1940s, 1970s, Drama, Thriller, War

The Damned (1947) / Rider On The Rain (1970)

Les Maudits / Le Passager de la Pluie

Director: René Clément
Screenwriters: René Clément, Henri Jeanson, Jacques Rémy / Sébastien Japrisot

By Roderick Heath

When it comes to the exalted ranks of great French filmmakers, René Clément belonged to a generation of filmmakers who helped bring French cinema renewal and new international attention after World War II. In those ranks Clément was linked with the likes of Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Jacques Tati. This crew mostly began making movies before the war but emerged most truly during or immediately after it. François Truffaut, in his infamous essay “Notes on a Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” noted Clément as one of the vital emergent figures who helped the national cinema by moving on from poetic realism to psychological realism, a mode Truffaut and his fellow Nouvelle Vague compatriots then set out to demolish in turn. Clément became indeed the preeminent director of that period when pre-war greats like Jean Renoir and René Clair were yet to come home or those, like Marcel Carne and Jean Grémillon, who kept labouring through the Occupation, who seemed to lose steam at its close. Clément had started making short films and documentaries before the war, commencing with the 20-minute Soigne ton gauche in 1936, starring Tati. Clément claimed top prizes at the renascent Cannes Film Festival twice in as many years, first with his docudrama The Battle of the Rails (1945), detailing the fight over the French rail infrastructure between the Nazis and the Resistance, and then with his first proper feature, Les Maudits, aka The Damned. He won the then-special Academy Award for best non-English-language film twice, with The Walls of Malapaga (1949) and Forbidden Games (1952), and also claimed the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion with the latter.

Like the major directors of the Italian neorealist movement, who he was often compared to for his early technique and outlook, Clément then faced subsequent decades negotiating with commercial cinema. Like Clouzot and Melville, Clément was usually at his best engaging with fraught portraits of people engaged in hazardous and morally ambivalent behaviour, but he stretched his talents further and scored his most acclaimed work in Forbidden Games with a poetically measured style. Clément did run afoul of the dangers of international coproduction with the poorly-received This Angry Age (1957), an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ The Sea Wall, but when he made a shift back into genre filmmaking with Purple Noon, a 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, he scored another hit, one that today might well be Clément’s best-known movie, particularly since it was disinterred after Anthony Minghella’s top-heavy 1999 version. Clément’s 1966 film Is Paris Burning?, an attempt to balance epic trappings with his early docudrama mode in recounting the 1944 liberation of the title city, received a bewilderingly harsh reception upon release, but it stands as a superior achievement. He again resurged to general success and acclaim in 1969 with Rider on the Rain, a swerve back to the chic thriller mould of Purple Noon, but Clément finally retired after 1975’s La Baby-Sitter.

As products from either end of Clément’s directing career, The Damned and Rider on the Rain have obvious differences. One is a rough-and-ready product that has the moment it was made in etched into its frames, filmed in stark black-and-white that seems to directly channel the raw-nerve, almost post-apocalyptic feeling of that time. The other is a sleek and moody psychodrama shot in colour, sporting an American star and meditating sardonically on shifting social mores as well as character and atmosphere. But the two films are also defined by a strikingly similar, smothering feel for intense psychological straits, with protagonists who find themselves adrift and cut off from the world at large, sweating their way through entrapped situations, sweltering through the consequences of their own culpability. The Damned, not to be confused at all with Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti’s films with that title but bearing certain thematic and conceptual similarities to both, opens in the French port city of Royan, damaged by fighting and only liberated in the waning days of the war. The bleak scenery consists of broken buildings and rubble-filled streets and evening murk, streaming evacuated townsfolk returning to their home to find, if they’re lucky, dark and shattered hovels, the pall of grey broken only by flashlights: this is the end of the war as just about everyone in Europe was still very familiar with when The Damned was filmed.

Clément’s protagonist is one of these returning refugees, a doctor named Guilbert (Henri Vidal). Guilbert finds the building he lives in blacked out and battered but still essentially in one piece. He’s pleased and moved to nostalgic reminiscing to find his old harmonica lying on the floor by his bed and lying down in the dark to play the instrument as flitting lights from outside play across the ceiling. By rights the war should be over for Guilbert at this moment, but as his rueful, film noir-esque narration quickly establishes, his rest won’t be long, and forces that will affect his immediate fate are being set in motion in a distant locale. Clément moves into a flashback to explain just what he means, as a few days earlier a U-boat prepares to sail from Oslo, about to embark on a mission to save several high-ranking Nazi and collaborators. Senior Wehrmacht General Von Hauser (Kurt Kronefeld) and Forster (Jo Dest), a Gestapo honcho closely linked to Himmler, have been assigned to lead this escape, with the intention of continuing some embryonic form of the Nazi government in South America and setting up networks for other fugitive Nazis: “Victory is never final,” Von Hauser tells a gathering of his motley collective. One of the collaborators travelling with them is the Norwegian scientist Ericksen (Lucien Hector), who the Nazis seem to hope might one day help them re-emerge with nuclear weapons.

Also on board for the voyage is Italian Fascist and magnate Garosi (Fosco Giachetti), accompanied by his Sudetenland-born German wife Hilda (Florence Marly), who is he actual reason they’ve made it aboard, being as she is Von Hauser’s lover. Guilbert’s narration notes that Garosi doesn’t speak German and Hilda doesn’t speak Italian, so “French was adopted as a diplomatic measure.” Frenchman Couturier (Paul Bernard) was a right-wing newspaper publisher and major collaborator, who quips of their vessel, “Like Noah’s Ark – all that’s missing is the Flood.” Forster is accompanied by Willy Mouris (Michel Auclair), described by Forster as his right-hand man and by Guilbert as a Berlin hoodlum, and who, Clément carefully reveals as the film unfolds, is Forster’s sadistically dominated lover. The passenger list is rounded out by Ericksen’s teenage daughter Ingrid (Anna Campion), an innocent completely out of place in such company of pathetic rogues and killers: the only creatures aboard she forms any connection with are Guilbert and the ship’s cat. The U-boat sets out expecting to make a quick voyage across the Atlantic and gain aid from an agent in Mexico, Larga (Marcel Dalio). But when they’re attacked with depth charges by a British ship, Hilda is flung against a hatchway and receives a concussion, and the Nazis realise to their chagrin they have no doctor aboard: “We thought of everything except the essentials,” Couturier notes. Von Hauser and Forster order the U-boat’s businesslike captain (Jean Didier) to put into Royan, but they find to their shock the city garrison has surrendered, so they send Couturier, Morris, and a couple of sailors ashore to track down a doctor. Which is how their path crosses with Guilbert, who has already returned to practice helping his direly needy compatriots amidst fears of a diphtheria outbreak.

The Damned is a bitter, punch-drunk reverie on the meaning of an age. The evocation of a pervasive atmosphere of moral rot is palpable, the mood distinctly post-apocalyptic, the result hovering in a hazy post-genre zone, not quite a thriller, not quite a war movie. The preoccupation with an entrapped hero squirming under the hand of characters who are at once fugitive criminals and representatives of authority and state repression has immediate tonal and situational connection with the film noir movements flourishing in Hollywood and Britain, playing out like a less rhetorical take on Key Largo (1948). But this is mixed with simmering political overtones beyond the range of noir’s usual interests: Clément is portraying still-intense anxieties and blocs of sympathy and reflex in the war’s aftermath, seeing no clean divorcement between the wartime milieu and after, and notably providing a nudging reminder of widespread French collaboration in the person of Couturier at a time when the legend of the Resistance was being officially played up. Nor do the film’s stakes of tension and character drama play out in a familiar manner. Even Guilbert, the nominated victim of the enterprise, has a load of guilt and grief that isn’t entirely explicated: he seems to have lost his wife Helen in the war, and can speak German but tries to keep this secret, perhaps to give himself an advantage and also perhaps to avoid questions how he acquired this talent. “My life was going finally going to resume its proper course,” Guilbert muses in the opening, followed by rueful awareness that fate has other things in store, a ruefulness that Clément sees permeating the whole post-war world and its uneasy mindset.

