L'aîné des Ferchaux

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.

As some of the other reviews have already stated, the print of the movie that is available is very poor. So it is not quite clear whether Melville wanted to have the washed-out look of the picture or whether it is just plain bad quality. Even rare TV screenings do not offer an improved version (ARTE). The relationship between the young ex-paratrooper/boxer/secretary (Belmondo) and the old bank owner/colonial adventurer (Vanel) is quite interesting and also stands for the generational conflict of the 1960s. Obviously, some of the plot is somewhat stretched but the tension between the main characters is excellently played out. Melville wanted Spencer Tracy for the Vanel part, but Tracy's health situation made any form of outdoor filming (not to mention insurance for this) Impossible. Belmondo, who is fooling around in Godard's "Breathless" and posing as a Bogart style tough guy, really plays a film noir character in this one. The way he treats his girlfriend at the beginning of the movie makes his protagonist almost unlikeable. In the damp Louisiana setting at the end of the movie, the whole affair really turns into a veritable noir.

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.

And not a crime film, as also was L'ARMEE DES OMBRES, this Jean Pierre Melville's movie is an absolute gem, about a loser, Belmondo, to whom his fate permits him to get another chance to achieve his goals. A very American film scheme, but the plot itself is quite different then. Belmondo is as powerful here as he was in Melville's LE DOULOS, two years earlier. It is not a crime film, but a drama, exceptional drama, very bitter, sad, with an unique atmosphere. The jewel, the best of this movie is of course the face to face between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel; two generations meet. This is a tremendous films which obvious skills announce the further Melville's masterpieces.

Adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, Magnet of Doom (why it's called that I don't know, though the American DVD I watched had the title An Honorable Young Man) is about a young amateur boxer and ex-military man (Jean-Paul Belmondo, the cool tall smoking male of the Nouvelle Vague) who becomes a 'secretary' to an older white collar criminal (Charles Vanel) who had to leave France fast. Instead of going to Venezuela, like one might think is most logical, they head to America, first to New York and then, following a brief road trip, New Orleans.

This is where most of the story takes place - which is mostly just watching their relationship disintegrate and thoughts about taking-the-money-and-running for Belmondo (yeah, Vanel has a big stack of cash that he had to take out of his security box in New York before the feds got wise) - and it's not bad. If there's a problem it's that by the time one comes to this movie, which I didn't really know about until recently (it only got released on DVD last year I believe, and aside from a NY Film Festival screening fifty years ago it never got a release stateside), one has probably/likely seen all of Melville's other films. And it's not a major work.

Or, if it is, Melville doesn't really have a lot of energy to make it more than just an interesting B movie, no more no less. It is actually a "crime movie" if you think about it, just different because it's not about a heist or guys in trench-coats, but about an older man trying to out-run the law and... himself, I guess.

Belmondo and Vanel make up most of the heart of the picture and keep it fascinating. You want to know what each one will do next - Ferchaux needs Michel more than he needs him - amid the sweltering heat and the old man's boy-cry-wolf physical ailments. And Melville cast his two leads well. So well that it helps, a little, to distract from portions that don't work dramatically or feel dated. There's a mid-section in the film while they're on their cross-country trek that Michel stops (rather suddenly) for a female hitchhiker, and they quickly become lovers (?) in one of those Movie-Fantasy-Scenes where right after they pick her up they stop and Michel and the young woman have a swim and kiss and then... at the next stop she tries to run away with another truck driver (?)

It's something like that where Melville, whether it's through himself or Simenon's text, shows a bit of sexism, or just not knowing what to do with a female character that could have become a fully developed character or a love interest (and there IS a love interest, sorta, later in the movie in New Orleans, though I wonder if this is also an excuse to just show a woman practically naked while Michel sits drunk). It's not a criticism I'd like to make against the director but I do; he has his two main male characters fully developed, and the actors inhabit them well enough, that it disguises that everyone else in the movie has not much dimension at all. Well, maybe the bartender has a little as a mean-looking-dude of a sort.

But Melville's love of America comes through and that helps a bit. And it's interesting to see him work in color for the first time, though ironically I think I prefer when he has his more subtle, washed out and blue-ish colors in later movies like Army of Shadows and The Red Circle. Here things are bright enough (hard to tell fully from the non-Amamorphic DVD transfer), and he gets the local color about right even as it's all shot, oddly enough, in his studio in Paris (what, you thought he'd trek out to America to shoot this? Heavens no, though I'm sure a second unit for the rest of the footage).

An Honorable Young Man/Magnet of Doom has an intriguing performance from Belmondo, in terms of 'what will he do next', and some good cinematography. But there should've been a little more 'there' there, past the male camaraderie and themes of loyalty (which, yes, it's fine and well drawn enough).