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© DR - CASQUE D'OR de Jacques Becker (1952) p9
01/11/2012 07:52
Autour du film (fin)
Une chanson de Serge Reggiani rend hommage au film Casque d’or et à Simone Signoret, Un menuisier dansait, disques Polydor, 1973 (réédition compilation en 3 CD, vol. 1, disque 3 La Chanson de Paul).
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La critique des spectateurs ImdB
Jacques Becker: cinema as art
Jacques Becker was an artist and a director. His legacy is a trilogy of masterpieces: "Casque d'Or", "Touchez pas au Grisbi", "Le Trou", three luminous instances of cinema as art.The linear story of "Casque d'Or" has the neatness of a Maupassant's tale. We are transferred into a most glorious epoch for French culture and art: the decline of the 19th century, the age of Impressionism. Marie (Simone Signoret) is a blond beauty, a cheerful "lost woman". She's the girl-friend of a member of a gang of small-time but ruthless criminals.
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She falls in first-sight-love with George Manda (Serge Reggiani) a former crook, now a honest carpenter. Predictable troubles ensue...The atmosphere of the epoch is wonderfully recreated, with a black-and-white photography of indescribable beauty. An Impressionist Master behind the camera couldn't have done better. And, in fact, Becker was a favorite "student" of director Jean Renoir, Auguste Renoir's son. Becker's characteristic narrating style is nostalgic, serene, gently ironic. He deliberately avoids over-dark tones in his representation of the underworld, even in the middle of tragic events.
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Simone Signoret is a charismatic presence on the screen: outstanding is her use of body-language to draw Marie's character, both a romantic enamoured woman and a cynical harlot. Reggiani is excellent as the laconic, tough Manda: he utters some twenty words along the whole movie, yet we perfectly understand his peculiar honor code, his profound love for Marie, his unselfish devotion to friendship. Splendid is Leca (Claude Dauphin), the boss of the gang, officially a respectable well-off wine-dealer: proficient, cool-headed, extremely cunning and Machiavellian, always ready to betray his own men to pursue his dirty purposes.
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Indeed, great care is paid to the design of all characters, with superb acting by the whole cast. Exquisite poetic touches permeate the movie... Marie drags Manda into a church, where a simple wedding (of unknown middle-class people) is taking place. Shortly after, Manda is impatient "Let's go"; and Marie "No, just another minute"... and she contemplates the wedding with a dreaming smile..."Casque d'Or": a perfect work of art.
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© DR - CASQUE D'OR de Jacques Becker (1952) p10
01/11/2012 07:55
Serge Reggiani-Odette Barencey-Simone Signoret
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Casque d'or :French cinema at its best!
Author: dbdumonteil
15 October 2005
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In a poll in 1979 ,Becker's chef d'oeuvre was part of the top ten of the best French movies of all time.
It's arguably Becker's best work;he achieved a luminous movie with many unforgettable scenes : -the small boats on the river,and the pack arriving at the guinguettes,those cafes down by the river Seine(Marne ?) which are no longer part of the landscapes.(remember Duvivier's "la belle équipe" ,1936) -all the scenes in the country where the nature seems to protect the lovers as a mother would do.Most of all,this admirable sequence when Reggiani 's sleeping :he opens his eyes and Marie's luminous beauty moves him deeply -never a director filmed Signoret as Becker did.
The scene which climaxes the opus is the one in the church.They hear the whole congregation sing the "Kyrie " in a tiny church:there's a wedding there.So Marie urges Manda to come in and they attend the ceremony When they leave ,they learn tragic news.Now the bell is tolling for them,even if these are wedding bells.The final scenes between Reggiani/Manda and his old pal Bussières /Raymond display Becker's love of loyalty manly friendship ,a subject which would come back in later works ,muted in "touchez pas au grisbi" and became an absolute pessimism in "le trou" where nobody could be trusted anymore.
