Prick me

René Clément directed that glorious celebration of La Résistance, La bataille du Rail, whose release in 1946 did so much to enable the French to create an all-pervasive myth of the Second World War as a time of France's glorious struggle against the Nazi oppressors rather than being largely one of ignoble (if entirely explicable) collaboration.


La bataille du Rail is shot in a semi-documentary style which lends an added air of authenticity to the proceedings.


These plucky little Frenchies would not be intimidated by the barbaric Hun, the Nazi scourge that was barely human.


The movie tale of courageous derring-do, of a heroic David-and-Goliath struggle, so thoroughly captured the French imagination that blowing up trains came to feature heavily in Second World War memorials -- such as this one, at Nice:


While there the brave men and women of La Résistance are laying explosives on the tracks, in that same monument a locomotive sails serenely overhead, perhaps on its way to the calmer times of the post-War era:


René Clément was a versatile director, and after the enormous success of La Bataille he was propelled into the upper leagues.

He settled on a rather gamey melodrama for his next big movie, Les Maudits. Also set in the War, this tells the tale of a group of Nazis who, in the dying days of the Reich, with Hitler shortly to kill himself, set sail from the submarine pens in Oslo headed for escape to Latin America.


The rather odd assortment of passengers includes a General, various sympathisers and their wives/mistresses, a senior Nazi zealot (one of the scariest incarnations of a Nazi ever to be filmed) and his toy-boy lover, and a kidnapped French doctor.


It's not a well-known film, although the claustrophobia of the submarine is well captured and there's a fascination in how this will all play out. However, I'm ashamed to admit that, at last night's screening of a nitrate print at the National Film Theatre, I fell asleep.

This is in no way a reflection on the skills of René Clément or of his brilliant Oscar-nominated cinematographer, Henri Alekan. Nor, indeed, was it anything to do with the exquisitely sexual charms of the actor playing the gay toy-boy, Michel Auclair (seen here in another film entirely -- bizarrely it's quite hard to find decent images from Les Maudits:)


No, it was a reflection of an exhausting week and an exhausting weekend followed by an exhausting Monday. I am tired. Unfortunately I only had a holiday ten minutes ago.

Damnit.