Johnny Hallyday: the French Elvis

The tao of Johnny Hallyday

Whenever depression looms for Joe Queenan, it's time to turn to Johnny Hallyday. What is it about the films of the French Elvis Presley that holds the answer to all life's woes?

Joe Queenan

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 December 2011 21.29 GMT


Spectacularly nutty … Vengeance. Photograph: Everett/Rex

The other day I was feeling unusually melancholy, what with the economy in the tank and construction workers building evil McMansions next to my house. One of my friends suggested I watch a Hong Kong gangster movie called Vengeance. He said the film was completely insane and would take my mind off my troubles. I told him all Hong Kong gangster movies were completely insane, but he fired back: "No – this one is really insane."

Vengeance
Production year: 2009
Country: Rest of the world
Runtime: 108 mins
Directors: Johnnie To
Cast: Anthony Wong, Johnny Hallyday, Lam Ka Tung, Lam Suet, Sylvie Testud

He was right.

Vengeance, released in 2009, is actually a Franco-Hong Kong collaboration that pools the resources of the legendary actor/director Johnnie To and those of the legendary rock star/actor Johnny Hallyday, the French Elvis Presley. Hallyday, né Jean-Philippe Smet, is in fact Belgian, but that has never been held against him. The role was originally offered to Alain Delon, but he said: "Non, merci." More's the pity for him, because Vengeance is so spectacularly nutty that it promises to attain unassailable cult status and be remembered as one of the strangest gangster films ever made for as long as human beings are making strange, nutty gangster films.

Vengeance opens with Hallyday's daughter, her husband, and her two boys getting gunned down by a trio of Chinese gangsters in Macau. Hallyday, a mite weatherbeaten, arrives in town and filches a matchbox found at the scene of the crime. The matchbox carries the name of a swank hotel, at which Hallyday arrives just as three hitmen are assassinating their boss's girlfriend. Impressed by their work, he hires them to track down the three killers who blew away his family. He explains this in English, which he doesn't speak very well, and they respond in English, which they also don't speak particularly well. But the killers probably wouldn't want to hear Hallyday speak in Chinese, nor would he care to hear them butcher the beautiful French language. So they improvise. He then takes Polaroids of his associates, writing their names on the back, explaining that, like Guy Pearce in Memento, he has short-term memory problems and will quickly forget who they are.

Over lunch, Hallyday blithely assembles a revolver while blindfolded. His newfound confederates really like this guy; the dude knows how to wear a Borsalino. They track the three killers to their lair in Hong Kong and are all set to polish them off when the targets' wives and children arrive for a picnic. Hallyday and co, gentlemen to the end, wait until after dinner to kill them. The boss of Johnny's crew then dispatches hundreds of henchmen to kill them. Meanwhile, Hallyday is on a beach somewhere, hanging out with a pregnant woman and a bunch of mysterious orphans, having forgotten who he is. But one day he sees mug shots of his dead confreres on TV and with the aid of the plucky orphans, tracks down the head of the rival gang and kills him and about 400 of his associates. He then goes back to the beach, smiles broadly at the pregnant woman, and has lunch.

Vengeance was every bit as demented as my friend had promised it would be, and watching it certainly lifted my spirits. For weeks after that I felt just great. Then, thinking over the matter, I understood it wasn't just the mesmerisingly insane quality to the movie that made me feel so emotionally rejuvenated. No, it was Hallyday himself. Casting back over my grim sojourn on this planet, I suddenly realised how many times life had pounded the stuffing out of me, and it was only by watching a Johnny Hallyday movie that I had reeled myself back in from the throes of depression. Even though Hallyday had only made about a dozen movies in a career that stretched back to the 1960s, several of them had a major effect on my emotional well-being, literally saving my life at a time when I thought I could just not go on. I know that is hard to believe, but it's true.

For example, in July 1973 I was really down because I had run out of money and my year abroad in Paris had come to an end, and all my girlfriends had gone back to Montreal or Tokyo or Helsinki, without leaving forwarding addresses or thank-you notes. But then, on the flight home to Philadelphia, I saw a Claude Lelouch movie called L'Aventure, C'est L'Aventure, which starred Jacques Brel and Lino Ventura. The cast also included Johnny Hallyday. The film was about a plot to kidnap the Pope while he is visiting Africa. It was so effusively zany that it brightened my spirits, lifted my heart, and I did not get depressed again until 1985 when my career, which had not yet started, seemed to be stalling.

But then I saw Johnny in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective, a film in which he plays a boxing promoter in trouble with the mob, and it brightened my spirits and lifted my heart even though it was not especially upbeat in and of itself, given that Jean-Luc Godard had directed it. No, it wasn't the film, it wasn't the story, it wasn't even the acting that inspired me. It was l'essence de Johnny. There was something about his blithe performance as a cash-strapped boxing promoter short on the vig that lifted me right out of the dumps. This would not have happened had the cash-strapped boxing promoter been played by someone such as Harvey Keitel.

