La Foire aux chimères (1946)

La Foire aux chimères is a French film first released in 1946, directed by Pierre Chenal.  The film stars Erich von Stroheim, Madeleine Sologne, Jean-Jacques Delbo, Louis Salou and Claudine Dupuis.  It has also been released under the title: Devil and the Angel.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Frank Davres is the director of an international institution that prints banknotes.  One evening, he visits a fairground and meets Jeanne, a beautiful young woman.  Because she is blind, Jeanne cannot see that Frank’s face is badly mutilated, the result of his WWI exploits.  Jeanne and Frank fall in love and marry.  Having ruined himself for the woman he loves, Frank is forced to make forged banknotes.  Meanwhile, Jeanne has an operation to restore her sight.  How will she react when she discovers her husband’s true visage?

After working successfully as an actor in France during the 1930s, Eric von Stroheim, in common with such French actors and directors as Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier, moved to Hollywood after the outbreak of WWII.  He left behind such memorable movies as Les Disparus de St Agil, La Grande illusion, Têmpete (the last to be shown) and L’Alibi which he made for Pierre Chenal.  On his return to France in 1946, he worked for both Jean Boyer and Pierre Chenal in the same year, creating with Chenal a minor masterpiece in La Foire aux chimères, which may be translated as The Fair of Dreams.  

Here von Stroheim plays Frank, a banker turned forger who is also badly disfigured.  At a fair, he meets and falls in love with Jeanne (Madeleine Sologne), who is blonde, beautiful and blind.  She is also the human target of Robert, a knife-thrower, and it’s tempting to speculate that Patrice Leconte retained memories of this movie when he came to make La Fille sur le pont fifty years later.  Having married Frank, Jeanne undergoes surgery which restores her sight.  What appears in print to be a fairly banal storyline is transformed indelibly by Chenal’s sure-footed direction in which sequence after sequence tightens the screw.  A film to cherish and watch time and again.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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