Few directors have ever had such devoted championing by a fellow director as Edmond T. Gréville had from Bertrand Tavernier, who spent so much time and effort promoting Gréville’s work and even took up a collection for money in 1966 to get him a gravestone. René Clair contributed to this search for funds, for Gréville had appeared as an actor in Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (1930).
In that Clair movie, Gréville is a sexy bad boy of the lower depths, but there is a self-consciousness about the way he behaves, and a hidden vulnerability, that marks him as a young male cinephile. Gréville worked on Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon (1927), on the Anna May Wong vehicle Piccadilly (1929), and on the Louise Brooks sound movie Prix de Beauté (1930), and all of these films had an effect on his own style as a director, particularly the Brooks film, which was prepared by Clair but directed by Augusto Genina, an Italian who gives it a remarkably free, rough, and open style.
Tavernier has written of the nearly frivolous daring of so much of Gréville’s own free, fluid camera style, his urge to make sudden and unexpected connections, his giddy instinct to keep us off balance no matter what, to make associative cuts from one image to another in order to tickle us, make us laugh, even cause bewilderment, because he wants his films to be alive at all cost. His first feature was called Train of Suicides (1931), and it was made to make use of train footage already shot. The young Gréville would nearly always work at the level of low-budget or independent production, and in the 1930s this gave him some freedom.
In the early 1930s he made a series of shorts, and Gréville was not yet 30 when he made what might be his masterpiece, Remous (1935), an audacious and visually expressive mood piece about love and sex and the difference between the two. The story was conceived by Peggy Thompson, who later was a writer on the screenplay for Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955).
The camera first surveys a wedding after the ceremony and picks up the chairs and the floor and the detritus, and then we hear the guests speaking about how the young couple, Jeanne (Jeanne Boitel) and Henry Saint-Clair (Jean Galland) have it all: beauty, wealth, love, but an older woman says, “One never knows.” As we see their wedding car trip from their POV driving, the near-constant musical score is exuberant, tempestuous.
After what has clearly been great sex between them, Jeanne beckons to Henry from their rumpled bed and she seems to be inviting us into bed with them for a kiss. But when they hit the road again, a car crash leaves Henry paralyzed from the waist down, and it is made clear in dialogue that he will never perform sexually again. A modern-day viewer might well ask, “What about oral sex for her? What about sex toys?” But this is beyond the scope of even this bold a film in 1935, and it would likely have been beyond the scope of two real people in this situation at that time.
Jeanne loves her husband, and she stays with him as he builds a dam, but some subjects in conversation point up their problem; when he asks her if she wants to see a Gary Cooper film, Jeanne starts to talk about how they say Cooper has never been more handsome in a movie, never been more…and then she stops, longing for what she had on her wedding trip, what she has lost.
Gréville presupposes that we can take the need for sexual pleasure on the part of a female seriously. This is the plot of D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and also Gustav Machatý’s Ecstasy (1933), yet it is complicated by the fact that the heroine adores her husband and once had wonderful sex with him that has now been cut off. When she is drawn to another man, he turns out to be the cartoonishly handsome Robert Vanier (Maurice Maillot), a man who looks to be too good to be true because he is.
When Robert looks with sexual interest at a veiled Jeanne in a record store, Gréville pushes in for extreme close-ups of their eyes and mouths, and he is a master of the extreme close-up as punctuation throughout his career, never overusing this device, and always seeming to get something out of his actors with it, some sexy inner being. (For those concerned with spoilers, skip the next two paragraphs until you have seen this movie, which is available on a French DVD with English subtitles.)
Robert turns out to be a narcissist who has a fake shelf of books to conceal liquor and a shirtless photo of himself displayed on a mantle, which we see during a risky strobe-light effect of very short shots as he kisses Jeanne. Yes, Robert Vanier is a stud, and amazing looking, but the sex with him for Jeanne is empty compared to what she had with her injured husband, who takes things badly when he finds out about them and commits suicide.
Remous ends with an inconsolable Jeanne in widow’s weeds as she looks at her late husband’s dam. Robert approaches her and says he cannot forget her, and she says simply, “I can’t forget him.” And Gréville is enough of a romantic to make this sound permanent on her part. He never had much money to work with, and the nightclub scenes in his best movies are modestly populated; in Remous, a scene at a large sporting event sounds on the track like all of six people are shouting and applauding. But this budgetary limitation also freed him to follow all his flights of fancy.
Gréville was adopted, and his parents had a French and English background, so he also made movies in Britain like Brief Ecstasy (1937), a kind of companion piece to Remous in plot yet very different in emphasis, championed for its frank eroticism by both Graham Greene and William K. Everson. Ambitious Helen (Linden Travers) slaps Jim (Hugh Williams) in the face after he looks at her with interest in a restaurant, spills a drink on her, and dabs at her lap with a napkin, and this all happens so quickly and with such clipped British force that it’s difficult to know at first just what we have seen between them.
