Reunion in France (1942) is not a great movie. I'm not even sure it's a good movie. It was directed by Jules Dassin and it's not his fault; I don't think even Michael Curtiz could have saved Joan Crawford as France. The conceit of a frivolously apolitical socialite awakened to her strength of patriotism after the fall of France makes for an unusually ambivalent version of the heroine as national symbol, but the American production draws most of the bite and risks condescension instead while the love triangle takes on cheesily allegorical overtones when it requires Crawford to decide between sticking safely with sophisticated fiancé Philip Dorn, his industrial designs now indispensable to the Nazis, and risking her life to aid aw-shucks American John Wayne of the Eagle Squadron of the RAF. "You told me once I reminded you of France because I was selfish and spoiled. I'm not anymore and neither is she. Whatever she is now, I am too." I think this sort of thing works better in opera. I'm skeptical about the swastika-shaped dinner arrangements in any genre beyond Mel Brooks. The actually quite nice supporting cast includes John Carradine, Howard da Silva, and Ava Gardner and they all do their best to distract the audience from the total absence of chemistry between Crawford and her co-stars, but it was with entirely unironic relief that I finally texted ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, "Oh, thank God, Ernst Deutsch had a drunken breakdown and got punched, elevating the dramatic quality of this movie on the spot."
I wasn't expecting to see him again so soon, but since his scenes are the reason I do not regret having watched this movie, I'm not complaining. I was happy to see him even when it was not obvious that his German captain would be a character as opposed to a sigil of occupied Paris, like the swastika flag flying over the train station as Crawford's Michele de la Becque returns wearily but still haughtily from what was intended to be a carefree summer in Biarritz. He's the officer in charge of the coal-allotment bureau that used to be her townhouse, a crisply characterless type—silvering hair brushed straight back, uniform as neat as if it were pressed on him—who allows that she has the right to one room for her personal use with exactly the same dry precision with which he reprimanded his subordinate for not shooting her when she burst into his office; he gets one clipped deadpan line about his war wound being a bite from a Belgian sheepdog ("We found them infinitely better equipped than the soldiers") and otherwise seems like background color, field-grey. He's credited only as "Captain." I was not surprised that Deutsch, like so many German-accented refugees in wartime Hollywood, had found himself playing the people he had fled from; I was just a little sorry the film hadn't given him more to do. And then he barged back into the third act in an electrifying state of inebriation and I almost forgave Reunion in France for trying to make me believe such pieces of whimsy from Wayne's Pat Talbot as "I fly very low and very slow, like a duck." The captain wants to talk to Michele, though he's drunk to the point where you aren't confident he'd remember if he did; he hardly resembles the featureless martinet of his earlier scene with his swaying gestures and his stickily tousled hair, sweating in his half-buttoned uniform. The smile we'd never seen before fell off his face as soon as he registered the tall young stranger in the Frenchwoman's room. His Nazi insignia isn't what makes him look dangerous; it's his vulnerability, because if sufficiently humiliated he might have someone shot over it. It's a near thing after he insults the American "student" and Pat lays him out like Captain America Comics #1. Michele diplomatically steers the captain outside; he steers her into a corner of the gatehouse. "If it's air you want, you can breathe it here just as well—and I can stand and look at you." There's something in his dry voice that's not just the expected play of power. He might actually, awkwardly be trying to seduce her when he insists that she's "not the enemy, you never were, you and your kind. You know what it means to be the masters . . . Everything you've had, you'll have again." She dares him to be magnanimous; he pulls her roughly close, as if calling her bluff. He kisses her. Boom.
