Tih Minh (1918)
Directed by Louis Feuillade

Film Review

Tih Minh was the last but one of Louis Feuillade's thriller serials, and the least well-known.  It repeats the successful formula of Feuillade's previous serials - Fantômas (1913-14), Les Vampires (1915) and Judex (1916) - but is noticeably different both in its tone and in its subject matter.  Whilst Tih Minh can certainly be enjoyed as a fast-moving escapist thriller, distilling the best elements of the director's earlier serials into an exciting adventure epic, its real value lies in what it has to say about the crises facing humanity in the aftermath of the First World War.  Anticipating Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Tih Minh presents a lawless world in which the conventional figures of authority are either totally absent or else completely impotent, leaving it to the individual to 'go it alone' and fight a solo crusade against a nebulous threat that is constantly present and constantly changing its appearance.  It is a world lacking both strong leadership and moral orientation, in which the menace is no longer clearly defined as it was before WWI but something far more amorphous and ambiguous, and where gung-ho Boy's Own vigilantism by cocksure individuals has come to replace the rule of law.  How uncannily familiar this world appears.  How closely it resembles the one we now inhabit, almost a hundred years after the film was made - a fractured, leaderless world slowly drifting towards anarchy.

The most chilling aspect of Tih Minh is how the principal villains of the piece - the evil Hun Dr Gilson and his Hindu sidekick Kistna - are able to distort reality for their own ends, which they do by adopting various convincing disguises which prevent us from seeing who they really are and also by administering some nasty, mind-altering concoctions to their victims.  In a similar fashion, Feuillade himself bends reality to a far greater extent in this serial than in any other film he made, giving it an uncanny dream-like feel, which the endless recycling of the same plot ideas can only exacerbate. This is a film that takes déjà vu to its limit.   In one bizarre, Cocteau-like sequence, the heroes enter a vast chamber filled with kidnapped society women who, under the evil doctor's influence, have come to resemble a hoard of Pre-Raphaelite zombies.  Other oneiric touches crop up throughout the film, giving it a very distinctive kind of dark and mysterious poetry that is unique in Feuillade's oeuvre.  It is hard to say how much of this we can attribute to Feuillade's assistant Julien Duvivier but there is an unmistakable foretaste of the bleak poetic realism that would feature in Duvivier's subsequent films.

Having played the title character in Feuillade's earlier Judex, René Cresté was a natural shoe-in for the part of the derring-do explorer-hero Jacques d'Athys, one of his last screen roles before his untimely death in 1922.   The role of Tih Minh went to the British actress Mary Harald, who also appeared alongside Cresté in Feuillade's Vendémiaire (1918), a far more overt exploration of the after-effects of the First World War.  Light relief is provided by another Feuillade favourite, the likeable comic actor Georges Biscot, who would star in the director's last thriller serial, Barrabas (1919).  Looking like a slightly grown-up, more up-market version of Stan Laurel, Biscot brings great comedic value to the film, without which it would have been almost monotonously grim.  Whereas the other heroes get to lay into the bad guys with swift punches and blazing guns, Biscot's humorous manservant Placide proves to be just as effective at fending off rampaging evil with a garden hose pipe.

As in Feuillade's other serials, it is the villains that prove to be far more interesting than the heroes.  Gaston Michel's Dr Gilson is an obvious forerunner of Lang's Dr Mabuse, a sinister shape-changer who, like Fantômas, seems to have supernatural powers of survival and an endless capacity for evil.  Just as creepy is Gilson's turban-wearing partner in crime, Kistna, who seems to be an eerie melange of Fu Manchu and Svengali, epitomising western stereotypical fears of the mysterious East.   No less fascinating is Georgette Faraboni's Marquise Dolorès, the most sultry and scarily reptilian of Feuillade's female creations.  Desirable, duplicitous and quite deadly, Dolorès is the very essence of a proto femme fatale.  Next to her, the other female characters, whilst generally spunky and emancipated, have almost no personality at all (the one exception being the cute, gun-totting maid Rosette).  Tih Minh, the supposed heroine, ends up being a mere plot device.  Like the Pearl White character in Louis J. Gasnier's The Perils of Pauline (1914), her job is simply to get herself into dangerous situations to drive the plot along.  After a while, you lose count of how many times she is abducted, hypnotised, drugged and left dangling from a dizzying precipice.

When he made Tih Minh at the age of 45, Louis Feuillade was at the height of his creative powers and knew it.  Not only is this the most sophisticated of his thriller serials, it is chock-full of some of his most impressive set-pieces.  Even though there is a fair amount of repetition, Feuillade manages to sustain the pace across twelve episodes and seven hours, gradually building to an adrenalin-pumping climax in the final gripping instalment.  The shift of location from gloomy Paris to the sun-drenched Côte d'Azur also gives the film a distinctive feel, whilst allowing for some more elaborate action sequences that Feuillade would have had difficulty filming in the environs of Paris.  In addition to the obligatory rooftop chase, there are car chases and shoot-outs galore along the mountain Riviera roads, and an explosive climax in a quarry.  Feuillade's technique may be modest by today's standards (no fancy camera motion or overblown effects) but he still manages to put together a fast-paced action thriller that holds the attention as well as any compulsive page-turner.  Most importantly, it provides a stark and unsettling vision of what the world will become without a clear moral purpose and firm, benign leadership - a world teetering on the brink of chaos and confusion, where every man, woman and dog has to fend for himself.  Get your hose pipe ready.

Tih Minh was originally screened in twelve episodes:
1. Le philtre d'oubli
2. Deux drames dans la nuit
3. Les mystères de la Villa Circé
4. L'homme dans la malle
5. Chez les fous
6. Les oiseaux de nuit
7. Evocation
8. Sous le voile
9. La branche de salut
10. Mercredi 13
11. Le document 29
12. Justice

Film Synopsis

After an expedition to Indochina, the French explorer Jacques d'Athys returns to his home in Nice, accompanied by Tih Minh, an attractive young woman he met on his travels and whom he intends to marry.  Before the wedding, Athys sets off for India, accompanied by his faithful servant Placide.  He leaves Tih Minh in the care of his sister Jeanne.  Two years later, Athys returns to Nice with a sacred book, the Nalodaya.  Unbeknown to the explorer, this book contains a handwritten coded testament which reveals the location of a fabulous treasure and also sensitive government information that could prove decisive in the event of another European war.  A gang of international spies led by the evil German Dr Gilson is determined to get its hands on this coded message and begins by kidnapping Tih Minh and wiping her memory with an amnesia-inducing drug.  Athys has no choice but to hand over the book, but only after the well-meaning Placide has removed the handwritten addendum.  Athys had the good foresight to take a photograph of this page before Placide destroyed it, but it isn't long before his enemies get to hear of this.  There is nothing Dr Gilson and his associates will not do to lay their hands on the coded message - and equally there is nothing that Athys will not do to thwart them in their endeavour, if only to protect his beloved Tih Minh...