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Drôle de Drame-1937

In an age of anxiety leading to WWII filmmakers in France coped as best as they could. Judging from Drôle de Drame it would seem Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert looked past their everyday milieu and set in another era and clime. They set their sights across the Channel and show how silly the Edwardian London was.
A botanist who moonlights as a writer of lurid whodunits , having to cope with a nosy bishop and a psychopath on the loose, is bizarre even by today’s standards. A silly premise it may be as far as the story and ‘types’ are but it is a near classic. No mistake of that.
Carné -Prévert would go on to make a few enduring classics like le quai des brumes(1938), les visiteurs du soir(1942), and les enfants du paradis(1945). A threat of another world war is gone and age old anxiety is still around but we manage nevertheless to move on. Cinema has ceased to be as forceful or creative medium that touched our lives as before. The aforementioned films are a precious record of history of our world reinvented for celluloid.
These films are as tragic as drôle de drame is a black comedy.
The film is strong with such fine actors like Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. The story by minute descends into a calculated chaos and the viewer’s all attempts to predict the direction it takes are foiled by the deranged view of life each character seem to display in response to situations. We can sympathize with a bishop who denounces the prurient interest of his flock in penny novels serializing detective dramas. But if he were to suspect the worst in his cousin and ready to use an impossible subterfuge to visit his home, his sanity may be called to question. Similarly we have a respected botanist whose passion in lucid moments is for his mimosa and it is understandable if he would require an outlet for creative congestion of his brain. He has an alter ego and he is Felix Chapel, who is the subject of the Bishop of Bedford’s wrath. Dr. Molyneux merely has found a way to buy himself some peace from his wife and his neighborhood. This sedate creature who passes his life quietly in harmony with his mimosa nevertheless revels in blood and gore, albeit written by his double Felix Chapel.
It turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who's madly in love with her. If he has his wife killed off as an excuse to explain a domestic inconvenience we may say for sure there are some loose cannons around and things go from bad to worse. Eventually Scotland Yard is called in to clear things up. How these square off their combined derangement is what makes the film memorable.
Summary
England, the early 1900s. Irvin Molyneux is a quiet botanist who secretly writes pulp fiction under the pseudonym Felix Chapel. His books raise the ire of Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford. Soper invites himself to dinner at the Molyneux’s home one evening, at a time most inconvenient to him. His servants have walked out on him forcing his wife to double as the cook. Molyneux's clumsy attempt to account for the absence of his wife arouses the bishop's suspicions. When he sees Molyneux mysteriously leave the house that evening, he contacts Scotland Yard, convinced that his cousin has murdered his wife. Later, when the Molyneux couple are away from home and the scrutiny of the press, Irvin Molyneux, as Felix Chapel, is invited to write an account of the mysterious Molyneux affair on the scene of the presumed murder. Disguised as Chapel, Molyneux returns to his house, which has been taken over by the police who are still investigating the alleged crime. He does not realize that the psychopath William Kramps, the notorious butcher killer, is in the area, determined to kill Felix Chapel. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Bedford realizes he must return to the houe of Molyneux in disguise...


The film bears affinity to the films of René Clair or Marx brothers as far as to include it as genre of comedy but it is vitriolic all through.
Cast
Michel Simon as Irwin Molyneux alias Felix Chapel
Françoise Rosay as Margaret, his wife
Louis Jouvet as Archibald Soper
Jean-Louis Barrault- William Kramps
and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Billy
Directed by
Marcel Carné
Produced by
Edouard Corniglion-Molinier
Written by
J. Storer Clouston (novel)
Jacques Prévert (adaptation)
Music by
Maurice Jaubert
Cinematography
Eugen Schüfftan
Running time
94 min
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Loves of a Blonde-1965

Is the first film that brought Miloš Forman international fame and he followed it with such classics as One flew over a cuckoo’s nest(1975) and Amadeus(1984). Forman’s early movies are still very popular among Czechs. Many of the situations and phrases are now in common usage: for example, the Czech term zhasnout (to switch lights off) from The Firemen’s Ball, associated with petty theft in the movie, has been used to describe the large-scale asset stripping happening in the country during the 1990s. Having introduced the director let me now get on with my appreciation of the movie.

