La Fin du monde is a French film first released in 1931, directed by Abel Gance.  The film stars Abel Gance, Victor Francen, Colette Drafeuil, Georges Colin and Samson Fainsilber.  It has also been released under the title: The End of the World.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Astronomer Martial Novalic discovers that a comet is on a collision course with planet Earth.  With the end of the world well and truly nigh, Novalic tries to galvanise action that may save mankind from extinction.  Meanwhile, his saintly brother, Jean, prays for a miracle.  With civilisation on the brink of collapse, the governments of the world resort to increasingly brutal methods to maintain social order. Too late. Whilst some pray in desperation, others sate their animal appetites in one final orgy. It’s The End…

And it very nearly was The End – for Abel Gance’s filmmaking career.  The man that had made such a mark in the silent era, with masterpieces like Napoléon (1927), allowed himself to be crucified by this ill-conceived, under-funded fantasy extravaganza.   (Actually, Gance was crucified in this film, since he allowed himself to play the part of Jesus Christ II – a sign of monomania that prompted his producers to take the film away from him before he could finish it.)

Although it is often cited as Gance’s worst film, there is something to be said for the director’s courage (let’s hope it wasn’t madness) in undertaking such a venture.  On a positive note, the film’s subject (it is one of the very few science-fiction films ever to have been made in France) allowed him to continue experimenting with the medium of film, this time with the new invention of sound (which, despite some mucking around with stereophonics, Gance spectacularly failed to master).

When the film proved to be a prize turkey in its original French language form, it was sold to an American distributor who effectively chewed it up and spat it out instead of getting someone to do a decent cut-and-paste job.  Retitled “End of the World”, with an English language soundtrack, at under half the length of the original film, this was effectively little more than a jumbled montage of images, with nothing in the way of an intelligible storyline (Gance’s appearance in the film is reduced to a few brief shots).  As the original film was deleted, this atrociously bastardised version offers the only glimpse of the film Gance intended making. It’s interesting that the orgy scenes were retained, these presumably being the film’s strongest selling point – from a distributor’s point of view.   There are a few moments of brilliance, particularly in the way Gance manages to portray the collapse of society using the kind of photographic artistry he is renowned for, but the “splice blind” hatchet job really does ruin the film.


© James Travers 2005

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