Guilbert quickly diagnoses and treats Hilda’s injury but realises the Nazis have no intention of releasing him, and indeed intend to kill him as soon as possible. To buy time, Guilbert, asked to check up a sailor with a sore throat, tells the Nazis that he has diphtheria and must be isolated, obliging them to retain his services. Guilbert immediately sees tactical advantage too: isolated the sailor will force his comrades and the passengers to cram together into smaller compartments: “Hate would become contagious,” Guilbert muses, and, as his plan begins to work, he declares, “I’d created a psychosis of contagion…I was the organiser of this shambles, this floating concentration camp.” During the voyage Clément carefully cross-sections the fugitive Nazis, their interpersonal tensions and quirks of outlook and temperament. “What I miss is going to the movies,” the Vichy collaborator laments, “I love the movies.” Guilbert becomes less an actor in the drama, fool of fate that he is, than a witness to the death throes of an epoch and these last exemplars. He comes to perceive the game being played out between Garosi, Von Hauser, and Hilda, with the Italian too lovesick over his wife and too weak in character (it’s made clear he finished up a Fascist because his father was one) to put up any fight against her affair with Von Hauser. Forster keeps his thug toy-boy in line with fearsome beatings, much in the same way he comes to completely dominate the mission as his companions falter in their will and look for ways out.

The feeling of The Damned mediating eras in cinema as well as history stems from the hangover mood of the pre-war poetic realist movement in the depiction of desperate fatalism amongst doomed people in a cramped, fin-de-siecle setting – co-screenwriter Henri Jeanson had written classics of that style including Pépé le Moko (1936) and Hotel du Nord (1938). A couple of key scenes, like the murder of a traitor and a manhunt through a warehouse filled with sacks of coffee beans, could very easily have been in Pépé le Moko. But the narrative’s swerves and the tone avoid the blasted romanticism of those chicly disaffected works: The Damned is at once more spikily immediate and more punitive in its attitude to the damned of the title. Clément’s direction and visuals are for the most part more realistic and hard-edged, leaning much closer to neorealism, employing non-actors for authenticity in some roles and blending in documentary footage to emphasise verisimilitude and trying to exactingly convey the cramped, tense interior of the U-boat in as convincing a manner as possible. Clément wrings atmosphere and unease out of a touch like a creepily creaking buoy in the Royan harbour. His stern, grey-scale aesthetic had its own influence – John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1965) seems to my eye to have used it as a template – with his emphasis on low, looming angles where the metal universe of the U-boat crowds in the antiheroic lot and cuts through boiling ocean. A long hand-held shot depicting Guilbert’s arrival on board ship and his uneasy march through its halls predicts Wolfgang Petersen’s roving steadicam shots in Das Boot (1981).

At the same time, there’s an added edge of something close to metanarrative play to the way the story unfolds, with Guilbert writing down the tale which he describes as buzzing before his eyes “just like a movie” and himself as writing feverishly as if being dictated to by the haunting personalities of his shipmates, as he is by the end left as a solitary survivor on a ghost ship, surrounded by the echoes of the dead and vanished but still remembering them vividly: The Damned is much about a witness and an artist’s response to the spectacle of war and fanaticism as it about those things. More immediately and practically, Guilbert looks for a way to escape, and gets aid from the U-boat’s Austrian radio operator, who tells him there’s an inflatable dingy and oar ready for him to use to steal away when he gets a good opportunity. Guilbert dithers too long, however, constantly expecting to be betrayed or discovered, and eventually when he does try to flee finds Ericksen has beaten him to it, leaving behind his daughter. Despite the official glaze of determination and sense of historical mission these Fascists set out with, all of them except Forster eventually prove to be contemplating their future with the deepest angst. Couturier plays with a canister of poison pills he carries, the last vestige of choice he has left in his life. When the Nazis finally make landfall in Mexico and visit Larga, who operates as a profitable merchant and seems bewildered this gang of lunatics are still playing war, he listlessly gives aid more to get rid of them than anything else, and encourages Willy to flee Forster and make a new life for himself while he has the chance, even advising him on how to do it.

The queer theme in The Damned, which I suppose should be designated as “strongly implied” but couldn’t be more obvious, reminds me of Roberto Rossellini’s similar use of lesbianism in Rome, Open City (1945) as a metaphor for fascist suborning and exploitation. Such an angle reads as rather homophobic these days, but it’s invested with a fascinating, unsettling potency in the unfolding. Early in the film Forster tells Von Hauser he wants to turf Hilda off the submarine at Royan because she’s dead weight, and tells the General he needs to put duty before pleasure, only for the General to riposte coolly that can very easily get rid of Willy for the same reason. Later Forster furiously bullies and slaps Willy when he teases him for losing a chess match to Von Hauser, and whips him with a belt when he tries to run away at Larga’s suggestion. The introduction of Larga sees the film shift away from the claustrophobia of the U-boat but without any feeling of relief, as Larga tries to obfuscate his way through talking with his visitors and encouraging Willy to abscond, but then faced with the particularly wrath of Forster as he searches for his lover. Clément wrings quintessential noirish energy from this sequence as Forster furiously stalks Willy through Larga’s warehouse, which is crammed with stacked sacks coffee beans, the space Larga recommended as a hiding place instead proving a trap, alleys between the bags lit in brilliant pools by overhanging lights and Willy’s hiding place given away by a gash he leaves in a sack, spilling out tell-tale beans in a gently shimmering shower. Forster advances and collects him with grim, Golem-like authority, and leads him back to Larga’s office where, by virtual pure force of will, he obliges Will to kill Larga: Willy, sweating and glaze-eyed, advances on the cringing Larga, before finally emotion flees his face and accepts the delivering pleasure of being a thrall and stabs Larga through the curtain he makes a last effort to hide behind.

Garosi, eventually humiliated just a little too much, sneaks up onto the submarine’s deck and silently slips into the water to drown himself. Hilda soon searches through his belongings but finds no money or valuables, much to her stung and infuriated chagrin: “Garosi had not even left what would have made him missed,” Guilbert’s narration comments. This scene is a great little vignette for Marly, her icy eyes flashing as Hilda desperately tries to put up a good front in realising she’s now entirely dependent on Von Hauser’s graces, putting earrings on brushing a lock of hair down to hide the dressing covering her wound. Marly’s presence in the film seems to violate the realist texture by pure dint of her hallucinatory beauty, an islet of French movie glamour in the hard, grey panzerschiff zone: Marly, whose subsequent move to Hollywood proved a disaster as she was mistakenly blacklisted, is best remembered to cineastes today for her part as the title character in Curtis Harrington’s Queen of Blood (1966). She’s just as much a vampiric alien here, with her high, razoring cheekbones and rapacious eyes, sowing discontent between the two drone males who lay nominal claim to her whilst also binding them in complicity. Of course, Marly does exactly what Clément asks of her in this, embodying twisted glamour and the erotic appeal of the power-hungry, delivering what Guilbert in recollection describes as “the disturbing Valkyrie widow.” “You only respect the dead that were respectable when they were alive,’ Forster comments when Couturier criticises everyone for carrying on normally after Garosi’s death, only to get up and bawl out some sailors for singing when the Fuhrer has died.

