The Northern Star (L'étoile du nord, 1982), by Granier-Deferre. Another Simenon adaptation, similar to The Widow Couderc, as Signoret plays once more an old lady charmed by a possible criminal that she's sheltering. This time it's Philippe Noiret, playing a french or belgian guy (it takes place in urban Belgium, also in the 1930s) who lived a long time in Egypt, and charms everyone with his folkloric depiction of eastern exotism (accompanied with dreamy flashbacks). He's suspected to have murdered and robbed someone in a train (a train named the northern star), but he claims he doesn't know why his coat is drenched in blood and stuffed with banknotes.
Lots of structural parallels with Couderc. It also features a too promiscuous teeenager (played by Julie Jezequel, too young to be as stunning as she'd become), and fortunately we're being spared any love scene this time. It also builds up the police catching up with the fugitive. it's also focused on the psychology and dynamics between the characters. But this film is less biting politically. All characters are kinda decent, flawed, weak at worst, and society as a whole isn't showed as oppressive as Couderc's rural France. There's still the rise of fascisms and anti-fascist protests as a background, but much more distant and subdued than in The Widow Couderc. But all in all, it has the same musicality, the same sense of melancholy and regret for lives in a conscious deadend, in all their different ways.
Simenon's novel is called "Le locataire", the movie is named differently because of Polanski's The Tenant. I've also watched
Man in The Attic (1953), which is adapted from a novel called "The lodger". It's one of the five or so adaptations of that book, some of which had been done by Hitchcock. Not that one. This one is Hugo Fregonese's, and features Jack Palance as... a smooth talking lodger, strongly suspected of murder, and who charms the whole family who shelters him in their pension. I feel I'm going in circles with my movies, these days. So, in this case, the guy is or isn't Jack the Ripper (as opposed to the other adaptations where he sometimes is and sometimes isn't Generic Serial Killer instead), except that this Ripper kills actresses instead of prostitutes (apparently the world "prostitute" would have made the public faint, back then). And it's a sweet movie, with sweet characters, sweet little songs (the lodger's flirt is a music hall dancer) and the terrific Palance who sounds like he's rehearsing for Dracula (which he'd play much later, I enthusiastically learnt). His almost Lorre-level suaveness makes him a terrific ambiguous presence.
So I was pleased to hear Shane mentioned in Henri Verneuil's
A Thousand Billion Dollars (1982), as the movie Patrick Deweare's character almost brings his son to, when the latter complains that he's seen Bambi too often and wants a western with lots of gunfights. A Thousand Billion Dollars is a typical Verneuil. An investigative suspense that serves as a
soapbox for Verneuil's political outrage. It's the 80s, Veneuil warns us that globalization benefits big international corporations that are actually solely driven by
PROFIT !!!. Deweare plays a reporter on a crusade to prove it and warn the unsuspecting world about it.
I love Verneuil. If his little masterpiece I For Icarus is some sort of JFK before Oliver Stone, and denounces the CIA's complicity with various dictatorships, Billion Dollars is some sort of All The President's Men about global economy. It may feel dated, because it does preach a lot about what is now common knowledge (and way worse than what the movie exposes), but it's still disarming with its passion, its heart at the right place, and its technical efficiency as a thriller. It's still a significanly lesser film than Icare, despite Deweare's performance (his penultimate one, as he'll commit suicide after his next movie, the precious and disturbing Paradise For All).
And I also watched
The Science of Sleep (2006) and it was lovely.
Haven't been gaming much.
