Noir Diary: Witness in the City [‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1959)

Whilst the first two films in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection were both interesting, enjoyable and well worth making time for, it is the third and final movie in the set which proved by far my favourite.

Édouard Molinaro is back at the helm, and Lino Ventura is back on the street, for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ [‘Witness in the City’], in which a Boileau & Narcejac script (with an additional writing credit for none other than Le Dos au Mur’s Gérard Oury) reshuffles a few of the plot elements from Molinaro’s earlier film, honing them into a movie which sits on the cusp between being a distinctly superior programme picture and an out-and-out genre classic.

Proceedings certainly begin in alarming fashion, with the sight of a screaming woman being callously thrown from a speeding train. Composing himself after returning to his compartment, her killer (Jacques Berthier) pulls the emergency cord, and we cut straight to the courthouse, where a clearly disgusted judge is forced to dismiss the case against him due to a lack of evidence. (“Doubt… your closest collaborator,” the judge dryly remarks to the man’s lawyer, perhaps in homage to a certain Hitchcock movie featuring similar train-bound maleficence.)

On his way home, the liberated murderer is delayed by a minor road accident which leaves his car out of commission, forcing him to rely on taxis to complete his journey. Far greater trouble awaits him though back at his remote and luxurious home.

In the meantime, y’see, we’ve been presented to a succession of gloriously menacing, giallo-esque POV shots, depicting a looming, trench-coated fellow (soon revealed to be Ventura) breaking into Berthier’s house. Sabotaging his fusebox and leaving mementos of his late mistress meaningfully strewn around the rooms (photo in the picture frame, dress laid out on the bed), Ventura proceeds to lurk in the shadows, awaiting his intended victim’s return. Not a sight any wealthy playboy really wants to be confronted with after a hard day spent clearing himself of his mistress’s murder, needless to say.

Ventura’s character Monsieur Ancelin is, of course, the dead woman’s husband. And, if you’re at all familiar with his usual screen persona in this era, you’ll realise he’s not about to take any guff from Monsieur “honest guv, I didn’t push her, it was suicide, she couldn't live with her betrayal, she loved only you.”

Long story short, the confrontation between the two men is beautifully played out, shot in brooding, gothic horror-esque candlelight, with Berthier’s two-faced pleading crashing hopelessly against the rocks of Ventura’s immoveable, soul deadened cynicism. Once the former has been left swinging from the rafters, Anselm sweeps the joint to remove traces of his presence, before making a swift exit, and…. running head-first into Pierre (Franco Fabrizi), the driver of the radio taxi Berthier ordered a few minutes before his untimely demise! Oops.

As Pierre’s taxi screeches off, Ancelin scribbles down the registration number… and his hunt for the titular witness begins.

During the movie’s second act, our focus shifts to Pierre, his blossoming romance with switchboard operator Liliane (Sandra Milo), and the close-knit community based around the offices of the Radio Taxi company for which they both work.

In contrast to the character work in the two earlier films in the Kino set, the relationships here are simply and believably sketched out, and ultimately very endearing. There’s a real sense of the fleeting pleasures of day-to-day life and of the excitement of young love here, as passing details like couple’s brief clinch as they wait to board a crowded metro live long in the memory.

Another very nice touch is the scene in which Pierre uses his taxi’s radio to broadcast the sound of a group of drunken American soldiers singing ‘Red River Valley’ in the back seat of his cab through Liliane’s headset, prompting momentarily hilarity in the switchboard office. Indeed, the use of this song, whose indelible melody becomes a kind of totem for the lovers, proves extremely effective, adding a very poignant note once events take a darker turn later in the film.

Speaking of which, the implacable Ancelin - who has effectively become the film’s antagonist at this point - is of course lurking always in the lovers’ shadows. Ventura’s unmistakable features and elongated eyebrows lend him an almost Nosferatu-like quality here, as he silently stalks the city streets, trailing Pierre in a succession of stolen cars and seeking a way to put him out of commission before he can report what he’s seen to the police.

From hereon in, the story ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ tells is entirely linear in its development, but the ambiguities created by the way our point of view shifts back and forth between Ancelin and his potential (and actual) victims make it kind of fascinating nonetheless.

By the film’s final act, Ventura’s character has mutated into an entirely different breed of expressionist monster - closer perhaps to Chaney’s hunchback or Lorre’s child killer in ‘M’ - as, hunted, bloodied and limping, he is run to ground by the combined forces of the (largely unseen) police, and the small army of radio-equipped taxi drivers upon whom the action largely concentrates.

Though no melodramatic flourishes are employed to jog our memory, it’s impossible not to recall here that the reign of terror Anselin has by this point inflicted upon the taxi-driving community was, ultimately, triggered by love - or at the very least, by a perceived masculine obligation to avenge the death of his beloved wife.

Whilst committing additional acts of violence purely in the name of self-preservation is never a good look for a revenger, we’re inclined to wonder by this point whether Anselim was always a remorseless psychopath, or whether the loss of his wife has simply pushed him over the edge, causing him to lash out at the world in some kind of grief-driven death-trip. This is a question which the film pointedly declines to address, leaving us unsure quite how to read this frightening and desperate character with whom we are to some extent encouraged to sympathise.

An additional level of bleakness is added to Anselin’s Harry Lime-esque plight through the fact that, whilst his crimes have all been committed against individuals whom we’ve spent some time with and grown to like, his eventual fate is entirely anonymised by the film.

There are no reassuring ‘job well done’ back-slaps or closing clinches for the ‘heroes’ here; indeed, the survivors’ lives are presumably left in pieces. Instead, the ‘villain’ of the piece is disposed of in a series of high angle long shots, taken down by an unseen army of cops behind a blinding circle of headlights, forcing us to reflect on the sad cycle of violence which has led him to this sorry fate.

The knack for visual storytelling Édouard Molinaro demonstrated in the opening sequence of ‘Le Dos au Mur’ reaches its full expression in ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’, and the way in which the film manages to wrangle a mass of logical/procedural detail without resorting to dry exposition is inspired. 

In fact, for a mid-century crime drama, it’s remarkable how little the screenplay relies on dialogue. Almost everything we need to know here is conveyed visually, and, once Anselin is on Pierre’s trail, the movie is almost all action (of one kind or another), keeping the characters perpetually in motion.

The fact that the film’s events all take place in or around cars naturally helps to maintain this sense of momentum, and the eventual series of chases and confrontations which comprise the final act are genuinely thrilling, allowing us to perhaps file this one alongside Don Siegel’s The Line-Up in the pre-history of car chases movies, even as the narrow alleyways and boulevards of Paris rarely allow the motors here to pick up much speed, keeping things more at a gear-grinding, ‘stalking and blocking’ kind of level.

Naturally, this concentration on exteriors means that the vast majority of the film is shot on location in the city, and the rain-sodden, night-for-night streets and avenues look absolutely beautiful, as they rightfully should, given that the legendary Henri Decaë (cameraman of choice for Melville, Truffaut and Louis Malle, amongst many others) was calling the shots as DP.