The greater part of the power of The Damned lies in the way it keeps the screw on whilst portraying the self-cannibalising nature of its characters, the weak ones falling away, running away or dying trying, whilst the strong lay waste finally to everything they nominally defend, including, ultimately, their own bodies. Garosi’s suicide and Willy’s failed escape reveal fateful cracks in the alliance. When Forster and Willy return to the U-boat in a boat of Larga’s and cast it adrift once aboard, Couturier tries to flee by swimming desperately for the drifting craft, only for Forster to shoot him in the water. All the while as the last vestiges of the Nazi regime are imploding, with reports coming in on the radio of Hitler’s suicide and then of the official surrender, only for Forster to impose a tight new blackout from the U-boat crew to try and maintain control long enough to gain their destination. Dest is palpable as the ultimate Nazi fanatic, a man with the face of an aging bank manager but the build of a weightlifter, intimidating despite not being a military man – he looks like he could break Von Hauser over his knee, and he later pounds Guilbert until he drops unconscious with pure brawn – and easily bending the young and potent Willy to his purpose. “You planned for everything except defeat,” Forster snaps at Von Hauser as the pressure builds: “I planned for everything including defeat – I’m the son of a blacksmith, not a general.” These kinds of details actually make Forster a unique and potent character, a gay and working-class avatar for Nazism rather than the usual mould of icy aristocrat or the vulgarly devolved, one for whom the credo is essential to his identity as one who feeds off other people.

The film builds towards bleak and ruthless spectacle as the U-boat rendezvous with a supply ship as they run dangerously short of fuel. Forster tries to keep the submariners from speaking with the ship’s crew. But they insist on shouting down the happy news that the war is over. This spreads aboard the U-boat, and a battle erupts between the sailors between those trying to enforce authority and those who demand their release from duty, resulting in a fascinatingly realistic tussle between the men where only one officer is vaguely proficient in punching and so gets the upper hand. Von Hauser elects to remain aboard the supply ship, whilst Hilda overhears Forster proposing to torpedo the ship in revenge: she attacks him in a grip of hysterical repudiation and tries to climb up a rope ladder onto the ship, only to fall in between the two vessels and be crushed as they roll together. Forster carries through on his threat, not just to punish those he calls traitors but also desiring to erase anyone not loyal to him who knows he’s alive. He and a loyal officer sink the ship, and then mercilessly machine gun their own fellow German sailors as they cling to lifeboats and rafts. This miniature holocaust is the climax of Clément’s parable, as he has tried to film the ultimate logic of the fascist mindset, as the numbers of the acceptable and worthy and true are whittled down to an ever-tighter circle of fanatics, until fellow Germans are being murdered in the same fashion as Allied soldiers and many others have been.

Finally, effective rebellion: the remaining ordinary sailors overcome the zealots and Willy kills Forster, albeit still only able to dare it by stabbing him in the back: “Bastard!” Forster groans as he sinks down and dies. The remaining crew flee the U-boat in a life raft, taking Ingrid with them, and Willy jumps aboard too: only Guilbert is left behind, having been knocked unconscious by Forster, with Willy refusing to go back for him in the fear he’ll be able to denounce them, despite Ingrid’s entreaties. The scene of the crew’s flight from the submarine is striking both in the filming and in the starkly evident lack of artifice, beheld in Campion’s frightened face as the actors helping her into the raft accidentally fall into the ocean and nearly take her with them, leaving her clinging onto the raft’s edge. When he comes to the doctor finds himself adrift on the unnavigable craft, the last resident of the Third Reich one dazed, baffled, filthy Frenchman, the last, bitterest irony. Guilbert, with no idea if he’ll ever be rescued, passes the time writing an account of his experience, the one we’ve been experiencing, by an improvised lantern. Relief comes at long last as Clément reveals Guilbert picked up by an American warship, which then sinks the U-boat, as Guilbert tells an officer that he plans to call his story “The Damned.”

Rider on the Rain, despite the many disparities in the two films, conjures a similar mood of opiated reverie from the outset as The Damned: much as Guilbert on his bed is oblivious to his oncoming trial and yet also seems to be dreaming it up, Rider on the Rain begins with its heroine, Mellie Mau (Marlène Jobert), gazing wistfully out a window on a day of omnipresent grey-blue drizzle. The setting is a small town on the French Riviera coast. Mellie sees the bus from Marseilles deliver a tall, bald man carrying a red-and-white TWA flight bag at a stop. Her mother, bowling alley proprietor Juliette (Annie Cordy), is sceptical when Mellie reports this odd sight, as she insists no-one every gets off that particular bus in this locale. The differences between Mellie and Guilbert are obvious too: Mellie is a young housewife, and far from being a survivor of war, is the product of dull, indolent, repressive peace. Mellie is married to Tony Mau (Gabriele Tinti), a Spanish airline navigator with a hot jealous streak, and maintains an uneasy relationship with her dissatisfied and sceptical mother. Mellie seems a good young bourgeois, trying hard to dress attractively, but not too provocatively, for her husband, in buying a dress from her friend Nicole (Jill Ireland): as she changes into the dress, clad only in her underwear, she realises the bald man is starting at her through the shop window, and hurriedly pulls a curtain shut. She drives home in the still-pouring rain and strips off her clothes to have a shower. Returning to her bedroom, she’s bewildered to find one of her stockings missing, and is suddenly set upon by the bald man, who’s wearing the stocking over his face: he ties her up and rapes her.

As far as movie openings go, the first ten minutes of Rider on the Rain weave a singularly powerful spell. Legend has it Jim Morrison was inspired to write “Riders on the Storm” after seeing the movie. Clément uses the Riviera locale, normally associated with blissful good weather, and the pall of rain to create a rarefied atmosphere, dreary and deserted, in which Mellie, whose full first name we later learn is the very apt Mélancolie, moves about in vague approximation of life, and what we see in the course of the narrative works on one level as a succession of conjurations of her haunted imagination. That the film commences with images of the bus bringing the marauding masculine force to her town with a quotation from Alice In Wonderland emphasises this dark fairy-tale feel. The opening credits unfurl over images of the bald stranger walking in the rain, the visitor signalling the arrival of threat that looks for another stray person to latch onto. Even when Mellie is assaulted, the sense of submersion continues. The space of her large and prosperous home becomes a trap where the monster lurks even after seemingly departing. Clément’s visual grammar anticipates the dinner party sequence of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) in close-ups victim and attacker’s eyes in strange duet of fear and relish. Mellie claws at the stocking mask, tearing holes in it so her attacker resembles some melting homunculus. After he seems to finish with her, the limp, sweat-soaked Mellie slowly slips her bonds, dresses, and phones the police, but cannot bring herself to actually talk to them.

