The Carabineers (1963)

Brilliant and touching

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A Disappointing Continuation

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Two soldiers arrive in a poor, desolate French-speaking area. They initially threaten, then announce "The King" needs troops for war. Recruited into service are taller, cigar-smoking Marino Mase (as Ulysses) and shorter, cigarette-smoking Albert Juross (as Michel-Ange). The brothers are promised cars, women and all imaginable riches will be their reward for service. Moreover, being war soldiers allows them to steal slot machines, break a kid's arm, burn towns, and massacre innocent people. They will even be allowed to eat at restaurants and not pay. The new soldiers happily start out killing people, but get world-weary after three years of service. When the war ends, the men own postcards of the world's landmarks. Lastly, they receive a surprise...Jean-Luc Godard essays a point-of-view more accomplished elsewhere. Granted, some famous critics have praised this one. The scene involving Michel-Ange's first visit to a cinema was the highlight. He wants to get a better look at a blonde in her bathtub. This scene can be removed from the film without altering the narrative in the slightest; enjoy it as a short.***** Les carabiniers (5/31/63) Jean-Luc Godard ~ Marino Mase, Albert Juross, Genevieve Galea, Catherine Ribeiro

A Godard war film. Of course, you can expect lots of politics, a completely impersonal and detached sort of film, one which doesn't have a rosy view of human nature, and contains satirical elements. Essentially, "Les Carabiniers" is a film that attempts to be neither involving nor formally compelling, and inhabits a world of its own, really. It's dark and vicious and ugly, but stops for comic set-pieces and unabashedly dark satirical digs at war-mongerers and violence in general. It's not really an anti-war film, it's an anti-'war film' which completely subverts all of the conventions of the genre.As far as Godard's ouevre goes, this is unquestionably one of his least satisfying works, and competes with "Made in U.S.A." for the title of his worst 60's film. The jokes are smug and self-satisfied (without being interesting, as much of Godard's work is), and the politics are similar to what made Godard's Marxist period in the late sixties/early seventies so unbearably aggravating. "Les Carabiniers", with its plot concerning two peasants drafted into the king's army, whose victories on the battlefields lead to their execution as traitors, offers little of worth narratively or even on a technical level, with some interesting experimental editing and typically Godard-ian attempts to remind the audience that it's just a movie shining bright amidst a muddle of superficial and rather stupid political satire and scatter-shot attempts at disconnect and surrealism."Les Carabiniers" was originally regarded as a disaster, but is now acclaimed by many. Neither consensus has it right, but I'd say that the critics who lambasted it in the 60's were a bit closer to the truth than those who praise it today. It's an important film to see when studying Godard as an auteur, but it is indicative of his worst rather than his best work.5/10

After catching this film on Turner Movie Classics last night I wondered what all the fuss was about. I remember hearing and reading about this film in the 70's and 80's as being one of the great grand-daddy's of anti-war genre. After sitting though it, all 85 minutes of agony, and hoping that every minute that this film will get better, I realized that this is simply a poor film. My expectations were higher, considering what these writers/directors had produced (Jules and Jim, Contempt, Weekend, The Wild Child, etc.) but what came out was worse than some sort of no or low budget sophomoric attempt to make a statement that fails. Even the attempt at humor, one of the brothers at his first movie, became a very cheap and childish shadow of Chaplin.About 1/3 of the way through I simply gave up caring about either one of the brothers (or their moronic wives) and stuck with the film simply because I hoped that there would something that would elevate it from putting it the same class as two 10 year olds who got a hold of daddy's movie camera. It never did. Even the cast members who had lesser roles, the car salesman, the Italian woman, the communist girl, etc., all looked as bored as I felt. The young communist girl actually looked happy to be killed just so she could get out of this mess.Plan 9 From Outer Space, move over.

That this movie got a 6.8 on the IMDB rating scale astounds me. That its audiences were expected to pay to see it and that it was thought worthy of being re-issued on dvd astounds me. Whatever points it was trying to make got lost in the what I found to be the ugliness of the film-making. Jean-Luc Godard, je vous accuse.