While many often reduce the whole of French cinema between 1959 and 1968 down to the machinations of the Nouvelle Vague, it’s a mistake to overlook the many filmmakers who weren’t hip to that movement, including Robert Hossein. The actor-turned-director is the subject of a wonderful new box set from Radiance, Wicked Games: Three Films by Robert Hossein, which includes The Wicked Go to Hell (1955), Nude in a White Car (1958), and A Taste of Violence (1961).
Hossein was somewhat popular in the 1950s and ‘60s as an actor, starring in several films directed by Roger Vadim (including 1963’s Vice and Virtue) and the similarly forgotten Bernard Borderie. He is perhaps most famous for his portrayal of the heroin-addled gang member Rémy in Jules Dassin’s 1955 classic, Rififi, released the same year as his directorial debut. He was mostly absent during the dominant discourse of the time, when flurries of film fans and crowds of curious columnists breathlessly praised the French New Wave.
Like many of his contemporaries outside that trend-setting scene, Robert Hossein’s work has been hard to find – besides some poor-quality uploads on Russian websites, it seems like the only film of his to make it to Blu-ray has been Arrow Video’s release of Cemetery Without Crosses (1968). Suffice to say, it’s safe to assume that even most card-carrying cinephiles haven’t heard of Hossein these days. As such, it’s certainly a satisfying surprise to see these three films get such a beautiful release.
The Wicked Go to Hell is a bifurcated crime drama about two convicts who are accused of snitching on a particularly powerful fellow prisoner. To avoid the potentially fatal consequences, they hatch an escape plan, eventually stumbling upon an isolated beach house with a broken-down vehicle. They share their new hideout with a beautiful woman who becomes both a hostage and the object of their lust.
Nude in a White Car is a wild psychosexual noir about a drifter and failed poet named Pierre (Hossein) who is picked up one night by a mysterious blonde wearing nothing but a fur coat, her face obscured by the darkness. It doesn’t take much to seduce him, but he is quickly kicked out of the car and tossed to the curb in post-coital confusion.
Pierre tracks down the car, which is parked at a decadent estate owned by Hélène, a beautiful blonde woman, and Eva, her paraplegic but equally flaxen and fit sister. The women claim to have not used the car in days, and they look similar enough that Pierre can’t tell which woman he slept with under the cover of caliginous night. He quickly finds himself drawn into their weird, wily web, spun with deceit and desire.
A Taste of Violence seems to be set in the recent past and in an imaginary Central American country, following members of a guerrilla liberation movement who kidnap their fascist president’s daughter. Intending to use her for a prisoner exchange, the three men must traverse a great distance with the woman before reuniting with their group. Divisions brew within the group during their journey – one of them begins to fall for the woman; another schemes to sell her for money; their leader (Hossein) remains a committed revolutionary dedicated to the task.
While A Taste of Violence may seem to be the outlier in Wicked Games, it shares many thematic and stylistic similarities with the other two titles, as do many of Robert Hossein’s films as a director. These three pictures incorporate a romantic triangle of some sort, assigning defiant and complicated roles to women; they all explore the relationship between crime and freedom and study the tortured trappings of machismo. Each of them incorporates the beach and the ocean in crucial ways, and their black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.
The Wicked Go to Hell and Nude in a White Car are both based on stories by prolific crime novelist Frédéric Dard, and each film stars Hossein’s wife from 1955 to 1960, Marina Vlady, star of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967). These two titles are the most closely related as a result, with more explicit love triangles and noir tendencies.
Meanwhile, A Taste of Violence is a Western, one that largely prefigures the Zapata Western subgenre, which would officially branch off from Spaghetti Westerns in the late 1960s. It was also the beginning of Robert Hossein’s exploration of different cultures and historical periods, which would lead the director everywhere, from early 20th-century Russia (1967’s I Killed Rasputin) to 19th-century France (1982’s Les Misérables).
Despite those genre differences, the three films in Wicked Games all exhibit fascinating gender-based power struggles. They also share strong existentialist tendencies, with toes dipped in absurdist waters. They could have easily been written by Harold Pinter, if the playwright went through a Francophile period of berets, ménages à trois, and even more ennui (and that’s a compliment).
The Radiance reissues look fantastic, especially the outdoor photography. The windy beachside drama of The Wicked Go to Hell and the lonely mountainous expanses of A Taste of Violence are stunning to behold. One can also see Hossein’s directorial development across the six years of these three films, with the filmmaker embracing bolder choices and more cerebral aesthetics by the time the ‘60s rolled around.
These films feel surprising and vibrant in retrospect. Of course, they’re far from Godard’s Breathless (1960) or François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), but they’re far from mainstream and still feel unique, especially through the lens of feminist theory. So it’s a bit strange, then, that Hossein was somewhat ostracized from his Nouvelle Vague peers at the time. His work was reportedly trashed by the auteurist crowd at Cahiers du Cinéma, who looked down on him as a continuation of France’s “Tradition of Quality” and the studio system’s old-school qualities.
Nonetheless, Robert Hossein stood alongside them at the infamous Colloquium at La Napoule in May 1959, hotly debating the future of French film. There, according to Michel Marie in The French New Wave: An Artistic School (2003), he proposed a “constituent assembly of young cinema” to help support burgeoning artists in the industry. He was ultimately rejected, but one wonders how different the subsequent history of cinema would be if he had been met with support rather than apathy.
Surely, Radiance’s Wicked Games set will restore his name in the history of French cinema (and hopefully foreshadow future reissues of his work). The supplements in the set are excellent, with critic Tim Lucas providing meticulously detailed (and rather dry) audio commentaries as usual. A video essay on femme fatales and an interview with Marina Vlady are other highlights, as is the excellent booklet that accompanies the films. Critic Walter Chaw’s in-depth essay, in particular, is beautifully written and genuinely edifying, an appropriate accompaniment to this notable set.