If you’re going to have an affair with someone’s wife, you should probably avoid women who are married to gangsters. Their husbands don’t like it, and in René Clément’s Joy House they even go all Queen of Hearts and ask their capos to “off with your head.”
In order to avoid ending up like the horse in The Godfather (which didn’t exist yet), Marc (Alain Delon) waits for an opportunity to escape. Thanks to some quick thinking and a very lucky dive off a cliff, he manages to get away, but a person can only run for so long, and Joy House has other plans for Marc — plans that don’t involve him spending the whole movie running for his life.
It’s not that the gangsters go away. In fact, it’s almost a joke how much they appear around every corner, justifying Marc’s paranoia and hilarious choice to drive completely hunched over so that they can’t see him. It’s because of the threat they pose to his life that a job offer to work as a chauffeur for a widow (Lola Albright) sounds so appealing. A chance to regroup and rest up — what could be more joyful?
House? More like “haunted house.” From the beginning, Clément never really strives for realism with this film. The action sequences feel straight out of a cartoon, like Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. It’s why the film could’ve almost gotten away with extending the cat and mouse chases for the entire runtime. Maybe all that adrenaline would’ve gotten exhausting after a while but because it’s Delon, too, who usually plays such cool, unflappable characters (see Le Samouraï and La Piscine), it’s fun to see him play frantic and how that colors his later attempts to come across as suave. At one point Marc gets away because the gangsters can’t get out of their car — their car doors keep hitting the cars next to them — and in another scene Marc has to leap onto the front grille of a truck to make it stop.
After Marc agrees to work for Barbara (Albright) and her maid, Melinda (Jane Fonda), though, all bets are off, and Joy House goes from being a wild (but straightforward) chase movie to one where Barbara is talking to herself in the mirror and there are peep holes everywhere, and it turns out Marc might’ve been better off hedging his bets with the gangsters than these ladies.
In their commentary, film historians, Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, discuss whether there’s any benefit to listening to the French audio track versus the English audio track (both are included on Kino Lorber’s release) and whether Joy House has a happy ending. They consider how Joy House fits with other films that address kept man syndrome, Lalo Schifrin‘s jazzy score, and the amazing “bric-a-brac” that production designer, Jean André, assembled for Barbara’s mansion.
They also talk about how the film was promoted, with an emphasis on sex. Going by the trailer, you would think the entire film consisted of women coming onto Delon and being mercurial. That isn’t the case at all, but maybe Clément forgot what his film was about, too.
During a recent appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Jane Fonda talked about a French director who tried to make her sleep with him by saying, “He needed to see how [she] orgasmed,” for the film. At the time Fonda didn’t name Clément (she did later on Watch What Happens LIVE), but she only starred in one film with Delon, so it was easy to figure out. Skipping over the fact that this is inappropriate, no matter the circumstances, Fonda doesn’t even have any sex scenes in Joy House, which means they were either cut or never existed in the first place.
Joy House is a wacky crime thriller that works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Fonda and Delon are both incredible and the screenplay by Clément, Pascal Jardin, and Charles Williams is full of unexpected twists.
Joy House is available on Blu-ray and DVD now from Kino Lorber.
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