Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 38.

In the powerful finale, Becker is put on trial by the underworld and pleads his case on the surprisingly moving grounds that his accusers have only chosen to commit crimes whereas he is compelled to commit them. Though the film establishes Inspector Karl Fatty Lohmann (Otto Wernicke)who would return to take on Langs eponymous archfiend (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)and black-gloved criminal kingpin Schranker (Gustaf Gründgens) as traditional cop-and-crook antagonists, Lorres desperate, clear-eyed, animal-like impulse murderer is the final voice of M, forcing his persecutors (and us) to look into ourselves for the seeds of a psychosis that equals his own. Creatively emphasizing the technological developments in film sound, Lang has the killer heard before he is seen (allegedly, the director dubbed Lorres

whistling) and identified by a blind witness. KN

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1930s

LA CHIENNE (1931)

THE BITCH

France (Jean Renoir, Braunberger-Richebé) 91m BW

Language: French

Director: Jean Renoir

Producer: Charles David, Roger Richebé

Screenplay: André Girard, from novel by Georges de La Fouchardière

Photography: Theodor Sparkuhl

Music: Eugénie Buffet

Cast: Michel Simon, Janie Marèze, Georges Flamant, Roger Gaillard, Romain Bouquet, Pierre Desty, Mlle Doryans, Lucien Mancini, Jane Pierson, Argentin, Max Dalban, Jean Gehret, Magdeleine Bérubet

The first significant film of Jean Renoirs career, La Chienne inaugurated the run of masterpieces he directed in the 1930s, his finest decade. It also gave that most gloriously idiosyncratic of all French actors, Michel Simon, his first major role. Adapted from a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière, the film would later be remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street (1945). But where Langs film is mesmerizing for its aloof detachment and laid-out tensions of a psychological case study, Renoir plunges us into the gamy tumult and vitality of his native Montmartre.

Simon plays a middle-aged bank clerk, Maurice Legrand, despised at work and oppressed by a shrewish wife, who finds solace in his amateur passion for painting. Along the way he becomes obsessed with a young prostitute, Lulu (Janie Marèze), who exploits him at the urging of her pimp Dédé (Georges Flamant). Lulu milks him for cash and passes off his paintings as her own. But when Legrand catches her with Dédé and murders her in a jealous rage, the pimp is executed for the crime. Legrand becomes a tramp, his stolen paintings selling for large sums.

Shrugging off the limitations of early sound techniques, Renoir shot his exteriors on location in Montmartre, lending the film a rich visual and aural texture. As always with Renoir at his best, we get a powerful sense of off-screen spaceof life going on, complex and abundant, around and between the events of the story. As Lulu, Marèze gives a performance of unabashed sensuality, feral and languid, that makes her early death all the more regrettableshe died in a car crash two weeks after shooting was completed.

Still, it is Michel Simon, avidly seizing his opportunity, who walks off with the film. Hankering after Lulu, his jowls quivering with resignation, Legrand is at once ludicrous and pitiable. Yet he brings to his scenes with Lulu the animal urgency of a man grasping a late, unlooked-for chance at sexual abandon. The pathos of his performance, and the warmth of Renoirs sympathetic gaze, lifts La Chienne out of the realm of petty melodrama, turning the banal story into something moving and universal. PK

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1930s

VAMPYR (1932)

The greatness of Carl Theodor Dreyers first sound film derives partly from its handling of the vampire theme in terms of sexuality and eroticism, and partly from its highly distinctive, dreamy look, but it also has something to do with the directors radical recasting of narrative form. Synopsizing the film not only betrays but also misrepresents it: While never less than mesmerizing, it confounds conventions for

establishing point of view and continuity and invents a narrative language all its own. Some of the moods and images conveyed by this language are truly uncanny: the long voyage of a coffin from the apparent viewpoint of the corpse inside; a dance of ghostly shadows inside a barn; a female vampires expression of carnal desire for her fragile sister; an evil doctors mysterious death by suffocation in a flour mill; and a protracted dream sequence that manages to dovetail eerily into the narrative proper.

Financed and produced by a Dutch cinephile, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburgwho was cast in the leading role of David Gray under the pseudonym of Julian WestVampyr was freely adapted from a short story by Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, that appeared in his collection Through a Glass Darkly (not a novel, as stated erroneously in the films credits). Like most of Dreyers other sound features, it flopped commercially when it came out, then went on to become something of a horror and fantasy (as well as art movie) staple, despite never fitting snugly or unambiguously in any of these generic categories.