Film Review
A very apt pupil
Under the influence of his friend and mentor Marcel L'Herbier - the man who
contrived to get him his first screen role at the age of 20 - Jaque Catelain
could well have become a filmmaker of comparable renown, had he so wanted.
Within just a few years of his screen debut in René Hervil and Louis
Mercanton's
Torrents (1917), Catelain had established himself as one
of France's leading screen actors, his renown becoming international through
his portrayal of the poet Vignerte in Léonce Perret's hugely successful
Koenigsmark (1923). He owed his success to L'Herbier, who not
only cast him in a leading part in almost all of his silent films, but also
helped him to develop a modern style of acting that proved to be enormously
popular with audiences and critics.
Yet Jaque Catelain's abilities were not confined to acting. Before
he entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 18 to study drama, he had
attended the elite art school Académie Julian with a view to pursuing
a career as a painter. In addition, he was a very capable musician.
L'Herbier was quick to recognise his muse's wider artistic abilities and
gave him the opportunity to develop skills in other areas of production on
his films. These included editing (
L'Homme du large), make-up
design (
L'Inhumaine) and set design (
El Dorado), all of which
the young actor proved to be exceptionally proficient in.
Catelain's aspiration of becoming a fully fledged film director was realised
in 1923 when L'Herbier conferred on him the honour of directing
Le Marchand
de plaisirs for his recently founded film production company Cinégraphic.
A hauntingly melancholic piece, this film had enough of an impact to break
even and win favourable reviews from some critics who saw Catelain's potential
as a more than worthy disciple of the French Avant-Garde. L'Herbier
was sufficiently encouraged that he immediately pushed his faithful acolyte
into directing a second film, on the proviso that it had a circus theme.
La Galerie des monstres was Catelain's second and last outing as a
film director, an incredibly ambitious work for the multi-talented 27-year-old
that eerily prefigures two far better known films set in the circus milieu
- Paul Leni's
The Man Who Laughs
(1928) and Tod Browning's
Freaks (1932).
La Galerie des monstres was a bold and deliberate attempt by Catelain
to extend the popular appeal of L'Herbier's impressionistic brand of cinema.
Offering a sensationalist subject with a colourful setting it was bound to
have broader appeal for the cinema-going public than the more cerebral dramas
of the established Avant-Garde filmmakers, but with a visual style that would
make it stand out from the more routine crowd-pleasers of the time.
With its classic love-conquers-all theme, cheap thrills and lurid title,
La Galerie des monstres was a conscious return to the roots of cinema
in the fairground and Grand Guignol theatre, and what is popular cinema anyway
but an updated form of circus? The public's abiding fascination
with circus folk has been exploited by many a worthy filmmaker and Catelain's
film is assuredly one of the best, even though it has languished in obscurity
for the best part of a century and has only recently become available after
its 2018 restoration.
A gallery of monstrous talent
Employing many of the bizarre but strangely effective impressionistic techniques
that L'Herbier had perfected in the early-to-mid 1920s (superimposition,
optical effects, choppy editing, huge close-ups, exaggerated lighting),
La
Galerie des monstres is as visually interesting as anything offered by
this pioneering auteur and his illustrious Avant-Garde contemporaries (notably
Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac), and in some areas - most notably the editing
- it pushes the boat out further into even more unchartered waters.
Yet what is most distinctive about the film is its warmth and humanity -
its emotional resonance is quite different to anything offered by the other
impressionist filmmakers. Imbued with a gently bleak lyricism, it connects
far more readily with the French poetic realist aesthetic of the 1930s, best
represented in that decade's great films of Marcel Carné, Jean Grémillon
and Julien Duvivier.
As well as being the film's producer, Marcel L'Herbier is also credited as
its artistic director, which implies he may have had a fair amount of creative
input into the film, even though he would already have had his hands full
with his next film -
L'Inhumaine.
Catelain benefited not only from L'Herbier's moral and technical support,
he also had the help of an incredibly enthusiastic assistant director - Alberto
Cavalcanti. It was L'Herbier who gave Cavalcanti his entry into cinema
as costume designer (on
El Dorado) and set designer (
L'Inhumaine),
just a few years before he became a major filmmaker in his own right (following
the success of his astonishing debut feature,
Rien que les heures).
La Galerie des monstres was certainly a challenging production for
a fairly inexperienced director, involving a great deal of location filming
in Spain and the ordeal of directing large crowds and potentially dangerous
circus animals. The strain of making the film was more than Catelain
was comfortable with, and this may have been a major factor in his decision
not to direct a third feature.