Loves of a Blonde (Czech: Lásky jedné plavovlásky) is a 1965 Czech film and it works at different layers. On the surface it is a simple story of Andula, a young factory girl falling head over heels with a traveling musician for whom it is a one night stand. Whereas the girl her whole life she shas invested ,-for its emotional depth I can only cite Renoir’s une partie de campagne(1936) for comparison, and must salvage it from falling to pieces. Unlike Henriette the Czech girl dares to follow it up.

The film begins with the general (’my hooligan love’ a pseudo Beatle number) to the particular musically represented by ‘Ave Maria’ at the end. The bach-gounod number in this case is meant to be a paen to the blonde working girl who in her elemental goodness stands as a modern Maria.

It is also a social satire.

The film takes place in the provincial Czech town of Zruc, which Forman sketches in a few shots: a train station, a housing block, a shoe factory that could have been lifted from any of the East European films of the communist era. Andula, the blond protagonist of the film is a worker in the shoe factory, one among some 2000 who outnumbers male population by 16 to one. The film opens with the benign manager of the factory asking army officials to place a regiment in Zruc, as a way of redressing the local imbalance of available males and yearning females. “They need what we needed when we were young,” the manager says to an avuncular Major who can well understand the manager’s predicament. ‘Sex liberates woman from their drudgery and social isolation’ seems to be the watchword and how the government tries to meet the expectations of the female workforce touches the very flaw of party manifesto as written and in practice.

Froman always had a felicity in casting the right actors for the parts. Just as he made the roles of Baron von Sweiten, Count Rosenburg and the valet in Amadeus memorable the three ‘old farts’ of army reservists who try to date the three workers are unforgettable.

In honor of the army reservists brought to the town a party is organized where girls in all sizes and expectations take part. The age old mating game played in the pub has plenty of room for comedy, which the director uses to lead the viewer to the heart of the film. Andula catches the eye of the comparatively dashing young pianist, Milda (Vladimir Pucholt). The next morning, the traveling musician assures her repeatedly, “I do not have a girlfriend in Prague.” Milda leaves town, as expected, but Andula has fallen in love with him, and decides to journey to Prague to track him down. A low-key black-and-white ensemble comedy, Loves of a Blonde was cast predominantly with non-professional actors.

In Prague Andula meets the dysfunctional family of Milda and it is clear that in his parents we have the duplicate the blonde and her feckless groom on the making. Forman’s dark comedy must be seen to be enjoyed. His comical sense reaches its best in the part where the parents try to cope with a strange girl who has intruded upon their private space though it is for one night. From that point the director tickles the funnybone, as it were with a scalpel, and only later we realize that whatever future happiness Andula may have with Milda shall only be a downer, an anti-climax to the trite line we are so familiar with, ‘and they lived happily everafter’.

‘Over the course of the three acts, the film’s context evolves from social satire (set in a public space) to emotional intimacy (confined to the private space of a single room and a single bed) to domestic drama (set in the awkward private-public space of a family apartment). The thematic shifts reflect the shifts in setting: the first section is centered on youth and infinite possibility; the second on young adulthood and romantic fulfillment; the third on maturity and inevitable disappointment.’ (Dave Kehr Feb 12, 2002-criterion collection)
Similar Works
Dolgaya Schastlivaya Zhizn (1966, Gennadiy Shpalikov)
The Pornographers (1966, Shohei Imamura)
Kitchen Stories (2003, Bent Hamer)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967, Milos Forman)
Noa at 17 (1982, Isaac Yeshurun)
Adoption (1975, Márta Mészáros)

( ack: wikipedia,criterion collection, Allmovie)

It was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. It is also known under an alternate title of A Blonde in Love.

Directed by

Miloš Forman

Produced by

Doro Vlado Hreljanović

Rudolf Hájek

Written by

Miloš Forman

Jaroslav Papoušek

Starring

Hana Brejchová

Vladimír Pucholt

Vladimír Menšík

Music by

Evžen Illín

Running time

90 min.

Language

Czech

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