I, Dalio
                                                                                                          
Director: Mark Rappaport
Year: 2015
Rating: 7.0
I think most of us know Marcel Dalio from both Casablanca where he is the Croupier and To Have and Have Not where he plays Frenchie. But we have all come across him so many more times and likely didn't recognize him or took no notice. He was one of the great character actors of the 1930s and 40s - both in Hollywood and in his country of France. This is a 30-minute essay and tribute to him from Mark Rappaport who has cobbled together a great collection of clips of him from many films. Rappaport is a film essayist and I always love coming across another one from him. They dig past the veneer of Hollywood and the subject to something darker. In The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender, he discusses homosexual imagery in film; in John Garfield how his leftist politics was used to destroy him; in Sergei he delves into the secret sexuality of Eisenstein; in Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna he explores why Anna Sten who was brought over to be the next Garbo disappeared off the screen; in My Dinner with Turhan Bey he admires the beauty of the man.

 

This 30-minute essay is narrated as if from Dalio talking about his career. In France he was often the Jew - he was Jewish in real life - and in many of his roles his Jewishness put him in negative roles - the blackmailer, the informer, the swindler, the money lender - and the film posits that though he might not have been identified as Jewish, everyone knew his character was. This was pre-the German invasion of France. Before that he was in two films that have become classics - Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion. Barely ahead of the Nazis, he along with his wife (in the Marseille scene in Casablanca) escaped from France and made it to America. Not mentioned in this film, but the Germans put up his poster in France that was labeled "Typical Jew" so that people could report them. The rest of his family did not leave and they all died in the camps. In America, he was no longer The Jew - but now the Frenchman which during WW2 was in demand for many films. Back to France after the war where again he got the same sort of roles - except in the many American films shot in Paris. But the difference was that in most American films he barely made a dent - far down on the list of credits while he was very famous in France and his appearance in a film was a big deal.   I wish I could get Rappaport's film essay on Debra Paget and Anita Ekberg.