Library of Congress Film and Sound Festival: "Frenchman's Creek "(1944), dir. Mitchell Leisen

The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023.  I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne).  Here is the first of the three introductions, presented on June 15.

Frenchman’s Creek (1944) dir. Mitchell Leisen 

With Joan Fontaine and Arturo de Córdova and Basil Rathbone

 

“The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system." – André Bazin, Essay on “la politique des auteurs”, Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1957.

 

Frenchman’s Creek, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1941 novel made by Paramount Pictures in 1944, directed by Mitchell Leisen, starring Joan Fontaine and Arturo de Córdova, winner of an Academy award for its production design, with technicolor cinematography by veteran George Barnes and a luscious score by the classically trained Victor Young, is an excellent example of André Bazin’s observation on the workings of Hollywood during the studio era.  And if the previous sentence should be forgiven for being weighty, it is because the “genius” of the system consisted precisely in shaping disparate esthetic, economic and technological elements into an extraordinary confection designed to appeal to a vast audience. Then and now.

 

Frenchman’s Creek is presented in a 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures and the Film Foundation, using a three-strip Technicolor nitrate print from UCLA.

 

The point of departure for Frenchman’s Creek was the historical novel by du Maurier, an author whose fame was cemented by the huge success of Rebecca, published in 1938, and its 1940 film version by Alfred Hitchcock. Beginning with Frenchman’s Creek, du Maurier gives shape to a different kind of heroine, a bold and fiercely independent protagonist, whose longings for adventure clash with the realities of marriage and motherhood. In Frenchman’s Creek – a novel well worth revisiting – the writer gives us a fantasy of infidelity, a sort of “erotic daydream”, as noted by biographer Richard Kelly. “It is the dream and not the interpretation that has the power to enthrall people”, he wrote.

 

This was the challenge faced by Mitchell Leisen, the veteran Paramount director assigned to the project: how to give sight and sound to a work of imagination, rooted in thoughts and desires. The conventions of the historical romance helped shepherd this melodramatic fantasy, along the lines of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and other swashbuckling pictures. The casting lent a good hand: Joan Fontaine, on loan by David O. Selznick, anchored the film according to genre expectations – even though it reversed the actress’ timid Rebecca persona. Arturo de Córdova, a Mexican star with a supporting role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), played the romantic lead, with an eye to becoming a “Latin Lover” like Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalbán and Fernando Lamas. The supporting cast was top talent: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Cecil Kellaway.

 

The festival program provides the film’s plot: Noblewoman Dona St Columb (Joan Fontaine), escaping from a loveless marriage and on the run from her husband, leaves London for the coast in Cornwall. She encounters a romantic French pirate (Arturo de Córdova), but their brief idyllic romance is interrupted by slimy Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone).

 

The adaptation by Talbot Jennings, a graduate from Yale Drama school and seasoned screenwriter with a flair for action adventure and romance pictures (until 1944, Mutiny on the Bounty, Romeo and Juliet, The Good Earth; later Across the Wide Missouri, Escape to Burma, The Naked Maja and The Sons of Katie Elder) was faithful and kept the key lines of dialogue and settings, to foreground the protagonist’s romantic dilemma. 
 

But it is in the director’s eye for décor, costumes and the use of color – more than in the performances – that the film becomes a baroque romantic fantasy, that verges on “camp”.

 

Mitchell Leisen was a versatile director at Paramount, who brought an appreciation for sets, costume and mise-en-scène in depicting the dynamics of romance, in comedies and dramas such as Midnight (1939), Remember the Night (1940) and Hold Back the Dawn (1941). In the auteur evaluation of Hollywood directors – spurred by Bazin’s essay - he was considered a minor figure. Andrew Sarris included Leisen in the category “lightly likable” of his influential The American Cinema (1968). When the studio system began to collapse, Leisen did not make the transition to independent projects, lacking, one could argue, the strong artistic vision of Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks or Huston.

 

To modern gender critics, details in the film including cross-dressing (pirates pillage a trunk full of women clothing), the foregrounding of exaggerated wigs symbolic of male emasculation, and some outrageous beefcake shots of Arturo de Córdova in his scanty blouses add to the intriguing visual rendering of Dona St Columb’s conflict.
 

More directly, the filmmaker uses sound to highlight the protagonist’s situation; this is presented in the sweeping rendition of Debussy’s piano piece “Clair de lune” as a full orchestra leitmotiv for her longing for adventure and romance.

