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The Red Inn
Claude Autant-Lara's The Red Inn (L'Auberge Rouge)
By André Bazin
Introduction
Claude Autant-Lara (1903-2000) is best known for his post-World War II films in the French "tradition of quality." His earliest work in the industry, however, was more closely related to the avant-garde movements of the 1920s than to the mainstream commercial cinema with which he was later identified. He began as a set designer in the 1920s, serving as art director for several of Marcel L'Herbier's films, including The Cruel Woman (L'Inhumaine, 1924), and for Jean Renoir's Nana (1926); he also assisted René Clair on a number of early shorts. After directing several films, he worked on an early wide-screen experiment, Construire un feu (1926), using the Hypergonar system designed by Henri Chretien (and later developed into CinemaScope by Twentieth Century-Fox). On the basis of his work in this format, he was brought to Hollywood and ended up directing French-language versions of American films for several years. He returned to France and directed his first feature of note, Ciboulette, in 1933.
During the war, Autant-Lara exercised greater control in his choice of projects and started working with the scenarists Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who would continue to be among his most consistent collaborators. He also started assembling a basic crew that worked with him through the 1960s: composer René Cloerec, designer Max Douy, editor Madeleine Gug, and cameraman Jacques Natteau. (His wife, Ghislaine, was a screenwriter, assistant director, and actress.) Autant-Lara then rapidly established his reputation as a studio director in the "tradition of quality." For many, the names Aurenche, Bost, and Autant-Lara are synonymous with this movement. Their films are characterized by an emphasis on scripting and dialogue, a high proportion of literary adaptations, a solemn "academic" visual style, and general theatricality (due largely to the emphasis on dialogue and its careful delivery to create a cinematic world determined by psychological realism). They frequently attack or ridicule social groups and institutions, seeming to revel in irreverent depictions of established authority.
Autant-Lara's prominence was effectively eclipsed with the emergence of the French New Wave, although he continued directing films. In the 1950s he, along with Aurenche and Bost, had been subject to frequent critical attacks, most notably by François Truffaut. In the wake of the success of this new generation of directors, Autant-Lara's work is often seen as no more than "stale" French cinema of the 1950s, which was successfully displaced by the more vital films of the New Wave. Yet in spite of, indeed owing to, their "armchair" criticism of authority, bleak representation of human nature, and slow-paced academic style, his films possess a peculiarly appealing, almost insolent sensibility.
Film critic, founder of the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, and spiritual father of the French New Wave as well as creator of the auteur theory of moviemaking, André Bazin (1918-1958) almost singlehandedly established the study of cinema as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Among the film critics who came under his tutelage there were four who would go on to become the most renowned directors of the postwar French cinema: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Although Bazin's career was brief, his impact on film is widely considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer.
Unlike nearly all the other authors of major film theories — and Bazin was the realist among them — he was a working or practical critic who wrote regularly about individual films, as his review of The Red Inn shows. Bazin based his criticism on the film actually made rather than on any preconceived aesthetic or sociological principles; and for the first time with him, film theory therefore became not a matter of pronouncement or prescription, but of description, analysis, and deduction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists. During his relatively short writing career, then, his primary concern was not to answer questions but to raise them, not to establish cinema as an art but to ask, "What is art?" and "What is cinema?" Over fifty years after his death, these are questions we are still posing.
Though Bazin died tragically young (he was only forty) of leukemia, he left much material behind: in his four-volume collection Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (1958-1962) and Le cinéma de la liberation à la nouvelle vague, 1945-1958, as well as in other books and in such magazines as Esprit, L'écran français, Le Parisien libéré, and France-Observateur. The translator, Bert Cardullo, is currently translating all of Le cinéma de la liberation à la nouvelle vague, 1945-1958, and is also compiling a collection of Bazin's writings on Italian neorealism, to be titled (aptly), André Bazin and Italian Neorealism..
Whatever can have happened to the celebrated team that brought us Le Diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1947)? What sort of a mess has one of our finest directors, one of the French cinema's most solid assets, namely, Claude Autant-Lara, intentionally got himself into? The Red Inn (1951) is not one of those commercial scripts that even the greatest directors sometimes agree to shoot because they need to earn a living like everyone else and the producer does not care whether they think it is any good or not. Autant-Lara cannot plead this in his defense. Although Fernandel is the star, The Red Inn is not a film lacking in ambition, not just another melodrama or a run-of-the-mill comedy. The idea of the film is original — that rarest of things — and it came from Aurenche himself. The adaptation is by Aurenche and Bost, with help from Autant-Lara, who also co-wrote the dialogue. But then, what went wrong, what cruel fate came to ruin an endeavor begun a priori under such favorable conditions?