Alongside the swathes of inky shadow we’d reasonably expect, the diffused gleam of streetlamps, headlights and neon signage adds a hazy ‘endless night’ kind of feel to the film’s sprawling urban landscape, whilst the conclusion - staged at the historic Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park - incorporates a series of absolutely exquisite deep focus long shots, as Ventura stumbles to his doom through a nocturnal maze of empty gardens and attractions. (Some may feel Molinaro’s decision to intercut Anselin’s flight with close-ups of the park’s caged birds of prey is a bit heavy-handed, but this attention-grabbing directorial flourish actually works very well in context.)

Also noteworthy meanwhile is a great, sultry modern jazz score from saxophonist Barney Wilen, who had played with Miles Davis on his indelible score for Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ a year earlier. This was presumably what inspired the decision to hire Wilen here, and if the material he and his group cooked up for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ feels slightly more akin to the buttoned down, compositional approach to jazz that Johnny Dankworth was busy bringing to British crime films of this era, well… that’s certainly no bad thing.

For my money, this all adds up to a nigh-on flawless example of a late ‘50s European crime film. Devoid of pretention or self-importance but still loaded with powerful imagery, ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ maintains an unsettling sense of moral greyscale amid its blinding headlights and sepulchral shadows, whilst its refusal to offer a conventional, reassuring resolution means that, like all the best noir, it is liable to haunt the darker corners of viewers’ memories for a long time to come.

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Though Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection pointedly fails to bear the legend ‘Volume # 1’, they are surely doing the lord’s work in bringing films like this one to an English-speaking audience on blu-ray, and we can only hope there are more such releases in the pipeline.

Noir Diary: Back to the Wall [‘Le Dos au Mur’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1958)

In stark contrast to Gilles Grangier’s no nonsense directorial approach on Le Rouge et Mis, director Édouard Molinaro begins ‘Le Dos au Mur’ [Literal translation: ‘Evidence in Concrete’, but more snappily retitled for English-speaking viewers as ‘Back to the Wall’] - the second film in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection - with an audacious, near wordless seventeen-minute sequence depicting a man (future writer/director Gérard Oury) breaking into a ground floor apartment and methodically cleaning/rearranging the scene of a murder, before managing to drag the carpet-wrapped corpse of the victim (Philippe Nicaud) to his car, driving it to a construction site and burying it beneath a layer of freshly laid cement.

A real tour de force of noir technique, perhaps reflecting the influence of ‘Rififi’s famed heist scene, this sequence boasts expressionistic, John Alton-esque photography from DP Robert Lefebvre, full of brightly illuminated details emerging from inky pools of darkness, fragments of light gleaming off glass and chrome and the rain-sodden headlight beams momentarily blinding us as they flash through the black void. (1)

In visual storytelling terms too, this is riveting stuff, with menacing low angles and rhythmic, Hitchcockian cutting cranking the tension, as Oury is forced to hide his nefarious activities from the attentions of sundry nocturnal witnesses.

It is only once our man’s unsavoury night’s work is over, and he is once again behind the wheel, cruising ‘Lost Highway’ style through the darkness, that - in true noir style - we drift into flashback, and the story proper gets underway.

Unfortunately, this involves the film’s visual style settling down into a far more conventional routine of set-bound chat and exposition, as we join Oury’s character - who it transpires is some kind of construction/cement magnate? - as he discovers that his much younger wife (Jeanne Moreau, fresh from ‘Ascenseur pour L’échafaud’ and already something of a crime/noir veteran by this point in her career) has been cheating on him with a feckless artist/under-employed actor type (Nicaud).

Given what we’ve already learned from the opening sequence, it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that Oury does not take this news well.

Clearly veering more toward the James M. Cain-derived, murder/adultery strand of noir than the gangster/crime thread represented by ‘Le Rouge et Mis’, ‘Le Dos au Mur’s concentration on the travails of a desperate, obsessive (and ultimately doomed) central character also brings a strong Cornell Woolrich flavour to proceedings.

Pedants might wish to note that the film also features one of those flashback structures full of scenes which the character recalling the tale couldn’t possibly have witnessed first-hand, but… needless to say, I’m not going to split hairs over details like that, especially given that the plot, based on Frédéric Dard’s novel, actually proceeds to unfold into a rather ingenious scenario, one whose possibilities would have provided plenty of red meat for any contemporary Hollywood screenwriter to get their teeth into.

Rather than rushing straight into a campaign of vengeance after discovering his wife’s infidelity y’see, Oury’s character’s preferred course of action is to instead begin blackmailing the adulterous couple, setting himself up with a fake ID, dispatching the requisite anonymous letters, and claiming back the resultant dough (which Moreau has already finagled from his pocket using an increasingly strained series of excuses) from a post office box in another part of town.

As you might imagine, this instigates an extended game of cat and mouse between the two parties, as, amongst other things, Oury hires a sublimely shifty private detective to gather more evidence against his targets, whilst the couple in turn engage the services of some underworld heavies to track down their blackmailer, whilst both sides attempt to gain the confidence of a barmaid in the drinking hole where Nicaud and Moreau often meet.

All of which adds up to a hell of a lot of plot to wade through here, so it’s just as well that it’s all pretty engaging, fun stuff. Really though, by far the most interesting factor in play at this point is the twisted and desperate motivations behind Oury’s decision to pursue his blackmail scheme in the first place.

Driven on by a toxic combination of vengeance and crippling fear of loneliness, he not only seeks to destroy Moreau and Nicaud’s relationship through the pressures created by his financial demands, he also wants Moreau to then return to him and voluntarily confess the errors of her ways, if you can believe that - sheer desperation blinding him to the realisation of what a nightmare this artificial extension of their long dead relationship would prove, even in the unlikely event it could be achieved.

Unfortunately, it is again the lack of development of the supporting characters which proves a stumbling block for this otherwise intriguing yarn. I must confess, Moreau is a star whose appeal has always been rather lost on me, and the script gives her precious little to work with here.

I mean, we might assume that her character is a woman who has married for wealth and convenience, only to seek solace in the arms of a younger and more exciting partner when she tires of her cold fish husband - but this is just a projection on our part as viewers. Nothing in the film actually bothers to communicate this to us, leaving the errant wife’s motivation, back story and emotional life a mystery.

Likewise, Nicaud’s character also feels like an empty vessel; imbued with no real character traits beyond being shiftless and a bit lazy, he certainly doesn’t convince as the kind of passionate lover capable to tearing a wealthy and glamourous woman away from the security of her marriage, and as a result, the scenes the couple share together fail to develop much in the way of either chemistry or, crucially, audience sympathy.

Conventional movie morality would tend to suggest we should kind-of, sort-of end up on their side, in preference to the scheming, tyrannical husband, but… in this case, it’s honestly difficult to care.

Sadly then, we’re left with a bit of a one-sided love triangle, but thankfully Oury’s extraordinary performance alone proves strong enough to hold it together, maniacal intelligence and emotional desolation battling behind his eyes as he glowers, simmers and broods his way through the film, at times almost contorting his lanky frame like a physical manifestation of the tangled mess he’s created for himself - the ‘hanged man’ per excellence.

It’s fitting therefore that, as a member of that hallowed sub-category of noirs which effectively begin with their endings (paging both Mildred Pierce and Walter Neff), ‘Le Dos au Mur’ dwells heavily on that most noir of themes - man’s inability to escape his fate. In fact, it even verges into Poe-derived gothic territory to a certain extent, as a restaging of the ever-popular ‘bricked up wall’ ending, clearly inspired by either ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or ‘The Black Cat’, ends up accidentally prefiguring Roger Corman’s adultery-enhanced fusion of both those stories in his 1962 anthology ‘Tales of Terror’. Who’d have thunk it!

