''Under the Roofs of Paris'' (french: Sous les toits de Paris) is a 1930 French film directed by
René Clair
René Clair (11 November 1898 – 15 March 1981), born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He wen ...
. The film was probably the earliest French example of a filmed musical-comedy, although its often dark tone differentiates it from other instances of the genre. It was the first French production of the sound film era to achieve great international success.
Plot
In a working-class district of Paris, Albert, a penniless street singer, lives in an attic room. He meets a beautiful Romanian girl, Pola, and falls in love with her; but he is not the only one, since his best friend Louis and the gangster Fred are also under her spell. One evening Pola dares not return home because Fred has stolen her key and she does not feel safe. She spends the night with Albert who, reluctantly remaining the gentleman, sleeps on the floor and leaves his bed to Pola. They soon decide to get married, but fate prevents them when Émile, a thief, deposits with Albert a bag full of stolen goods. It is discovered by the police, and Albert is sent to prison. Pola finds consolation with Louis. Later Émile is caught in his turn and admits that Albert was not his accomplice, which earns Albert his freedom. Fred has just got back together with Pola who has fallen out with Louis, and in a jealous fury at Albert's return Fred decides to provoke a knife fight with him. Louis rushes to Albert's rescue and the two comrades are re-united, but their friendship is clouded by the realisation that each of them is in love with Pola. Finally Albert decides to give up Pola to Louis.
Cast
*
Albert Préjean
Albert Préjean (27 October 1894 in Paris – 1 November 1979 in Paris) was a French actor, primarily in film. He served in World War I, and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d'honneur. With Lysiane Rey, he was the ...
as Albert
*
Pola Illéry
Paula Iliescu Gibson (18 December 1909 – 19 October 1993) known professionally as Pola Illery, was a Romanian-American actress and singer, best known for her appearances in early Cinema of France, French film, and of the latter after emigrating ...
as Pola
*
Edmond T. Gréville
Edmond T. Gréville (born Edmond Gréville Thonger; 20 June 1906 – 26 May 1966) was a French film director and screenwriter. He was married to the actress Vanda Gréville.
Career
Gréville began his career as a film journalist and critic. ...
as Louis
*Bill Bocket as Émile, the thief
*
Gaston Modot
Gaston Modot (31 December 1887 – 20 February 1970) was a French actor. For more than 50 years he performed for the cinema working with a number of great French directors.
Biography
Modot lived in Montmartre at the beginning of the 20th cen ...
as Fred
*
Raymond Aimos
Raymond Aimos (4 February 1889 – 22 August 1944) was a French film actor.Capua p.127
Selected filmography
* '' Accused, Stand Up!'' (1930)
* ''Under the Roofs of Paris'' (1930)
* ''Wooden Crosses'' (1932)
* ''Aces of the Turf'' (1932)
* ''The ...
as "un gars du milieu"
*
Thomy Bourdelle
Thomy Charles Bourdelle (20 April 1891 – 27 June 1972) was a French actor.
Bourdelle was born in Paris and died in Toulon, Var, France.
Selected filmography
*'' Roger la Honte'' (1922)
* '' Surcouf'' (1925)
* '' Jocaste'' (1925)
* ''Jean ...
as François
*
Paul Ollivier
François Hilarion Paul Olivari, stage name Paul Ollivier (10 February 1876 - 10 June 1948) was a French film actor.
Selected filmography
* ''The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge'' (1925)
* ''The Queen of Moulin Rouge'' (1926)
* ''The Imaginary Voyag ...
as the drunken customer in the café
*
Jane Pierson
Jane Pierson was a French film actress.Goble p.130 She appeared in fifty five films between 1924 and 1952.
Selected filmography
* ''The Imaginary Voyage'' (1926)
* '' Captain Rascasse'' (1927)
* '' The Marriage of Mademoiselle Beulemans'' (1927)
...
as the fat woman with a purse (uncredited)
Background
The arrival of synchronised sound in the cinema in the late 1920s provoked mixed reactions among French film-makers, and some of the masters of silent film technique were pessimistic about the impact it would have. In 1927, even before ''
The Jazz Singer
''The Jazz Singer'' is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated ...
'' had been shown in Paris, René Clair wrote: "It is not without a shudder that one learns that some American manufacturers, among the most dangerous, see in the talking picture the entertainment of the future, and that they are already working to bring about this dreadful prophecy". Elsewhere he described the talking picture as "a redoubtable monster, an unnatural creation, thanks to which the screen would become poor theatre, the theatre of the poor". It was therefore an irony that it was Clair who would produce the French cinema's first big international success with a sound picture in ''Sous les toits de Paris''.
