As far as I’ve been able to research, the French film industry never fell under the yoke of a censorship regime as sweeping as the Hays Code, which effectively neutered American cinema from 1934 to 1968. Yet Martin Roumagnac, a 1946 crime thriller newly restored and released by Icarus Films ($26.49 Blu-ray), bears the hallmarks of a Hays-era Hollywood noir, its lasciviousness expressed in shadow, suggestion and wry double entendres rather than overt bedroom pyrotechnics.
Marlene Dietrich’s Blanche Ferrand, introduced legs first as she descends a stairway in her uncle’s ramshackle pet store in a rural French town, skips the meet-cute with her main love interest in the film, Jean Gabin’s calloused homebuilder Martin Roumagnac; rather, it’s a meet-sexy from moment one. An exotic Australian immigrant who moved to France three years ago only to survive the death of her husband, Dietrich’s merry widow seeks her kicks one night at a boxing match, where she finds an open seat next to Martin. Blanche crosses her million-dollar legs, setting Martin’s loins a-flutter, after which he comments, ostensibly about the boxing match in front of them, “see the legwork?”
A few scenes later, having fallen hopelessly in love with Blanche — to the point that he’s willing to gift her with the villa he’s building for himself on a plot of desirable land — the clandestine couple lay on the grass together, where Martin ogles her clothed body for an unusually long and languorous shot. His gaze is interrupted only by Blanche alerting him to birdsong in a nearby tree. “It’s a tit’s nest,” Martin responds, without missing a beat, a line that may well have been engineered for an American audience. (If the couple seems especially alchemical in their scenes together, it’s worth nothing that Gabin and Dietrich were lovers in real life.)
Their courtship, though full-throttle in its consummation, nonetheless must be covert, for Blanche is effectively spoken for: A rich, unctuous consul named Laubry (Marcel Herrand) is counting the days for his terminally ill wife to shake off her mortal coil before he swoops in to marry Blanche, thereby lifting the widow and her émigré uncle back into the upper class. Blanche, then, is divided between at least two options — the uncouth builder with whom she’s genuinely in love, and the deep-pocketed but cruel-hearted diplomat who can offer her the creature comforts and Parisian refinement Martin never could. Still other lustful men, from a meek schoolteacher to a married public official, seek Blanche’s hand at various points, with significant consequences.
Co-written and directed with invisible dexterity by Georges Lacombe, Martin Roumagnac has much to say about class divides and xenophobia in postwar France. “Foreigners have no taste,” sneers a nativist woman who sees Blanche in a Parisian nightclub. “They’re not like us.” Later, Laubry speaks gleefully about carving the working class into various factions and pitting them against each other rather than at corrupt elites like himself. This is an observant, smartly written film that says the quiet parts out loud.
It also carries literary heft, with its careful use of foreshadowing. “This species can only live in pairs,” Blanche says, refusing to sell a single lovebird to the besotted schoolteacher she meets in the opening scene. “They’ll die if separated.” Later, like a moment of pent-up passion in a Tennessee Williams play, Blanche flings open the doors of her pet shop’s birdcages, liberating the animals from their prisons. It’s just one example of the dichotomy between freedom and confinement that serves as a recurring theme throughout Martin Roumagnac, and helps us sympathize with Blanche even when she seems to satisfy the serpentine tropes of a femme fatale.
The movie, indeed, shares much tension and craft with film noir, particularly the sense that the title character is doomed from the outset, felled by his own spiraling impulses and a sense of predestined catastrophe. But to his credit, Lacombe never allows genre to dictate its direction, and his film offers poignant surprises, revelations and ruminations on the many meanings of freedom right up until its devastating climax.
Lacombe is not remembered among the most fashionable of French directors — he completed his last film in 1958, a year before the French New Wave upended the country’s cinematic identity — and may well have been dismissed by filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut as a member of the arthritic “cinema de papa” he was so eager to rebel against. But, with its moving blend of sexual inhibition, realistically grounded drama, and a reckoning with the social divides of mid-1940s France, Martin Roumagnac proves that sometimes, father knows best.