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(1) Exploitation fans might be interested to learn that although Robert Lefebvre was already a veteran of the French film industry by this point, having worked as a DP since the early 1930s, he actually ended his long career working on a series of erotic / sex films during the ‘70s, including Max Pécas’ ‘Je Suis Une Nymphomane’ (1971) and Radley Metzger’s ‘The Image’ (1975).

Noir Diary: Speaking of Murder [‘Le Rouge et Mis’] (Gilles Grangier, 1957)

 To those of us in the English-speaking world, it can sometimes feel as if France’s contribution to the culture surrounding mid-century crime/noir cinema remains an obscure and mysterious prospect. Such a conclusion begins to seem increasingly misguided though, the longer one spends scanning shelves and considering the matter.

After all, Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955) and the films of Jean-Pierre Melville are universally revered touchstones of the genre. Classics like Jacques Becker’s ‘Touchez pas ou Grisbi’ (1954) and ‘Le Trou’ (1960), and Henri Decoin‘s ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, (1955), are all available on nice, sub-titled editions, as of course are arthouse/nouvelle vague-affiliated genre entries such as Truffaut’s ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ (1960) and Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ (1958). Claude Sautet’s heart-rending ‘Classe Tous Risques’ (1960) starring Lino Ventura has received a release from the BFI, and I bet your local library can still dig up a DVD of Julien Duvivier’s ground-breaking ‘Pépé le Moko’ (1937) upon request.

Nonetheless though - what unites the films listed above is their quote-unquote “importance”. All are critically acclaimed, top tier productions which - despite their intermittent brutality and nihilism - remain thoroughly respectable. They’re all great movies, no question, but, taken in isolation, can they really furnish us with a full picture of the wider culture from which they emerged?

It’s as if we’ve been given access to the Gallic equivalents of Double Indemnity, ‘Laura’, ‘White Heat’ and ‘Touch of Evil’…. but where are the Parisian analogues of ‘Raw Deal’, of The Big Combo, or of Framed..? Were the stars and directors we know from their more celebrated pictures also battling it out week by week in scuzzier, run-of-the-mill programme pictures? And if so, can we watch them please?

Such are the questions I was hoping Kino Lorber’s inaugural French Noir Collection - gathering three late ‘50s examples of the form from the Gaumont archives which I don’t believe have previously been granted much international exposure - would begin to address. Long story short: it doesn’t disappoint.

Straight out of the gate, Gilles Grangier’s ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ (1957) opens with a sight sure to warm the heart of any French crime enthusiast, as genre heavyweights Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura lead a four-man gang carrying out a stick up job on a street corner bank in a quiet Parisian suburb.

The film’s recurrent theme of violence erupting from placid, everyday surroundings is disturbingly foreshadowed as Ventura, scowling intently in regulation trench-coat, briefly turns his tommy-gun in the direction of a cowering mother and her children who have inadvertently wandered into the midst of the robbery. Pausing, Ventura’s character ‘La Gitan’ (‘The Gypsy’) seems to be thinking it over, before he comes to his senses and ducks into the getaway car - demonstrating a sense of restraint which he will increasingly abandon as the movie progresses.

Rather inadequately retitled as ‘Speaking of Murder’ for English-speaking audiences (wouldn’t something closer to the literal ‘The Red is Lit’, or ‘The Red Light Is On’ have worked better?), Grangier’s film has the particular ice-cold, proletarian atmosphere which defines so many post-war French crime movies down pat.

Certainly, there’s little of the smoky glamour and lethargic ennui which defined some of Gabin’s other films in the genre be found here. Instead, he and his gang conduct their day-to-day from remote lock-up garages, chrome-countered street corner bars and shabby rural outbuildings. Mirroring the atmosphere of dour alienation later perfected by Jean-Pierre Melville (who had directed his first crime film a year earlier), the gang members are squinty-eyed hard cases who’d rather lose a limb than express emotion in front of their colleagues. Everywhere looks absolutely freezing.

Despite this though, Grangier dials back the nihilism considerably here, humanising his crooks, and (with the help of his fine cast) making their interplay rather fascinating. Admittedly, ‘La Gitan’ is indeed the remorseless, taciturn psycho which our initial encounter with him suggested, but ‘Sailor’ (Jean Bérard) provides rather rather more reluctant muscle, whilst Gabin (‘The Blond’) provides a rather more paternal presence, labouring under the strain of keeping the outfit together whilst also affecting the appearance of a legitimate businessman. The fly in the ointment meanwhile is Fredo, ‘L’American’ (Paul Frankeur), the gang’s fixer, a slimy chancer Ventura doesn’t trust as far as he can throw him, but whom Gabin - much to his later chagrin - insists is legit.

With all this good heist movie stuff already in play, I confess I was slightly disappointed that much of the remainder of the film concentrates instead on Gabin’s relationship with his much younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, later of ‘The French Connection’), a feckless kid who’s just got out of the joint on bail, but insists on skipping town to hook up with his girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot).

Regrettably, Hélène is characterised here in strictly one-dimensional terms, as a greedy, black-hearted bitch who cuckolds naïve Pierre at every possible opportunity, mocking him behind his back and earning the contempt of his far cannier big brother in process. Meanwhile of course, the cops are hovering, keen to pull Pierre in for breaking his bail conditions and hoping they can persuade him to spill the beans on his brother’s outfit to avoid heading back to the slammer.

The scenes between Gabin, Bozzuffi and their elderly mother (Gina Licloz) convey a great deal of warmth, establishing their strained and unconventional family dynamic rather nicely, but beyond that, it’s a shame that the film’s story eventually takes a rather melodramatic turn, incorporating a series of door-slamming familial confrontations, and culminating in a would-be tragic denouement hinging on the consequences of an easily resolved misunderstanding.

It’s difficult to credit that this rather bathetic bit of plotting came from the pen of Auguste Le Breton (whose novels provided the inspiration for about half of the calssics I listed in this review’s opening paragraphs), but… many a slip betwixt page and screen, I suppose.

For the most part, Grangier’s direction here is plain and unobtrusive, devoid of the stylistic flourishes we usually associate with noir, but, perhaps for that very reason, the film’s intermittent scenes of bloodthirsty violence stand out. In particular, a bungled armoured car heist followed by a vehicular chase and massacre midway through the movie really makes an impression, framing outbursts of chaotic carnage against a bleak, uninhabited rural backdrop, whilst the climactic confrontation between Gabin and Ventura (you knew it was coming) achieves an impressive level of intensity.

If ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ can be seen then as a rock-solid exemplar of French crime cinema, its routine story-telling elevated by a seedy atmosphere and an exceptional cast, the second film in Kino’s French Noir set proves a far more unconventional and off-beat proposition… as we shall discover in a few days.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (Ken Ruder, 1972)

Yes, folks - ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. If you thought I was going to turn down the opportunity to add this one to my shelves when Mondo Macabro put it up for pre-order earlier this year… well, you clearly don’t know me too well.

Irresistible as that title may be however, it’s worth noting that this obscure and rather mysterious Franco-Spanish co-production actually found itself travelling under a wide variety of other identities as it traversed the darker corners of the cinematic underworld in the early 1970s.

English-speaking territories primarily knew it as ‘Lips of Blood’ (thus causing confusion with the Jean Rollin film of the same name), whilst Spain got a shorter, sex-free cut featuring alternate ‘clothed’ takes, under the more chaste title of ‘El Secreto de la Momia Egipcia’.

As if to highlight the differences between film markets and censorship regimes in the two co-producing nations, the French distributors meanwhile went to the opposite extreme in their marketing, inviting the public to sample ‘Perversions Sexuelles’. (Well, yes, I suppose being molested by a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy is pretty perverse, but beyond that it’s hard to believe the audience who turned out for that particular release got their money’s worth; blood-drinking aside, this Mummy’s tastes are pretty vanilla for the most past.)

But, it will always be ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ to me - a title the film first acquired upon its Canadian release under the auspices of David Cronenberg’s early sponsors Cinepix, and which, perhaps surprisingly, captures the spirit of thing more accurately than any of the alternative options listed above.

To get down to brass tacks then, what we essentially have here is a hoary and austere gothic horror framing narrative in which Spanish genre mainstay Frank Braña rides ‘cross the moors to meet his destiny at the sinister Dartmoor Castle. Therein, he meets Baron Dartmoor (George Rigaud), an amateur Egyptologist (and, it transpires, colonial grave robber), who proceeds to narrate in flashback a tale so absurd and offensive it could have been pulled straight from one of those crazy Italian porno-fumetti we all [know and love / grudgingly acknowledge the existence of / are about to google and probably lose our jobs as a result of – please delete as applicable].

So, one fateful day it seems, The Baron found himself unboxing the latest unearthed sarcophagus delivered straight to his gaff from the Valley of the Kings, only to discover that it contained not the usual papyrus-wrapped bag of bones, but the body of a perfectly preserved, eerily life-like young man (one ‘Michael Flynn’, in his only screen appearance).

Having established that his new acquisition is the body of “the depraved son of a priest, put to death for his crimes” (I wonder what the hieroglyphic character for ‘depraved’ looks like, incidentally), The Baron does what any self-respecting reclusive Victorian gentleman-scientist would do, dusting off his best Frankensteinian electrical clobber and setting out to bring the bugger back to life.

Once this small feat has been achieved with a minimum of bother though, we soon start to get an idea of why the Ancient Egyptians felt the need to get shot of this particular bastard ASAP.

Batting aside The Baron’s curious offer of a gravy-boat filled with milk, the Mummy instead hones in on a cut on the arm of Dartmoor’s man-servant John (Martin Trévières), making it clear that what he really needs to maintain his unholy existence is BLOOD, and plenty of it.

Again taking a leaf straight from the mad scientist playbook, The Baron pauses to consider the conflict between his humanitarian and scientific principles - spoiler, science wins! - and promptly sends John out to apprehend the first nubile virgin he can find wandering the blasted heathland which surrounds the castle. (The potential use of animal blood, or non-lethal transfusions from willing donors, is never considered here I note. Only the best for the Blood Mummy!)

As is the case with most of this film’s female cast, the actress who portrays the Mummy’s first victim is effectively uncredited (a list of anglicised pseudonyms on the opening credits is all we have to go on), but anyway - after guzzling down the proffered vessel of her fresh lady-blood, the Blood Mummy makes it clear that his appetites do not end there.

Rising from his slab and casually bashing John into unconsciousness, the Egyptian heads straight for the prone female captive, tears off her clothes, and, well… rapes her, to not put too fine a point on it, concluding his extended ravishment by bloodily chewing her throat out.

Using his hypnotic powers to take over John’s mind, the Mummy soon has The Baron locked behind bars in his own dungeon, forced to look on helplessly as his long-suffering man-servant is sent out again and again to find new girls, bludgeoning them into submission and carrying them back to the castle across his hunched shoulders, there to satisfy the relentless lusts of the Blood Mummy (who, monster fans will note, by this stage embodies traits usually associated with the mummy, the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster).

Bluntly staged by the filmmakers for the purposes of pure, gratuitous exploitation, these dungeon-based assaults - which comprise the bulk of the film’s middle half hour - soon prove as repetitive, joyless and robotic as the Mummy himself.

This creates an odd tonal disjuncture with the sombre and painstakingly atmospheric exterior sequences, during which reflections of twisted tree branches glimmer in icy lakes as horse gallop hither and yon, and as John (who rather resembles Paul Naschy in one his grotesque/simpleton roles) trudges out yet again across the freezing countryside, dragging captured women back to meet their doom across barren, coastal landscapes which resemble something Caspar David Friedrich might have come up with on a particularly bad day.

Once established, this grim pattern is broken only slightly when the Baron’s daughter unexpectedly arrives home from university accompanied by a friend (the latter played by Spanish horror regular Christine Gimpera). Dismounting and heading indoors, the pair are giggling like schoolgirls until - in a moment of pure, Bunuel-esque surrealism - they walk straight into a meet-cute with the Blood Mummy, leading to a surprisingly exciting horseback chase in which the malevolent Egyptian saddles up in pursuit of his prey.

After demonstrating such pluck, you might have expected the daughter (played by a very striking actress, who, again, sadly remains unidentified) to emerge as the heroine of a more, uh, ‘normal’ movie, but… nope. In fact, if there’s one thing I love about ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’, it’s its sheer, bald-faced ruthlessness.

Just as a potential hero / hapless boyfriend character was earlier thoughtlessly dispatched when he took a step backwards and fell down a well (the Mummy did not give a fuck), the daughter is soon spread-eagled down in the dungeon, receiving the full Blood Mummy treatment whilst her horrified father looks on. The only girl to get out alive (simply because the Mummy is too busy to deal with her), Gimpera’s character meanwhile flees the scene in a state of mute insanity. Nice.

When it comes to trying to fathom the mystery of precisely how and why ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ came into existence, attempting to nail the film down geographically proves a good start.

Alongside exteriors shot primarily around the coast of Brittany, it also features interior/studio work carried out on subterranean sets which I’m pretty sure are the same ones used by another Franco-Spanish co-production, Jordi Gigó’s ‘Devil’s Kiss’ (1976). Meanwhile, the chateau featured in the film is the same one seen in Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (‘La Vie Amoureuse de L'Homme Invisible’, 1970) - a film which often feels like the closest comparison to this one in terms of tone, visuals and weird/unhinged exploitation elements, and with which it was double-billed on at least one occasion [see the poster reproduced at the top of this post]. And, well… there’s a reason for that, which we’ll get on to shortly.

Though credited to a Frenchman (veteran Eurocine DP Raymond Heil), the film’s murky, autumnal photography strikes me as belonging very much in the Spanish horror tradition, heavy on the browns and greens, lending everything an antiquated, rusty/mouldy look similar to that often seen in the work of directors like Amando de Ossorio or León Klimovsky. This adds a melancholy, faintly despairing air to proceedings which is only intensified by the glacial, almost bloody-mindedly languid pacing.

The film’s music - which is fantastic - meanwhile feels very French, running the gamut from propulsive funk and weird loungey stuff to swelling, romantic strings and some creepy, avant garde electronic cues which lend an eerie, Blind Dead-esque quality to some of the Mummy’s antics.

