Im Dunkel der Nacht

This is the first of the two movies directed by highly talented actor Charles Vanel,and by a wide margin the best ,"Affaires Classées" ,his sophomore effort being a muddled affair .

Made at the end of the silent era ,with subtitles kept to the minimum (I've rarely seen a silent movie so "silent" ,so to speak;these subtitles are actually closer to speech bubbles in comics .

The first part depicts in parallel a wedding and the miners' work.;it's nice to watch but needless to say,it's the second part which sustains the movie ,beating Feuillade at his own game.Without any special effects ,years and years before "Les Yeux Sans Visages" " Seconds " , "Abre Los Ojos " (not to mention its remake " Vanilla Sky") or ,as Writer's Reign smartly hints at it,"Face/ Off" ,Vanel creates a disturbing frightening atmosphere with two masked men ,one of whom was disfigured after an accident;And the final unexpected twist ,at a time when they were not that common,packs a real wallop.

And so they were married, Charles Vanel and Sandra Milovanoff, and they were very happy because they were so much in love. But Vanel was a miner, and one day a dynamite charge went wrong. He spent months with his faces in bandages. When they were removed, his face was horribly scarred. Mlle Milovanoff couldn't love him the way a husband needs to love. He was given a mask, but that somehow made it even worse. And so she planned to leave him with a wandering circus acrobat, who promised they would always be happy.

Reputed to be the last French silent movie, this earned critics' praise when they prevued it in February of 1930, but when it was released in May, it flopped. The easy explanation is that the public no wanted silent movies. Undoubtedly that was a part of of it. However despite fine silent acting, a story that required very little in the way of titles, and amazing camera technique that was available only for silent movies at this stage, it's got an annoying ending. Whether it was the bad returns or some other reason, Mlle Milovanoff left the screen for ten years, returning in older parts in 1940. Vanel kept working. Already a 20-year veteran of the screen, he achieved his best-remembered roles in the 1950s, including an appearance in a Hitchcock film, and his co-lead in LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR. He continued to appear on screen until his death in 1989 at the age of 96, one of the longest screen careers on record.

The worst nightmares are those which spoil an otherwise perfect dream, and in this silent melodrama the transition between bliss and terror is swift but subtle, coming after a long, leisurely, and remarkably naturalistic opening sequence showing a wedding celebration in a small French mining community. The honeymoon is abruptly shattered when an accident in the mine leaves the groom hideously disfigured, condemning him to a shadowy nocturnal life behind a grotesque half-mask while his young bride, shocked and repelled, seeks comfort in the arms of another man. The difference in mood is, appropriately, like night and day, with the sinister, oppressive second act completely overshadowing the light and open air of the early scenes.

Seen at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California (in the spring of 1987), with Gaston Modot's 1929 featurette 'Cruel Tale / Torture By Hope', an Inquisition fable with a self-explanatory title. Modot's film resembles an accomplished amateur effort and is therefore less impressive next to Vanel's professional feature; both benefit from the visual emphasis imposed by the silent camera.