Reviews and notes

FESTIVALS:
1964 Taormina
2018 [Restored] Grand Lyon


René Clément’s brilliantly over-the-top Joy House dances on the fence between classic noir and neo-noir. Whatever we call it, it’s an outrageous concoction of Gothic gangster action murder mystery set on the Cote d’Azur and starring French sensation Alain Delon and that quintessentially modern American actress, Jane Fonda, accompanied by one of the most brazen musical scores in all of noir. Delon plays a con artist womanizer named Marc who’s running from a gangster whose wife he had seduced and finds shelter in a Catholic mission. When two strange, beautiful, black-clad philanthropists (Fonda and Lola Albright) stop by the mission with donations, they home in on Marc and take him home to their neo-Gothic mansion, ultimately offering him a job as live-in chauffeur. It’s not long before Marc is juggling affairs with both women, but the more he learns about their mysterious pasts, the more the gangsters on his tail don’t look so bad... Delon’s physicality during his extended capture and escape from gangsters rivals that of Tom Cruise, and the third act, in which secrets and plots are unleashed with explosive force, the film is a thrill ride deserving of reassessment.
– Heart of Noir.


René Clément’s career had its ups-and-downs, but his collaborations with Alain Delon were high points. Their first, Purple Noon, established Delon as an international star. The second, Joy House , is a sophisticated film noir that ought to have been included in either the MoMA’s Jazz Score series or the Film Forum’s French Crime Wave retrospective.

Delon plays Marc, an amoral gigolo, which is a promising start to any film. Dumb enough to romance the wife of an American mobster, he quickly finds he is not safe, even on the Riviera. Needing a hiding place, he takes work as the chauffeur of Barbara Hill, a reclusive American widow living alone with her niece Melinda, or so they tell Marc. He quickly suspects there is another player somehow involved in the Hill household — someone who probably played a role in Barbara’s bereavement. After all, it is impossible for Marc to believe the beautiful widow, played by Lola Albright, is not enjoying the attentions of a man. He would certainly volunteer for the position, but it is the niece (a pre-Barbarella sex-kittenish Jane Fonda) who repeatedly throws herself at him, leading to something more complicated than a love triangle (a rhombus maybe).

Delon’s adventurer might not be particularly likeable, but he is not an idiot, immediately recognizing all is not right with his employers. Lola Albright, of Peter Gunn fame, brings a surprising vulnerability to her black widow role. As Melinda, Fonda is reasonably credible, conveying the danger lurking beneath her coy surface. What really makes the film enjoyable though, is some of the hardboiled dialogue. At one point the European contact for the American gangsters tells them he is Corsican. “Well, that’s not your fault,” one replies.

Titled Les Felins in French, there is a pronounced feline theme, with the women literally showing claws at times. Clément creates a sense of desire turning claustrophobic, heightened by Jean André’s production design, which really makes Barbara’s castle-like villa another character in the drama.

Adding a sultry flavor is Lalo Schifrin’s groovy little crime jazz score. Recorded with members of the Paris Opera Orchestra as well as trumpeter Roger Guérin, who also played on Martial Solal’s soundtrack for Breathless, and bassist Pierre Michelot, who played on Miles Davis’s Elevator to the Scaffold soundtrack and was a member of the house band seen in Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight, Schifrin’s soundtrack was only just issued in full four years ago. However, his main theme, The Cat took on a life of its own, with Jimmy Smith, Claude Nougaro, Peggy Lee, and Schifrin himself recording cover versions of it at the time.

Joy House is a clever crime story with a cool swinging sixties vibe. Having taught it in a jazz and film class as an example of Schifrin’s film work, I am happy to see it readily available again.
- Joe Bendel, JB Spins, 15 August 2008.



JANE FONDA
The real scene stealer here though is Jane Fonda, whose wild card performance veers between self consciousness and uninhibited provocation which is completely appropriate for her enigmatic character. Joy House marked the beginning of Fonda’s European phase when she tried to establish herself as an actress on her own terms. In her autobiography, My Life So Far, Fonda recalled, “..France seemed to be in the cards... French director Rene Clement flew to Los Angeles to pitch me a film idea that would co-star Alain Delon... I agreed. I liked the idea of putting an ocean’s distance between me, Hollywood, and my father’s long shadow. Moreover, France was then at the apex of the nouvelle vague, with young directors like Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Malle, and Vadim. Clement was up in years and wasn’t part of this new wave, but he directed the brilliant Forbidden Games.”

According to biographer Christopher Andersen in Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda “Even before shooting began, Jane got things going. “I will undoubtedly fall in love with Alain Delon,” she declared. “I can only play love scenes well when I am in love with my partner.” No idle prediction. Within weeks of her arrival, Jane had broken up Delon’s long-standing affair with actress Romy Schneider... Likening her to France’s sexual icon of the 1950s, Brigitte Bardot, the press started calling her la BB Americaine. It was no coincidence that Roger Vadim, the former husband of Bardot and director of the film that launched her breakthrough film ...And God Created Woman in 1956, would soon come calling and reinvent Fonda’s screen image as a continental sexpot.

Fonda had previously met Vadim in Paris and later turned down an offer from him to star in a remake of La Ronde. But during the filming of Joy House, the two met again and began an affair which led to marriage and a collaboration on four film projects, beginning with Circle of Love (1964), Vadim’s take on La Ronde.

As for Joy House, Fonda would later remark, “There was no script and very little organization... It sort of threw me because I’m used to working within a structured framework. There was just too much playing it by ear for my taste. But Clement is still a wonderful director.”

Although Fonda would dismiss most of the films she made during her European sojourn (and no one would make claims for any of them as great cinema), she looks sensational in Joy House and her performance is more entertaining to watch than some of her later, more acclaimed work after she became a serious Oscar winning actress; I cite the glum, morose mystery thriller The Morning After (1986) as an example. I think Pauline Kael succinctly captured her appeal during this period when she noted in her review of Barbarella that “Jane Fonda has the skittish naughtiness of a teen-age voluptuary. She’s the fresh, bouncy American girl triumphing by her innocence over a lewd, sadistic world of the future.” And that’s pretty much true of her performance in Joy House too.
- Jeff Stafford, Cinema Sojourns, 9 January 2020.

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