User Reviews

If there actually is a downside - apart from perhaps eye-strain - to reading thousands of books and watching thousands of films it may well be a tendency that can approach the status of an affliction to find links between given titles. Back around the middle of the twentieth century there was a short-lived vogue for the compendium or portmanteau film, i.e. one comprising three or more separate segments. Often - but not always, Easy Money, for example - the segments were the work of a single writer, Fox, for example, filmed five stories by O'Henry, Ophuls three by de Maupassant etc and in England between 1948 and 1951 no less than ten stories by Somerset Maugham were adapted into three (Quarter, Trio, Encore) portmanteau films. In the last of these, Encore, one of the stories was Gigolo and Gigolette and was set in a cabaret in the South of France where nightly for the delectation of the patrons a young woman would ascend a ladder, climb onto a small platform from which she would plunge perhaps a hundred feet or so into what from her perspective appeared to be little more than a tub full of water. The main thrust of the story was the strain the woman's increasing terror inflicted on her relationship with her partner who was faced with nothing more daunting than looking good in a tux, announcing the dive and counting the take. In Eternal Conflit Fernand Ledoux starts off as a schoolteacher who prefers to speak his mind rather than feeding les enfants the party line. He shares his home with his wife and mother in law neither of whom are exactly a barrel of laughs. Some years previously the couple had lost their daughter and after revealing to his wife that she actually took her own life Ledoux lights out for the circus where he becomes a clown and befriends a young woman (Annabella) who dives nightly from a high platform into a pool of water. As long as we're talking links how about this: Just as the movies were finding their voice Emil Jannings, a mannered actor at the best of times, played, in a film entitled The Blue Angel, a respected and respectable professor who would up wearing big shoes and a red nose. Once again there was a woman involved, in this case not a daughter but a love object in the shape of Marlene Dietrich. So there's nothing new under the sun. The transition is hazy at best, it's just possible that I didn't catch the dialogue where Ledoux says to his wife and mother in law, 'I've had it up to here so I'm running away to join the circus'. Possible but somehow I doubt it. This director was not a guy to let shaky transitions bother him. Though Ledoux likes Annabella and tries to straighten her out she in turn vacillates between the attentions of Clifton Webblookalike Michel Sadou and cad Michel Auclair, neither worth the powder to blow him to hell. Another curio but definitely worth a look.