Spooks South of the Border

Mexican film making appears to be the most active of the Hispanic industries but outsiders continue to ignore it. We know it's there because observers, who would never go in, pass their U.S. Spanish language theatres and international celebrities occasionally have worked in their films - Toshiro Mifune, Alida Valli, John Carradine, Max Von Sydow.  Mexican cinema broke into the festival circuit a couple of times, once after World War II, with the films of Emilio Fernández, María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz and others. More recently, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón launched Gael García Bernal.  

Mexican trash cinema is more relevant for our purposes - fat comedians slapping the bottoms of naked women, Latino kung fu fighters and masked luchadore wrestlers.  Mexican monster movies penetrated VHS, notably with the collection that K Gordon Murray dubbed for the 'States. However the history, nature and quality of the country’s vast output remains largely mysterious.

A corner of the curtain has been pulled back with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the Film Project restoring two nineteen-thirties titles, alongside their more austere ventures.

Ramon Peron’s 1933 la llorona (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwtlaAV) is said to be the first example of the Horror films which became a staple of the busy Mexican film business. It is clearly intended for the market that was absorbing the contemporary Hollywood entries. Among the Spanish language parallel versions of the first sound films, George Medford’s Dracula, shot on the decors of the Lugosi version, would have been an obvious model. Peron’s film got points locally for utilising Mexican subject matter, the legend of the wronged woman who becomes a weeping, child-drowning ghost.  The story comes back at regular intervals in their country’s films.

This production is clearly the work of people still learning sound filmmaking.  It is too slow and drab to be more than a curiosity for most of its run time. Severely padded, not unlike the first feature-length silents, this one kicks off with one of its unnecessary subplots, where a man passing a cemetery gate is terrorized by the Llorna shriek - CU of face with rictus grin and dissolve from the victim’s hand on the footpath to it on a sheet in the operating theatre. 

Ramon Pereda, the doctor there, goes home, where all is not well. His young son is enjoying his birthday party, unaware that he is menaced by the family curse, which claimed an earlier member at his age, while a sinister hooded figure with an Aztec ring is using secret passages that no one seems to have noticed.

In the library (a bookcase, a desk and a couple of suits of armor) Paco Martinez, the boy’s grandad, reads the story of the viceroy-era ancestor (also Pareda) who wouldn’t acknowledge his out-of-wedlock child, to the anguish of the kid’s mom, Adriana Lamar. In the street, frill collar foot-pads set upon Pareda in an unequal sword fight (passable choreography but dull choice of angles). Witness Marquis Alberto Marti comes to his aid, sending them on their way. Turns out that the aristo. is an admirer of Lamar and takes a dim view of the faithless lover, starting another duel.

     La llorna - wedding

Dastardly Pereda marries better in a lengthy church service and doubles back to collect his child from what he sees as his own house. In the ensuing friction, the mother dies and flies off as a double-exposed ghost. Back in the then-present, we get more action from the hooded figure, comic retainer Carlos Orellana  and  servants who have been in the family for generations. It’s time for Martinez to crack open another book of which the contents are represented by double-exposed shots of steel helmet conquistadors montaged rotating. Grandpa is killed with a stubby antique knife and the cops are called but the black hood figure makes off with the child,  placing it on the Aztec altar in the cellar, before the good guys catch up with them. Police inspector Alfredo del Diestro proclaims that there was no ghost, only to see a manifestation of La Llorna.

La llorna : secret passage

Simple minded stuff with a nasty/tacky quality not unlike like Edgar Ulmer’s contemporary U.S. The Black Cat, nothing particularly imaginative or accomplished here. Their Llorna doesn’t even weep let alone drown children, though it does manage the character’s shriek.  

