Les Cinq gentlemen maudits (1931) - film review

Five disparate friends take a boat to Morocco for what they hope will be a relaxing sightseeing holiday.  They arrive in the midst of a religious festival and immediately provoke the wrath of an old man when they try to remove the veil of his young female companion.  The old man reveals that he is a sorcerer and promptly puts a curse on the five men.   With relish he announces that within the next lunar cycle they will all die.  Of course, the friends refuse to take this seriously.  But then, one evening, one of their number accidentally drowns himself.  A few days later, another member of the group, an aviator, dies whilst performing at an air show in Berlin.  It looks as if the old man’s prediction is going to come true.  The three remaining friends are going to die, and there is nothing they can do to prevent it...

This early sound film from avant-garde French filmmaker Julien Duvivier contains an odd mix of styles which range from an early attempt at neo-realism (most noticeable in the location sequences) to a subtly expressionistic approach that prefigures film noir.  Les Cinq gentlemen maudits is an unusually experimental work for Duvivier, using long tracking shots and unusual camera angles (including extensive use of low and high angle shots) in a way that achieves a striking fluidity and darkly oppressive mood throughout.  High contrast lighting adds to the sinister atmosphere, with dark shadows conveying a sense of all-pervading menace which is highly appropriate for the story.  These daring stylistic touches help to compensate for the bland screenplay whose denouement is all too obvious to anyone who has seen the Sherlock Holmes film The House of Fear (1945).

Even at this early stage in his career Julien Duvivier was able to attract high calibre actors and the cast for this film includes three of the biggest French actors of the decade: Harry Baur, René Lefèvre and Robert Le Vigan.  Baur, a film and stage actor of enormous repute, had recently starred in Duvivier’s David Golder (1930), Lefèvre had just become a huge star thanks to his appearance in the René Clair musical Le Million (1931) and Le Vigan would go on to play Jesus Christ in Duvivier’s Biblical epic Golgotha (1935).  The cast also includes Georges Péclet, a prolific character actor who would turn to directing in the late 1940s, his films including the wartime drama Casabianca (1951).

Unusually for a French film of this era, most of the film was shot abroad on location, in the Moroccan towns of Fez, Marrakech and Moulay-Idriss.  This provides the film with an almost documentary-style realism and authentically exotic feel which audiences of the time would have appreciated.  It is interesting that Duvivier’s next film to be set in North Africa, Pépé-le-Moko, would be filmed entirely in the studio (although so convincing are the sets that you would think it was shot on location).  In parallel with this film, Duvivier shot a German language version, Die fünf verfluchten Gentlemen (1931), which starred Anton Walbrook in one of his earliest screen roles.

© James Travers 2009


Even if it were completely lacking in merit, imagination, quality, etc. this film would still serve as a magnificent thumbing of the nose to those petulant schoolboys who, some twenty-five years later would grow orgasmic at the notion of shooting movies on location.  Sorry, Godard, Truffaut et al, Julien Duvivier, who left more quality in the trims on his cutting-room floor than in your entire oeuvres, got there slightly ahead of you, about a quarter of a century ahead.  That apart, this is a striking film, as well it might be with the name Julien Duvivier on the credits.  

The plot is not necessarily novel, even as far back as 1931.  It revolves around five companions far from their native France who unwittingly offend local custom and are subsequently cursed (think Howard Carter in Egypt).  As is sometimes the way of coincidence, two of their number do, in fact, die within a very short time, but this is merely a springboard for maestro Duvivier to dazzle us with light and shade, camera angles and fine performances.  Still think the New Wave is the last thing on French cinema?  You've got to be kidding.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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