‘Un témoin dans la ville’

Friday, March 29, 2024

I found and purchased a Doxy reissue of Barney Wilen’s soundtrack to the film Un témoin dans la Ville (Witness to the City) a few years ago. I’m a fanatical fan of French Jazz music, especially when it is tied to a French film, such as Un témoin dans la Ville. The film was made by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, and I never heard of it until I heard the Wilen soundtrack album, which is beautiful in that Parisian Noir landscape - both the film and music.

Thanks to the Kanopy streaming channel, which is a great location to find more obscure films than others. It is part of the United States Library system; all one needs is a library card. It’s free. I found Un témoin dans la Ville there and finally saw the images that go through my head while listening to Wilen's music. As usual, I don’t care about the plot or story; I’m more in love with the images of the main character, played by Lino Ventura, going through Paris to various cafes for a quick coffee and following a taxi driver through the Parisian urban landscape. The dreamy jazz by Wilen goes perfectly well with images of despair and true existential (French-style) angst. Ventura has magnificent eyes, and his role has little dialogue except here and there, but his eyes consistently tell his state of mind throughout the film.

The film's main characters are taxi and truck drivers. It is almost a documentary about how taxi drivers are connected to the women who communicate the rides to them and their hangouts, such as a cafe, before, during, and after their work. Ventura belongs to the world of trucks, and they, too, have their own cafe hangout. Two companies or cultures move through France in the nighttime hours, so everything is on wheels, including the murder that takes place on a moving train. Again, the film is on wheels or tracks.

And like the Peter Lorre character in Fritz Lang’s M, chased through Berlin and Harry Lime (Orson Welles) running for his life in Vienna, so is Ventura through an exotic bird zoo. Being in pursuit through cars, trains, and busy Paris streets, this is a perfect motif for living as a verb and not as a noun. You must do to live, and we, the audience, think of the nouns and thoughts on why such a thing can happen. So with the great score by Wilen, with the assistance of the great musicians Kenny Clarke, Duke Jordan, Paul Rouvère, and Kenny Dorham - a blissful one hour and a half, and however long the LP is.