BOOTLEG FILES 898: “No Exit” (1954 French film based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s play).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It was never released in the United States.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
In May 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre’s drama “Huis clos” had its premiere in Paris. The play came to New York in November 1946 with a production directed by John Huston – this would be the filmmaker’s only foray into directing for Broadway. Sartre’s title, which translated as “Behind Closed Doors,” was changed to “No Exit” for this production, and since then the work is known to American audiences by that title – in Britain, the play has been produced as “Vicious Circle” and “In Camera.”
For those unfamiliar with the work, it is deceptively simple. A valet brings three unlikable people to what looks like a strange hotel room, except that it is really their new home in Hell and they are being imprisoned for their deplorable actions. The disreputable journalist Garcin was killed by a firing squad for being a wartime collaborator with the enemy. The obsessive lesbian Inez lured her cousin’s wife away from a happy marriage – but after the man was killed in a tram accident, Inez’s new lover created a murder-suicide by turning on a gas stove while Inez was sleeping and crawling into bed with her. The conniving Estelle married a rich old man but kept a young lover – when she became pregnant by her lover, she killed the baby, causing the grief-stricken lover to kill himself. The threesome quickly realize they are acutely incompatible and were grouped together to torment each other for eternity. Or, as Sartre succinctly has Garcin observe, “Hell is other people.”
While “No Exit” received critical acclaim, it was not commercially successful and only ran for 31 performances on Broadway. But even if it was a hit, a Hollywood adaptation was out of the question because the Production Code would not allow a film where overt lesbianism figured prominently. Huston would later ask Sartre to write a screenplay for his biopic on Sigmund Freud, but they quarreled over the script and that ended their relationship. But the French film industry was not burdened with the onerous censorship of the Production Code and a screen version of “No Exit” was released in 1954.
Unfortunately, this production – which Sartre adapted in collaboration with Pierre Laroche – decided to expand on the stage version by bringing in additional characters while visualizing the sequences that the Hell-bound characters describe as the lives of those they left behind. It also enlarges the part of the valet who shows the characters to their room and locks them in for eternity. With these changes, the film significantly weakens the power of Sartre’s text.
Much of the problem involves a new opening sequence that plays like a boulevard comedy instead of an Existential drama. An elevator brings a collection of diverse characters in a downward journey, with the elevator opening to the lobby of an ornate hotel. The new “guests” include a self-important bemedaled military office, a dizzy dowager, a Chinese coolie, a priest, a vagabond, and a young woman who collapses in hysteria when the elevator reaches its lower-level destination. Each guest is treated with mild condescension by a front desk clerk who processes their arrival with varying degrees of irritation – he is not impressed with the men’s professional standing or the dowager’s bribery attempt.
Nearly 10 minutes pass before the film gets to the heart of the Sartre play. The valet is played by Yves Deniaud, a comic actor and singer who plays the role in a sad-faced deadpan manner that gives the character a more sincere vibe than the supercilious personality given to the valet in Sartre’s original vision.
The actors three main characters are closer to the play’s vision – Frank Garcin intelligently captures the self-loathing destructiveness of the malevolent Garcin, Gaby Silvia is perfect as the vain and none-too-bright Estelle, and the great Arletty – who became an international star in Marcel Carne’s 1945 “Children of Paradise” – is most effective as the predatory Inez. But while the actors shine in their roles, the film version unwisely robs them of the dramatic power of their respective soliloquy’s where they can view and describe the world they left behind. In this production, those glimpses into the land of the living are visualized by having them look out a window that turns into something of a television screen broadcasting what they are describing. This device also erases a key element of Sartre’s Hell – the room where the trio are imprisoned is supposed to be windowless, in order to reinforce their eternal isolation.
“No Exit” was directed by Jacqueline Audry, who was the first female director to gain prominence in the post-World War II French cinema. Audry was married to the screenwriter Pierre Laroche and they collaborated on several films including the 1949 non-musical version of “Gigi” and the 1950 “Olivia,” which also had a lesbian storyline – both of these films were released in the United States, but made little impact with critics or audiences. Today, Audry is mostly unknown to American movie lovers.
“No Exit” was not theatrically released in the United States and, to date, it has never been made available on any commercial home entertainment format. There is a collector-to-collector service that sells a DVD with English subtitles, while the film was uploaded with authorization to YouTube in a non-subtitled print – but if you watch that, be wary of YouTube’s none-too-accurate French-to-English translations.
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