La main du diable

One-handed Pierre Fresnay comes to a second-rate inn on the Franco-Italian border. The guests are suspicious as he tells the story of how he bought a hand from the Devil, a hand that turned him into the greatest painter of the age. He bought it cheap, but he had to sell it to someone else before the Devil came for his soul, and for every day that passed, the price would double. By the time he looked up from his triumphs, who could buy this hand that would turn its bearer into the greatest in his chosen field?

Maurice Turneur had been directing for 30 years by this point, and his silent work was filled with glorious, painterly images. Here he is working in black and white, but his monochrome images are startling in their limning, and the story and performances peerless.

Painter Pierre Fresnay (Brissot) arrives at a secluded mountainside hotel that has been cut off by an avalanche. He carries a box with him and has a rather unpleasant attitude which alienates him from the other guests there. The police may or may not be on his tail as they arrive to ask about a man they have been chasing. When his box is stolen by supernatural forces, he decides it is best to come clean and tell his tale. We are then thrown into a flashback story that explains his life and how he came to have this box, and what its significance is as well as what is inside. It's a story of selling your soul to the devil and things come to an end at this mountainside hotel.

It's a good film that keeps you gripped. Fresnay is thoroughly dislikable at the beginning of the film but due to his predicament he wins you over and you understand why he is this way. A small man in a bowler hat, Palau, seems to follow him around. His appearances keep the tension going as he can change fortune but not necessarily in a good way. Fresnay has this box that gives him instant success, wealth, love, etc but it comes at a cost. His love interest is Josseline Gael (Irene) who is pretty straight-talking and whose behaviour also seems influenced by whether or not Fresnay has the box. Her real life story is interesting as she was married to a member of the French Gestapo and was jailed the following year to this film being made. She was subsequently stripped of her French citizenship whilst her husband was executed by a firing squad in 1946.

An annoyance at the beginning of the film is that everyone speaks too quickly so that you just about have time to read the subtitles let alone look at the picture of the actor's faces speaking the lines at the same time. It can be frustrating. You need to accustom yourself to this and then things get OK. The plot's theme is interesting and there are good sequences including a line-up of masked men, all previous owners of the box, who have a brief tale to tell. Fresnay's ability comes from painting with his left hand and he signs his name as Maximus Leo. Is this name significant? Yes it is.

What would you do if your debt kept doubling everyday and the debtor required payback? Easy, go to the bank and get a loan. Not sure why Fresnay didn't do that. But, then again, the devil doesn't play fair, so would probably conjure up a bank shortfall on that day. Maybe the best thing is to just enjoy the success you've got while it lasts. Fresnay fights back.

The tragic and ill-fated Gérard de Nerval left a small but highly regarded body of poetry but it was as a superlative storyteller that he was first perceived by his contemporaries. He had already published a much praised translation of Goethe's 'Faust' and his short story 'La Main enchantée' is a variation on the 'Faustian pact' theme. It has been adapted for film by Jean-Paul le Chanois. To say it is a 'loose' adaptation is an understatement and le Chanois has interpolated snippets from popular Breton tales told to him by his grandmother.

This is undeniably the best of the five films made by Maurice Tourneur under the aegis of Continental Films, created by Herr Goebbels to distract the French public from the minor annoyance of the Occupation. From the very earliest Monsieur Tourneur's films were noted for their pictorial qualities and he employed his astonishing visual sense most effectively in themes of mystery and fantasy. The air of menace that pervades this piece is due to the Expressionist lighting. His cinematographer here is the legendary Armand Thirard whilst the editing by Christian Gaudin (strangely uncredited) maintains the tension. The sets are by Andrej Andrejew, one of the finest scenic designers of German Expressionism. By all accounts, due to the indisposition of the director, it was the assistant director Jean Devaivre, who was responsible for the wonderfully imagined sequence that gave the film its alternative title of 'Carnival of Sinners'.

This film has been seen by some as an allegory of the pact made between Hitler and Pétain and the Devil here, as played by the diminuitive, bowler-hatted Pierre Palau, is a thoroughly prosaic and unpleasant personage who might easily pass as an official of the Vichy regime. This of course is open to interpretation.