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-The score which Becker used in the last sequences is none other than the old French folk song "le temps des cerises" actually an organizing song,a revolutionary song ,since it was the anthem of the Commune in 1871."Casque d'or" is one of the jewels of the French cinema.Becker used to like the Apaches (=ruffians) ,the outcast,cause he would transfer Leblanc's Arsene Lupin adventures to the screen in 1957.A failed attempt though.But "Casque d'or" generally looked upon as Becker's peak ,hasn't aged a bit.
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© DR - CASQUE D'OR de Jacques Becker (1952) p11
01/11/2012 08:00
The blonde beauty
Author: jotix100 from New York
9 December 2005
Jacques Becker's "Casque d'or" is a fine example of the best in the French cinema. At times, this splendid 1954 film, keeps reminding us about paintings of the impressionist school, especially Renoir, because it takes us back to that era. In fact, the beginning of the film almost gives the impression we are witnessing characters that inspired the painters of that art movement.
"Casque d'or" is enhanced by the magnificent black and white photography of Robert Lefevbre who has a poetic way to get the best of what M. Becker intended him to do. The atmospheric music of Georges Van Parys takes the viewer back to those places one has seen in different paintings of that era.
The lovely young woman at the center of the picture, Marie, gets taken with Manda the moment he enters the country restaurant where she is seen with some of the petty criminals she is friendly with. One realizes this is a passion that is not meant to be from the start. Marie belongs to one of the Felix Leca's gang. When Roland senses his girl has an eye for another man, he wants to take get rid of him.
Georges Manda has also been to jail, but now is a carpenter and trying to go straight. Fate is not kind to Manda, who, when provoked, reveals he is not to be made a fool. Leca, who is also quite smitten by Marie's beauty plans to get rid of Manda so he can have the blonde woman all to himself. Leca, who knows his way around the law, and is friendly with the police, will prove to be Manda's undoing.
What Jacques Becker achieved with this film was to create the right atmosphere to set his story. Working in France he had the access to the great movie locations one sees in the movie. The film evokes that period convincingly. The director adds touches, that even when watched today, are a delight to watch.M. Becker got good performances out of his cast. Simone Signoret at that point of her life was at her prime. Her Marie is a fine example of what she was able to project without much effort. Her beauty is evident and she plays Marie with elegance.
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Serge Reggiani plays Manda with conviction. M. Reggiani covered quite a lot of ground in the French cinema. Aside from his good looks, he was an accomplished actor and singer. His contribution to our enjoyment of the film made "Casque d'or" to be a classic it became. Claude Dauphin is Felix Leca, the unscrupulous man in love with Marie who will stoop so low in order to get the woman that he wouldn't have otherwise. M. Dauphin conveys the evil in Felix Leca with an economy that works well in his portrayal of this sophisticated monster.
Finally, this is Jacques Becker's triumph. "Casque d'or" is one of the best films of all times.
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© DR - CASQUE D'OR de Jacques Becker (1952) p12
01/11/2012 08:02
Magnifique!
Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom
9 March 2011
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This is one of the great classics of the French cinema from the immediate postwar period. The title, which means 'helmet of gold', presumably is a reference to the prominent bun in which Simone Signoret wears her golden hair, since it is she who precipitates all the dramatic and violent events in the story by driving men wild. The film is set circa 1900 in and near Paris, and the brilliant director Jacques Becker, who was a fanatic about period detail, has given us a vivid portrait of daily life in the suburbs of Paris, such as Belleville, at that era. I have rarely seen such perfection of costume, props, and sets for a period film. Sometimes it seems as if Becker must personally have supervised every stitch of thread in the clothing.
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The main characters are those low-life ruffians, or small-time gangsters, of Paris whom the French love to call by the name of 'apaches', a term derived from the Americans and their accounts of the supposedly wildest and most unruly of the American Indian tribes. The apaches (pronounced in the French style, 'layzuhpahsh') are a kind of national obsession to the French, perhaps even more so now that they are largely extinct, having been superseded by those far more extreme villains of our own time, international drug dealers and people traffickers, and terrorists. The apaches had their own peculiar codes of honour (such as shown in this story), whereas 'honour' means nothing to the more vicious criminals of today.
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The British used to be nearly as obsessed with their own native small-time gangsters, the London East End gangs, as the French have been with their Paris apaches. But just as nation states are being dissolved before our eyes, so too are the local criminal gangs of specific countries, and the quaint behaviour of such people seen in films like this is now an anachronism which is bound to be as remote to younger viewers as the thrashing tails of dinosaurs, and from an epoch perceived by them as being nearly as distant. It is an endlessly fascinating spectacle to watch this film, and savour the costumes, settings, and mannerisms of the time, which are so perfectly portrayed.
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The apache men, and indeed many ordinary workmen such as carpenters, all wear wide pale cummerbunds wrapped around their waists, beneath which rise the high narrow waists of their otherwise baggy and billowing corduroy trousers. They wear those pull-over shirts with buttons that only go half the way down, with broad and wide open collars and baggy sleeves gathered in at the shoulders. They are as careful of their appearance as they are of their reputations for villainy and violence. The head of a gang, Leca, played by Claude Dauphin, at one points tells one of his gang to stop wearing a flat cap, as it will give the gang a bad name with the neighbours!
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The film opens with a scene straight out of a Renoir painting, with three long rowing boats on the Seine upstream from Paris pulling in to the shore, the men wearing boaters, and their gaily laughing girlfriends all dressed to the nines for a Sunday out. They run giggling in to a quaint outdoors riverside 'bal', a restaurant with a small band where they can do what the apaches and their gals love best: dancing with passion and style. The dancing itself is a marvel to be seen. But then we come to realize that these are not ordinary young men and women, these are gangsters and their molls. And here, the mischievous flirtation of Signoret, the most glamorous of the molls, with a handsome young stranger, sets in motion the tragic events which then proceed to unfold with bloody inevitability.
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The young man she fancies is played with eloquent macho silence by Serge Reggiani. It turns out that he has previously spent five years in the same prison cell with a member of the gang, who is his best friend. This sets up various conflicts of loyalty and enhances the tensions. Signoret is an expert at portraying sensual intensity while holding her head high, what might be called 'the proud whore motif'. When appearing in a film, she can turn on the inner sexual incandescence with the ease with which someone of today can click a computer mouse. All that was required was for a director to say: 'Action!' (in French, of course), and the fire would flare up in her smouldering eyes and all actors in the film had better watch out.
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She never has pushed any buttons for me personally, as I have always found her too heavy, solid, and masculine, but then there are a lot of men out there who like that (as witness the strange preoccupation so many British males have with Judi Dench, and before her, with Glenda Jackson, and other such potential dominatrixes whose more feminine qualities always seem to be somewhat at the ebb tide, no matter how they may glower and try to convince us that they are female by the intensity of their expressions). I have always had the uncomfortable feeling that maybe Simone Signoret was really a man. I know that is ridiculous, and I confess to being in what must be an insignificant minority on the subject.
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But let no one imagine that she does not set the action on fire in this film, which she does aplenty. It is such a pity that only three films by Jacques Becker (1906-1960) appear ever to have had English subtitles added to them. He was a true master of the screen, even though the French have tried to keep him as their little secret. His son is Jean Becker (born 1933), another master of the screen who carried on the family's directorial tradition by making equally riveting and desperate films.
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© DR - CASQUE D'OR de Jacques Becker (1952) p13
01/11/2012 08:05
A great film of passion
Author: Grim-15 from New York City
20 September 2002
Casque d'or is one of the greatest films about passion I have ever seen. The intensity of the feeling between Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani, particularly the former, is overwhelming. These people are outsiders from the very beginning, being part of the criminal underworld from which they will never escape. The honest, bourgeois world is permanently closed to them. Children in French secondary school write essays about this film as if it were a classic French novel. It certainly is a classic, and it could not have been made in any country other than France.
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