When she hears a noise coming from the basement, she loads a shotgun and commands the attacker to come out: he does, but when he teases her by making a strangling gesture with the stocking, she shoots with both barrels and he tumbles back into the cellar. When she bends over his body, she finds he still isn’t dead as he tries to grab her, so she finishes the job by frenziedly beating him to death with an oar. Mellie, seeming to decide it’s much easier to dispose of the man’s body than try and explain how all this happened, methodically cleans up the house and drags the corpse into the back of her wagon, and drives it to a remote stretch of coast to dump. Along the way, to her great unease, she encounters a police roadblock, but luckily it’s being overseen by a friend of her husband’s, Inspector Toussaint (Jean Gaven), who furtively asks Mellie if she can arrange for Tony to give him a loan as he’s lost all his pay playing cards. Mellie drops the corpse over a cliff and returns home, only to find Tony waiting for her, and when she tries to pretend she was with her mother, finds Juliette is there too. Tony’s jealousy is whipped up and he constantly recalls how his father would have reacted if his mother had been caught being unfaithful. Nonetheless Mellie is able to burn the last evidence of her action and seems able to resume the comfortable façade of normality, until, a couple of days later, she meets a tall dark stranger, Dobbs (Charles Bronson), a pushily charming American who insists on dancing with her and begins hinting he knows what happened to her.

A cat-and-mouse game develops between Dobbs and Mellie. She at first assumes he’s some kind of blackmailer, as he oppressively inserts himself into her life after Tony heads off for a long haul to Djibouti. Dobbs bullies her and forces her to get drunk so he can then get her to spill her guts, whilst also implying he’s seeking a fortune her attacker stole, which was likely in the TWA bag, which has gone missing. Mellie leaps to the conclusion Dobbs thinks the attacker might have been working with Tony in some kind of drug smuggling scheme, a suspicion that seems to be confirmed when Dobbs encourages her to steal a TWA bag from a shelf in the bus station in belief it was the bald man’s, only to find merely a photo of Tony inside it. The subtler part of Clément’s stylisation here is the way all the various characters seem to have hostile intentions towards Mellie, running the gamut from her indolent, critical mother to her hot-headed and hypocritical husband, and all the way to the man who really does cruelly and viciously assault her. Mellie, as Clément carefully explicates, has a childish aspect to her character, with life experienced as a succession of ugly and wrenching randomness, sourced in a key trauma of her youth, in which she caught her mother having an affair and eventually told her father, who then promptly walked out on them. Whilst he certainly wouldn’t get a job in a rape crisis centre with his method of badgering Mellie and guessing the circumstances of her violation, Dobbs nonetheless walks the line between romantic fantasy, father confessor figure, and masculine threat, at least until his purposes start to become more clear.

Rider of the Rain is dated in some aspects, particularly the gender politics and Bronson’s incarnation of a certain ideal of bristling masculinity as tough-love assaultive, as when he’s glimpsed literally pouring booze down Mellie’s throat, even given that he’s trying to find out if Mellie is a thief and murderer. But it also reflects the shifting mores of the era with some agility, as Mellie shifts from being essentially a decorative object for her husband to someone capable of holding him and others to account, and avenges herself with deadly force, but not with malice. The pitch of Mellie as an innocent abroad trying to leave behind her childhood angst amidst a myth of death and pain signals that in the end Rider on the Rain is much a product of the side of Clement that made Forbidden Games as the one that made The Damned. Nicole is a hipper lass who relies on Tony to bring her records from Swinging London and gleefully awaits a recording she hopefully describes as “bestial,” much to Mellie’s fascinated bewilderment. One notable product of Rider on the Rain’s success was that after nearly two decades as a familiar and increasingly prominent movie face and a smattering of lead roles including Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), it was actually Clément’s film that made Bronson a colossal star in Europe, and his full emergence in Hollywood came soon after. As the film was shot simultaneously in French and English, Bronson was a sport and did his own French dialogue phonetically, but didn’t bother doing it again. This swerve in Bronson’s career was particularly interesting given his role as a character who’s not his usual type of character: Dobbs certainly requires Bronson’s aura of igneous physical and character strength, but who for the most part keeps them restrained, entering the movie as a figure more akin to Cary Grant’s in Notorious (1946) as a smoothly insinuating agent who impersonates and goads the heroine’s guilt complex.

Sébastien Japrisot’s script is replete with nods to Hitchcock, most obviously and a little cornily when the bald rapist is eventually revealed to be named Mac Guffin. And yet Rider on the Rain maintains a very different tone and style to Hitchcock, playing with his beloved transference-of-guilt theme and fascination for highly ambivalent relationships that seem poised between ardour and brutality, but approaching it more as a character investigation where the tension derives almost entirely from the interpersonal encounters. Like The Damned, Rider of the Rain doesn’t quite belong to any genre. It could be said to be Clément’s revenge on Truffaut, as it’s a far better Hitchcock riff than Truffaut ever managed. Rider on the Rain also fits into a mode of art-house thrillers from the time, fusing French cinematic mores and Hollywood-styled narratives also including the likes of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969) and The Outside Man (1972), as well as films by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Pierre Melville. The accoutrement of plot in Rider on the Rain is then mostly unimportant except as it reflects Mellie’s choice to hide her crime and refusal to play along with Dobbs. Her determination to keep the secret is rooted in her sense of responsibility for her father’s abandonment, which she confesses to Dobbs after he’s made her drink two bottles of whisky, a drink she eventually seems to enjoy as much as she says her mother does: “She’s a wiz at infidelity and alcohol.” When a kind of story does develop, it’s the by-product of their gamesmanship.

Mellie is such a goody-goody she can’t even swear, instead substituting the word “saxophone” for any curse she wants to utter, but her unexpected streak of savagery unleashed on the rapist provides vivid proof she’s a tougher, stranger, more formidable person than anyone suspects. Her deflecting way with Dobbs maintains a similar kind of resolve, trying to erase what little proof he can dig up to support his entirely correct summation of what happened between her and Guffin: she threatens Dobbs with the same shotgun she killed the rapist with, but deliberately shoots the wall to obscure gouges left by the original shots. In the course of defending her psychic barricades, she is however forced to pay attention to things she’s been studiously ignoring, like the fact Tony is unfaithful to her with her friend Nicole: when she confronts Nicole, the couturier admits to sleeping with Tony twice, and when Mellie starts slapping her, Nicole halts her angrily after the third blow: “I said twice!” Dobbs meanwhile represents as much fatherly authority to Mellie as an image of masculine menace and fancy: when she tries to lock him out he kicks down her bedroom door, which reminds her, in flashback, of a man who helped her and her mother break into her parents’ locked bedroom, where they found the martial bed shredded by her departing father. “This house is like my life,” Mellie quips after her battles with Dobbs leave it a mess, “Two days ago everything was in order.”

When Nicole comes visiting, hoping to make up with Mellie, Mellie kisses Dobbs to make Nicole think they’re lovers. Dobbs explains as their bickering continues that he’s been able to construct a timeline that brought him to her simply by asking questions around town of people like Nicole and Juliette: “The hell you did,” Mellie objects, “Nobody gets anything from my mother.” She also explains the story of how she got her name, which was rooted tellingly in her father’s whimsical and mercurial nature. Business between Mellie and Dobbs becomes increasingly like a parody of marriage, as Dobbs gets Mellie to fry him some eggs breakfast, which she does dutifully only to then drown them in ketchup (“Americans live on ketchup and milk – I’m a wiz at geography.”), whilst Dobbs takes to sarcastically calling her Love-Love after the writing on her kitchen apron, and introduces her to a game played with chestnuts, chucking them at panes of glass – if the pane breaks, then the thrower is in love. Every time Mellie does it the glass breaks. “You and your Cheshire Cat smile!” Mellie snaps at Dobbs, who has thus far resisted settling down but carries a photo of a son – “I always keep my children.” Finally Mellie does discover the rapist’s bag and the money in it where he left it in her car. Emboldened, she goes to Dobb’s hotel room and finds he’s not a crook or an opportunist, but an American Army Colonel on an investigation.

