Gérard Philipe and Maria Félix in Fievre.
Myself and others have not infrequently had the occasion to quote Luis Buñuel’s reflection on his career as a filmmaker, to the effect that, while he’d often been obliged to work with scanty budgets and subjects that he didn’t find aesthetically congenial, he’d never put on film something that contradicted his morality. For instance, in my New York Times’ review of Ingmar Bergman’s rarely seen This Can’t Happen Here — a 1950 anti-Communist propaganda narrative that Bergman very soon came to see as a bad move — I kicked off with what I thought was the Buñuel quote: “I never made a single scene that contradicted my convictions or my morality.”
Trying to track down the quote recently, what I found was a slightly different pronouncement. Which is from a 1964 interview with Wilfried Berghahn, for the German film magazine Filmkritik, and it goes like this: “It is quite true that in the beginning, caught up by necessity, I was forced to make cheap films. But I never made a film which went against my conscience or convictions.” In the excerpt from the quote as cited on the site cranes are flying, Buñuel continues: “I have never made a superficial, uninteresting film.”
But in his conversations with the Mexican film critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in 1974 through 1975, collected in the invaluable book Objects of Desire: Conversations With Luis Buñuel, he reveals some considerable misgivings about 1959’s La fievre monte a El Pao. Turrent says, “It doesn’t seem like you have very good memories of La fievre monte a El Pao.” Buñuel responds: “No, and neither did Gérard Philipe. It’s the last film he acted in. One day during filming we dropped our masks. ‘Why did you agree to make this film?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And you?’ ‘I don’t know either,’ I told him.”
I’m not familiar with the situation in today’s France, but here in the States, French film star Gerard Philipe is barely remembered, in part because his career did not even span two decades. He died in 1960, at age 37, not too long after completing Fievre. But prior to that the delicately handsome actor was something of a matinee idol in his country. His greatest cinephile hits include Ophuls’ 1950 La Ronde and Vadim’s 1959 Les Liaisons Dangereuses; he also made pictures with Allegret, Becker, Clair, Guitry, and Autant-Lara, the latter if I recall correctly something of a bete noir for the anti-Cinema du Papa agitators of Cahiers du Cinema. (Godard called Autant-Lara’s 1947 Devil in the Flesh, starring Philipe, “miserable,” so there’s that.)
Buñuel explains why he agreed to make the film with customary bluntness: “My agent proposed it from Paris. A certain producer wanted to make a film with me and came to see me in Mexico. The truth is that it didn’t interest me much, and I accepted it only because at the time I took everything offered to me, as long as it wasn’t humiliating, because I didn’t have any money and lived day to day. I think my lack of interest is apparent. It turned out to be a very routine film, made to get out of my financial predicament.”
While one can’t quite call Fievre a buried Buñuel, it’s not one that’s frequently revived, so I never saw it until this month, courtesy of a solid all-region French Blu-ray (with English subtitles yet) from Pathé, complete with a “restored by” box on the front cover. You may recall Pathé was widely criticized for its digital scrubbing of Carné’s Les enfants du paradis back in 2012, and it may have learned something from that episode. I didn’t consider the image here bothersome in the slightest but some might still find its rendering of Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography a little more Mr. Clean that it ought to be. I’m thinking of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s remarks about contemporary video transfers in my friend Farran Smith Nehme’s interview with the idiosyncratic duo in the September 2022 issue of Sight and Sound, with Tarantino rhapsodizing over the days when “Ninety-nine per cent of every video transfer was done from a direct print of a movie. They had a 35mm or a 16mm, usually a 35. They had the best print they could get, but it was a print,” and Avary chiming in that sometimes an original negative scan is “sometimes worse” than one from an interpositive. Such sources, Tarantino points out, “Never saw a lab…never played in a theatre, never entertained and audience…that print has no life.”
Does it seem like I’m waltzing around articulating my direct experience of the movie? Well I probably am, in part because Buñuel’s own implicit assessment of the work is so spot on. “Despite everything, I tried to make a professional, well-made film, and even to put in interesting details.” And guess what? He did. The movie is set on a fictional Caribbean island where its tyrant Vargas is assassinated. The aftermath relates a triangle of intrigue between Vazquez, the martinet’s mild-mannered and idealistic secretary (Philipe), Gual, the underhanded and corrupt military leader making an out-and-out power grab (Jean Servais, best-known for his portrayal of a hangdog heist man in Rififi), and Inés (Maria Félix), Vargas’ widow, who had been conducting an affair with an officer before her husband was killed and who now flits between the sincere attentions of Vazquez and the perverse desires of Gual.
Overt politics never interested Buñuel, but sexual politics certainly did, and it’s interesting that he didn’t opt to emphasize them more in this scenario. Certainly, once he got the assignment, he took it seriously; in a December 1958 letter to his Paris-based agent, Paulette Dorise (reproduced in the volume Luis Buñuel: A Life In Letters), he wrote of his work on the screenplay, which was based on a novel by Henri Castillou: “Luckily filming is still three and a half months away, which will give me time to introduce new improvements, as well as the changes that are likely to emerge from your notes. I am happy with the work in general. Despite what you may think, the adaptation was very, very difficult.” For all its difficulty, Buñuel must have felt obliged to stick closely with the overtly political aspects of the story. Because watching the movie, it’s entirely self-evident that Vazquez is a much less compelling character than Gual. It’s not that Buñuel couldn’t make idealistic characters interesting; I mean, look at Nazarin. The problem here is that Vazquez’s idealism doesn’t propel him into the absurd that way that Nazarin’s does. And there’s also Philipe’s delicacy. Some observers of the movie have said he looks physically ill here; he doesn’t, really; he was never an intimidating presence (his portrayal of the ultimately hapless and feeble Count in Ophuls’ La Ronde almost a decade earlier uses his corporeal wispiness to great effect), and again, Buñuel is right on when recalling this movie 15 years after its making: “The role didn’t go very well for Gérard; he wasn’t the man for that character, that was obvious even in the way he wore his pistol hanging loosely on his belt.”
On the other hand, Servais’ Gual is really something, particularly as he toys sexually with Maria Felix’s uninhibited Inés, giving her precise instructions on how to undress for him and then dismissing her with an abruptness that suggests self-disgust but could be something rather more peculiar. Servais’ hooded eyes and dispirited jowls put across a paranoid mood that’s practically Nixonian.
The scenes between Servais and Felix, one of which Buñuel claimed to have adapted from Tosca, are the liveliest in the movie. Another sequence, in which two former henchmen divide the worldly goods of a master who’s just been put to death, has a droll Buñuelian mordancy. So too, does Vazquez’s declaration of love for Inés, which he makes from a subservient position, while cleaning up broken glass in what was once Vargas’ office. But there’s no surrealism, either lower-case “s” or upper. And there’s not much fever, and there’s practically no mounting. So while it’s a Buñuel picture as per the credits, one is left with the conviction that it’s something less than un vrai Buñuel picture.
In a February 1960 letter to Buñuel, his friend the film critic Georges Sadoul wrote from Paris:
“Anne Philipe” — Gerard’s widow — “came to dinner last week, the first time we’d seen her since the death of poor Gérard, we had so much to talk about we didn’t have a chance to ask her about you, we were also afraid of stirring up sad, recent memories. We were genuinely relieved to discover that Gérard’s death was not related to any kind of amoebic infection. The doctors were mistake, thinking there was an amoebic connection, when it was in fact cancer; so, no one can now claim he died prematurely because he went to make a film in Mexico, where he was supposed to have contracted a terrible illness.”
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