Movie review - "Wicked City" (1949) **1/2

Enjoyable old melodrama was shot in France with French talent but done in English. It stars the husband and wife team of Jean Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez. Aumont is fine - I'm not a big fan of him as an actor but he's okay.

The surprise is Montez who is actually good - maybe "competent" is more accurate, but she's certainly more natural and skilled than in her famous Universal movies. She's a vixen who romances sailor Aumont then is responsible for him being knocked out. He goes off to romance Lili Palmer (giving the best performance in the film) then comes back to get revenge on Montez, and go to prison.

There's some decent seaside atmosphere, and interesting use of whistling "Jingle Bells".

Movie review - "Jour de Fete" (The Big Day) (1949) **

Jacques Tati is supposed to be a genius and there were one or two funny moments in this but for the most part I found it very unfunny. The plot is about a rural French mailman who bludges most of the day - forever stopping to chat to people etc - then becomes worried about new fangled methods of transport making his job obsolete so goes all out to deliver his mail.

The good bits included a gag involving a cross eyed person trying to hammer a pike and some antics on the bike. For most of the part I found it too illogical, and not in a fun way but an annoying one. Uninteresting support cast, crappy colour, it dragged on and on.

Book review – “Sun and Shadow” by Jean-Pierre Aumont

Aumont belongs to that sub-category of movie stars – foreigners who went to Hollywood and usually played second leads in between some interesting marriages. Michael Wilding is another I can think of in this category. Nonetheless, he had a fascinating life and I really enjoyed his memoirs. 

 

Aumont has been blessed by good and bad fortune. He had only been acting for a short time before being picked to act in a play by Jean Cocteau and Louis Jouvet. Good luck. His looks ensured he enjoyed a steady film career as a leading man during the 1930s (good luck), until interrupted by war. (Bad luck) He was on leave visiting his dying mother (bad luck) when his platoon was mostly wiped out (good luck). He managed to get a visa to America from Vichy France, was picked to act in a play with Katherine Cornell (through a French theatre acquaintance) which didn’t go to Broadway, but got him film offers. (Good luck). He signed with MGM, starred in two films (no support roles for him), the most notable of which was The Cross of Lorraine (good luck), then went to fight for the Free French in Africa, Italy and France. Real service too – driving tanks, in amidst running into Marlene Dietrich; he was injured twice. (Good and bad luck)

 

He returned to Hollywood, where his reign as a leading man didn’t last long (very few French accented actors have had a long reign as a star - Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier, maybe Louis Jourdan). However he did carve out a decent career as a second lead, in films like Lili and Hilda Crane. He also worked in France and on stage (including Broadway)… and even had a nightclub act (despite the fact he wasn’t the best singer). 

 

Aumont is still perhaps best remembered (in a certain segment of the population, anyway) for his marriage to Maria Montez – the barely had started dating when he proposed, right before he took off for 18 months of service, but they were happy until her tragic early death (an odd one: a heart attack in a hot bath). Montez comes across a bit sketchy in this account - nice, beautiful, eccentric, devoted to her husband and astrologers. Apparently she and Aumont were going to star in Orphee for Jean Cocteau - the mind boggles. (They couldn't get the financing then the next they heard of it he was making it with Jean Marais.) Her death is one of the most moving sections of the book, though. 

 

Aumont later married Marisa Pavan, and was also in the 40s engaged to Hedy Lamarr; he also hints at a romance with Grace Kelly (who was alive when this book came out). His daughter Tina became an actor and was married to Christian Marquand (like Aumont, a French star who played some support roles in Hollywood). 

 

Aumont was probably too good looking to write a really good book – I get the feeling he wasn’t as an accomplished raconteur in the way, say, Michael Caine or David Niven was. He’s a bit up himself at times, constantly referring to the fact that he got better reviews on stage than his female co-stars. 

 

 But there’s lots to enjoy. Particularly strong is a chapter on starring with Vivien Leigh on Broadway, which includes some astute analysis of Leigh’s personality and acting, as well as an account of her breakdown; also performing with Al Pacino on Broadway (apparently Al loved to paraphrase), working with Cocteau, Louis Jouvet, Joan Littlewood (in a play on the Congo Crisis), and Francois Truffaut on Day for Night (he says things like “the problem with real life is it’s so badly directed” – very Truffaut – the director wrote the foreword to this book); the elongated shoot that was Castle Keep. Worth a read.

Book review - "You see I haven't forgotten: Yves Montand" by Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman (1992)

Biography of Yves Montand, singer best known to Western movie fans for having an affair with Marilyn Monroe on the set of Let's Make Love. Montand never quite made it as a film star in Hollywood films - Warners spotted his talent in the 1940s and tried to sign him when he was just an emerging singer; he returned when a superstar and made a series of films for Fox and later musicals such as On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. But he really hit his straps as a leading man for Costa Gravas. This book is probably definitive account of his life - it is particularly fascinating on the politics.

Montand was actually Italian - his family fled to France in the 1920s to escape fascism. His dad became a commie, which you can understand; so did his sons; but his son Julien remained a die hard commie for most of his life, which I'm sorry makes you a moron esp after post WW2 and 1956 and 1968. Montand remained very pro communist until around the 60s and 70s (it's weird that this could be the case but this was France) but then became anti-communist, causing a split. His opinions were valued in France - in the early 80s some polls said 30% of the population wanted him to run for president!

The book accounts all this brilliantly; it also has useful descriptions of Montand's singing and acting (which is a little tricky to those such as myself unfamiliar with them - but how else do you do it in a book?)

It's no surprise to see Montand was a ladies' man, despite being married to Simone Signoret for around 30 years - he was slim, had all his hair, could sing, dance and act, grew up in Marseilles in poverty so had working class street cred, worked as a wharf labourer so had even more cred, worked for a year in his sister's hairdressing salon so learned a lot about women quickly. Never had much of a war service, but nobody's perfect. One can't feel he had some attraction to famous ladies, his paramours including Edith Piaf, Signoret and Monroe.