When Mellie hears of a dead man’s body discovered along the coast, she immediately assumes it’s the rapist. Toussaint tells her it’s been identified as a former boxer and gangster named Bruno Sacchi. Mellie hears that Sacchi’s girlfriend, Madeleine Legauff (Ellen Bahl), is the leading suspect for the killing as she also had underworld connections, and drives out to the beach where Toussaint and other cops grill her to get a look at her. Mellie is stricken with remorse and determines to try and help Legauff beat the rap: she travels to Paris, where Toussaint told her she worked, and follows leads to the place where Legauff’s sister works, after mailing the money back to her home to keep it safe. Trouble is, this proves to be a brothel her sister Tania (Corinne Marchand) runs under the auspices of some sanguine gangsters. Clément nods again to a similar preoccupation with illicit desires as he had in The Damned as Tania tries to seduce Mellie by stroking her thigh, before passing her along to her bosses who, bewildered by Mellie’s entreaties, promptly torture and torment her to find our what she’s about, forcing her to walk about on all fours like a dog and threatening to burn her with cigarettes. Fortunately Dobbs, who the gangsters deride as sounding like a figment of her imagination when she tries to explain about him, chooses this moment to break into the brothel, having tracked Mellie down on the urging of his superiors in fearing she might be endangering herself. Dobbs lays waste to the gangsters in a few artful moves.

This scene provides the closest thing Rider on the Rain has to traditional action, but remains part of the film’s dizzy texture in that it comes about purely because of misunderstandings. It’s easy to see nonetheless why this scene probably did much to cement Bronson’s popularity (after a notable earlier shirtless scene showing off his formidable build), as he genuinely seems like a man who can toss goons around like nine-pins, and blends this confirmation of sheer bullish physical strength with peculiar delicacy in reclaiming Mellie and carrying her out. This whole sequence, whilst essentially a long narrative discursion, provides rather an emotional catalyst on a subliminal level, as Dobbs makes up for some of his obnoxiousness and Mellie finally gains the kind of paternal protector she lacked before. Soon Dobbs explains the truth, that Scchi was actually killed months before and his body was only discovered because Dobbs had the police hunting for Guffin’s. Dobbs himself was sent out to track down Guffin after he broke out of a mental hospital, where he’d been consigned after raping three other women with the same pattern as his attack on Mellie, and stole Army funds. Whilst Bronson got the stardom, Rider on the Rain really depends on Jobert, with the French actress (ironically today probably best known as the mother of actress Eva Green) deftly playing a difficult role as a character who is at once trying to truly grow up and also already has the tools of a survivor, both sympathetic but also eccentric and sometimes insufferable, oscillating between extremes of sweat-sodden suffering, peevish resistance, and crisp, combative humour.

Rider on the Rain is a beautiful-looking product of Clément’s mature style, with visuals that share a near-indefinable quality with those in The Damned in wresting both semi-abstraction and palpability from his mise-en-scene, but in a more sophisticated manner, constructing a psychological universe with his slightly oblique framings and space-perverting zoom shots and mediating long shots. His deployment of colour effect is almost as exacting as Michelangelo Antonioni’s or Michael Mann’s, with most of the film utilising carefully dressed locales and costumes blending blues, greys, and whites, only broken up by specifically associative touches like the fiery red linked with Dobbs (in his sports car and hotel room curtains) and the suggestively uterine saturation of the décor in the brothel. This is a world seen through the eyes of the melancholy Mellie. Clément’s careful framing and use of mise-en-scene is similarly careful, constantly framing along horizontal lines and moving his camera deftly in keeping the performers in orbit with each-other. Some shots evoke the fussily subverted naturalism of Magritte whilst others, like Dobbs setting on a seaside breakwater, and Mellie watching Legauff from a distance on the beach, have a quality reminiscent of minimalist artists like Jeffrey Smart and Alex Colville, utilising stark forms and desolate locales.

Clément risks some in-joke cameo casting touches in employing Bronson’s wife Ireland and Jobert’s stepsister Marika Green, of Pickpocket (1959) and Emmanuelle (1974) fame, as a hostess at the brothel, as if trying to work the theme of family and generational angst into the form of the movie. Another aspect of Rider on the Rain that helped make it a hit was Francis Lai’s score, modish for its time in some ways but very effective, with strains of gently played guitars and organs and thrumming sitars providing a shimmering, haunted texture, and interludes of tinny barroom piano and woozy waltzes lending a faint hint of burlesque to moments of melodrama. The aftermath of Dobbs’ rescue of Mellie leads to a series of epiphanies that finally make sense of the odd behavioural and genre plot flux of the bulk of the movie. Surviving a confrontation with ugly force and self-betrayal brings Mellie to a gentler shore where her mother is now more caring and solicitous, finally murmuring her daughter’s full name for the first time as she watches over her sleeping, whilst Mellie is able to calmly insist Tony take her to London with him on his next trip where they can talk through their problems. The last gift to her comes from Dobbs, who finally locates Guffin’s body and finds a button from Mellie’s dress in his grasp, which he gives to her as a gesture of release. The film’s punch-line is finely humorous as Dobbs, watching Mellie and Tony drive off together, casually tosses away a chestnut he finds in his pocket only for it to shatter a window, leaving him to gaze after the departing Mellie in bewilderment. Rider on the Rain is a peculiar but mesmerising and cumulatively affecting work, and with The Damned stands as a testimony to Clément’s artistry and versatility.

1980s, Auteurs, Fantasy, Horror/Eerie, War

The Keep (1983)

Director / Screenwriter: Michael Mann

By Roderick Heath

The Keep’s very first shot, as if tracing the path of a falling angel, describes a seemingly endless downwards pan, descending from grey, storm-ridden sky to jagged pine forests clinging to the flanks of soaring mountains, before finally settling on a convoy of grey-painted Wehrmacht trucks labouring their way up a narrow mountain pass, set to the throbbing, alien textures of Tangerine Dream’s score evoking both the roll of thunder and the chugging of the straining motors and mimicking the narcotising effect on the German soldiers rolling up the road. A cigarette lit in ultra-close-up, a shot of caterpillar tracks churning along the gravelly road, swooning visions of the mist-drapped mountain peaks. Immediately, director Michael Mann, making his second feature after Thief (1981), deposits the viewer within a dreamlike space, offering a classical Horror genre setting and motif in journeying from the mundane world into one of oneiric remove, but wrapped not in traditional genre style cues, but a hard shell of burgeoning 1980s high style cinema. The year, a title card informs us, is 1941, with the Nazi onslaught reaching its climax with armies closing in on Moscow. In this place, the Dinu Pass in the Carpathian Mountains, Captain Klaus Woermann, embodied in rugged, sagging melancholy by Jürgen Prochnow, leads his men into a tiny Romanian hamlet clinging to the jagged walls of the pass’s highest reaches, to occupy and garrison an enigmatic medieval fortification there.