Given the sheer variety of sounds and instrumentation featured, I had assumed whilst viewing that this soundtrack must be comprised of ‘needle-drops’ from pre-existing sources, but no - as part of his exhaustive research into the origins of this film, Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs has confirmed that ‘Love Brides..’ music credit - to composer/arranger and former pop singer Max Gazzola - is in fact genuine, and that the music featured here is (so far as we know) entirely original; which is pretty remarkable. (If any obscure reissue label moguls out there - I’m looking at you, Finders Keepers - feel like dredging up the tapes for a soundtrack LP, that would be just lovely, thanks.)

So - we’re definitely dealing here with that very particular liminal zone between Spanish and French ‘70s horror cinema, that’s for sure, with a few potential Eurocine connections swirling around in the mix… but beyond that, the question on every Euro-horror fan’s lips after first viewing this one will no doubt be: who exactly is the hilariously named ‘Ken Ruder’, the mysterious individual, referred to as an “underground American filmmaker” in some of the film’s original marketing materials, who ostensibly oversaw this baleful madness…?

When searching for an answer, it is probably instructive to consider the fact that - as noted above - ‘Love Brides..’ is a film which seems to be simultaneously pulling in two very different directions.

At times - primarily during the exterior scenes - someone definitely seems to have been attempting to make an artistically engaged, atmospheric horror film here, exhibiting an uncanny, almost ‘folk horror’-ish fixation with the natural world, including a lot of quality time spent with disorienting watery reflections, peat bogs, tree boughs, swathes of fog and a lengthy excursion through a field of glistening wheat sheaves.

Although the ‘look’ of the film’s photography remains consistent throughout, this all contrasts pretty sharply with what goes on once we get inside the castle, wherein we’re faced with the aforementioned succession of gruelling, dispiritingly quotidian mummy rape scenes - footage which, though not especially explicit, often veers toward the kind of fetishistic / quasi-pornographic realm in which the presentation of naked woman being tormented and molested becomes the central point of the exercise.

This all results in a confounding and unsettling viewing experience which often feels like a Eurocine sleaze movie directed by someone suffering from clinical depression; a prospect which very few modern viewers will be likely to even tolerate, let alone enjoy or try to understand.

Amid this entropic torpor though, ‘Love Brides..’ also incorporates frequent outbursts of pure, surrealistic strangeness, tailor-made to fascinate and perplex those of us who are likely to be more sympathetic to this kind of cinematic oddity.

When we first meet Baron Dartmoor for instance, he is thrashing a disembodied arm chained to his living room wall with a riding crop - a bizarre, rather Freudian image which remains unexplained until the film’s final act. Shortly thereafter, The Baron demonstrates his (otherwise unmentioned) magical prowess by presenting Frank Braña with a walking cane which he transforms into a writhing snake on the fireside rug - an effect realised through a totally unexpected application of genuine stop-motion animation.

This latter incident is a total non-sequitur, and is never referred to again during the film’s run time. (Given that the Baron is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, it occurred to me that perhaps he might have recovered Moses’ fabled magic staff, but if that was supposed to be the idea, it was completely overlooked in both the French and English dubbing.)

Elsewhere, more stop motion effects (presumably an expensive and time-consuming addition to a marginal production like this) are used to animate the Mummy’s disembodied hand during the film’s conclusion - which is pretty cool - whilst the incessant use of a primitive, in-camera ‘irising’ effect lends a peculiar silent movie feel to much of the footage in the film’s second half.

Combined with the mysteries surrounding the film’s creation, these inexplicable elements of weirdness seem to hint at a strange, hidden intelligence lurking behind the morbid and frequently rather dull events unfolding on-screen; an intelligence whose aims certainly seem to stretch beyond the brutish commercial concerns signalled by the film’s sexploitation content.

Indeed, if we fall back on the old saw that the best horror stories are those which emerge from genuinely disordered minds, then ‘..Blood Mummy’ ceases to be merely an ill-regarded Euro-trash obscurity and instead becomes something of an inscrutable, rather haunting quasi-classic - like a broadcast from some other cinematic universe entirely.

The punchline here though of course is that, thanks to ther aforementioned Mr Tombs’ tireless researches, we do actually now have a pretty good idea of who directed ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. In a sense, it would be nice to perpetuate the mystery by keeping everyone in the dark, but, given that the special edition version of the blu-ray containing Tombs’ comprehensive liner notes is now permanently sold out, it would seem churlish of me not to spread the good word.

So, long story short - surviving documentation from the film’s production suggests two potential suspects hiding behind the Ken Ruder pseudonym. The first is Alejandro Marti, a Barcelona-based producer and occasional director who got into political hot water in 1968 as a result of daring to make a film (the musical comedy ‘Elisabet’) in the Catalan language, and was thus presumably seeking alternative avenues for his talents at this point in time.

The second meanwhile is - wait for it - our old friend Pierre Chevalier, director of ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’, along with masses of largely forgotten softcore sex films, largely financed and distributed by (yep) Eurocine.

Whilst we have no way of ascertaining the nature or timeline of the collaboration (or lack thereof) between these two gentlemen, now that we have their names on paper, it’s naturally just a hop, skip and a jump toward speculating that Marti must have been responsible for the atmospheric / gothic exterior footage in ‘Love Brides..’, whilst Chevalier - an old hand at sexploitation, often with a fairly rape-y focus - must have been brought in to handle the more overtly sexual / gory stuff taking place down in the dungeons.

The continuity of photography, costumes and actors across the film suggests that these two directors may have worked in parallel (rather than it being a case of the sexy stuff being inserted later or some such), which is interesting, and also raises questions regarding the provenance of the alternate ‘clothed’ scenes included in the film’s Spanish cut… but anyway, not to worry! Basically, we now have a workable solution to the question of who was responsible for ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. When it comes to the why though, well… that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Though for most viewers, Ken Ruder’s magnum opus will likely prove an unpalatable cocktail of leaden pacing, gothic misery and poorly-staged rape, for certain epicurean connoisseurs of strange cinema (hi guys, you’re probably both reading), it holds the potential to soothe, hypnotise and fascinate long after the final strains of Max Gazzola’s romantic closing theme have faded away.

As I write this, I know it is destined to be one of those films which will live on, like an itch I can’t quite scratch in the back of my mind, until the next time I’m drawn to pull the disc down from the shelf like some 21st century equivalent of a dusty, thrice-translated grimoire, in search once again of lost esoteric wisdom otherwise left buried in the remains of some condemned film lab in the French-Catalan border.

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Horror Express: Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal (Patrice Rhomm, 1974)

“Just my luck. Some people meet with Ursula Andress or Brigitte Bardot in their dreams. I always meet with some crazy woman who thinks she’s Nostradamus…” 

Also unleashed upon the Parisian public as ‘Perversiones Lubriques’, ‘Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal’ is a horror-tinged French sex film directed by Patrice Rhomm, a filmmaker probably best known (relatively speaking) for contributing to the script for the thoroughly batzo Italio-Belgium trash classic ‘The Devil’s Nightmare’ (1972).

