And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (36 page)

General Charles de Gaulle, who for more than four years had led the French fight against Germany, first from London, then from Algiers, returned to Paris on liberation day, August 25, 1944. The following morning, he walked down the avenue des Champs-Elysées and was acclaimed by Parisians. (
Roger-Viollet
)

After the liberation of France, writers and artists were among tens of thousands of men and women brought to trial on charges of collaborating with the enemy. The writer Robert Brasillach, left, was condemned to death and shot on February 6, 1941. Sacha Guitry, right, was jailed for sixty days, but legal proceedings against him continued until August 1947, when his case was shelved. (
Top Foto/Roger-Viollet
)

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CHAPTER 10
_·
Distraction on Screen

THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
is remembered as a golden age of French cinema, but the truth is more nuanced: of the 220 films made in France between June 1940 and August 1944, only a handful were memorable and the most popular of all, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece,
Les Enfants du paradis
, was released only after the liberation of France. Yet the movie industry had good reason to feel upbeat. It had a captive audience, one that was eager to flee the ennui of daily life into the laughter and tears of the screen (and, in winter, into the warmth of a crowded theater). By 1943, movie attendance was 40 percent higher than in 1938. As important, “enemy” films, first British, then American, were banned, so that, with the exception of German movies, which few French filmgoers wanted to see, foreign competition largely disappeared. Even within the industry, there was less competition. Some major talent left for the United States. And, perhaps unintentionally, the Germans made further room in the industry by expelling Jewish producers, directors and actors from the profession and banning French films made before 1937. Henri-Georges
Clouzot, Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker, Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara would be among directors who made their names during the occupation.

The key variable was how the Nazis defined their interests. They would allow nothing anti-German or excessively nationalistic to appear on French screens, but even Goebbels regarded cinema as a good way of keeping the French distracted. A movie buff himself, he also had a soft spot for French stars: one famous photograph taken in July 1939, barely one month before war broke out, shows him posing with Fernandel and Elvire Popesco while visiting the Berlin set of Albert Valentin’s
L’Héritier des mondésir
. Less predictably, while dozens of French films were made in Germany in the 1930s, Goebbels now wanted Germany to make commercially successful French films in France itself. The man he sent to Paris to execute this mandate was Alfred Greven, a forty-year-old World War I veteran and Nazi Party member. A longtime producer at the Berlin-based studio Universum Film AG, or UFA, he was a cultivated man who spoke fluent French and admired French cinema. He also knew many French producers, directors and actors who had worked for UFA in Berlin. Once in Paris, he created a new German-owned studio, Continental Films, and assumed control of both a distribution affiliate and a company managing theaters once owned by Jews. Under his guidance, he imagined French cinema—or at least his films—assuming the dominant position in Europe enjoyed by Hollywood before the war.

The industry as a whole fell under the responsibility of a section of the Propaganda Staffel called the Referat Film, run by a taciturn German officer known to the French only as Dr. Diedrich. This unit was in charge of authorizing screenplays, production schedules, distribution, film crews and actors. It also issued a list of two hundred films that could not be shown, some for being anti-German, others for having Jewish actors or directors, a dozen for being so pro-Nazi as likely to provoke French fury. One obvious target of censorship was any film made by Max Ophüls, a German-born Jewish director who had fled to France in 1933 and had recently sought refuge in Switzerland. Soon the list of banned films was expanded to include those of directors who had left for the United States, like Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier and René Clair. A few films in production before the fall of France were abandoned. Delannoy’s
Macao
had to be reshot because its male lead, the Austrian actor Erich von Stroheim, was a renowned
anti-Nazi who was already in the United States. Two years later, the film was released as
L’Enfer du jeu
, with von Stroheim’s scenes now played by Pierre Renoir, a son of the painter and the older brother of Jean Renoir.

