French to a fault
By Michael J. Roberts
"After having been the most sought-after woman in Paris, I am now the most shunned." ~ Arletty (After her conviction for treason)
French actress, singer and model Arletty was born Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat, outside of Paris in 1898 to a large working class family. She worked office and factory jobs before she modelled, danced as a chorus girl and as a singer in music hall revues as a young woman and was then encouraged into the theatre at age 21 where she worked on and off for the next 40 plus years. Scared by the war, where her young lover was killed, she became a lifelong pacifist and never married – a not uncommon feature for young women who lost their sweethearts in WWI. After 10 years stage experience Arletty started to appear in films in 1930, coinciding with the advent of sound in French cinema. Her captivating, serene beauty soon found her a supporting part in Jacques Feyder's Pension Mimosas, with a script by Charles Spaak and, crucially, the assistant director was Marcel Carné. She also had a stage success in L’École des Veuves a Jean Cocteau play (written for her) and also in Fric Frac with Michel Simon, which she would later film with him.
Simon also turned up in Raymond Bernard’s Lovers and Thieves and for Sacha Guitry (besotted with the beautiful actress and wooing her as much as directing her) in three films in close succession, Let’s Make a Dream, Pearls Of The Crown and Désiré. – she rejected his personal overtures but made a lifelong friend. A couple of non-descript programmers kept her before the public, but also were worthy efforts with fine directors like Marc Allégret. She teamed up again with the singular Michel Simon for Mirages, and stardom was finally confirmed up her with Marcel Carné’s masterful Hôtel du Nord, scripted by Henri Jeanson and Jean Aurenche which also starred Annabelle and Jean-Pierre Aumont. Arletty played a prostitute, Madame Raymonde and she had a career defining scene, crossing a bridge over the Canal St.-Martin in the glorious studio recreation by Alexandre Trauner of the Paris canal setting, with her bad boy lover Louis Jouvet. She gives her response to his suggestion he prefers to be alone because she brings down his mood, or the “Atmosphère” around him – “Atmosphère,! Atmosphère!!” she shrieks in response and burned herself into cinema consciousness for all time.
Suddenly now a big movie star she had found her Svengali with Carné and his brilliant writer Jacques Prévert. They were associated with the Poetic Realist genre of the period and she followed it with another prime example, Le Jour se lève, this time opposite big star Jean Gabin and wonderful character actor Jules Berry. Arletty is magnificent as the worldly wise Clara, in love with Gabin’s Françoise but knowing her hopes are doomed. She followed it with a sparkling film version of the hit play she’d done with Michel Simon, Fric Frac, ably filmed by Claude Autant-Lara according to Arletty, although the directing credit went to producer Maurice Lehmann. Jean Boyer directed her and the quirky Simon again in a breezy comedy, Circonstances Atténuantes, another solid box office hit. She starred with Marcel Dalio and Erich Von Stroheim in a crime thriller Thunder Over Paris, released just before the outbreak of WWII and with Arletty arguably at the peak of her commercial career – but of course, the war changed everything.
The Nazi occupation and the collaboration of the Vichy regime under Pétain led to effective control of the output of French cinema from mid-1940. The Nazi’s set up Continental Film under Alfred Greven and forced other producers to play safe with their subject matter causing a slew of light romantic comedies or fluffy period pieces that did not speak to the current political situation. In a sparse two years, Arletty starred in a Napoleonic set story based on a play by Sardou, Madame Sans-Géne, and in a drama with Mireille Balin, The Woman I Loved Most. She also did two comedies, one for Jean Boyer, Bolero and one for Jean-Pierre Feydeau, The Lover of Borneo, both safe subjects for the Nazi overlords. What Arletty was doing to fill the time in her reduced work schedule was cozying up to the occupiers and one in particular, the German Luftwaffe officer, Hans-Jürgen Soehring. Ten years her junior, the pair had fallen in love and the officer even proposed marriage. Arletty rejected this proposal as she did all others but the couple remained in contact after the war and Arletty’s subsequent problems the liaison caused. The fact that she’d also had an affair with the wife of a Resistance fighter at the beginning of the war would not be a mitigating factor in her defence when the reckoning came.
Arletty had a large network of friends who were connected to the Nazi occupiers and spent time at glamourous parties with others in the industry including Sacha Guitry, Robert le Vigan, Mireille Balin, Jean Cocteau and Corinne Luchaire (Les Dernier Tournant) whose father was friends with the German Ambassador to France, Otto Abetz. She was also a close friend of the Vichy French Prime Minister’s daughter, Josée Laval and Coco Chanel, both accused of collaboration. She was also a friend of well-known writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a notorious anti-semite and Nazi cheerleader, who wrote a supporting piece for her in 1948. In this environment the beautiful people partied like it was 1939 but the consequences for all would be significant. Prime Minister Pierre Laval was executed for treason after the war.
