Commander
X
: a character interpreted by Michel de Ré in the early 1960s, whose pseudonym owes nothing to chance.
In this series, he plays a French intelligence agent whose resolutely discreet missions take place during the Second World War, but also during the years following the Allied victory.
This series is presented as an event.
It is indeed the first time, in the history of the small screen, that a fiction is inspired by authentic facts, discovered in the archives of the years 39/45: the passage of resistance fighters in Spain, the dismantling of clandestine networks , the search for a senior Nazi who managed to escape shortly after his arrest...
Read alsoThe Eye of INA: Petula Clark, singer, actress and resistance fighter
Between 1962 and 1965, Michel de Ré shot ten black and white films that Madelen invites you to discover or rediscover.
With a duration varying between 55 and 75 minutes, which at the time did not pose the slightest problem, they are presented in the form of "
files
", whose titles recall the time when giving a code name to a mission was the first principle of precaution:
letterbox
,
Saint-Mathieu
,
Edelweiss
… Directed by Jean-Paul Carrère, they were written by Jacques Antériou and Guillaume Hanoteau.
Journalist and novelist, he is also the author of
La Tour Eiffel qui tue
, a play which is at the origin of what Michel de Ré, which became popular thanks to
Commander X
, considered his real job, even if it was more discreet: directing.
At the end of the 1940s, he entered the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier.
This hall, created by Jacques Copeau in 1913, was then considered the temple
of "a popular theatre, far from commercialism
".
He will thus sign several plays, including
La perle du Colorado
, a parody of a western in the form of a musical whose headliners are beginners: Michel Piccoli and Georges Wilson.
To add extra spice to this show, Michel de Ré also spotted and hired, for the comic interludes, a nascent duo,
the Pinsons
.
It was made up of two members of the Compagnie du Vieux Colombier, Robert Verbeke, originally from Belgium, and a certain Raymond Devos.
Then an actor in search of small roles, he thus began a journey which led him, a few years later, to become a master of absurd humour.
Michel de Ré, who died in 1979 at the age of 54, was renowned for the almost military rigor of his work.
He actually had something to hold on to.
His real name was Michel Gallieni and was the grandson of Joseph Gallieni.
Governor of Paris in 1914, this soldier went down in history for having taken the decision to requisition the taxis of the capital in order to transport troops, at the time of the battle of Ourcq, which allowed the victory of the Marne.
Disappeared in 1916, and became posthumously Marshal of France in 1920, Joseph Gallieni accomplished many other feats of arms, which, a few decades later, marked the childhood of Michel de Ré.
He spent his childhood Thursdays, the day off from school, helping his father put order in the dozens of notebooks where his grandfather wrote about his daily life.
This is to say if, then, at school, he was regularly first in history.