A musical promenade

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"How tall is King Kong ?"
Don't mind me. Just strolling in the area, whistling some old tunes, from an era I like to call "the French Morricone years". They may or may not be related to Morricone, as lots of other composers took part in it. It's just that Morricone has been so insanely prolific, dominating the listing and influencing the other authors, that he kinda sets the tone.

And it's all about tone. French crime movies of that era (70s, 80s) still fluctuate from comedic to social-bleak, but they are all very dialogue-driven (often written by Michel Audiard, meaning fast and unrealistically perfect retorts - think Charade's Roger Stone), and they are all grounded in some kind of dry urban pessimism and underlying violence, with a vague sense of social madness.

So, Morricone's nostalgic dissonances were a perfect fit. Without apparent motive (Labro, 1971) is a simple thriller about trying to stop a seemingly disconnected series of assassinations, secretly related to an older, unresolved drama. The investigating cop is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, a classic actor who always seems (a bit like Christopher Walken) barely hiding some weird instability or vulnerability. So of course it would sound like that :



That's the sound of fear, tension, violence and irreparable ancient injustice barely piercing through the surface of everyday life. It's one of these soundtracks that contain the whole movie in one tune, sometimes told better than the director could. And it's very, very morriconesque, recycling his usual tricks. For instance, madness, trauma, social dissonance are evoked in the same manner in his classic soundtrack for Fear Over the City (Verneuil, 1975), a movie about a puritan serial killer (imagine Norman Bates loose in Paris with a sniper rifle) :



Does something remind you of The Thing or The Untouchables ? The Carpenter/Morricone soundtrack uses roughly the same heartbeats for tension, and there's the already echoes of Frank Nitti's unhinged violence in there.

I'm saying : if the cracks of sanity and society made a sound, Morricone captured it well. This musical and thematic tension can be resolved several ways, and Morricone did also oversee some of that. Wait, I'd like to evoke a bit the musically satisfying ways society explodes in a few other movie soundtracks. Same promenade, taking a corner.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
So, society. It's the 70s/80s. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Below you, mere street criminality. But above you, there's a government you learnt to mistrust : there's speculations about Kennedy's murder, there's CIA involvement in anti-democratic putsches, there's the cold war, a silent invisible war between to geopolitical superpowers trying to impose their own personal hell to the rest of the world. You're nothing. A pawn a naive witness of it, a victim if you try to get involved. It's sad. It's super sad. I mean, I'm not joking, listen how sad it is :



The Secret (Enrico, 1974) represents one side of the violence. That's when the power in place crushes love and friendship. It's felt differently when it's frontal, unmasked, and, instead of crushing the blind and powerless romantic citizen, crushes its savvy and tenacious opponents. I as in Icarus (Verneuil, 1979) is all about direct implication in political assassinations and suppression of civil resistance. It leaves your intimacy for an epic, tragic struggle of geopolitical proportion :



It's sublime in a kantian way : the paralyzing awe in front of the storm that obliterates you. The melancholy is still present, but bypassed by the metaphysical spectacle of an insurpassable might. Icarus's wings destroyed by the burning sun he was chasing. Fitting reference for an expression of dread inspired -among other things- by the Greek political reality. The investigation of Iorgos Lambrakis' assassination revealed a political military conspiracy, but this didn't prevent the perpetrators to seize power for a seven year long dictatorship. Greece is weird, and the music that Lambrakis' friend Theodorakis composed for Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) is actually hopeful, ironic and vaguely comedic, evoking the deadly ridicule of the ruling Colonels' bombastic.



In France, the public will seek solace elsewhere. If governments are untouchable, at least our heroes can do something about street thugs and ordinary mafias. There's something more festive behind the next corner.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Social unease is expressed through stories of criminal governmental conspiracies, and criminal street-level organisations. Everyone is out to get you, from above and from below. As semiologist Ignacio Ramonet points out, the US mythology has been sending upper-class policemen to tackle street thugs (Kojak) and working-class policemen to catch the elite's criminals (Columbo). Can France find heroes to protect us on both fronts. They can try sending Jean-Paul Belmondo. It's the 80s, that's what they do.

The Professional (Lautner, 1981) pits him against a corrupt government's realpolitik and geopolitical compromission with African dictatorships (in a network that journalists and historians will call "la françafrique"). It doesn't go too well, as Morricone's famous soundtrack (actually recycled from a 1971 polish film named Maddalena) implies :



So, if punching up leads to mixed results, let's try punching down. Belmondo's characters are much more (or less ambiguously) efficient there. After all, it's also the age of Dirty Harry and vigilante movies. Both Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo will compete in that territory, converging towards more and more testosterone-y and humorless action movies, distinguishable from each other only through some fading remnants of Belmondo's comedic roots. But it does the job. And it's again on flawlessly exhilarating Morricone tunes that, for instance, The Outsider (Deray, 1983) cleanses the street of Marseille of its dangerous mafia, disrespectful youth and scary minorities.



