Edmond T. Greville had almost 40 films on his Director's CV but is probably remembered only for The Hands Of Orlac which is a great pity as he proves himself here to be a fine craftsman. During the several years he spent making films in France Erich Von Stroheim played many diverse characters but never, to my knowledge, a pipe-smoking sea captain, still, there's a first time for everything. The only other 'name' in the cast is Dora Doll who by this time could phone in the stereotypical lush, slut, femme fatale, perm any two from three, and does so here as the drunken, sluttish wife of novelist manque Blaise d'Orliac, who takes a bullet where it will do the most good (note the similarity to Hands Of ... close enough for me to be able to say she perished at the hands of D'Orliac. Scott Fitzgerald's breakthrough novel in 1929 was This Side Of Paradise and clearly Greville wanted to show us another side and does so by straying into Marcel Pagnol country, literally in setting his film in Provence and figuratively by peopling his small town with Pagnol types as they might have appeared two decades after the Marius trilogy; on the other hand we could argue that what we have here is a prototype of Peyton Place which in 1953 was still in the head of Grace Metalious. Whichever way you slice it this is a fine French movie; a friend of mine has drawn attention to the bells which are heard throughout but he seems to have missed their secondary message; they were in fact warning us that the dreaded New Wavelet was on the horizon and that for a brief moment of madness fine films like this would be consigned to the trash can. Of more interest to me was the recurring motif of bars - the slats through which the cop looks down on Blaise, the back of the wicker rocking chair in the 'murder' scene etc, symbols which suggest that small towns in the open countryside are also prisons.
Review of L'envers du paradis
