Film Review
Tih Minh was the last but one
of Louis Feuillade's thriller serials, and the least well-known.
It repeats the successful formula of Feuillade's previous serials -
Fantômas (1913-14),
Les
Vampires (1915) and
Judex (1916) - but is
noticeably different both in its tone and in its subject matter.
Whilst
Tih Minh can certainly
be enjoyed as a fast-moving escapist thriller, distilling the best
elements of the director's earlier serials into an exciting adventure
epic, its real value lies in what it has to say about the crises facing
humanity in the aftermath of the First World War. Anticipating
Fritz Lang's
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
(1922),
Tih Minh presents a
lawless world in which the conventional figures of authority are either
totally absent or else completely impotent, leaving it to the
individual to 'go it alone' and fight a solo crusade against a nebulous
threat that is constantly present and constantly changing its
appearance. It is a world lacking both strong leadership and
moral orientation, in which the menace is no longer clearly defined as
it was before WWI but something far more amorphous and ambiguous, and
where gung-ho
Boy's Own
vigilantism by cocksure individuals has come to replace the rule of
law. How uncannily familiar this world appears. How closely
it resembles the one we now inhabit, almost a hundred years after the
film was made - a fractured, leaderless world slowly drifting towards
anarchy.
The most chilling aspect of
Tih Minh
is how the principal villains of the piece - the evil Hun Dr Gilson and
his Hindu sidekick Kistna - are able to distort reality for their own
ends, which they do by adopting various convincing disguises which
prevent us from seeing who they really are and also by administering
some nasty, mind-altering concoctions to their victims. In a
similar fashion, Feuillade himself bends reality to a far greater
extent in this serial than in any other film he made, giving it an
uncanny dream-like feel, which the endless recycling of the same plot
ideas can only exacerbate. This is a film that takes
déjà vu to its limit.
In one bizarre, Cocteau-like sequence, the heroes enter a vast
chamber filled with kidnapped society women who, under the evil
doctor's influence, have come to resemble a hoard of Pre-Raphaelite
zombies. Other oneiric touches crop up throughout the film,
giving it a very distinctive kind of dark and mysterious poetry that is
unique in Feuillade's oeuvre. It is hard to say how much of this
we can attribute to Feuillade's assistant Julien Duvivier but there is
an unmistakable foretaste of the bleak poetic realism that would
feature in Duvivier's subsequent films.
Having played the title character in Feuillade's earlier
Judex, René Cresté
was a natural shoe-in for the part of the derring-do explorer-hero
Jacques d'Athys, one of his last screen roles before his untimely death
in 1922. The role of Tih Minh went to the British actress
Mary Harald, who also appeared alongside Cresté in Feuillade's
Vendémiaire (1918), a far
more overt exploration of the after-effects of the First World
War. Light relief is provided by another Feuillade favourite, the
likeable comic actor Georges Biscot, who would star in the director's
last thriller serial,
Barrabas (1919).
Looking like a slightly grown-up, more up-market version of Stan
Laurel, Biscot brings great comedic value to the film, without which it
would have been almost monotonously grim. Whereas the other
heroes get to lay into the bad guys with swift punches and blazing
guns, Biscot's humorous manservant Placide proves to be just as
effective at fending off rampaging evil with a garden hose pipe.
As in Feuillade's other serials, it is the villains that prove to be
far more interesting than the heroes. Gaston Michel's Dr Gilson
is an obvious forerunner of Lang's Dr Mabuse, a sinister shape-changer
who, like Fantômas, seems to have supernatural powers of survival
and an endless capacity for evil. Just as creepy is Gilson's
turban-wearing partner in crime, Kistna, who seems to be an eerie melange of Fu
Manchu and Svengali, epitomising western stereotypical fears of the
mysterious East. No less fascinating is Georgette
Faraboni's Marquise Dolorès, the most sultry and scarily
reptilian of Feuillade's female creations. Desirable, duplicitous
and quite deadly, Dolorès is the very essence of a proto femme
fatale. Next to her, the other female characters, whilst
generally spunky and emancipated, have almost no personality at
all (the one exception being the cute, gun-totting maid Rosette). Tih Minh, the supposed
heroine, ends up being a mere plot
device. Like the Pearl White character in Louis J. Gasnier's
The Perils of Pauline (1914), her
job is simply to get herself into dangerous situations to drive the
plot along. After a while, you lose count of how many times she
is abducted, hypnotised, drugged and left dangling from a dizzying
precipice.
When he made
Tih Minh at the
age of 45, Louis Feuillade was at the height of his creative powers and
knew it. Not only is this the most sophisticated of his thriller
serials, it is chock-full of some of his most impressive
set-pieces. Even though there is a fair amount of repetition,
Feuillade manages to sustain the pace across twelve episodes and seven
hours, gradually building to an adrenalin-pumping climax in the final
gripping instalment. The shift of location from gloomy Paris to
the sun-drenched Côte d'Azur also gives the film a distinctive
feel, whilst allowing for some more elaborate action sequences that
Feuillade would have had difficulty filming in the environs of
Paris. In addition to the obligatory rooftop chase, there are car
chases and shoot-outs galore along the mountain Riviera roads, and an
explosive climax in a quarry. Feuillade's technique may be modest
by today's standards (no fancy camera motion or overblown effects) but
he still manages to put together a fast-paced action thriller that
holds the attention as well as any compulsive page-turner. Most
importantly, it provides a stark and unsettling vision of what the
world will become without a clear moral purpose and firm, benign
leadership - a world teetering on the brink of chaos and confusion,
where every man, woman and dog has to fend for himself. Get your
hose pipe ready.
Tih Minh was originally screened in twelve episodes:
1.
Le philtre d'oubli
2.
Deux drames dans la nuit
3.
Les mystères de la Villa
Circé
4.
L'homme dans la malle
5.
Chez les fous
6.
Les oiseaux de nuit
7.
Evocation
8.
Sous le voile
9.
La branche de salut
10.
Mercredi 13
11.
Le document 29
12.
Justice
© James Travers 2014
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Next Louis Feuillade film:
Barrabas (1919)