La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall)

As a subset of the prison movie, the asylum scenario plays with even higher stakes. Remember poor McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? In cinematic terms, institutionalization does more than take away your freedom, it destroys your soul. Consider director Georges Franju’s 1959 La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall) that turns your average juvenile delinquent into a dispirited husk all to save a father’s reputation and a psychiatrist’s ego.

Francois Gerane (Jean-Pierre Mocky) is the son of a wealthy attorney who has never forgiven his father for his mother’s suicide…if it really was suicide. After a family confrontation, Francois is committed to a private mental institution under the care of Dr. Varmont (Pierre Brasseur) whose old-school techniques ensure the patients are kept removed from polite society. Francois’ only hope lies in Dr. Emery (Paul Meurisse), a progressive expert in the field, and Stephanie (Anouk Aimee), a spontaneous love interest who offers a potential future beyond the estate’s walls.

Shepherded to the screen by its star and based on a 1949 novel, La Tete contre les Murs pulls quite a bit of inspiration from 1948’s The Snake Pit, leaning into some outmoded treatment methods for dramatic effect. There’s no shock treatment, but Dr. Varmont is portrayed with almost cartoon villainy, hoarding his patients with selfish possessiveness and relishing each escape attempt. Speaking of which, Franju – whose seminal Eyes Without A Face would be released the following year – only seems directorially interested in those brief moments of suspense, allowing the rest of the film to unfold at an antithetically languid pace.

For years Jean-Pierre Mocky complained he would have made the film differently, and he did wind up becoming an interesting director in his own right. But in Franju’s defense, La Tete contre les Murs is always engaging; it simply feels disconnected from the emotions on display. The script connects all the dots but the final picture is less a masterpiece than just a lesser copy of Bresson’s A Man Escaped for teens. Not the worst thing a movie can aspire to be, but perhaps not enough to justify labelling it a forgotten classic either.

Making it’s world English-subtitled Blu-ray premiere, Radiance’s 3000-copy limited edition comes from a 4K restoration with several archival interviews, a more recent sit-down with Mocky expert Eric Le Roy and a collector’s booklet with invaluable backstory/critique of the film itself.