The Great Movies III

When he actually does protect her, his dreams seem within reach. The giveaway is that he's so elated when he defends her from an attack by two hoods. A real gangster, a real buddy of Bugsy's, a real former hit-man, would not be as excited as a kid. Yet Lou's childlike delight at his own startling behavior is part of the man he really is: like the narrator of Scorsese's GoodFellas, he admires and envies gangsters and likes to be a big shot.

Louis Malle (1932-95) was a French New Wave pioneer who alternated between documentaries and fiction, between France and America. His first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1958), grew directly from the 195os French noir period that gave us Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville, and the late flowering of the actor Jean Gabin. Their French noirs were more elegies than adventures, more concerned with failure than triumph, less interested in action than the close observation of the daily behavior of their heroes. The best scene in Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi shows Gabin preparing a late-night dinner of pate for the old pal he has loyally supported through one fiasco after another. After dinner, he gives him a toothbrush and pajamas.

For Lancaster's character, the association with Grace begins with the fact that she needs Lou to survive. To conceal her desperation, she insults and criticizes him like a diva, and he sees right through her. Grace the aging beauty (and perhaps retired whore) finds a natural rapport with Chrissie the hippie, who believes in reincarnation and foot reflexology. They're far apart in age, style, and beliefs, but they both construct fantasies to wall off the grim reality surrounding them.

As for Lou and Sally, there is something tender and subtle going on. Neither was born yesterday. Both have dreams. Both have lived with disappointment. Even though they could be lovers, they have no future together, and maybe no future separately. They don't need to say this to each other. When he helps her, it is because she needs help, and equally because he needs to help. His payoff is not living happily ever after, but in having an eyewitness who knows that at least once during his descent into obscurity he stepped up to the plate and acted as he thinks a man should act-a man like the men he admires, who may have been criminals but were powerful and respected. The movie does not deny reality; it ends with what must happen, in the way it must happen, given what has gone before.

The British critic Philip French, who knew Malle since his first film, thinks Atlantic City is the best of his American projects, although I would choose My Dinner with Andre (1981), and Stanley Kauffmann thinks Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Malle's last film, is the only successful film of a Chekhov play. When I told a French film official last autumn that I had just seen and admired Elevator to the Gallows, I received not a smile but a scornful "pffft!" Perhaps Malle alienated his countrymen by moving to America, by marrying Candice Bergen, by taking on so many American stories (Pretty Baby,Alamo Bay). Malle did not follow his New Wave origins into ideological extremities, like Godard, but like his German contemporary Fassbinder frankly desired large audiences.

What's interesting, even with a seemingly commercial project like Atlantic City, is how resolutely he stayed with the human dimension of his story and let the drug plot supply an almost casual background. Here is a movie where reincarnation is treated at least as seriously as cocaine, and the white suit even more so.

here is such exhilaration in the heedless energy of the schoolboys. They tumble up and down stairs, stand on stilts for playground wars, eagerly study naughty postcards, read novels at night by flashlight, and are even merry as they pour into the cellars during an air raid. One of the foundations of Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants (1987) is how naturally he evokes the daily life of a French boarding school in 1944. His central story shows young life hurtling forward; he knows, because he was there, that some of these lives will be exterminated.

The film centers on the friendship of two boys of twelve, Julien Quentin and Jean Bonnet. They are played by Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto. They had never acted before and barely acted again. Julien's father is always absent at his factory; his glamorous mother wants him safely away from Paris, and sends him by train to a Catholic school for rich children. Here he will find priests and teachers he respects, and classrooms where the students actually seem happy. One day after Christmas, a new student arrives: Jean.