete disaster ;today in France everybody's forgotten all about the movie .Director Michel Gast has made only four movies in total.

The leads ,Antonella Lualdi and Christian Marquand ,had teamed up the precedent year in Astruc's excellent "Une Vie";but Gast left them to their own devices and it has to be seen to be believed.How could we believe Marquand is a black man with a white skin? (Vian's book was a pastiche ,they say)How could we believe that Daniel Cauchy (see Melville's "Bob le Flambeur") and Jean Sorel (Jean Sorel?) are "rebels without a cause "James Dean style?(the electric chair scene takes grotesque to new limits).And this macho racist man played by Paul Guers?And the old man played by veteran Fernand Ledoux ,the best actor in the whole movie,but in his worst part ever.

The script is so poor (I do not speak of the lines,particularly those when Guers tells Lualdi she is restive and he will take pleasure in taming her) it's difficult to catch up with the plot.The form is Nouvelle Vague style complete with jazz with borrowings from the American movies (the ending recalls Lang's "You only live once" and too many chase movies).If it's a plea against racism,then it thoroughly fails in its purpose.

A French-made rumination of American racial tensions, circa the late 1950s, emerges a ludicrous attempt. A remarkable dissonance of plot, character and sentiment overwhelms practically every scene. The juxtaposition of French-language dialogue and the Continental performances are at odds with the subject matter, which focuses on a so-called "light-skinned" African-American, played by badly miscast lily-white Christian Marquand, who tries to fit in with a U.S. town overrun with racist bourgeois and a "Wild Racer"-type motorcycle gang that appear to have been imported from some American-International juvenile delinquency movie. The clashes of acting, stilted dialogue, a strange French version of Americana, and a plot that is meant to be social commentary but emerges as mild exploitation, result in an abject failure. A risque nude swimming scene is a surprise, and was probably the only reason this movie found its way into the international marketplace. A good jazz-infused music score is the singular plus here.

It may be that the nightmarish quality of my memory of this movie is caused by my having seen it at about 2 a.m. one night in New York at one of those very seedy all-night theaters on Times Square while I was waiting for a 6 a.m. train. The American "South" portrayed in the film was as phantasmagorical (and real, in its way) as the vision of the country in Kafka's _Amerika_. As I recall it, the screenplay was quite faithful to Boris Vian's original novel of the same name, and both developed from European stereotypes of American culture, with some probable input from Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. The acting was barely tolerable, but the filming technique (again, as I remember it after almost 40 years) made it seem appropriate. Altogether this was a startling and powerful experience, obviously memorable, but I am sure that it was artistically very bad. Somehow that suggests that some examples of bad art can transcend their own badness, though the reasons are seldom clear.