Mademoiselle Fifi (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 9 p.m. I ran my husband Charles a 1944 RKO movie produced by Val Lewton and directed by Robert Wise, Mademoiselle Fifi. (We watched it on a YouTube presentation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRl5e3c4a1s, which had subtitles in Portuguese but luckily had the full original English soundtrack intact,) It and one other Lewton RKO movie, Youth Runs Wild (a juvenile-delinquency drama that anticipated The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause and the other J.D. classics of a decade later), were left out of The Val Lewton Collection boxed set because they were not horror films, though at least some of the movies that made it to the box were on the cusp between horror and something else (The Lepoard Man and The Seventh Victim between horror and film noir, The Ghost Ship between horror and action-adventure, and Bedlam between horror and historical drama). The film’s opening credits announced that it is “Based on the Patriotic Stories of Guy de Maupassant” and the script is by Joseph Mischel and Peter Ruric. (Mischel’s name is otherwise unknown to me, but Ruric was director Edgar G. Ulmer’s co-author on the script for the 1934 The Black Cat, the first film to co-star Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and one of the most fascinating and maddening horror films in the Universal canon; it’s a pity Lewton didn’t use Ruric on a horror film.)

The “Patriotic Stories” of Maupassant the film is based on are “Mademoiselle Fifi” and “Boule de Suif” (which according to the online French-to-English dictionary I consulted means “The Scapegoat”). “Boule de Suif” also served as the inspiration, indirectly, for an even better-known classic film, 1939’s Stagecoach (produced by Walter Wanger, directed by John Ford, and starring Claire Trevor in the part Simone Simon plays here; it’s best known as the mega-hit that launched John Wayne’s star career after he’d been kicking around Hollywood for a decade). American writer Ernest Haycox had adapted “Boule de Suif” into a Western magazine story called “The Stage to Lordsburg,” and Ford bought the movie rights and assigned Dudley Nichols to do the script. The opening title makes this film’s didactic intent clear: “1870. The Franco-Prussian War. Then as in our own time, there was Occupied and Unoccupied Territory.” The film begins in the occupied French village of Cleresville, where an aged priest (Charles Waldron, who later played General Sternwood in the 1946 film of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) has told the German occupiers he will not ring the town’s cathedral bell until it has been liberated and is once again under French control. Alas, he is retiring and he’s worried that the young priest (Edmund Glover) who’s coming to replace him will be unwilling or unable to resist the pressure from the German occupiers to ring the bell.

The priest is riding into town in a stagecoach in the dead of winter along with an assorted group of passengers, including Our Heroine, Elizabeth Rousset (Simone Simon in her third and last film for Lewton), whom we first see standing in the courtyard of Rouen in front of a statue of Joan of Arc whose pedestal is inscribed, “She Died for France.” She’s ostensibly a laundress – we even see her working in a laundry – but Lewton, Wise, Mischel and Ruric throw every hint they can at us to suggest Elisabeth is a prostitute without breaking the Production Code’s ban on hookers, especially sympathetic ones. Among the other passengers are the Count and Countess of Breville (Alan Napier and Helen Freeman), a manufacturer (Romaine Callender) and his wife (Fay Helm), a wine dealer (Jason Robards, Sr.) and his wife (Norma Varden), and Jean Cornudet (John Emery, Tallulah Bankhead’s husband), who talks a good game of political activism and confronting the Germans but hasn’t done anything to resist them. The stage is forced to stop at a country inn where a group of German officers is also staying. The leader of the group is Lieutenant Van Eyrick (Kurt Kreuger), who’s made up to look like Hitler’s version of the blond Aryan superman but who’s been nicknamed “Mademoiselle Fifi” because he’s adopted the French expression “fi-fi donc” (essentially “fuck you”) and they’ve responded by giving him a woman’s name. (This reminded me of the story historian Barbrar Tuchman told in her book The Proud Tower of the German general in the years before World War I who, at a party attended by his fellow generals, suddenly had a heart attack and died while in the middle of a drag performance as a ballerina. The other men there had to take the tutu off the corpse and re-dress him in his proper military uniform before they reported the death.)

In Maupassant’s original story Van Eyrick demands sexual services from Elisabeth and, when she refuses, commandeers the horses needed to pull the stagecoach and says he’ll only release them if she has sex with him. Since the Production Code Administration would never in a million years have approved that, Van Eyrick’s sexual advance got turned into a “dinner” invitation. One thing about Mademoiselle Fifi is it shows, even more clearly than his horror films (with the possible exception of I Walked With a Zombie), how politically progressive Val Lewton was. The real villains of the piece are the French aristocrats and capitalists who fraternize with the Germans for protection and financial gain. In the end Elisabeth finally accepts Van Eyrick’s “dinner” invitation after a wild party during which the Germans have demanded the attendance of Elisabeth’s fellow washerwomen and dressed them up in the fancy gowns left behind by the owners of the big house they’ve commandeered, only she stabs him to death. The example of Elisabeth’s successful act of resistance inspires Cornudet to join a local resistance group and actually fight the German occupiers instead of just talking about them. At the end, the young priest yields to the Germans’ demand that he ring the church bell to honor their fallen officer, rationalizing that he’s really doing it to honor Elisabeth’s act of resistance in killing him, and the film’s final scene is an ambiguous close-up of Simone Simon as “The End” title (not the design RKO usually used then) is superimposed over her.

Mademoiselle Fifi has the “look” of a Lewton film, especially in the scenes towards the end when Elisabeth and Cornudet make their escapes through the streets. It’s also an example of how a low-budget producer at a major studio could make it look like he had a bigger budget than he did; many of the sets were recycled from a bigger-budgeted RKO drama about a French village resisting occupation, This Land Is Mine (1943), directed by Jean Renoir and starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara. Mademoiselle Fifi was Lewton’s attempt to break out of the ghetto of horror films and establish himself as a serious producer who could handle dramas, and it’s certainly quite unique. It’s true there were a lot of the didactic moments that appeared in many Hollywood movies made during World War II, but in some ways Lewton pushed the envelope farther than most wartime filmmakers did. Lewton seems to have adopted Bertolt Brecht’s idea of making the characters as impersonal representatives of social classes rather than individuals in theor own right. The capitalists in particular are identified only by their socioeconomic statuses and don’t actually have names. It was also Robert Wise’s first feature film entirely on his own; he had replaced documentarian Gunther von Fritsch on Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People but this was his first solo credit. It’s fascinating that Wise’s most famous film, The Sound of Music, also involves characters fleeing German occupiers, though the presentation there is far more anodyne and unthreatening than it is here!