 

But Leisen does not let the décor overwhelm the themes, which the film highlights from the original novel, by keeping a key exchange between the pirate and the aristocrat:

 “You forget that women are more primitive than men. For a time they will wander, yes, and play at love, and play at adventure. And then, like birds do, they must make their nest. Instinct is too strong for them. Birds build the home they crave, and settle down into it, warm and safe, and have their babies. You see, my Dona, there is no escape for a woman, only for a night and a day".

From inside the film fantasy emerges a biological counterargument - open to controversy, I’m well aware – that makes it nevertheless a remarkable case of self-reflexivity, a work commenting on itself.

The troubles with the Production Code Administration are not difficult to imagine, “adultery and illicit love without 

 compensating moral values”.  As noted by the AFI Catalog, a compromise was reached when, at the end of the film, the Frenchman tells Dona, “Of course, if you choose to stay in England, there is nothing that has happened between us that  would make your marriage a pretense."

 

A super production for Paramount in 1944, with a budget a little short of 4 million dollars, the film was shot on location in Mendocino County, California, with faithful reconstructions of English Restoration interiors in Los Angeles. Cinematographer George Barnes – a cinematographer from the silent era, who had mentored Gregg Toland, and photographed Rebecca, Meet John Doe and Jane Eyre - worked the lighting patterns to follow the protagonist’s increasing sense of liberation, a feature to be nicely observed in this restoration.  Academy awards went to Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegté and Samuel M. Comer for Production Design.  A good source for fascinating production details about Frenchman’s Creek is the oral history/biography of Mitchell Leisen by David Chierichetti, published in 1973.

A final note about the short-lived Hollywood career of Arturo de Córdova. The actor is an example of Hispanic masculinity in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.  In Spanish, he is described as a “galán de cine”, a leading actor in roles of romance and action.  A modern-day equivalent is Gael García Bernal, a star working in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and the U.S. in films like Bad Education (2004), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Amores perros (2000) and Mozart in the Jungle (2014-2018). De Córdova starred in memorable works in a variety of genres during the classic era. He is best remembered as the protagonist of iconic Mexican crime films like La diosa arrodillada / The Kneeling Goddess (1947) and En la palma de tu mano / In the Palm of Your Hand (1951), directed by noir master Roberto Gavaldón. In Él / This Strange Passion (1953), the ferocious satire on masculinity directed by the iconoclast Luis Buñuel, he plays the dark side of the “hidalgo español”, the Spanish gentleman, of which Don Quijote is also a caricature. 

 

De Córdova’s career spanned 1939 to 1959, with 73 films, including the 24 he made outside of Mexico.  Seven of those were productions by American studios. The actor may have seen Frenchman’s Creek as an opportunity to launch a Hollywood career as a leading man, with his good looks and fluent English. A move not unlike that of Pedro Armendáriz, who carved a small niche in westerns.  

 

The actor’s fine performance in Frenchman’s Creek, is perhaps too down to earth in contrast to the “fairy tale princess aura of Fontaine”, as Chierichetti observed. But the Mexican “galán” certainly is an attractive masculine counterpoint to both the bumbling libertine of a husband (Ralph Forbes) and the degenerate Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone).

 

The audience will have the opportunity to appreciate the many facets of Frenchman’s Creek, a fantasy weaving romance and adventure made to entertain in the midst of a world war, by talented individuals above and below the line, working in a true “dream factory”.

 

List of sources

 

AFI Catalog of Feature Films. The First 100 Years, 1893 - 1993 (2006). “Frenchman’s Creek" (1944).

   https://catalog.afi.com/Film/1617-FRENCHMANS-CREEK?sid=9eb98440-c7f8-                                  4615-9e59-c614886c3340&sr=10.508499&cp=1&pos=0 

Chiarichetti, David, Hollywood director: The career of Mitchell Leisen, 1973.

 

Cloarec, Nicole, Anne Hall et Xavier Lachazette, “The Enduring Appeal of Daphne Du 

    Maurier's Fiction. New Critical Perspectives”, Revue LISA, Vol. 19-n°52, 2021.  

    https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/13277

 

de la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, “Homenaje a Arturo de Córdova”.  Catálogo del Festival 

    Internacional de Cine de Morelia, 2013.    

    https://catalogos.moreliafilmfest.com/pdf/catalogo_2013_1_3.pdf

 

Drabelle, Dennis, “Swing High, Swing Low: Mitchell Leisen in Perspective”. 

    Film Comment, September – October 1994.

 

Kelley, Richard Michael, Daphne Du Maurier, 1987.

 

Lippe, Richard, updated by John McCarty, “John Fontaine”. International Dictionary

     of Films and Filmmakers, 2000.

 

Sarris, Andrew, “Mitchell Leisen”. The American Cinema. Directors and Directions,

     1929 - 1968, 1968