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On the cusp of the new decade, Jean Renoir updates the puppet theater from La Chienne as a television program—the auteur ambles into the studio and narrates "a shocking story" for multiple cameras, practically a Hitchcock introduction. (Psycho is still a year away, so is Les Yeux sans Visage.) The artistic mind and "the most abominable thirst for perversion," the unshackled id skulking through the alleys of Paris in a beastly rampage. Dr. Cordelier (Jean-Louis Barrault), silver-haired and ascetic, toasted as "a benefactor to humanity" by his attorney friend (Teddy Bilis) and condemned as "a threat to humanity" by his scientific rival (Michel Vitold). An elixir brings out Monsieur Opale, of roiling gait, spastic neck and abrupt lurch, gleefully terrorizing the young and bludgeoning the elderly. Boudu multiplied by Robert Louis Stevenson, then, "un homme libre." Suppressed desire and liberated instinct, the human schism seen not with Renoir's lush textures but with a chilling astringency, ferocious as can be. The doctor keeps up his sang-froid as a female patient writhes in anticipation for his injection, the ogre gooses secretaries and maintains a well-stocked cabinet of whips. (Bresson and Harpo are the modalities of Barrault's tour de force.) "Certain social rules" aren't for the feral self, stylized contortions on vérité streets evoke Feuillade. The bourgeois party served by Gaston Modot himself, the scream in the laboratory and the confession in the tape recorder. "I like to understand." A work of profound virtuosity and profound absurdity, of the utmost importance to Lewis (The Nutty Professor), Russell (Altered States) and Carax ("Merde," Tokyo!). The closing view is from Whale's The Invisible Man. With Jean Topart, Jacques Dannoville, André Certes, Micheline Gary, Ghislaine Dumont, Jacqueline Morane, Madeleine Marion, Jaque Catelain, and Sylvane Margollé. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |