Alphaville ***** (1965, Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon) – Classic Movie Review 3079

Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s highly esteemed 1965 French classic Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution was the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival. This is a cautionary tale.

Eddie Constantine stars as US special secret agent Lemmy Caution, who arrives in his trusty Ford car at Alphaville, the futuristic city capital of a distant planet, where’s he has been sent to track down the mysterious Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), meeting his daughter Natacha (Anna Karina). It turns out that von Braun is an evil scientist and the city’s ruler. The city is controlled by a huge computer, which has made the citizens zombies, outlawing love and poetry.

Godard’s key French New Wave triumph, uniquely blending 60s comic-strip pop art with sci-fi, is as fresh and startling as the day it was made. Godard’s futuristic fantasy mixes George Orwell’s 1984, a sci-fi tale and a plot from pulp fiction to produce one of its director’s most stylish and enjoyable films.

Constantine (as crime author Peter Cheyney’s private eye character Lemmy Caution) and Karina (as a robot) were deservedly icons of the day, and this clearly shows why. Akim Tamiroff also makes his mark as Henri Dickson. But the film’s real hero is cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whose futuristic images of actual 60s Paris amaze the eye without any special effects.

With the actors improvising their lines, there was no script as such, only a ‘treatment’, though nevertheless a screenplay is now available, transcribed and written down when the subtitled version was first made.

Jean-Pierre Léaud makes an uncredited cameo as the hotel clerk who brings breakfast to Lemmy and Natacha.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3079

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