Le Loup des Malveneur (1943)
Directed by Guillaume Radot

Film Review

Le Loup des Malveneur is a rare excursion by French cinema into Gothic horror, one of a handful of creepy fantasy films that helped to distract French cinema audiences at the time of the Nazi Occupation.  In common with two similar French films of this era - Maurice Tourneur's La Main du diable (1943) and Serge Poligny's La Fiancée des ténèbres (1945) - the film can be read as a veiled allegory of the evils of Nazism, and you can hardly imagine a more vile caricature of Vichystes than the characters portrayed so vividly by Pierre Renoir and Gabrielle Dorziat, the last in a line of aristocrats afflicted by an ancient curse.  Renoir's character is particularly interesting.  A mad scientist in the Dr Frankenstein mould, he is obsessed with conquering death.  In this respect, he resembles a famous 16th century physician whom G.W. Pabst boldly likened to Adolf Hitler in his film Paracelsus, which was coincidentally released at almost exactly the same time, in the early spring of 1943.  If Pabst's film was intended to glorify Hitler, Le Loup des Malveneur clearly had the opposite agenda - to characterise the leader of the Third Reich and his followers not as humanity's saviours, but as dangerous mad men.

From the opening sequence, which grimly recounts the ancient legend of the Malveneurs, another film immediately comes to mind: 20th Century Fox's adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, made four years previously.  Whilst the plot similarities with Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes novel are striking to the point that the film feels like a shameless rip-off, there are many other, more subtle, references which give the film greater depth and interest value.  These include Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Universal Pictures' Frankenstein and Wolf Man films.  Far from being a lazy pastiche, the result is a film that makes an astute morality play on the nature of evil, one that is eerily expressive of the mood of Occupation Era France.

Le Loup des Malveneur was the first film to be directed by Guillaume Radot, and probably the only film he made that has stood the test of time.  After this, Radot directed half a dozen or so non-descript films, the best known being Le Bal des passants (1944), a complacent melodrama, again with a surprisingly overt anti-Vichy slant.  The fact that Radot was supervised by Marcel L'Herbier on his first film is probably significant.  The film's striking visuals - which visibly reference Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) - seem to owe far more to L'Herbier, one of the avant-garde giants of French cinema, than to the second-rate journey man Radot.

There is an obvious dual identity to the film, with much of the middle section of the film mired in the kind of slushy melodrama that is Radot's stock in trade.  It is in the opening and closing parts of the film where L'Herbier's stylistic impact is most felt, with some artfully composed shots that seem to breathe with menace and malevolence.  In these scenes, Maurice Thiriet's ominous score and Pierre Montazel's moody photography, which veers towards the most unsettling kind of expressionism in places, do much to convey a mounting sense of fear, which builds to a suitably grim and tense finale in the final reel.

Pierre Renoir and Gabrielle Dorziat are excellent casting choices for the two villains of the piece and make an effective contrast with the innocents, deftly played by Madeleine Sologne and Michel Marsay.  Renoir may have made a humane Maigret in his brother Jean's La Nuit du carrefour (1932), but he is undoubtedly at his best when playing sinister types.  In a role that allows him to chew the scenery with impunity, Renoir is at his most powerful and terrifying.  Dorziat's performance may be more restrained but it conveys the same sense of contained malignancy - her scenes genuinely do send a cold chill down the spine.  One of the main strengths of the so-so script is that, far from being presented as crude archetypes, the Count and his sister are fully developed characters, both drawn with a frightening realism.  By contrast, the other characters - Sologne's enterprising heroine and her mysterious boyfriend - turn out to be little more than stock melodramatic types.

Le Loup des Malveneur is more of a curiosity piece than a classic, its uneven narrative and occasional longueurs made up for by some gripping performances and deliciously eerie atmospherics.  One of the more blatant anti-Vichy films made during the Occupation, it is surprising it didn't land its authors in a great deal of trouble.  The Nero-like image of the deranged scientist calmly playing his harmonium with flames lapping around him is quite possibly French cinema's most apt metaphor for the Third Reich.

Film Synopsis

Legend has it that, many years ago, the first of the Malveneurs was transformed into a wolf by a curse and became a ravenous beast that preyed on the locals.  Ever since, the Malveneur family have lived alone in their ancient castle, shunned and feared by the inhabitants of the nearest village in this remote spot of rural France.  The present head of the household, Count Réginald, occupies himself in his biological experiments, believing he is close to uncovering the secret of cellular regeneration.  He lives with his sister Magda, his young wife Estelle and their five-year-old daughter Geneviève.  Réginald's sudden disappearance, along with that of his faithful gamekeeper,  comes as a shock to Estelle, who has just engaged a young governess, Monique Valory, to take charge of her daughter's education.

As soon as she has taken up residence in the old castle, Monique senses something is amiss, and her employers' reluctance to talk to her aggravates her anxieties. The only person Monique can confide in is Philippe Laportelle, a young man she sees painting in the grounds of the castle.  One night, Estelle is troubled upon hearing a favourite waltz of her husband being played on a harmonium.  Not long afterwards, she is found dead, having apparently killed herself.  Suspicious about Estelle's death, Monique explores the castle and discovers secret underground rooms that show signs of recent habitation.  Meanwhile, Philippe, who is not what he pretends to be, has found the badly decomposed remains of a man who is assumed to be Count Réginald.  After the funeral, Monique returns to the castle's basement and discovers the count alive and well.  To her horror, she learns he intends using her in his experiments...