The Sunday Intertitle: A few pricks of my serum

Episode Eight of BARRABAS, or “Which character will Louis Feuillade abduct to a lonely villa this week?” Since the episode is called The Mysterious Mansion, any possibility of disappointment is banished in advance. The lucky winner is retired shipping agent Maurice Bernard, kidnapped by two men of the bench variety and forced to write a reassuring note to his housekeeper.

The mansion is plenty mysterious! Man Ray would plotz.

Varese meanwhile rents his own rival lonely villa, or rather a lovely villa, overlooking the Med. His entourage moves in. Is this episode mainly going to be about moving in? A kind of daytime reality show, 1919 style?

Feuillade may not be keen on camera movement, but he shows the passage of time in père Bernard’s prison with artistic changes of lighting and tinting:

And, in the morning, as low-quality sunlight invades the cell, M. Bernard makes a discovery that greatly advances our understanding of the plot, which was originally about the disappearance of a rich American. This room was apparently the former prison of the vanished Lewis Mortimer (I like to think of him as the son of Mortimer the railroad baron from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and he’s scratched on the wall his will, dividing his vast fortune among several of our heroes (it’s nice to note that the Biscotin clan is not neglected).

Brilliantly, this discovery is made by the one character to whom it means least, Bernard not having met any of the characters referred to in the hand-scratched plasterwork testimony.

in a Tolkeinesque romantic touch, the wall-will is only legible by dawn’s first rays, which accounts for the kidnappers never having noticed it.

Now Strelitz makes his move: he tells Bernard he can either pay off his debts and salvage his business, or keep him entombed forever. All Bernard has to do is sign a document stating that Varese’s dad didn’t drown at sea. Of course the significance of this crime means nothing to Bernard, but he knows it would be a crime, so he’s reluctant. Feuillade shows us his thought processes in a series of iris shots — he recalls Mortimer’s imprisonment-for-life in the lonely villa, as inscribed on its wall, and pictures his lovely home which he might never see again. Bernard (another marvelous actor, but nameless now and perhaps for evermore) is torn, but gives in.

He’s returned home, and immediately Varese and reporter Raoul descended upon him. Poor Bernard — his maiden flight, the dream of his old age, turned into a barnstorming terror ride, he’s been abducted and blackmailed, and now he must traduce himself before pesky strangers. Throughout the lies that follow, as he dutifully repeats Strelitz’s cover story, his poor old honest face frantically signals his internal torment, but Raoul is too busy comforting the distressed Varese to notice. His litany of lies completed, Bernard faints dead away, like Elia Kazan faced with a tricky question about his HIAC testimony.

Bernard’s performance is being monitored from upstairs by the venal Dr. Lucius. To show him putting his ear to the floor, Feuillade is forced into one of his rare reframings, a tilt that shows the doc raising his head and looking thoughtful. It’s pretty clunky, but then panning or tilting while hand-cranking a camera can’t have been easy. American filmmakers got better at it because they tended to do it more. Feuillade’s team of cinematographers never got the practice, but their stationary shots are exquisite — Olivier Assayas in IRMA VEP has his fictional director marvel at the innocence and beauty of the framing.

Varese and Raoul having left in shock, the venal Dr Lucius now descends from the upstairs room, which we learn he has rented. He revives Bernard and promises that “a few pricks of my serum” will have Bernard on his feet in no time. Meanwhile he gives him a bottle to sniff which makes Bernard conk out altogether.

Stealing the unconscious retiree’s keys, Lucius now fetches from his bureau the proof that Varese died an innocent drowned steamship passenger and not a guillotined criminal. All seems lost —

But then the loveable rascal Laugier, who has been monitoring the house from the garden, bounds in through the window, biffs Dr. Lucius on the snoot, and makes off with the proof! I tell you, I rarely get this kind of thrill from modern movies. The emotional ups and downs are expertly orchestrated here.

Touching scene where Laugier presents the evidence to Varese — at last, his family reputation is saved and Strelitz’s fiendish hold over him broken! Then all the supporting cast arrive in a fleet of limos to move into the villa, and we’re back to daytime reality show stuff again. The Biscotins, the distrait Mme Rougier and daughter, the tattooed nurse, Varese’s sister, all troop from vehicles to villa, appreciating or not, according to mental state and social class, their palatial new surroundings.

Meanwhile, in a splendid comic denouement to the episode, Bernard awakens from his drug-induced stupor to find his doctor prone on the floor from Laugier’s snoot-biff. He and his housekeeper hoist the afflicted medico into a chair, and Bernard thinks to give him a sniff of his own tonic to revive him.

Force-sniffed his own knock-out drops, Lucius faints dead away. Funny, thinks Bernard. Better give him another too. Hmm, that didn’t do the trick. Maybe third time’s the charm.

Fade-out on the fiendish doc being given potentially fatal doses of his own medicine.

