Tumultes

Charles Boyer is well known of the American audience for he worked with the best directors:Cukor,Preminger,and more.

Robert Siodmak's "tumultes" has got a very good reputation in France:I must say I was a bit disappointed ;this director would do a better job with "pièges" some years later.

"Tumultes" 's conclusion is something like that: being in jail is awful,but living in the free world is still worse! The first part is not enthralling,IMHO,but things go much better in the second half: the sequences at the fair are film noir at its best : the fight between Boyer and his girlfriend's lover scenes, during a firework which becomes part of the action, compares favorably with those in Hitchcock's "strangers on a train" (which was released 20 years later!).That scene when Boyer takes out a knife and .. eats an apple ,in front of his terrified lover commands admiration too.

Interesting but not for all tastes.

When small-time crook Ralph Schwarz (Charles Boyer) is released from prison early for good behaviour, he heads straight back to his girlfriend Ania, unaware that she's having an affair with Gustave, a successful photographer. Knowing Ralph's violent temper, Ania's smart move would be to drop Gustave without delay. But she's unable to resist a good thing, any more than Ralph can resist the murderous rage that consumes him when he finds out.

Set almost entirely at night or in shadowy gloom that seems to press in upon the characters, Tumultes is a dark film both thematically and optically. It doesn't leave you with a good feeling about the human race. We are, in Siodmak's vision, wretched creatures, imprisoned and ultimately destroyed by our lowest impulses. Twice in the film Ralph gets free from captivity. But his freedom is illusory. His obsessive jealousy and pride, centred around the femme fatale Ania, make his downfall a grim inevitability.

Charles Boyer is magnificent as the unlikeable but fascinating Ralph. As in the best noirs, there is a tragic dignity about this doomed anti-hero, and Boyer captures this perfectly in the lull before the final storm, as Ralph sits quietly eating an apple with his knife while he waits for Ania's latest beau to arrive.

Siodmak's other great French noir, Pièges, is perhaps a more entertaining film, lightening the darkness with comedy and with a strong-willed central character who is in control of her fate. But Tumultes is the more concentrated, complex and psychologically penetrating of the two.