Visual De Tocqueville

"Before such an extraordinary document," wrote the Communist Lettres Franc,aises grudgingly, "one can't help admiring the candor with which Americans portray their army. The fact that a French producer was authorized to make such a film indicates great liberalism." The film is a 24-minute short titled The Marines, and its producer is Franc,ois Reichenbach, 38, who made a big New Wave splash last spring with his first full-length movie, the much criticized L'Amerique Insolite (generally translated "unusual"). For his latest effort, a stark study of the Parris Island, S.C., boot camp, Reichenbach last week was unanimously greeted as one of France's most poetic, powerful film makers.

Starting with slope-shouldered, checker-shirted young boys "not knowing what to do with their bodies or souls," The Marines, in a series of vivid, violent images and startling closeups, follows the grim process of making men of them. Naked torsos are lined up in a sterile examination room like sheep. Barbers briskly shear them. Then come the relentless weeks of screamed orders and merciless reprimands ("Hey, stupid, you shave this morning?" "Get that crummy chin up!"), reaching a crescendo in the savagery of bayonet drill. "Downward slash!" barks the drillmaster. "You know what that means." At that point, the Paris audience invariably gasps.

"The Marines," commented French Director Roger Vadim (who gave the world Brigitte Bardot), "plants a sword in the human consciousness, for it tells of young volunteers who, in order to prove their human identity, accept precisely the contrary: loss of their individuality . . . Still, I know well while writing these words freely that I owe my freedom in part to other shaved-headed young men who 16 years ago brandished these bayonets on beaches now boasting bloody names."

Love at First Sight. One of Reichenbach's most successful efforts is his musical score; The Marines opens with rock 'n' roll, drowns out roaring sergeants with soaring cellos, beats jungle drums during bayonet drill, concludes with Beethoven's Grand Fugue. That kind of startling contrast has become the trademark of the many-talented, Paris-born moviemaker whose first creative work was collaborating on songs, some of them for Edith Piaf. In 1947 he visited the U.S., fell "crazy in love with that country," stayed on for five years as a consultant to art museums.

Not until 1953, when he bought a tiny, wrist-strapped, 16-mm. camera to film the Grand Prix de Paris, did Reichenbach find his calling, and begin to make short documentaries about the U.S. For L'Amerique Insolite he spent 18 months crisscrossing the continent in an effort to capture "the American from birth to death, his extraordinary youth, his passions, his love of violence, his kindness."

What Reichenbach ended up with was an oddball odyssey including hot-rod races ("tranquilizers for young boys"), Disneyland ("America has thousands of little artificial worlds"), the annual Huntsville Penitentiary Rodeo ("Here hope is never lost"), a Los Angeles striptease school ("Certainly Americans didn't invent the naked woman, but they were the first to have thought of giving her a theoretical formation").

Marvelous Disorder. The movie, said one observer, showed its producer to be a kind of visual De Tocqueville. Even those who criticized Reichenbach's obsessions with the far-outlandish were captivated by his imagery. Said Jean Cocteau: "He proves that, in this day of the robot, there still exist everywhere surprises, excesses, marvelous disorder."

Many Americans failed to see the point. U.S. tourists--particularly those who saw the Italian version's satiric narration--felt that the movie was insolite to the point of vulgar distortion. But Reichenbach, who maintains apartments in both Paris and New York and hopes to become a U.S. citizen, is currently negotiating for distribution of the film all over the world, including Russia and the U.S. Says he: "I am crushed when Americans misunderstand or feel I am making fun. I don't feel I portrayed only the seamy side; on the contrary, if I photographed the classic, boring, middle-class suburbia image, that would really be insulting."

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