Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950)
Directed by Jean Delannoy

Film Review

By the late 1940s, Jean Delannoy had earned his reputation as one of the standard bearers of what would come to be known (somewhat derisively) as the 'quality tradition' of French cinema.  A string of remarkable films - L'Éternel retour (1943), La Symphonie pastorale (1946), Les Jeux sont faits (1947), Le Secret de Mayerling (1949) - bore witness to Delannoy's flair for making quality melodramas with a modern resonance that ensured their success at the box office.  Dieu a besoin des hommes was one of a number of ambitious literary adaptations undertaken by Delannoy around this time, this one taken from the 1945 novel Un recteur de l'Île de Sein by Henri Queffélec.  So controversial was the film's subject matter (an undisguised attack on Christian orthodoxy) when it came out that originally the organisers of the 1950 Venice Film Festival refused to screen it through fear it might upset the Catholic Church; in the end, they changed their minds and the film walked away from the festival with two awards.

The extent to which you appreciate Dieu a besoin des hommes - indeed whether you consider it an inspired masterpiece or soulless racist trash - is greatly determined by whether or not you have already seen Jean Epstein's  Mor vran (1931).  Both films are set on the distant Breton island of Sein and present a grim taste of how the islanders live, cut off from the civilised world and struggling to eke out the most meagre of existences. Yet the films are strikingly different and it isn't too difficult to see which is the better of the two.  Epstein took the trouble to familiarise himself with the islanders and worked hard to gain their complicity in the making of his film.  As a result, what he delivered is a work of sublime humanity, an effective melange of drama and documentary with some astonishing visuals.

By contrast, Delannoy does only what is required of him - to put on the screen what Queffélec puts down on the printed page, without any real engagement with his subject.  No wonder the islanders in Delannoy's film look like a bunch of superstitious savages.  Epstein achieves what he singularly fails to do, which is to humanise them and make us see them as near relations, not weird aliens from some distant galaxy.  Epstein's film also had the benefit of being shot entirely on location, which adds enormously to its immediacy and visual drama.  Delannoy's film is mostly a studio production, and the whole thing is smothered in that deadening studio aura that blights so many of his films and now makes them appear unbearably dated.

The pedigree of its writing team (Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) not withstanding, Dieu a besoin des hommes is a lumbering, poorly constructed melodrama that has some occasional moments of brilliance but overall fails to do justice to its source novel.  At the time, Pierre Fresnay was widely praised for his performance but today it comes across as ludicrously theatrical, not a convincing character portrayal but a sad comedy grotesque that fails to elicit even the merest glimmer of humanity.  Having to listen to Fresnay mug, grunt, bellow and snarl his way through this stuttering plod-a-thon is enough to turn you against Jean Delannoy for life, and if it weren't for some strong support from elsewhere in the cast the film would be utterly unbearable.  Daniel Gélin also appears to be afflicted with Fresnay's tendency to overact (both actors seem to reckon that uneducated island folk have to speak and act like lobotomised Neanderthals), but thankfully there are some less mannered, more engaging turns from the likes of Jean Brochard, Madeleine Robinson and Sylvie. Watch closely and you may catch a glimpse of Jean Carmet and Jean-Pierre Mocky, early on in their screen careers.

In common with just about every film that Delannoy made from this point onwards, a sickening sense of complacency clings to Dieu a besoin des hommes.  All it offers is the blandest and most literal interpretation of Queffélec's provocative novel, and you can't help wondering how much better it might have turned out in the hands of a more committed and imaginative director than the rent-a-hack that Delannoy had now become. It is whilst watching - or rather enduring - films like this that you begin to see what Truffaut was getting at when he laid into the 'quality tradition' directors with such vehemence and bile in his notorious 1954 article Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.  Unlike Epstein's revelatory Mor vran, which makes such a deep impression that you are left feeling as if you have actually set foot on the island of Sein and got to know its strange breed of inhabitants intimately, Delannoy's film merely strikes you as a contemptible freak show, as comfortable to watch today as an episode of the Black and White Minstrel Show or any other blithely racist piece of television from a bygone age you care to name.

Film Synopsis

In the 1850s, life is so hard on the remote Breton island of Sein that its inhabitants have to resort to wrecking passing boats and stealing their cargo to survive.  This wanton savagery so enrages the island's Catholic priest that he turns his back on his parishioners and returns to the mainland, leaving them to fend for themselves.  As they wait in hope for a replacement priest to be found, the islanders continue worshipping, but with an uneducated fisherman, Thomas Gouvernec, acting as a temporary priest, much against his will.  Knowing that he has no authority to administer the holy sacraments, Gouvernec refuses to offer communion or absolution to his fellow islanders, but he finds himself morally torn when his sister-in-law Jeanne confesses that she has become pregnant not by her husband, but by another man.  By offering Jeanne absolution Gouvernec crosses a line and soon finds he is called upon to take on more of the responsibilities of a parish priest.  In doing so, he further aggravates relations between the islanders and the Abbé Kerhervé, the man who is to decide whether or not Sein will have a new priest...