The French New Wave's Love Affair With the B-Movie

À bout de souffle opens with a dedication to Monogram Pictures.

Monogram was a Poverty Row outfit that operated out of Los Angeles from 1931 until it renamed itself Allied Artists in 1953. It made Charlie Chan pictures, Bowery Boys pictures, westerns shot in a week, and second features designed to fill the bottom of a double bill and be forgotten by Thursday. It was, by any measure the American industry recognised, the cheap end of the cheap end.

In 1960, a thirty-year-old French critic making his first feature put that company’s name on screen before his own title, and film culture has been trying to work out how sincere he was ever since. The honest answer is that he was entirely sincere and also making a very shrewd argument about money.

The critics who needed Hollywood to be art

Cahiers du cinéma was founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and it very quickly acquired a stable of young writers with a grievance. In January 1954 the twenty-one-year-old François Truffaut published “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français”, an attack on the French industry’s prestige tradition and specifically on its screenwriters, whose literary adaptations he characterised as the work of people who despised cinema. The essay’s positive programme became the politique des auteurs: the claim that a film’s author is its director, and that authorship shows up in style rather than in subject matter.

The consequence was immediate and, to the French establishment, absurd. If the director is the author and style is the evidence, then Howard Hawks directing a programme picture is doing something more artistically serious than a respectable adaptation of a respectable novel. So the Cahiers writers went to the Cinémathèque and the Latin Quarter cinemas and came back with a canon that consisted almost entirely of American genre directors: Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Robert Aldrich, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger. Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer wrote the first serious book on Hitchcock in 1957, when the English-speaking world still filed him under entertainment. Truffaut spent a week interviewing him in 1962 and turned it into the most influential film book ever published.

They were right on the merits. Fuller’s undercover asylum picture, Ray’s doomed young couple, Bogart’s most frightening performance — these are extraordinary films, and the French saw it first because they were watching the direction while everyone else was reading the plot.

They were also making a case that a person with no money could direct.

The dedication was an inventory

Look at what the B-picture actually offered a young French critic in 1959.

It offered permission. If art can happen in a film shot in eleven days on standing sets, then the absence of a studio, a star and a budget is no longer disqualifying. The Cahiers group had none of those things and no realistic prospect of getting them through the French industry’s apprenticeship system, which required years as an assistant before anyone handed you a camera.

It also offered a working method. American second features had solved, at scale, the problem of how to make a watchable film for nothing: shoot on location, keep the cast small, keep the camera moving so the sets do not have to be dressed, let the plot carry the exposition. Detour — six days, one road, a fatalism no A-picture could have got past its producer — is the extreme demonstration. The economics of the double bill had accidentally produced a school.

And it offered subject matter with no cultural rent to pay. Nobody in Paris was going to object to a young man making a crime film, because crime films were beneath objection.

The pulp shelf

The adaptations tell the story better than the manifestos.

Truffaut’s second feature, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), comes from David Goodis’s Down There, a paperback original by the bleakest man in American crime writing. His The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Mississippi Mermaid (1969) both come from Cornell Woolrich, the author whose short story became Rear Window. Godard’s Bande à part (1964) is adapted from Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold. Pierrot le fou (1965) comes from Lionel White’s Obsession — and White also wrote the novel Kubrick filmed as The Killing, which makes him the accidental hinge between American and French crime cinema.

Alphaville (1965) goes further and adapts a franchise. Eddie Constantine had been playing Lemmy Caution, a hard-drinking American agent out of Peter Cheyney’s novels, in a series of French B-thrillers for a decade. Godard hired the actor, kept the character, kept the trench coat, and dropped him into a dystopia shot in the office blocks of contemporary Paris with no sets built at all. The most avant-garde science fiction film of its decade is a franchise entry.

This is a group of directors who read the same shelf their heroes filmed from, and who understood that a paperback original could be bought cheaply, stripped for structure, and abandoned halfway through.

What cheap actually bought

The craft argument sits in Breathless’s production, and it is worth getting the details right because they get romanticised.

