Eurociné

Films BAP (1937 to 1957)

Eurociné traces its lineage to Films BAP, a company created by French film pioneer Robert Péguy and Charles Battesti, the owner of a Saint-Maur-des-Fossés theatre called Cinéma de l'Horloge. The firm was formally established on 19 February 1937 in Paris, although Battesti and Péguy had already worked under the BAP label in 1935–36. The company's star was Jacotte Muller, or "Little Jacotte", a child actress discovered at the Théâtre du petit monde, a stage venue for young performers created by Pierre Humble, who collaborated to some of her vehicles. Roger Tréville was another company regular. Although BAP was cleared by occupation authorities to operate during World War II, Péguy did not produce any work for the company during the conflict. Péguy's post World War II projects were unsuccessful and the company went dormant.

Acquisition by Lesoeur and rebrand

Marius Lesoeur, movie producer with the SOPADEC company and one-time carnival owner, took a stake in BAP Films in 1957. He bought out Battesti and Péguy in 1958. Eurociné's official history ambiguously states that Lesoeur "discovered that film was a continuation of his life as a traveling entertainer" during the shooting of BAP's 1937 production Monsieur Breloque Has Disappeared, before taking full control of the company years later. In a 1999 interview, Marius' son Daniel gave another circuitous explanation: "The Eurociné company was founded in 1937. The film Grandfather [a 1938 BAP production] was produced under our imprint, although someone else served as executive producer at the time. Founder Marius Lesoeur, my father, made his first appearance as a producer with the film Une Belle Garce [a 1946 picture not made by BAP]." French film historian Christophe Bier found no evidence that the elder Lesoeur participated in any BAP films, and suggests that the family may be blurring the lines regarding his achievements, harkening back to carnival showmanship.

Lesoeur, using BAP's former corporate entity, appears to have started doing business as Eurociné around 1960, although it co-existed with SOPADEC for a brief period. In those early years, André Castillon, a jeweller from Gers and fellow résistant, was nominally listed as Eurociné's manager. Lesoeur also released some films through an affiliate called Eurocinéac (short for "Euro Ciné Action"), which was managed by Georges Estin. Marius' son Daniel joined his father shortly after his takeover of Eurociné in the early 1960s, first working assistant jobs before graduating to executive roles.

Minority co-productions

At that time, Marius Lesoeur focused on co-productions with Spain, whose cheap labor provided him with solid films at a much lower cost than his home country. But even then, he remained a minority producer, merely trading francophone rights against an investment as small as a few ten-thousand francs, which often went uncredited for regulatory reasons. After a period of film noirs and musicals, whose real-life parallels exposed him to the wims of Spanish censorship, Lesoeur became one of the backers of Eduardo Manzanos Brochero's Golden City, Spain's first Western set. Against the objections of Manzanos, who did not believe they could emulate an American setting, he pushed to replace the Spanish character El Coyote with the Californian Zorro, who held broader appeal and paved the way for the Eurowestern boom. After joining Manzanos and Lesoeur for another Zorro, Italian producer Alberto Grimaldi suggested the Frenchman invest a larger amount in a project with Sergio Leone. To his later regret, Lesoeur chose the safe option and declined, sealing his company's fate as a minor player. Problems encountered by Lesoeur on some relatively ambitious, pre-Eurociné films, may have contributed to his risk averse approach.

Following a pair of fluff musicals, Eurociné's third collaboration with director Jesús Franco begat the seminal The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962), which kickstarted the era of Spanish Fantaterror. After seeing the film, Amando de Ossorio approached Lesoeur to pitch him his own horror debut, Malenka, but the producer passed on it in favor of another western, Tomb of the Pistolero, and the film was not made until years later. Nazario Belmar, the Catholic backer of Franco's post-Orloff effort Death Whistles the Blues, attempted to steer him towards a career as one of Spain's high-brow filmmakers, which at one point had been his dream. But, finding Lesoeur's business model a better outlet for his urge to film, he broke up with the former and signed up for Eurociné's The Sadistic Baron von Klaus. Both Lesoeur and Franco would frequently revisit the horror genre, which they later infused with more overt erotic influences.