However the second recovered piece, the following year’s El fantasma del convento/The Phantom of the Monastery (https://ok.ru/video/6739623611120) is a genuinely scary movie, more so than its Hollywood prototypes were prepared to be, and a distinct advance. Put that down to the Mexican industry’s growing experience and the promotion of  Fernando  De Fuentes from script collaborator to writer-editor-director, confirming his status as their leading pre-WW2 film maker. We are lucky that it arrives in an impressively restored, English-subtitled copy.

        Carlos Villatoro & Ruel

Credits cut straight to leads, elegant Marta Ruel with husband Enrique del Campo and their friend Carlos Villatoro stumbling about in some studio bushes, which the film assures us are a ravine. They look for shelter to Victorio Blanco, the cowelled monk encountered with his huge dog and he ushers them to the nearby monastery (locating long shots don’t match) where they get the whole treatment - vows of silence and separate cells, the shadow of a bearded monk flagellating, mummified hands, a meal that turns to ashes, a door barred with a decaying wooden cross and a Jeremiah quotation, and a howling wind which sends the anguished monks into despair.  Blacno & the dog, who Prior Martinez (la llorna’s grandad) told them didn’t exist, show up - don’t ask!

We get the backstory of Brother Rodrigo, who deployed a satanic book to steal the wife of his friend and who the monks attempt to contain in the closed cell.

Villatoro

When the visitors turn in, things get really spooky with the inexplicable bat shadow on the wall (an ingenious deployment of the film’s glass shot technology). Villatoro’s lusting for Ruel parallels that of the cursed Rodrigo. When he finds the barred cell open, he uncovers a shrouded body (clumsy face make up) wlth a shrunken hand which falls on the book beside it - and Ruel arrives, desire gleaming in her eyes.

Comes the dawn and the disturbed trio encounter jolly caretaker José Ignacio Rocha, who assures them there are no monks there and shows them the inexplicably decayed dining hall (which still has the accusing word “corbade” Ruel scratched on the long table) and a vault with the mummies of long-dead monks. The trio exit into sunny rural normalcy.

Despite the limitations of Mexico’s still early sound filmmaking (dodgy make-up and wardrobe and some unsteady pacing evident), this one mounts to the genuinely disturbing scene in the finally opened cell. The film has an intensity that its US models couldn’t or wouldn’t match. Fuentes had mastered ignoring logic and narrative in favour of atmosphere and shock. It is not the simple-minded affair it resembles, with Ruel’s cynical take on events set against formula elements. “Quien sabe?”

Long before The Exorcist, Mexican cinema had brought into play the exploitation potential of Catholicism -  religious robes & ceremony, damnation, scourging, crucifixion, resurrection. A comparison between this film and European Biblical movie drama makes a viewer sharply aware of differences. La Llorna has its extended Cathedral marriage and a third restored film, Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes is also set in a Monastery. My favorite touch in Fernand Méndez' 1957 El Vampiro is the disinterred aunt who spends the whole film proffering a giant ceramic crucifix.  Mix this with indigenous religion, as in The Day of the Dead.  When it came to a battle of imageries, contemporary Marxist states were totally upstaged. Best they could manage was a few Union Parade banners or maybe a panorama of hands raising rifles above the heads of the crowd.

Fantasma - Martinez, Del Campo, Ruel & Villatoro with Last Supper mural.

The personnel on these films continued working into the fifties and beyond. Generally, despite determined effort, I’ve never been able to see their other work, about which I remain curious. De Fuentes' excellent Vamonos con Pancho Villa did slip into my grasp a few years back, another film that is not as simple-minded as might be expected. That makes the current discoveries more valuable than they might be. The fact that The Ghost of the Monastery proved remarkable is a nice bonus. It really is time that I tried to track down Fuentes's other work. 

Santo's Mummies of Guanajuato -  compare Fantasma.

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Barrie Pattison 2025.

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2025.

A new Spanish Film Festival is a welcome reminder that even in what are not the best of times, it can still be worth going to the movies. As well as adventurous handling, the Spanish films are energised by showing recent history as a live issue. The selection I saw tended to the grim side. Alex De Iglasea and Santo Segura were missed. Let's also note these Hispanic Film events have a large Latin American element. Once again, we score a significant part of the year's best viewing. I regret that it's too expensive and too time-consuming to work through the whole card, but cherry-picking the 2025 selection had its rewards.

Rafa Cortéz’ (back after the 2006 Yo) provided Amanece en Samaná / Samana Sunrise, which turned out to be unexpectedly substantial.  It’s a (sort of) multiverse movie. There are a few of those in the manner of the lingering Marvel model - Redux Redux in the Sydney Film Festival. They get compared to Sliding Doors  (people forget Mario Adorf in Straße der Verheißung  (Street of Shame)  but this one veers closer to Jimmy Stewart's vision in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Luis Tozar, Bábara Santa-Cruz & Luis Zahera

The new film kicks off with two old-friend middle aged couples flying into a  pre-season Samana resort. Maria Louisa Mayol & Luis Tosar (previously together in Fatum) and Luis Zahera & Bárbara Santa-Cruz (Tres bodas da mes) are not the most interesting subjects, filmed too close and squabbling about opening the hotel's sealed liquor or  Tosar’s dull job in his father-in-law’s paper works - from habit he evaluates the Hotel’s menu cards. We wonder what the imposing actor is doing in this lightweight. We find out.

Maria Louise lets slip that way back she manipulated the loss of her car keys to set in train her marriage to  Tozar and, in the confrontation which follows, she hits her head on a rock. That puts her out only to wake as the long-time wife of Zahera, who she detests. The new sleeping arrangements send her spare. Everyone thinks she’s nuts when she tries to conform events to the old model. Holidaying Fellow guest, English-speaking therapist Charles Dance suggests, via his beach boy translator Andresito Germosen De La Cruz, that they should indulge her till she recovers and Santa Cruz keeps on banging her with Beach Tennis paddles to try and jolt her back to reality. 

The piece moves past the comic material into Maria Louisa’s alarming realization that she has ruined men in two realities and that her son now has Santa Cruz for a mother. Both Zahera and Tozar have disturbing monologues about the lives she has created for them. Maria  Louiza goes to sleep apalled but sun up brings yet another reality. There's no boring explanation footage either.

Production gives an illusion of lush life and the performers make what you would expect to be trivial material into something genuinely disturbing. This one is unsettling.

Marcel Barrena’s El 47  rivals it as a hit of the event.

His opening recalls the De Sica ll tetto.  Here the Catalan-speakers have been moved from now desirable Extremadura land to a remote hill area on the other side of the mountain from Barcelona. They try to exploit a legal loophole where they can squat a structure if it has a roof at sunrise, extorted by the building materials salesman and seeing their work smashed by the Guardia Civil patrol, when it remains incomplete by dawn.  They turn to Eduárd Fernandez for leadership and he says don’t build a district. Everyone work on putting up one house at a time. One scornful opponent says “Whose house gets built first?” and Eduárd comes back, “Yours!” The troopers, back next sunrise with sledgehammer workers, are outsmarted. We have established our hero, the officer, the residents and caring nurse-nun, Clara Segura whose religion is confronting to Eduárd.

Cut, with overlapping sound, and it’s become 1958 Torre Baró, a newly built-up hillside with bricks holding the flat roofs in place and residents complaining about inadequate power, water and transport. The men play cards out of doors and Segura has given up her calling to marry red Plaza Carelunya bus driver Eduardo and run the community school in an abandoned trolley car, where the kids have to hold the plastic on the window to keep out the wind.

There’s a fatal house fire.  The brigade can’t get the wagon up the grade and water supply fails, which is breaking point for Eduárd. He wants his bus company to run a Torre Baró route but no one seems to know how he should make an application, including the clerk who has to handle the paperwork. A fellow driver vandalises Eduárd's bus in protest and the union organiser claims to be unable to help. However a regular passenger is a council clerk and figures it out. Our hero says that one will be mayor one day.  Winning teen daughter Zoe Bonafonte is brought back from the station by the scornful policeman, when she’s caught joining in protest graffiti-ing city hall. The cop sees himself as being helpful (“People fall out of windows there”) The lavishly decorated council chambers and public buildings contrast with basic homes. When Eduárd finally gets to make his nervously rehearsed pitch,  they say the bendy buses can’t get up the hill.

Our hero won’t take no and hijacks his own bus for a rousing finale, where they have to board over potholes and knock down markers to make the climb. As they complete the run, the sedate scoring gives way to the cheering residents' traditional music, along with their towering carnival stilt men.

The film effectively offers incidents as spontaneous indignation. This gets to be winning as when Torre Baró’s women and girls, who never learned to read, file into Segura’s meager classroom for lessons or the diverse passengers elect to stay on Fernandez' co-opted bus - lawyer, well well-dressed older woman and finally the daughter. There’s not a dry eye in the house and they do it again with the school choir, where the other members leave the stage and Bonafonte standing alone does the Republican “Gallo nero, gallo rojo” song, to the befuddlement of the teacher.

Film making avoids glossy production values, matching the washed-out tones of the old location footage and conforming the format to the Academy frame, like The Phonician Scheme and this event's Ocho. Fernandez has made the jump from leading man to imposing character actor and, as in their immigrant smuggling piece Mediterraneo, he and director Barrena are an impressive combination. El 47 is pretty much the text book on activist filmmaking, though the most political it gets is the account of Falangists putting four rounds into the lead’s father. The makers must have liked that, using the actual driver character reading his late parent’s letter as an epilogue. The final insert of putting up the bus stop sign deserved a round of applause - and got it. How often does that happen at a movie?

Also on their hits list came la infiltrada /Undercover a Spanish cop piece, which started with a couple of extra claims on our attention. It deals with the unfamiliar Basque Nationalists’ ETA movement, whose graffiti the art department dawbs on the genuine locations (and would have had to put in time scrubbing off after the shoot) and it features Luis Tozar again. His briefing, where he describes the difference between undercover and covert work, is the point where the film takes hold and once again the makers signal their approval by repeating it at the end. Tozar takes second billing to director Arantxa Echevarría’s regular star, Carolina Yuste - think a young, non-singing Barabara Streisand.  

 

Yuste has the central role of the provincial girl who witnesses a nineties ETA murder at the film’s opening, being inspired to become a cadet at the Ávila Police Academy. National Police commander Tozar spreads photos of the graduating class on his superior’s table and, over his objections, picks out hers, saying that all previous attempts to infiltrate the terrorists have been detected and they have to choose the least likely. Later at a key moment, a woman on Tozar’s team, who has become pregnant, similarly intervenes as their least suspicious-looking member.

The bulk of the films covers the eight years in which Yuste moves to San Sebastian and establishes herself with Basque sympathisers, fly postering the city and working with their theatre group till she is trusted to the point where they have her take in an organisation man wanted for a murder, getting a new apartment especially.  Tozar’s team is nearly caught putting in secret microphones. The fugitive turns out to be a presentable young man to whom Yuste is unwillingly drawn. His disconnected recall of the assassination attempt that put him on the most wanted list, is one of the film’s highlights.

 The film etches in the political background, where the National Police Unit is constantly frustrated by the successes of the competing Guardia Civil getting all the glory, so that what becomes eight years of work, with Yuste dealing on a daily basis with people who could kill her instantly, looks like being wasted. Funding cuts are given as an excuse but they suspect the influence of their law enforcement rivals who have just had a well-publicised success. The Basque separatist movement gets no analysis, with the film’s last word a reference to the eight hundred and fifty murders down to ETA.