At first it looks like ordinary drunken belligerence—when Michele asked what he'd come to see her about, he escalated in defensiveness at once. "Why must it be about something? It's not an unusual request. People talk to each other all over the world!" Actually the captain is having a one-man The Moon Is Down, cracking up over his inability to be treated as a person rather than part of a genocidal machine, and it breaks out of him with all the intensity of the actor's Expressionist years. "You let me kiss you as if it were some sort of penance," he recognizes, harshly grinding the words out; he doesn't sound drunk at all, except that he wouldn't be saying any of these things sober. "I've met others like you before. They looked at me as you did just now . . . As if I were something to be suffered through, like a disease—patient, knowing that someday I would pass and that they would be well again. As if I were an animal. As if I were anything but a human being like themselves!" It is a wrenching honesty and all he wants is for it to be answered in kind and Michele won't give him even that much, double-speaking with one eye on the street where her underground contact was supposed to appear: "Isn't it my first duty to do as I'm told?" He's not a fool, this captain, for all that at the moment he's a mess. He knows—not about Pat's mission or Michele's plan to get him out of Paris, but that she's only let an officer of the German army walk her outside and stand her up against a wall and put his hands on her because she's buying someone else's safety; even when she murmurs his own words back at him, echoing too her ex-lover's conscience-soothing fascist soft sell, he knows he can't trust her to mean it. But she's the one making the forceful first move this time, she kisses him fiercely and he takes it, accepting for just a moment the illusion of human desire, and behind his back Pat and the young man from the underground get away safe down the street. Michele turns the captain loose, doesn't take her eyes off him. Low-voiced to her enemy, she says, "Don't let anyone ever tell you you're not human."
It might be the best line in the picture; it's certainly Crawford's best delivery. It's as honest as her kiss. It's the right form of words to encourage a man and she says it as if she's cursing him, even a little triumphantly. Be human, because you can be lonely. Be human, because you can be weak. Be human, because you can fool yourself; be human, because you can be defeated. For his moment off guard, the captain's caught in his compromising state by a superior officer, dressed down in untranslated German, left to listen to Michele's laughter as she moves on to a "bigger tiger." His last gesture onscreen is the sharp jerks of rebuttoning his tunic, putting himself back in order, his mouth pulled dryly down. He got nothing from her and she made him give everything away. And the movie had forty minutes to go of increasingly convoluted plot and counterplot, the mounting interest of the Gestapo, the late-breaking uncertainty as to the motives of Dorn's Robert Cortot, and I couldn't care as much as I did for those five minutes with Ernst Deutsch. There's nothing else like it in Reunion in France—nothing as realpolitik, nothing, I'm sorry, as sexy. It's not just the unibrow. Crawford has chemistry with Deutsch. It's the sort of twisty power differential there are entire tags for on AO3, but it's more fun to watch than Crawford repeating softly to Wayne, "I told you I wasn't mad" or protesting to Dorn, "But I'm not at war with anyone—I'm in love!" It's the only time the film remembers that life in an occupied country means more than vulgar Nazi wives taking over the fashion houses of Paris. I have no idea if at any point in its production the script had more grit to it or whether it was always high-gloss propaganda, but despite the importance of a third-act departure for Lisbon, let's just say it's no Casablanca (1942), all right?
Being made in 1942 but set in 1940, this film barely qualifies as a historical, but I'll accept it under January rules. If nothing else, it provided further support for my theory that noticing character actors promptly summons them. I appreciate that when it happens. Even when they're not the best thing in their film. This tribute brought to you by my human backers at Patreon.
spatch, "Oh, thank God, Ernst Deutsch had a drunken breakdown and got punched, elevating the dramatic quality of this movie on the spot."I wasn't expecting to see him again so soon, but since his scenes are the reason I do not regret having watched this movie, I'm not complaining. I was happy to see him even when it was not obvious that his German captain would be a character as opposed to a sigil of occupied Paris, like the swastika flag flying over the train station as Crawford's Michele de la Becque returns wearily but still haughtily from what was intended to be a carefree summer in Biarritz. He's the officer in charge of the coal-allotment bureau that used to be her townhouse, a crisply characterless type—silvering hair brushed straight back, uniform as neat as if it were pressed on him—who allows that she has the right to one room for her personal use with exactly the same dry precision with which he reprimanded his subordinate for not shooting her when she burst into his office; he gets one clipped deadpan line about his war wound being a bite from a Belgian sheepdog ("We found them infinitely better equipped than the soldiers") and otherwise seems like background color, field-grey. He's credited only as "Captain." I was not surprised that Deutsch, like so many German-accented refugees in wartime Hollywood, had found himself playing the people he had fled from; I was just a little sorry the film hadn't given him more to do. And then he barged back into the third act in an electrifying state of inebriation and I almost forgave Reunion in France for trying to make me believe such pieces of whimsy from Wayne's Pat Talbot as "I fly very low and very slow, like a duck." The captain wants to talk to Michele, though he's drunk to the point where you aren't confident he'd remember if he did; he hardly resembles the featureless martinet of his earlier scene with his swaying gestures and his stickily tousled hair, sweating in his half-buttoned uniform. The smile we'd never seen before fell off his face as soon as he registered the tall young stranger in the Frenchwoman's room. His Nazi insignia isn't what makes him look dangerous; it's his vulnerability, because if sufficiently humiliated he might have someone shot over it. It's a near thing after he insults the American "student" and Pat lays him out like Captain America Comics #1. Michele diplomatically steers the captain outside; he steers her into a corner of the gatehouse. "If it's air you want, you can breathe it here just as well—and I can stand and look at you." There's something in his dry voice that's not just the expected play of power. He might actually, awkwardly be trying to seduce her when he insists that she's "not the enemy, you never were, you and your kind. You know what it means to be the masters . . . Everything you've had, you'll have again." She dares him to be magnanimous; he pulls her roughly close, as if calling her bluff. He kisses her. Boom.
