Pagnol, Marcel (1895–1974). Dardamelle, 1953. Manuscript, about 90 pages in a school notebook dated 4 January 1953. This is very much a working manuscript entirely in the author’s distinctive and easily legible hand, unsigned with revisions throughout. Pages loose, covers detached. Housed in a custom clamshell case.

An early draft of Pagnol’s screenplay for the film that would be released in May 1953 as Carnaval. Unpublished in any form, the manuscript offers a unique opportunity for analyzing the processes of one of the most influential geniuses of French cinema, the first filmmaker elected (in 1946) to the Académie Français.

Marcel Pagnol as a young auteur. Marcel-Pagnol.com

Marcel Pagnol was a successful playwright before he turned his considerable talents to cinema. In a series of manifestoes published in the 1930s, he described cinema as the next step in the evolution of the theatrical arts; following Sacha Guitry, he initially embraced the idea that movies were “canned theater” (“théâtre en conserve”) allowing plays to reach a wider audience than hitherto imagined, and to shape the experience of the drama with greater precision and directness than had ever been possible. “Pour la première fois, les auteurs dramatiques pourront réaliser des oeuvres qui ni Molière ni Shakespeare n’ont eu les moyens de tenter.” A scenarist at heart, Pagnol believed that sound film offered possibilities that would “reinvent the theater” and generate a wholly new dramatic form.

Flush with enthusiasm and funds from the success of his Fanny trilogy, he went all in. In 1933-34 he built a film studio in Marseilles, inaugurating a career as the consummate auteur, serving for over 20 years years as an independent writer, director, and producer of a series of films whose dedication to naturalism would profoundly reshape French cinema. Pagnol’s company would draw upon local talent, eschewing Parisian stars in favor of little-known actors and singers from the caf’conc (café concert) scene to develop a troupe of actors and a team of personnel who returned for film after film – Raimu, Fernand Charpin, Maupi, Milly Mathis, and others. “Our cinema was a family affair,” Pagnol wrote, and those who worked with him agreed. For open-air shots, Pagnol enlisted Provençal locals – a whole town if necessary – a novel approach that, along with his warm sympathy for the lives of ordinary people (his “chaleur humaine”), has led film historians to credit him as the godfather of both Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave.

Marcel Pagnol at his writing table in his villa n Monte-Carlo. © Detaille - Archives du palais de Monaco – IAM

The present manuscript, likely written at La Lestra, his villa in Monte Carlo, forms the basis for one of Pagnol’s last efforts before he abandoned cinema in 1954. It also represents one of his earliest ambitions. “Le film parlant, qui apporte au théâtre des ressources nouvelles, doit ré-inventer le théâtre,” he wrote in December 1933. In 1934, while imagining the possibilities for “un cinema nouveau,” Pagnol contemplated some his favorite plays, including Molière’s Le malade imaginaire, Octave Mirbeau’s Les affaires sont les affaires, Jules Romains’s Knock – and a vaudeville by Émile Mazaud, Dardamelle, ou le cocu. The latter was in the repertoire of the Comédie-Frangaise and according to his biographer Raymond Castans, Pagnol viewed the play repeatedly and thought about it often. Indeed, Dardamelle echoes many of the themes that recur throughout his work. “Pagnol’s most successful feature films systematically enact the purification of a community that has been progressively contaminated by secrets, lies, and deception,” writes film historian Brett Bowles, and one sees in Le femme du boulanger a reworking of the themes of cuckoldry and charivari, comedy and realism, cruelty and laughter, selfishness and compassion that are present in the dark farce of Dardamelle: at one point the faithless wife berates her unhappy husband for bringing shame upon the family. “Est-ce tu crois que c’est drôle d’être la femme d’un cocu?”

Fernandel and Jaqueline Pagnol in Carnaval, Pagnol’s adaptation of Dardamelle (1953). Marcel-Pagnol.com

Regrettably the production, retitled Carnaval, was a failure. Pagnol convinced the great comic actor Fernandel (Fernand Contandin, 1903–1971) to star in the film. A fellow son of Marseilles, Fernandel had performed in some of Pagnol’s most successful ventures, but the two had grown apart. The actor insisted on bringing to the project a new collaborator, the young director Henri Verneuil (born Ashot Malakian, 1920–2002), who would go on to become a leading figure in French cinema. Pagnol complied but soon regretted it. He clashed with both, insulting his star publicly and complaining loudly that the director had ruined his script – a rather surprising claim given that Pagnol usually allowed the members of his troupe leave to improvise. Quarrels among the principals notwithstanding, Verneuil and Pagnol were able to organize some remarkable moments for the film, including a carnival scene shot with six cameras thickly crowded with what was allegedly the entire population of Aix-en-Provence. It is a sad irony that Pagnol began his career in film imagining an adaptation of Dardamelle and ended it frustrated by the result. The fact that the Comédie Française reprised Mazaud’s play later in 1953 under the direction of the versatile Henri Rollan (1888–1967) was likely not occasion for joy in Marseilles.

Filming the musical number aboard the "cuckold float" in Carnaval. Marcel-pagnol.com

The manuscript is dated January 1953. Carnaval premiered in Monte Carlo in May 1953 and released in Paris in September. The turnaround time seems all the more remarkable when one compared this draft to the dialogue in the final release (which one may watch in its entirety on Dailymotion, a venture of Canal+). One sees the film in embryo here but there are also substantial differences -- there is material here that was omitted or revised for the film, and the last scene of the movie, a banquet where Dardamelle offers a long soliloquy and (spoiler alert!) reunited with his wife, is not present in this draft.

Angry words from Dardamelle's unfaithful wife Francine, played by Pagnol's wife Jacqueline in the film.

Because the filming of Carnaval was so far removed from the auteur’s control, film historians have by and large ignored it. Raymond Castans numbers the movie among “les Pagnol qui ne sont pas de Pagnol,” and in his several trenchant analyses of the auteur’s work Brett Bowles passes over Carnaval without comment. Regrettable but understandable: to date there have been few resources to assess the extent of Pagnol's hand in the production. The present work offers the missing link that will allow historians to delve into his processes -- and Verneuil’s. Pagnol's manuscript for Dardamelle retrieves from obscurity a project that shadowed the entire cinematic career of one of the greatest luminaries of French film.

Selected References

Beylie, Claude. Marcel Pagnol, ou, Le cinéma en liberté. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1995

Bowles, Brett. Marcel Pagnol. Manchester University Press, 2012

-----. Marcel Pagnol’s The baker’s wife, a cinematic charivari in popular front France, The historical journal 48/2 (2005) 437-69

Castans, Raymond and André Bernard. Les films de Marcel Pagnol. Paris: Julliard, 1982

-----. Marcel Pagnol: biographie. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1988

Faulkner, Chris. René Clair, Marcel Pagnol and the social dimension of speech, Screen 35/2 (summer 1994) 157-70

Jélot-Blanc, Jean-Jacques and Guy Morel, Pagnol inconnu. Paris: M. Lafon : Editions de la Treille, 2000.

Mazaud, Émile. Dardamelle; ou le cocu. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1923

Pagnol, Marcel. Cinématurgie de Paris, 1939-1966 in Oeuvres completes II: cinema. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1995, pp. 9-101

Poster for the Belgian release of Carnaval