Happy Birthday, Jacques Becker! Born today in 1906 as Jacques Louis Thomas Becker, this French screenwriter and film director first worked in the 1930s as an assistant to French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author Jean Renoir during what is considered the latter's peak period.
Becker's interest in films was stimulated by a meeting with American film director, film producer, and screenwriter King Vidor ('The Big Parade', 'The Crowd', 'Stella Dallas'), who offered him employment in the United States as actor and assistant director. However, Becker remained in France.
In the 1930s, he eventually worked as an assistant to Renoir during what is considered the latter's peak period.
These included such works as his 1937 French black and white drama/anti-war film 'La Grande Illusion' ('The Grand Illusion') and his forty-minute 1946 French black and white drama/short film 'Partie de campagne' ('A Day in the Country').
In the early part of World War II, Becker was held in a German prisoner-of-war camp for a year. During the Nazi occupation of France, he later became a film director in his own right.
He also joined the Comité de libération du cinéma français. This was an organization of filmmakers in France created in 1943.
In the early 1960s, Becker co-wrote and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 1960 French black and white crime/drama film 'Le Trou' ('The Hole').
The film is an adaptation of French writer and filmmaker of Corsican origin José Giovanni's (the pseudonym of Joseph Damiani) 1957 novel The Break. Giovanni also co-wrote the screenplay.
His debut novel, it is based on a real escape attempt by Giovanni from the La Santé Prison in 1947. The prison is one of the most infamous in France.
The film follows four prison inmates (Michel Constantin, Raymond Meunier, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy), who have been hatching a plan to literally dig out of jail
Sometime later, another prisoner, Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), is moved into their cell. Together, they each take a risk and share their plan with the newcomer.
Over the course of three days, the prisoners and friends break through the concrete floor using a bed post and begin to make their way through the sewer system. -- yet their escape is anything but assured.
The film balances lyrical humanism with a tense, unshakable air of imminent danger. This was also Becker's final feature.
For the film, Becker used mostly non-actors for the film's main roles, including one man (Jean Keraudy) who, along with Giovanni, was actually involved in the 1947 escape attempt. While playing Roland Darbant, Kerraudy also introduces the film.
Becker passed on February 21, 1960 in Paris, France. He was later interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. Becker was 53. This was just weeks after shooting on 'Le Trou' had wrapped.
The following month, 'Le Trou' was entered into the 13th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year. While there, it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. However, 'Le Trou' didn't win.
Two years later, 'Le Trou' was nominated for two BAFTA Awards for Best Actor (Philippe Leroy) and Best Film from Any Source (France). This occurred at the 15th British Academy Film Awards.
Jean-Lu Godard once said of the French filmmaker: "Before us, the only person who tried to see France was Jacques Becker."
An admiring François Truffaut once wrote, “Becker is an intimate and realistic filmmaker who is in love with verisimilitude and everyday realities."
Becker was called by French director, screenwriter, actor and producer Bertrand Tavernier “the finest French filmmaker of the ’40s and ’50s, the most even in quality, the smartest in his choices.
One reason Becker has been so regularly overlooked — even with such acknowledged classics like 'Le Trou', 'Casque d’Or' ('Golden Helmet') (1952) and 'Touchez Pas au Grisbi' ('Hands Off the Loot') (1954) on his relatively slender résumé is because he is so hard to pin down tonally or narratively.
Becker made period pieces, romantic dramas, comedies, gangster flicks. His work displays a certain patience toward his material and a generosity towards his characters, but often too varied ends; there's no overt, consistent Jacques Becker “feeling” or “sensibility.” At least, not in the traditional sense
While Becker remains lesser-known internationally than peers such as Renoir and French film director Marcel Carné ('Daybreak', 'Children of Paradise'), Becker is nonetheless regarded as a major French filmmaker, with 'Casque d'or' held in high esteem among film critics.
Becker is an easy director to like, but a more difficult one to get a handle on. Each of his thirteen features is eminently watchable, with three being undisputed classics.
Yet, despite being installed in the pantheon by the influential iconoclasts of the French journal Cahiers du cinéma, Becker was largely ignored during his lifetime, and several critics continue to question whether he merits a place among the front rank of French filmmakers.
However, the naysayers insist that he never emerged from the shadow of his mentor, Renoir, and failed to achieve a distinguishing signature in flitting between genres and settings.
Moreover, they reckon that the jobbing assignments Becker undertook in the mid-1950s disqualify him from auteur status.
It may not be easy to make a case for a director whose ambition was to make a film “with no beginning, no end, and virtually no story” in order to prove that “life is stronger than everything else”.
Even as fervent an admirer as Truffaut admitted that Becker was “anxious, distressed, elegant, lyrical, British, nervous [and] tormented”. In many ways, Becker was a director's director.
Yet, despite accusations that he had merely appropriated from Renoir (whom he had assisted on eight pictures between 1932 and 1938) trademark traits like a sound sense of place, a lyrical approach to realism and a generosity towards his characters and casts, Becker undoubtedly had a style of his own.
His camerawork might be unassuming, but it retained an elusive objectivity as it lingered on key details within the scene to reveal the personality of characters who “go on living off-screen”.
As a lover of jazz, his editing had a graceful precision and rhythmic fluency.
In fact, he saw himself as “something of an entomologist”, whose patient observation of the ‘temps mort’ or ‘time out’ between key plot points enabled him to examine the effect of environment and interaction on the behavior and emotions of his characters.
No wonder, then, that he preferred slender plots and small themes, which afforded him the space and time to develop character and reflect upon his own ideas and preoccupations.
Becker had been active from 1935–1960.
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