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Summary
In a small mountain village in the Savoie, the inhabitants busily prepare for Christmas.
The toy-maker Cornusse is occupied making presents for the children of the village, unaware
that his beautiful young daughter, Catherine, is being courted by a mysterious baron.
Having just returned to the village after an absence of several years, the baron lives
alone in his chateau and refuses to see anyone, until Catherine visits him out of pity.
On Christmas Eve, the baron fails to keep a dinner date with Catherine and, at the same
time, a priceless diamond is stolen from the church. Shortly after, two children
of the village discover the body of Father Christmas lying, dead, in the snow on a mountain
slope. With the police prevented from arriving because of bad weather, the villagers
attempt to resolve the mystery themselves and discover who killed Father Christmas...
Review
A stylish melange of fairy tale, romance, melodrama and suspense thriller, L’Assassinat
du Père Noël is typical of French cinema of the early 1940s. Whilst
France lived through its darkest hour, its cinema attained a quality of form and expression
which is virtually unmatched in any other period. Some of the brightest, darkest,
most imaginative and extraordinary films were made in France between 1941 and 1943, and
one of those films is Christian-Jaque’s magnificent murder mystery, L’Assassinat du
Père Noël.
The quality of the cinematography alone would easily make this one of Christian-Jaque’s
best films, but add to that some remarkable acting performances (Harry Baur, Raymond Rouleau,
Robert Le Vigan...) and a totally absorbing plot and the result is something quite special.
In addition to be a hugely entertaining and engaging film, it is also appealing from an
artistic point of view - consider the sombre sets which lend the film its sinister atmosphere,
the hauntingly beautiful panoramic shots of the Savoie mountains, not to mention Christian-Jaque’s
innovative use of the camera. The scene in the inn, where revellers dance around
the apparently jilted Catherine, is brilliantly executed, rising to a peak of frenzied
euphoria before - like a single brutal gunshot - the death of Father Christmas is suddenly
announced.
Other examples of the director's creative imagination abound in this film which should
be regarded as one of his most inspired works. The film's only noticeable weakness
is that the mystery is resolved all too quickly and conveniently at the end, and it is
little surprise when the "obvious suspect" is unmasked as the villain. Strictly,
this is more a fault of the original novel on which the film is based, but the haste of
the denouement is nonetheless something which should have been resisted in its film adaptation.
As in Christian-Jaque’s earlier film,
Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, the film relies on strong performances from child
actors to counterbalance (and sometimes heighten) the film's darker elements. Although
peripheral to the central plot, the scenes with the lame boy Christian are poignant, reminding
us of what Christmas should be: a time where fairy tale becomes reality. This is
a theme which the film also develops in reverse, as the adults of the village find their
cosy reality transformed into an ugly nightmare. In many ways, the film can be seen
as an adult variation on the classic children's fairy tale.
L’Assassinat du Père Noël had the dubious honour of being the first
film which the Nazis allowed the French to make in their own country during the occupation.
It was the first film to be made by Continental-Films, a company set up in Paris in 1940
to allow the French to make films under close German supervision. As in many
films made for Continental, it is not too difficult to read a double meaning into some
of the elements of L’Assassinat du Père Noël, the death of Father Christmas
being perhaps a rather obvious allegory for the end of France's autonomy during World
War II. With a cruel twist of fate, the film's star, Harry Baur, (incidentally,
one of France’s greatest actors) was to die within a few years of making this film - allegedly
at the hands of the Gestapo.
© James Travers 2002
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