TO BE CONTINUED

Beards Over Nice

Music: since the Gaumont-Pathé Archive’s copy of BARRABAS has no music, I’ve been playing different stuff to accompany it. Morricone’s more psychedelic thriller scores work surprisingly well, but this time I played some of Edgard Varèse’s electronic musique concrète which was also amazingly effective. In both cases the paranoid modernity of Feuillade’s world emerged from behind the facade of 1919 trappings.

BARRABAS takes to the air in its seventh episode, reminding me of the arresting passage at the start of the first Fantomas book in which it is solemnly predicted that one day aeroplanes will be used for terroristic purposes. in this serial, however, the evil Strelitz uses them mainly for hopping about from Paris to Marseilles to Nice.

Chap 7. saw our heroes pretty consistently thwarting Strelitz in a variety of ways. The pattern is reversed this time. They think they’ve got the drop on him in Marseilles, and are even on the point of stealing from him the documentary evidence he’s using to blackmail lawyer Varèse. But they stupidly let both mastercriminal and compromat slip through their fingers.

Also in Marseilles, both Raoul the noble journalist and the dastardly Strelitz learn of a former shipping company man who may be able to confirm whether Varese’s dad drowning at sea or survived, possibly to become the guillotined false-Rougier, which would obviously be a disgrace to Varèse’s name, a blot on his escutcheon, if escutcheon is the word I want.

Because he has a plane, Strelitz is able to get to the retired shipping agent first. Mind you, it’s not much of a plane. Its bodywork owes more to the perambulator or babycart in design than to any aerodynamic vessel. Its tail is connected to the cockpit by mere struts — the whole middle of the vehicle just seems to go away. I wouldn’t get in that thing even on the ground, it looks apt to collapse jaggedly into scrap.

Bernard the shipping agent turns out to have a beard almost as nice as Strelitz’s. He’s able to explain that Varese père did indeed perish at sea — he has documents showing that the man’s wallet was stolen, which explains why Strelitz has the unused steamship ticket. Obviously, poor Bernard must be gotten out of the way.

But first, Strelitz treats him to a ride on his little plane. The pilot does all sorts of risky manoeuvres like flying under a bridge, while Strelitz uses the time to fetch a henchman. Fantastic stunts and landscapes and aerial photography. By the time the flustered Bernard is returned to earth, his abductors are ready to take him for another kind of ride…

TO BE CONTINUED

The Sunday Intertitle: A Tumult of Hypotheses

Episode Six of BARRABAS has a lot of shoe leather but also a good deal of emotion.

We short-circuit narrative delays by having Simone Delpierre, daughter of the false-Rougier, discover (offscreen) a news article about her father, who has been guillotined under his assumed name. So she naturally visits the slain man’s lawyer, our hero, Varese, not knowing that he may be her long-lost half-brother. Do try to keep up.

Simone is played by Lugane, an actress married to Louis Feuillade. But she’s very good, as are all the actors. And I predict that la petite Odette, her screen daughter, will end up besties with the Biscotin’s little boy. This is that kind of show.

Because Feuillade’s serials are fantastical nightmares of paranoia, he doesn’t get the credit for sophisticated performances that Griffith has often received. But his actors are both as subtle and as fervid in their melodramatics as anyone across the pond. Feuillade may not have a powerhouse like Gish at his command, but his ensemble casts bring conviction and nuance to the preposterous plots.

Regular Feuillade star Fernand Herrmann, as Varese, portrays his character’s “tumult of hypotheses” extremely well — a very detailed and clever performance — you can chart the emotions travelling across his chubby little face in waves. Obviously bourgeoise respectability is a major motivating force at this time, and admitting to Simone that her father received a judicial neck-shortening operation isn’t the done thing. Unfortunately, the evil Strelitz now appears and breaks the bad news to her in the foulest way possible, causing her to faint dead away.

Where’s a tattooed nurse when you need one?

Strelitz calls his venal doctor to have Simone put away. False imprisonment for insanity is a great melodramatic staple, going back to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, and is always very powerful. It speaks to our innate sense of justice and injustice, and also, it was a real thing that happened a lot, usually to inconvenient women.

However, when Simone comes to, she really is distracted to the point of mental estrangement, and can only repeat a request to be taken to her father’s grave. Instead she’s taken to another of Feuillade’s dreaded lonely villas, under the “care” of the fiendish Lucius.

Fortunately, Strelitz has made the rookie error of introducing two of his reluctant recruits, and Noelle the tattooed nurse, an employee at Lucius’ funny farm, is in cahoots I believe they’re called with Varese. A plan is hatched for the Biscotin family, who have now sold their creamery and intend to go into perfumes in Nice — can I suggest they call their shop Nice Smells? — to help Noelle and Simone escape the loony bin.

This leads to the image spoilered by this episode’s poster — Noelle clocking Lucius with a carriage clock. Unusual behaviour for a sister of mercy, but needs must. We’re told that the surrealists enjoyed Feuillade’s serials, which by the twenties had somehow lost their intertitles, rendering plots opaque, motivations incomprehensible and outbursts of violence like this completely mysterious and shocking.