Le masque de Dijon

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.

World famous stage magician Diijon (Erich Von Stroheim) has retired, having performed the greatest trick of his career: getting babe Victoria (Jeanne Bates) to marry him. Diijon now dedicates his time to studying the power of suggestion and hypnotism, but treats his wife like dirt, which leads to the poor woman leaving, becoming a singer and teaming up with dashing musician Tony Holiday (William Wright).

Consumed with jealousy, and having finally perfected his powers of mind control (testing his ability by disarming a stick-up artist and commanding a man to commit suicide), Diijon hypnotises Vickie into shooting Tony in front of an audience at the Romany Gardens restaurant.

A poverty-row B-movie from PRC, The Mask of Diijon is a rather routine potboiler lifted somewhat by a commanding performance by Von Stroheim, who lives up to his nickname 'The Man You Loved to Hate': Diijon is dour, cruel, menacing and thoroughly unlikeable, which makes the film's finalé, in which the miserable mesmerising magician meets a grisly fate, suitably satisfying.

5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.

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.

The year 1946 was one of the best for great movies, giving us such winners as The Best Years of Our Lives, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, and Canyon Passage. Unfortunately The Mask of Diijon was not one of these.

Bizarre actor-director Eric Von Stroheim had his triumphs in a long career, which dated back to the early silent era -- as a director, Foolish Wives (1922), The Merry Widow (1925) -- as an actor, The Grand Illusion (1937), Sunset Blvd. (1950). Unfortunately The Mask of Diijon was not one of these.

Showing up in Hollywood just before World War I, Stroheim excelled playing cruel German officers with his trademarked shaved head and monocle. He passed himself off as an Austrian aristocrat and a military expert, claiming he had served as an officer in an elite cavalry regiment. In reality he was from a respectable Jewish lower middle class family, and the closest he got to the cavalry was a brief stint as a mounted mail carrier. Never mind, the self-made legend was born, and it stuck to him all his life. He was billed as "the Hun" and "the man you love to hate." His career as a director was over by the late twenties. After several expensive flops, studio bosses were tired of his extravagant ways and his egotistical, abrasive personality. He continued on as an actor though, on occasion rising out of mediocrity with such as The Grand Illusion (1937) and Five Graves to Cairo (1943), in the latter of which he played German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel!

The Mask of Diijon is a long way down from those days, possibly Stroheim's darkest pit with the light of Sunset Blvd four years distant. This is a very cheap production. No-name actors, except for "the Hun", cheap sets, bad lighting, and awful script. The use of many dark scenes that some people may mistake for arty noir style is obviously just the result of not wanting to spend the dough for bright lights. Murky was the word all the way through. The acting was uninspired but not terrible, especially considering the cast got maybe 20 seconds per scene to rehearse in a budget-minded number like this. The story was the real killer though. Disturbed, paranoid magician uses hypnotism to get innocent victims to do his will, including suicide and murder. His hokey method of hypnotizing these clucks is simply reflecting off a shiny lighter into their eyes and mumbling something like, "You vill do vatefer I say!" And get this -- he learns this evil, occult skill simply by reading some books with self-help type titles something like How to Control People with Your Mind. Puleazee!!! If it were that easy to hypnotize people, I would have my grouchy old wife packed and down the road tonight, and by tomorrow night I would have a half-dozen young babes cavorting about my house! Come to think of it, I would have to hypnotize myself into being able to cavort. Never mind.

There were a few good moments in The Mask of Diijon, but I found myself continually praying the 70 minutes would finally drag to an end (I'm one of those masochist types who can't just turn one off). This movie is a stinker -- only for Von Stroheim devotees or desperate insomniacs.

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.