Homework Movie - Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966)

The French Heist movie Le Deuxieme Souffle (Second Breath) has everything you can ask for in a film noir heist film. A criminal that has escaped prison, police following the moves of the major players with such a cool attitude, a femme fatale who's in love with the hardened criminal, and a score that's worth the risk. It's the way the Jean-Pierre Melville crafted this movie that makes it a must see for anyone that enjoys crime stories.

In beautiful black & white film, Melville composes wonderfully long scenes of flight from prison, sets the mood in both planning scenes with the gangsters and the romantic interlude with Gu (our main protagonist played by Lino Ventura) and Manouche (his love interest played by Christine Fabrega). The cool Inspector Blot doesn't skip a beat when in the room with criminals covering for their partners in crime nor does he break a sweat when interrogating them once he's got them in custody.

Melville cleverly goes between the criminals telling what they are going to do and the police showing where things might be happening to give a duel narrative for the audience to follow the story along without seeming to spoon feed the material. The whole time line for the story takes a little over a months time and the title cards tell us when everything's going down to keep track. The added time on the departure is worth the risk for Gu as he needs the money to travel, so he decides to do one last score for a large sum of money. However, he doesn't know all the players until it's too late.

We watched another Melville movie in class that had similar subject matter. In Le Doulos every character in it was two faced. Wages of Fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot showed the desperation of a man that was released from prison and couldn't find any other work but manual labor. The struggles he had to make ends meet were the least of his worries in the field. Every turn he had issues from the co-workers to the location itself being dangerous.

Homework Movie - A Bell From Hell (1973)

After seeing several different countries horror genre films as well as other genres from the 70's time period, I came to the conclusion that "A Bell from Hell" was a bit clunkier than it could have been for a horror film. The story involves a young man coming home to his family estate to get revenge for his imprisonment in an Insane Asylum. Some of the subplots don't help move the story along and feel unfulfilled to me.

The young man is played by Renaud Verley, who's a French native working in Spain on this and a few other productions. His character plays a few jokes on people during the course of the movie that don't feel like they belonged with this story. The only reason they're in the movie is to serve their purpose and they don't add anything. He enjoys a few prosthetic gags early on and has a life-sized model of himself sent to the house which later on someone believes is Juan (or John in the English dubbed version) and it's destroyed. It doesn't make any sense when Juan tries to save a young woman in a boat then not much else comes of it other than a bandaged Juan. Maybe it's to give his character an alibi, but it's unclear even after watching the movie a few times to pick up things I may have missed the first time.

Having a bell sent to the local church gives us the title of the movie, and it plays a very small part in the film. For a brief moment the bell doesn't ring when the church alter boys pull the rope. Not much else comes of it and even now, I never really got a clear reason for it not working.

A good deal of the camera work in the movie also doesn't help with the story. There's a lot of unnecessary shake in the camera, to me suggesting that it wasn't on stable ground when they shot. Those things could and should have been adjusted when they shot, not left in for the audience to be taken out of the film with.

About half way through the movie is when the real story begins to unfold. Juan starts to seduce one of his cousins which is disturbing at best, and begins a game of cat and mouse with the rest of the family to begin killing them. His home becomes sort of a petting zoo during dinner one night which is funny, but again it doesn't pay off anywhere else in the story, unless you count the bees used to kill his Aunt, which had no part of dinner.

One redeeming point to the movie is the way the girls get away from Juan in the end. They help each other out as one slips their bonds but doesn't leave the rest. All the while in the background of the place they are all staying at is running clips from the childhood of the five people.

Of all the clips we've watched this week and A Bell from Hell, I couldn't pick a really good movie out of the bunch. Alucarda had a good story with a little bit of blood (okay, a lot of blood) and some possessed people. The Black Pit of Dr. M has some funny moments that were supposed to be scary. Dr. M had a split in personality that seemed comical, not very scary. In all, this generation of import horror didn't terrorize more than it made me laugh. It would be the director, Claudio Guerin's last film, so he couldn't scare us any longer.