Poison Ivy (1953)

Original title: La môme vert de gris

Casablanca, Morocco, still under French colonial occupation. A young lowlife is lethally hit with a bottle in a nightclub under somewhat woozy circumstances. Before he conks in an ambulance, he utters last words that suggest curiously intimate knowledge of the details of a US gold transport. The flics ask the FBI for help.

The FBI send their finest agent, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). Arriving undercover as some Texan weirdo, Caution tries to find out what the hell is going on, but his contacts tend to end up dead before they can, well, contact him, and the movie’s actual plot is as unclear to him as it is to the audience. At least he quickly realizes that the sister of the deceased lowlife, sexy femme fatale-ish nightclub singer Carlotta de la Rue (Dominique Wilms) and her associate Rudy Saltierra (Howard Vernon) are clearly involved in whatever there is to be involved in. So Lemmy aggressively flirts with women in a way that would get him cancelled right quick today (though I’d say a kick or three in the nether regions would be the better solution here), punches a lot of guys, shoots a couple or three, and eventually somehow finds out why he’s even in the country. Thwarting any evil plans really only needs the application of fists, bullets, and dubious smart remarks thereafter.

When last I wrote about a movie featuring France’s favourite American silver screen pulp hero Eddie Constantine, I was still a little confused by the man’s popularity in France. Having now hereby seen his first movie, and also the first one in which he plays Lemmy Caution, a character he is mostly going on to play even in movies that nominally don’t feature him, I’m not confused about that at all anymore. While Constantine certainly wasn’t a great thespian, he was a great Lemmy Caution, embodying the thuggish type of hard-boiled pulpy crime protagonist in the vein of Spillane’s Mike Hammer perfectly. Constantine really has the right dead glare in his eyes before Lemmy starts beating or shooting someone, suggesting a man who genuinely enjoys the violence and the mayhem that follows him, while thinking himself rather righteous. Constantine is also quite good shifting gears between the thuggish hardman facial expression and the supposedly charming smiles when he flirts. His eyes stay just as dead there, of course, which seems only correct for the type. Add to this ability to embody a certain type the actor’s willingness to throw himself into the physical elements of his chosen genre, and it’s no wonder at all anymore he became big in France.

Apart from Constantine’s fine performance as a pretty unpleasant yet very entertaining to watch man, Poison Ivy has more things to recommend it. Bernard Borderie’s direction may tend to the direct and the unsubtle, but he has a strong sense for movement and pacing, often utilizing cramped spaces (a budgetary thing, I presume) in moments of violence that make punch-outs feel a bit rawer and more intense than typical for this era. Borderie is also able to present spaces as actual spaces, an ability that’s a perfect fit for any kind of action sequence for it always makes things more dynamic. It also tends to lead to effective and meaningful framing and blocking. Just take the short scene in which Lemmy sits in a taxi and realizes he is being tailed. Unlike the typical rear-view mirror set-up, Borderie shoots through the windscreen of Lemmy’s taxi, positioning the characters so that we can see the tailing car through the back window of the taxi. It’s aggressively un-boring filmmaking.

This is of particular import in the world of pulpy hard-boiled crime, where ratiocination always happens via fist and gun. As Borderie films it, this special sort of ratiocination is a lot of fun, which goes for the whole of Poison Ivy.