Yuste resists orders to quit, though she now scrubs her skin after contact and conflicts with the organisation bigwig she drives for, facing off with him about his carrying a give-away pistol. He comes close to exposing her, calling the numbers on her cell ‘phone menu as he prepares his major outrage - and he has rotten taste in TV programs, does sloppy house cleaning and maltreats her cat, which becomes a key element.

The crisp location photography is an asset and editing, that breaks out in three second cuts during the action material, gets attention but it is the uniform standard of performance that is the main asset. This is not an unfamiliar subject. Think Bullets or Ballots, The Street With No Name or Nevada Smith. Miriam Hopkins’ “treating friends as enemies and enemies as friends” outburst in Virginia City is a remarkably close match. However this film can claim to be the most plausible and detailed version we have on film. It has been a hit in its home market. 

Julio Medem is on the way to being Spain's most admired director and there's no way to deny the ambition of his new Ocho/8.

However the film is hard to follow with its eight successive time shifts over ninety years from the Spanish Civil War to the present, marked by relevant changes in screen formats. Performers come back as their descendants to confuse the issue. 

Medem, Alvarro Morte & Javier Rey 

In 1930’s Spain, Republicans and the Royalists face off over the recent election as two babies are born in adjacent villages, with the doctor having to rush from one delivery to the other - in tinted monochrome Academy Frame.

Needless to say, the two children grow in hostile camps with Ana Rujas marrying Javier Rey the soldier member of the firing squad that offs his opposite number, the free thinker school teacher following an order personally signed by Generalisimo Franco. Rey becomes a conservative business success, who expects his wife to attend church in severe clothes, (veil & no neckline) She skips mass to make it with cab driver Alvarro Morte,  but their pairing is sabotaged by his mum’s demise, meannig her stuffy husband ends up raising a child that’s not his a couple of screen ratios later.

The first elections in forty-one years coincide with Catalan separatist demos in which one of Rujas' sons is killed by the other, who gets fifteen years (and a shift to full screen two to one) before the leads are united in one of those technically impressive but eerily off-putting aged make-ups.

The two branches of the family scrap at the wedding anniversary lunch, about the time Anna gets the grim prognosis and takes to the bed we saw her born in at the opening.

It’s meant to tell us something about Spain as a divided society where the Republican heritage is the one to treasure, while impressing with its inventive technique, but it holds attention more from curiosity than content - distractions like lengthy mobile camera work that has us trying to spot the invisible edits when characters leave the studio process photography car and enter genuine exteriors.

This one may have taken on the less-than-inspiring model of The Brutalist.

 

Marina Seresesky's Sin instrucciones/Babies Don’t Come With Instructions is a feel-good movie with a twist. This one is agreeable enough and has a good standard of production, though it seems made to order.

Paco Leon & Maia Zaitegi

Established comedian Paco Leon (Tribu, Mamá o papá) does the middle-aged dropout who has the perfect life as a Canary Islands drinks waiter with plenty of female company, when old fling Silvia Alonso shows up with a baby, which she dumps on Leon. She burns down his sea front home and scoops the cash out of the cafe till, so Paco’s options are shrinking but he pursues her to Blbao (lots of scenics in this one) with a photo of Alonso in a park there as his only clue. He gets arrested in the company of amiable unlicensed black umbrella salesman Malcolm Treviño-Sitté, whose help he enlists along with the scaffolder who saw our hero rescue the kid from a plank walkway despite his (laboured) fear of heights. They become the basis of his new life - eight years later and we cut to his playpen home where he raises Maia Zaitegi without too much reliance on teachers, of which the school councilor takes a dim view. 

To complicate matters Alonzo shows up again, having kicked her habit and acquired a so nice German fiancé. Ah! but there’s more.

Bright colours, beautiful people, baby poo, beach scenics, shooting on the roof of the Ghery Guggenheim museum, legal complications and a twist ending. The audience seemed happy.