Helen is a British woman of her time and class, and so of course her attitude with a man is, “How dare you express an interest in me! How impertinent!” But it is clear almost immediately that this is a social pose, and that underneath she is longing to be noticed like this, and by Jim in particular. They go out dancing and stay out all night and kiss in the hall of her rooming house, but he has to go to India to look after his father, and she is involved with her older mentor Professor Paul Bernardy (Paul Lukas), a famous astronomer.
Part of Helen’s attraction to Paul is that he can do something for her career, and so he makes a key mistake after marrying her in insisting that she give up her work and settle into what he calls “home life,” particularly since their lovelorn maid Martha (Marie Ney), closer to the Professor in age, is madly in love with him and hyper-alert to Helen’s dissatisfaction, sexual and otherwise, and what it will lead to when she meets up with Jim again.
Greene was very taken with the shot of Travers bending over a pool table in a black satin dress, which is from the point of view of Lukas’s Paul and puts him into an agony of sexual inadequacy, and the extreme close-ups that Gréville provides of Travers’s beautiful, yearning face are indelible, partly because he seems to be 100% on the side of her character, and he has sympathy for Ney’s housekeeper too, especially when the Professor fires her and she says, “After…20 years!” to herself. Gréville is deeply drawn to this sort of “wasted life” type of emotion, and this is tied to his confident youth at the time of making Brief Ecstasy, the ending of which is just as sad in its way as Remous.
On the brink of war, Gréville made Menaces (1939), a film that was clearly shot under tremendous pressure where Erich von Stroheim plays a man named Hoffman who wears a black mask over half of his face to hide bad facial scarring. Threat looms over both the characters and actors here, and both of Gréville’s male leads from Remous also appear in this picture, which takes place in a hotel where refugees are on the brink of extinction, and there is something very moving about the final shots of the film, which were clearly shot much later after the war, that show the gorgeous Maurice Maillot looking haggard and thin and flashing a peace sign. The style of Menaces is like someone holding onto a ledge over a precipice with their fingertips, and Gréville, who was Jewish, barely worked during the war.
He reemerged post-World War II with three films that showed a darkening of his content and a greater control of his mise en scène. From this period, Pour une nuit d’amour (1947), which is from a Zola source, is hyper-controlled, beautifully structured, observant of all characters and spaces in a provincial town, and unerring in its emphasis on the tightening knot that forms around the main male character Julien (Roger Blin), who pays the ultimate price for his love from afar of a society beauty (Odette Joyeux).
Also atmospheric is his Le diable souffle (1947), which begins with a roll call of the characters and the line, “He knows men too well not to hold them in contempt.” That picture gets wobbly by its mid-way point, but Gréville was at his mature best again with a British noir called Noose (1948), which has a headlong quality best described by Tavernier, who wrote of Noose in a 2017 article for Film Comment: “What moves me most are the background scenes depicting young women, like the seemingly useless moment when beautiful Annie enters the nightclub while Olive Lucius sings a song in French: a young girl puts on makeup, waiters rest, a cleaning woman sweeps the floor, and a murder is about to take place, which Gréville conveys through the image of a stole that slips to the ground. British puritanism and Anglo-Saxon understatement seem to electrify Gréville and make his energy feverish.”
Gréville gets a lot of dread and suspense in Noose out of long shots and careful framing of figures that seem to loom up out of the dark, and the threat of violence is ever-present yet believably vanquished by the nerve and gumption of a reporter played by Carole Landis, and his portrayal of her heroine shows that Gréville was a romantic about the American character, especially when she tries to perk up a morbid French moll.
Gréville’s work declined steadily after that, and his later films like Beat Girl (1960) and The Hands of Orlac (1960) feel more visually plain, and stymied by exploitation material of that moment; a shot of a stripper grinding her near-bare behind into the floor in Beat Girl is a long way from the erotic expressiveness of that shot of Linden Travers playing pool in her black satin dress in Brief Ecstasy.
Gréville did not think highly of himself as a director, according to Tavernier. There are embarrassing failures in his career: Josephine Baker is disrespected throughout his Princess Tam Tam (1935), and in L’île du bout du monde (1959), also known as Temptation, he portrayed a woman’s sexuality as part of a mental illness, a sad thing from the man who made Remous and Brief Ecstasy, but those films plus Menaces, Pour une nuit d’amour, the first half of Le diable souffle, and Noose represent achievements from Gréville brought home against great odds.
Gréville died in a car crash in May of 1966 at the age of 60, a reminder that it is a car crash that ruins the lives of the central characters in his most confident and free-flowing film, Remous. Following the thread of his movies over time, at least the ones that can be located or seen, it feels as if Gréville’s life and career were a process of great trouble and disillusionment wearing him down. But his best films are so unique to him that it seems odd he was never fully taken up by the New Wave directors in the 1960s in France, since his finest work was made so clearly in the spirit of directors like Truffaut and Godard.