“There are no theories in circulation about Jacques Becker,” François Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma in the spring of 1954, “no scholarly analyses, no theses. Neither he nor his work encourages commentary, and so much the better for that.” Truffaut was reviewing Becker’s newest film, Touchez pas au grisbi, an adaptation of Albert Simonin’s novel of a heist gone bad. The film would enjoy great commercial success and launch the final phase of Jean Gabin’s career by casting him as a patriarchal gangster, but Truffaut was not concerned with that aspect of it. For him and many of his colleagues at Cahiers, Becker was one of a handful of French filmmakers—Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, and Jacques Tati were others—who could be taken as role models, as embodying a more personal approach than the self-consciously literary and often formulaic modes of the “tradition of quality” they disdained. Becker was not a purveyor of broadly telegraphed social messages or portentous psychologizing, and his films could not be mistaken for anyone else’s: “Every one of Jacques Becker’s films is a Jacques Becker film…. What happens to Becker’s characters is of less importance than the way it happens to them.”
Becker had been a significant figure in French cinema since his early acquaintance with Renoir, who took a liking to the younger man—“he was twenty years old and had a natural elegance”—and relished their shared passion for films. Born in 1906 and raised in a bilingual household, the son of an industrialist who worked for the Fulmen battery company and an Irish-born fashion designer who maintained her own maison de couture in Paris, Becker had been a restlessly curious and playful adolescent and an indifferent student, an enthusiast of cinema and jazz bent on resisting his father’s efforts to dragoon him into the world of industrial engineering. Working for a time as a steward for a transatlantic steamship line, he got to know touring American musicians, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington among them, and met the director King Vidor, who offered him an acting job in Hollywood.
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1
See François Truffaut, “The Rogues Are Weary,” Cahiers du Cinéma 34 (April 1954); reprinted in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier (Harvard University Press, 1985). ↩
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2
Quoted in Valérie Vignaux, Jacques Becker, ou l’exercice de la liberté (Paris: Céfal, 2000). ↩
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3
On the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps; her interview can be found as a supplement to the Criterion Collection’s edition of Casque d’or. ↩
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4
Brigitte Auber, “Rendez-vous avec Becker,” Positif 608 (October 2011). ↩
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5
André Bazin et al., “Six Characters in Search of auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 71 (May 1957); in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s. ↩
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6
Cahiers du Cinéma 107 (May 1960). ↩
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7
Roy Armes, French Cinema Since 1946 (London: Zwemmer, 1966). ↩
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8
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 2004). ↩
