Le masque de Dijon

It is rather well known that you cannot force anyone to do anything under hypnosis that they will not be willing to do themselves when of their own free will. Unfortunately that bit of reality which audiences in 1946 knew well that keeps The Mask Of Dijon from becoming a top flight melodrama. The cheapness of a PRC production also doesn't help.

They combine to defeat the incomparable Erich Von Stroheim who is playing a formerly great magician with an insane jealous streak that makes Othello look well adjusted. His Desdemona is Jeanne Bates a nightclub singer who runs into her old accompaniest William Wright who persuades her to come back and take Von Stroheim's rusty magic act as a package deal.

What both don't know is that Von Stroheim has been studying the art of Mesmer and he's going to use that to settle old scores, real and imagined. I can't say much more, but I will agree with another reviewer who did love the ending that Von Stroheim met.

Would that the rest of the film was that good.

Erich von Stroheim plays Diijon, a retired stage illusionist who mistreats his young wife. When he attempts a comeback he is over-confident and makes an embarrassing error.

Diijon then learns hypnotism from a how-to book and sets out to avenge himself on those he feels have wronged him, including his now estranged wife and the man who is making a play for her.

There are plot holes galore, but the ending is top stuff.

Well worth a watch.

Erich von Stroheim stars in The Mask of Diijon from 1945, directed by Lew Landers.

Diijon is a former magician who is studying the power of the mind, to the dismay of his partner and wife Victoria (Jeanne Bates). She can't find a job, and he refuses to work. When her ex-accompanist Tony (William Wright) shows up, he arranges for them to work at his club. It's a disaster, but Victoria stays on as a singer.

Thoroughly jealous of Tony, Dijjon tries a hypnosis technique out, then hypnotizes Victoria so her song will end in a spectacular manner.

Lousy cheap production but von Stroheim is always effective. And of course learning hypnosis from a book and convincing people tondo all manner of things is ridiculous.

However, as others have pointed out, the finale is not to be missed! Total genius. Splendid performance by Sheba the cat.

No one will ever accuse THE MASK OF DIIJON of being a landmark thriller/drama/noir/whatever. But this film deserves the honor of having the all-time greatest final 30 seconds in the history of cinema. To reveal its wonderful climactic secret would be to rob the viewer of easily the best moment in the whole film, so I will resist, but it's all more worth watching than one might think.

Erich Von Stroheim chews up every scene he is in, which is the bulk of the picture, and this is a good thing. Anyone who adored him as Max Von Mayerling in SUNSET BLVD. knows full well that there isn't really any such thing as a bad Stroheim performance. He even smiles and laughs - admittedly rather briefly - in THE MASK OF DIIJON.

And the film is, for all its faults in narrative, an inevitably fascinating ultra-cheapie. The very fact that Stroheim committed to the project at all raises eyebrows; he treats the whole picture as a gag and is arguably the only sparkling performer in the whole project, and must have known this. The very opening sequence shows his character reduced to peddling cheap carnival tricks (and in doing so, tricks the audience by creating a fake beginning to the film), so there had to be an air of self-consciousness here, considering that the main conceit of the film (the power of hypnosis) is entirely preposterous. And there are a handful of nice touches throughout, particularly an outlandish sequence where Stroheim hypnotizes a would-be robber and stops the crime cold.

It's all a sublimely ridiculous tale, never believable for a moment, and pure entertainment. And it has the greatest ending ever. Trust me.

Deserves a fairly good rating because it has a very skillfully set up and well done ending. Once in a while a golden nugget of movie brilliance can be found lodged within a cheap forgotten film. The ending of this one is such a nugget.

Most of the cast is lively if not memorable and they are better than the film itself. They keep it watchable despite the drabness of the PRC production values and undoubtedly rushed filming schedule. Von Stroheim is his usual menacing self and does a good job in the title role.

Von Stroheim is effective but the hypnotism techniques used in this film are rushed and not well thought out. Despite many such weak elements "The Mask of Diijon" holds together and moves along in a fairly well paced linear b-movie style. Its not a terrible example of the dark 1940's b-movie creepy murder genre, and certainly worth a look.