In the fall of 1940, the only moviemaking was taking place in the unoccupied zone: in Marseille, where Marcel Pagnol, who was also a novelist and playwright, completed
La Fille du puisatier;
and in Nice’s Victorine Studios, where Abel Gance, best known for his silent movie
Napoléon
, began shooting
Vénus aveugle
, which he dedicated to Pétain. But both men were soon disillusioned: Pagnol chose to destroy his only other film,
La Prière aux étoiles
, while Gance, whose father’s family had Jewish roots, moved to Spain after making
Le Capitaine Fracasse
in 1943.

The French movie world itself was slow to adjust to the new regimes, those of the occupier and of Vichy, which also assumed a right to censor screenplays and movies. Having fled Paris in June 1940, many producers, directors and actors chose to remain in that welcoming stretch of Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Nice. Then, in October, Vichy’s Statute on Jews confirmed what many had feared: that Jews could no longer work in cinema, an industry that French Fascists had long claimed was dominated by Jews. Lucien Rebatet, the anti-Semitic critic of
Je suis partout
, claimed that 82 of 110 new French films in 1938 were produced by Jews. In 1941, he returned to the subject in a book called
Les Tribus du cinéma et du théâtre
, the
tribus
, or “tribes” being Jews.

According to one study, Jews accounted for only 15 percent of all movie-industry workers—some 9,000 out of 60,000—but these included the owners of more than forty movie theaters, as well as a score of important producers, some of whom had also done business in Germany before the war. The theaters were quickly taken over or Aryanized, but experienced foreign-born Jewish producers like Gregor Rabinovitch, Arnold Pressburger, Joseph Bercholz, Serge Sandberg and Simon Schiffrin could not easily be replaced.
^*
The story is told that the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert warned Greven that his cause was lost: “Because you have no Jew with you. Look at Hollywood. You can’t make movies without
them.” Subsequently Greven asked the screenwriter Jean Aurenche if he knew any Jewish writers who would be willing to write for him. As Aurenche recalled the conversation, Greven explained: “I read very few interesting screenplays. You know why? Because there are no more Jews in France or Germany. And many of the best screenwriters and directors were Jews.”
¹
Greven heeded his words, at least in one noteworthy case. Although he knew that Jean-Paul Le Chanois was a Jew with the family name of Dreyfus, he hired him to write the screenplays for four Continental movies:
Picpus, La Main du diable, Vingt-cinq ans de bonheur
and
Cécile est morte!
Two more Jews, Henri Calef and Jacques Cohen, also worked as screenwriters in the unoccupied zone.

By early 1941, Boulogne-Billancourt and a score of other Paris studios had reopened and, along with Pathé-Cinéma, Gaumont and numerous smaller French companies, Continental Films at last started making movies. In 1941 alone, Greven’s firm produced eleven films, starting with two thrillers made by experienced directors,
L’Assassinat du Père Noël
(The Murder of Father Christmas) by Christian-Jaque and
Le Dernier des six
(The Last of Six) by Georges Lacombe. Its third production was
Premier rendez-vous
, directed by Henri Decoin, who had made several prewar films for UFA in Berlin and whose strongest card was that he was married to France’s biggest star, Danielle Darrieux. “We were in Cannes together, but then he went to Paris and called me from there to join him,” she later recalled.

It didn’t seem strange to make a film for Continental because I’d already made so many films in Germany before the war. They’d make French and German-language versions of the same movies. It was funny because if they were shooting the German version first, we’d peep to see how they were doing it. My very first film,
Le Bal
, made by a German called Wilhelm Thiele, was like that. Everyone said, “Ah, the little girl.” I was fourteen, and after that I made lots of films in Germany. Later, I’d hear things, that homosexuals were being arrested, that Hitler was evil, but I was really very naïve.
²

After
Premier rendez-vous
, where she appeared opposite the rising screen heartthrob Louis Jourdan, Darrieux made two more movies for Continental Films,
Caprices
, directed by Léo Joannon, and
La Fausse maîtresse
by André Cayette.

