I have a love-hate approach to this movie. What I love about it is the sheer insane ambition of it all. The End of the World! And not one of those cheating films where right at the last minute something happens, the danger is averted and we never get to see the catastrophe we've been building toward. No, Gance goes all the way, with collapsing buildings, screaming crowds, boiling oceans, lava flows and worldwide mayhem. Though most people scoff at the 1930s-era special effects, I find them oddly endearing. The blurry comet hurtling through space has a sort of odd mystery about it that today's HD special effects have to forego. Today's SF producers have to have scientific accuracy; Gance was able to make a poet's vision of astronomy.
But what I hate about the film is the truly awful acting and writing. Early American talkies also had that stagy, declamatory style of acting, simply because nobody had done it before and they were learning on the job. The dialog is incredibly slow and the emotional delivery zigzags from flat to extreme, often within the same scene. Gance plays the saintly Jean Novalic, and delivers most of lines gazing soulfully upward - he's so holy, doves perch on him as he's dying! His performance alone is MST3K-worthy, but Colette Darfeuil as Genevieve is a good match for him. She veers from kittenish coquette to screeching drama queen, and from devout acolyte to corrupted vamp. It's hard to know just WHAT Gance wanted from this actress, or what her character was supposed to be. She seems to be an amalgam of several different women, and is completely unbelievable.
Victor Francen is a bit more comfortable before the camera, but he also suffers from the bizarre screenplay. He's believable as the single-minded man of science, but he's also supposed to be a political idealist, media mogul and action hero.
It would be unfair not to point out that the movie is materially injured by its editing history. Gance lost control of the project when it was only partly completed, and the movie was taken out of his hands and severely edited. Like Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', what exists today is just a partial version of what Gance intended, and much of it makes little sense, even after several viewings.
The problem was that Gance was TOO ambitious; it wasn't enough for him to make a film about the end of the world, he wanted to make deep reflections on the state of mankind and prescribe a utopian solution. There's just too much crammed into this movie. The science fiction story about the comet really occupies less than a third of the movie. There are at least 3 other subplots: 1) a love triangle between the two brothers and Genevieve, later supplemented by Schomburg's seduction of the heroine. 2) A political theme, with a world war threatening and the governments of the world hurtling towards military conflagration. And 3) something to do with world stock markets and military/industrial speculation. Instead of eliminating some of these complicated subplots, the people who replaced Gance just half-heartedly pruned them, so we have fragments of subplots which seem to come out of nowhere and then slip back out of view.
The love story is particularly sketchy, yet it's the driving force for a lot of the plot. We can believe that Jean and Genevieve are in love, because we see a few scenes of them talking to each other and discussing their future. But it's a real surprise to find that Martial is also in love with her; he's a lot older than she is, and we never even see them interact until Jean basically hands her over to his brother in his will, and orders them to eventually get married. I think Genevieve is supposed to be the sort of character who is attracted to these two steely saints, but can't live in the rarified air of their idealism, and ends up falling back into the sinful fleshpots represented by Schomburg. She's such a flimsy character, it's hard to understand why so many men are deeply interested in her.
The conclusion at least is satisfying. The infamous orgy scene isn't that shocking, but when it's broken up by a procession of religious penitents, the whole thing becomes almost hallucinatory. One starts to wonder if this can really be happening, even in a film as crazy as this one. The music, canting camera angles, blurred lenses - it all reaches a wild climax in the great hall where human beings form a United States of Mankind before the comet strikes and wipes out all but a saving remnant of humanity. After all this sweaty insanity, the coda, with human beings returning to their various faiths and beginning again with primitive agriculture, is a bit of an anticlimax, but it's not likely that anything could compare with Gance's wild vision of the apocalypse.
But what I hate about the film is the truly awful acting and writing. Early American talkies also had that stagy, declamatory style of acting, simply because nobody had done it before and they were learning on the job. The dialog is incredibly slow and the emotional delivery zigzags from flat to extreme, often within the same scene. Gance plays the saintly Jean Novalic, and delivers most of lines gazing soulfully upward - he's so holy, doves perch on him as he's dying! His performance alone is MST3K-worthy, but Colette Darfeuil as Genevieve is a good match for him. She veers from kittenish coquette to screeching drama queen, and from devout acolyte to corrupted vamp. It's hard to know just WHAT Gance wanted from this actress, or what her character was supposed to be. She seems to be an amalgam of several different women, and is completely unbelievable.
Victor Francen is a bit more comfortable before the camera, but he also suffers from the bizarre screenplay. He's believable as the single-minded man of science, but he's also supposed to be a political idealist, media mogul and action hero.
It would be unfair not to point out that the movie is materially injured by its editing history. Gance lost control of the project when it was only partly completed, and the movie was taken out of his hands and severely edited. Like Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', what exists today is just a partial version of what Gance intended, and much of it makes little sense, even after several viewings.
The problem was that Gance was TOO ambitious; it wasn't enough for him to make a film about the end of the world, he wanted to make deep reflections on the state of mankind and prescribe a utopian solution. There's just too much crammed into this movie. The science fiction story about the comet really occupies less than a third of the movie. There are at least 3 other subplots: 1) a love triangle between the two brothers and Genevieve, later supplemented by Schomburg's seduction of the heroine. 2) A political theme, with a world war threatening and the governments of the world hurtling towards military conflagration. And 3) something to do with world stock markets and military/industrial speculation. Instead of eliminating some of these complicated subplots, the people who replaced Gance just half-heartedly pruned them, so we have fragments of subplots which seem to come out of nowhere and then slip back out of view.
The love story is particularly sketchy, yet it's the driving force for a lot of the plot. We can believe that Jean and Genevieve are in love, because we see a few scenes of them talking to each other and discussing their future. But it's a real surprise to find that Martial is also in love with her; he's a lot older than she is, and we never even see them interact until Jean basically hands her over to his brother in his will, and orders them to eventually get married. I think Genevieve is supposed to be the sort of character who is attracted to these two steely saints, but can't live in the rarified air of their idealism, and ends up falling back into the sinful fleshpots represented by Schomburg. She's such a flimsy character, it's hard to understand why so many men are deeply interested in her.
The conclusion at least is satisfying. The infamous orgy scene isn't that shocking, but when it's broken up by a procession of religious penitents, the whole thing becomes almost hallucinatory. One starts to wonder if this can really be happening, even in a film as crazy as this one. The music, canting camera angles, blurred lenses - it all reaches a wild climax in the great hall where human beings form a United States of Mankind before the comet strikes and wipes out all but a saving remnant of humanity. After all this sweaty insanity, the coda, with human beings returning to their various faiths and beginning again with primitive agriculture, is a bit of an anticlimax, but it's not likely that anything could compare with Gance's wild vision of the apocalypse.