Lead producer and grindhouse years

Mainstream co-productions dried up after a few years, but genres ushered in by the sexual revolution provided Lesoeur with new low-risk opportunities. In 1968, Eurociné made their first feature as main producer with the pseudo-social guidance film Nathalie l'amour s'éveille (lit. 'Nathalie, Love's Awakening'), also their first to be directed by French veteran Pierre Chevalier. In its heyday, the company released five or six films a year. Their themes were chosen during bimonthly meetings with France's six independent regional distributors. Even in the Gallic market, these films were not widely seen, but they were good sellers in developing countries. Foreign distributors, especially Italian ones at MIFED (Mercato internazionale del film e del documentario), also provided key pointers. The success of Salon Kitty created demand for Nazisploitation product, and Eurociné obliged, although their films were considered tamer than others in that niche.

The Lesoeurs' production ethos, which emphasized marquee appeal over the films' actual contents, has been construed by some as a reflection of their sideshow roots. Daniel Lesoeur simply defined his family as "artisans". Crews were very small, and actors were often not provided with a script in advance. Many scenes from their movies were shot at the company's small Champs-Élysées offices or at the Lesoeur's secondary residence in Soisy-sur-École, where they stored props and furnished several sets. According to Franco, this mindset was compounded by Daniel Lesoeur's promotion to producer. The company became infamous for its use of stock footage, and some new films were built from the ground up to recycle large chunks of a previous one. While Daniel has downplayed the practice's frequency, a few of the company's respectable 1960s Westerns did receive a sexed up makover.

Franco's status with the Lesoeurs typically exempted him from having to build his films entirely around others', and despite escapades with better producers like Harry Alan Towers, he found the freedom of working for them to be worth the compromises as it resulted in two of his favorite works, Female Vampire and The Sadist of Notre Dame. However, directors with less leverage were not as well treated, decrying not only the Lesoeurs' untenable budgetary limitations, but their tendency to deflect blame onto them. During the mid 1970s, softcore was superseded by hardcore pornography. Eurociné seldom dealt in the genre, but some of the many alternate versions it churned out featured explicit inserts. Franco accepted that at least some of Daniel's tinkering was dictated by the changing French marketplace, and collaborated to these.

Regulars

Eurociné's quick production schedules relied on a cast of regulars, which Daniel Lesoeur has dubbed "The Eurociné Family." This included actual relatives, who all worked multiple roles. Daniel's wife Ilona Kunešová was a script supervisor and occasional writer, and became the company's head of acquisitions after they refocused on sales. Their daughter Anouchka acted in several of their films as a child before, too, helping managing the company's catalogue. In the 1990s, their son Thomas joined the company's front office as well.

Howard Vernon, an alumn of several pre-Eurociné noirs produced by Lesoeur, is perhaps the actor most associated with the company thanks to his role as Franco's classic character Dr. Orloff. American Jack Taylor was signed to a salaried contract by the elder Lesoeur during the 1960s Western boom, which enabled him to get a Spanish work permit, a rare commodity under Franco. Lesoeur was also responsible for changing his early stage name Grek Martin to Jack Taylor. Supporting players included Frenchman Olivier Mathot and Spaniard Antonio Mayans, both character actors who had brushes with the mainstream, and a few Belgian transplants like Roger Darton and Pierre Taylou, who worked mostly as stage actors. Among the company's erotic starlets were Evelyne Scott, glamour model turned actress Alice Arno, former adult film performer Nadine Pascal and Monica Swinn (another Belgian who was brought to Eurociné by her boyfriend, underground film figure Jean-Pierre Bouyxou).

Jesús Franco was the company's emblematic director. He was introduced to Marius Lesoeur—right as he was starting to do business as Eurociné—by Sergio Newman, the Spanish-based producer of Queen of the Tabarin Club. While tempestuous, their on-and-off relationship spans every era of Eurociné, even after his death thanks to the Lesoeurs' collaboration to some posthumous projects. Due to their tortuous production history, the number of films credited to the partnership has varied, but Franco biographer Alain Petit pegs it as 28. Pierre Chevalier, a former director of popular comedies who revived his flagging career during Eurociné's sexploitation era, is the other director most often associated with Eurociné. In addition to many Spanish co-producers, the Lesoeurs frequently used Belgian father and son Jean and Pierre Quérut as international co-production partners, often through the company Brux International Pictures.

Alain Hardy was the Eurociné's longest tenured cinematographer. Gérard Brissaud was another company regular working for both Franco and Chevalier, although Franco biographer Stephen Thrower notes that the former sometimes used Brissaud's name as an alias to beef up the credits when photographing his own features. Jazz composer Daniel J. White, a Frenchman of Scottish descent, had also started working with Lesoeur during his pre-Eurociné noir days. About 80 percent of the company's posters were drawn by Ukrainian-born artist Constantin Belinsky, a fixture of the French B-movie industry.