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16 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Casque d'or :French cinema at its best!, 15 October 2005
Author: dbdumonteil

In a poll in 1979 ,Becker's chef d'oeuvre was part of the top ten of the best French movies of all time.

It's arguably Becker's best work;he achieved a luminous movie with many unforgettable scenes : -the small boats on the river,and the pack arriving at the guinguettes,those cafes down by the river Seine which are no longer part of the landscapes.(remember Duvivier's "la belle équipe" ,1936) -all the scenes in the country where the nature seems to protect the lovers as a mother would do.Most of all,this admirable sequence when Reggiani 's sleeping :he opens his eyes and Marie's luminous beauty moves him deeply -never a director filmed Signoret as Becker did- -The scene which climaxes the opus is the one in the church.They hear the whole congregation sing the "Kyrie " in a tiny church:there's a wedding there.So Marie urges Manda to come in and they attend the ceremony.When they leave ,they learn tragic news.Now the bell is tolling for them,even if these are wedding bells.

-The final scenes between Reggiani/Manda and his old pal Bussières /Raymond display Becker's love of loyalty,manly friendship ,a subject which would come back in later works ,muted in "touchez pas au grisbi" and became an absolute pessimism in "le trou" where nobody can be trusted anymore.

-The score which Becker used in the last sequences is none other than the old French folk song "le temps des cerises" actually an organizing song,a revolutionary song ,since it was the anthem of the Commune in 1871.

"Casque d'or" is one of the jewels of the French cinema.Becker used to like the Apaches (=ruffians) ,the outcast,cause he would transfer Leblanc's Arsene Lupin adventures to the screen in 1957.A failed attempt though.But "Casque d'or" generally looked upon as Becker's peak ,hasn't aged a bit.

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13 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Jacques Becker: cinema as art, 15 January 2001
10/10
Author: pzanardo (pzanardo@math.unipd.it) from Padova, Italy

Jacques Becker was an artist and a director. His legacy is a trilogy of masterpieces: "Casque d'Or", "Touchez pas au Grisbi", "Le Trou", three luminous instances of cinema as art.

The linear story of "Casque d'Or" has the neatness of a Maupassant's tale. We are transferred into a most glorious epoch for French culture and art: the decline of the 19th century, the age of Impressionism. Marie (Simone Signoret) is a blond beauty, a cheerful "lost woman". She's the girl-friend of a member of a gang of small-time but ruthless criminals. She falls in first-sight-love with George Manda (Serge Reggiani) a former crook, now a honest carpenter. Predictable troubles ensue...

The atmosphere of the epoch is wonderfully recreated, with a black-and-white photography of indescribable beauty. An Impressionist Master behind the camera couldn't have done better. And, in fact, Becker was a favorite "student" of director Jean Renoir, Auguste Renoir's son. Becker's characteristic narrating style is nostalgic, serene, gently ironic. He deliberately avoids over-dark tones in his representation of the underworld, even in the middle of tragic events.

Simone Signoret is a charismatic presence on the screen: outstanding is her use of body-language to draw Marie's character, both a romantic enamoured woman and a cynical harlot. Reggiani is excellent as the laconic, tough Manda: he utters some twenty words along the whole movie, yet we perfectly understand his peculiar honor code, his profound love for Marie, his unselfish devotion to friendship. Splendid is Leca (Claude Dauphin), the boss of the gang, officially a respectable well-off wine-dealer: proficient, cool-headed, extremely cunning and Machiavellian, always ready to betray his own men to pursue his dirty purposes. Indeed, great care is paid to the design of all characters, with superb acting by the whole cast.

Exquisite poetic touches permeate the movie... Marie drags Manda into a church, where a simple wedding (of unknown middle-class people) is taking place. Shortly after, Manda is impatient "Let's go"; and Marie "No, just another minute"... and she contemplates the wedding with a dreaming smile...

"Casque d'Or": a perfect work of art.

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11 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
The blonde beauty, 9 December 2005
10/10
Author: jotix100 from New York

Jacques Becker's "Casque d'or" is a fine example of the best in the French cinema. At times, this splendid 1954 film, keeps reminding us about paintings of the impressionist school, especially Renoir, because it takes us back to that era. In fact, the beginning of the film almost gives the impression we are witnessing characters that inspired the painters of that art movement.

"Casque d'or" is enhanced by the magnificent black and white photography of Robert Lefevbre who has a poetic way to get the best of what M. Becker intended him to do. The atmospheric music of Georges Van Parys takes the viewer back to those places one has seen in different paintings of that era.

The lovely young woman at the center of the picture, Marie, gets taken with Manda the moment he enters the country restaurant where she is seen with some of the petty criminals she is friendly with. One realizes this is a passion that is not meant to be from the start. Marie belongs to one of the Felix Leca's gang. When Roland senses his girl has an eye for another man, he wants to take get rid of him.

Georges Manda has also been to jail, but now is a carpenter and trying to go straight. Fate is not kind to Manda, who, when provoked, reveals he is not to be made a fool. Leca, who is also quite smitten by Marie's beauty plans to get rid of Manda so he can have the blonde woman all to himself. Leca, who knows his way around the law, and is friendly with the police, will prove to be Manda's undoing.

What Jacques Becker achieved with this film was to create the right atmosphere to set his story. Working in France he had the access to the great movie locations one sees in the movie. The film evokes that period convincingly. The director adds touches, that even when watched today, are a delight to watch.

M. Becker got good performances out of his cast. Simone Signoret at that point of her life was at her prime. Her Marie is a fine example of what she was able to project without much effort. Her beauty is evident and she plays Marie with elegance. Serge Reggiani plays Manda with conviction. M. Reggiani covered quite a lot of ground in the French cinema. Aside from his good looks, he was an accomplished actor and singer. His contribution to our enjoyment of the film made "Casque d'or" to be a classic it became. Claude Dauphin is Felix Leca, the unscrupulous man in love with Marie who will stoop so low in order to get the woman that he wouldn't have otherwise. M. Dauphin conveys the evil in Felix Leca with an economy that works well in his portrayal of this sophisticated monster.

Finally, this is Jacques Becker's triumph. "Casque d'or" is one of the best films of all times.

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12 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Golden Oldie, 3 December 2003
Author: writers_reign

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It took me years to catch up with this classic and when I did so it was in a small Paris Art-House and, ironically, shown with English subtitles. I went with the knowledge that on its release it was a disaster in France - though Signoret picked up a Best Actress Award from England - where it was quickly yanked and not shown again for another nine years by which time Becker was on the menu and unable to bask in his vindication. It's difficult now to see what contemporary critics and audiences found to beef about. Becker did not so much shoot this film as paint it with delicate brush strokes - another irony as the story is in yer face. It was based on real characters and events of 1902 and maybe it was Becker's painstaking re-creation of an era half a century away that disturbed. Signoret was at the height of her passionate romance with Yves Montand and this shows in every frame in which she appears and who wouldn't have swapped places with Serge Reggiani (a close friend of both Signoret and Montand - he had played opposite Montand in Les Portes de la Nuit). Ever reliable Claude Dauphin completed the eternal triangle. When Pal Joey opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Christmas Day, 1940, it was years ahead of its time, a musical in which every character was offensive in some way; though the score by Rodgers and Hart was vintage and grudgingly acknowledged to be so one pertinent critical comment read 'is it possible to draw sweet water from a foul well'. 12 years later, in 1952, the year Casque d'Or was savaged, Pal Joey was revived and became a major success. The story of Casque d'Or is arguably sordid and equally arguably a foul well yet Becker, via his lovingly detailed compositions and re-creation of the period DOES draw exceedingly sweet water from a foul well. Trivia question: What do Juliette Binoche and Simone Signoret have in common. Answer: Both watch their man (husband, Daniel Auteuil, lover, Serge Reggiani) executed at the end of the film. Patrice Leconte began 'La Veuve de St Pierre' brilliantly with a tracking shot featuring Binoche looking down at we know not what - only at the end do we realise she is watching Auteuil face a firing squad. Signoret's Marie also looks down on the scene as Reggiani is guillotined. In 2052 this one will still be great.

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8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
A great film of passion, 20 September 2002
Author: Grim-15 from New York City

Casque d'or is one of the greatest films about passion I have ever seen. The intensity of the feeling between Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani, particularly the former, is overwhelming. These people are outsiders from the very beginning, being part of the criminal underworld from which they will never escape. The honest, bourgeois world is permanently closed to them. Children in French secondary school write essays about this film as if it were a classic French novel. It certainly is a classic, and it could not have been made in any country other than France.

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6 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
About passion and its consequences, 3 April 2006
10/10
Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.

