The French director who left me disgusted with Murmur of the Heart left me satisfied with The Fire Within (the French title is Le Feu follet—“Will-o’-the-wisp”), a 1963 gem.  Louis Malle, the director, outdid himself with what is an adaptation of a novel I haven’t read about a man’s unstoppable suicide.

Life seems mainly worth living in the film, but perhaps not for Alain (Maurice Ronet), a former (?) alcoholic with no money of his own and a dissatisfying marriage to an American wife living in New York.  Confidently Malle delivers a world—in 1960s Versailles and Paris—of socially undamaging psychological pathology.  Quiet neurosis is almost everywhere, but Alain is the only suicidal character.  Yet the film induces us to ask questions.  Is Alain’s situation actually hopeless?  At the beginning of the movie we see him with a mistress.  Maybe for a damaged man who cheats on his wife it is hopeless.  Then again, does Alain’s suicide merely emanate from what seems to be an unyielding self-absorption?

The Fire Within is challenging.  For me it is a trifle hard to get through since incidents in the film are scarce, but it’s an utterly mature, smartly made artwork with enjoyable Satie music on the soundtrack.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of The Fire Within – Criterion Collection

To have one’s mind taken away is to lose one’s personhood.  This is what happens to the people of Santa Mira as the outer space body snatchers do their demonic possessing in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955).  Once the bodies are snatched, the people feel no love or any other emotion, caring only about self-preservation.  In the interest of this, in fact, they know how to mimic people who still have their humanity.  Miles (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky (Dana Wynter) still have theirs, and they themselves rush about for the sake of self-preservation.  There is a fascinating panic in the film.  Siegel never makes a misstep, and the tale, based on a Collier’s magazine serial, is unerringly crafted.

Cover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The other night I saw the 1946 Orson Welles film, The Stranger, about the tracking down of a Nazi war criminal in a small American town.  It’s a seriously flawed picture, but one which ought to be seen for the same reason The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, and Othello ought to be seen (never mind Touch of Evil)–it was made by Orson Welles.

Whatever their defects, these films remind us of Welles’ concern about the distinction between art and craft in cinema.  They show us what style, however flamboyant, in old-time moviemaking really means, and how much Welles cared about the sorrow and gravity of dramatic tragedy.  Just like Citizen Kane, of course.

English: Screenshot of Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai trailer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)