Les Mystères de Paris (1943)
Directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Film Review

Eugène Sue's popular novel Les Mystères de Paris, first published in instalments in 1842, has been honoured with no fewer than eleven screen adaptations to date, the best known being André Hunebelle's lively swashbuckler version of 1962 with Jean Marais in the lead role of Rudolphe.  As entertaining as Hunebelle's film is, it is somewhat out-classed by an earlier version directed by Jacques de Baroncelli during the dark days of the Occupation, which has (as you might expect) a much darker tone and is much closer in spirit to Sue's tale of dark intrigue in the depraved lower depths of 19th century Paris.

With over eighty films to his name, Jacques de Baroncelli was one of the most prolific of all French film directors and enjoyed considerable success with crowd-pleasers spanning a wide range of genres.  Les Mystères de Paris is one of his most lavish films, its opulent production values belying the period of extreme hardship in which the film was made.  Filmed entirely at the famous Victorine Studios in Nice, it made effective use of permanent exterior sets that offered the most authentic reconstruction of 19th century Paris.  With Léonce-Henri Burel in charge of the cinematography (having brought considerable artistry to other films with such noted directors as Abel Gance), Les Mystères de Paris could rival any Hollywood blockbuster of the time, impressing both with its flamboyant exteriors and its intensely oppressive interiors, a stark contrast which pointedly evokes the dramatic split in Parisian society in the 1800s.

The film's main strength is its impressive cast, made up of accomplished character actors and stars of the French stage.  Taking the lead is a dashing Marcel Herrand, who would soon earn a place in film posterity with his portrayal of the criminal Lacenaire in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945).  Alexandre Rignault, Lucien Coëdel and Roland Toutain all provide strong supporting performances and the only female member of the cast to excel is Germaine Kerjean, superbly vile as the unutterably evil hag La Chouette, who spends almost the entire film stabbing the rest of the cast in the back.

Made up to resemble something that would be more at home in a German expressionist horror film, Kerjean gives decrepit, one-eyed psychopathic harridans a bad name before her character meets a spectacularly grim end.  For what seems to have been aimed at a family audience, the film is surprisingly violent, with multiple stabbings, shootings, strangulations, drownings and other gruesome methods of dispatch offering a veritable banquet for the morbidly inclined.  It probably never occurred to the German censor that the film might have been claimed as a training film for the French Resistance...

Film Synopsis

France, 1830.  In the guise of a down-and-out named Rodolphe, the Grand-Duke of Gérolstein enters the lower depths of Paris in search of his missing daughter Fleur de Marie, the fruit of one of his erstwhile amorous adventures.  Before he can rescue Fleur, she is abducted by a deformed hag, La Chouette, acting on the orders of a jealous mistress, the countess MacGregor.  The girl is imprisoned in Saint-Lazare but is finally rescued by the duke when he obtains the proof that she is indeed his daughter.