Actually entering the village, penetrating a veil of mist to behold a medieval hamlet, sees Mann shifts to slow motion and the score to spacy, mysterious strains as Woermann surveys this piece of another, older world cut off from the sturm-und-drang of the warlike moment and, seemingly, whole other intervening centuries. And the Keep itself, a featureless trapezoidal block of grey brick, looming over the village and a deep gorge. One of Woermann’s men complains about this unimportant detail when Germany’s soldiers are near to total victory, but Woermann assures him the real fighting is over and Germany is now master of Europe: “Does that enthrall you?” he enquires with theatrical enthusiasm. Woermann’s own ambivalence over fighting in a war that most certainly does not enthral him is something that resolves even as his situation becomes ever more mysterious and terrible. Woermann and his men enter the Keep and begin setting up their garrison. But Woermann notes, however, the building is not a defensive structure, but designed like a prison. The walls are lined with 108 silvery, crucifix-like markings that the Keep’s caretaker, Alexandru (Morgan Sheppard), warns are not to be touched, a taboo he insists upon with deadly seriousness although he doesn’t know why and can’t report any bad events in the Keep save the general refusal of visitors to stay through the night: “Then what drives people out in the middle of a rainy night?” Woermann questions. “Dreams?” the caretaker replies.

Since the time of its release, The Keep could scarcely seem more benighted. Despised by F. Paul Wilson, author of its source novel, it was also soon disowned by Mann, furious at the way Paramount Pictures threw the film away after losing faith in the project. Special effects master Wally Veevers died during production, leaving the planned spectacular finale in uneditable disarray. Finally the film proved a calamitous bomb at the box office and was generally dismissed by critics, although many Horror genre fans and scholars grasped its unique and fascinating aesthetic. Mann’s active role in keeping the film hidden away, refusing to let it be released on DVD for many years, only helped its slow accruing of near-legendary mystique for anyone who could catch it on TV or had access to its early VHS and laserdisc releases. The Keep has evolved into one of my absolute favourite films, and its evident flaws are an indivisible part of its compelling makeup. After success with the telemovie The Jericho Mile (1979), Mann made a terrific debut as a feature filmmaker with Thief, a movie that commenced Mann’s career-long aesthetic preoccupation with trying to blend classical genre cinema with a hypermodern, dramatically distilled approach, trying to place as much of the weight of the storytelling and ambience fall on his rigorously constructed imagery that often nudges a kind of neo-expressionistic minimalism. This approach generally suits his preference for tough, stoic heroes, beings who still have some of the toey instinctiveness of forest animals even in the densest urban jungle.

When, for his second film, Mann chose to make a Horror movie, he took a similarly essentialist approach, trying to make a movie describing the idea of a Horror movie as much as the thing itself. He stripped out almost all of the background lore of Wilson’s novel and trying to convey a sense of dread and lurking menace through careful visualisation, to make a fable of pure menace and mood. Mann shot most of The Keep in Shepperton Studios whilst building the Romanian village and the Keep’s exterior in a Welsh quarry, but Mann’s notorious later habit of causing budget overruns with his exacting shooting style was apparently already emerging. But, again as he would later, Mann’s exacting reach for effect justifies itself. The early shots see him weaving his style in a series of elusive directorial flourishes: that opening shot conveys place and time but relentlessly pushes the eye down a vertical access, giving little sense of the surrounds. A lake surface mirrors back the sky, turning the grand space into a trap. Woermann’s first glimpses of the village are dreamy, punch-drunk, barely liminal. The Keep itself is hardly glimpsed apart from the looming grey gateway, with only two proper wide exterior shots of the structure in the whole film. This approach lets Mann skirt location and special effects shortfalls, of course, but also conditions the viewer to a zone unmoored from any sure sense of geography and spatial stability, just as Woermann beholds a scene out of the Middle Ages, unmoored in time.

The Keep itself presents a cultural, architectural, and military conundrum: the locals who maintain it have no real idea of how old it is, who pays for its upkeep, or what its purpose it ever served. Woermann’s soldierly eye notices that for what seems to be a defensive structure it’s built inside out, with easily scalable exterior walls and the largest, strongest stone blocks inside, more like a prison. Rumours start to grip Woermann’s more avaricious men, including Pvt Lutz (John Vine), that the crosses are made of silver and other treasures might be hidden in the Keep: Lutz tries to break off one of the crosses only to receive watch detail for a week from the irate Woermann. During the night, as Lutz stands bored and lonely watch, one of the crosses begins emitting an eerily bright blue light, and looking closer at it Lutz realises that this cross does indeed seem to be silver. He fetches another man on watch, Otto (Jona Jones), and the two men claw out the granite block the cross is affixed to, revealing a narrow tunnel that Lutz crawls into. Mann’s stylistic oddness continues in this sequence, as he distorts the avaricious franticness of the two soldiers with slow-motion shots of them running to and fro amidst hazily backlit shots, all bound together in strange manner by the use of Tangerine Dream’s theme “Logos” on the soundtrack, imbuing a propulsive mood, if retaining a spacy, alien texture inherent in that classic synthesiser sound, of a unit with Mann’s recurrent passion with intensely rhythmic image-audio match-ups, the flagrant anachronism of the scoring heightening the disorientating texture.

Lutz crawls into the passage and dislodges a block, only to almost fall into a vast, dark space beyond, saved because he had Otto tie a strap to his waist. In one of the greatest shots in all of fantastic cinema, Mann’s camera retreats a seemingly infinite distance away from the soldier’s dwindling torch into the furthest depths of the abyss, a space which contains mysterious ruins of some ancient structures. Once the long pullback shot finally concludes, a surge of light swoops into the frame and coalesces into ball of light that rises up to meet the faint torchlight. Otto is almost pulled into the tunnel by a sudden, violent jerking, and when he drags his comrade out, finds only a steaming, headless trunk, before being flung away with bone-shattering force as a mysterious power floods out of the shaft and infests the Keep. Mann cuts with headlong force to the antipathetic force stirred to action: Glaeken Trismegestus (Scott Glenn), awakening in a bed somewhere in Greece, eyes glowing and surging energy drawing into his body, stirred by the eruption of the entity in the Keep. Glaekus rises from bed, packs his belongings including a long wooden case, and heads to the docks of Piraeus where he bribes a fishing boat captain to take him to the Romanian coast: Mann films the boat’s voyage into dawn light in a languorously beautiful vignette.

Walking the line between intriguing hints and frustrating vagueness is always a tricky art, and for many Mann went too far with The Keep. But it’s precisely the film’s allusive sense of arcane and ageless struggle, and its near-ethereal, carefully reductive vision of perfect forms of good and evil, that makes it something unique, the hints of cosmic battles and unknowable history at the heart of the story, a vast mythic-emblematic Manichaeism pointedly set against the more immediate and definable evil of Nazism, the heart of darkness nested inside the European übermenschen dream. Paramount might well have hoped the film would prove a Horror movie variant on the supernatural anti-Nazi revenge fantasy of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Most broadly and obviously, the film presents a variation on the classic motif of a haunted castle. Wilson’s novel presented a Lovecraft-tinted rewrite of that founding tome of modern Horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a work that’s retained much of its popularity for the way, published just before the dawn of the 20th century, it charted so many of the oncoming age’s faultlines. Wilson made more literal the connection between Dracula and the paranoid impression of dread power and evil rising in the east of Europe it articulated, by moving the setting to World War II and drawing together crosscurrents of folklore and politics at the moment.

