“At the theater Crainquebille made me weep,” remembered Marcel Proust in 1916.
Of course it did. Anatole France’s parable of an aging vegetable peddler whose minor run-in with a policeman has a devastating effect on his life was written to provoke not just tears, but indignation. France’s novella, which first appeared in Le Figaro in 1901, refers to “more celebrated affairs,” other examples of mangled justice, and his readers would have been quick to see the parallels between L’Affaire Crainquebille (the novella’s original title) and the Dreyfus Affair then polarizing the country: the wrongful conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason and his twelve-year struggle to clear his name.
Like Captain Dreyfus, Crainquebille the pushcart peddler is tried and imprisoned—for insulting a police officer in his case—despite a lack of evidence and witnesses testifying to the contrary. And like Dreyfus, Crainquebille serves time and is released—although his fifteen days in jail is a significantly lighter sentence than the five years Dreyfus spent on Devil’s Island. Crainquebille also sees his livelihood affected; but whereas Dreyfus succeeded at last in clearing his name and continuing his army career, Crainquebille’s fate is more ambiguous. Finally, while Dreyfus was a victim of anti-Semitism, it is Crainquebille’s economic and social position on society’s margins that makes him a target.
Between the novella’s first appearance in Le Figaro and an announcement in the summer of 1922 that Jacques Feyder would be directing a film version, Crainquebille had also been published in book form and adapted into the popular play that Proust saw. Anatole France had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year prior, boosting the novella’s commercial potential. The press notices announcing the production mentioned the author first, its star Maurice de Féraudy (of the Comédie-Française) second, and Feyder last. Although Feyder, whose bumpy career included brilliance and frustration in equal measure, is now considered one of French cinema’s greats, he was a relative novice in 1922, with only one feature under his belt, the exotic fantasy L’Atlantide (1921), a risky enterprise made under great duress over months in the Sahara, but which paid off at the box office.
Feyder’s second feature was a contrast to his first in every way: shorter, cheaper, local, rooted in reality, and yet with its own set of difficulties. Friends had advised Feyder against the project, arguing that Anatole France’s much admired literary style would never translate to the silent screen as well as it had to the stage. However, Feyder was ready to make another bet, albeit on a more modest scale. The thirty-seven-year-old proved up to the challenge, making a film that yanks France’s original story as polemical essay back to the streets of Paris, fleshing out the details of Crainquebille’s corner of the city, a world of pushcart peddlers, street urchins, prostitutes, and shop owners. Feyder replaces the author’s cerebral abstractions with visualized daydreams of the characters’ hopes and aspirations, or with astute details like Crainquebille’s amazed delight at the warm radiator in his jail cell. He also deftly conveys the layers of wordplay around the French insult “mort aux vaches” (slang roughly equivalent to “kill the pigs”) that precipitates Crainquebille’s arrest.
If any French critics recalled the connection to the Dreyfus Affair, they didn’t mention it in their reviews. Instead, they played up the film’s Frenchness with a chauvinistic pride, conveniently ignoring that Feyder was actually Belgian. Cinéa praised the photography, calling the street scenes “so essentially Parisian, executed by the hand of a master,” and L’Echo National exulted, “Coming out of the screening we could tell ourselves, no, the cause of French cinema isn’t so desperate, we still have directors, artists; it’s our job to encourage them to tirelessly keep on with their efforts until the day we will be first in the world film market!” In fact, Hugo Riesenfeld acquired Crainquebille for his New York theaters. “This was the only picture he saw that he felt like bringing back to America,” Film Daily reported. And after seeing it in New York D.W. Griffith declared, “I have seen a film which, for me, precisely symbolizes Paris.” While not achieving world domination, Crainquebille did better overseas than most French productions.
A film that made money abroad as well as at home was the holy grail of the floundering French film industry in the early 1920s, and penetrating the American market was always cause for celebration. But such success was exceptional in France’s chaotic and perennially underfunded film business. Feyder had relied on a banker cousin to raise the money for L’Atlantide, while Crainquebille’s producers were small independents, part of “a cottage industry,” according to historian Richard Abel, that sprang up to fill the production vacuum when large studios like Pathé and Gaumont cut back on production.
The upside of this hobbled industry was an openness to experimentation, with producers and directors trying to revive French filmmaking through sheer creativity. Crainquebille is an inventive blend of disparate cinematic ideas, combining melodrama, realism, Expressionism, and a touch of whimsy, making for a finished product that was both a commercial success and avant-garde. Influential critic Émile Vuillermoz wrote in his review of Crainquebille, “We can’t vanquish the Americans by opposing our franc to their dollar; but if we want to oppose our intelligence to theirs, we’ll beat them hollow.”
The director liberally expanded on the source material, opening the film with a sequence of farm wagons crossing nighttime Paris that not only gives us a jolt of visual pleasure but sets up the film’s economic and social power structures and introduces crucial secondary characters, all before we meet the protagonist. Feyder’s cameraman was the talented Léonce-Henri Burel, who worked with everyone from Abel Gance to Robert Bresson, and this sequence is one of the first actually shot at night rather than being merely tinted. As dawn breaks, the wagons reach Les Halles, the city’s historic central market (demolished in the 1970s), and the high-angle camera captures its vastness, panning over the crowd of buyers and sellers swarming around pyramids of cabbages and cauliflowers.
In his memoir Feyder wrote, “There is no sharper pleasure, no greater or more unreliable happiness than the invention of a vocabulary, the fixing in place of some new kind of cinematic syntax.” Feyder’s mastery of cinema syntax is apparent throughout the film. During the pivotal encounter between Crainquebille and the policeman, the director crosscuts between our protagonist who’s waiting for payment, the policeman ordering him to move along, the growing traffic jam, and the shopkeeper who’s gone to get change and been distracted by a customer of her own. Feyder orchestrates these multiple perspectives to create a polished set piece of half-comic, half-suspenseful tension. In other sequences Feyder switches gears, incorporating fantastical effects—miniature people dancing on one character’s tarot cards, a statue of Marianne, emblem of the Republic, swiveling her head in the courtroom scene as if appalled at the proceedings. Much of the novella’s charm lies in the author’s sardonic aphorisms, one about the inherent injustice of the justice system Feyder converted into funhouse images of a giant policeman in the witness box followed by a miniature witness for the defense.
In November 1922 Crainquebille was previewed for free to an invited audience of Parisian pushcart peddlers. It was, unsurprisingly, a hit with them. “That’s it exactly,” one spectator murmured as Les Halles appeared on screen, according to an eavesdropping journalist. The audience applauded Féraudy, whistled (a sign of disapproval) at the police and judges, wept at Crainquebille’s hard times, and applauded even more vigorously the upbeat conclusion (very different from the novella’s). Another reporter quoted a peddler who said, “It’s not us they should be showing this film to.” To whom, then? “The cops” was the succinct response.
At the opposite end of the social scale, Vuillermoz’s review did more than rave. While he objected to the ending’s sentimentality, he gave the film credit for transcending its own melodrama, arguing that while no one—not the judge or the customers who turn away from Crainquebille—acts maliciously, nevertheless “Jérôme Crainquebille is slowly caught and broken by the powerful, well-oiled gears of our institutions.” It’s a perceptive summation of what we call systemic inequity today, and it’s this sophisticated, nuanced portrait of social machinery and its destructions that makes Crainquebille resonate a century later. In that sense, the wronged ghost of Dreyfus haunts the film still.
Presented at SFSFF 2023 with live musical accompaniment by the Stephen Horne Ensemble (Stephen Horne, Frank Bockius, and Amber Lamprecht)