From the comfort of his new office at 104 avenue des Champs-Élysées, Greven set about recruiting other top directors and actors. The immensely experienced Maurice Tourneur would be the most active of Continental’s directors, with six films, while Richard Pottier made five, Cayette four, Decoin three and both Christian-Jaque and Clouzot two each. Among actors, along with Darrieux, Greven hired both established and rising stars, including Fernandel, Robert Le Vigan, Pierre Fresnay, Edwige Feuillère, Jean-Louis Barrault, Harry Baur, Albert Préjean, Raimu, Suzy Delair, Michel Simon, Ginette Leclerc and Martine Carol. Of these, only Le Vigan displayed overt sympathy for the Nazis; the others presumably never imagined that exercising their profession in this way could damage their reputation. In that sense, it was Carné’s good fortune that no Continental movie ever carried his name. “After I was demobilized,” he later recounted, “Greven summoned me and asked me to make films for Continental Films. I demanded in exchange that the screenplay be chosen by mutual accord and that the film be made in France. I was called to Matignon
^*
and told that I would not be allowed to make films. Then Continental agreed to the two clauses and I signed, but I made no film for Greven. Instead I signed up with an independent producer to make three films.”
³

Still, those working for Continental enjoyed many advantages, not the least of which was job stability: directors were given three-movie contracts and were confident that financing would be forthcoming, while technicians were hired for one year. Continental’s screenplays were also waved past German censors, while Greven himself ensured that productions were supplied with film stock, clothes for costumes and even electricity for studio work. French producers, in contrast, had to negotiate their scripts with the Referat Film, which also supervised the actual shooting of films and decided if the final version could be released. Dr. Diedrich, who often appeared unannounced at studios, was himself not short of opinions. “In the past, French films had a negative quality and were made by Jewish producers who assumed no moral responsibility and were in effect vile speculators,” he said in a speech to the industry in September 1941. But the French people, he went on, could now look forward to “wholesome films, which are worthy of the
artistic heritage of the country and carry the stamp of the new order.”
⁴

The Germans also occasionally banned or censored parts of films made in Marseille and Nice that Vichy had already approved. Vichy would in turn prohibit movies made in the occupied zone, which it considered damaging to France’s moral welfare. The formation in late 1940 of a new professional organization, the Comité d’Organisation de l’Industrie Cinématographique, COIC,
^*
served both French and German interests. Headed by Raoul Ploquin, a producer who had worked with Greven in Berlin, its aim was to give a structure to France’s disorganized movie industry. In 1944, for instance, it founded the country’s first film school, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, IDHEC. Yet the COIC’s first action was to remind the industry that the Statute on Jews had excluded Jews from all jobs in cinema. In practice, since Jews could not obtain COIC’s new professional card, they could not work in the industry.

Until November 1942, Vichy’s Information Secretariat had responsibility for monitoring movie production in the south. What Vichy wanted was a French cinema that promoted the family, rural and Catholic values of the National Revolution. Or, as Ploquin put it in August 1941, the aim was to raise the artistic and moral level of French cinema “by not allowing morbid and depressing films to poison the soul of the French public.”
⁵
That said, both Vichy and the Propaganda Staffel cheerfully approved three poisonous propaganda films:
Les Corrupteurs
, a twenty-nine-minute anti-Semitic documentary by Pierre Ramelot shown in 1942 before Decoin’s popular
Les Inconnus dans la maison
(which also had suggestions of anti-Semitism);
Forces occultes
, an anti-Freemason and anti-Semitic diatribe in the form of a full-length feature made in 1943 by Jean Mamy
^*
under the name of Paul Riche; and an anti-Communist documentary,
Français, vous avez la mémoire courte
(People of France, You Have a Short Memory). To reach a larger public, Vichy also drummed out its political message through Gaumont’s
France actualités
, the fifteen-minute newsreels that preceded every feature film and were devoted to glorifying Pétain and the National Revolution. It was not long before audiences responded to it with whistles and shouts of abuse.
Then, after orders were issued for the theater lights to stay on during the newsreels, many cinemagoers made a point of arriving just in time for the opening credits of the feature film.