CASQUE D'OR Movie Review

Golden Marie
Golden Helmet

Based on an actual murder case that took place in Paris in 1898, Jacques Becker's Casque d'Or (Golden Helmet) is both gangster film and period melodrama, as well as one of the great romantic epics of all time. The 31-year-old Simone Signoret is Marie, the woman known by her “golden helmet” of hair in the dance hall where she spends her evenings. It's in that small riverside establishment where she first meets her lover, Manda (Serge Reggiani); it's also where the unsavory leader of a gang known as apaches—who's in love with Marie himself—first marks Manda as his target. Becker's straightforward storytelling plunges us into the seamy and forbidding underworld of a Paris of the imagination; it's an assured and intoxicating work, though oddly enough it was in England where Casque d'Or first gained its deserved reputation as a masterpiece—the French were late to discover its timeless pull. Reggiani and Claude Dauphin are perfectly cast as the two men obsessed with Marie, but it's Simone Signoret who elevates Casque d'Or to a celestial plane—this is the performance of her life. (Another of Becker's masterworks has still not received the acclaim it deserves; his 1959 prison drama Le Trou (The Hole)—Becker's final film—is rarely screened today, and has yet to be released in the U.S.)

NEXT STOP … Touchez Pas au Grisbi, Le Trou (The Hole), Room at the Top

1952 96m/B FR Serge Reggiani, Simone Signoret, Claude Dauphin, Raymond Bussieres, Gaston Modot; D: Jacques Becker; W: Jacques Becker, Jacques Companeez; C: Robert Le Febvre; M: Georges Van Parys. VHS FCT