Mann, whilst divesting much of the novel’s superstructure, had his own take on the same idea evidently in mind. In particular, Mann seemed interested in investigating through visual and thematic refrains the link suggested by German film historian Siegfried Krakauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler between the psychic anxieties communicated in the imagery of classic German Expressionist films and the oncoming fascist mentality. The German Expressionist era was replete with contradictions, like future Nazi Paul Wegener’s obsession with the Jewish myth of the Golem that caused him to make two films on the subject, and the Nazi leaders’ worship of the monumental aesthetic laid down by the half-Jewish Fritz Lang. Krakauer’s ideas had their highly dubious aspect, but Mann found how to put them to dynamic use, making The Keep perhaps the closest thing anyone has made to a truly modern take on the Expressionist Horror style, and tethering it to a story that specifically offers meditation on the Nazi mindset and questions of how to resist it. The story purposefully unfolds simultaneous to WWII’s supreme tipping point of the furthest Nazi advance during the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the drama enacted in the Keep is both far more intimate than the war and far larger, a confrontation of primeval forces.

Mann’s casting notably has the Eastern European characters speak with American accents, to emphasise their distinctness from the Germans, who are played by a mix of British, Irish, and German actors. Mann also shifted away from the novel’s use of vampirism, which he found silly: once the entity trapped within the grand cavern is unleashed into the Keep, it begins killing Woermann’s men by absorbing their life essence, leaving charred and withered corpses. The entity, appearing after a time as a writhing pillar of fog around a stem of skeletal parts and blood vessels, builds substance out of its harvested victims. The idea of a monster slowly assembling itself a physical form echoes back to Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and would be used again in Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy (1999). Woermann’s messages of distress soon bring not relocation as he hopes, but an SS Einstaz Kommando detachment under the command of Sturmbahnführer Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne), which steams into the village, takes a number of hostages, and shoots them before their horrified fellow villagers. Kaempffer promises of more retaliation against them if any more Germans are killed. The irate Woermann, who is ordered by Kaempffer not to interfere, points out that Kaempffer has just killed citizens of an allied state.

Kaempffer nonetheless begins using all his arrogant prowess as a bully and killer to get to the bottom of the mystery, using terror tactics to root out presumed partisans. “Something else is killing us,” Woermann states in riposte: “And if it doesn’t care about the lives of three villagers? If it is like you? Then does your fear work?” When some mysterious words appear carved in a wall of the Keep near another dead soldier, the village priest, Father Mikhail Fonescu (Robert Prosky) recognises that the words are not written in any living language, and suggests the only way Kaempffer might get them translated is to find Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen), a scholar and expert in Romanian history and linguistics, who grew up in the village and once made a study of the Keep. Problem: Cuza is Jewish, and has recently been rounded up for deportation. Cuza and his daughter Eva (Alberta Watson) are at that moment sitting in a depot with other Jews, Gypsies and sundry undesirables awaiting transportation. Cuza is crippled by a degenerative disease that makes him look far older than he really is, and Eva acts as his carer.

Kaempffer’s command brings them both to the Keep, where the SS commander taunts Cuza with talk of place he was just about to be taken to, a place with two doors out, one of them a chimney: “So you had better find a way to be of use to me in three days.” Cuza recognises the language of the writing on the wall as a language dead for 500 years, and reads, “I will be free,” a message Kaempffer immediately interprets as a rebel declaration. Woermann tries to assure the Cuzas that he might be able to sneak them out of the Keep to a safe hiding place if they can buy enough time by keeping Kaempffer satisfied: “But then again you may not,” Eva comments sceptically. Eva soon attracts the lascivious eye of a couple of the German soldiers, who track her through the Keep after she comes to get food in the mess, and assault her in a dark, lonely corridor. Mann pulls off another of his weird yet potent visual flourishes as he pans down from Eva’s body, suspended between the two would-be rapists, to the leather boot of one soldier, an almost fetishistic contrast of the soft and feminine with macho brutality. As with the appeal to greed that helped set it free, the assault on Eva only stimulates the entity’s appetite as well as its cunning: the entity, now a ball of fire and smoke reminiscent of the one that pursues the hero of Night of the Demon (1957), surges through the Keep’s innards and falls on the soldiers, who disintegrate messily as the entity absorbs them.

Mann lingers on the image of the entity, now with two burning red eye-like orbs attached to a glowing brain stem, peering out of a writhing pillar of mist, carrying Eva with tender-seeming care back to her and her father’s room, a particularly strange distillation of the classic image of the monster and the maiden, whilst the scoring imbues the vision with the overtone of angelic deliverance. The stunned Cuza nonetheless retains his wit and will sufficiently to tell the entity to release his daughter. The entity speaks to Cuza, accusing him of collaborating with the Nazis: Cuza responds vehemently that he’d do anything to stop them, so the entity reaches out and touches him, giving him a shock of energy. When he regains consciousness, Cuza finds that he’s been restored to full health and mobility, and he realises why quickly enough: the entity wants his help to escape the Keep, which still entraps him. When he again encounters the entity, whose name, Molasar (Michael Carter), is only uttered once in the film, the mysterious being refers to the Jews as “my people” and vows to destroy the Nazis if Cuza will help him escape the Keep: Cuza agrees to find a mysterious energy source hidden in the grand cavern, an object Molasar describes as the source of his power and must be removed if he is to leave the Keep’s confines.

Mann’s enigmatic approach to the entity and the supernatural drama emphasises the humans in between ultimate good and evil as enacting gradations. “You believe in Gods, I’ll believe in men,’ Cuza tells Fonescu, and yet both material and emblematic conflicts have to play out to their bitter end. Where Thief had mooted Mann’s fascination for self-enclosed, self-directing protagonists, The Keep introduced his other career-long obsession, one with with doppelgangers, characters sharing similar traits and characters who often find they have surprising kinships, yet are doomed to clash violently because they’ve become, or were born, disciples of opposing creeds. It’s a preoccupation Mann would notably take into Manhunter, which revolves around the hero’s capacity to enter into the mindset of his repulsive quarries, and Heat (1995), where the cop and criminal have more affinity for each-other than anyone else, as well as The Last of the Mohicans (1991), where the heroes and villains are linked but also perfectly distinguished by their responses to loss of home and habitat. Mann would extend his recurrent imagery and implications to the point where he’d shoot Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat (2015) in a way that would make him look strikingly similar to Glenn in this film. In The Keep Mann’s preoccupation is presented in a set of generically rigid yet unstable binaries: Woermann and Kaempffer, representing Nazi Germany’s armed forces and yet divided by completely different characters and philosophies, contrasted with the atheist Cuza and Orthodox priest Fonescu, who’s desperate to do anything to keep his learned friend safe, and gives Cuza a crucifix as a gesture of protective feeling: Cuza hands the cross on to Woermann. In the course of The Keep, the link between the overt evil of the Nazis, particularly Kaempffer, and the entity as manifestation and overlord of their diseased ideals, is constantly reiterated; Woermann likens the twisted psyches of the Nazis to the illogical forms of the Keep’s architecture, and the entity itself no mere stand-in for their sick fantasies but the secret source of them.