So, that's at least one form of social unease that, the movies say, can be solved with a gun (or, I assume, with very ballsy politicians greenlighting police violence : Belmondo movie posters were actually used in police recruitment stands at weaponry trade fairs). But however one feels towards the underlying politics of these films, or just their qualities (which are a bit all over the place), there's still this musical aspect that makes them enjoyable. They just have great soundtracks. And it's not just Morricone.

Take a much more subtle Belmondo movie. The brilliant Body of My Enemy (Verneuil, 1976) is also a movie about an everyman cleansing his town from its entrenched mafia, but it's quite an atypical revenge movie. First of all, it's a Verneuil (Verneuil rules), secondly it's above all a classy movie about nostalgia, childhood, social class, politics, with a criminal investigation being more of an investigation into one's own past, identity and implicit motives. And Francis Lai makes it sound like this :



That's the music of walking back in a town that you haven't seen since your childhood, that has changed, and is still haunted by memories of early loves, unsolved injustices, old frustrations, and confusing, half-understood events. It's the music of introspection, retrospection, and feeling a stranger in a place that was supposed to feel familiar. The music of a free stroll through a place you should maybe not have come back to, for emotional reasons. A music I've heard in my head in many places.

But it's also simultaneously nostalgic and hopeful, open on the future. Despite its view of politics, and on the irreparable past, this movie still has an optimistic tone, open on the future. And perfectly defined by this soundtrack. So, finally, it's pretty independent from ideological undertones : movies about gangsters tend to be more uplifting that movies about governments (at least during that era). And their musics reflect that.

Let's turn another corner to see what these musics tell us about spies.



Good stuff. I don't have much to add but I'll be reading.


I remember being a little annoyed by how easily Belmondo's character kept coming out on top in The Professional, but I suppose his ultra-competence is part of tree point. No comments about the music, but I do remember liking the scoring during the climax especially.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
I remember being a little annoyed by how easily Belmondo's character kept coming out on top in The Professional,
Yeah well, Belmondo was to France what Errol Flynn or John Wayne were to the USA, or Roger Moore in the UK, a cheerful figure of indisputable manly supremacy and total control. His characters were as reliable as Superman, Zorro, or James Bond (actually, the year's "new james bond" and "new belmondo" releases were often considered in direct competition). So, with the Professional, you actually get the least triumphant of his main characters. At least until he got older and started playing in more serious and melancholic dramas (that sound as such, courtesy of Francis Lai).



Of course, there's also the movies of the era before he became a full action hero. You may have seen him in some Jean-Luc Godard classics (Breathless in 1960, Pierrot le Fou in 1965). Or Borsalino (Deray, 1970), a 1930s gangsters movie where he plays Alain Delon's sidekick, with a very very famous Claude Bolling music :



Belmondo and Delon will fight in court for the poster billing, and Delon will be alone in the sequel (Borsalino and Co, 1973). In the meantime, Belmondo will have entered his 70s/80s bulletproof decades, where, as I said, he'll progressively ditch his self-depreciating humor to try to out-dirtyharry Delon's own self-serving franchise.

Anyway, this is a Bebel parenthesis. I was trying to check out the musicality of french spy movies from the 80s. But here comes a twist.



"How tall is King Kong ?"
The surprise is that there's really few serious spy movies in France, during the 70s and he 80s (three? four?). There's a lot of jamesbondry up to the 60s, with spy heroes such as OSS117 (an embarrassingly serious version of the character that Hazanavicius and Dujardin will brilliantly parody later), The Monocle, The Gorilla, The Tiger, each of them with their own series of films, rarely very good. But I guess that the genre gets drown in social/political thrillers and cop movies. Maybe France's in-between status between the East and West geopolitical blocs prevents it to embrace the Cold War which fuels English and American thrillers.

So of course there is the absolute classic that is Yves Boisset's Espion Lève-toi (1982), a perfect spy movie by my standards, all in doubts and unclear affiliations, in manipulations and in ruthless violence under a varnish of respectability, set in a very familiar Swiss environment (including a location very dear to me for romantic reasons) and capturing very well this country's cultural taste for calm, polite and icy hypocrisy. All of this served by a flawless cast (Cremer, Piccoli, Ventura) with a formidable Morricone music :



It's a music that sounds like a puppet show, giving you the impression that every character is pathetically manipulated through invisible strings, and that's what good spy movies are about. Morricone used a similar style for unrelated Italian movies where the protagonists also feel deprived of agency, fumbling around in a story that gives them no importance. Compare with The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Bertolucci, 1981), where an Italian entrepreneur runs around trying to pay a ransom for something he hardly understands.



Same mix of nostalgia on vaguely comedia dell'arte background rhythms, with a few menacing dissonances. A similarly despaired atmosphere was already present in Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), the story of a high-ranked official who commits a murder just to see if the clues he leaves around will eventually lead someone, anyone, to dare suspecting him despite hierarchy, or if the system will protect him to the end.



Three movies, three settings, with one common theme, underlined by the music : we're all pathetically powerless puppets, clueless cogs in a blind system which invisible logic dominates us yet emerges from us. Yes, the common tone you hear in these three melodies is Michel Foucault's ghost, there I said it. I said it. I did that. Did I actually say that ?