Armed with the knowledge, the opening ten minutes of ‘Draguse’ had me ready to declare Rhomm an unheralded pulp horror savant. Sadly, I fear things went a little awry as my viewing progressed, but… let’s kick off with the good stuff, shall we?

Enlivened by the strains of a delightfully spooky, propulsive library track, ‘Draguse’s opening credits give us skeletal trees under an overcast sky and brooding shots of one of those shabby / decrepit rural houses so believe of low budget French horror.

As a handheld camera proceeds to explore the house’s suitably rundown interior, silver-haired Eurocine mainstay Olivier Mathot begins to deliver a monologue in voiceover, explaining that he is being transported to this house in his dreams, wherein his spirit is imprisoned within a pentangle (nattily represented by a mirror with what looks like some cake icing daubed upon it) as he is forced to witness the lewd and perverse displays enacted for him by a witch named Draguse (Eurocine & Jess Franco regular Monica Swinn).

Soon, a flash of lightning turns the pink candles black (frankly neither colour is really suitable for the lighting needs of god-fearing citizens, I fear), a gnarly-looking skull and crossbones appears upon the frame of some kind of antique furnace-type thing, and Draguse baptises the skull with a trickle of deep red blood.

With these formalities out of the way, more rockin’ library music kicks in, as Swinn treats us to some lascivious dancing in a baby doll nightie, before spreading her legs across a nearby armchair and proceeding to pleasure herself (non-penetratively, I hasten to add) with a massive bone.

My god, what is this movie? It’s demented, and amazing. Total ‘70s witch-smut nirvana.

It is at this point however that Monsieur Mathot awakens with the standard issue “whaaa, where am I?!” comic flourish, and we discover that, like seemingly all people in ‘70s French movies, he actually lives in a cramped, high rise Parisian apartment with amazing wallpaper and flowery bed sheets, shared on this occasion with his perpetually naked and very much up-for-it wife (Martine Fléty, who also appeared in a number of Jess Franco films in the late ‘70s).

Much to Ms Fléty’s chagrin however, Mathot soon turns out to be essaying that most tedious of sex comedy clichés, the serious-minded, frigid academic who steadfastly ignores the parade of willing female flesh which is constantly paraded before him wherever he goes.

A historian by trade, Mathot’s character dreams of publishing his great historical monograph on The Queens of Scotland, but his publisher (played by director Rhomm) has other ideas - namely, inexplicably hiring this sexless stick in the mud to write a series of erotic novels for the paperback market.

Taking this new assignment rather more seriously than anyone presumably intended, Mathot declares that he will relocate to the countryside and rent the house seen during the opening, in order to gain the solitude he needs to compose his new literary masterworks. In a turn of events more far-fetched than any of the film’s supernatural elements, his publisher not only voices his approval for this idea, but even volunteers to cover the rent.

Before heading out to the sticks however, our hero begins his ‘research’ by conducting an in-depth survey of Paris’s adult entertainment industry - or, in other words, Rhomm’s camera goes on a lengthy, handheld ramble around the exteriors of various sex shops and porno cinemas, whilst Mathot contributes a witless, nattering voiceover over the top.

I’m assuming that the film’s original audience (who would have been more than familiar with such sights) must have found the inclusion of this time-killing filler material absolutely infuriating, but the passage of a few decades has ironically turned it into an absolute goldmine for 21st century smut historians, giving us a fleeting glimpse of all manner of funky, pop art-influenced décor and long-forgotten posters and cinema hoardings, not least some promo material for the Jess Franco sex comedy ‘Le Jouisseur’ (aka ‘Sexy Erotic Job’, aka ‘Roland, The Sexiest Man in the World’). So, count that as another point in ‘Draguse’s favour, if you are thus inclined.

When Mathot eventually arrives at his shabby rural hideaway (which, with typical porno logic, is still close enough to town for him to walk to the red light district to buy cigarettes), we might reasonably have expected the film’s horror quotient to pick up again, but sadly that’s not quite the way things pan out, despite a few spooky manifestations from the titular Draguse.

Instead, the movie veers off into a rather lackadaisical series of disconnected vignettes. First, Mathot picks up a prostitute (Sylvia Bourdon, who went on to appear the following year in the inserts shot by Jean Rollin for the bastardised porno version of his own ‘Lips of Blood’). Then, once that’s all over with, he dresses up like Count Yorga and visits a fun fair, somehow convincing an idle, hippy-ish bloke to return with him to the house to have sex with the (apparently now corporeal) Draguse, who subsequently kills him, leaving Mathot (who is apparently now dreaming this whole escapade) to dispose of the body.

After dawdling well past the half-way mark with this sort of thing, ‘Draguse..’ then makes a belated attempt to transform itself into a kind of Amicus-style anthology movie, as Swinn turns up in a second role, playing a sort of “real life” avatar of Draguse.

Ostensibly a secretary who has been dispatched by Mathot’s publisher to help him get his shit together, this lady begins telling him erotic / macabre tales ostensibly based on the house’s sordid history, each of which is dramatised as a stand-alone vignette featuring Mathot as the male protagonist.

So, first we enjoy the ‘tale’ (if it can indeed be termed as such) of a stuffy tutor trysting with a hotpants-clad nymphet (Danièle Nègre). Then, we bear witness to a Nazisploitation-themed light bondage threesome, in which a Hitler-fixated photographer (Mathot again) lures a model (Claudine Beccarie, who appeared in the original version of ‘Lips of Blood’) back to his lair for some jackbooted hi-jinks with a dominatrix (French porno regular Erika Cool).

I could make a point of noting that everyone present in this scene (plus Swinn to boot) reunited two years later for Eurocine’s epic disasterpiece ‘Train Spécial pour SS’ (aka ‘Special Train for Hitler’)… but to be honest, material like this was so ubiquitous in the lower depths of Western European exploitation cinema during this era that you’d almost be surprised if a film featuring Mathot and Swinn didn’t include somebody busting out the swastikas and riding crops at some point.

(A special mention should probably be made however of the fact that, once several Nazi marching songs have been aired on the gramophone, the reminder of the scene is soundtracked with what sounds like a recording of chugging train carriages. Tasteful.)

Anyway - by this point, any vestige of the witchy / horror aesthetic featured in ‘Draguse’s opening scenes is long gone, and sadly it never really returns. Towards the end of the film, there’s even a suggestion that the ‘real life’ Draguse (the secretary lady) may have been spiking Mathot’s drinks, causing him to hallucinate, thus conveniently nixing the film’s supernatural element altogether. (Given that secretary-Swinn doesn’t even turn up until two thirds of the way through the movie, this explanation …. well, hell, it makes about as much sense as anything else here I suppose…)

Whilst ‘Draguse’ is eventually a bit of a bust in terms of horror, it should be noted that it is equally unsatisfactory as a sex film, in spite of all the kinky shenanigans outlined above.

Attaining modest historical significance as the first domestic French production to be awarded the country’s ‘X’ certificate (meaning that it could be legally screened with unsimulated sex scenes), the film nonetheless continues to inhabit an uncomfortable no man’s land between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ cores.

A few, fleeting moments of explicit ‘action’ are included, but the film still largely relies on simulated coupling, often confined to long shots and lacking the artful/imaginative approach which allowed directors like Franco to liven up such ‘hard soft’ material in this period. (And yes, I’m going for a record for “most references to Jess Franco in a non-Franco review” here - thanks for noticing.)

