Film Credits

Written & Directed by: Pierre Schoendoerffer

Starring: Jean Rochfort, Claude Rich, Jacques Dufilho, Jacques Perrin, Odile Versois, Aurore Clement

Review

"Le Crabe-Tambour" is the nickname of Willsdorf, a French naval officer, and by the time the reason for the name is explained, we have watched his story played out on an immense international canvas, from Indo-China to Newfoundland, from the Bay of Bengal to the North Atlantic. His career is disclosed to us in the reminiscences of those who knew him during the collapse of European colonialism and the failed Algerian putsch. He is successively captured by the Viet Minh, desert tribesman, the French police, yet survives to command a fishing trawler in what seems like the most isolated spot on Earth. Boyishly handsome, grinning in adversity, perpetually stroking a pet cat -- his only constant companion -- Willsdorf is the most complete romantic figure depicted in recent movies: a knight errant whose code of conduct is so much a part of him that hesitation is not even a permissible state of mind. His impulses are so lofty and humane, his instincts so sure and intelligent, they direct his behavior better than the most tortuous, protracted reflection.

Yet, for all the screen time devoted to him or to others talking about him, Le Crabe-Tambour is not about Willsdorf at all -- or, rather, it is much less about him than about the fellow officer whose career he inadvertently, and tragically, destroys. It is a story without villains, a tale of "gestures" made in the name of honor, which, for a hero like Willsdorf, require no afterthought, while for another man, no less truly heroic, involve the profoundest sacrifice a human being can make.

Pierre Schoendoerffer wrote and directed this film from his own novel, and it is our good fortune that it comes to us from hands so sympathetic to the material. The narrative is structurally closer to the print than to the motion picture medium. The pace is steady and unaltering, with no conventional build-up to suspenseful "highs" or "big" moments. Events crucial to the underlying theme are not set apart for easy recognition but are peppered among apparently irrelevant sequences that are themselves quite as powerful and lasting as anything else in the film. The plot is dense with such "asides," told in the same tone of voice, sometimes with even greater sensitivity and attention to detail. Thus, flashbacks of Willsdorf are interspersed with a ship engineer's recollections of the village of his birth; or lingering shots of a ghostly derelict vessel; or seamen eviscerating a mountain of freshly-caught fish; or a U-boat veteran's proud boasting of Allied tonnage sunk and lives lost, being interrupted by silent TV footage of a grieving Vietnamese dragging his dead child home in a sack. The wonderful thing is that all these digressions actually increase the film's narrative grip. They provide a germinous moral soil in which the theme grows to universal stature. Schoendoerffer's narrative decorum may be eccentric or too "literary," but the questions he asks, and the sometimes disagreeable answers he provides, are important ones.

So pay no attention to Vincent Canby's disc jacket blurb calling it an "adventure story." For all its exotic locations and ocean vistas, and however adventurous the characters may be by temperament or by profession, Le Crabe-Tambour is no more an adventure story than "Hamlet" is a murder mystery. All the important action elicits a cerebral, not a visceral, response. Armed with an ingenious screenplay and a master cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, Schoendoerffer transforms what might, in lesser hands, have been an obscure story of misguided loyalty among a boy-scout officer class into a great and compelling film.

Image offers the movie as part of its "CinemaDisc Collection" with a $49.95 price tag. Running just under two hours, it is spread over three sides, with side three in CAV. Since the disc duplicates the film's original aspect ratio of approximately 1.55:1, the "letterboxing" is minor, and white subtitles translate the French dialogue. The 1977 production has a scratch or two in the opening and closing reels, but the print is by no means ragged and is generally in fine shape. Some sequences are grainier than one would like, but this is, I suspect, a problem in the source material. Considering the circumstances under which it was shot, with location, weather and lighting conditions that would reduce a less-gifted cameraman to lunacy, Coutard's work is extraordinary -- the Atlantic Ocean has never looked so magnificent -- and well-deserving of the Cesar award it won. Unlike some other recent Image issues, this title is commendably served in the transfer. The CX-encoded digital mono, like the picture, isn't perfect but is more than adequate. The packaging of two discs in a single sleeve, instead of a gatefold jacket, is always regrettable, but CBS/Fox, MCA and even Criterion must plead guilty to that offense; anyone interested in Le Crabe-Tambour should not be dissuaded by such trivial objections. The disc was pressed at Mitsubishi (Japan), is Table of Contents encoded, and has 19 unlisted chapter markers (#19 is color bars).