pariscinemablog

“Le Voleur de bicyclette is, in my eyes, one of the great talking films, and perhaps the highest, most indisputably great thing that cinema has given us since Charlie Chaplin.” That was André Bazin writing about Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film in Le Parisien liberé, and of course we know that, for him, there could be no higher praise than to compare any movie to a work by the great silent comedian.

Every few years, a film shocked French critics, intellectuals, and artists, showing them possibilities for cinema that they could not have imagined. In 1916, from Paramount Pictures, it was Cecil B. DeMille’s Forfaiture (The Cheat [1915]). In the first year or two of sound, Le Chanteur de jazz (The Jazz Singer [1927]) generated some excitement, but it was Broadway Melody (Broadway Melody of 1928)—a film we remember now for Bessie Love’s spectacular performance, but not much else—that knocked them over. A few years later, from Germany, it would be Josef von Sternberg’s L’Ange Bleu (Der Blaue Engel [1930]. There were also French films that astonished French audiences, for instance Renè Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (1930) and Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion (1937). In the years after World War Two, a backlog of incredible movies from the United States and other allied countries, banned during the German occupation, opened seemingly every week in Paris, including, of course, Citizen Kane (1941). There were also new French films that still remain a part of the cinematic canon, for example Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945). But more than any of them it was an Italian film that stunned all of those in France who took cinema seriously: Le Voleur de bicyclette (Ladri di biciclette, known as Bicycle Thieves in the United States).

De Sica’s film opened in Paris in August 1949, at two of the more important cinémas d’exclusivité in the city, and both in the very fashionable eighth arrondissement: the Biarritz on the Champs-Elysées and the Madeleine on the boulevard de la Madeleine. The locations themselves tell us something about the significance of the film, and, indeed, Le Voleur de bicyclette may have been the most anticipated movie in France of the immediate postwar period.

That interest had been building. Roberto Rossellinni’s Rome ville ouverte (Roma città aperta [1945]), was the first of the neo-realist films to come to Paris in 1947, and had caused something of a sensation, helping establish a French market for Italian films. But along with the excitement generated by De Sica’s new film, there was also the sense that neo-realism had already, perhaps, used itself up.

Writing in Combat when Le Voleur de bicyclette opened, journalist and author (and occasional screenwriter) Jean-Pierre Vivet explained that, “at a time when we believed the vein of what we had called Italian neo-realism to be exhausted…this film is still superior to any previous production,” including Rome ville ouverte, Rossellini’s 1946 film Paisà (1946), and De Sica’s earlier film, Sciuscià (1946, and known in the United States as Shoeshine). This was the sense, really, of so much of the commentary on Le Voleur de bicyclette, that it had surpassed all other neo-realist films. The great film historian Georges Sadoul, in Les Lettres françaises, called it “the culmination, the summit of four years of Italian neo-realism,” and added that “neither Sciuscià, nor Le Soleil se lève encore (Aldo Vergano’s Il Sole sorge encore, from 1946), nor Paisà are this intense and stripped bare.”

So many others felt the same, and described seeing the film in similar terms. In the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, Claude Henares wrote that “it is not easy to define the overwhelming impression left by this film” (l’impression bouleversante), reflected in the “audience’s applause at the end of each screening.”  When Jean Cocteau reviewed the film in the rightwing L’Intransigeant, his headline said, simply, “De Sica’s Le Voleur de bicyclette overwhelms us” (Le Voleur de bicyclette…nous bouleverse).

He also called  Le Voleur “a masterpiece,” and then Cocteau, whom we associate as a filmmaker with the abstraction and artifice of such movies as Le Sang d’un poète (1930) and La Belle et la Bête (1946), responded most to what he considered the groundbreaking realism of the film, “the theater of the Italian street,” where “the most insignificant woman in the window is an actress, the littlest kid an actor.”

From Bazin to Sadoul to Cocteau, it is hard to find another film from the period that generated such a focused, intense response from so many intellectuals and artists. In fact, Sadoul echoed Bazin, writing that, with this film, De Sica “achieves a universality close to that of Chaplin in Le Gosse (The Kid [1921]), which Le Voleur de bicyclette brings to mind.” The French Communist party leader and journalist Francis Cohen, in L’Humanité in September 1949, held up Le Voleur de bicyclette as the film that fully depicted “the current daily life of workers,” and the model for all “progressive filmmakers.”