Clair accepted the inevitability of the talking picture but at first retained very specific views about the way that sound should be integrated into film. He was reluctant to use dialogue or sound effects naturalistically, and maintained that the alternate use of the image of the subject and of the sound produced by it - not their simultaneous use - created the best effect.
In 1929, the German film company Tobis Klangfilm (Tobis Sound-Film) established a studio at
Épinay near Paris which was equipped for sound production. This studio inaugurated a policy of making French-speaking films in France rather than importing French performers to make French versions of films in Germany. The company concentrated on prestigious productions, and they recruited René Clair to undertake one of their first French projects with ''Sous les toits de Paris''. Other early French sound films were ''
Prix de beauté
Prix was an American power pop band formed in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1975 by Tommy Hoehn and Jon Tiven. The group ended up primarily as a studio project. Its recordings were produced by Tiven along with former Big Star member Chris Bell, who als ...
'' (''Miss Europe'') and ''
L'Âge d'or
''L'Age d'Or'' (french: L'Âge d'Or, ), commonly translated as ''The Golden Age'' or ''Age of Gold'', is a 1930 French surrealist satirical comedy film directed by Luis Buñuel about the insanities of modern life, the hypocrisy of the sexual mor ...
''.
Production
René Clair filmed ''Sous les toits de Paris'' at Épinay between 2 January and 21 March 1930. The setting of the film was defined by the elaborately realistic yet evocative set which
Lazare Meerson
Lazare Meerson (1900–1938) was a Russian-born cinema art director. After emigrating to France in the early 1920s, he worked on French films of the late silent cinema and the early 1930s, particularly those directed by René Clair and Jacques Fe ...
devised to depict a street of Parisian tenements, populated by familiar archetypes of 'ordinary life': the young newly-weds, the pickpocket, the street singer. The film begins with a long crane shot (engineered by cameraman
Georges Périnal
Georges Périnal (1897 Paris– 23 April 1965 London) was a French cinematographer. He is best known for his works with Jean Grémillon, René Clair, Jean Cocteau, Michael Powell, Charlie Chaplin, Otto Preminger.
Partial filmography
* '' Six e ...
) which starts among the rooftops and then descends along the street closing in on a group of people gathered around a singer, whose song (the title-song) gradually swells up on the soundtrack. (A reversal of this shot ends the film.) This is the first of many ways in which Clair affirms his loyalty to the style and techniques of silent cinema while creating a distinctive role for the new element of sound. Elsewhere, a conversation is cut off by the closing of a glass door and then has to be followed in dumb-show; the hour of midnight is indicated by the sound of a mere three chimes - and the superimposition of a clockface; and a knife-fight is first seen but not heard as a passing train drowns out all else, and then the fight's continuation in darkness is conveyed only by its sounds until the headlights of a car illuminate the scene. Such devices are not only imaginative but amount almost to a satire of the sound film.
Among the other members of Clair's team on the film were
Georges Lacombe as assistant director and
Marcel Carné
Marcel Albert Carné (; 18 August 1906 – 31 October 1996) was a French film director. A key figure in the poetic realism movement, Carné's best known films include '' Port of Shadows'' (1938), ''Le Jour Se Lève'' (1939), '' The Devil's Envoys ...
handling script continuity ("secrétaire de plateau"). During the last weeks of filming, the art director Lazare Meerson hired a 23-year-old Hungarian as a replacement in his team,
Alexandre Trauner
Alexandre Trauner (born Sándor Trau; 3 August 1906 in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, Hungary – 5 December 1993 in Omonville-la-Petite, France) was a Hungarian film production designer.
After studying painting at Hungarian University of Fin ...
, who went on to work as designer on many major French films of the following decades. ''Sous les toits de Paris'' was the first of four successful sound films that Clair made for Tobis, all in collaboration with Meerson and Périnal. It was also the sixth and last of Clair's films which featured the actor Albert Préjean. When it was shown in Paris, the cinema gave Préjean star billing in its advertisements which led the two men to fall out. Clair commented: "I think that the star system is immoral and unjust for everyone, the artists and technicians, who work on a shared project". The future film director
Edmond T. Gréville
Edmond T. Gréville (born Edmond Gréville Thonger; 20 June 1906 – 26 May 1966) was a French film director and screenwriter. He was married to the actress Vanda Gréville.
