Now that we've finished 31 Days of Oscar for another year, it's time for TCM to get back in to its various spotlights. One of them is going to be a prime time night of TCM Imports tonight. One of the movies is one that's already on my DVR and that I hadn't blogged about before is Mauvaise graine, early tomorrow at 2:00 AM (so March 21 in Eastern time, but still March 20 out on the west coast if you don't have the west coast feed). With that in mind, I watched the film in order to be able to put up this post in conjunction with tonight's airing.
Henri Pasquier (Pierre Mignand) is a playboy living in Paris with his doctor father. Dad makes a reasonably good living as a fashionable doctor, but it's not enough to be able to support Henri in the manner to which he has become accustomed. Henri drives a nice car and can't be bothered to work. So one day when Henri gets home, Dad asks if he's got the car keys and registration. That's because Dad decided to sell the car. Henri can join the 7/8 of Parisians who don't have their own car.
Henri is none too pleased about it, and then one day he happens to come across the old car. The people who bought it left it parked with the keys in the ignition, this being the 1930s when people were much more trusting. So Henri decides he's going to "borrow" the car since he was hoping to meet up with a woman in one of Paris' many parks for a date. The two start driving around, until Henri discovers that he's being followed.
The reason the men are following him is that they are part of a ring of car thieves who steal high-value cars and sell them off to people looking to get a good car on the cheap. However, the ring considers Paris their territory, and they don't want anybody horning in on it. Henri's quick thinking convinces the leader of the ring, against his better judgment, to let Henri into the ring. There, Henri meets two of the other members, Jean (Raymond Galle), a kleptomaniac who steals neckties, and Jean's sister Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux). Jeannette is the bait for a lot of the men thanks to her looks. These two become Henri's friends in the ring.
Henri screws up the theft of one of the cars, losing the rear license plate which is picked up by a little kid who rides one of those pedal replica cars. Eventually, the rightful owner of that car spots the kid, which brings the police on to the ring. But before that, the head of the ring has decided to get rid of Henri, sending him to Marseilles where the plan is to have Henri killed along the way by having him drive a car with a busted axle. The two make it to Marseilles where they plan to escape to Casablanca. Except that Henri doesn't want to leave Jean behind, which is why he goes back to Paris and arrives just in time for the police pinch.
Billy Wilder, along with any number of people involved in the German-language cinema, fled Germany and Austria after the Nazis took over. Wilder wound up in Paris briefly becure making his way to Hollywood, and it's in Paris that he directed Mauvaise Graine. Another refugee was Franz Waxman, who provided the score. This was the first time Wilder directed a movie, having done screenwriting up until now, and continuing to write for several years more once he got to Hollywood.
As an early directorial effort, it's obviously not yet to the level that Wilder would reach once he became an established diretor, but Mauvaise Graine is still an interesting movie and one that's definitely worth a watch.
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