☆ ☆ ☆
Toi… Le Venin (Night is Not for Sleep) (1958) – R. Hossein
Last night, I
thought I might have stumbled onto a forgotten French noir gem. The first few
minutes held promise: a drifter (Robert Hossein, who also directed) is alone on
the road at night when he is offered a lift by a mysterious blonde in a white
Cadillac. Instead of driving on, she pulls over, seduces him, and then kicks
him out of the car. Catching a glimpse of the number plate as she drives off,
the drifter, Pierre Menda, resolves to track her down, which he does by visiting
the police station. When he arrives at the address, he finds two sisters, Helene
and Eva (played by Odile Versois and Marina Vlady, real sisters), but cannot
figure out if either of them or neither was the mysterious woman from the night
before. To complicate matters, Eva is in a wheelchair, unable to walk due to
polio. The rest of the movie involves Pierre and viewers trying to guess who
goes out each night in the white car, while both women compete for his
affections. Unfortunately, by the time
we reach the conclusion, I didn’t care too much anymore; the filmmakers had undermined
my interest with a hesitant plot. In
addition, I’m not sure the film is really a noir either, as the protagonist is
able to walk away shrugging his shoulders just as easily as he fell into the
sisters’ story. It turns out that there
is an entire oeuvre of Hossein movies, across different genres, which he wrote,
directed, and starred in. Perhaps for those with more time on their hands than
I?
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