Tumultes (1932) - film review

Once released from prison, Ralph Schwartz doesn’t waste any time organising another bank raid with his band of crooks.  His wife Ania is less keen to see him: she has started to have an affair with another man, a photographer named Gustave.  Oblivious of Ania’s infidelity, Ralph moves back into his apartment, having adopted a juvenile criminal, Willi, who, in his turn, falls for Ania’s charms.  After a fight in which Gustave is killed, Ralph is arrested by the police.  Having escaped custody, Ralph returns to Ania, convinced that she has betrayed him…

Tumultes is instantly recognisable as the work of Robert Siodmak, one of the first film directors to appropriate the German expressionist style for the thriller genre, thereby effectively inventing film noir.  With its deeply pessimistic view of human relationships, portrayal of easy seduction, betrayal and infidelity, it is a film that must have shocked the sensibilities of its original 1930s audience, and indeed, in a more cynical age, it still makes pretty grim viewing.  Unusually, there isn’t a single sympathetic character in this film, and there is no real moral or sense of “natural justice”.  Rather, the characters appear to be self-motivated soulless animals, victims of their own bestial impulses, imprisoned in their own circumstances, unable to even imagine a nobler kind of life.

In one of his most memorable early film appearances, Charles Boyer makes the perfect cypher for this mood of nihilistic abandon, playing a character that is incapable of improving his lot and remains a victim of his own primitive instincts.  The relentlessly gloomy atmosphere is emphasised by Günther Rittau’s inspired photography, which lends a ghost-like quality to some of the characters whilst shadows, beloved by film noir directors, are used to convey a mood of oppression, threat and imprisonment.  The film’s most memorable sequence is a fight-to-the-death scene in which the drama of a duel is merged with the spectacle of a firework display – an extraordinarily effective piece of cinematic artistry.

© James Travers 2006

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