The cast is headed by Pierre Fresnay who was to shine the same year in Clouzot's masterpiece 'Le Corbeau', a thinly disguised allegory that got its director into all sorts of trouble. Fresnay is joined again by Noel Roquefort and Pierre Larquey. A small and uncredited role is played by the excellent Louis Salou, moving up the ranks and just three years before his signature role as Comte de Montray in 'Les Enfants du Paradis'. Fresnay's feverish and intense performance as the doomed painter frantically trying to save his soul is magnetic, even by his standards and it is to be regretted that this brilliant artiste, despite being a decorated hero in the previous war, was never able to shake off the stigma of alleged but never proven collaboration. His leading lady in this is Josseline Gael who was to pay a far higher price for her ill-advised horizontal collaboration with a member of the French Gestapo whilst still legally married to actor Jules Berry.

Maurice Tourneur died in 1961, having been forced to retire from filming in 1949 following the loss of a limb in a motor accident. In a career spanning thirty-six years his output is bound to have been variable but he remains one of Cinema's great visual stylists. His son Jacques, in his films for RKO in the 1940's, proved a worthy successor.

A hotel in the Alps is filled with guests after an avalanche left them stranded. Roland Brissot walks out of the snow with a fake left hand and a box. The police comes looking for someone fitting his description. The lights go out and Roland's box goes missing. The other guests are suspicious of him. He recounts his story starting from a year ago. He's a failing painter with girl trouble. He's offered a talisman which would fulfill his gift.

This is a French horror film titled La main du diable. It's basically the monkey paw horror story. Losing a hand is interesting. I like the general concept and its history. I don't really like paying back the money which seems to require some math work. I still like passing it from one person to the next. It's an interesting spin on this horror story.

A few years ago I was attracted to the work of French filmmaker Maurice Tourneur, after reading his IMDb profile. I already knew that his film «La Main du Diable» had a cult following, and that he was the father of Jacques Tourneur, the famous director of «Cat People», «I Walked with a Zombie», and «Out of the Past», but I had no idea of his own prestige and importance in the history of cinema.

During the silent film period, Maurice Tourneur was as popular as David W. Griffith and Thomas Harper Ince, and his movies had a strong influence due to their visual design refinement. I am yet to see his version of James Fenimore Cooper's «Last of the Mohicans» (1920), selected to the National Film Registry by the US Congress, but I have already seen his adaptations of Maurice Maeterlinck's «The Blue Bird» (1918, also selected to the National Film Registry), and Joseph Conrad's «Victory» (1919).

I have just finished watching «La Main du Diable», a French production made during the last stage of his career, when he returned to France, tired of the commercialism of the Hollywood films. Connections are often made between Nazi occupation in France and certain films that are or seem to be allegories of this state of things, as Carné's «Les Visiteurs du Soir», or Clouzot's «Le Corbeau», so I would not be surprised if there are analysis linking «La Main du Diable» to Nazi presence in French territory.

If it's true that this reading is possible and plausible, that is fine, but the film is fascinating as it is, a moral tale with elements of fantasy and subtle horror: in an Alpine hotel, the boring confinement of a group of travelers trapped by an avalanche, brightens up with the sudden arrival of a nervous man, with a stump and a small box under his arm. After the box is stolen during a blackout, the travelers become a captive audience (as we, the spectators), listening to the man as he tell his story, from being a luckless painter, to buying a sinister talisman that brought him fame, love and fortune, and being cheated by the Devil.

The story of course is similar to other cinematic pacts with the Devil, as those made by Faust, the Prague student, Jabez Stone in «The Devil and Daniel Webster», the phantom of the Paradise theater, the investigator in «Angel Heart», or the young lawyer in «The Devil's Advocate», among others. But Tourneur, as Murnau in his «Faust», fascinates us with his visual reading of Gérard de Nerval's novel, and creates a glowing monochromatic world of oblique lines, shadows, masks, and an affable little Devil, played by a smiling old man who, behind the appearance of a helpless civil servant, hides his treacherous essence.

The film is a well-mounted clockwork that reaches its expected conclusion with the same punctuality the Devil demands of his creditors. If by chance it crosses your path, don't miss «La Main du Diable», a work that only asks for 78 minutes of your time.