After being released from prison where he served five years for an undisclosed crime, Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), a soft-looking, taciturn man with a handlebar moustache, becomes a hard working carpenter, determined to go straight. When Raymond (Raymond Bussieres), a fellow gang member with whom he served time in prison, introduces him to Marie (Simone Signoret) at a dance, however, the solid foundation he was trying to build begins to come unglued. Signoret, one of the classiest and most elegant actresses, is strikingly irresistible as the moll of a suave gang leader in Jacques Becker's 1952 masterpiece Casque D'or. Considered a failure when it first opened but, after receiving critical acclaim in New York, the film developed a wider audience in France and has now become a classic, newly restored on a Criterion DVD.

Set in Paris in the 1890s and based on actual police accounts, Casque D'or is not an arid period piece or costume drama, but a rich, vibrant, and lovingly evocative work that successfully recreates the ambiance of Paris at the turn of the century. Unlike Melville's Le Samourai which was filmed in near darkness to capture the sullen milieu of the underworld, Becker bathes his film in a dazzling poetic light that belies the darkness of its theme and some scenes have been compared to an impressionist painting. Marie is being "kept" by Roland (William Sabatier), a volatile and jealous dandy and is also sought after by the crime boss Felix Leca (Claude Dauphin). Manda and Marie fall in love but soon Manda runs afoul of the law after killing the jealous Roland in a fight. Leca seizes on this opportunity to remove Manda from the picture by framing his closest friend but doesn't count on Manda's dedication to doing what is right.

Despite being about the criminal element, there is little violence in Casque D'or and it is more of an moody romance than a crime drama, perhaps accounting for its initial failure at the box office. The most brilliantly realized sequence takes place at a countryside retreat where Manda and Marie go for a few hours of happiness together before the inevitable denouement. Casque D'or is a film about friendship, loyalty, and, most of all, about passion and its consequences. When Marie hears wedding bells and drags Manda into a church, all he can say is "not now", but his expression suggests that he knows that their love will be a dream that fades into dawn.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A hymn to voluptuous, mature beauty, 23 September 2007
8/10
Author: rhoda-1

Despite the corsets and petticoats and horse-drawn cabs, this lush, richly textured film has more in common with the bleak, fatalistic modern-dress films of the period than with conventional historical romance. The action takes place over the course of only a few days, but in France that's long enough for a passion strong enough to change a life, or end it--more than one man dies because of the bewitching Marie and her golden hair that shines like the sun. The intensity of the characters' emotions and the suddenness of their violence is powerfully countered by the reserve of the playing--of the solemn, laconic toughs and of Simone Signoret as Marie. In moments of great emotion, her slight smile changes to a broad one, but with her lips still closed. There's none of the giggling and wriggling that marked the other blonde Fifties sex symbols, Bardot and Monroe, and countless others since, and obviously no nudity, total or partial, but in her morning-after scene with Serge Reggiani, you can practically smell smoke.

Like Zola's Nana, Marie is neither a villain nor a victim, simply an elemental force of nature. This elemental-woman business can, in French and non-French movies, be pretentious and unwittingly comic, but there's none of that here, because neither Signoret nor the director indulge in any fancy dialogue or vocal tricks to play up how alluring she is--they don't have to. We are always aware of Marie as a figure of enormous strength, with a broad, strong back, round shoulders spilling out of her blouse, and a mouth too wide for coyness.

In an otherwise favourable review, Pauline Kael said that the film's tone was slightly trashy, as if it were saying, of the low-life characters, "Look, they have feelings too." I disagree--the scene of the wealthy, slumming group in evening dress who find the characters "marvelously amusing" show us what Becker thinks of that viewpoint and implicitly reproaches anyone who shares it.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
The french naturalism of the hand of Jacques Becker, 26 April 2009
9/10
Author: psagray from Spain

Passes the year of 1900 when it happens the film, Marie (Simone Sginoret), is a beautiful blond prostitute of Paris lover of a component of a gang of thugs. Problems arise when Marie, (Simone Signoret) falls in love with a carpenter "Manda" very friend of one of the components of the gang"Raymond". The story is based on real facts, and reflects the inevitability of naturalism french. The conviction that makes the poor and humble characters players in this film, which does not give option and from the outset is smells the tragic end. The planes are carried out on the face of the protagonist Simone Signoret, are splendid, a great beauty. The scenarios of the film are very good of a huge realism, that remind us of the authentic photographs of those years, as the wedding who see the two players, dances and the gesture of all the characters. Its director Jacques Becker achieves a masterpiece in this movie.

