Mauvaise graine

Henri Pasquier is the prodigal and profligate son. Daddy Warbucks takes away his car so the kid goes rogue. Steals a car and before long we're treated to an excellent car chase through the streets of Paris. Remember, this is 35 years before Bullitt and French Connection. Hollywood movies at the time barely left the studio.

Henri soon finds out the car-theft business is an organized racket. Luckily for him, they're hiring.

The plot then really gets going, with beautiful women distracting wealthy car owners from daring daylight car thefts on the streets of Paris. The head of the international car-theft ring is devious and charming in his own way. We get a plethora of interesting side characters. And a gorgeous love interest for Henri.

Complications arise when Henri goes to bat for better wages for the crew, so the boss cooks up a scheme to get rid of him.

Now I'm supposed to note that Bad Seed is Billy Wilder's directorial debut. He was temporarily in France after fleeing Natsy Germany. While the exterior scenes are very well done, the interior scenes are, at times, pretty stiff. Maybe that was the work of co-director Alex Esway.

Luckily, Wilder co-wrote the screenplay. The plot works on every level. The characters are believable, gritty, and lively. The setting is second-to-none.

This bothered absolutely no one but me, but back when I did the run through of Billy Wilder's movies I missed his first film, Mauvaise Graine, also known as Bad Seed. It's a minor work, made in the brief period he lived in France after he fled Germany with Hitler's rise to power and before he settled in Los Angeles to start his career as a screenwriter and, eventually, celebrated director. I didn't skip it because it's minor, though. I skipped it because I simply couldn't find a copy. I wanted to watch it, but I just couldn't locate anything anywhere. It's mostly skipped over in takes on Wilder's career, anyway.

So, I'm currently reading Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride, and I got to the point in his discourse of Wilder's life where he described the production and film itself. It just got me curious, and I looked again, finding that copies had gone online within the past year within about five minutes of searching. I'm quite happy that I've found the copy so that my unhappy sense of incompleteness that no one cared about is now addressed.

Anyway, the film holds a lot of Wilder's motifs, themes, and familiar character archetypes, albeit in very undeveloped forms. I remember being somewhat amazed at the polish brought to his first Hollywood feature, The Major and the Minor, and this feels much more like one would expect of a first film. Of course, in the interim between 1934, when he made Mauvaise Graine, and 1942 when The Major and the Minor was release, Wilder had a major education in storytelling, writing dozens of scripts alone and with his first major writing partner Charles Brackett, including the script for Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire and Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka in the still powerful studio system. That lack of polish is part of the charm of his first directorial effort, though.

The story is of a young man, Henri (Pierre Mingand), whose father (Paul Escoffier) takes away his car in an effort to get him to grow up and take responsibility in his life. Henri, having made a date with an attractive young woman where his car was a selling point, steals another Buick like his own and picks her up, also picking up a tail of three men. After a chase around Paris, they stop him, take the car and Henri, and head towards a garage run by the Chief (Michel Duran) where he offers Henri a job stealing cars. Henri quickly befriends the youngest member of the gang, Jean (Raymond Galle) and falls in love with his sister Jeanette (Danielle Darrieux) who also works with the gang, distracting wealthy men and giving Jean time to steal the car.

Henri takes to the work, and Jeannette takes to Henri. However, Henri's increasing popularity within the gang and his ability to stand up to the Chief in front of everyone threatens the Chief's power. He sends Henri off on a suicide mission with a car carrying a bad axle designed to break with too much stress. Henri brings Jeannette along, and on the road to Marseille, they end up in a chase with the police. There isn't a whole lot more story after this (the movie is only 73 minutes long), but it ends on a combination of sweet and sad that Wilder would more commandingly deliver in later films like The Apartment.

So, you have a transient young character who gets into some kind of seedy life in order to survive who ends up in love and deciding that love will conquer all, all while the subtext of the film is satirical in nature, providing comedy and dramatic pathos along the way. Yup, sounds exactly like a Billy Wilder movie to me.

The problem is that Wilder's writing (alongside Jan Lustig, Max Colpet, and Claude-Andre Puget) ends up thinner than necessary. Henri has none of the interesting depth of someone like Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd., Jean's obsession with ties is amusing but doesn't really mean much, and Jeannette is little more than a pretty face (though Darrieux would use it as the starting point for a very long career in French film). There are fun quips of dialogue here and there, like when one of the other gang members, trapped by the police, tries to get his way out by wondering what kind of reward he'll get for turning in the stolen bus he's sitting in and the police respond by saying two to five years, but it's not at the same level as the nearly nonstop fun as in Some Like it Hot. Speaking of that gang member, I imagine a longer version of this film (twenty minutes or so), giving him more character than someone who can't steal cars right.

