French director Louis Malle was never the type to shy away from controversy. He regularly approached material from a slightly different angle than one might expect, and he wasn't afraid of being brutally honest. Of course, one sure way to rile people up is to show or expose them to what they don't want to know. Lacombe, Lucien (1974) probably ruffled as many feathers as any film Malle ever made (including his notorious Pretty Baby, 1978), and with good reason.

The story of a teenage peasant (Pierre Blaise) who joins up with the Gestapo after being rejected as too young by the French Resistance, Lacombe, Lucien documents one person's journey to the dark side, and it's a disturbing sight. At the time, many French critics despised the film for its apparent attack on the moral purity of the Resistance. But remember, the Nazi occupation of Paris was a reality only 30 years earlier. Malle was seen as an elitist who somehow had it in for the heroism of his own countrymen. That's not a comfortable position for any filmmaker to find himself in, but Malle seemed to take it in stride. In fact, it was his intention to keep audiences from deciphering the confused psychology of his lead character. It seems likely that Malle would have considered the movie a failure if a few people didn't get angry.

In a series of interviews with Philip French (released in book form as Malle on Malle), Malle talks at great length about the making of Lacombe, Lucien. Initially, he thought he would make a picture about Vietnam. The massacre at My Lai was in the newspapers at the time, and this drove his interest. Finally, though, he felt an American filmmaker should tackle the subject. Then he turned his thoughts to a traumatic event from his own childhood that would eventually be the basis of his later film, Au revoir les enfants (1987). But he didn't feel emotionally prepared for such a challenge, and eventually landed on the idea of a young Frenchman who winds up collaborating with the Nazis. And he knew he was asking for trouble.

"The moment I invented characters and situations – even if they came directly from my research," Malle tells French, "I was exposing myself to controversy. I knew this was a minefield, so I was very cautious; for months I conducted research, interviewing ex- collaborators and members of the Resistance, seeing historians who were specialists in the period." Malle goes on to explain how hearing a melancholy Beethoven sonata played on a distant piano while he walked down a lonely street in the town of Figeac, helped coalesce his rough ideas about the film.

Later, during the research period, Malle would discover that a man very much like the character he was creating actually existed. One of the interview subjects mistakenly thought that Malle was talking about the man while he was describing the fictional Lucien! In a potently bizarre twist, Malle also found out that this real-life Lucien lived in Malle's family's abandoned home during the war! "I thought it was a sign of fate," Malle said. "It happened just a couple of months before I started shooting.""

That kind of inspiration and focus shines through in Lacombe, Lucien. But Malle would be the first to admit that much of the picture's ultimate impact was due to its star, a rather nonchalant amateur named Pierre Blaise. Malle knew that the character had to be played by a man from the area where the story takes place, and he had to have an accurate accent. So Malle started fishing for a performer during a series of casting calls that didn't go well. That is, until Blaise walked in.

Malle tells French that, as he was walking out of the casting building, he ran into Blaise. The boy, who had a tough peasant accent, explained that he was there for an audition, but had arrived late. "Immediately, I saw something about him that was unique," Malle said. I said, 'Let's go to a café and talk.' I discovered he'd been more or less forced by his mother to come; he had absolutely no interest in playing the part." The more Malle talked to Blaise, the more he grew convinced that he had found his Lucien.

But Blaise wasn't entirely taken with the filmmaking process when shooting began. He told Malle after the first few days of filming that he was going home. Malle and an assistant had to talk him into sticking around. Malle later determined that Blaise, who was only 17 at the time, didn't like how everyone on the set ordered him around all day long. Malle gathered his main technical collaborators together, and said, "...'Starting Monday, you're going to treat him as Alain Deon. Don't think of him as Pierre Blaise, this little peasant of seventeen. Think of him as Belmondo. You have to be really cautious. He's got the whole film on his shoulders; he's so much more important than any one of us.' And from then on, things went better. He started enjoying being the main man on the set."
br> Director: Louis Malle
Producer: Louis Malle, Claude Nedjar
Screenplay: Louis Malle, Patrick Modiano
Editor: Suzanne Baron
Cinematographer: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Django Reinhardt, Andre Claveau, Irene de Trebert
Art Design: Ghislain Uhry
Cast: Pierre Blaise (Lucien), Aurore Clement (France), Holger Lowenadler (Albert Horn), Therese Giehse (Bella Horn), Stephane Bouy (Jean Bernard), Loumi Iacobesco (Betty Beaulieu), Rene Bouloc (Faure), Pierre Decazes (Aubert), Jean Rougerie (Tonin).
C-138m. Letterboxed.

by Paul Tatara