The world probably doesn’t need a new print of LE COMBAT DANS L’ÎLE (1962)

Posted by Daniel Metz

A fairly mediocre French New Wave-ish film directed by a protege of Louis Malle. Cavalier was assistant director on Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and Les Amants (not bad films to have worked on), and Malle produced this ménage à trois film. If you ask me, its style is satisfying but it lacks the substance of character and plot that similar, better films have.

Romy Schneider (Welles’ The Trial, Visconti’s scene in Boccaccio ‘70, Play it Again, Sam, etc.) plays a woman whose husband is involved with a radical anti-communist militia group planning to assassinate a politician. He is set up and they both flee to the countryside, to the house of his old friend. Delightfully, the old friend is played by the man who put the “Jeem” in Jules et JIm, Henri Serre.

The ménage à trois is popular in French cinema, and for good reason.

He flees, and the woman falls for Henri Serre. Note here that Serre pulls in the sloppy seconds in both of these films. This obviously causes some tension, and it ends with a riverside gun duel (hence the title) leaving one of the men…DEAD!

The film is capitalizing on this type of woman who does whatever she wants, pursuing pleasure at the expense of propriety. This lifestyle is something often attributed to Brigitte Bardot in the 1956 film Et Dieu…créa la femme. In fact, it is a character that is often explored in late 1950s early 1960s French cinema, arguably perfected by Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants in 1958 and Jules et Jim in 1962. Although she is energetic and charming, Schnieder is not really up to the task of her predecessors. She is not a firecracker like Bardot, nor is she as intoxicatingly womanly as Moreau.

Jeanne Moreau she is not, although she has charms of her own.

Oh, I wish I could spend my life thinking about how much of a woman Jeanne Moreau was (she’s still alive but…). She is what you call “une femme.” Or something like that; I don’t really know French.