Against this backdrop she remarkably enjoyed two artistic triumphs, both courtesy of her friend Marcel Carné, the first of these was Les Visiteurs du Soir (1943), where the inventive script by Jacques Prévert contained a subtle invocation of the resilience of France, one totally missed by the Nazis and by many of the French viewers too. Arletty was at the height of her powers and the Nazis were in decline when Carné and Prévert made one of the most celebrated films in World Cinema, Les Enfants du Paradis. Arletty was central and perfection as the goddess figure Garance, but her participation was fraught as she was pregnant by her Nazi lover and decided on an abortion, procured during production. Robert Le Vigan abandoned his role after two days filming to flee France ahead of the Allied liberation and was replaced by Pierre Renoir. Carné and Prévert brought Poetic Realism to its apogee with the film, redolent of impressionistic realism tinged with melancholy within Trauner’s impressive sets and Arletty represented the epitome of feminine allure and mystery as Garance, an astonishing career highpoint at age 45.
The war ended and the merde hit the fan for those who were a little too close to the Nazi occupiers. Unlike others Arletty refused to run from Paris at the Liberation. She was, however, arrested by partisans when she made her famous quip, “My heart is French but my ass is international.” In the immediate aftermath of the Liberation there was a period known as ‘épuration sauvage’ - broadly translated as savage purge. Because of her fame Arletty was spared the common ritual humiliation of being beaten, pack raped, insulted, spat on, hair shaved, a swastika drawn on her head and forced to parade half-naked through the streets of Paris. Her friend and co-star Mireille Balin (Pepe le Moko, Gueule d’Amour) was not so fortunate for her fraternisation with a Wehrmacht officer (to whom she was subsequently engaged) as she was gang raped by partisans and her lover was summarily executed before she went to prison and died in poverty and alcoholism aged 59.
Arletty moved into the next post-liberation phase (épuration légale), wherethe courts took over from vigilantes and she was tried, found guilty of treason and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment in 1945, but she only served two months in a very luxurious château. At her trail she said to the judge, ‘If you didn’t want us to sleep with the Germans, you should never have let them in.’ She was also banned from making films for three years. James Lord, the American writer and her friend, wrote about her punishment saying: “Arletty was too well known for the mere humiliation of having her head shaved, her naked skull tarred with a swastika and in this abject state paraded through the streets to confront the jeers and spittle of the mob. Prison would be none too good for her, people said, looking forward to severe retribution for the moral treason of which they found her guilty.” Collaboration Horizontale was the common accusation aimed at many women, as many as 20,000 cases, and it is estimated (quoted by historian Antony Beevor) that as many as 80,000 children were born to such illicit liaisons.
In 1949 she returned to screens opposite Erich Von Stroheim and Pierre Brasseur in the Bernard Roland film, Portrait of an Assassin and a string of noted directors still turned to the ageing actress for key support roles – Giles Granger (L’Amour Madame), Marcel L’Herbier (Mademoiselle’s Father), Robert Siodmak (The Great Game) and old friend Marcel Carné with a role opposite another ageing legend in Jean Gabin in L’Air de Paris. She returned to the stage in a Cocteau adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire as Blanche, a role she was born to play at that point in her life. She also starred on stage again in Marcel Achard’s Les Compagnons de la Marjolaine, in Colette’s Gigi (which enjoyed a long run) and later that decade Arletty would star in another play by Williams, La Descente d'Orphée (Orpheus Descending).
In 1954 the bisexual Arletty played a lesbian Inez in Jacqueline Audry’s Huis Clos, a notorious Jean-Paul Sartre piece and another artistic high point, but in films she was now mostly a supporting actress, the older woman. She appeared in Henri Verneuil’s Maxime with Michèle Morgan and Charles Boyer and in Marc Allégret’s Drôle de Dimanche with Danielle Darrieux (who had her own collaboration story). Charles Gérard’s The Law of Men with Micheline Presle was one of her last screen roles in 1962, besides a bit part (ironically) in The Longest Day – Hollywood’s look at D-Day and the beginning of the Nazi end. In 1968, Arletty would return to the Paris stage in Cocteau's Montres Sacres, but a few years earlier she had begun to suffer a progressive loss of vision in her left eye and by the mid 1960s she was effectively blind. She died in 1992, effectively forgiven and widely loved by the French people.
Arletty was often spoken of as a French Garbo, and she shared many similarities with the Swedish legend. Garbo never married and had women lovers and never had children. They both lived their lives under the male gaze but on their own terms and were reclusive in their later years. Both embodied a mysterious feminine allure that entranced cinema goers and beguiled men for generations and both left indelible marks on the silver screen. Arletty also had the insouciance of a Marlene Dietrich to add to the Garbo airs and a presence of her own when she got down and dirty amongst the working class and grifters that Prévert and Carné put her way. Arletty was electric, she charged and changed the ‘Atmosphère!’
C’est formidable.