DVR alert: on Monday the 25th, TCM has a double feature lined up of the classic Arsène Lupin films from the 1930s. The first of these, the Jack Conway Arsene Lupin starring both Lionel and John Barrymore, is one of my very favorite films of the 1930s and absolutely an underrated treasure you need to make an appointment to see; its sequel with Melvyn Douglas is a lot of fun, too. I’ve written about both titles here before, though, so instead of repeating myself I think I’ll take this moment to tell you about the 2004 French blockbuster that tried to update this old-world “gentleman thief” for a new era.
When I was in France on vacation recently, my rental apartment had a DVD player and about 2 dozen movies—all of them American (Blow! Erin Brockovich! Hotel Transylvania 2!) except for a disc of Claude Chabrol films and this modernized Arsène Lupin. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m not surprised—it has never been formally released in the U.S.
French author Maurice Leblanc first started writing pulp thrillers about Arsène Lupin, the Gentleman Thief, in 1905. Leblanc posed as Lupin’s biographer for a staggering run of 20 serialized adventures that continued until 1939. In the 1970s, the writing team of Boileau-Narcejac (of Diabolique and Vertigo fame) revived the character for five sequels authorized by Leblanc’s estate. Along the way there were countless unauthorized forays into Lupinalia by other writers—but Leblanc and his heirs had little room to complain, given that Leblanc had once seen fit to throw Sherlock Holmes into his tales. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle complained, Leblanc responded by renaming him “Herlock Sholmes” as if that settled things.
If you wanted to live as a hermit and couldn’t think of anything else with which to occupy your time, a life’s work could be spent cataloging the many appearances of Arsène Lupin in popular culture in various media—if you wanted to be completist and cover the Japanese versions of Lupin you might need more than a lifetime.
Where Fantômas and Dr. Mabuse remained rooted in their particular countries of origin, appreciated abroad only by specialists, Lupin went Hollywood early. The very earliest Lupin film was made in America by silent film pioneer Edwin S. Porter back in 1908, while the ink was still wet on the earliest of Leblanc’s stories. Although French filmmakers mounted a silent serial around the time of Feuillade’s Fantômas craze, it was up to American filmmakers to show how it ought to be done.
Director Jack Conway’s 1932 version for MGM starred John Barrymore as the arch-burglar and Lionel Barrymore as his frustrated nemesis Detective Guerchard, with a script adapted from the 1915 Lupin stage play by Edgar Jepson. A marvel of witty writing and carefully modulated scenery-chewing by the Barrymore brothers, this is a true Golden Age classic (seriously, set your DVRs people).
Two more American Lupins followed in 1938 and 1944. Not until 1957 did French cinema come to its senses and embrace one of the key figures of French pulp fiction. The great Jacques Becker (The Hole) retooled Arsène Lupin for a colorful petit four of a movie—but the results were controversial. Seen today, Becker’s The Adventures Of Arsène Lupin is a ripping good piece of fun. Back in the day, those very virtues were the cause of its notoriety. The writers of the Cahiers du Cinema laid into Becker’s picture in the scathing article “Six Characters in Search of Auteurs.” At issue was style, not content—the French New Wavers would themselves pay homage to Fantomas, Judex, and Mabuse; Edouard Molinaro would tackle Lupin in his own idiom in the 1962 Arsène Lupin contra Arsène Lupin. And the New Wavers certainly held great respect for Becker—Truffaut called him one of cinema’s greatest artists, Rivette apprenticed under him. But when Becker and Lupin met the result was too slickly commercial, they felt, and a sure sign that French cinema needed to be purged of such pseudo-Hollywood aesthetics, forcibly returned if need be to grittier, more personal, more political roots. Thus the New Wave.
I mention this backstory because it shows how the history of Lupin on film is tied up in questions of Hollywood versus France, of American blockbuster ethos and glossy production values versus the character’s roots in French culture. Jean-Paul Salomé’s ambitious 2004 adaptation marks the first time since 1957 that French cinema has unhesitatingly indulged in making a legitimate Arsène Lupin, true at once to his literary roots and ready to beat Hollywood at its own game. If you think French film = pointy-headed arthouse pretension (come on, admit it, you do) prepare to eat your words.
With a budget of roughly $25 million and stars Romain Duris and Kristen Scott Thomas, Jean-Paul Salomé’s Arsène Lupin tries to revamp elements of French pulp culture for 21st century sensibilities by invoking as much noise, havoc, and martial arts as can possibly be crammed into a moving picture. If Romain Duris’ Arsène Lupin so much as needs to scratch his nose, expect it to be rendered in no fewer than 57 different camera angles, some of them in slow-motion, all punctuated by thunderous sound effects and ominous music. The result is as punchy and mindless a summer action movie as anything cooked up in Hollywood (and I mean that as a compliment).
Consistent with contemporary comic book movies’ unhealthy obsession with origin stories, the new flick sets out to explain Why He Came To Be. And, consistent with contemporary comic book movies, the answer turns out to be all about father issues. Lupin is a thief because papa was, too. This is a trifle unsatisfying because all it does is shove the question back a generation. Was Theophraste Lupin a thief because his daddy was? Does it go all the way back to Caveman Lupin? However, this is as Leblanc wrote it, in tales as “Le Collier de la Reine,” “La Comtesse de Cagliostro,” and “L’Aiguille Creuse,” which screenwriters Salomé and Laurent Vauchaud have strip-mined for material.
Romain Duris plays the role as a young, inexperienced Lupin, not yet the fearless anti-super-hero he appears to be in other films. He alternates between cocksure aplomb when he is in full thief-mode, but reverts to a scared and sensitive young man as he finds the situation spiraling out of his control. Opposite him is the regal Kristen Scott Thomas as the mysterious Josephine Balsamo—possibly the deathless and ageless daughter of the legendary Cagliostro, or maybe just his granddaughter putting on an act (the original novels were equally circumspect as to her true identity). She has designs on a trio of ornate crucifixes that can reveal a hidden treasure—and since Lupin has designs on her, he has to steal the crosses (and the treasure they describe) first. Along the way we will enjoy surgically altered identities, mutilated war victims, half-remembered fragments of a secret crime, messages concealed in fake eyeballs, and the truth behind the start of World War I. And did I mention kickboxing, lots and lots of kickboxing?
The finale sets up a sequel, of which there was none. The filmmakers had their sights clearly on a franchise, but overwhelming box office success in France alone isn’t enough to warrant a massive production of this scale, and more than ten years later Lupin remains MIA in America.