The Gangster Girl (1966)

Directed by: Frans Weisz | 90 minutes | drama | Actors: Kitty Courbois, Paolo Graziosi, Astrid Weyman, Gian Maria Volonte

As an ode to the prevailing film styles in Europe around 1966, Frans Weisz made ‘The Gangster Girl’, an impressive debut with the major plus points being the innovation in Dutch cinema and the screenplay by Remco Campert and Jan Blokker – and the minus point being the dubbing. As a son of the Italian film school, the director was a big proponent of recording dialogues afterwards, although they are not always successful in the film. The question is, however, whether Weisz could have achieved the same result if he had recorded the dialogues on set. The winks – whether intentional or not – to Godard’s Nouvelle Vague and Fellini’s surrealism would probably have turned out less well; after all, the French and Italian also recorded all their dialogues after filming.

So it is possible that the Italian Paolo Graziosi plays the lead role as Wessel Franken opposite Kitty Courbois, with whom director Weisz was in love at the time. This love jumps off the screen, as does the passion to make film; at the time not so common in the Netherlands. Campert’s intelligent story was perhaps just a little too unfilmable, but because book and film were written at the same time, that was not yet clear at the time. The difficult process of making the film became known only later.

But there are many aspects that make ‘Het gangstermeisje’ worthwhile: the beautiful shots in black and white, the cameos by some great Dutch avant-garde artists, the title song by Liesbeth List and the music by Robert Heppener. At its premiere in 1966, the film was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival – an honor that not many Dutch people remember. In addition, the film will be released again in 2011. Writer Remco Campert takes center stage during Nederland Leest and the Eye Film Institute joins in by making a restored copy of Weisz’s debut film available. ‘Het Gangstermeisje’ may not be a paragon of Dutch cinema, but it surpasses its contemporaries in progressiveness and perception.