"I enter into the way of collaboration. In the near future, the weight of suffering of our country could be lightened, the fate of our prisoners ameliorated..."
~ Marshal Pétain

MGM purchased the rights to James M. Cain’s racy, pulp-ish novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934 and it took them 10 years before they thought they could get any version passed by the US censors. In the meantime an unauthorised Italian adaptation became a cause celebre because MGM tried to suppress or destroy the prints of Luchino Visconti’s idiosyncratic 1943 version, Ossessione. - famously made after Jean Renoir recommended he do so after he handed Visconti a copy of the novel when Visconti was assisting Renoir on Toni. What has been overlooked in cinema history is that the French beat them both to it with the faithful 1939 version directed by Pierre Chenal, Le Dernier tournant. Several variants were made through the years and a fine Bob Rafelson version featured Jack Nicholson in 1981 was more in tune with the French original than any other.

Frank (Fernand Gravey) is a drifter who sets down at a roadside diner run by Nick (Michel Simon), a friendly man who needs a helper for the night shift. It seems he also craves some male company he can bond with, as Frank witnesses Nick with his younger wife Cora (Corinne Luchaire), who takes care of all his other needs but is poorly treated in return. Frank and Cora develop a strong, mutual attraction and soon Cora is insinuating to Frank that they’d be better off with Nick out of the picture. After the first attempt fails and Nick is hospitalised, the pair get cold feet, until their passion again rises and they decide to finish Nick off for good. They ‘accident’ they execute starts an investigation and soon the police are playing the lovers off against each other, meanwhile Nick’s cousin (Robert Le Vigan) begins making troublesome demands. 

Viewing this version after knowledge of the other three, more famous versions it’s a tad bracing to see Frank played by a slighter, more sensitive male. This characterisation lines up more with the Jack Nicholson 1981 interpretation, rather than the hyper masculine interpretations of both Garfield in the Hollywood version and Massimo Girotti in Visconti’s Ossessione. Fernand Gravey had been (like Dick Powell) known as a musical star so this role was against type, but he’s very good in it. Chenal makes us realise that Cora is just looking for a solution to her dreary life and any likely male would suit, which was Bob Rafelson’s approach with Nicholson. As is the fact that Cora is a simmering, sexual knockout and Frank was putty in her hands from the first meeting – a trope that all versions share in keeping with the central notion of the book.

What Chenal had as an ace that the others did not was Michel Simon as the doomed husband. Simon was so compelling as the slobbering, good natured Nick that Chenal had scenarist Charles Spaak beef up the part to take advantage of it. It means that Frank’s dilemma is even more loaded – he takes Nick’s hospitality, his food, his friendship and his wife – but can he go all the way to the end of the lie and take Nick’s life? Simon is electric in the part and as with many of his roles he made it his own, by turns quirky, awkward, gauche and endearing he makes his shabby Nick very human and contrasts and accents the darkness in Cora and Frank. Frank tries vainly to escape Cora’s snare but the web is sticky and the spider venomous. 

Corinne Luchaire plays Cora wonderfully - sly, conniving and seductive she gives it everything - Gravey’s lazy, shiftless and hapless Frank never stood a chance. Luchaire had enjoyed a couple of attention grabbing parts in middling films by Ukrainian directorLéonide Moguy but Cora was a role that might have made her a star had not the war brought unexpected changes. Corinne Luchaire had quite the story. Her father was French journalist and politician Jean Luchaire, friend of Otto Abetz (German ambassador to Paris) who would marry Luchaire’s secretary and (according to Life magazine) enjoyed Corinne as his mistress! Jean Luchaire was a prominent booster of the Vichy government so when Abetz ruled Paris as a personal fiefdom during the Occupation the Luchaire’s were living the high life while Frenchmen everywhere suffered under the Nazi jackboot. The Allied victory saw their world collapse, Jean was shot for treason and Corrine sent to prison for 10 years for her collaboration under the Dégradation Nationale law. It was collaboration of a horizontal kind that made the Life headline ‘The Nazi’s Courtesan’ and detailed the fact that she had a succession of Nazi lovers and had given birth to a son fathered by a Luftwaffe captain. She was 19 and beautiful at the time she filmed Le Dernier Tournant and died at 28 of tuberculosis, bereft and in disgrace, after having failed an attempted suicide.  

Another side story is that of Robert Le Vigan, who gives a great performance as the slimy, blackmailing cousin, a fine actor who'd worked notably for Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné but who was also a collaborator and like Corinne Luchaire he was found guilty under the Dégradation Nationale and sent to prison in 1946. He'd previously used his connection to the Luchaire family to meet with them in Germany where he joined them in attempting to flee to Switzerland, but all were arrested and subsequently tried. Duvivier, Madeleine Renault and Jean-Louis Barrault all spoke in support of Le Vigan at his trail, attempting to place the blame on Le Vigan's notorious friend Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a famous anti-semitic author who somehow managed to be on the wrong side of both Vichy and the Free French! They claimed Le Vigan was easily led but the actor was sentenced to 10 years, served three and left for Argentina via Spain and died destitute and in disgrace in 1972.

Le Dernier Tournant benefited greatly from cinematographer Christian Matras who had worked solidly in French cinema during the 1930s for directors like Jean Grémillon, Marcel L'Herbier and notably with Jean Renoir on the worldwide hit La Grande Illusion. He’d worked for Chenal earlier on an adaptation of Jack London’s The Mutiny of The Elsinore, and he provides a suitably shadowy template for the tones of this film, while the sets are detailed and grimy, befitting the working class milieu that the characters inhabit. The atmospheric score was provided by the prolific Jewish composer Jean Wiener, a Renoir and Duvivier favourite, for whom the war would also bring obvious unwelcome complications.

Pierre Chenal is no legendary auteur in the history of French cinema during its classic Poetic Realist era, and that may account for part of the reason the film has not been championed in the intervening years. That and the blighted history of his collaborationist Cora and the sleazy Cousin. Chenal was a capable director and worked with many A-List stars of the era, from Harry Baur, Louis Jouvet, Viviane Romance, Marcel Dalio and especially Pierre Renoir, but as with many artists the war interrupted any chance of continuity and being Jewish, Chenal had every reason to fear the Nazi occupation of France. He fled to Argentina with his wife, Florence Marly (who played Madge the glamourous lion tamer in Le Dernier Tournant) and together they made several films there.

Le Dernier Tournant is a great film with excellent performances by the three leads and a sparkling, agile script from the masterful Charles Spaak. If Pierre Chenal does not belong to that list of legendary, classic era French directors such as Clair, Renoir, Duvivier, Feyder or Carné et al., he at least provided a fine film with Le Dernier Tournant, one that stands up in their company – and one where the behind the scenes stories are as entertaining and compelling as what he put on screen.
C’est formidable.

*The story of Corinne and Jean Luchaire was made into a film, Rays and Shadows in 2026.