Similarly, in 1950, Force Ouvriére, the official newspaper of the Communist party, wrote about a recent “renaissance of the cinema.” The medium was now fifty years old, and for most of that time had served as “the expression of the bourgeoisie.” But there were a few recent films that worked against the commercialism of the cinema and the capitalist class that controlled it. These included Mark Robson’s Le Champion (Champion [1949]), Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête (1949), Jules Dassin’s La Cité sans voile (Night and the City [1950]), and, more than any of the others, Le Voleur de bicyclette. 

Critics other than communists posited Le Voleur against the typical Hollywood films that had such a dominant position in French cinema. David O. Selznick had hoped to produce the film for De Sica, or perhaps make an American version (and would, in fact, work with him in a few years, on Indiscretion of an American Wife/Stazione Termini [1953], which starred Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones). In his review, Sadoul breathed a sigh of relief that this hadn’t come to pass, because Selznick would have insisted on casting Cary Grant as the lead actor. An anonymous reviewer for Combat mentioned the same thing, writing that Selznick “wanted Cary Grant to be the main actor,” and then applauded De Sica’s courage and his commitment to a realist model of filmmaking: “De Sica refused, preferring to this professional actor an authentic metallurgical factory worker in Rome, Lamberto Maggiorani.”

Le Voleur de bicyclette played exclusively at the Biarritz and Madeleine through late-October 1949. Once the film left those locations, it opened again almost without a break at the Ursulines in the fifth arrondissement and at Agriculteurs in the ninth. By early-December, Le Voleur showed at six cinemas throughout Paris. One month later, in January 1950, the film played at fourteen cinemas, including five in the twentieth arrondissement (among them the Palais-Avron, shown in the photo at the heading of this post). If there had been any incongruity in this film, about a desperately poor Italian working class, opening in Paris in the fashionable eighth arrondissement,it was now, at so many cinemas in the twentieth, always one of the poorest neighborhoods, almost certainly screening for audiences who fully understood and related to the predicament of the characters in Le Voleur. 

This extended run through the city seemed all the more remarkable because of the film’s apparent failure in Italy. According to Combat, the response to Le Voleur indicated the sophistication of the French audience, because “in Rome, this film only screened for four days.” De Sica’s film, in fact, had a significant and ongoing impact throughout French culture. In January 1950, the tabloid Qui Detective printed something of a joke, headlined “Le Voleur de bicyclette,” about a Parisian traffic cop whose bike was stolen. More seriously, in November 1949, A la page, a weekly for young people, ran a disappointing review of another Italian film, Renato Castellani’s Sous le soleil de Rome (Sotto il sole di Roma [1948]). The critic claimed that he had been eager to see the film only because of the recent reputation of Italian cinema, established primarily by Le Voleur de bicyclette.

We can return to Cocteau for the most deeply felt connection between the film and its audiences, the filmmaker and the French public, and the sensation of seeing Le Voleur de bicyclette in 1949. “I repeat,” Cocteau wrote in L’Intransigeant, “Vitorrio de Sica has arrived at the top of the mountain,” and then he concluded, “like all lovers of new things, we owe him all of our gratitude.”

On December 28, 1937, the front page of Le Petit Parisien promised a feature on Greta Garbo, as part of a series on “Public Favorites, in Private.” Of course, a supposed glimpse into the star’s home, let alone her love-life (“Eighteen men have held Greta Garbo in their arms!”), made perfect sense; there was probably no greater celebrity in France at the time than Garbo. But sharing the front page, and just below this announcement, there was a photo of another star, this one from Germany, and a headline about her; “Brigitte Helm Renounces the Screen.” This, then, was a story about an actress who seemed practically the equal of Garbo, given the space they both occupied on page one, and whose decision, apparently, to quit making movies constituted extraordinarily important news.

Helm was indeed a very big star. We remember her now for her extraordinary success in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a German film that was a major hit in France. Helm continued to make films in Germany and became very much a muse for the great director G.W. Pabst, who featured her in Der Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927) and the Franco-German L’Atlantide (1929). Helm  also appeared in the British film The Blue Danube (1932) as well as such French films as Voyage de noces (1933) and the Marcel L’Herbier classic L’Argent (1927). All of her films constituted major cultural events when they opened in France. Like the Czech actress Anny Ondra or the German Lil Dagover, Helm was one of the great stars throughout Europe, not quite on the same level as Garbo, who had been born in Sweden, or the German Marlene Dietrich, both of whom made films in Hollywood, but close.

Not just in Le Petit Parisien but in newspapers throughout France, her sudden retirement made front-page news, in L’Express, Paris-Soir, Le Petit Journal, Le Phare de la Loire, and La Gazette de Biarritz, as well as in North Africa, in L’Echo d’Alger. Regardless of their political affiliations, newspapers featured Helm’s announcement, from the far-right L’Intransigeant to the socialist party’s Le Populaire. In reporting the story, most of them emphasized Helm’s global significance. Le Temps called her the actress “applauded around the world,” while Le Phare de la Loire placed her as one of the most important stars in the “cinematic firmament.” That same newspaper then compared her to one of the greatest of all foreign celebrities in France, the American music hall performer Josephine Baker, who like Helm was also threatening to retire, but unlike her wouldn’t actually do so for decades.

Helm wrote an open letter in L’Intransigeant to announce her departure from movies, although some of the details remain a little vague, or at least don’t fully correspond to what we know of her biography. She reported on the rumors that she “had been driven out of Germany,” which she denied, and claimed that she left the country voluntarily, after a very serious car accident there. Helm then wrote that she and her husband decided on an extended stay in France, where she received numerous offers to make films, including a remake of Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (1925), the movie that made Greta Garbo an international star. But then, suddenly, she “received news from Berlin,” and so she and her husband decided to return.

In fact, we know that Helm had had several automobile accidents, one of which resulted in the death of someone in another car. There are reports that she was called back to Germany to face manslaughter charges, and that Adolf Hitler himself saw to it that the case against her was dismissed. But there is also evidence that Helm was vehemently opposed to the Nazi takeover of Germany and the German film industry, left the country because of that, and then felt significant pressure to return. But she would not return to make films.

In her letter, she wrote that “I have just made a big decision, to abandon cinema for good.” Her role now was to retreat fully from the world, and to stay home and take care of her child and support her husband, away from the “demands of the studio.” She had “abandoned cinema without regret, despite the joys it has brought me,” and would never make movies again, because “I have never gone back on a decision.”  She closed her letter by saying how much she loved France and all of her French fans, and that, on her last visit before her return to Germany, “Paris was beautiful, beautiful.”

The press told Helm how much the French loved her, but also accepted her at her word that she was leaving cinema forever. All of the headlines expressed that finality, informing readers that Helm had “abandoned” the cinema, or “renounced” it, or “quit definitively.” But they let fans know that Helm had not abandoned them, that as Paris-Soir put it, “she will keep coming back to France.” The papers also expressed Helm’s desire to return home, not to Germany, but to her son, because she had discovered, in the words of Paris-Soir, that “the life of a star is irreconcilable to the life of a mother.” The same newspaper, referring to her as “the vamp with a mother’s heart,” said that now, fans would have only their memories of Helm, and that would have to be enough, of the “great star of Metropolis, of l’Atlantide, and…especially of L’Argent.”

Every available source but one endorsed her decision, however sadly, and celebrated the great actress. The only opposing view came from Toulouse, in La Dépêche. On December 31, 1937, a few days after Helm’s announcement, the newspaper already seemed tired of the story, and claimed that Helm had been threatening to retire for at least a year. Then the article insisted that she had never really lived up to the promise she had shown in Metropolis, that “she was bad in L’Argent,” and that, in L’Atlantide, she had been “truly, too cold.”

This was, to say the least, a minority view. After her retirement, Helm turned up less and less in French newspapers, and this would be particularly the case after the beginning of World War Two. There was, of course, not much news to report about her, as she kept to her promise to stay away from movies in order to raise her family.  But with the outbreak of the war, French newspapers were reluctant to write that much about German stars, regardless of their international fame. Then, once the French surrendered, the German-controlled press in France also ignored her, because the anti-Nazi Helm had decided to spend the war in Switzerland.

She would turn up now and again, however, and in ways that underscored her celebrity in France and also the regard in which she was held as an actress. In May 1939, L’Intransigeant ran an article about Rosine Deréan, who had been appearing in films since 1931 with some small success. L’Intransigeant dismissed her, though, as merely a “phony Brigitte Helm,” a creation of producers who had “bleached her hair blonde and arched her eyebrows” so that she would resemble the great German star, even though she could never compare to her.

Helm stayed in Switzerland until her death in 1996 and never returned to films, except for an appearance in a 1978 short film, Egon Haase’s Wie im Traum. When she retired in 1937, at the height of her international fame, she may not have been quite the equal of Garbo, who would herself leave filmmaking in 1941. But Helm remained “Garboesque” for the rest of her life, and like the Swedish star never gave any interviews about her career or clarified her reasons for ending it so abruptly.

Parisian authorities could trace Suzanne Barbala’s whereabout on September 1, 1922, with almost absolute precision. The eleven-year-old girl left her home at 4, boulevard Port Royal in the fifth arrondissement in the early afternoon. She walked south to a pharmacy in the nearby thirteenth arrondissement, and then she hoped to visit her grandmother, who also lived in the thirteenth. But her grandmother wasn’t home, and now Suzanne’s motives and intentions became a little less clear. She made her way to the Madelon cinema, at 174 avenue d’Italie in the thirteenth, but probably not to go to the movies. It was raining that day, and so Suzanne may have tried to shelter herself under the marquee, at least until the downpour stopped. After that, the trail seemed to end, and no one would see Suzanne for almost an entire month.

On September 29, 1922, the newspaper L’Oeuvre described the Madelon as a “modest cinema,” with a manager, a pianist, a violinist, and a projectionist who doubled as a janitor. Paris had around 200 cinemas at the time, and the Madelon would be one of the many cinémas des quartiers in the city, a neighborhood cinema that showed films in their subsequent runs. Its programs would never be reported in the city’s newspapers, which tended to concentrate on the far more important cinémas d’exclusivité, the first-run exhibition sites, and so it is impossible to tell now, one hundred years later, what was showing on the day of Suzanne’s disappearance. The best evidence we have for the Madelon comes from a November 1922 edition of L’Economiste Français that listed the 1921 “gross receipts” for all of the city’s cinemas. The Madelon reported only 108,000 francs for that year, not the lowest in the city, but far away from the 1.7 million earned by the Neauveautés, the 1.5 million taken in by the Omnia, or the revenues from many other larger, more important cinemas.

It was at the end of September 1922 that the pianist at the Madelon, accompanying a silent film, complained about a terrible smell coming from around the screen. As reported in most of the city’s newspapers, this led to a search of the space in back of the screen, and to a grim discovery; a body. At first, the Madelon staff thought it must be that of an animal, but then as L’Oeuvre wrote, “they saw it was human,” and that, grimly, it had been expertly “cut into pieces.”

A doctor identified the body as that of a young girl, and then it was determined to be Suzanne, who had been missing for weeks. The autopsy showed that she had put up a significant fight, but that the murderer had overpowered her. Authorities believed that she had been killed near the cinema, perhaps as she sought shelter there from the rain, and then her body hidden behind the screen.

Each day, new details came out. In early-October, Le Journal reported that the murderer must have been a regular at the cinema, and he must have known Suzanne well. Each of the cinema’s employees was questioned, and each one ruled out, except for one, the manager, Jean Cuvillier. Le Journal went on that it was he who reported the murder, but that he had been suspiciously “drenched in sweat” as he spoke to police. He seemed to physically fit the part of murderer. He was about “fifty years old, very strong…with big hands, a big mustache, and a heavy air.” As an afterthought, the story provided something of his employment history, which would later become significant. Before the war, he had managed a cinema in Reims, about 75 miles outside of Paris.

Cuvillier maintained his innocence and named two other suspects, as L’Action Française explained on October 7, the projectionist and a young man who did odd jobs around the Madelon. Meanwhile, the press suggested other possible murderers, for example a man who sold flowers on the avenue d’Italie, named by L’Avenir in November 1922.

Nevertheless, most of the attention remained on Cuvillier. As hard as they tried, authorities couldn’t prove he was involved in Suzanne’s murder. But they did find troubling details from his past, in Reims. As it turned out, he had been charged there with assaulting a young girl, but the beginning of the war had interrupted his trial, and he had conveniently left for Paris. After police arrested him as a suspect in the Madelon murder, that earlier charge was reinstated, and in March newspapers reported that he had been sentenced to four years in prison for his guilt in the earlier case.

That still left Suzanne’s murder unsolved, even though suspicion reasonably remained on Cuvillier. In fact, Parisian police never found the person responsible. The press reported on the case frequently, at least until Cuvillier’s sentencing for the previous crime. After that, the case came up now an again, for instance in December 1924, when Le Matin ran an article about “Perpetrators Who Have Escaped Justice for Their Crimes,” about Suzanne’s murder and also that of another very young girl, as well as a few others killed under mysterious circumstances. Two years later, in 1926, Le Petit Journal informed readers that the skeleton of a young girl had been found just outside Paris,in Rambouillet, and began its coverage with, “A new crime, one that brings to mind the murder at the Madelon cinema of the young Suzanne Barbala…has been discovered.” As late as 1929, the case remained a touchstone for legal caution as well as for unintended results. That’s when L’Oeuvre ran an article, “Respect for the Condemned and Contempt for Witnesses,” reminding readers that Cuvillier had been all but convicted although apparently through false testimony, and then had been justifiably—and almost accidentally—found guilty of serious previous crimes.

As a sign of the ongoing impact of the case on French culture, in 1928 L’Avenir ran a brief piece about various murderers, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The article highlighted the most famous and frightening of all the country’s serial killers, Henri Landru, who murdered at least eleven people, all but one of them women, and possibly dozens more during the war, before he was arrested, found guilty, and executed in 1922. The newspaper likened his victims to “the petite Suzanne Barbala,” whose “horribly mutilated body was hidden at the Madelon cinema,” and his methods to Suzanne’s murderer. With this comparison to the terrifying, remorseless Landru, Barbala’s unidentified murderer clearly had entered a pantheon of French criminals.  

Perhaps because of the Madelon’s ongoing association with Suzanne’s death, the cinema had changed its name by 1928, the same year as the reference in L’Avenir to Landru and the first year for which I can find reliable listings. By then, the cinema would be identified by its location, on the avenue d’Italie, as the Ciné-Italie.  The Italie continued as an exhibition site at least until the beginning of World War Two, when, like all other cinemas in the city, it closed with the German occupation of the city. Over the course of the occupation, the Germans reopened about fifty cinemas, but the small, neighborhood Italie was not one of them. It may have become a working cinema again after the liberation, but by 1949 and the first postwar listings for the entire city that I have been able to locate, there is no longer any cinema at 174, avenue d’Italie. Now, in 2023, there is a housing development at the site, in a style from the 1960s or 70s, with no sign at all of the Madelon cinema, and certainly no indication of the crime that had been discovered there more than one hundred years ago, and that was never solved.  

In the years just before World War Two, the French far right followed their leaders’ directives with violent immediacy. On January 13, 1936, Charles Maurras, the publisher of L’Intransigeant, the most widely read fascist newspaper in France, called for the assassination of some 150 members of government, should they take the country to war in Ethiopia to defend that nation against Benito Mussolini’s invading Italian army. Included in that number was Léon Blum, whom Maurras listed as among many other dangerous “radicals, socialists, and communists.”  In just a few months, of course, Blum would be elected Prime Minister of France, becoming the leader of the Popular Front, an alliance of leftwing groups mobilized largely by the rise of so many fascist organizations in France during the 1930s. At the time of Maurras’ editorial, though, Blum served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, representing Narbonne, in Southern France.

There would be no war with Italy in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, exactly one month after Maurras’ denunciation, on February 13, three members of the fascist group Les Camelots du Roi pulled Blum from his car as he left the chamber in Paris’ seventh arrondissement and beat him practically to death before he managed to get away. The attackers were, no doubt, motivated by Maurras’ call to violence, although given their own animus towards the French left in general and their virulent anti-Semitism, they probably needed little inducement to go after Blum, who was Jewish.

Just a little over a week later, on February 21, the assailants were in a Parisian court for a preliminary hearing. Every prominent newspaper in the country covered the event, and each of them highlighted the same thing about this initial appearance, that a film of the attack was shown in court, in the presence of the presiding magistrate, the prosecuting attorneys, the defense counsel, and the defendants themselves. The movie had been made by amateur filmmaker Gérard Bennett, who may have had his camera that day to get some footage of the funeral procession, near the chamber, of rightwing historian Jacques Bainville, the reason so many fascists had gathered in the area.

Newspapers provided precise details of the movie and its screening. As Le Matin reported, “the film reproduces the entire scene, from the moment the crowd comes running up to the car to the instant Blum takes refuge in a building on the rue de l’Université.” Le Matin, like most other sources, emphasized that there were two showings in court, the first at normal speed, taking four minutes. The second was in “slow motion,” and “was interrupted two or three times to allow identification” of the assailants. One of them, Edouard Aragon, could not be seen. The other, Léon Andurand, was there “for a few moments…smoking a pipe,” while the third, Louis Courtois, “appeared throughout the film,” and “seemed furious, vociferous,” although he could not be seen “throwing punches” at Blum.

Most sources agreed that the film really didn’t show that much. Excelsior, for example, claimed that “the range of the camera was very limited, so the film does not constitute a document of great value.” Le Matin agreed that “the view is incomplete.” But the determination of the film’s worth might also come down to a newspaper’s political inclination. The far rightwing L’Ami du Peuple, which had been founded by perfume magnate and fascist supporter François Coty, informed readers that, “it was in vain that we looked in this film for the famous scene imagined by so many leftwing newspapers, where we might see one of the ‘aggressors’ hitting” Blum.

One of those “leftwing newspapers,” L’Humanite, actually seemed fairly measured, writing that, “despite the rapidity of the film, we clearly see two of the assailants, Andurand and Courtois.” L’Humanité then added that the latter’s “attitude and movements are particularly revealing,” reinforcing the reporting in the very staid Le Matin and other papers. 

One newspaper emphasized the historical significance of the film, which even transcended the event that it showed. “For the first time in France,” L’Oeuvre wrote on its front page on February 22, “the cinema has been used as evidence in a courtroom.” The article described the two screenings in detail, much more fully than other sources, and then interviewed the judge who had authorized the use of the film. He felt that the footage served as a terrific “means of investigation.” L’Oeuvre claimed that motion pictures as evidence were long overdue, because “justice has been using photography” for so long, and in particular because film had been introduced into American courtrooms years before.

In fact, US courts had been making use of film as evidence at least since 1923, in a case that was directly related to the popular culture of the period. In this instance, a vaudevillian had severely injured his leg in a car accident. As part of his trial for damages, his lawyer introduced a film of his stage routine, over the objection of the opposing attorney. But it’s unclear when, if ever, an American trial had used movie footage to determine the guilt or innocence of defendants, as in the Blum case. More than anything else, the French instance seems to anticipate Fritz Lang’s first American film, Fury, from 1936, which was released in Paris in the fall of that year to considerable acclaim (see my blogpost from September 1, 2022, at https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/38257950/posts/4230313808). In that movie, the newsreel footage shown in court identified all of the townspeople who had tried to lynch Joe Wilson, an innocent man wrongly accused of kidnapping, and played by Spencer Tracy.

In France, in the Blum case, the film itself, in addition to serving as evidence, quickly came to be involved in a dispute over ownership. The man who shot the footage went to court in March 1936, claiming that the police had seized his film and refused to return it, and possibly even profited from it, releasing, as they did, frame enlargements to the press. Newspapers reported on the filmmaker’s claim but then seemed to drop it, so the outcome remains unclear. The case against Blum’s attackers, on the other hand, ended much more decisively, if, perhaps, somewhat disappointingly. Newspapers informed readers at the end of April 1936 that two of the three men had been found guilty, and the film clearly had something to do with the verdict. Edouard Aragon, who did not appear in the footage, was released without punishment.  Léon Andurand, the man seen mostly smoking his pipe, was sentenced to 15 days in prison, while the “furious, vociferous” Louis Courtois received a sentence of three months, which in each case seems hardly enough given the severity of the attack.

Blum’s term as prime minister lasted only about a year, and the leftwing coalition he represented just a little more than that. If he is remembered today as having any connection with film, it is as the negotiator, with American Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, of the post-World War Two Blum-Byrnes agreement. Along with establishing other commercial contracts between the two nations, the agreement also set the relationship between the French and American motion picture industries, and which typically has been understood as significantly lopsided in favor of the US.  But years before that, he was involved in some of the most important amateur footage ever shot, footage that certified, in French courts at least, the place of motion pictures as evidence in criminal trials.

Today, in various national contexts, we might expect such evidence to be used. In the United States, for instance, at least dating to the 1963 film of the Kennedy assassination taken by another amateur, Abraham Zapruder, we have come to accept both the importance and inconclusiveness of cinematic evidence. But in 1936 in France, the footage of the attack on Blum—footage that apparently no longer exists—marked a significant moment in the country’s legal history, providing a new source of proof and also a frustratingly inadequate record of the events of February 13^th. The men who attacked Blum seem to have disappeared from the public record after their sentencing. Charles Maurras, the man who had instigated the attack on the deputy from Narbonne that Gérard Bennett recorded, would be arrested as a Nazi collaborator in 1944, after the liberation of Paris, and sentenced to life in prison.

“Year after year…the number of prizes given to films and actors increases around the world.” That was the plausible claim made in the April 13, 1949, edition Le Bourgogne Républicain, which then went on that, “even though the great majority of global spectators are women, until now there has never been such a prize chosen by women, judged from the feminine point of view.”  All of that had just changed, with the first Grand Prix Féminin, sponsored by the French fashion magazine, Elle.

That this was the first such prize was all the more remarkable, because there had been other similar awards in the arts for many years. 1904, for example, marked the first year of the Prix Fémina in literature, sponsored, as in the case of the later prize in cinema, by a woman’s magazine, in this case La Vie Heureuse. In one well-known instance, Roland Dorgelès won the Prix Fémina  in 1919, for his anti-war novel, Les Croix de Bois, withsome critics complaining that he also should have received the even more prestigious Prix Goncourt, which went, instead, to Marcel Proust for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the second volume of À la recherches du temps perdu.

Newspapers in 1949 time treated the film prize as a major story, because Elle was such an important magazine, and also because the jury for the award was something of a who’s who of women in French arts, literature, and culture. Among the dozen or so members, there was Hélene Gordon-Lazareff, the journalist who had founded Elle; the painter Nora Auric (who was married to composer Georges Auric); Marie-Louise Bousquet, the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar as well as being credited with “discovering” Christian Dior; the actresses France Roche and Juliette Verneuil; the journalist, politician, and editor of Elle, Françoise Giroud; and the internationally famous fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

All of the judges met on the rue Beaujolais at the very chic restaurant Véfour (which is still there today) and decided on the inaugural winners. They gave a number of awards, with Jean Simmons winning Best Foreign Actress for Hamlet (1948) and James Mason Best Foreign Actor for Huit heures de surcis (Odd Man Out [1947]). There were also awards in categories that reflected the jurors’ interest in style and fashion. They named Gabrielle Dorziat “the most elegant actress on the stage,” Edwige Feuillère “the most elegant…on the screen,” and Hélène Perdrière as “the most elegant in Paris.”  The jurors chose Pierre Fresnay the Best French Actor for his performance in Monsieur Vincent (1947), and Le Miracle de la 34me rue (Miracle on 34^th Street [1947]) as the Best Foreign Film, but the big winner in that first ceremony was Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles (1948). Dorziat won as Best French Actress for her role in the movie, and the film itself was named Best French Film.

Cocteau had adapted his film about intense family disfunction from his play of the same name, and it had been understood as a modern, difficult classic as soon as it opened in Paris in December 1948. The film premiered simultaneously in three of the important cinémas d’exclusivité in the city, the Aubert-Palace in the ninth arrondissement, the Gaumont-Théâtre in the second arrondissement, and the Colisée in the eighth, on the Champs-Élysées. Les Parents Terribles left those cinemas after an almost two-month run, opened again soon at several other significant locations, and played fairly steadily throughout Paris and the rest of France. The review of the film in V in 1948 stands out as representative, admiring Cocteau’s vision while unsure whether or not a responsible viewer could fully endorse such a movie. V called Les Parents Terribles “a magnificent transposition of the play, cinematically adapted in the most subtle, intelligent way.” But then the review hedged a bit before a final endorsement, saying that “one can like it or not, but one cannot help but be in awe of the splendid results achieved by Cocteau.”

In other words, the jurors for Le Prix Féminin awarded a complicated, controversial film. The prizes as a whole, though, demonstrated the broad range of the jurors’ judgements; it’s hard to imagine two films so distinctly different from each other as the sweet, feel-good Miracle de la 34me rue, the Best Foreign Film winner, and Les Parents Terribles.

Elle magazine sponsored the awards in 1950 as well, with many of the same jurors but also some new additions, such as the lawyer Suzanne Blum. Alida Valli, Danièle Dejorme, Gregory Peck, and Bernard Blier won the acting awards, and the jurors gave a special prize to the young boy who co-starred in Le Voleur de bicyclette (Ladri de biciclette [1948]), Enzo Staiola. The awards were still a major news story, but this time, some perhaps predictable snarkiness had crept into the reporting.

Writing in L’Aurore in February, 1950, Claude Lazurick-Garson, herself a member of the jury, complained that the prize for Best Foreign Film had been split between Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Louisiana Story (1948) because of, “by nature, the indecisive feminine sex.” She complained that the women, “tired of being pushed around at Christian Dior’s atelier,” had “refused to award the prize for the best dressed French actress because none of them deserved it.” Some of the jurors had fought hard for Marlene Dietrich in this category, but she “was declared too American,” which Lazurick-Garson thought “curious for a German.” Finally, the reporter/jurist informed readers that Ingrid Bergman had been put forward as a Best Foreign Actress nominee, but one of the judges (perhaps Lazurick-Garson herself) “arose to say that it was not enough to have an illegitimate child to be a big star,” a reference to Bergman’s affair with Italian director Roberto Rosselini and the birth of their son, Renato.

Regardless of any arguments about Dietrich and Bergman, the plan, at least according to Lazurick-Garson, was to have another Prix Féminin the following year. I haven’t found evidence for any such awards for 1951, or any year after that, although this might be because of the   scant availability of materials from the 1950s, for example the newspapers that might have reported on the prize. But even if the Prix Féminin lasted only for two years, the award nevertheless marked a significant instance of French film culture. The cinephilia of the period has been well documented, but the record is always a masculinist one. There is Henri Langlois, so important to the ciné-club movement and then as a founder of the Cinèmatheque Française. Then there are the young men at the ciné-clubs during the postwar period and during the first years of Cahiers du Cinèma: Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut first and foremost, both of them under the tutelage of the great historian and theorist André Bazin.

Despite this still powerful mythology, there were also, always, women deeply involved in all aspects of French cinema from the period. Some of them were among the most famous names in French cinema, for instance the filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who was such a tireless champion of ciné-clubs throughout the period. There were also women who are practically unknown today, such as Lucie Derain, who followed Dulac and who was just as much an enthusiastic promoter programmer of the clubs.

In addition, we have those women who gathered at the restaurant Véfour and who were so important to so many fields—journalism, literature, fashion, politics, law—and who sought to acknowledge the best in cinema. They were the women of the Prix Féminin, who for two years at least, if not more, gave a prize that was understood as being of national importance. Certifying the significance of Cocteau or appreciating the simpler pleasures of Le Miracle de la 34me rue, they asserted the place of women in French film culture, the power of Elle magazine beyond fashion, and their own role as tastemakers and critics equal to the men who have been far better remembered and celebrated in film history.