The fact that Jaque Catelain was cast in the lead role (most likely at the
insistence of L'Herbier) did not help the burden he had to shoulder as the
film's director, particularly as he was the only star name in the cast.
His female co-star Lois Moran was a complete unknown and hadn't yet turned
15 when she began work on the film, although her potential as a great actress
soon become apparent during filming. The following year, Moran would
have her big Hollywood break in Henry King's
Stella Dallas (1925),
resulting in a blitz of stardom that would propel her into the arms of F.
Scott Fitzgerald and literary immortality as the model for the character
Rosemary Hoyt in the writer's 1934 novel
Tender is the Night.
Moran is at her most beguiling as
La Galerie des monstres's winsome
romantic heroine Ralda, the perfect complement to Catelain's equally camera-friendly
and no less adorable gypsy boy Riquett's.
L'Herbier's mother-in-law and frequent collaborator Claire Prélia
has a significant role in the film as Madame Violette, the downtrodden wife
of the principal baddy who is played by an impressive but now totally forgotten
character actor named Yvonneck. Famous at the time as a singer of traditional
Breton songs, Yvonneck had only a brief career as a screen actor, appearing
in minor roles in half a dozen films after this, the only one of note being
René Clair's
Un
chapeau de paille d'Italie (1928). One of the few credited
cast members to achieve lasting fame was Jean Murat, making an early screen
appearance here as Catelain's more flagrantly seductive romantic rival before
going on to become a prominent face in French cinema from the 1930s through
to the 1950s.
For a mid-1920s audience, one of
La Galerie des monstres's key attractions
would have been the celebrity model Kiki de Montparnasse. Her appearance
as an exotic dancer brings to the film a wild burst of terpsichorean eroticism
unsurpassed in French cinema until Brigitte Bardot's spectacular turn in
Roger Vadim's
Et Dieu créa
la femme (1956). One of the most extraordinarily photogenic
women of the 20th century, Kiki was socially connected with Paris's artistic
elite and became the muse of a number of celebrated artists, including the
avant-garde photographer and filmmaker Man Ray. She also put in an
appearance in L'Herbier's
L'Inhumaine (1923). Kiki's short-lived
fame pales in comparison with that of another member of the cast - Philippe
Hériat, well chosen to play the circus giant. After starting
out as an actor (he appears in many of L'Herbier's early films, most famously
as the clown-rapist in
El Dorado),
Hériat went on to become an enormously successful French novelist.
Even more surprisingly, Michel Simon and Roland Toutain are reputed to have
made their screen debuts in this film as extras - a decade before
they became two of France's most high-profile film actors.
The sheer abundance of talent that was available to
La Galerie des monstres
on both sides of the camera makes its present obscurity all the more puzzling.
Whilst the film suffers a little from some narrative unevenness and a general
lack of polish, it is an alluring, technically accomplished piece of cinema
that holds up well compared with most quality productions of this time.
The story it tells is hardly original but, filmed with flair
and compassion, it has no difficulty holding our attention, periodically
rewarding us with the kind of unexpected mise-en-scène flourishes
that only a natural-born filmmaker would have been capable of.
Shock and awe
The film's stylistic and dramatic high-point comes like a lightning bolt
at the start of its final third, with an utterly inspired example of cross-cutting
combined with accelerated montage - of the kind that Sergei Eisenstein would
employ to devastating effect on
Strike
and
Battleship Potemkin
one year later. This is for the horrific sequence in which the helpless heroine
Ralda (Lois Moran) is threatened with rape in her caravan by her tyrannical
employer, Buffalo. The attack occurs just as Ralda's devoted partner
Riquett's (Catelain) is performing an insanely frantic dance as a monstrously
made-up clown before a heaving mass of spectators. It is the
first of the film's two classic
Perils of Pauline moments in which
the defenceless heroine is placed in mortal danger - the second being even
more viscerally shocking as she is literally thrown to the lions.
The first of Ralda's ordeals is the one that is more powerfully rendered,
the nightmarish first-person experience of rape conveyed with terrifying
power through an inspired mix of subjective camerawork and rapid editing.
(By comparison, the rape scenes in L'Herbier's
El Dorado and
L'Argent seem incredibly tame.)