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the middle-aged Mathot - who ostensibly takes part in every sex scene - did not ‘do’ hardcore, meaning that an obvious body double is employed for his sporadic full frontal / below the belt shots. Disastrously however, it appears that even Mathot’s allotted stunt-cock had trouble performing, lending the film’s sex scenes an awkward, fragmentary quality which somehow feels far more furtive and unsavoury than the, uh, ‘natural flow’, shall we say, of the full-on pornography which would come to dominate low budget French film production over the next few years.

Despite the fact that it conspicuously fails in pretty much everything it set out to achieve however, I must confess that - for some peculiar reason - I found ‘Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal’ both exceptionally charming and hugely enjoyable.

I’m not sure I can quite explain why this is the case. Perhaps it was watching those Jean Rollin softcore movies all those years ago which warped my brain, or perhaps my recent enthusiasm for the films of Michel Lemoine has something to do with it [see my write-up on his ‘Les Désaxées’ here], but I just love the wonky, off-kilter, frankly ridiculous world in which these pre-hardcore French erotic films take place.

Even in a frankly shabby, low budget effort like this, it just all feels like so much fun; it’s all so inherently, casually surrealistic, full of bright, comic book-like colours and weird, canned music, interspersed with time-killing scenes in which characters sit in outdoor cafes or on patios, sipping white wine and having earnest conversations about utterly irrelevant topics.

In this particular instance, Patrice Rhomm directs with such a hap-hazard, “eh, what the hell” type disregard for narrative and cinematic logic - never mind the expectations of his chosen genres - that this strange effect is only intensified, adding an “anything could happen next, and WE DON’T PARTICULARLY CARE if it does” type insouciance to proceedings which I can’t help but get a kick out of.

So, the next time a furtive man approaches you in the park to ask whether you’d like to go back to his country house and have sex with a spectral witch, why not consider putting your finer feelings aside, and simply replying “well, I’m not doing anything else this afternoon, so, eh, why not?” Then finish off your unfiltered gitane, pull on your fringed velvet jacket and shuffle off after him…. as long as the funky harpsichord plays, you’ll be just fine.

Horror Express 2020 #9: The Night Eats The World (Dominique Rocher, 2018)

I was kind of in two minds about this one. On the one hand, it certainly starts off strong, as a well-directed and well-shot take on the ol’ zombie apocalypse formula (last-man-on-earth subdivision), with requisite nods to ‘I am Legend’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘28 Days Later’ all present and correct, and that gut-wrenching “something dreadful is about to happen” feeling effectively established.

Protagonist Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), sole survivor of a zombie-crashed house party at his ex-girlfriend’s Paris apartment, initially seems to have reassuringly good survival instincts too - scoping out his surroundings, stockpiling food and weapons and sizing up the abilities of his undead opponents, just as we’d all probably like to think we would in his situation. But, as the film transitions from the straight survival horror of its first act toward a more psychological study of long-term isolation and loneliness, it lost focus and began to annoy me.

Although on one level we’ve got to commend the filmmakers for having the foresight to essentially make a lockdown movie in 2018, their protagonist’s predicament never really rings true (see below), and, well… basically, as we spend more time with the man, and as his actions become more irrational and self-indulgent, we begin to realise that he's actually a bit of a dick. Not in a “the filmmakers are challenging us to accept an unsympathetic protagonist” sort of way either, I should specify, but more of a “this character is the fimmakers’ idea of a relatable, everyday guy, but frankly that guy is a tosser” situation. And when you’re watching a film with only one character, that’s kind of a problem.

Also, despite the film's painstakingly naturalistic, contemporary setting, the apocalyptic scenario it is asking us to accept begins to seem more ridiculous, the longer you stop to think about it.

By which I mean - a crucial element of this film is that its zombies are not capable of breaking through locked doors. Our protagonist survives the initial, nocturnal zombie attack because he is unconscious in a locked room. When subsequently reclaiming the apartment block, he simply secures the exterior doors and windows, and is safe for the duration.

So far so good, but, given that MOST people essentially spend their nights asleep behind a locked door or two, and probably tend to at least look out of the window in the morning before they step out for a stroll... surely there would be loads of survivors? The idea that everyone else in the city has been wiped out overnight by zombies with less agency than feral animals is patently absurd.

Likewise, despite the movie being set in the late 2010s present day, no one in this apartment building seems to have owned a computer, or a TV, or even a radio. Instead, like our painfully hip, DIY musician protagonist, the residents seem to have favoured cassette tapes (so retro and chic, y’know?). Conveniently, this allows him to bop around the empty rooms using up the batteries on a walkman he reclaimed from a ‘punk’ teenager’s bedroom (in 2018? really??), instead of, say, using his smartphone to try to contact the outside world. (You see what I mean about this whole ‘dick’ thing?)

In fact, he briefly checks his voice messages on his phone during the first morning, establishes that his nearest-and-dearest are dead, then abandons it. I get that “isolation” is the film’s watch-word, but the idea that he wouldn’t have at least tried to find out what was happening in the wider world whilst the electricity was still running is difficult to accept.

Of course, I don’t mind directors bending a film’s world to suit their own needs in a movie whose presentation is pulpier or more fantastical, but given this one’s absolute realist aesthetic, the failure to address these issues just seems like an insult to the viewer’s intelligence - a wilful refusal to provide us with the information we need to make this story work for us, on either an emotional level or a purely narrative one.

My wife, incidentally, has already christened ‘The Night Eats the World’ “that emo zombie movie”, and whilst I wouldn’t go that far in my criticism (I thought it had its moments), I get where she’s coming from.

Weird Tales: The Evil Eye by Boileau & Narcejac (Four Square, 1961)

Before being subsumed into our dearly beloved New English Library at some point in the 1960s, paperback imprint Four Square published a wide variety of interesting stuff, including a lot of obscure and/or sought after titles (often in translation) which have rarely been reprinted since.

Four Square books also often featured bold, attention-grabbing artwork, of which this fabulous, comic book style ink & watercolour number from acclaimed SF/fantasy illustrator Josh Kirby provides a perfect example [the signature in bottom right confirms this as Kirby’s work, although it looks drastically different from his later, better known style]. As such, obscurities from the company’s long-lost back-list have done much to liven up second-hand book shopping in the UK across the decades, although collecting them can also prove a frustrating experience.

Due to their especially cheap binding (or so I’m assuming), Four Square’s paperbacks have a tendency to look reasonably well preserved on the outside, but to crack and fall to pieces, scattering dried out pages to the four winds, as soon as some poor fool tries to read them. Thankfully I just about managed to make it through ‘The Evil Eye’ without destroying it in the process, but… I’m not sure that many future readers will get a chance to enjoy the charms of this particular copy, let’s put it that way.

In the English-speaking world, Pierre Boileau (1906–1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908 –1998) will almost certainly get more name recognition from film fans than literary types. With their names appearing ominously on the writing credits of Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955), Franju’s ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960) and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958), its safe to say that the duo’s residual influence has sunk deep into the very bones of the horror and thriller genres, as well as those of auteur and arthouse cinema more generally.

