Summary
Daniel and Paul are two factory workers who supplement their income by some nocturnal
safe-cracking. But their luck soon runs out: caught red-handed during a robbery,
Paul kills a man before fleeing whilst Daniel is shot and arrested. Some time later,
Daniel manages to escape whilst being transferred to a prison and goes into hiding in
Haute-Provence. There, he befriends the owner of a remote petrol station, Thomas,
who invites him to live with him and his wife, Maria, in exchange for doing odd jobs.
When she discovers that Daniel is an escaped criminal and safe-cracker, Maria decides
to coerce him into breaking open her husband’s safe, so that she can run off with his
substantial nest egg. Daniel is reluctant to betray his new friend but has no choice
when Maria threatens to hand him over to the police. When he learns the truth,
Thomas turns on his wife, but she kills him in self-defence. Having disposed of
the body, Maria and Daniel continue to run the petrol station as if nothing has happened,
although Maria is still eager to escape with the money which remains locked up in the
safe. Then Daniel’s friend Paul makes an unexpected appearance. When she realises
that the newcomer is in the same line of business as Daniel, Maria finds him instantly
attractive...
Review
With this respectable adaptation of a well-known James Hadley Chase thriller novel, Julien
Duvivier offers a credible homage to the American B-movie and manages to impose on the
genre his own distinctive style. This is true film noir, in which the director’s
pessimistic streak (apparent in most of his post-World War Two films) is at its most acute.
There are also elements of suspense thriller (suggesting an influence from Alfred Hitchcock),
giving the film a striking modernity, particularly when it is compared with the later
films of Duvivier’s notable contemporaries.
Catherine Rouvel’s shockingly believable performance as the manipulative yet seductive
Maria epitomises the femme fatale of Duvivier’s later works (from the 1950s onwards) -
a vile, villainous creature totally lacking in humanity, whose only justification for
her behaviour is a tortured adolescence. The men who end up in her net are powerless
to resist her charms, too easily corrupted by her beauty, too naïve to realise the
extent of her cruelty. In the failed criminal Daniel Boisett, she finally meets
her match, and through Daniel - a conventional film noir hero, magnificently played by
Robert Hossein - we witness the extent of her depravity. Maria is a woman with absolutely
no soul at all.
The relationship between Maria and Daniel is the most fascinating aspect of this film.
Both characters are fugitives: Daniel is literally on the run, charged with a murder he
did not commit; Maria is escaping from a past she cannot forget, to a future she can never
attain. In the desert wilderness of an isolated mountain petrol station, the two
characters find the only snatch of happiness fate will afford them. Their contentment
lies not in the fact that they are free but in the knowledge that each has the possibility
of escaping. Of course, in the best tradition of film noir, it is all an illusion.
There is no escape, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - only death. It is
a harrowingly pessimistic portrayal of human existence, the impact of which is made more
acute by the realisation that what we see has more than a glimmer of truth about it.
Chair de poule may not have the impact or artistic quality of Duvivier’s earlier
films (indeed the opening scenes of the film are positively shoddy), but it is nonetheless
a compelling work which ought to be considered one of the best examples of French film
noir in the 1960s. The characters, the location and the situation are all skilfully
orchestrated and imbued with a spectacularly noirish atmosphere, to which Georges Delerue's
haunting music adds a great deal. Some sequences (notably the night-scene when Daniel
has to fend off two thuggish neighbours who are intent on digging up the dead petrol station
owner’s fortune) have a manic intensity, which are almost guaranteed to bring on the goose
pimples. Yet again, Duvivier, the master craftsman of French cinema, has more than
a few surprises for his unwitting audience.
Although at the time Duvivier was on the receiving end of some very harsh criticism (mainly
from the New Wave directors, Truffaut et al.), Chair de poule demonstrated that
his flair for filmmaking had not deserted him, even if the critics and cinema audiences
had. Compare this with film with the typical policier of the day and it is apparent
that it is a different kind of work altogether. This is no shallow imitation of American
film noir, but a film which skilfully uses the film noir trappings to express some rather
chilling thoughts on the darker aspects of human nature.
© James Travers 2003
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