Calladita, the first film of writer-director Miguel Faus, aims at being a sexy Latino lesson on social inequalities but runs too long and too familiar. Despite realist ambitions, it's a lesser entry in the Regles de jeu-Theorema-Parasite cycle about perverse relations between employers and servants. The hand of promoter Stephen Soderberg is vaguely visible - what credited Mike Judge contributed less so,

 The opening shot reveals Colombian maid Paula Grimaldo, framed in what proves to be a window whose glass she is cleaning. The symbolism of the invisible partition is maintained. Turns out that she is working for the rich Barcelona art dealer family holidaying in their Costa Brava rental home, while they nurse the sale of the giant garden sculpture that will be their biggest deal. Politeness and consideration are, of course, a deception as they string Paula along with the prospect of residency and the gift of an out-moded Super Mario console. She maintains the home's showroom finish, while encouraging stray cats with the canned sardines she was supposed to poison for them, after the grandfather has the owner take out the one she was petting with a shotgun blast, leaving blood for her to clean up. 

Quiet Maid - Paula Grimaldo

Paula pilfers skimpy bikini-clad or topless blonde daughter Violeta Rodriguez’ pink cell ‘phone to arrange a Tinder rendezvous, making out with the contact while the family is away - anal in the pink (again) Flamingo float in the pool. The brother also goes full frontal and there’s the illicit beach party with the neighbor’s clued-in maid, attention-getting Nany Tovar, and the guy who turns agro when Paula won’t accept his come-on.

The plan of Paula, working to finance the education of her younger sister, hits the shredder about the time the family all prove to be despicable, even Gramps admitting that the residency thing depends on her staying with them as a menial. Climax and the point where the film can claim to be cutting edge, is the son, and his yobo drinking mates, all abruptly in big close-ups, offering the prospect of laying the money to solve her problems on the table if Paula will blow them. She gets to be the focus of our sympathy turning them down and he rats her out about the flamingo to mother Adriana Gil, still recognisable from her glamour parts - La Belle Epoque.  Complications with the signature to a Crypto fund - like the one that's a source of the finance for this film.  

Calladita is glossy but not altogether polished. Elements are planted obviously - the poison, the cats, the inflatable, the sculpture we expect to get smashed - but most are not deployed in the way we anticipate, which is not all that clever but still worth a look. Grimaldo is plausible and her being as calculating as the exploitator family is a passable twist. The film only has traction when she considers and rejects the low life solution to her problems.

An intresting enough opening offered hope for Sebastián Schindel’s grim Argie drama Una muerte silenciosa / A Silent Death. The staff at Alejandro (El Bar) Awada’s Estancia Copenhague Patagonia hunting lodge are helping American guests shoot an imposing Twelve Point Stag in the snow -- dark riders on the white background. The sheep-stealing family nearby are glimpsed through telescope sights on the hunting rifle. Told a few sheep are not a big deal, Awada responds “I will lose respect.” Meanwhile, there’s a triangle situation between youngsters - Gonzalo Garrido the photographer son, Ramiro Pintor, a dope-smoking smuggler and local girl Sol Wainer. Tensions develop when Pintor ups the price on the Mauser pistol Garrido wants to buy as a gift for his dad and it becomes an erratic murder weapon, killing the girl. The local gendarmes do interviews with the people who were in earshot of the lethal second burst of pistol fire.

Unsatisfied with the inconclusive investigation of his niece’s death, hunter Joaquín Furriel  (El año de la Furia) makes his own inquiry, despite his sleeping pill addiction and the suspicious circumstances of the driving accident which killed his brother, when the wagon they were in turned over.

None of the possibilities of the early scenes deliver. Frequently dim ‘scope images and art director detail (charging an ammunition clip,  the Copenhagen snow globe, a red lit dark-room, purloined VHS tapes, skinning stolen sheep) don’t make the intrigue any more involving. The cast suggests they might impress in better material.

