criterionforum.org

Befitting its no-nonsense title, Sacha Guitry’s film serves up black comedy at its most gleefully cynical, in which murder is philosophically justified and the law is comprehensively revealed to be an absolute ass. The latter sentiment is especially heartfelt: at the start of the film, an on-camera Guitry introduces his cast and crew and expresses especial appreciation for the accuracy of the prison cell set - a detail that no-one familiar with his troubled mid-1940s history is likely to miss.

But despite this apparent score-setting and a seemingly penny-dreadful subject (a disaffected husband and wife harbouring secret plans to kill each other), the film is somehow as soufflé-light as Ealing’s bookending Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, which gave serial murder and granny-bashing a similar air of disconcerting levity. It’s easy to tell from a dialogue description of the protagonist Paul Braconnier as a man who “looks like a monster, but has a strange kind of charm - halfway between chimera and clown” that the part was written with the incomparable Michel Simon in mind, one of the few actors who could take a man who is unambiguously a murderous misogynist and turn him into some kind of tragic hero.

The large supporting cast is deftly sketched, including Germaine Reuver’s monstrous shrew of a wife (the Braconniers’ mealtimes are sullen, surly affairs, mockingly underscored by airy radio chansons), Jean Debucourt’s blithely arrogant lawyer Aubanel (the mid-point scene in which he’s given an official bollocking - “Jurisprudence is not theatre!” - being a particular highlight) and Jeanne Fusier-Gir’s one-woman Greek chorus of a small-town florist, whose evident self-image as a latterday tricoteuse is reinforced by her French Revolutionary chalk-board calendar. Like all expert farceurs, Guitry plays it slowly at first, meticulously planting little comedic bomblets that are primed to explode when the action starts revving up.

domino harvey wrote:It's a one joke movie where the joke isn't funny and yet Guitry is determined to hammer it (stab it?) home over and over.

ptatler wrote:

domino harvey wrote:It's a one joke movie where the joke isn't funny and yet Guitry is determined to hammer it (stab it?) home over and over.

So we're talking On purge bébé-levels of bad?

Gregory wrote:There is a crucial similarity between the two: both were extreme cases of fast, shoestring productions. On purge was shot in six days; La poison was done in nine—with multiple cameras and no retakes.

domino harvey wrote:one joke movie

domino harvey wrote:Guitry

swo17 wrote:It should be said though that the Renoir film was one of his first (and his very first sound film), while the Guitry film was one of his last.

domino harvey wrote:That too. God bless users like movielocke who actively seek out and discuss most releases (though he can skip this one)