Made on an extremely tight budget where Wilder was essentially just the one who volunteered to direct in a period of transition from Wilder's life in the Berlin film industry to when he would find a home at Paramount a year or so later, Mauvaise Graine is an amusing trifle of a film from a young man who wasn't even sure if he wanted to direct movies. Unsure of where he belonged in the world, it's easy to feel his confusion even here in the unrefined form. The light tone through most of the film carries it a lot, and the ending holds a surprisingly firm grasp of competing emotions. Wilder still had a lot to learn, but he wasn't starting from nothing when he directed his first film. He'd definitely learned something writing at Ufa.

Let me start by saying, if you've never seen a Billy Wilder movie, see at least 5 to 10 before seeing this. You won't appreciate it much unless you want to see Wilder's roots. This is Wilder's directorial debut, and it shows. That's not to say its a bad picture (Wilder didn't do many bad pictures), it's just not great.

When Nazis took over Austria, Wilder fled to Berlin, and later to Paris. While he was there, he wrote and directed one movie. This is it. While the film is pretty rough and not nearly as tight as his later movies, it definitely shows early aspects of his later films. You will see lots of gags similar to those he would later write with I.A.L. Diamond. Particularly the scene at the water park. Watch carefully for a make-up mirror shot, he later duplicated in The Apartment.

In between scenes there are one to three minute montages of music and shots that don't do much for the story, and tend to make your mind wander off a bit. However, one of the film's most redeeming factors is Franz Waxman's score. This movie is not only a must-see for Wilder fans, but also for fans of movie scores, as Waxman's music can be heard in nearly 300 movies, including The Philadelphia Story, Gone With the Wind, Hitchcock classics such as Rear Window and Rebecca, and some of Wilder's American films like Sunset Blvd., and Stalag 17. Waxman's music helps deliver nearly all of the jokes, and keeps the movie flowing well.

The scene that stands out most in the movie, is probably the car chase (wonderfully scored by Waxman, by the way), which is not too shabby considering it was the first film Wilder directed, and on such a low budget.

This film is important for the careers of Billy Wilder and Franz Waxman and is a must see if you are a fan of either. Was also an early film for Danielle Darrieux who has been acting in films for over 70 years, and is still going.

7/10

First thing to bear in mind is that it's a collaboration Wilder/Esway.Esway was a minor FRench director whose best film is perhaps his old-fashioned but charming "Education de Prince" starring Louis Jouvet.

Of course Billy Wilder became one of the greatest directors in history but many of his fans might be disappointed.The seeds of the works to come are here but they are few and far between Of course the "statistics" and the voice-over heralds the prologue of "the seven years itch" These two-bit gangsters are the forerunners of those we would find in "some like it hot".

The greybeard who tries to seduce Jeanette and has his car stolen already displays that Wilder's tendency to turn "moral" something which is not ("Kiss me stupid" "Avanti") But the best gag remains the brat putting a stolen license plate on his car .

The ending does not convince since it's finally very dramatic ;but all in all,it was the classic ending of the French movie of that era: going somewhere else.

NB:When Wilder was working in Paris,Richard Pottier was making at about the same time his "Fanfare d'Amour" which would inspire ( check the screenplays ) BW's own "Some like it hot".

Cocky son of a doctor Henry (Pierre Mingand), a frankly wreckless driver, has the keys to his father's car taken away from him. Even with his Maurice Chevalier impression he is unlikely to be able to impress the girls by bus. He is tempted to steal a car in order to fulfil a date, is hijacked by a real car-stealing gang and throws in his lot with them. And so we find ourselves in what I think is called a Straßenfilm - Henry rejects his comfortable background for Paris's streets of crime.

The gang at work are entertaining, with cravate cleptomaniac Jean, and le Zèbre who keeps turning up with a string of old bangers. It's good to see a black actor (Gaby Héritier) shown as part of the city's makeup, and Michel Duran is excellent as the gang's wily boss.

In this film Danielle Darrieux (still only sixteen or seventeen) escapes her role as the ballroom-frequenting daughter of the aristocracy. She is funny as the gang's honey-trap and hilarious as the sullen secretary.

There are clunky but exciting night-time chase scenes through French villages as the plot moves into something more like a road-trip movie, and there's a noticeable change in mood as Darrieux and Mingand find themselves walking down the mountain road. Here, for a while, you get the feeling of two real people talking to each other and just the hint of a different movie again.

Certainly it's an uneven sort of film in tone but still a good watch and of interest to fans of Darrieux and of Wilder.