Marcel Pagnol by Brett Bowles (review)

Marcel Pagnol, playwright, novelist, and filmmaker, was one of the most influential personalities in the French cinema of the first half of the twentieth century. A dedicated exponent of popular — some would say populist — culture and of theatre as a source and determinant of filming, he was also an energetic producer, a successful champion of French cinema against the Hollywood rival, and a much-loved portraitist of Marseille and rural Provence. His name remains a box-office draw to this day. Brett Bowles’s impressively researched study of Pagnol as filmmaker aims to avoid the kind of hagiographic approach that has characterized earlier French biographies, while giving full recognition to his innovations and artistic authenticity as well as to his influence on the industry. The book concentrates on the Pagnol of the 1930s, with the most detailed discussion being devoted to the Marseilles trilogy, Marius, Fanny, and César (although Marius and Fanny were nominally directed by others, Pagnol as writer and hands-on producer was a central creative force, and the trilogy is probably his best-known work), and to the three films that Pagnol adapted from Jean Giono’s work in the later part of the decade, with subsequent issues over copyright. These discussions are preceded by an assessment of Pagnol’s conversion to cinema, including what theatre meant to him before and his attitude to art during his formative years, and followed by an examination of how Pagnol’s methods of production, distribution, and marketing changed the French industry. A brief epilogue is devoted to his legacy in contemporary production. Bowles quotes extensively from Pagnol’s letters and articles, giving a thorough and even-handed assessment of his creative philosophy, of the production history of the principal films studied, and of their stylistic ambitions and effects (there are several close sequence analyses to illustrate how Pagnol’s work functions visually). The decision to concentrate so completely on the films of the 1930s, however, leaves the reader somewhat frustrated. Wartime and post-war films, with the exception of Manon des sources (1952), barely get more than a casual mention; and indeed the war, with all that it implied for someone engaged in the film industry as both director and producer, is almost written out of the book. We learn that it forced Pagnol to liquidate his studios, and that he made only two films during this period, but what exactly happened? The question has some weight, given the obvious suitability of some of Pagnol’s ideology to the priorities of the Vichy Regime (which is, of course, very far from calling him a vichyste), and the post-war difficulties that Giono encountered for this very reason, which Bowles mentions in order to indicate that Pagnol, in the influential position of President of the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, was able to defend his friend. Notwithstanding this, Bowles’s book will surely prove the definitive work on Pagnol in English for some time to come.