Original title: Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

Lemmy Caution was an FBI agent and later private investigator created by the British crime novelist Peter Cheyney, making his first appearance in 1936 in the book This Man is Dangerous. Despite some resistance to the idea of an American hero created by a British writer, Caution became a popular character, Cheyney writing a total of eleven novels featuring him. He was popular enough in Australia and New Zealand for there to be a radio show based on his adventures in the 1940s and his post-War popularity in France led to a string of film appearances. Dutch actor John van Dreelen played him first in Henri Verneuil’s three-part detective omnibus Brelan d’as/Full House (1952), the other stories featuring Maigret and Inspector Wens.

The following year, American-born singer/actor Eddie Constantine took over the role for the first full length Caution film, La môme vert de gris/Poison Ivy and proved hugely popular, leading to six more screen appearances – Cet homme est dangereux/This Man is Dangerous (1953), Les femmes s’en balancent/Dames Get Along (1954), Vous pigez?/Diamond Machine (1955), Comment qu’elle est!/Women Are Like That (1960), Lemmy pour les dames/Ladies’ Man (1962) and À toi de faire… mignonne/Your Turn, Darling (1963). They were all hits, but that winning streak would come to an end in 1965 when Jean-Luc Godard, darling of “la nouvelle vague,” cast Constantine as a very different version of Caution in the science fiction film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution.

Godard’s take on Caution was a far cry from the confident, womanising and virile hero of the earlier films. Dressed in drab raincoat and hat and with Constantine forbidden from wearing make-up and often filmed in harsh lighting, he seemed a much older and less dynamic character than earlier. It had such a negative impact on Constantine’s career that he wouldn’t play Caution again until the 1989 made-for-television film Le retour de Lemmy Caution, returning one last time in Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991).

Alphaville might not have been what audiences expected from a Lemmy Caution adventure but it’s probably what you would expect a science fiction/film noir hybrid from Godard to look like. You wouldn’t expect the great provocateur to make a conventional film from either genre and he certainly doesn’t. He deploys just enough of both genres’ images and archetypes to make them just about recognisable, but bends both genres well and truly out of shape.

Here, Caution is a secret agent, codenamed 003, working for the never really defined “Outlands”. He arrives in the futuristic city of Entering Alphaville – actually the more modern areas of Paris with few of the traditional trappings of science fiction – in his Ford Galaxie car. He’s in the city posing as “Ivan Johnson”, a journalist working for Figaro-Pravda, searching for missing agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) and also tasked with finding the architect of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon). The city is run by von Braun’s creation, the sentient computer Alpha 60 which has outlawed free thought, love, poetry, and any other emotions. Dissidents are hunted down, interrogated, and murdered on Alpha 60s orders. An organisation known as Grand Omega Minus brainwashes selected citizens, sending them to “other galaxies” to ferment industrial and social unrest.

Caution traces Dickson, but he dies while having sex with a “Seductress Third Class”, teams up with von Braun’s daughter and Alpha 60 programmer Natacha (a great turn from Anna Karina), learns that von Braun was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu and has frequent meetings with Alpha 60 which he eventually destroys by posing it a riddle involving poetry (Number Six would do something similar to another machine in The Prisoner (1967-1968) episode The General (1967)).

Godard’s films can often come across as insufferably pretentious and it’s true that Alphaville is peppered with references, asides, quotations and stylistic flourishes that are often hard to decipher. Apart from its often heavy-handedly delivered anti-technology stance (“I don’t like new technology” Caution says), it’s hard to determine what attracted Godard to the project and what he was trying to say with it – which is probably exactly what he was after. But it’s also fascinating, and often very funny, though it’s not always easy to explain why. There are certainly some memorable moments here and there, particularly a surreal trip to a swimming pool where “irrational” dissidents are executed on the diving boards, their bodies then hacked at with knives by young women in the pool below, or Caution’s trips to commune with Alpha 60.

Godard was trying to subvert the macho, tough-guy image that Constantine had become famous for, making Caution look lost and out of place in this sterile, computerised future. The director had originally wanted to call the film Tarzan vs IBM, highlighting the clash between the physical, impulsive and manly Caution and the emotionless, ruthlessly logical machine. Godard casts a jaundiced eye over a world already becoming increasingly reliant on technology (what would he have made of the world of 2022?) and doesn’t like what he sees one bit, painting a portrait of a very near future that still largely looks like our own but where we’re already starting to lose some of the things that make us human. It’s a world where people engage in tedious small talk because that’s all Alpha 60 will allow them, a world that has become so reliant on its electronic guardian that when Caution forces it to shut down, they can no longer do something as basic as walk any more.

Godard and his regular director of photography Raoul Coutard shoot all this in a fittingly crystalline black and white that contrasts the shiny surfaces of Parisienne modernity with the light and shadows of film noir and they indulge in those long takes that Godard was often so fond of – the opening is a bravura long take of Caution arriving in Alphaville and checking into his hotel. It results in a film that looks marvellous, Godard making good use of whatever his meagre budget could afford to realise the film’s most futuristic element, Alpha 60. It’s seen as a light behind a spinning set of fan blades, as a set of overhead microphones that lurch around Caution’s head during interviews and heard as a voice portrayed by an actor whose larynx had been ravaged by cancer and who relied on an artificial voice-box to make himself heard. It’s all very low key but nevertheless creates an impressively realised future that’s more hinted at that’s explicitly shown.

Alphaville may be a dystopia, but Godard ends the film on a note of hope, Caution and Natacha fleeing the chaos of the now disabled city as she tries out her new vocabulary (she tells Caution that she loves him). Inevitably, as with any dystopia tale, the spectre of George Orwell hangs over Alphaville (hotel rooms are furnished not with copies of the Gideons Bible but Newspeak-like dictionaries that are constantly updated to exclude words and concepts no longer allowed) but the film ends on a more positive and hopeful note.

As already noted, the future wasn’t that positive for Constantine. The public’s reaction to Alphaville wasn’t overwhelmingly encouraging, not particularly liking the particular turn that the character of Lemmy Caution had taken. He would continue to act of course, working with Jesus Franco, Agnès Varda, Ulli Lommel, Larry Cohen and Rainer Werner Fassbinder among many others, but he would no longer be associated with the role that had made him a star in his adopted France. One of the great mysteries of caution remains why, despite being an American character created by a British writer, he’s never appeared in an English-language adaptation. That may happen one day but until then, Constantine’s portrayal remains very watchable, even in the odd version that stalks the streets of Alphaville.