In his day, playwright, filmmaker, novelist and memoirist Marcel Pagnol was a national treasure in France. Born at the end of the 19th century in the south of France near Marseille, the son of a schoolteacher and a seamstress, he taught English in Marseille and Paris as a young man, but his passion was writing stories and plays. In the mid-1920s he enjoyed enough success as a playwright to quit teaching. When talking pictures arrived, he embraced filmmaking with a passion, producing and scripting screen adaptations of his stage hits Marius (1931) and Fanny (1932), founding his own film studio in Marseille (where he produced, among other films, Jean Renoir's Toni, 1935) and finally taking the director's chair himself in 1933. In 1946 he was elected to the Académie Française, the first filmmaker so honored, and in the 1950s he started writing novels.
Pagnol drew his inspiration in the people and culture of his birthplace. His plays, films and novels all embrace the distinctive dialect and the rhythms and details of village life in Provence. As a filmmaker, he found a kindred spirit in the stories of Provençal writer Jean Giono. The Baker's Wife became his fourth and most popular Giono adaptation.
As Pagnol recounted in a 1966 interview, his original intention was to make a short feature to occupy his crew after the cancellation of a production that had booked his studio soundstages for two months. With the prospect of his business lying idle, he turned to an episode in Giono's autobiographical novel Blue Boy, the story of a baker in a small village who stops making bread after his lovely but unhappy young wife runs off with a handsome shepherd and the town rallies to reunite them to get their daily fresh bread back. He quickly scripted an adaptation, expanding and transforming Giono's passionate, poetic tale into a classic Pagnol production filled with social satire and earthy, eccentric characters, including a chorus of townsfolk who gossip, argue and debate ideas of love, sex, fidelity, morality and forgiveness.
Pagnol intended to cast Marcel Maupi, a member of his regular acting company, in the central role of the hearty baker, fittingly named Aimable. As the filmmaker recalled in a 1966 interview, Maupi turned him down. "I don't have the talent for this," Maupi told Pagnol. "You need Raimu." A burly, bearish music hall entertainer and actor from Marseilles, Raimu had created the character César in the original Paris stage production of Pagnol's Marius and went on to play the character in three films: Marius, Fanny and César (1936). It's hard to imagine another actor in the role, but according to film historian Ginette Vincendeau, Raimu and Pagnol had fallen out since making César and it took the intervention of actress Ginette Leclerc, who plays the young wife, to reunite the pair.
Critics of the time tended to dismiss Pagnol's films as "canned theater," an attitude Pagnol himself encouraged with proclamations like "The talkie is the art of recording, of fixing and of diffusing theater." Pagnol favored dialog and performances in his filmmaking and used his camera to capture the action in long takes and full shots that kept all the actors in the frame. But Pagnol also took his camera out of the studio to shoot on location in the towns and countryside near Marseille. He treated filmmaking as a communal activity and his collaborators as family. He would live with his cast and crew for weeks or even months at a time at the production locations, playing games of boules between takes and eating meals together at a long table.
While much of The Baker's Wife was shot in the studio, he took the company to the village of Le Castellet for the film's exteriors. The easy pace of small town life informs the film. Pagnol preferred to shoot in long takes and follow the rhythms of the actors as they settle into their roles and interactions. He wrote his characters with his performers in mind (which, Pagnol liked to remind people, Voltaire did in his day) and rewrote dialog on the set of The Baker's Wife to play to the strengths of his cast and their chemistry. It gave his stock company of players some of their most memorable roles: Fernand Charpin as the roué of a marquis, Robert Vattier as the moralistic, hectoring priest and Robert Bassac as the skeptical schoolteacher.
It became Pagnol's final Giono adaptation. The author was so upset with the liberties that Pagnol took with his material that he broke with the director. Audiences didn't care. The Baker's Wife was huge at the box office and became of Pagnol's most successful films. Even critics who sniffed at Pagnol's "filmed theater" were enchanted. "The poor film critic is once again baffled by the phenomenon of a film that eschews much of the technique and polish of cinema yet achieves undeniable greatness," wrote British filmmaker and critic Basil Wright. "It is probable that no review can give a satisfactory explanation of the film's beauty." When it opened in the U.S. in 1940, New York Times film critic Frank Nugent proclaimed it "one of the very greatest pictures ever made: pagan, poetic, and incomparably witty."
Sources
French Cinema, Roy Armes. Oxford University Press, 1985.
"The Marseille Trilogy: Life Goes to the Movies," Michael Atkinson. The Criterion Collection, 2017.
"The French are Telling the Scandalously Funny Story of 'The Baker's Wife' at the World Theatre," Frank S. Nugent. The New York Times, February 27, 1940.
"The Baker’s Wife: Bread, Love, and a Trophy Wife," Ginette Vincendeau. The Criterion Collection, 2019.
World Film Directors Volume 1 1890-1945, ed. John Wakeman. The H.H. Wilson Company, 1988.
"Marcel Pagnol ou Le Cinema tel qu'on le parle, 2e partie" episode of Cinéastes de notre temps. French television program, 1966.
