Billy Wilder made his directorial debut (alongside Alexander Esway) with the French drama, Mauvaise Graine (English: Bad Seed).
The screenplay by Wilder, Jan Lustig [de], Max Colpet, and Claude-André Puget focuses on a wealthy young playboy who gets involved with a gang of car thieves.
Although Wilder and Esway shared the directing credit, in later years leading lady Danielle Darrieux recalled Esway had been involved with the project in some capacity but clearly remembered she had never seen him on the set.
Set in 1930s Paris, the story centers on Henri Pasquier, whose wealthy father decides to no longer support his playboy lifestyle. Dr. Pasquier sells his son’s beloved Buick roadster, which Henri later sees parked on a street with the keys left in the ignition by the new owner. He takes the car to keep a date with a young lady he just met.
Henri is followed by three men who overtake him and bring him to the service station that serves as the front for a gang of car thieves. Believing he is one of them, they warn him not to compete with their operation.
Perceiving Henri and Jeannette to be troublemakers, the leader sends them to Marseilles in a car with damaged front axle, hoping it will crash, killing the two. It does crash, but the couple escape without injury. They decide to sail to Casablanca and begin a new life, but Jeannette refuses to leave without her brother.
Henri returns to Paris to retrieve him, only to arrive at the garage in the middle of a raid. Jean is shot and seriously injured, and Henri brings him to his father for medical treatment, but he dies.
In the end, Dr. Pasquier, anxious to help his son escape a life of crime, gives him money so Henri and Jeannette can sail off and start anew.
Wilder arrived in Paris from Berlin on March 1, 1933, and settled in the Hotel Ansonia, residents of members of the German film industry who had fled from their homeland. Among them actor Peter Lorre, composers Franz Waxman and Friedrich Hollaender, and writers Jan Lustig and Max Colpet, who helped Wilder develop a plot. In order to secure financing, they needed someone with directing credits, and so they invited Alexander Esway.
Without making reference to Esway’s participation, Wilder later recalled, “I directed out of pure necessity and without any experience. I cannot say that I had any fun making Mauvaise Graine . . . There was pressure. People depend on you, and you aren’t really in control, but you can’t show that, or everyone gets nervous . . . I, alone, was responsible for everything – everything! I had to be everybody from the producer to script girl. I was an extra, not because I was trying to pull a Hitchcock, but because we couldn’t afford another body.” Budget constraints required the director to make use of whatever locations were available to him. “We didn’t use a soundstage. Most of the interiors were shot in a converted auto shop, even the living room set, and we did the automobile chases without transparencies, live, on the streets. It was exhausting. The camera was mounted on the back of a truck or in a car. We were constantly improvising . . . We were doing nouvelle vague a quarter of a century before they invented a fancy name for it.”
Much of the film is silent, with sequences punctuated by jazz-infused score by Franz Waxman and Allan Gray.
He later recalled: “I still didn’t think of myself as a director, not exactly. I wasn’t certain I liked being a director, but I did know I could do it. That was satisfying.”
Mauvaise Graine was Wilder’s last European film–by the time it premiered in summer of 1934, he had moved to Hollywood.
It would be eight years before he would direct again, the 1942 comedy The Major and the Minor after establishing himself as a screenwriter.
Recycling:
It was remade in Britain in 1936 as The First Offence, starring John Mills and Lilli Palmer.
It was later remade in France as the 1950 The Unexpected Voyager.
Cast
Danielle Darrieux as Jeannette
Pierre Mingand as Henri Pasquier
Raymond Galle as Jean-la-Cravate
Paul Escoffier as Dr. Pasquier
Michel Duran as Gang Chief
