Le Joueur d'échecs (1938)
Directed by Jean Dréville

Film Review

Such is the high regard afforded to Raymond Bernard's 1927 silent masterpiece Le Joueur d'échecs that the film's 1938 remake, competently directed by Jean Dréville, has almost passed into oblivion and is seldom given the credit it is due.  Whilst there is no question as to which is the better film - Bernard's film is simply sublime, easily the best he ever made - Dréville's slick adaptation of Henri Dupuy-Mazuel's famous novel is not without interest and certainly does not deserve its present obscurity.  One of the most prolific French filmmakers of his generation, Jean Dréville didn't really come into his own until after WWII, when a string of popular successes - La Cage aux rossignols (1945), Copie conforme (1947) and Les Casse-pieds (1947) - brought him the public recognition that he deserved.

By the time he came to direct Le Joueur d'échecs, Jean Dréville was an accomplished journeyman who had made around a dozen films, spanning a wide variety of genres, over the previous decade.  He was by now more than up to the task of directing a lavish period piece and, whilst he lacked Raymond Bernard's flair, he knew how to combine strong visuals with impressive performances to deliver an arresting piece of cinema.  His Le Joueur d'échecs may not be as visually spectacular as Bernard's version, but the film offers more in the way of psychological depth, and whilst there are some obvious production weaknesses (some of the effects disappoint) it stands as one of Dréville's better films, far superior to some of his better known post-war crowdpleasers.

In common with Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938), which was released earlier in the same year, Le Joueur d'échecs was a film that appears intended to promote French national unity at a time when the country was under threat from Fascism both within and beyond its borders.  It is no accident that the resistance figurehead, Sonia, is referred to as a Polish 'Joan of Arc', and the Empress Catherine II - powerfully portrayed by Françoise Rosay - feels like a crude amalgam of all those iron-willed totalitarian leaders that were in the process of taking over Western Europe.  Had the film been made just a few years later, it would doubtless have been banned by the Nazi censors.  As it is, the film feels eerily prophetic - an appeal to resistance issued before France had fallen to its enemy.

It was entirely fortuitous that Conrad Veidt was in France when the film went into production.  Having become persona non grata in his own country after refusing to divorce his Jewish wife, Veidt spent a short while in France before moving to the UK and then Hollywood to continue his illustrious screen career.  If there is one reason to watch Dréville's Le Joueur d'échecs it is to savour Veidt's splendid performance as the automaton-maker Baron de Kempelen.  Given that Veidt's speciality was playing villains and fiends of various kinds - most famously the sleepwalking ghoul Cesare in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) - it's quite a novel experience to see him in a sympathetic role, albeit a slightly creepy one that evinces a subtle, Dr Frankenstein-like suspicion of demonic purpose.

Dréville more than gets his money's worth with his charismatic lead actor.  Using massive close-ups of Veidt, he drews us into Kempelen's dark soul to reveal the turmoil beneath the cool, calculating exterior.  In what is quite possibly the most fully developed character portrayal of his entire film career, Conrad Veidt grabs your attention from the start and doesn't let go - and this is why the film's grim conclusion is so utterly devastating.  Veidt's Kempelen is a tragic figure in the traditional sense, but he is far more than  this.  He is sometimes sinister, sometimes darkly humorous, but there is also a fractured humanity, a solitariness that almost makes you want to weep.  No other character in the film is half as interesting, and most (Rosay's Empress Catherine being the only notable exception) just seem to fade into the background, unnoticed, uncared for.

Lacking the resources that were available to Raymond Bernard, Jean Dréville has more difficulty living up to the epic feel of Dupuy-Mazuel's novel, although there are some memorable set-pieces, such as the horrific sequence near the end when a Russian officer is cornered by Kempelen's deadly automata and mechanically sliced to pieces.  The budgetary limitations are apparent in the paucity of location footage and modest sets, but this helps to give the film its distinctive mood of claustrophobia, which intensifies (through some fluid camerawork and ingenious lighting) as the story builds to its gory climax.  Dréville goes overboard with the camera motion in a few scenes, but more often than not the director's artistic choices pay off.  At no point does the film have that depressing static feel that we tend to associate with 1930s cinema.  Le Joueur d'échecs falls somewhat short of being a masterpiece but it is definitely well worth a fresh appraisal - if only because of Conrad Veidt's tour de force portrayal of the greatest conman in history.

Film Synopsis

1776.  Along with Lithuania and Prussia, Poland has succumbed to the might of the Russian Empire, but a determined resistance movement is working to bring an end to the country's annexation.  A young woman named Sonia is the figurehead of the Polish resistance fighters, but the Empress Catherine II has no fear of her, as she knows that Sonia is of Russian blood - a fact that she asks the Baron de Kempelen to make known to her political enemies.  But Kempelen's allegiances are ambiguous and he appears more preoccupied with the elaborate life-size automata he is working on than the political situation.

After a violent insurrection orchestrated by the scheming Russian major Nicolaïfeff, one of the leaders of the Polish resistance group, Colonel Boleslas Vorowsky, is wounded and goes into hiding in Kempelen's house.  To save the colonel, Kempelen conceals him in his latest creation, a chess-playing automaton.  Before Vorowsky can be smuggled out of the country to join his revolutionary allies, Kempelen is compelled to present the mechanical chess-player to the Empress at her court.  Unimpressed by the automaton, the Empress orders that it be destroyed, by a firing squad...