La Galerie des monstres (1924)
Directed by Jaque Catelain

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.

Film Synopsis

Castile, Spain.  Idealistic youngsters, Riquett's and Ralda are deeply in love but their union is opposed by the latter's over-proud aristrocratic grandfather, who has higher hopes for his orphaned ward than marriage to a mere itinerant gypsy boy.  The ardent lovers have no option but to elope and make a fresh start among strangers.  They join a travelling circus troupe and are soon settled into their new life, Riquett's as well-suited to playing the circus clown as Ralda is at dancing.  They have a baby and remain devotedly attached to each other, in spite of the fact that Ralda has acquired two ardent admirers, in the form of Buffalo, the circus's bossy owner, and Sveti, Riquett's supposed friend.  One night, Buffalo gives in to his insane lust for the dancer, whilst her partner is performing his wildest dance on stage before an enthralled crowd.  Ralda manages to shake off her attacker, but Buffalo later gets his revenge by setting the lions on her when she is doing her act.  Ralda's injuries are not fatal, fortunately, and she is soon well enough to leave the circus with Riquett's and their baby, setting off once more in search of a new life.  Only Madame Violette, Buffalo's long suffering wife, knows the truth of Ralda's hasty departure.  Once she has revealed her husband's crime, the rest of the troupe turn on him.