24 Hours in the Life of a Clown

Follows the clock round as music hall clown Beby takes off his make up, goes home for a meal, looks at photos and goes to bed to rise, spend a day in the village and perform with his new partner.

Melville, if known at all, is best remembered for "Le Silence de la Mar" and the incredible "Le Samourai". He is not known so much for short films in the 1940s that involve French clowns. And yet, that is what we have here.

Is this a documentary or staged? Probably a bit of both. It appears the people involved were truly the clowns they were portraying, but the actual setup may have been slightly scripted. One suspects that not every day involves looking through an old scrapbook.

While not nearly as famous as Godard and Truffaut, my favorite French director is Jean-Pierre Melville...the man who made many great thrillers including "Bob le Flambeur", "Le Samouraï" and "Army of Shadows". This is THE reason I decided to watch "24 Heures de la Vie d'un Clown", as I otherwise have no interest in clowns....none.

The film was the first by Melville....and I guess you need to start somewhere. This is a documentary about the life of Beby the Clown and his friend, Maïss. As you'd expect with t film like this, the film was cheaply made--in black & white and with narration instead of dialog and it's a short. Much of it consists of Beby (without makeup) looking through books and old photos.

So is it any good? Technically, it's okay but unless you are a huge Melville fan, you could probably skip it. It's not terrible...but more a chance for Melville to try his hand at filmmaking.

'24 Hours In The Life Of A Clown (1946)' is a short film that looks at, well, 24 hours in the life of a clown. Starting and ending at 11.50pm, the film chronicles a day in the life of a circus performer. It starts just as he's about to finish his shift, follows him home, sees him wake up and go about his daily business, before it finishes with a showcase of his evening performance. All the while, the inky noir narration gives us little insights that the visuals do not, more or less communicating the central character's backstory and relationship with his craft. Despite a few humorous moments and a generally fairly charming vibe, the overall affair is actually rather dull. The filmmaking is fairly straightforward, although there are a handful of scenes that are more artfully presented, and the scripting is very matter-of-fact. It's almost as if the flick is trying to seem like a typical documentary, but most of it is clearly staged and there are some jokes sprinkled throughout the otherwise dry narration. I don't think much of it could be considered 'fly on the wall', but it's unclear to what extent it has been manufactured. Ultimately, this is a fairly uninspiring effort. It isn't bad, but there just isn't all that much to it. It's fine.

It's a day in the life of the Cirque Medrano clown, Beby.

Jean-Pierre Melviille's first movie as director would seem to be a documentary short, showing the routine of a clown and his partner. It an odd choice for a director whose movies showed men under great stress, living by their own rough, confused and sometimes self-destructive codes of behavior. Yet it is in his actions that we see how the artist creates his art. It's composed of memories of other great clowns, and the set routines of his life off the stage. Together, in the hours before their show, Beby and his partner sit at a cafe and watch life go by them, arguing over how to distill the ordinary life before them into something for their audience: something grander, something more heartfelt, something funnier.

Is this not what Melville himself tried to do in his films? With his moral gangsters and would-be-moral flics, with his fantasy images of Manhattan and failed boxers, was he not doing the same?

The movie is shot wild, except when Beby is on stage. There's an uncredited narrator, a man in a trenchcoat and hat following the movie's subject: the stand-in for the creator of this film, trying to understand his subject by observing his actions. He thinks he understands Beby. Does he? Is the clown simply a distorted image of the director?

This was the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, a short about two clowns working in France in Montmarte. It's very heavily skewed on being like a documentary, but it's a little too kidding to be taken too seriously. It's clear Melville didn't have (or just decided not to go for) recorded sound, so everything, with the exception of the final clown performance on stage that the '24 hours' is leading up to, is with a narrator filling in voices and the screen directions. It's awkward and kind of stilted, even as it's meant to be cute ("Here Beby reads one of his fan letters... here Beby gets his dog to pray, since they both pray to the same God")

It's been in obscurity for a long time and probably for good reason; it's hard for me to imagine Melville as someone who would go to a lot of clown events, and it was likely made to showcase that Melville could put something on film and present it to the public, which is fine. There is one sequence that made me smile where we see the other clown Marais changing up his make-up and a guy in the background keep changing up instruments (how he plays guitar synced up to him putting on make-up is pretty clever). But even at 18 minutes there seems like there's filler here, as we see a lot of pictures of former and/or current clowns in and out of make-up.

It's not really bad but it's just dry stuff, meant not so much for art as to fill up some time at the theaters in the period it was made, and for Melville completists; it's included on the blu-ray for Silence de la Mer.