Passages to Marseilles

A VISIT TO FRANCE is high on my agenda, and it has to include a stop in Marseilles. I’m prepared to be disappointed – I take it for granted – because my expectations have been honed by three movies written by Marcel Pagnol and filmed between 1931 and 1936, which places the first of them right at the advent of sound. And that’s what inspired successful playwright Pagnol to expand into cinema. Like Sacha Guitry, his compatriot, who also was an acclaimed playwright, Pagnol wasn’t interested in the medium until it included his own particular medium: words.

Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis

Which led to the accusation, especially after World War Two, that Pagnol’s movies were merely filmed plays, static and therefore uninteresting. The same criticism was lobbed at Guitry; not coincidentally, both Guitry and Pagnol were accused and subsequently cleared of being collaborationists with the occupying army during the war. Passions ran high!

Toward the end of the 1940s, Francois Truffaut spearheaded a critical reassessment of Pagnol’s work, but the effort was dampened by the lousy quality of what prints of those films were still available. Over time, however, a new generation of filmmakers, like Bertrand Tavernier, helped spark a greater resurgence of interest and even, eventually, the restoration of Pagnol’s most-important titles.

In 2017, a restored version of Pagnol’s “Marseilles Trilogy” was released to theaters and then to a Criterion DVD set. We sat down with that set before Thanksgiving to see if “Marius,” the first film of the trilogy, lived up to its reputation. As you can figure, I wouldn’t be writing about it if it didn’t. But be sure your expectations sit in an appropriate context.

This is a movie made in 1931. Sound capture and reproduction was still crude, although it’s done as well as was possible here. “Marius” was first a very successful play – unexpectedly successful, because Pagnol dared to present a setting and characters foreign to the Paris audience. That is, he presented his native Marseilles, a seaport in the south. The people there were low-class and spoke like bumpkins. Nevertheless, the play found its audience and ran for over 800 performances.

Raimu, Orane Demazis,
and Fernand Charpin

So it was vital to preserve the provincial character of the piece, and to assist that, Pagnol insisted on using the same cast in the movie, such little-known actors as Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, Orane Demazis, and Fernand Charpin (all of whom became stars as a result). The culture clash between Marseilles and Paris is lost on me, but there’s no question that these actors are terrific. The movie is over two hours long. It moves at an easygoing pace. The camera is fairly static, giving us long two-shots in dialogue scenes. Although the story moves slowly, the dramatic arc is skillfully constructed, leavening the piece with comedy even as we’re drawn into the emotional richness of characters and situations.

The plot is simple: Fanny Cabanis (Orane Demazis) grew up alongside Marius Olivier (Pierre Fresnay) and deeply loves him. He returns this affection, but blandly, as he wants to follow a dream of working aboard any of the many ships that ply the harbor. His father, César (Raimu), wants him to marry the girl and eventually run the family’s pub. Meanwhile, wealthy sail merchant Honoré Panisse (Fernand Charpin) has his cap set for Fanny. Pretty standard stuff as domestic dramas go, but the movie, directed by then-fledgling Alexander Korda to Pagnol’s screenplay, turns it into magic.

A week later we watched “Fanny,” the second in the trilogy, again based on a Pagnol play, this one directed in 1932 by Marc Allégret, bringing back the same cast and locations. The stakes are higher: Fanny is pregnant. It’s Marius’s child, but he’s working aboard the ship Fanny urged him to catch. At César’s urging, Fanny agrees to marry Panisse, who is only too happy to accept this child a his own. Not surprisingly, Marius returns and wants Fanny back. These complications were too much for American censors, who kept these films out of the country for decades.

We let a month go by before watching “César,” the wrap-up of the series. What a luxurious feeling, sink back into the Pagnol world of this Marseilles village! This one was written for the screen and directed by Pagnol in 1936. He’d already established himself as a director with “Jofroi” (1933), “Angele” (1934, also starring Demazis), “Cigalon” (1935), and, notably, “Topaze” (1936), based on his own play, already filmed in 1933 both in France and the U.S. (the latter starring John Barrymore), and filmed again by Pagnol in 1951 and by Peter Sellers in 1961 (a film Sellers subsequently tried to suppress).

“César” brings back the familiar cast, by now so famous and therefore expensive that Pagnol couldn’t afford to mount a stage version of the story first. The plot continues. The boy, Césariot (André Fouché) is 20. Panisse is dying; the priest at his bedside later insists that Fanny reveal the identity of the boy’s real father. Complications and comedy ensue, all of it reflective of a gentle, accepting nature of what was then still a rural community, and which has now become its own charming world.

Alice Waters was so profoundly affected by seeing these films that when it came time for her to open what would be an innovative and influential restaurant in Berkeley in 1971, she named it Chez Panisse.

As you would expect from a Criterion release, the three-disc set includes a wealth of interviews and other extras. When you want a break from the slashers and shoot-em-ups and CGI, when you’re truly ready to adopt an easygoing pace at odds with the frenetic pace of entertainment today, I recommend you give yourself over to the world of Pagnol’s “Marseilles Trilogy.” It’s a remarkable place.