Raoul Coutard shot the film hand-held, largely without lights, on real Paris streets with no permits and no crowd control. To do that he needed a film stock faster than anything sold for motion picture use, so he took Ilford HPS — a stills stock — and had it spliced into long rolls. The camera moved on a wheelchair pushed by the crew. Nothing was recorded live; the dialogue was post-synchronised in the Italian manner, which is why Belmondo and Seberg can play a scene on a boulevard with traffic going past.

Then the jump cuts, which are the most misunderstood thing in the film. Godard’s first assembly ran far too long. The received advice was to remove whole scenes. He removed material from inside scenes instead, cutting frames out of a continuous shot of a woman in a car so that her head jerks between positions, and left the discontinuity visible. A choice made in the cutting room under commercial pressure became the defining grammar of a movement.

That is the whole New Wave method in one anecdote. The constraint arrives first. The style is what you do with it. And it is exactly the lesson Poverty Row had been teaching for thirty years to an audience that was not listening.

Chabrol stayed

One member of the group took the argument literally for forty years, and he is the one the histories skip.

Claude Chabrol financed Le Beau Serge (1958) with his first wife’s inheritance and followed it with Les Cousins (1959), and those two films are usually credited with opening the door the others walked through. Then he did something none of his colleagues did: he became a genre director and stayed one. From Les Biches (1968) through La Femme infidèle (1969) and Le Boucher (1970), Chabrol made thrillers, dozens of them, at a rate that would have embarrassed a Poverty Row contract man, working the same small territory of provincial bourgeois murder over and over.

The critics who had championed the politique des auteurs were noticeably less enthusiastic about a Frenchman applying it. Chabrol’s consistency read as commercial cynicism where Hawks’s identical consistency had read as authorship. He kept working anyway, and his late run is the strongest sustained body of genre filmmaking anyone from the movement produced.

If the Cahiers thesis was right, Chabrol is its proof. He did what Hitchcock did — repeated himself with variations, inside a disreputable form, for a lifetime — and got the treatment Hitchcock got before Truffaut’s book rescued him.

The case against my own argument

The economic reading is tidy and it is incomplete, and two facts push back on it hard.

The first is chronology. Truffaut was writing love letters to Hawks and Hitchcock in 1954, when he had no money and no plausible route to a camera, and his enthusiasm was indistinguishable in kind from the enthusiasm he had in 1966 when he was an international name who could have financed anything. Godard put Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le fou and let him define cinema in a sentence about emotion, which is a fan’s gesture with no strategic value whatsoever. The love came first. The argument was built on it afterwards.

The second is that the B-picture strategy did not work commercially. Tirez sur le pianiste failed. Truffaut said afterwards that he had made it for himself and that the audience had declined to attend, and his next film was Jules et Jim. Godard’s genre pictures grew progressively more hostile to the genre they came from until the crime film disappeared entirely into essayism. The New Wave’s B-movie period is short, and it ends because the audience for a French film about American pulp turned out to be roughly the size of the Cahiers subscriber list.

So the affection was genuine and the tactic was a partial failure. My claim survives in a narrower form: the aesthetic argument and the financial reality were the same argument, and neither man would have been able to separate them if you had asked.

The debt returned

Jean-Pierre Melville is the figure who makes the whole exchange legible. He was making American crime films in French before the New Wave existed — Bob le flambeur in 1956 is the precursor everyone borrowed from — and Godard put him in Breathless as a novelist being interviewed. Melville then spent the next fifteen years distilling American noir into something colder and more formal than anything Hollywood attempted, and the Americans imported it back.

That is the shape of the thing. Los Angeles made cheap crime pictures. Paris decided they were literature. Paris made its own, on Paris money, using techniques Los Angeles had invented to save time. And by the 1990s an American video-shop clerk was naming his production company after a Godard film that was adapted from an American paperback, which is the loop closing on itself with a click.

Start with Breathless and Bob le flambeur, then read the dedication card again. Monogram made rubbish. Some of it was the best-directed rubbish in the world, and two young Frenchmen with no money were the only people in the building taking notes.