jamesenge | Dec. 31st, 2025

I watched Melville’s 1963 film L’aîné des Ferchaux (“The Elder Son of the Ferchaux Family”, also known as Magnet of Doom or An Honorable Young Man). It’s got some reputation as a road movie, and for the first half of its run is pretty interesting. Michel Maudet, a Frenchman with Italian ancestry who tries to make it as a boxer, is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, a Frenchman with Italian ancestry who tried to make it as a boxer.

French poster for the Melville movie — Screenshot

Maudet is fired by his manager after losing a series of fights. He convinces his girlfriend that they have to sell all their belongings to get money to live on. Then he ditches his girlfriend without splitting the take with her and takes a job as secretary/bodyguard for an amoral millionaire, the titular Ferchaux, who has to flee France for a place where they love amoral millionaires, i.e. the United States. Even in the U.S.A. Ferchaux isn’t 100% welcome, so they empty one of Ferchaux’s caches of money in NYC and go on the road.

I didn’t love any of these characters, but the movie maintained its interest until it stops in its tracks, literally and figuratively, in the outskirts of New Orleans. For reasons never explained, Ferchaux, who had planned on travelling to Caracas in Venezuela (a place our current president finds difficult to pronounce, but easy to bomb), instead halts in Louisiana and settles in a decaying manse. He eventually dies there, but the movie predeceases him, becoming an increasingly tedious exercise in watching Maudet become bored and frustrated. There’s a burst of violence at the end which doesn’t really redeem the foregoing tedium.

I may be missing something here. The movie is based on a book by Georges Simenon, and I have to admit that I’ve never really wrapped my head around the way he tells a story (or, as I see it, fails to do so).

Melville I tend to like, especially his masterpiece, Army of Shadows (1969), which tells the story of the French Resistance in the same unglamorous, antiheroic style as his crime movies. This one didn’t make me like him any less, even though I can’t really recommend it. The first half or so was fairly absorbing, and there were some interesting turns by Stefania Andrelli as an amoral hitchhiker and Michèle Mercier as an exotic dancer with a heart of gold.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.