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"History of a scoundrel," parallel with Sirk's A Scandal in Paris. Punch personified, the ex-soldier (George Sanders) climbing the Belle Époque social ladder, plenty of Judies along the way. He enters the journalistic world by way of his tubercular comrade (John Carradine), and is seen blocked at his desk with quill pen in hand and a devilish figurine surrounded by crumpled pages. (Echoes is his unsavory breakout, a column dedicated to gossip and rumors.) "I've noticed that women take to men who have the appearance of wickedness," thus the schemer's gallery of amorous targets, from adoring widow (Angela Lansbury) to unconquerable violinist (Frances Dee). "Your cruelty is dearer to me than the love of others." Albert Lewin on Maupassant is a most erudite "Petit Guignol," a miniature constellation of cultivated savagery, a virtual recomposition of The Moon and Sixpence. The friend expires with accordion by his side, the fabricated scandal involving his independent-minded wife and the Minister of Foreign Affairs occasions an affecting reunion of Ann Dvorak and Warren William. "There's only one way to develop an immunity to the diseases of life, and that's to be exposed to them," theorizes the weathered caricaturist (Albert Bassermann), the newspaper magnate (Hugo Haas) meanwhile takes pleasure in starving artists as only a crass studio executive can. Vermeer's checkerboard floors, Manet's Folies Bergère, Max Ernst's Technicolor canvas. On her knees tugging at her disinterested lover's sleeve, Katherine Emery delivers an acute rendition of "an old, soot-filled chimney" painfully rekindled. The wedding ring in the beer glass, the bullet for the mannequin, the duel that brings it all back to the mud. "We are waiting, monsieur, for your devastating reply." Renoir's puppet theater turns up at the close, for the benefit of Huston's Moulin Rouge. Cinematography by Russell Metty. With Susan Douglas, Marie Wilson, Richard Fraser, John Good, David Bond, and Wyndham Standing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |