Bright lights | René Lévesque, great film critic

From December 1947 to November 1949, between his periods as a correspondent on the battlefields of the Second World War and Korea, René Lévesque was, among other things, a film critic for the weekly The Clarion of Saint-Hyacinthe. Film professor Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan has made a collection of them which is published by Boréal. Explanations.

Andre Duchesne
The Press

back in time

In the summer of 1946, René Lévesque was about to celebrate his 25th birthday (he was born on August 24, 1922). Back from the battlefields in Europe, he resumed his work at Radio-Canada and collaborated with The Clarion de Saint-Hyacinthe, a Maskoutain weekly which has branches in Montreal and Quebec. Lévesque first wrote chronicles on the radio and shows. Then, on December 5, 1947, he took over from a certain Mr. Lefebvre (pseudonym of Marcel Vleminck) in the cinema chronicle. Each week, this one plays very well at the top of page 4 with a small drawing of a projector and the word CINEMA prominently displayed. His first text is about comedy Life with Father by Michael Curtiz (director of casablanca), adaptation of a play. Lévesque admits to having a “soft spot” for the actress Irene Dunne, but does not say a word about a certain Elizabeth Taylor, although he acknowledges that the entire cast is “solid and well balanced”.

Discovery

Professor of cinema in the department of literature, theater and cinema at Laval University, Jean-Pierre Trahan-Sirois “discovered” these chronicles through a friend, Sébastien Hudon, photography historian and exhibition curator. . “He sent me a column on Orson Welles, asking me if the signatory was “the” René Lévesque that we knew. I answered probably, because I knew that he had written film reviews through his activities as a journalist. But I didn’t know he was a columnist and had written so many reviews. When I went to see, I realized that Mr. Lévesque had written a column a week for two years. It was getting really interesting. I sent my research assistants to strip them. This gave 88 chronicles, maybe 89, because a number was missing. »

A cinephile with dazzling style

Mr. Trahan-Sirois is enthusiastic about the work of René Lévesque, film critic. “We discover that he is a profound cinephile and even one of our first great film critics, he assures us. It’s really amazing. We also realize that René Lévesque is a writer in the full sense. We feel it by his style, which is dazzling, his brio in analysis, the quality of his writing, his humor. Professor Trahan-Sirois goes further by saying that in his opinion, Lévesque could have become a filmmaker “like Truffaut, like Godard”.

Some titles

René Lévesque’s tastes are diverse. Among the films he has approached are The Fugitive by John Ford, The three Musketeers by George Sidney A man and his sin by Paul Gury (from the text by Claude-Henri Grignon), The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles, The Barkleys of Broadway by Charles Walters (with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) or even Torments (hets) by Alf Sjöberg, from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman.

Varied opinions

When he likes a film, Lévesque praises it. Such The cursed by René Clément, on the subject of which he evokes a “perfect distribution”, a “sober and nervous text”, “clear and raw” images, a “knowingly clashing” editing of “short, stormy scenes”. It can also be extremely harsh. About Ruy Blas, a film by Pierre Billon adapted from the work of Victor Hugo, it evokes: a film with a great spectacle, pretty costumes and consummate insignificance, which I would not inflict on my worst enemy”. A warning about terms that may shock or offend appears in the “Setting the Text”, an introduction that precedes the chapters.

Bright Lights – Film Chronicles 1947-1949

Rene Levesque

boreal

368 pages