People want to act like having a kid in their 20s who has zero desire to work and just sponge of their parents is a brand-new thing. But it turns out they’ve been around for decades and not exculsiv to the USA. La Tete Contre Les Murs (translated from the French as Head Against the Wall) is about an adult child with no ambition other than to get wild at parties and not care about growing up. The film came out in 1959 so there was no Sally Jessy Raphael ready to send them to boot camp. The film finds an equally worse place to straighten out a disappointing adult child.
François (Solo‘s Jean-Pierre Mocky) has been living a bit of a wildlife instead of maturing at age 25. He zooms around the countryside on his motorcycle. He gambles with borrowed money. He parties with cool equally unemployed kids who might be taking pills and living off a trust fund. He even seems to have scored a cool girlfriend with Stéphanie (Fellini’s 8½‘s Anouk Aimée). How does he support such a lifestyle? This time he sneaks into his father’s house and breaks into a desk to steal money. Except dad catches him in the act. Instead of calling the cops on his lazy son, Dad has the kid committed to a mental asylum. This turns out to be worse than jail for many reasons. This includes the fact that there’s no set date of release. He’s there on the whim of the head shrink. He also learns that he’s not the only one there that isn’t exactly crazy. Although there are people who are crazy and violent amongst them. One guy hits a fellow inmate in the face with a handsaw. I wonder if this movie is where Christopher Nolan came up with his Joker’s face? The good news for François is that Stéphanie visits him. While she wants him to reconcile and show he’s better to the staff. No matter how hard he tries, the asylum doesn’t want to lose patients. This leads him to come up with escape plans
The black and white film looks great because cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan is a legend. He was behind the camera for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Abel Gance’s Napoléon, Eyes Without a Face and The Hustler. He won an Oscar for The Hustler. The music is from Maurice Jarre, the Oscar winner for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India. Even though this is a nasty subject, the look and the sound of the film make it compelling.
Jean-Pierre Mocky wanted to direct the film since he also wrote the script and acted in the main role. But the producers brought on Georges Franju to direct even though he’d only done some short films. Franju had quite a bit of talent as a director. His follow up film was the legendary horror Eyes Without a Face that reunited him with Schüfftan and Jarre. You might not have seen the film, but you’ve heard the song by Billy Idol.
La Tete Contre Les Murs is a great film from the French New Wave era. The film has elements that would later be explored in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest over a decade later. The head of the asylum is a nasty piece of work in his white coat. He’s always ready to dope up a troublesome patient. Jean-Pierre Mocky is fantastic as the trouble youth who has no vision of the future except getting over the walls of the asylum. This is a rebellious film for its times. I don’t think a French New Wave survey is complete without La Tete Contre Les Murs on the schedule.
The Video is 1.37:1 full frame. The 4K restoration makes the black and white images shine. The Audio is French LPCM 1.0 mono. It sounds good. The movie is subtitled in English.
Jean-Pierre Mocky (10:00) has the star and screenwriter talk about the movie. He talks about how their weren’t many films about insane asylums when he made it 50 years before (this was recorded in 2008). Turns out that this was a real situation that he turned into fiction. He wanted to direct it, but the French film industry wasn’t into letting young actors call their own shots. This was right before the French New Wave changed all the rules. He didn’t mind working with Georges Franju, although he points out the guy’s vices on the set. Indeed when Franju had to got to the hospital, Mocky was left to direct.
Georges Franju and Charles Aznavour (11:40) is from when the director went on French TV to promote his feature film debut. The interviewer asks him about his violent short films. Is the new film as violent? He says novelist Herve Bazin told him after a screening “This is harsher than my book.” He gets into the issues of shooting on location. Charles Aznavour shocked the interviewer by saying he didn’t sing in the film. He was a major singing star at the time. This was shot on film so it looks great.
Eric Le Roy (26:08) is a former assistant to Mocky and Head of Collections at CNC. He gets into how Mocky and Franju have shared ownership of the film. Mocky had contacted Bazin about two other books before finding out about this novel. He makes a point that Mocky should be considered part of the New Wave although he was the only one that started as an actor.
Collector’s Booklet has an excerpt from a French film book by Raymond Durgnat.
Radiance Films present La Tete Contre Les Murs (Limited Edition). Directed by Georges Franju. Screenplay by Jean-Pierre Mocky and Jean-Charles Pichon. Starring Pierre Brasseur, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Anouk Aimée, Charles Aznavour & Jean Galland. Running Time: 97 minutes. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: June 23, 2026.
