Movies: At Least the Baby got to see Australia

There are three facts that I am pretty sure of.

1. America has all but forgotten about its most important artistic contribution of the last 100 years, jazz.
2. Americans dislike the French.
3. Americans don't like trucker movies anymore.

Wesley Snipes character, Shadow Henderson, stated in the 1990 film Mo' Better Blues: "If you played the shit that they like, then people would come, simple as that." This simple statement speaks volumes about the sad state of jazz in America circa 2008.
To say jazz has been relegated to a third tier in the hierarchy of American music is an understatement.

In the last two major wars that involved America, France was the charter member of what was dubbed the "Axis of Weasels" in 2003 for their lack of support to the U.S. going into the Iraq invasion. Prior to that, they got saddled with "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," and before that, there was the U.S. military issued handbook, 112 Gripes about the French.

Convoy came out in 1978 at the height of the American CB Radio/trucking craze. Perhaps as America crawled out of the free living, post-On The Road hippie decade, there was some source of comfort in such films as the above mentioned movie by Sam Peckinpah and its cousins such as Breaker! Breaker! and Smoky and the Bandit. America just wanted to "keep on truckin'..." and it did; for a little under 5 years.
For whatever reason, the national obsession passed and to this day there is yet to be a proper revival.

I made it out to The Museum of Modern Art, where the good people at that wonderful establishment have taken it upon themselves to curate an almost 6 month celebration of soundtracks of the films whose direction was guided by names as Godard, Allen, Polanski, Cassavetes and a number of others. On display was the 1977 film La Menace, a film that somehow manages to capture the seemingly incongruous triad of things I have just discussed. It is a French film; it is, for the most part, a trucker film; the score is created by the late saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

Where the idea of watching a French film with a jazz score at MoMa might conjure up visions of highbrow snobbery almost 30 years after its release the film comes off as almost campy. Basically Henri Savin (played by Edith Piaf's ex-lover Yves Montand) creates a plan to help free his current lover Julie Manet (played by the beautiful, Jane Birkin-esque Carole Laure) from false imprisonment for the murder (although it was a suicide) of his FORMER lover, the beautiful, older and somewhat obsessive Dominique Montlaur. The plan includes Savin verbally tearing Julie to shreds in front of a judge in a disposition, planting false evidence at the scene of the "crime", running scissors up and down his arm to create the look of a struggle and then escaping to Canada to fake his own death only to cross the paths of some truckers who believe Henri is responsible for the murders of some of their comrades. The film ends with Julie leaving France,newborn baby in tow, to rendezvous with Henri in Australia. Tragically, Henri has suffered the great consequence of telling one great big lie, when all the while the lovers could have just fessed up and everything might have been okay.
Confusing? Grandiose? Ludicrous?
Oui. Oui. Oui.

Leaving MoMa after watching this film (played to a sold-out audience I must add) I began to wonder if this was possibly where America began to turn. In just a few short years "smooth jazz" would become a common term, trucker films would fall out of vogue, and the French would continue to be a source of mockery among Americans for years to come. Whatever the case, with its plot line having as many holes as Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, its bumbling cops and a pretty wonderful jazz score, La Menace might be the almost unknown camp classic of the entire Jazz Score retrospective.