Band of Outsiders (1964) - #174

A big one million dollar film.

Actually, Band of Outsiders turned out to be quite the opposite of that phrase, so carefully enunciated by a bit player practicing English early on. Instead, the film comes across as something of a palate cleanser for Jean-Luc Godard, a return to his cinematic comfort zone of independent films shaped by his own discretion after the intense pressures he dealt with in his previous feature Contempt. Emerging from that film's gauntlet of complications - a trio of pushy and conflicted producers from different countries, the necessity of catering to the demands of a prima donna star (and her entourage) that accompanied the casting of Brigitte Bardot, the logistical challenges of shooting Technicolor CinemaScope in Italy and fervent industry expectations that his next feature would vault him into the ranks of critically-acclaimed directors who could also reliably generate good box office - Godard realized that his dream of directing a full-scale Hollywood production had been fulfilled... or at least was probably as close to being fulfilled as the dissonance between skeptical showbiz money-men and his own iconoclastic tendencies would ever allow.

So after collaborating with American cinema verite pioneer Albert Maysles to create Montparnasse et Levallois as part of the omnibus film Paris vu par..., Eric Rohmer's 16mm nouvelle vague omnibus project, for his next feature Godard exercised an option to adapt a pulpy American crime thriller titled Fools' Gold. Acting more or less as his own producer - his on-screen credit sums up his contributions to the project as

Jean-Luc
Cinema
Godard

- Band of Outsiders, with its muddy grey compositions and decidedly quotidian working class setting, marked a strong departure from Contempt's lush, sun-drenched palette. It was shot in just a few weeks in early 1964, under slate-clouded skies and bare-limbed trees, a small-time caper film that reworked gangster/ noir themes as carried out by reckless photogenic youngsters, the same formula that helped make Breathless such a sensation. Were it not for a few iconic scenes - the Madison dance...

... the dash through the Louvre, the (less than) one minute's silence - that capitalize primarily on the appeal of Anna Karina, framed so flatteringly by her roguish male sidekicks Sammi Frey (Bardot's ex) and Claude Brasseur, the slightness of the narrative might have destined the film for the relative anonymity of features like The Carabiniers and A Married Woman that bracket Band of Outsiders in Godard's canon. Perhaps it's precisely because he chose to tell this story more conventionally and accessibly than any of his other early films that, despite a decidedly mixed critical and commercial reaction upon initial release, it's now widely regarded as one of his most popular and successful titles.

That trailer, which also serves as the disc menu for Criterion's marvelous blu-ray reissue from earlier this year, tells the entire story in a highly compressed, silent movie fashion: two movie-obsessed pals, Arthur and Franz, embark on a criminal escapade after they accidentally learn about a stack of illicitly-obtained cash being stored in a house in suburban Paris. Their key to getting access to the money is Odile, a naive, vaguely troubled schoolgirl who impulsively disclosed the information to Franz in the course of their mutual flirtation. Odile lives with her aunt in some kind of foster-care situation, and the money belongs to the aunt's boyfriend, a corrupt civil servant who stashes his loot in an upstairs bedroom. We quickly learn that Arthur is the more experienced and dominant of the two would-be burglars, as he coaches Franz on how to win Odile's confidence. Sizing up the girl for himself by dropping in on the English class where Franz and Odile first met, Arthur puts his alpha-male skills to work, effortlessly seducing the girl while subordinating his tentative sidekick all in the same motion. The trio of misfits establish a bond that will turn out to be flimsy and short-lived, fun enough while it lasts but doomed by the inevitable love triangle, disruptive bursts of confusion and betrayal and (of course) a heist gone wrong.

The fact that this film was released in the summer of 1964, just a month after the Beatles made their big-screen debut in A Hard Day's Night, also lends Band of Outsiders a pleasant nostalgic sheen, just on the verge of a massive explosion of generation-defining style and independence in the West's youth culture. Even for those not yet born or (like me) too young to remember that shift in fashions, there's an undeniable appeal in watching Anna Karina's Odile come of age ever so slightly over the course of 90 minutes, as if she's recapitulating a generation's emergence from sheltered innocence to an awareness of both the perils and the thrills of plunging blindly forward into life. Though Karina turned in much stronger and more demanding performances in films both preceding (Vivre sa vie) and following (Pierrot le fou) this one, I don't think she was ever more affectively charming or vulnerable than she was here - despite being saddled with the worst hairstyle of any of her starring roles. ;) And perhaps because Jean-Luc her husband was characteristically using his creative work to win the favor of Anna his wife, with whom he was reconciling after a serious marriage-threatening conflict at the time, he refrained from the kind of bitter denouement that could have easily been fashioned at the end of this film, i.e. he let her live! Given all the plausibly fatal and depressing options at his disposal, Godard instead chose to tack on a happy epilogue, a generous concession to his audience that also constitutes another likely explanation for Band of Outsiders' continuing popularity. It leaves us smiling as we go.

Next: Red Desert