Le Puritain (1938)
Directed by Jeff Musso

Film Review

It was whilst he was en route to Antilles to make a documentary that aspiring film director Jeff Musso met the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty and discussed the possibly of making a film together.  Immediately prior to this, O'Flaherty had allowed his cousin John Ford to adapt his novel The Informer.  Meanwhile, Musso and made just one film, a documentary on his former violin instructor Zino Francescatti.  O'Flaherty agreed to work with Musso on the screenplay adaptation of his recently published novel The Puritain, a dark character study about the fanaticism of the self-righteous that serves as a bleak analogy of political ideology in Ireland of the early 1930s.  After this, O'Flaherty and Musso would collaborate on one other film, Dernière jeunesse (1939), based on the writer's novel Mr. Gilhooley.

Released at a time when fanaticism was running rife across the continent of Europe, Le Puritain was enthusiastically received by both critics and audiences in France.  It was awarded the second of the recently inaugurated Prix Louis-Delluc, which was (at the time) the highest accolade a French film could hope to secure.  The previous year, the award had been won by Jean Renoir's Les Bas-fonds, and the following year it went to Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes.  One point of interest is that, across these three films, we see the gradual emergence of a very distinctive form of French film noir, which came to be known as poetic realism (a phrase that Renoir himself coined in describing his film)  Musso's film represents an intermediate state between the proto-neo-realism of Renoir's film and the oppressively shadowy noir-scape of Carné's timeless masterpiece.  At the time, Le Puritain had an immense impact and was the most controversial of the three films (it was banned outright by the state of New York) - all of which makes its comparative obscurity today all the more inexplicable.

Le Puritain is easily Jeff Musso's most inspired and compelling film, every bit as disturbing as O'Flaherty's novel.  Being an accomplished musician, Musso also composed the film's score, which adds as much to its distinctive atmosphere as the moody lighting and claustrophobic sets.  After the war, Musso's career floundered and he spent most of his time making documentaries (most of which are now forgotten).  The success of his first feature perhaps owes less to Musso's talents as a director and more to the accomplishments of his cast and crew.  Le Puritain's main selling point is that it assembles a magnificent cast headed by two of the decade's most prominent stars, Pierre Fresnay and Jean-Louis Barrault.

As the driven police inspector, who combines an irresistible matinee idol charm with a subtle aura of malice, Fresnay vaguely resembles Commissaire Wens, the character he would play in two popular murder mysteries of the Occupation era, Le Dernier des six (1941) and L'Assassin habite au 21 (1942).  Likewise, Barrault's unhinged puritanical freak, in his murderous violent outbursts, can hardly fail to remind us of the evil Hyde character he would later play in Jean Renoir's Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959).  The supporting cast includes some very familiar faces of the time, including Viviane Romance, Alexandre Rignault, Jean Tissier and Fréhel (the latter cast, unusually, for her dramatic rather than vocal talents).

Barrault's overwrought performance may appear somewhat excessive today (how could anyone fail to mistake him for a deranged murderer?) but it would doubtless have struck a chord with a cinema audience at a time when posturing, self-righteous moralists were three-a-centime.   The film's most unsettling aspect is the near-immunity that Barrault's character secures for himself via a potent cocktail of moral indignation and passionate religiosity.  Not only does he evade arrest (for an implausibly long time), he very nearly succeeds in sending an innocent man (whom he judges to be his moral and intellectual inferior) to the scaffold.  It is the power the self-righteous have to infect others with their delusions that makes them so dangerous, and this is as true today as it was in the 1930s.  The most remarkable thing about Jeff Musso's all-but-forgotten debut film is how astonishingly relevant it still is - and how easily we can recognise modern equivalents in the grotesquely sanctimonious main protagonist, the sort who array themselves in saintly virtue whilst preaching hatred and division to all who will listen.  Beware the puritan, for the Devil has fewer allies better suited for his purpose...

Film Synopsis

Francis Ferriter is a Dublin journalist and staunch Catholic who leads a fanatical campaign against declining moral standards in his city.  One night, he is compelled to murder a young woman, ostensibly for her loose morals.  In fact, the killing stems from jealousy and repressed desire.  To save his neck, Ferriter does his best to incriminate another man for the murder but police superintendent Lavan is not so easily deceived.  In the end, Ferriter condemns himself by his wild fanaticism...