The answer, I think, is that the authors took a catastrophic wrong turn in their initial decision as to how they would treat the material. They tried to make of the story something different or something more than it was capable of providing. To wit, they committed the sin of pride. The idea itself is funny and appealing. A worthy monk, going from door to door collecting alms, comes to spend the night in an isolated mountain inn. He could not know that by choosing just this spot he was also signing his death sentence, because the innkeeper has a nasty habit of murdering his guests so that he can steal their belongings. But the innkeeper's wife herself has principles. The thought of murdering a monk bothers her, so she looks for some way to spare him without interfering with the couple's after-hours activities. To do this, she comes up with an idea that is as sacrilegious as it is practical: she confesses to the monk. In this way she will have warned the monk of the danger he is in, but because he is bound by the inviolability of the confessional, he would not he able to tell the other guests, who suspect nothing.
You can imagine the diabolical situation in which the poor monk will find himself for the rest of the night. A simple word would be enough to save the life of five people, but since he cannot say it, he has to invent a thousand different ruses to get the unfortunate visitors, who have no idea of the deadly traps being set for them, out of harm's way. When the sun finally comes up next morning, the providential arrival of the police saves the day and the innkeeper is unmasked. The travelers' coach is about to leave with its occupants safe and sound — except that in order to make up for lost time, it will take a short cut pointed out to them by none other than the good monk . . . and plunge over a precipice.
Perhaps a moral philosopher would have chosen to tell this story in the form of a philosophical tale, something like Candide, another classic pamphlet denying Providence. But Voltaire hasn't started making movies yet! Approached in a less ambitious spirit, it could have been done as a sort of comic thriller. If Christian-Jaque had been the director, he would have done this picture in the half-fantastic, half-poetic style of his L'Assassinat du Père Noël (Who Killed Santa Claus?, 1941). But Claude Autant-Lara chose not to adopt any of these courses, or rather he seems to have adopted all three at once, even adding to them a satiric intention that was not an integral part of the original subject — a vague anti-clericalism that is far less effective than the simple logic of the story's situations would have been.
The result is a strange film whose strangeness has nothing to do with the script, but everything to do with a painful clash between styles that the mise-en-scène did not manage to harmonize. The viewer does not know what is expected of him because he cannot see what the authors expected from their script. This confusion undermining the film from within is not a gratuitous supposition on my part. It is the only excuse — the only one that does them credit, that is — I can find for the incredible blunders made in the adaptation, the weakness of the dialogue, and most of all the stupefying lack of rhythm in the mise-en-scène, not to mention, alas, the clumsiness of the editing.
It has to be said that Fernandel's performance helped to create the general muddle, and perhaps after all is said and done he was unintentionally the original cause of the disaster because he introduced an element of comic fatalism into a story that could just as easily have been given a tragic treatment. But the truth is that in other films Fernandel has succeeded in moving us without failing to be funny, too, whereas Autant-Lara seems to have given him more freedom than if this actor were just turning out some second-rate Adhémar (which Fernandel directed himself, and in which he starred as well, in 1951). The presence of Fernandel always poses the dilemma of choosing between him and the script. But a director of Claude Autant-Lara's caliber ought to have solved the problem in one way or another. Pagnol managed to do it in Angèle (1934), and even Christian-Jaque pulled it off in François Ier (Francis the First, 1937).
We can only hope that somewhere in the making of this film there were some unforeseen accidents that prevented its makers from doing what they really had in mind. Whatever the case, it is certain this artistic failure can pretend to an unusual grandeur that even in its present shape makes it more praiseworthy than the vast majority of "commercial successes." Its errors are as considerable as the talents and ambitions of those who made them. They are in fact the paradoxical confirmation of those talents and ambitions, and therefore still deserve the esteem and forbearance of all those who love the cinema.
Note: First published in Le Parisien libéré, 29 October 1951, reprinted in Le cinéma de la liberation à la nouvelle vague, 1945-1958 (Paris: Editions de L'Etoile, 1983), pp. 31-33. Other entries in Bert Cardullo's Bazin series presented in Bright Lights cover "Fifteen Years of French Cinema" and "Monsieur Hulot and Time."
August 2009 | Issue 65
Text copyright © 2009 by The Estate of André Bazin
Translation and introduction copyright © 2009 by Bert Cardullo
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