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.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Léonce Perret film:
Molière (1909)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.