As the attack becomes more brutally animalistic, the pace of editing escalates
alarmingly, cutting rapidly between Ralda's savage violation and Riquett's
whirlwind dance on stage. As the latter surges to its vertiginous climax,
the musicians beside the dancing clown perform with increasing vigour, building
to an ear-splitting crescendo that threatens to bring the house down.
As the shots become shorter and faster, the camera moves in so close that
the images blur and become virtually indistinguishable, ultimately melding
together into a wild blizzard of abstract patterns. The entire sequence
lasts five minutes but as you watch it you completely lose sense of the passage
of time - just as in a dream. So intensely involving and emotionally
draining is this cinematic ordeal that, by the end of it, the spectator feels
as exhausted and dizzy as Riquett's appears when he finally collapses in
an ungainly heap after he exceeds the limits of his endurance. This
five-minute frenzy of visual overload has to be one of the most remarkable
sequences of any French film, an impressionistic explosion that not even
Jean Epstein could top in his least uninhibited moments of creative delirium.
The audience barely has time to get its breath back after this onslaught
before it is subjected to a second manic bout of psycho-visual pummelling.
This time Ralda's attacker isn't a sex-crazed maniac but something much deadlier
- a ravenous lion! On this occasion, the horror of the moment is driven
home by the harrowing juxtaposition of massive close-ups of the Nymph-like
dancer and the wild-looking beast - the innocence and vulnerability of the
former nourishing our sense of expectant dread as the latter eyes its victim
with a hungry relish. The cut-away shots of Buffalo planning something
nasty in the shadows lead us to expect the worse, but when the moment of
horror comes it has the impact of a well-aimed javelin hitting a defenceless
baby meerkat. So stark and powerful are the images, the jagged abruptness
of the editing viciously heightening the ferocity of the attack, that you
feel you can almost hear the howls of terror and amazement as the circus
audience reacts to the unprogrammed mauling.
La Galerie des monstres's two shock sequences are all the more impactful
as they appear totally incongruous with what has gone before. For its
first half, the film progresses as the classic lyrical romance, very much
in the picturesquely melancholic Frank Borzage mould. There isn't the
slightest hint of the Grand Guignol-cum-proto-slasher-movie turn the film
takes later on as the dewy-eyed teenagers Riquett's and Ralda succumb to
the spell of Eros, the fairytale nature of their amorous adventure highlighted
by the scenic locations they pass through in their flight to freedom and
unalloyed bliss. (Catelain and his cinematographer Georges Specht certainly
made the best use of their stunning locations in Spain - Pedraza and Segovia).
The film acquires a noticeably more oppressive atmosphere when the narrative
settles on the circus and the couple's relationship comes under threat from
multiple sources, with both the hero and the heroine subjected to the libidinous
designs of their supposed new friends. It is here that the meaning
of the film's title becomes painfully evident, as the darker side of human
nature asserts itself in the barrage of assaults that Ralda and Riquett's
endure whilst wrongly believing they are in safe company. Superimposition
is used to great effect to show us what is in the minds of the protagonists
as they cope with their increasingly fraught new life - and on each occasion
we feel we know them better, have a deeper sense of the anguish they experience
as they struggle to hold on to the dream of their perfect romance.
Jaque Catelain had every right to be proud of his second directorial offering.
La Galerie des monstres is an original and absorbing piece of impressionistic
cinema - not quite up to the level of L'Herbier's best, but not far behind
either. The critics were generally favourable to the film upon its
release in September 1924, far more so than they were to L'Herbier's much
grander
L'Inhumaine when it came out three months later. And,
unlike his mentor's highly stylised masterpiece, Catelain's film did well
enough at the box office to meet its ample production cost. But what
could have been another distinguished filmmaking career ended here, on an
abrupt high. The reason: Catelain was not sufficiently motivated as
a director to make any further films. Instead, he stuck to what he
knew best, notching up two international successes as the male lead in
Robert Wiene's
Der Rosenkavalier (1925) and Victor Tourjanski's
Le
Prince charmant (1925). He didn't need to be
another Marcel L'Herbier; he was happy enough being the French Rudolph
Valentino. Jaque Catelain belonged to the minority of big name screen actors
of the silent era to successfully negotiate the transition to sound cinema, although by the
mid-1940s he had lost the mantle of stardom and was reduced to playing bit
parts for the remainder of his career. Today he is all but forgotten,
along with the two remarkable films he directed and which leave us with more
than a hint of his unfulfilled genius.
© James Travers 2023
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