Sunday, April 23, 2017
113 - Alphaville, 1965, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.
Before 007, there was 003.
His name is Caution. Lemmy Caution. Agent 003. From the Outlands.
Sent into Alphaville to recover agent Henri Dickson, assassinate the founder of Alphaville, Professor Vonbraun, and destroy its computer. Alpha 60.
He arrives in the city. In what is the future to us.
Technology has finally won.
Everything must be perfectly logical.
No more emotions.
No more intuition.
No more spirit.
No more love.
People behave like robots.
If they behave illogically, then they are executed.
A Geisha-like woman is assigned to him at the hotel to attend to him.
She is Beatrice, Seductress, First Class.
Quite a different Beatrice from the one who guides Dante on his journey.
Lemmy, under the alias of journalist Ivan Johnson, is not interested.
He throws her out. He kills the men who have infiltrated his hotel room to attack him.
He begins his mission.
He will meet Vonbraun's daughter. He will fall in love with her.
She, however, does not know what love is. She has never heard of it. She has never met her father.
Will she discover love through Lemmy? Will she fall in love with him? Will they break the curse?
Lemmy Caution is a character created by Peter Cheyney, appearing in ten novels published in the 1930s and 1940s.
He appears in more than a dozen feature films, both French and German, all played by Eddie Constantine.
The character is smart, confident, good at what he does, and good with women. Whereas 007 drinks a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, 003 drinks whisky and smokes.
Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution in nine films from 1952 to 1963 before playing him here in 1965 in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.
Godard changed the character so much that audiences did not recognize him, even though it was still Constantine, and the movie did poorly at the box office.
Constantine would continue to play the character for other directors.
The film has grown in acclaim over the years, standing in a line of futuristic, dystopian science-fiction films.
And films where robots talk.
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