For the next 17 years, I managed to avoid serious depression. I bought a nice house, made a lot of money, raised a nice family. But then in 2002 I lost my job as a columnist at GQ, and a close friend stabbed me in the back, and my football team lost the game that would have put us into the Super Bowl, and I felt perfectly suicidal. And who came to my succour? You guessed it, Le Grand Johnny, in Patrice Leconte's brilliant The Man on the Train, a taut psychological thriller about a gangster and a teacher who have a chance encounter, then slowly begin to switch identities. The film cheered me up so much that when Johnny's next film – Crime Spree – a comedy about inept crooks marooned in Chicago got released, I didn't need to watch it in order to feel good. I was still basking in the glow of the previous, enormously inspirational Johnny Hallyday film. That's how great these films are. Their positive, salubrious, emotionally regenerative effects can sometimes last for years.

Johnny's most recent film, released in 2009, the same year as Vengeance, was The Pink Panther 2. I have not yet seen it, mostly because Steve Martin is in it, but also because I am worried that if Johnny never makes another film, and I have another major bout of depression between now and the end of my life, I will find myself stranded with a gun that has no bullets left in it. (For whatever the reason, watching Johnny Hallyday films a second time does not cure depression.) This is the same reason I have not yet seen Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse (2004) or The Case of the Missing Bottle (1983).

Johnny, now 68, had a heart attack a couple of years ago, followed by a bout of colon cancer, so he is clearly running out of time. But so am I. I plan on having four or five more bouts of serious, seemingly incurable depression before I check out for good, and there are only three Johnny Hallyday films that I have not yet seen, so I could use some help. I'm not saying that Johnny Hallyday films will work for everybody; for a lot of people, it's best to stick with mainstream anti-depressants. And I'm not saying that Johnny Hallyday movies will necessarily save your life. But I'd rather take my chances with Johnny Hallyday than with some prissy, fatso blabbermouth like Marcel Proust. Any day of the week.

Le Roi du rock'n'roll: Johnny Hallyday's musical career

It's never been a problem for French pop stars to come across as political conservatives. Nobody in Britain in the 1960s would have had the nerve to have a go at Bob Dylan, but across the Channel Johnny Hallyday could cut a mocking imitation of Subterranean Homesick Blues called Cheveux Longs et Idées Courtes – long hair, short on ideas – without ever being doubted. Johnny was "Le Roi", unquestionably France's biggest pop star, and largely why French pop was regarded as a joke until the 90s, when the 60s recordings of the likes of Jacques Dutronc and France Gall suddenly became hip names to drop. Hallyday will never be a hip name to drop. He shouts rather than sings, and affects a gravelly warble on ballads; you can almost hear the veins sticking out on his neck. This is not what the British want or expect from French pop. For a start, it isn't sexy at all.

Hallyday's live shows made his name. During a festival at the Palais de Sport in 1961, he set off a riot, and all rock'n'roll shows were banned in France for the rest of the year. Yet next year's shows at the Royal Albert Hall will be his first ever UK appearances. The main reason he has never found success here is that the songs that made him famous were all covers: Be-Bop-a-Lula, Da Doo Ron Ron (or Da Dou Ron Ron as he would have it), House of the Rising Sun, Let's Twist Again, all became part of the Hallyday oeuvre.

Things started getting more interesting for non-Gallic fans when he decided to stop aping Elvis and hang out with British musicians instead. In 1966, Hallyday was supported at Paris Olympia by the Jimi Hendrix Experience – one of their very first gigs – and they had a galvanising effect on his music. He began choosing material that better suited his growl – Black Is Black, Hey Joe, Joe South's Hush, and a clutch of impressive originals. The 1967 single Psychedelic lives up to its bare-faced title, featuring guitar wigouts courtesy of hired hand Jimmy Page. Most astonishing is A Tout Casser from the spring of 1968, on which Page plays the Whole Lotta Love riff some 18 months before Led Zeppelin II was released. Page wasn't the only Brit called on by Hallyday – the 1969 album Rivière … Ouvre Ton Lit features several songs written and played by the Small Faces.

By the end of the 60s, the Elvis schtick was forgotten, and he even briefly reneged on his reactionary beefcake image with Jesus Christ in 1970. That was pretty much the end of his experimental years, though, and he later said that Rivière … Ouvre Ton Lit was the worst record he ever made. Since then, there have been Shakin' Stevens-like rock-revival albums, sincere modern-day blues, and a whole lot of ballads. You can't blame him. Whenever he deviates from his own take on rock'n'roll – most notably with 1976's catastrophic double concept album, Hamlet – sales drop off. The French still love him – he has no problem selling out three nights at the 80,000-capacity Stade de France. Even Bono has written a song in his honour called I Am the Blues. Maybe the singers bonded over their love of tax avoidance – Hallyday is now a Swiss resident. Bob Stanley

Johnny Hallyday plays at the Royal Albert Hall on 15 and 16 October. Details: royalalberthall.com