Le Roman d'un mousse (1914)
Directed by Léonce Perret

Film Review

By the time Léonce Perret came to direct his second feature Le Roman d'un mousse in 1913 he was not only Gaumont's star director (second only to the company's artistic director Louis Feuillade in productivity and impact on the cinematographic landscape), he was also established as one of the world's most important filmmakers.  His previous L'Enfant de Paris (1913) (the first feature-length film produced by Gaumont) had brought him international renown and placed him virtually on equally footing with D.W. Griffith, justifiably as by this stage he had around two hundred films to his name, mostly shorts.  Perret's earlier Le Mystère des roches de Kador (1912) provided the template for the adventure thriller which became an important mainstay for Gaumont for the rest of the decade, including, most famously, Feuillade's Fantômas films and subsequent thriller serials.  Le Roman d'un mousse is another entry by Perret in this popular genre, a well-paced mix of criminal intrigue and melodrama that is as compelling as any page-turner crime novel.

Like Feuillade, Perret harboured an unadorned predilection for the macabre - most evident in his short films Sur les rails (1912) and Les Dents de fer (1913) - and this is what gives his thrillers a chilling sense of reality and makes the villains in his films so believable.  A Mabuse-like venality surrounds the main villainous protagonist of Le Roman d'un mousse, a despicable usurer named Werb who appears to delight in the power he has over his clients, driving them to perform acts of unspeakable nastiness to avoid disgrace or penury.  Magnificently interpreted by Maurice Luguet, Werb is a particularly memorable villain because he contains his obvious evil within a very affable, avuncular exterior.

In contrast to the elusive, almost supernaturally endowed criminal fiends of Feuillade's films, Werb has a solidity and ordinariness about him that makes him seem even more sinister and frightening.  Luguet's habit of peering straight into the camera lens whenever his character strays onto the dark path with malignant intent not only has the effect of humanising Werb, by showing a guilty awareness of his crimes, but it also makes the spectator complicit in his wrongdoing.  Perversely, Perret compels us to feel more for his main villain than for the innocent victims of his film, an unfortunate woman who is about to be denuded of her fortune and a chubby little boy (sympathetically played by Perret's nephew Adrien Petit) who is destined to end up as fish food.  Today, one of the most unsettling scenes in the film is the one in which the diabolical Werb (looking every inch the habitual paedophile) gains the boy's confidence by getting him to smoke a cigarette.

Léonce Perret's success as a film director wasn't just down to his unerring ability to captivate an audience's attention with a good yarn, he was also a supremely gifted innovator and a fair chunk of the language of cinema owes its existence to his penchant for experimentation.  The use of deep focus photography was a particular trademark of Perret's and is apparent throughout most of Le Roman d'un mousse, most effectively in the picturesque shots of Biarritz, Saint-Malo and Le Havre and the frantic courtroom scenes at the end of the film.  The fact that so much of the film was shot on location adds greatly to its modernity and disturbing realism.  The sequence depicting a violent sea storm is particularly impressive and ominously prefigures Jean Epstein's Le Tempestaire (1947).  Expressive framings and backlighting (with characters in the foreground often reduced to stark silhouettes) are two other devices that Perret confidently uses to heighten the drama and poetry of his film, breaking the deadening monotony of the static camera.  Close-ups are rarely used in films of this era, but Perret employs one close-up (of a hand) when it is dramatically expedient, in the scene where the police smash their way into the safe that contains Werb's incriminating correspondence.

Le Roman d'un mousse may not be as grand or emotionally involving as L'Enfant de Paris, but it shows just as much artistry in its mise-en-scène and is one of Perret's most absorbing films, more focused and somewhat better paced than Feullade's interminable thrillers.  The lack of plot sophistication is amply made up for by Perret's almost unrivalled powers as a storyteller and his artistry as a filmmaking pioneer.  The modern suspense thriller clearly owes a great deal to Perret's crime films and you can't help wondering to what extent these may have influenced Alfred Hitchcock, had he been fortunate enough to see them in his youth.  Perret's dark humour certainly has a ring of Hitchcockian malice about it.

Film Synopsis

Deeply in debt, the Marquis de Luscky begs the moneylender Elie Werb to save him from ruin.  Werb refuses to give the Marquis any further money as he already owes him a substantial amount.  Instead, he persuades him to marry the fabulously wealthy Countess de Ker Armor, who has recently been widowed.  Whilst the Marquis and the Countess are away enjoying their honeymoon in Italy, the Countess's young son and heir, Charles-Henri, is left in the French port of Saint-Malo, in the care of Werb, posing as a private tutor.  Werb blackmails one of his other clients into abducting the boy and taking him out to sea in a sailing ship, where the troublesome heir will meet with an accident and drown.  To avert suspicion of any wrongdoing, Werb gets Charles-Henri  to write a letter to his mother claiming that he has decided to go to sea and start a new life as a ship's boy.  On learning of her son's disappearance, the Countess falls ill and the Marquis is able to proceed with the next phase of the operation, which is to poison his wife.  The plan goes awry and the Marquis dies when he takes the poison by mistake.  Blissfully unaware that his mother has been arrested for murdering his stepfather, Charles-Henri is enjoying his adventures at sea, not knowing that his killer is about to strike...