So, how to take spy stories seriously in those conditions ? No wonder that the overwhelming majority of french spy movies in that era were parodies, spearheaded by a titan of comedy : Pierre Richard. Which means we're entering Vladimir Cosma territory (yay).



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Pierre Richard was a genre by himself. A tall blond curly Harpo-like who always played catastrophe-prone bumbling, naive, or impossibly unlucky underdogs, shielded from the world by his poetic innocence and good heart. The (hopefully) most famous of his movies is La Chèvre 1981, english title : Touch on wood), the first of a buddy movies trilogy by Francis Veber which will always pair a naive, clumsy Pierre Richard with a serious and efficient Gérard Depardieu. In this first opus (remade as Pure Luck in 1991, with Martin Short and Danny Glover), Pierre Richard's character is such an unlucky person that he is used by Deperdieu's detective character to trail a similarly unlucky girl who had disappeared, with the idea that the same string of random catastrophes will befell them the same way. Vladimir Cosma's musical style is always perfect for uplifting comedies, but still have the underlying sweetness that fit the poetic premise of two people who don't know each other and never met being unwittingly united by similar bad luck.



As with almost all Francis Veber scripts, the second movie (The Comdads, 1983) features the same dynamic, and almost the same names, for a similarly structured but completely different story. Supernatural bad luck is replaced by crippling depression, and the depressive Pierre Richard character is paired with a once more serious badass Depardieu in quest for a runaway son that both believe to be theirs. Cosma's music there is even less forgettable :



This should give you an idea of Vladimir Cosma's recognizable style. Back to spy movies. Spies, secrecy, gadgets are comedic devices that fit Pierre Richard's busterkeatonesque style pretty well, so you could expect movies such as Gérard Oury's The Umbrella Coup (1980), in which Pierre Richard's character gets unwittingly hired as a killer (by the mafia actually) and given a lethal Bulgarian umbrella without realising it. The gadget spy as a joke makes a good entry point, but we get fully in the genre with The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972) and its sequel, The Return of the Tall Blond Man (1975), both by Yves Robert. In 1985, Tom Hanks would play the part in the unavoidable american remake (The Man with One Red Shoe), but seriously, how could it work without Cosma :



Yes, the five first notes are Mancini's 1963 Pink Panther. To be honest, I only realized it now. Still, it's enough of its own thing to give a distinct flavor to that film, and to stick in mind years afterwards.

This detail disappoints me less than his absolutely insipid music for the 1991 spy spoof La Totale (the film that has been remade by Cameron as True Lies). Cosma deserves better than being remembered for that. This post is about his peak. I have no idea what the next post will be about.



Yeah well, Belmondo was to France what Errol Flynn or John Wayne were to the USA, or Roger Moore in the UK, a cheerful figure of indisputable manly supremacy and total control. His characters were as reliable as Superman, Zorro, or James Bond (actually, the year's "new james bond" and "new belmondo" releases were often considered in direct competition). So, with the Professional, you actually get the least triumphant of his main characters. At least until he got older and started playing in more serious and melancholic dramas (that sound as such, courtesy of Francis Lai).
Interesting to know. Yeah, I'm mostly familiar with his '60s movies (Godard, Le Doulos, That Man From Rio) and like him enough in those that I'm eager to dig further. I do remember liking the opening scene in The Professional where he breaks out (IIRC) and actually seems to struggle.


That being said, I rewatched some of the Death Wish movies earlier this year and am definitely now less resistant to seeing leathery, grizzled older guys blast people away with minimal resistance, so perhaps The Professional will go down easier with a rewatch. I heard some of his '70s movies contain lunatic, death-defying stunts, so definitely interested in delving further into his career.



On (even more of) a side note, you have a strangely familiar posting style. Did you by any chance post on the Rotten Tomatoes forums back in the day?



"How tall is King Kong ?"
Interesting to know. Yeah, I'm mostly familiar with his '60s movies (Godard, Le Doulos, That Man From Rio) and like him enough in those that I'm eager to dig further. I do remember liking the opening scene in The Professional where he breaks out (IIRC) and actually seems to struggle.
His early films are why I love Belmondo, and I'm generally forgiving because he never truly entirely lost that silly over-theatrical persona. But they are simultaneously why I'm disappointed with his later cop movies. The self-seriousness armwrestles the joyful self-derision, and it's uselessly awkward. I wish all his action movies had kept the Man From Rio tone.

Still, Les Morfalous is brilliant. Le Magnifique is great. Le Corps de Mon Ennemi is one of the best movies ever. And stuff like Le Guignolo or L'Incorrigible are still great fun. You have a lot to explore and enjoy. Before... well, before he goes full Terry Finch :



But even these are charming and fascinating in their own ways (also Bruno Cremer is always impressive).

And no, I've never posted in cinema-related forums before. I've spent some time on The AVClub before being banned for assaulting a racist in a sarcastic way that was itself interpreted as racist, and on videogame forums before that. But I wouldn't be surprised if my style resembled most french-speaking people who read too much.



Ah, ok. Yeah, your posting style (languorous and peppered with YouTube clips) reminded me of a few posters on that site. I actually didn't realize you were a French speaker (although I suppose the in-depth Belmondo knowledge should have given it away).