We Are All Murderers

Several years ago, two former lawyers, Charles Spaak and Andre Cayette made a movie called Justice is Done which fiercely attacked the jury system. We Are All Murderers, written and directed by the same pair, concerns capital punishment, and it too has a purpose. But it purposes much less to show that capital punishment is bad, than that the ideas of responsibility and duty on which the law rests dissolve in the confusion of human relations. Though they may be a part of lives, these ideas collapse when they are used to explain life.

The change in life from the days of the French Resistance to post-war times provides the movie's setting. Before D-Day it was considered brave to kill Germans and steal from them. Many who were enlisted into the movement scarcely knew why, and for some of them it was hard to stop.

Such a person was Rene LaGuen (Marcel Mouloudji). He is discovered in an act of apparent heroism by a member of the Resistance, Sautier. Later this man betrays the Resistance and LeGuen is ordered to kill him, which he does with pleasure if not comprehension. Long afterwards, as LeGuen awaits execution for the continuence of these indulgences in times of peace, a former member of the Gestapo is accused of Sautier's murder. LeGuen, who had never been caught, is convinced to confess to this murder, too, so that he can get another trial. To preserve her husband's memory, however, Sautier's wife insists that the Gestapo killed him. Although she is too compassionate to accuse the German, her story makes her an accomplice to LeGuen's punishment.

The plot is too complex to summarize; and this is just one of the ambiguous processions of events on which 'responsibility' casts no light. Complicity, then, is the shared fact with which the authors criticize the idea of responsibility.

At the movie's end, unanswered questions scatter like clouds into the audience. If it were merely an idea-movie, however, these questions might not seem so important. Perhaps, the most striking thing about the movie is the photography. It contrasts the scarred fields and broken buildings of war-time with the prison that is LaGuen's home afterwards. During the war the fields and buildings lie empty about the people, dwarfing them, but in prison the shots are dramatic individual close-ups.

The acting, however, is superb. As Rene LaGuen, the sick, bewildered half-idiot, Marcel Mouloudji is unforgettable. With his raggedy walk and shapeless body, he looks often like a teddy bear but seems, at times, a man possessed. LeGuen's cellmates, Raymond Pelligrin as Gino and Antoine Balpetre as Dr. Dutoit, the one a young Corsican feudist and the other a resigned old man, make proud and individualistic people for whom legal 'responsibility' can only be irrelevant. It merely intensifies the private obligation to die well. As Rene's kid brother, Georges Pouliouly sometimes seems less bewildered than still. But no words could express the burden that will fall on him. The casting in the minor roles is exceptional.

If all are complicit in the wrong done to Rene and the wrong that may be done to his brother after him, it is because of no tangle of ideas, but because of what people do.