A NOUS LA LIBERTÉ Movie Review
Freedom for Us
Having established a reputation as a brilliant satirist during the silent era with films like 1924's Paris Qui Dort, in which an experimental ray gun causes Parisians to reveal their own hypocrisy, René Clair worried—as did so many other directors of comic films at the time—about the prospect of sound intruding on their fantastic and surrealistic silent world. While Chaplin actually managed to dodge the auditory bullet until the final minutes of Modern Times in 1936, Clair's 1931 A Nous la Liberté tackled the possibilities of sound head on, with the not inconsiderable help of composer Georges Auric. This is a tale of a prison escapee (Raymond Cordy) who makes his way to freedom and becomes rich by opening a highly regimented, prison-like factory manufacturing phonograph records. (An image undoubtedly meant to symbolize Hollywood's new obsession with early talkies: prefabricated, stiff entertainments that only had to make noise to become hits.) The ironies compound as Clair adds a another former prisoner to the mix, a free-spirited and gentle soul (Henri Marchand) who seems fully modeled on Chaplin's ragingly popular “little tramp.” Apparently Chaplin himself was more flattered than offended by Clair's “homage,” so he felt free to do a little borrowing himself five years later. The assembly line scenes of Modem Times, which bear more than a passing resemblance to Clair's, so blatantly outraged Clair that he sued Chaplin over it, apparently forgetting that the inspiration for A Nous la Liberté’s “gentle soul” was clearly none other than Chaplin himself. The suit was eventually dropped as Clair admitted that Chaplin was a spiritual father to all screen comedy, and history has rightly made a place for both films as the original and visionary works that they are. Both, of course, have always remained influential, and for a witty reference to the scene in A Nous la Liberté in which well-dressed dandies scramble over each other for ill-gotten cash, take a look at the 1956 Peter Sellers classic I'm All Right, Jack, perhaps the one film in movie history that makes a believable case for labor and management having but a single, common purpose—greed.
NEXT STOP … Le Million, Modern Times, I'm All Right, Jack
1931 87m/B FR Henri Marchand, Raymond Cordy, Rolla France, Paul Olivier, Jacques Shelly, Andre Michaud; D: Rene Clair; W: Rene Clair; C: Georges Perinal; M: Georges Auric. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘32: Best Interior Decoration. VHS, 8mm NOS, MRV, VYY