"Magnet of Death" is a very unusual film from writer/director Jean-Pierre Melville. While the plot involves a crook, which is pretty typical of Melville, the plot itself is most unusual as the film is a meandering road picture--one with a scant plot and plenty of quiet moments.

When the story begins, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is fighting his last boxing match. He just hasn't got what it takes and he needs to find a new job. He soon learns about an unusual job...being the traveling secretary and body guard for a rich man, Mr. Ferchaux. As for Ferchaux, he's a rich and well respected crook...a banker who soon is bound to be arrested for his many misdeeds. His plan is to skip the country and live out his life abroad...and so Michel has to be willing and able to travel with him.

The pair head to the United States because much of Ferchaux's ill-gotten wealth is in banks in America. The plan, then, is to collect his money and head to South America where there is no extradition treaty with France. However, this is all easier said than done....banks in America keep delaying him and a could FBI agents seem to be following the two men. Instead of being a gangster picture, which it seemed to be at first, it becomes a road picture...and a meandering one at that. It was as if Melville didn't have a script at times and the pair just aimlessly travel the roads of America as they head south.

While the film is an interesting character study, it also meanders too much. Overall, an odd sort of picture...and one I mildly enjoyed but nothing more.

Even though I have always enjoyed Melville's films, I had never heard of "L'Aine des Ferchaux" until it was on TCM this past week. I'm bowled over. It was amazing!

The American title is "Magnet of Doom." Before I saw the film, I thought, "This is the best movie title ever. There's no way the film can live up to it. And not only does it live up to it, but it exceeds it in every way!

Down and out boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo is hired to drive a disgraced, on-the-run, banker Charles Vanel across the backroads of the US, from NYC to New Orleans, in Kennedy-era 1962, kind of like a proto-"Green Book"... except "The Green Book" sucks and "L'Aine des Ferchaux" is amazing!

I loved seeing the cold/stoic characters of French Film Noir thrown into the over-the-top world that's also occupied by American films like "Cool Hand Luke," "Midnight Cowboy," "Easy Rider," Tennessee Williams, and even "Hurry, Sundown." It's film noir, it's a road trip, and it's also a fantastic widescreen/color travelogue of JFK-era US in 1962. Belmondo even visits Sinatra's home in Hoboken, and he brawls with toughs in a diner, like Rock Hudson does in "Giant." Much of the dialogue is in English, too.

European directors sometimes pick up on little nuances of Americana that American filmmakers miss. Here, I'm thinking of this film, but also of Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas." This film is full of small details that only a European outsider would notice (Melville is definitely fetishizing Chevrolets, roadside motels, lady hitchhikers, and American rock and roll),plus a few comedic set-pieces that seem to be right out of David Lynch or John Waters.

The score by Georges Delerue is excellent, and it stays in your head, long after the film is over.

This film is sometimes left out of Melville retrospectives, because it's less somber than some of his other films, and I guess Melville purists don't like it. I enjoy the director's other movies, but I also really liked this one a lot. Entertaining and fun, from beginning to end.

Washed-up boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo answers an ad for a secretary. It's Charles Vanel, a magnate whose brother has just been jailed for corruption. Vanel needs to get out of the country, pick up his money in New York and then fly to extradition-safe Venezuela. Belmondo goes with him. In New York, the bankers put him off, so they go on a road trip, ending up near New Orleans. Vanel grows weaker. Belmondo chafes at the situation. Locals try to get him to help kill the old man.

There's a sequence in which Belmondo goes to New Orleans and has an affair with Michèle Mercier, whose character is a French stripper called "Lou." This makes me think that writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville had the song "Frankie and Johnny" in mind, and that this is a love story with a tragic ending, with Belmondo on a voyage of self-discovery through an alien, idealized America of his own imagination How these pieces fit together is not clear; Melville had these bizarre ideas of how things worked that often bore no relationship to reality. The journey, wth Vanel occasionally providing insight into how Belmondo's character thinks, strikes me as something of a journey into the underworld. Melville's symbolism is so idiosyncratic, and the pacing so slow, that the movie is recondite and unsatisfactory.