All Richard Fleischer at the Cinémathèque Française

The American filmmaker of Vikings and Soleil Vert, equally at ease with flamboyance and darkness, has long been a well-kept secret among cinephiles. Its retro should make everyone agree.

At a time when the Hollywood system seems to have banned all forms of formal, aesthetic or narrative exploration, where the “product” must be digested before even being “manufactured”, it is good to remember that this same system had once in its ranks guys like Richard Fleischer (1916 – 2006). Not madmen wanting to overthrow everything, no, simply great employees keen to do well and at times, to transcend the order. So when Disney studios asked him to adapt Jules Verne, it gave Twenty thousand leagues under sea (1954), an almost unsurpassable model of adventure film in Technicolor and Cinemascope, perfect balance between a great innovative spectacle (the scene with the giant octopus!) and mythological closed doors (Douglas, Mason, Lorre). This prodigy son of one of the pioneers of animation Max Fleischer, until now subscribed to B series, will then change category becoming the man of challenges and innovations “bigger than life” (a sort of pre-Ridley Scott), which he will recount over the decades: The Vikings (1958), Barabbas (1962), The Fantastic Journey (1966), Green Sun (1973), until Conan the Destroyer (1984). Discreet but a good accountant, Fleischer himself gives his assessment in the intro to his brilliant memoirs (Surviving Hollywood, Marest Editor): “ Forty-seven feature films, twenty-five Oscar nominations and eight wins. »

Between these peaks, there is nevertheless a whole more or less secret corpus which tells something else, an exploration of human pain in all its facets: class crime (The girl on the swing, The Evil Genius…), devastating perversity (The Boston Strangler, The Strangler of Rillington Place…), acute paranoia (Blind terror…) or even depression (Cops don’t sleep at night). All that ” does not make Richard Fleischer a “modern”, but more an artist dedicated to continuing a tradition in the very gesture of furtively decentering it. » writes Jean-François Rauger in his text accompanying the Cinémathèque retro. With Fleischer, the journey is never smooth, as if the man hidden behind the filmmaker, the citizen behind the craftsman, had constantly sought to change the route along the way.

Retrospective at the Cinémathèque française from January 4 to February 5. www.cinematheque.fr