Mauvaise Graine, a.k.a. Bad Seed (Compagnie Nouvelle Commerciale, Pathé Consortium Cinéma, filmed 1933, released 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 5) Turner Classic Movies showed the first and third films, respectively, directed by Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder was born June 22, 1906 in Galicia, a small town now part of Poland but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wilder eventually pursued a career as a journalist, first in Vienna and then in Berlin. One of my favorite Wilder stories was that when he was a reporter in Vienna he pursued an interview with Sigmund Freud, who had an ironclad policy against talking to journalists. Wilder got his revenge by inserting nasty comments about psychoanalysis into his subsequent films whenever he could. He sought a career as a screenwriter, which he claimed he got into when a woman sex-worker friend of his had a minor German film producer named Galitzenstein as a client; Wilder caught them “in the act” and threatened to tell Mrs. Galitzenstein if Mr. Galitzenstein didn’t give him a job as a writer, and Wilder’s parting shot to his woman friend was, “Next time – Erich Pommer!” (Pommer was the head of UFA Studios, the biggest German film company.) Wilder was an up-and-coming screenwriter until disaster struck both his career and the world on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. His mother and 12 other blood relatives stayed behind and ultimately were murdered in the Holocaust, but Wilder himself fled to Paris and settled in with a group of similar German expats, including Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Kurt Weill and Friedrich Holländer. In 1933 Wilder and a number of his friends got together to make a movie, and to keep the budget down Wilder agreed not only to co-write it but also co-direct it.

The film was called Mauvaise Graine, which means “Bad Seed,” but it had nothing to do with the later American film The Bad Seed. Instead it was a quirky dark comedy about cars; the male lead is a spoiled rich kid named Henri Pasquier (Pierre Mingand), whose doctor father (Paul Escoffier) literally takes away his son’s car and throws him out of his home. We’ve already seen Henri using his fancy car (a Buick; a lot of the cars in this movie are American imports) to pick up a girl, Jeannette (Danielle Darrieux, about the only person in the cast who built a reputation outside France). Then dad takes the Buick away and tells Henri to get a job and support himself, and instead Jean steals the same car his dad just sold out from under him. Only he’s chased by three men who are after him, and since there’s no indication that they’re police officers it’s clear that they mean him no good. It turns out they’re members of a well-organized auto theft ring that operates from a chop shop called the “Garage Monico,” and Henri moves in with one of the other members, a young man nicknamed “Jean le Cravat” (Raymond Galle) because he compulsively steals other men’s neckties. It turns out that Jean is Jeannette’s brother and Jeannette is also part of the gang: her role is to get herself picked up by middle-aged men in fancy cars for long lunch or theatre dates, and while she’s alone with her pickup the other gang members will steal his car. Also involved with the gang is a Black man identified only as “Le Zèbre” (Jean Wall) whose job is to repaint the stolen cars and change their license plates to render them unrecognizable. The chief of the gang (Michel Duran) gets tired of Henri because Henri is trying to organize the workers in the car-theft ring to get a bigger share of the proceeds.

He decides to eliminate Henri by sending him to Marseilles in a hot-looking boat-tailed sports car with a badly damaged front axle that endangers any driver who takes the car above 55 miles per hour. Only Henri has already made a date with Jeannette for the evening, and she insists that she’s coming with him no matter what. The car is finally stopped by police along the way – a cop’s finger smudges the forged registration papers the gang has concocted for it – and there’s an elaborate in-the-dark chase scene in which Henri pushes the car well past 55, its axle breaks, it crashes and both Henri and Jeannette end up in the local river. They try to walk back to Paris but eventually decide (while they’re riding in a hay wagon, obviously a ride they’ve hitchhiked) to go to Marseilles and flee the country, heading to one of France’s colonies in Southeast Asia. Only a necktie salesman at the dock in Marseilles reminds Jeannette of her brother, and she insists that they can’t flee the country without him. Meanwhile, the Paris police catch on to the real business of the Garage Monico – they’re busted when a kid picks up one of the license plates they’ve taken off one of the cars they stole, and the car’s owner sees the license plate on a kid’s toy car, recognizes it and calls it in. They raid the place and Henri and Jeannette try to escape with Jean, but Jean gets killed in the process. Ultimately Henri goes to his dad for help, and dad orders him to do whatever he tells him to do – which turns out to be boarding that Southeast Asia-bound steamer in Marseilles and getting the hell out of France.

For some reason the writers and directors of this film were credited only by their last names; the directors were listed as “Esway & Wilder” (Esway was Alexandre Esway, an established director in France who was assigned as Wilder’s collaborator even though Wilder insisted he shot most of the film himself) and the writers as [Jan] “Lustig,” “Wilder” and [Max] “Kolpé,” with another writer credited under his full name, Claude-André Puget, whose job I’m guessing it was to translate the three German writers’ work into French. The film owes a great deal to a movie Wilder had worked on three years earlier in Germany, People on Sunday, directed by Robert Siodmak (as Wilder explained in his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for The Celluloid Muse, “Robert was the director for a very simple reason; when kids play football on a meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and he owned the camera”) with Edgar G. Ulmer as assistant director, Eugen Schuftan as cinematographer and Fred Zinnemann as Schuftan’s assistant. Unlike the elaborate UFA productions shot on elaborate indoor sets even when the scenes were supposed to take place outdoors, People on Sunday was shot catch-as-catch-can on real streets, and it’s pretty obvious Wilder shot Mauvaise Graine that way as well. It’s not a film that offers too many insights into the sort of director Wilder would become, though it’s been cited as an influence on the “neo-realist” films from Italy just after World War II and the “new wave” movies from France starting in the late 1950’s, likewise shot catch-as-catch-can on real streets (with whoever happened to be on them as unpaid extras). “We didn’t use a single soundstage,” Wilder told Higham and Greenberg. “Most of the interiors were shot in a converted garage, even the living-room set, and we did the automobile chase sequences without transparencies, live, on the streets, at speed, and it was very exhausting.” The result was a quite good, attention-getting movie, well directed and capably acted, and a good start for Wilder’s career even though he wouldn’t get another chance to direct for nine years.