In France, the film was titled “Alphaville: A Unusual Journey of Lemmy Warning,” after its hero (Eddie Constantine), a trench coat-wearing investigator who’s identified primarily by his ID quantity, 003 (sound like every other well-known secret agent that ?). Lemmy enters Alphaville from The Colonies in a Ford Galaxie, presenting himself as a journalist named Ivan Johnson who writes for Figaro-Pravda. He is really come to destroy the Alpha 60, a sentient pc that controls life in Alphaville, and discover and kill professor Von Braun (named after the rocket scientist), who created the pc. This film got here out three years earlier than “2001: A House Odyssey,” with its murderous HAL-9000. Worry of computer systems was all over the place in Sixties cinema—it by no means went away after that, actually—and should you purchased a ticket to the cinema then, you had been more likely to encounter a plot line that concerned wall-sized items with magnetic tape spools and punch playing cards (even in romantic comedies like “Desk Set”), together with discussions of whether or not humanity was on the verge of shedding its free will and sense of poetry and turning into serfs or worse.
Lemmy represents that disreputable wild-card sense of the human spirit that bubbled up from well-liked tradition by gangster and detective films and sure hard-edged mid-century Westerns (like those that starred James Stewart and Glenn Ford, in addition to Sergio Leone’s “{Dollars}” movies, which had been made contemporaneous with “Alphaville”). It flowered totally within the Nineteen Seventies, with combative counterculture heroes lashing out towards The System, nonetheless incoherently. There are some affinities between this film and the novel and movie of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which pitted an outwardly impassive agent of the oppressive Powers that Be towards a raging, scruffy, grandiloquent pig hero whose unpredictability and hazard symbolized the free will that was in peril of being misplaced. The equations for quantum physics and spatial relativity are often flashed onscreen, additional placing throughout the concept a twisted caricature of “logic” defines Alphaville and is squashing the humanity out of it.
There is a pressure of misogyny, as there typically is in crime or detective movies and what would later be often known as counterculture fables. This film has no use for ladies besides as schemers, seducers, and people in want of educating and rescue, though, as is normally the case in Godard’s scripted movies, the ladies look so fabulous and carry themselves with such assurance that they develop into dynamic life-forces anyway. (A person dies having intercourse with a “Seductress Third Class.”) Lemmy ultimately groups up with Natacha von Braun—performed by Godard’s muse Anna Karina—an Alpha 60 programmer and the daughter of Professor von Braun. They fall in love, despite the fact that she says she would not perceive love or conscience or different ideas, and despite the fact that poetry, emotion and affection have been banned by the pc overlord of Alphaville. “Star Trek” hound-dog James T. Kirk bought into this sort of predicament, too.
Lemmy’s impulsive, macho, instinctual strategy is a risk to the brand new establishment. His meathead roughness represents the humanity that is on the verge of being deprogrammed from the species. (The Forties Hollywood films had been higher with this form of stuff, curiously; they let their femme fatales and even their “honey entice” minor characters have a little bit of psychological depth even when the tales had been primarily pushed by formidable, macho males.)