At first it looks like ordinary drunken belligerence—when Michele asked what he'd come to see her about, he escalated in defensiveness at once. "Why must it be about something? It's not an unusual request. People talk to each other all over the world!" Actually the captain is having a one-man The Moon Is Down, cracking up over his inability to be treated as a person rather than part of a genocidal machine, and it breaks out of him with all the intensity of the actor's Expressionist years. "You let me kiss you as if it were some sort of penance," he recognizes, harshly grinding the words out; he doesn't sound drunk at all, except that he wouldn't be saying any of these things sober. "I've met others like you before. They looked at me as you did just now . . . As if I were something to be suffered through, like a disease—patient, knowing that someday I would pass and that they would be well again. As if I were an animal. As if I were anything but a human being like themselves!" It is a wrenching honesty and all he wants is for it to be answered in kind and Michele won't give him even that much, double-speaking with one eye on the street where her underground contact was supposed to appear: "Isn't it my first duty to do as I'm told?" He's not a fool, this captain, for all that at the moment he's a mess. He knows—not about Pat's mission or Michele's plan to get him out of Paris, but that she's only let an officer of the German army walk her outside and stand her up against a wall and put his hands on her because she's buying someone else's safety; even when she murmurs his own words back at him, echoing too her ex-lover's conscience-soothing fascist soft sell, he knows he can't trust her to mean it. But she's the one making the forceful first move this time, she kisses him fiercely and he takes it, accepting for just a moment the illusion of human desire, and behind his back Pat and the young man from the underground get away safe down the street. Michele turns the captain loose, doesn't take her eyes off him. Low-voiced to her enemy, she says, "Don't let anyone ever tell you you're not human."
It might be the best line in the picture; it's certainly Crawford's best delivery. It's as honest as her kiss. It's the right form of words to encourage a man and she says it as if she's cursing him, even a little triumphantly. Be human, because you can be lonely. Be human, because you can be weak. Be human, because you can fool yourself; be human, because you can be defeated. For his moment off guard, the captain's caught in his compromising state by a superior officer, dressed down in untranslated German, left to listen to Michele's laughter as she moves on to a "bigger tiger." His last gesture onscreen is the sharp jerks of rebuttoning his tunic, putting himself back in order, his mouth pulled dryly down. He got nothing from her and she made him give everything away. And the movie had forty minutes to go of increasingly convoluted plot and counterplot, the mounting interest of the Gestapo, the late-breaking uncertainty as to the motives of Dorn's Robert Cortot, and I couldn't care as much as I did for those five minutes with Ernst Deutsch. There's nothing else like it in Reunion in France—nothing as realpolitik, nothing, I'm sorry, as sexy. It's not just the unibrow. Crawford has chemistry with Deutsch. It's the sort of twisty power differential there are entire tags for on AO3, but it's more fun to watch than Crawford repeating softly to Wayne, "I told you I wasn't mad" or protesting to Dorn, "But I'm not at war with anyone—I'm in love!" It's the only time the film remembers that life in an occupied country means more than vulgar Nazi wives taking over the fashion houses of Paris. I have no idea if at any point in its production the script had more grit to it or whether it was always high-gloss propaganda, but despite the importance of a third-act departure for Lisbon, let's just say it's no Casablanca (1942), all right?
Being made in 1942 but set in 1940, this film barely qualifies as a historical, but I'll accept it under January rules. If nothing else, it provided further support for my theory that noticing character actors promptly summons them. I appreciate that when it happens. Even when they're not the best thing in their film. This tribute brought to you by my human backers at Patreon.
