Magnet of Doom (1963) (original) (raw)
Synopsis
Young boxer Michel Maudet is sacked by his manager after a series of match defeats and is forced to look for a new job. He is engaged as secretary to a millionaire named Ferchaux who is in a hurry to flee the country when he discovers he has been implicated in a high-profile fraud.
Cast
Popular reviews
This film takes a circuitous root in folding out it's narrative as we have two characters one Michel Maudet(Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Dieudonné Ferchaux(Charles Vanel) on opposite ends of many factions like financially,age and you could make a statement certain intelligence but really that makes these characters who are desperate to get away from there situation as we make way to America and all of a sudden we are in a travelogue noir film dealing with random characters of mainly menace but really struggle with each others egos.
I hate to flog this dead horse but It very much reminds me of a low key "Wages of fear" however that might just be the French dialogue(and Charles Vanel;)) that helps inflect…
Action! – Three Auteurs: In The Wavelength of Melville
Melville’s first film in color is a film that feels both like a continuation and a departure from what he has been doing to this point. There’s a little bit of suspense and a little bit of humor all packed into this sort of road movie. Basically, we had the always irresistible Belmondo playing this would-be boxer who loses his big fight and gets sacked by his manager. Jobless, he sees an ad in the newspaper from someone searching for a male secretary able to travel. The person listing this gig is a senior partner of a failing bank with a criminal past. He gets the job, and the two flee…
"Things could have worked out between Ferchaux and me, but fate had other plans, which only I could see in the rearview mirror."
After proving a washout as an amateur pugilist, aimless ex-paratrooper Michel Maudet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) skips town—and continent, for that matter—on his sweetheart to try his hand as a traveling secretary for wealthy executive Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), who faces mounting scrutiny for his murderous past. The unlikely pair make tracks immediately, planning to hit the U.S. long enough to recover some secreted spoils before moving on to Caracas for a similar haul. The threat of Ferchaux's extradition—personified by a tenacious FBI tail of which only Michel is aware—dangles like a Damoclean sword, leading to his assets being…
"Things could have worked out between Ferchaux and me, but fate had other plans, which only I could see in the rearview mirror."
Okay, so I was already drifting a little into drowsiness when I turned on Magnet of Doom, the last of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Paul Belmondo's films together following Léon Morin, Priest (1961) and Le Doulos (1962). Still, contrary to my heavy eyes and the mixed reviews I'd seen, I kind of loved it? Simenon adaptations always end up being entertaining; just give me super bright Eastmancolor cinematography by Henri Decaë in contrast with the crime drama, sharp editing by Monique Bonnot and Claude Durand, our star Belmondo playing an ex-boxer who becomes a corrupt banker's (Charles Vanel)…
A bit of an outlier in Melville's filmography, perhaps because he didn't initiate the project. But he uses his adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel as a bit of an homage to America and its culture.
It was reported that Melville was barely on speaking terms with his two stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo & Charles Vanel, by the end of filming, but you wouldn't know it from their excellent performances.
Belmondo is Michel Maudet, a failing boxer in Paris, who has to quickly look for other employment and finds it as a 'secretary who must be able to travel' to an unscrupulous, very rich banker named Dieudonné Ferchaux (Vanel), who must flee the country immediately as his past catches up with him and…
Those who cite the inspirations for American Odyssey movies don’t, as far as I know, typically include Magnet of Doom among other criminals-on-the-lam standbys like Gun Crazy, Breathless, They Live By Night (etc.). If I haven’t just missed the memo, I think this movie’s less-heralded position among Jean-Pierre Melville’s filmography might be because it doesn’t feel like a Melville film. Or, rather, it feels the most French New Wavey of his films, a loose-feeling tour of lesser-known America, absent the gravity of Army of Shadows or the slick tension of Le Samourai and his other gangster flic(k)s.
Still, it’s hard for me to judge it on its own merits — I just saw it for the first time, and I’m…
"I intend to remain the master of this situation."
A Parisian Noir in America
Failed boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo signs on to be a secretary to failed banker Charles Vanel, and together they fight for mastery over their mutual failures. Vanel needs to flee the country to avoid going to prison, and Belmondo needs work badly enough that he's willing to uproot his life and travel around with this loser. But most of the ex-banker's money is locked down pending his extradition, so he and his ex-boxer peon find their exile somewhat less comfortable than they had imagined, and they end up squabbling over a small briefcase of petty cash.
Vanel was looking for someone desperate enough to exploit, but what…
jean-paul belmondo is so distractingly hot which sometimes blends perfectly within the structure of a film, and sometimes makes me incapable of paying attention to anything else. in this case it was the latter.
America: seduction and doom. This is Melville cashing in on Nouvelle Vague popularity for his own very esoteric interests. Deep downm there's a Simenon novel, but it less important than how Belmondo's face (he is playing here a failed boxer and soldier like himself) adapts to Melville. It is a strange film, somehere in between traditions, very far from the tight control Melville usually shows, but the feelingsare all his and they come through.
This movie disturbs the parallel alignment of the molecular magnets in my eyes, thereby creating a repulsive force.
Some really nice home movie footage. Shame they’re stuck in the middle if this boring-ass film.
FUN FACT :
In this film, Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the role of a secretary to a fugitive millionaire.
38 years later, this film was remade for the french television, and Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the role of the fugitive millionaire.
“couldn’t we have settled in a less rotten country?”
simultaneously Melville’s love letter to America and a vicious condemnation of it. Ferchaux drives Maudet through lavishly captured American streets only to take a quick detour through segregated neighborhoods. when you’re doomed to die in a country that’s eating away at you what else can you do but view it through rose tinted glasses?
that same dynamic - the begrudging codependency - is present in the relationship between Ferchaux and Maudet as well. Ferchaux insists that he’s affectionate to Maudet - even though according to Maudet said affection consists of “pushing him into corners - while Maudet, though largely indifferent to Ferchaux’s so-called affection, would basically be nothing without the opportunity…