Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau (1976-81)

The thing about Alain Corneau’s crime thrillers is, for all they take their time telling a story, they let you know what they’re really about straight away. Each of the three titles collected in this Radiance Films Blu-Ray set kicks off with a sequence or shot that immediately flags up an essential theme of the movie. Sometimes that’s a straightforward narrative beat, like starting a story about escaped prisoners with a shot of a prison wall and an alarm sounding. But sometimes it cuts deeper, and offers a glimpse not just of Corneau’s concerns with this particular film, but where he stands in the whole pantheon of noir directors.

Take Police Python 357, for instance. (And get your minds out of the gutter – it’s a make of police-issue gun, OK?) The opening credits to the earliest film in the set roll over domestic scenes, each of which would be mundane were it not for two things: firstly, each kitchen appliance and cupboard door is a little masterpiece of 1970s flat-pack design. Secondly, it keeps being interrupted by equally plainly shot but more alarming scenes of guns being cleaned and loaded. Straight away, we learn this is a film about the criminal world invading the domestic sphere, and so it proves. Yves Montaud plays a straight-arrow police inspector whose personal and professional lives are upended when the woman he loves is murdered by his corrupt boss; worse, his boss then frames him for the murder.

Noir-literate readers will recognise this as the plot of Raymond Fearing’s 1946 novel The Big Clock, which has been filmed two more times by John Farrow in 1948 and Roger Donaldson in 1987. Each adaptation moves it into a different workplace; Farrow retains the novel’s publishing-world setting, while Donaldson moves it into Washington politics. By moving the story into the police, Corneau ups the hard-boiled quotient at the expense of a little passion. Corneau, you see, is one of those neo-noir directors who idolizes a certain reserved, taciturn coolness above all else. He’s a descendant of Jean-Pierre Melville and an ancestor of Michael Mann. Yet, while his films have their visual strengths (and Police Python 357, in particular, looks gorgeous in this new restoration) he’s nowhere near as wildly stylized as Mann in Thief or Heat mode. Police Python 357 looks like a realistic movie about real people, which invites the obvious rejoinder: shouldn’t all this corruption, domestic violence, vengeance and adultery raise the pulses of the people on screen at some point?

I found the meandering tone and pace of Police Python 357 ultimately self-defeating; the whole film was as supine as Simone Signoret’s mostly bed-bound supporting role. Happily, the next film, 1979’s Série Noire, finds a way to up the pace. Specifically, it finds the answer in Patrick Dewaere’s unhinged lead performance, which at one point sees him repeatedly head-butt the bonnet of his car. Dewaere approaches a Nic Cage level of volatility as Franck Poupart, a door-to-door salesman who stumbles across a teenage girl (Marie Trintignant) being pimped out by her own aunt. Simultaneously horrified and drawn to the girl, he decides to set her loose by any means necessary.

No spoiler to say it goes wrong. If Montaud is playing a version of the hard-boiled detective in Police Python 357, Dewaere is essaying the other main kind of noir hero: the sap out of his depth, driven by lust, greed and an awareness they’re never going to get another shot at what they want. You don’t have to know the genre inside out to rescue this – you just have to watch the opening scene, which again sets out exactly what the film will be about. Crouching behind his parked car, Poupart practices a gunfight, then turns the radio on and imagines himself dancing with a beautiful woman. You know immediately that this guy’s a poser, and so it proves.

Série Noire‘s title, a reference to a popular French crime fiction magazine, also flags up the voyeurism, irony and play-acting at the film’s core. It’s adapted from one of that very magazine’s biggest hits, Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman. Thompson has never had the lasting Hollywood popularity of peers like Raymond Chandler or James M Cain, and no wonder: his novels are far too good at evoking the sense of their main characters’ venal, desperate, degenerate, edge-of-psychosis mental states, to the point where you want to retch after reading one. There are things in Série Noire that hit harder in retrospect. It can be hard seeing Dewaere, who died by suicide just three years after this, as such an unbalanced character, just as it can be hard seeing Trintignant, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2003, as a victim of exploitation. But Corneau’s typically measured, cool directing style allows him to get a lot of Thompson’s story on screen without making the film as audience-repelling as Michael Winterbottom’s infamous take on Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. It feels like a better use of this counter-intuitive mood than Police Python 357.

1981’s Choice of Arms is the latest, longest and starriest film in the set, with Montaud joined by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu and Christian Marquand. A tale of escaped prisoners calling on their old and not always reliable underworld contacts to stay ahead of the law, it makes mixed use of that phenomenal cast. Deneuve is, sadly, as horizontal as Signoret was in Police Python 357 for much of the film, and while Montaud is good he’s saddled with a flat cap that makes him look like Nigel Farage in farmer-cosplay mode. It’s Depardieu who steals the film, bringing the volatile, on-edge mania of Série Noire into a film that’s just a bit too long and convoluted for its own good.

Corneau’s films are very dependent on your taste in crime cinema: if you’re more of a Kiss Me Deadly man than a Le Samourai lover, they can be hard going sometimes. But he knew how to get the best out of his collaborators, from Étienne Becker’s moody, wintry, twilit cinematography for Police Python 357 to Phillipe Sarde’s odd but effective upright-bass jazz solos on the score for Choice of Arms. All of the films have plentiful archive interviews with Corneau and stars including Montaud, Dewaere, Trintignant, Deneuve and Depardieu, as well as new featurettes on fascinating side topics like Jim Thompson’s screen adaptations and Montaud’s 1970s films. Two films get unique extras: Police Python 357 has the set’s only commentary, from Mike White, while Série Noire gets a full 53-minute making-of documentary.

Graham’s Archive – Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau