history

The Paris Cinema Project

Posted on by Eric Smoodin

When Micheline Presle died in February at 101, she was almost certainly the last link to the French cinema of the 1930s. Indeed, she was also one of the last performers still living who had starred in films in the immediate post-World War Two era, and even before that who had been active in France during that morally ambiguous period of the German occupation, when some actors left for Hollywood while others stayed to make movies for a film industry controlled by the Nazis, either by choice or because they were forced to. Two of the greatest of all French movie stars whose careers began in the thirties, Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux, died less than a year apart in 2016 and 2017, and Suzy Delair, a somewhat lesser celebrity, died in 2020. But an entire generation has grown up in France with little memory of many of the others, such as Odette Joyeux, Viviane Romance, and Edwige Feuillière, let alone men like Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, and Pierre Fresnay.

Presle was famous by the time she was 17, in 1939. She had bit parts in films as early as 1937, but two years later she was one of the featured players in the great expat German director G.W. Pabst’s Jeunes filles en détresse. In the buildup to that film, Presle did the things that starlets often do. In June 1939, for instance, just a few weeks before the premiere, she was one of the contestants in a car contest, with each make and model paired with a woman, either an actress or low-ranking royalty or the wife of a politician. Annie Vernay, who had appeared in Max Ophüls Le Roman de Werther (1938), participated, as did the Comtesse d’Oncieu de Chaffardon as well as Madame Tixier-Vignancour, married to the far-right statesman Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. Against this heavy competition, and representing Renault, Presle took third place.

An advertisement gives Presle top billin in Jeunes filles en détresse, from Le Jour, August 23, 1939.

The French press covered that contest and took an immediate interest in Presle. L’Oeuvre noted that the young actress, who had been born Micheline Chassagne, first appeared in films as Micheline Michel but had changed her last name to Presle, matching the name of the character she played in Pabst’s film. L’Oeuvre approved, telling readers that she had been spared the embarrassment of another up-and-coming star who had insisted on calling herself Simone Simon.

When Jeunes filles en détresse premiered in July, in Vichy in Southern France, Presle was there for the opening. In August, when the film was about to open at the exclusive Marignan cinema on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Excelsior headlined, “Micheline Presle a Star at 16,” and described her as a sort of child emerging into womanhood. “Last year,” the newspaper explained, Presle “was still at the convent, poring over schoolbooks,” but now, after her success in Pabst’s movie, she was “back at the studio for a starring role in…Le Paradis perdu,” directed by one of France’s greatest filmmakers, Abel Gance.  

Most of the publicity for Jeunes filles en détresse emphasized Presle, even though she was part of an ensemble rather than the obvious star of the film. On August 24, 1939, L’Intransigeant ran a large ad for the film, which featured a photo of Presle, and in an ad in Le Jour from the day before the actress received top billing among the cast. When the film came to Marseille in July 1940, it was very big news, with Le Sémaphore running a picture of Presle along with a review, in which she was singled out as “intelligent, fine, and skilled.” Blanche Albert, the reviewer, added, “I think she will go far.”

Exercising with Micheline Presle, Pour Vous, February 7, 1940.

The last available reference to Presle from before the surrender to Germany appeared in the February 7, 1940 issue of the film tabloid Pour Vous. In “Fifteen Minutes of Exercise with Micheline Presle,” the reporter asked Presle if she did “physical training in the morning?” Presle replied, “Of course! You have to keep your figure!” Then she explained her routine, with photos showing her practicing various exercises. Of course, this was just a puff piece. But it very much posited Presle as a modern woman, one who wasn’t afraid of working out, and this might well have been a perfect segue to her stardom during the Occupation, with the Germans privileging this type of well-toned female body.

Indeed, in that period, Presle made a number of appearances in Ciné-Mondial, the film magazine that Germany produced for French movie fans. In the issue of September 5, 1941, for instance, the magazine covered a cocktail party for the new film, Le Pavillon brule. Ciné-Mondial reported that, while Presle wasn’t in the film, she appeared at the party, along with such well-known collaborators as Jean Cocteau and also others whose connections to the Nazis were far less clear and more tenuous, like the director Marcel Carné and the actress Arletty.

In January, 1942, Presle appeared in two issues. First, on January 9th, Ciné-Mondial reviewed her new romantic comedy, Histoire de rire, directed by Marcel L’Herbier, with the magazine praising Presle for “acting without self-consciousness,” and for her “capricious romanticism.” A week later, in the next issue, Ciné-Mondial ran a brief appreciation of Presle, telling readers that “here is this petite, lively, and cheeky young actress, ready to live up to all of her promise.” Just a month later, the magazine profiled a now much more mature Presle, in an article about her artistic ambitions. In “A New Painter: Micheline Presle,” a reporter seemed amazed that this young woman, so “charming…pretty,” and with “an adorable little nose…and legs for which we lack adjectives,” should be such an accomplished artist, spending so much time in her studio. “Despite her fine, soft hair…her nose like Cleopatra’s, so small,” the reporter went on, “this beauty, Micheline Presle, is very serious.”

Presle the painter, Ciné-Mondial, February 20, 1942.

Presle was still a teenager when the German occupation began in June 1940, and she still wasn’t quite enough of a star to draw any interest from Hollywood. So it’s hard to judge her politics at the time, and whether she collaborated overtly, or benignly, or somewhere in between. None of the readily available obituaries that I’ve read say anything about her career during the war, although she certainly continued to work in France and made a great number of films.

Just after the liberation of Paris, L’Aube reported in September 1944 that Presle had been arrested by French authorities for collaborationist activities, and sent to the internment camp in Drancy, a Parisian suburb. This was the same site where the Germans had sent French Jews on their way to concentration camps, including those rounded up in July 1942 at the Vel d’Hiv, a Parisian velodrome, in the most well-known of all of the Nazi deportations in France.

L’Aube sent a reporter to Drancy, who walked around the camp, where the crowd was “teeming” and “agitated” and “struggling.” The reporter noted that “some women still looked good,” because “they had kept their makeup and toiletries with them,” but most internees looked dirty and unkempt.  There were active collaborators at the camp, among them the champagne magnate Pierre Taitinger, journalist Titaÿna, and the filmmaker Sacha Guitry. And there was also Micheline Presle.

Whatever the charges against Presle, her rehabilitation seems to have been rapid. By October 1945, she was on the cover of Cinévie, in character as Boule de Suif, the heroine in a film based on the Guy de Maupassant short story. The report inside called Presle “as spontaneous as she is beautiful,” the actress having gone from an internment camp for alleged German collaborators to starring in a story from a quintessentially French author.

Presle as Boule de Suif, on the cover of Cinévie, October 10, 1945.

A few months later, Presle appeared at a benefit organized by the newspaper France-soir, one designed to help rebuild France. Royan, on the country’s western coast, had been held by the Germans because of its proximity to important water routes. The Allied strategy to liberate the town was to bomb it, including one of the first uses of napalm. The town was destroyed, and more than 2500 inhabitants killed. The Hollywood film Les Milles et une nuits (Arabian Nights [1942]) had its French premiere there, with all proceeds going to the town and the people who remained. Maria Montez, the star of the film, was present at the premiere, and so were luminaries from the French film industry: the actor and screenwriter Noël-Noēl, the singer Germaine Sablon, the actor Thomy Bourdelle, and, among others, Micheline Presle.

In the postwar period, Presle would star in some of France’s most significant films, including Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Diable au corps (1947) and Les Jeux sont faits (1947), directed by Jean Delannoy and with a script by Jean-Paul Sartre. On the strength of these films, Presle went to Hollywood in the late-1940s, but filmmakers there failed utterly to use her intelligently, even insisting on changing her last name to Prelle, and she returned to France just a few years later, where she remained a constant presence in movies and on television. After Presle died, the French minister of culture, Rachida Dati, issued a tribute to the great actress. She called Presle, simply, “the dean of French cinema.”

For further reading on some of the people mentioned here, see these posts:

Danielle Darrieux: https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/100647815/posts/858

Michèle Morgan: https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/100647815/posts/653

Titaÿna: https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/38257950/posts/4357448260

Suzy Delair: https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/100647815/posts/1158

The Paris Cinema Project

Posted on by Eric Smoodin

In the edition of November 6, 1942, the French Resistance newspaper Combat reported on victories over the Nazis from the previous month. Mostly, there were bombings, organized by the Resistance against the German military as well as French collaborators. On October 12 in Paris, there was a bombing near the offices of the collaborationist newspaper Le Matin; ten days later, in Lyon, another explosion at another fascist newspaper, L’Union Française.  At Montpelier and Nice, Resistance fighters had set off a bomb at the headquarters of the French Fascist Party in the city, and in Toulouse and Annemasse that month, there were too many to count, so Combat simply reported “bombs in various locations.”

There were also attacks on cinemas. In Brussels, for example, a bomb exploded in an unnamed cinema during a screening for the Catholic, far-right Rexist party, with one member of the audience killed and many wounded. In another attack, and the one that particularly interests me here, on October 6 in Paris, the Resistance set off a bomb at the Maillot cinema, on 74 rue de la Grande Armée in the seventeenth arrondissement. The blast killed two and wounded forty-four. I’ve written before about the cinemas in and around Paris as not infrequent sites of fascist violence (see my post at https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/100647815/posts/116). But this incident was a different case altogether, the Maillot as the location of anti-fascist opposition.

Combat announces the bombing at the Maillot, as well as at a cinema in Brussels, November 1942.

The location was a fashionable one, but the 800-seat Maillot was a cinéma de quartier rather than a first-run cinéma d’exclusivité, mostly showing films that had already played elsewhere in the city. Nevertheless, after all 300 or so of the cinemas in Paris had closed by the time of the surrender to Germany, the Maillot was important enough to have been one of the 50 or 60 exhibition sites that the Nazis reopened while they occupied the city. During that first week in October 1942, it had been screening Soyez les bienvenus, an innocuous 1942 comedy starring Gabrielle Dorziat and Jean Mercanton, directed by Jacques de Baroncelli. But on the night of the explosion, the Maillot showed something else, the notoriously anti-Semitic 1940 German film Le Juif Suss (Juf Süß).

Commissioned by the head of Nazi Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and directed by Veit Harlan, the film told the story of the 18th century Jewish banker Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. The movie had already had an extended run in occupied Paris, having opened in February 1941 at the Colisée, a cinéma d’exclusivité on the avenue des Champs Elysées in the eighth arrondissement. After a six-week engagement there, the film went into wide distribution throughout the city. The screening at the Maillot wasn’t part of the film’s movement through Paris, however, but was instead a special, one-night presentation.

Newspapers had been advertising the free screening for several days, so the Resistance certainly had time to make plans. On October 5, for instance, Le Cri du Peuple announced that, at 8:30 the next night, the Maillot would show the “celebrated film Le Juif Suss,” accompanied by a lecture given by Pierre Thurotte, representing the PPF, the French Fascist party. Some newspapers announced, seemingly without irony, that the screening and lecture were part of a conference on anti-Semitism, while others claimed that the evening dealt with le problème juif, “the Jewish problem.” Of course, by this time, the Nazis had solved their Jewish problem, in France and elsewhere. The roundup of Parisian Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the fifteenth arrondissement—the Vél d’Hiv—and their subsequent deportation to concentration camps had taken place in July 1942, several months before the screening.

The October 5, 1942 advertisement in Le Cri du peuple for the screening of Le Juif Suss at the Maillot cinema.

The bomb at the Maillot went off about ten minutes into the film. The collaborationist press provided all of the details of the attack, and typically emphasized the innocence of the fascists in attendance. On October 8, Le Cri du Peuple announced that a second victim had died as a result of wounds from the bomb, and then declared that “In placing their bomb in a cinema, the assassins deliberately attacked women, the aged, and children.” Other sources were more measured. Le Journal, for instance, drily informed readers that this second fatality had been a Monsieur Pasteur, sixty years old, a businessman who lived at 18 bis rue de Chartres in Paris, and that his wife had also died in the explosion, with 24 others having been seriously injured while 20 had been slightly hurt.

The Resistance newspaper France reported that the Maillot bombing marked the third attack against the PPF in a week, and that the leader of the party, Jacques Doriot, had confidently announced that he “knew how to exact revenge.” In fact, Doriot and other French fascists might well have expected this attack. In the aftermath of the Maillot explosion, La Croix d’Auvergne wrote that only six weeks before, on August 28, a bomb had been set off in a cinema in the Parisian suburb of Clichy, also during a screening of Le Juif Suss, killing one spectator and injuring 20 others.

Immediately after the Maillot incident, the collaborationist press demanded action, and announced within days of the explosion that an inquest had begun.  At least from the available sources, however, nothing seems to have come from this, and the press lost interest after just a few months. None of the reports specifies the precise damage to the Maillot, but within just a few days the cinema was apparently back to business as usual. On October 10, for example, newspaper listings let readers know that they could see René Dary and Paul Azaïs in Léon Mathot’s 1942 film Forte tête there. Even if these listings had been scheduled for publication days before the explosion and were printed even though the location necessarily had to close for repairs, by the end of the month the Maillot was certainly back in operation, with a reissue of Marcel L’Herbier’s Histoire de rire (1942).

The interior of the Maillot cinema.

The principal characters involved in the incident had varied careers following the explosion. Doriot, the fascist leader who vowed revenge (and who had founded Le Cri du Peuple, which covered the story so fully), died in February 1945 during an air raid by Allied planes. On the other hand, Pierre Thurotte, the lecturer that night at the Maillot, lived until 1984, and seems to have been welcomed back into mainstream French politics after the war, winning election in 1959 as conseiller municipal for Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, just a few miles outside of Paris.

The Maillot remained a cinema in the city until the late 1970’s. The last listing I’ve found comes from the end of July 1977, when two movies played there on alternate days: the 1963 Japanese horror film Atragon on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, and the 1967 low-budget Italian science fiction film 4,3, 2, 1…Objectif Lune on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Mondays. Before a cinema had been established there in 1916, a restaurant occupied the space at 74 avenue de la Grande Armée, and now once again, today, at this site of anti-fascist resistance in 1942, there is a dining establishment, a Fratellini café, part of a chain of such bistros throughout Paris.

Today, there’s a Fratellini café at the site of the Maillot.