Career
Gréville began his career as a film journalist and critic. ...
appeared as an actor in the role of Albert's friend Louis.
When the film first came out, it began with a five-minute sequence outlining the relationships of the main characters, before the spectacular travelling shot that descends from the rooftops. In later versions this introduction disappeared, perhaps reflecting Clair's second thoughts, and the symmetry of the film's beginning and end was allowed to stand out.
Reception
The film was first presented at the Moulin Rouge cinema in Paris from 2 May 1930, advertised as "100% talking and singing in French", but it did not at first have more than a modest success in its own country. In fact only about one quarter of the film could be described as 'talking', and this may have contributed to the disappointment with which it was greeted by many Parisians, eager to experience the new medium. Among the other criticisms which were made by French reviewers were the slowness of the narrative, the conventionality of the characters, and the systematic emphasis on the Paris of hoodlums and the underworld.
The director of the French branch of Tobis, Dr Henckel, had given Clair complete freedom to make the film, but after the Paris opening he told Clair that it was now clear what others thought of his methods, and that in future he would have to resign himself to giving the audience what they wanted - talking pictures that really talked.
However a gala screening of the film, attended by Clair, was arranged in Berlin in August 1930, and there it was greeted as a triumph. Its run in German cinemas continued for several months. This success was repeated when the film appeared in New York and in London (both in December 1930), and it was also well received in Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow and Buenos Aires.
After its international acclaim, ''Sous les toits de Paris'' was released again in France and this time it enjoyed a real success on its home ground. Early defenders of the film's warmth and charm, such as
Jacques Brunius
__NOTOC__
Jacques B. Brunius (born Jacques Henri Cottance, 16 September 1906 – 24 April 1967) was a French actor, director and writer, who was born in Paris and died in Exeter, UK. He was cremated in Sidmouth, with a tribute by Mesens.
Assista ...
and
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Henri-Georges Clouzot (; 20 November 1907 – 12 January 1977) was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed ''The Wages of Fear'' and '' Les Diaboliques'', ...
, found greater support, and the originality of the approach to sound was better appreciated. René Clair later recalled that the profits were such that the cost of the film, which was considerable, was covered by the returns from a single cinema.
During the following decade, the film's creation of a colourful working-class neighbourhood as the setting and source of a contemporary drama found an echo in such films as ''La Rue sans nom'' (1934), ''
La Belle Équipe
''They Were Five'' (French: ''La belle équipe'') is a 1936 French drama film directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin, Charles Vanel, and Viviane Romance. It tells the story of five unemployed workers who win the jackpot in the nat ...
'' (1936) and ''
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
''The Crime of Monsieur Lange'' (; French: ''Le Crime de Monsieur Lange'') is a 1936 film directed by Jean Renoir about a publishing cooperative. Imbued with the spirit of the communist/socialist Popular Front, which would score a major political ...
'' (1936).
Modern judgments of the film, while acknowledging its importance for its time, have tended to find it limited by its nostalgic portrayal of the "little people" of Paris and by its "studio artifice"; in the words of one critic, it tends to "smother cinematic interest with the sheer cleverness of the conception and the technical mastery of the execution". There are hesitations in its continuity and pacing, and uncertainty in some of the performances as they try to adapt to the spoken word. On the other hand, questions which Clair was addressing about the appropriate use of sound in an essentially visual medium continue to be valid, and his film remains a witty exploration of some of the possible answers.
[Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, ''15 ans des années trente''. Paris: Stock, 1983. p.72.: Clair "s'était interrogé sur ce qu'on pouvait faire avec du son, en le traitant comme un matériau aussi malléable que la lumière ou le comédien. ''Sous les toits de Paris'' est le premier fruit de ses réflexions". Clair had asked himself what could be done with sound, by treating it as a material as malleable as the light or the actor. ''Sous les toits de Paris'' is the first fruit of his reflections."/ref>
]
References
External links
*
''Under the Roofs of Paris''
an essay by Lucy Sante
Lucy Sante (formerly Luc Sante; born May 25, 1954) is a Belgium-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to ''The New York Review of Books''. Her books include '' Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York'' (1991) ...
at the Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinep ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Under The Roofs Of Paris
1930 films
1930s French-language films
Romanian-language films
French musical comedy-drama films
French black-and-white films
Films directed by René Clair
1930s musical comedy-drama films
Films set in Paris
1930 comedy films
1930 drama films
1930 multilingual films
French multilingual films
1930s French films