Not every film was a beauty but I can't help wishing the material we get from other sources hit the standard of these.

Alvarro Morte, Javier Morgarde &  Ana Rujas filming Medem's 8

Barrie Pattison 2025

Imaginary Voyaging.

Facing Le voyage imaginaire again after all this time jets me back to my landfall in serious movie activity - the world of Penguin Film Review, Film Societies and “Film Appreciation.” where you could get by remembering half a dozen names - Sergei Eisenstein, John Grierson, David Lean in his Dickens Period, Leni Reifenstahl, Charlie Chaplin  - and René Clair.

 René Clair was supposed to be the fun one. It came as a blow to find his work was so clumsy in comparison to his American and German Contemporaries.

The restoration on  Paris Cinémathèque’s Henri site prompted me to have another look at Le voyage imaginaire. By 1926, our man had gained some traction. It features a couple of the players who will figure in Clair’s more famous works - Albert Préjean and Jim Gerald, unfortunately not the leads but a comic duo backing a Swedish ballet dancer named Jean Börlin and the winning Dolly Davis.

Voyage Imaginaire & decor

 Börlin’s bank clerk is harassed on all sides. Co-workers Préjean and Gerald bully him and he’s too timid to move on office Dactylo Davis. The bouquet he wanted to give her migrates round the bank ending in Prejean’s button hole in a lengthy, Chaplinesque routine that isn’t funny. A shawled crone arrives in a decorated auto and convinces Börlin that he will receive a magic ring guaranteeing a happy life. A loop falls off the curtain rail and his colleagues convince him it is the charmed object. Biographer Jean Mitry suggests this is derived from the fake enchanted umbrella in the Harold Lloyd Grandma’s Boy and we will get some of the trick photography (upside down camera, jump cuts) done better in the films of Buster Keaton.

The action moves outside and, like Nicolas Koline in  Le Braisier Ardent’s two years earlier,  Börlin tumbles down a (soso animation) rabbit hole, not into the Trouve Tout Agency this time but a fairy land - balloons, seashells, cellophane-covered walls and meshing teeth doors. The crone tells him that she is a fairy under an ugly spell which his kiss will remove and our hero reluctantly complies, turning her youthful. All her fairy sisters are eager for the same and soon the decor is full of underclad women. M. Clair’s notion of raunchy hasn’t come down the years well. The bad fairy is a fuzzy-haired (boot-polish) black girl who takes a dim view of our hero pairing with Mlle. Davis. Cinderella, Blue Beard (!) and Puss in Boots show up. Via some shonky mist FX work, the bank staff are transferred to the roof of Notre Dame - which does class up the visuals. Préjean, then a stunt actor, does all the dangerous stuff. (Clair will also shoot several films on the Eiffel Tower)

 From here, action moves to the Musé Grevin, where the waxworks (actors with painted eye lids) come to life After Hours and their tableau of The Terror condemns Börlin, now transformed into a bull dog,

René Clair

 to the miniature guillotine (don’t ask) from which he is rescued by Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin (a passable imitator). Curiously, this was the only part of the film which I remembered from a fifty year back one-night run at London’s French Institute. A Happy Ending follows.

Le voyage imaginaire is recognisably René Clair and visibly French silent cinema, between Meliés & Ivan Mozjoukine - between primitive and accomplished. Not the work of a major talent but it is intriguing to see someone trying to push the envelope.

Clair did have his moments - Le chapeau de paille d’Italie, a WW2 run in the ‘States and three films with Gerard Philippe. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to play to his strengths. He should have stayed with Eugène Labiche and Hollywood. Too much of the rest was embarrassingly fun free and lame, outclassed by the best work of its day to which it was too often compared. With his  Académie Française status, no one was game to talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

 

The copy of Voyage imaginaire at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9hj-Cjcts has English subtitles, while the one on the Paris Cinémathèque’s Henri site is slightly better quality.

Barrie Pattison 2023