Back in France of course, Boileau-Narcejac are equally remembered for their achievements in the field of putting words together on the page, but for whatever reason, translations of their work have remained extremely scarce over the years. So, naturally I was keen to take the opportunity to check out some of their prose, despite the risk of the book crumbling to dust in my hands.

It’s probably fair to assume that ‘The Evil Eye’ (‘Le Mauvais Oeil’, originally published in France in 1956) is a minor work within the duo’s oeuvre, weighing in at just over 120 pages, and sadly the horror spin that Four Square’s packaging puts on the material turns out to be almost entirely erroneous, with the protagonist’s suspicion that he is afflicted with the power of the “evil eye” merely numbering among a number of fantasies and delusions which flicker through his unsettled mind through the course of the novel.

In fact, ‘The Evil Eye’ barely even qualifies as a thriller in the conventional sense of the term. What we have here rather is kind of a downbeat, quasi-gothic character study, in the ever-popular “dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family bounce off each other in their decaying old house” vein which went on to become so beloved of filmmakers in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, for whatever reason.

It's a testament however to the talents of Boileau-Narcejac (and indeed to their translator on this occasion, Geoffrey Sainsbury) that this rather morose and uneventful tale actually remains a thoroughly engrossing read, drawing me into the story far more deeply than I suspected it would once I’d got the basic gist.

Our protagonist here is Rémy, a young man who has been paralysed from the waist down since infancy, when his mother apparently died under traumatic yet mysterious circumstances. We join him on the morning when, aged eighteen, and following the ministrations of a questionable ‘healer’ hired by his emotionally distant father, he gets out of bed and walks.

Disappointingly for Rémy, this Lazarus-like recovery prompts surprisingly little jubilation from either his brash, business-minded uncle or the two female servants who have provided him with his only real human contact over the years, and so, largely left to his own devices, he sets out to undertake the long-delayed process of growing up, digging into the inevitable backlog of uncomfortable family secrets in the process.

Intelligent, self-possessed and callously confident, yet at the same time hopefully naïve and chronically lacking in the kind of practical experience which most of us have gained by the time we reach adulthood, Rémy makes for an interesting and complex viewpoint character. Though he is not necessarily an “unreliable narrator” in the usual sense of the term, a lifetime of near isolation has left him with an unhealthily introspective approach to life, and throughout the novel, we’re forced to bear witness as he twists the people and events around him into his own melodramatic, self-centred narrative, unable to understand the feelings of others or to comprehend the more prosaic motivations behind their actions.

Though ‘The Evil Eye’ offers few of the shattering narrative revelations or surprise handbrake turns that Boileau-Narcejac’s cinematic reputation may have led one to expect, its strengths lie elsewhere – in the deceptively complex exploration of character dynamics, and in the cultivation of a richly ominous yet finely tuned atmosphere.

In fact, the book is steeped in that very particular world of seedy, grey-skied decay which seems to persistently creep into French culture of this era, from the damp-stained walls, musty bedclothes and corked, half empty bottles to a persistent impression of poverty and bankruptcy dogging the heels of the purportedly wealthy characters, and of the grindingly tedious, antiquated duties still performed by their indentured servants, long after modernity should have rendered them irrelevant.

Inevitably, the duo’s writing reminded me somewhat of the precise, descriptive prose of Georges Simenon, even as they push things far further than he would have done, including a few extraordinary, opium-scented flights of poetic fancy which can't help but push the tale toward the eerie, indefinable realm of what we’re obliged in this context to call le fantastique.

For all that it’s essentially a naturalistic, psychological tale in fact, one could perhaps apply a supernatural explanation to the book’s final paragraph ‘shock’ ending. But, this is never directly implied, cleverly leaving readers to map their own beliefs and gut feelings over the plainly recounted events.

All in all then, a surprisingly rewarding few nights reading, well worth making time for if you can manage to track down a copy that’s still in one piece.

Deathblog: Janine Reynaud (1930-2018)

I was sad to hear today, via Tim Lucas’s blog, of the death of Janine Reynaud, who has apparently passed away at her home in Texas at the age of 87.

Born in Paris, Reynaud is best known amongst Jess Franco fans for her remarkable lead performance in his landmark Necronomicon (1967), and she also comprised one half of the “Red Lips” duo along with Rosanna Yanni in its light-weight follow-ups ‘Sadisterotica’ and ‘Kiss Me Monster’ (1968).

After this, she accompanied most of her collaborators on those films (minus Franco) to Germany, for the Adrian Hoven-directed ‘Im Schloss der Blutigen Begierde’ [‘Castle of the Creeping Flesh’] (also 1968) – not a classic film by any stretch of the imagination, but one that I nonetheless have a great deal of fondness for, not least due to the fact that Reynaud rules in it.  

(I’d also argue that it holds historical importance as the first fully-fledged example of the kind of erotica / gothic horror crossover that would soon come to dominate European genre cinema during the early ‘70s – but I’ll save that for my Erotic Castle Movie monograph… one day I’ll write it!)

Thereafter, Reynaud made some in-roads into the Italian exploitation field, appearing in several gialli (most notably Sergio Martino’s ‘The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail’), but she delivered what I think is almost certainly her best performance back in France, in José Bénazéraf’s 1971 masterpiece ‘Frustration’ – one of the best, and most under-appreciated, films ever to emerge from the fertile horror/sex/art-house crossover zone of ‘70s European cinema.

As a brief bit of mental arithmetic will confirm, Reynaud was considerably older than your average uninhibited starlet when she took on these challenging roles, but her unique features, statuesque build and evident self-confidence made her an electrifying screen presence, allowing her to convey a sense of mature sexuality and inner turmoil that is frequently captivating – something that Bénazéraf took full advantage of as he tore down the walls of her character’s psychological make-up in 'Frustration'.

In all of these films except the Italian ones, Reynaud co-stared alongside her then-husband, the equally weird and mesmeric Michel Lemoine, future director and star of the wonderfully barmy ‘Les Weekends Maléfiques du Comte Zaroff’ (aka ‘Seven Women For Satan’, 1976), who sadly passed away in 2013.

Naturally enough, Reynaud lent her talents to many of the low budget softcore and comedy films that Lemoine directed in France during the early ‘70s, including such tantalising titles as ‘Les Confidences Erotiques d'un Lit Trop Accueillant’ and ‘Les Chiennes’ (both 1973), as well as apparently providing the voice of Joan d’Arc in a picture named ‘Les Petites Saintes y Touchent’ (1974). In between all this – and slightly more accessibly for English-speaking viewers – she was also second-billed in ‘Je Suis Une Nymphomane’ (aka ‘Libido: The Urge To Love’, 1971), an internationally distributed item from arthouse-erotica specialist Max Pecas.

Both now gone, Reynaud and Lemoine must have made a striking couple to say the least, and the stories they could have told from this uniquely wild era of European cinema must have been remarkable.

I’m not sure I recall ever seeing or reading any interviews with Reynaud; I don’t know whether or not she was ever approached to speak about her time in the film business, or if she simply had no interest in doing so, but regardless – it saddens me greatly to think that yet another key figure linking us to the increasingly distant milieu from which these extraordinary movies sprang has passed on, leaving her story seemingly untold, and making that lost world feel even further away.  R.I.P.

The screengrabs above are taken respectively from ‘Necronomicon’, ‘Castle of the Creeping Flesh’ and ‘Frustration’.