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8 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Light into Motion, 24 March 2005
10/10
Author: frankgaipa from Oakland, California

One more memory game: I'd been wanting to re-see this for years after a single Pacific Film Archive screening I'm not sure what decade. Memories of style as attack, attack by aura, dancers and fighters tracing curves across the screen. Manda's one-armed grab of Marie's waist the first time he dances with her. All the film's men swaggering, strutting, dancing with pointed nonchalance. Cummerbund things. Caps, derbies. Knives. Guns?! Yes, there are guns, but those I'd forgotten. The knife fight that my memory placed near the end, High Noon style, actually starts things moving. Maybe -- I'm only slightly ashamed to say it since I know hundreds of French films -- a little bit of Chuck Jones' or Pepe le peu's France had leeched into what I remembered. Or maybe it was Popeye introduced me to apache dancers.

So now I own it. Most of the story returns as I watch.

Just one small thing I want to say though, that anyone else might not, has to do with what photographers call highlights. Only two characters, Marie "Casque d'or" and her Manda, get eye sparkles. Especially when they're with each other or thinking of the other or her eyes are tearing, Becker and his photographer allow a bit of maxed out exposure, to us gleam, a twinkle, a tiny bit of white screen in a black pupil. Did they manually scrape the film to allow light to show through? Some when zoomed in upon look like little crosses, or multi-pointed stars with long axes. They're quite intricate. I've never developed film, but know from converting digital images in my editing software to black and white that this is both difficult to achieve naturally with a camera and difficult to create after the fact so as to look natural. But it's no lucky stroke that the two lovers' eyes gleam. Becker did it. The only other character allowed this sparkle is Leca, a single instance, I think right before he forces himself on Marie.

Light laces the film's parts. The boats of the opening emerge from a silver white landscape as simply, deceptively simply, conceived as sumi-e. The girls and the gang soon turn the light into motion on the dance floor. The "swells" are light, as is any and every sheet Marie has lain upon. Does the guillotine blade sparkle? Probably not. I've forgotten again already.

Touch points? Not for light, but for motion, dance, and both male and female confidence and swagger: Carlos Saura's Carmen and Blood Wedding.

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An instant classic,, 24 September 2009
7/10
Author: Ralph Ignacio Litardo (lancaster@fibertel.com.ar) from Capital, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Not being a Becker fan *at all* I guess I can be objective. This film is enjoyable like if it weren't a classic. Once begun, you'll want to watch it till the end. Simone looks gorgeous here, IMDb reviewer "pzanardo" from Padova, Italy is right when he writes that the director seems to have filmed her specially well. By the way, have you noticed how bad Italians fare on French period films? Thérèse Raquin (1953) from the next year is one of a string of examples...

The Mafia aspect is so naive it's almost lovable in comparison with nowadays'. So is the city, the police, the woman/man relationships, class divisions... Félix Leca's character is stereotype incarnate, but at the same time very "believable", in spite of his constant narcissism and tics.

Trevor Willsmer on Amazon is right at why it works: we expect a romantic period piece but during the knives fight in the beginning we realize crime is never nice, only made to look so. Yet somehow, our aesthetically expectations still are about something "nice", while the plot is dark. The police seems like a pantomime, in most of the film the State seems to be absent, and Félix the only one who does the thinking for everybody. The romance is almost enhanced by the heavy censorship. Nothing whatsoever is "shown" (even a kiss on the grass turns into the sky :)) but you feel enough passion. Signoret specially knows how to vibrate with a swagger attitude. Look at her entering a bar, greeting everybody, self assured and always knowing how to deal with men. Manda on the contrary, is a "too perfect hero" to be of my liking. My favourite scene is when he's doing nothing with a branch and she takes the initiative: "Kiss me" and then we have to watch the sky, if not, we'll burn :).

Randy Buck on Amazon is right the film has a sort of documentary feel totally lacking in "Gangs of New York", that Willsmer writes was heavily influenced by this gem.

Then only moment Félix Leca looses the grip of authority is when he is responsible of Raymond's death. Even thugs have rules... On the contrary, when they dispose of the blonde barman who talked too much, only the dumbest of them feels sorry for it.

It's true it's not exactly believable that a mobster would be so cautious and "Machiavellian" when he could just grab and use the lady, but, sincerely, I don't care for feasibility in this sort of films.

It's only with a twinge of nostalgia that I corroborate the swarm of reviewers & fans this film has. I'm absolutely glad about it, as of having watched this film.

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