Le feu aux poudres (1957) Online

In the second half of the fifties ,Henri Decoin's natural flair for film noir was slowly but inexorably fading away."Le Feu aux Poudres" is a mediocre flick but what was to come later was worse ,a dreadful spate of turkeys :only maybe "Malefices" based on a Boileau /Narcejac novel would deserve to be watched but it is currently impossible to find it;there are also good scenes in the first "Chatte" but that's about it.

"Le Feu aux poudres" is another gangsters movie .It deals with arms dealing and it is obvious that Peter Van Eyck has an almost worthless part:he is given one scene to shine,when he tells Pellegrin about "man who will always kill for it is his nature":for a short while,Decoin regains his pessimism which made "Non Coupable" "La File Du Diable" or "La Verite sur Bebe Donge" great films noirs.

Apart from that,the audience will visit Roquefort village with its cellars full of the famous cheese ,and there's a funny scene when Lino Ventura and his pal ,the cops,try to make Charles Vanel say (they are recording a tape to fool his accomplices) "Demain Il Sera Trop Tard" (Tomorrow will be too late).

Françoise Fabian ,an earnest thespian has a decorative part and Raymond Pellegrin is wasted.

The title of this film can be translated as bringing things to a head and although he had fourteen further films in him purists would argue that Henri Decoin's career had already come to a head by the mid-fifties. He was certainly at his peak in the late thirties and early forties and still capable of turning out quality product into the fifties but then he was still - on occasion - working with his ex-wife Danielle Darrieux in that decade. Purists may also argue that Decoin was not really at home dealing with gun-runners which is just about all the plot in this case. Raymond Pellegrin is an unsatisfactory protagonist and Peter Van Eyck a bit on the cardboard side of oak as the principal heavy. Heavy hitters Charles Vanel and Lino Ventura don't appear for about four reels and the film shows its age in the sequence where Ventura's flics are tape recording Vanel's statement in another room and subsequently 'edit' the tape so that when they play it back to Van Eyck over the telephone it sends a totally false message. I'm a great admirer of Decoin, especially in the films he made with Darrieux, some of the finest in French cinema, and not prepared to write him off totally whilst conceding that this effort is far from his best.