Le Trou was and still is a riveting prison film because it manages to have its cake and eat it (and I'm sure someone slipped a sharp nail file in that cake, ho-ho), and by that I mean director Jacques Becker and his cast make a fully dramatic story out of material that isn't melodramatic or so heightened that you ever feel taken out of it into something even vaguely sentimental. I wonder if there are some who come to this who have seen a prison break-out movie or two and may expect, oh, Shawshank or Alcatraz and it's not that. At the same time, it's not quite the level of sparse and austere stripping away to the bare essentials as Bresson and A Man Escaped (and I have to think Becker must have seen that).
Le Trou is somewhere between those two extremes, so no there is no scene where an inmate plays an opera record and makes everyone entranced by an emotional connection. Matter of fact, due to how this French prison is presented, where prisoners are mostly kept within their cells - and four or five to a cell and that's it - we don't get much of a sense of what the other prisoners are like at all. That's part of what makes Le Trou so effective and unique is that there's the central unit of these guys, and how this young "decent' fellow Claude may be a wild card (Marc Michel, he was in Demy's Lola you mag recall). But this group does grow to trust him, and pretty soon they go into the execution of this plan... which has several hiccups along the way.
It does help that Becker mixes up some actors who were regulars in films and a couple who were not, specifically Jean Keraudy who was an actual prisoner and appeared as a version of himself here (others like Constantin would go on to further careers but this was also his first feature); I can't imagine what he could have said to direct him in this scenario except to just be as close to himself as possible. It helps that he doesn't necessarily have to deliver Tennessee Williams here, and as a listener he's always interested and it's all down to subtlety. And then as the screws may be tightening in the last ten minutes of this, how characters simply look at one another, how Becker holds on everything, that's all you need to make the drama work. Who needs hackneyed conflict when a man with some information, and how much he knows vs everyone else, that's conflict all its own.
But it's all the attention to detail, the extremely and harsh physical process, of every bolt getting sawed down, all the floor that has to get hammered away, how two soldiers hide from two guards in a small space, that's the meat of the entertainment in Le Trou. And I dont think Becker forgets to make it an entertaining spectacle, even as he perhaps was influenced by Bresson from the attention paid to physicality and that purity of cinematic action and movement (I haven't watched interviews or read up on it so I can't guess how much or how little). We get to know about these guys, know what makes them tick, but the reality is if they don't get the fake bodies under those blankets moving just so as the guard passes by the door there's trouble, and Becker and the actors take enough time in the first half hour to get us invested.
Sharply filmed, tense, hard-bitten French Film Noir. Glad I finally got around to it and it didn't disappoint.
Le Trou is somewhere between those two extremes, so no there is no scene where an inmate plays an opera record and makes everyone entranced by an emotional connection. Matter of fact, due to how this French prison is presented, where prisoners are mostly kept within their cells - and four or five to a cell and that's it - we don't get much of a sense of what the other prisoners are like at all. That's part of what makes Le Trou so effective and unique is that there's the central unit of these guys, and how this young "decent' fellow Claude may be a wild card (Marc Michel, he was in Demy's Lola you mag recall). But this group does grow to trust him, and pretty soon they go into the execution of this plan... which has several hiccups along the way.
It does help that Becker mixes up some actors who were regulars in films and a couple who were not, specifically Jean Keraudy who was an actual prisoner and appeared as a version of himself here (others like Constantin would go on to further careers but this was also his first feature); I can't imagine what he could have said to direct him in this scenario except to just be as close to himself as possible. It helps that he doesn't necessarily have to deliver Tennessee Williams here, and as a listener he's always interested and it's all down to subtlety. And then as the screws may be tightening in the last ten minutes of this, how characters simply look at one another, how Becker holds on everything, that's all you need to make the drama work. Who needs hackneyed conflict when a man with some information, and how much he knows vs everyone else, that's conflict all its own.
But it's all the attention to detail, the extremely and harsh physical process, of every bolt getting sawed down, all the floor that has to get hammered away, how two soldiers hide from two guards in a small space, that's the meat of the entertainment in Le Trou. And I dont think Becker forgets to make it an entertaining spectacle, even as he perhaps was influenced by Bresson from the attention paid to physicality and that purity of cinematic action and movement (I haven't watched interviews or read up on it so I can't guess how much or how little). We get to know about these guys, know what makes them tick, but the reality is if they don't get the fake bodies under those blankets moving just so as the guard passes by the door there's trouble, and Becker and the actors take enough time in the first half hour to get us invested.
Sharply filmed, tense, hard-bitten French Film Noir. Glad I finally got around to it and it didn't disappoint.