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What a brilliant gesture of contempt for human weakness
I am not convinced that The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950) is a faithful adaptation of Georges Simenon's A Man's Head (La Tête d'un homme, 1931) if only because I have trouble picturing a Maigret novel ending with a life-or-death chase to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but it was shot entirely on location in Paris and directed mostly by Burgess Meredith and I had not actually realized until the UCLA restoration notes came up before the title that it was a film noir in color. It's not great color. The process was something called Ansco Reversal, the original elements have gone the way of all nitrate, the surviving color prints had a hard life, and the combined result, Stanley Cortez's intelligent photography notwithstanding, looks like a vintage cheap postcard of Paris in 1948. It's good at green and red and everything else looks a little bleached out, a little acidic and brassy—a pulp magazine cover, the pages beneath burnt brown with age. It makes the whole production look more like a penny dreadful than I think it is, even with Franchot Tone having a blast playing a brilliant unstable murderer whose narcissism is going neck-and-neck with his manic swings and Charles Laughton concealing shrewdness behind stolidity as he waits for his suspect to cleverdick his way to the guillotine. There's a murder swap prefiguring Highsmith, the kind where one party doesn't think it's a real offer and the other party is already washing the blood off their hands. William Phipps as a baby-faced plainclothes policeman has drunk hair nearly as impressive as Dan Duryea's. Meredith's hair is something else again—in addition to directing with help as needed from Laughton and Tone, he co-stars in the pebble-thick glasses of a frame-up waiting to happen and even allowing for the prevailing dinginess of the print, I had no idea he had ever been a copper-wire redhead. He's as good as a lantern in the mostly day-for-night scenes, which I suspect were not meant to have ground quite so far down to black. There is a stronger vibe of hey, kids, let's put on a show to this picture than anything else I have seen released by RKO. But the street views are astonishing, the casual documentation of a city that gets playfully but fairly fifth-billed above the title. I don't begrudge the plot a single one of its three chase scenes—on foot—because there's cafés and barges and newsagents and ghost signs and kids jumping rope out front of drugstores and occasionally an artist with a street easel, but it's never the soundstage romance of An American in Paris (1951), it's Weegee's naked city transplanted to the banks of the Seine and the next most affordable thing to Technicolor, which at least you can't accuse of looking glossier than its material. There's the bronze lion of the Place Denfert-Rochereau, there's the colonnade of the Palais-Royal, and there's whatever the French is for flophouse, its rusted iron balconies and knocked-off plaster looking, I imagine naturally and literally, as though the building has been through the wars. I am particularly fond of the middle chase scene, which goes over a broken plateau of terra-cotta chimney pots and smoke-plumed skylights, and the way most of the cast hang out at Les Deux Magots, using their native accents so that the dialogue has to footnote which character is American because otherwise who could tell. The climax at the Eiffel Tower is legitimately memorable: it was done with minimal recourse to stunt work or rear projection and consequently even though Meredith lands a leap onto a moving elevator that would make Buster Keaton proud, the amateurishness with which he and Tone squirrel their way around catwalks and girders with the wide-open skyline on all sides actually boosts the realism. I am not convinced that Laughton is a faithful version of Maigret, either, but I enjoyed spending time in the world he belongs to enough that I won't hold it against him when I read the novel. This tour brought to you by my authentic backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! My knowledge of French idiom is not equal to my knowledge of American hardboiled slang.
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I think there is a good chance you would like this film a lot.
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the amateurishness with which he and Tone squirrel their way around catwalks and girders with the wide-open skyline on all sides actually boosts the realism. --and this
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It was a really fun movie to watch. And even more of a hey, kids, let's put on a show than I'd thought—according to this interview with Stanley Cortez and this article from UCLA, the musical chairs of the direction extended through Meredith, Laughton, and Tone into occasionally Cortez himself, while the funding was entirely Tone, which was an issue only insofar as it made him the person responsible for securing the adaptation rights from Simenon and therefore the person who didn't realize the author was not bluffing when he insisted on retaining the right to destroy the film if he didn't like it. I had figured the incredible scarcity of surviving prints was just normal B-movie wear and tear. Apparently it was Simenon. This movie really was, and I say it with great affection, amateur hour.
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