As the film unfolds the affinities evolve and twist: Fonescu, under the influence of the evil in the Keep, degenerates into a ranting fanaticism for his creed like Kaempffer, whilst Cuza’s physical prostration is mimicked by Woermann’s moral impotence. At the same time the shaded oppositions cast Woermann as a pawn of the necessities of patriotism in the same way the entity turns Cuza into his Faustian representative: Cuza’s desire to smash the Nazis is realised but as he flexes his fist in his new strength he unconsciously mimics a fascist salute. Behind each set of mirroring protagonists, the eternal champions of light and dark, converging in the Keep. Glenn’s Glaeken is glimpsed making his way to the Dinu Pass, frightening and intimidating a pair of Romanian border guards at a checkpoint when his eyes again flash with brilliant energy as he warns them not to touch the case he has strapped to his motorcycle, a marvellously eerie vignette. Fittingly for a character intended as the pure incarnation of good, the otherworldly Glaeken is also presented as the ne plus ultra of Mannian hero figures: mostly silent, he dominates purely by corporeal presence and baleful charisma, communicated by a stare that seems to x-ray people even when not radiating supernatural energy. Mann had Glenn base his character’s odd, halting, ritualistic speaking style on the vocalisation of electronic musician Laurie Anderson. Glaeken turns up in the village at last making claim to a room in the inn which has been promised to Eva, after Woermann and Cuza outmanoeuvre Kaempffer in getting her out of the Keep. Glaeken the eternal warrior seems to have been left to wander the earth until needed to exterminate Molasar once and for all, and he quickly seduces Eva.

Mann’s debt to William Friedkin as a source of influence on his style – one that would reverse for To Live and Die In L.A. (1986), much to Mann’s displeasure – is apparent in The Keep through borrowing of Tangerine Dream’s pulsing, estranging sonic textures and a visual preoccupation with machines in motion from Sorcerer (1977), and subsuming that film’s subtler sense of atavistic powers working behind the mask of inanimate yet strangely motivated things. Mann’s style is its own thing, that said, to a radical degree. Mann contrives glimpses of grotesque and perplexing things, like the discovery of a dead soldier under the carved words comes in an obliquely framed glimpse of the man’s head fused into the wall, one staring eye amidst a charred black face, and Eva realising she can’t see Glaeken’s reflection in a mirror in what seems a perfectly intimate moment. The colour palette of Alex Thompson’s brilliant photography is mostly reduced to a sprawl of slate greys and blacks and misty whites, tellingly broken up only by the red of the SS Nazi armbands and the glowing eyes of Molasar. The film is full of disorientating jump cuts and discordant camera angles, work to sever a clear sense of chronology and context, as precise measures of time and place cease to be relevant as if within an explosion of the innermost Id, whilst relating back to classic genre cinema and the sense imbued by works from Lang through to Val Lewton of a world gone mad: indeed the cumulative sense of isolated paranoia closely resembles Isle of the Dead (1945), with which it shares a wartime setting and invocation of imminent doom in an isolated locale that seems to have slipped off the edge of the world’s physical and psychic maps.

Molasar meanwhile poses as a saviour to please and manipulate Cuza, who’s desperate to find a way to halt the Nazi onslaught: the Molasar costume, designed by Enki Bilal, an artist for the storied sci-fi and fantasy comic book Heavy Metal, was designed to be reminiscent of Wegener’s Golem with its dark, lumpen, bulbous, stony form, and Molasar, like the Golem of myth, promises to be a righteous weapon defending the faithful and victimised, only to prove a destructive monster. Molasar needs a man like Cuza to release him because, as Glaeken later mentions when he confronts Cuza, only an uncorrupted soul can even approach the imprisoning talisman. McKellen, who after playing D.H. Lawrence in Priest of Love (1981) was having a brief moment as a major film actor long before his eventual resurgence in the mid-1990s, wields a noticeably plummy American accent, but ultimately gives a galvanic, impressively corporal performance in playing an intellectual hero who nonetheless experiences his world physically in his relationship with his wrecked body and frustrated will, and whose transfiguration from angry cripple to empowered and determined avenger has suggestions of both spiritual and erotic overtones – “He touched my body!” he tells Eva in describing his encounter with Molasar. This echoes again in Glaeken’s seduction of Eva, an act that has the flavour of ritual, the lovers become vessels connecting the immortal and mortal, sacred and earthly, flesh and alien substance, culminating in the couple forming themselves into a cruciform.

Prochnow was undoubtedly handed the part of Woermann because of his similar role as the intelligent and humane U-boat captain fighting for an evil cause in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981), although Woermann’s ultimately quite a different character, and Prochnow gives a subtly apposite performance. Where the captain was endlessly tough and resourceful in defence of his men and his command whilst maintain open cynicism for their cause, Woermann is already bursting at the seams when he arrives at the Keep, haunted by witnessing SS men slaughtering people in Poznan, and by the wish he’d fought in the international brigades in Spain and had taken a stand against Nazism before it consumed his and everyone else’s lives. His punishment for his failures of nerve is to be stricken with ineffectiveness in protecting his men, relieved only by upbraiding the icily revolted Kaempffer, who ultimately diagnoses Woermann in turn with “the debilitating German disease – sentimental talk.” Woermann describes Kaempffer’s version of strength as having become literal in the Keep, a force of evil beyond imagining, the manifestation of all the sick psyches that have been given guns and carte blanche to slaughter. The clashes between Woermann and Kaempffer are unusually potent rhetorical vignettes thanks in part to the intensity of the two performers, inhabiting archetypal roles, the classic liberal and the perfect fascist: Woermann ferocious in his denunciations of evil but lacking the necessary edge to be truly effective, Kaempffer all too willing to do anything to make the Nazi ideal real, and willing to murder anyone who stands in opposition, including, ultimately, Woermann.

Their clash reaches its climax when Kaempffer furiously shoots Woermann in the back, just as Woermann, hearing his men screaming as Molasar assaults them, grabs up Fonescu’s cross, and he dies with it in his bloody hands. Kaempffer, plucking the cross from Woermann’s bloody hands, heads out into Keep’s atrium only to find all the remaining Germans killed, some fused into the walls, others scattered in smouldering chunks across the floor, their war machines twisted and melted, as if Molasar has become some Picasso-like modern artist working in the medium of stone, steel, and flesh to create mangled interpretations of warfare. Kaempffer is confronted by Molasar, causing him to drop to the ground wailing for Jesus to protect him, brandishing the crucifix. Molasar seems momentarily afraid of the icon, which resembles the talisman that holds him in the keep, so Kaempffer gathers up enough of his customary arrogacne to stand and face the thing. “What are you?” he demands. “Where do you come from?” the amused hulk asks: “I am you.” He takes the cross from Kaempffer, crushes it, and casually sucks the life from him with the same pitiless ease with which Kaempffer murdered, the Nazi releasing a bone-chilling shriek as he does. This is a brilliant moment where even the utterly despicable Kaempffer earns a flash of cringe-inducing empathy in the face of such pure, inhuman malevolence.

Mann’s hope to make a parable about fascism might well have been a tad pretentious, but he succeeds within the film’s dream logic as Mann paints in visual textures the symbolic drama he’s describing. Molasar literally feeds off the darker desires in the men who release him, and in turn stirs people to more and more destructive acts. Kaempffer’s total embrace of Nazi ideology and methods makes him the human equivalent of Molasar, aiming to build “the next thousand years of history” on the bones of necessary sacrifice, but Molasar even uses Cuza’s own best qualities against him by posing as a messianic saviour figure simply by appealing to his righteous anger and hunger for revenge. The blackened, shrivelled, charred bodies of the Germans ironically resemble holocaust and atomic bomb victims, the casual victims of the war’s unleashed apocalyptic logic. Mann’s depiction of the Keep’s architecture, a strange space of uncertain angles and spaces above the mammoth, black, atavistic cavern, presents an ingenious visualisation of what Woermann describes as “twisted fantasies” of Nazism, growing out of the Nietzschean abyss, the abyss that looks back and sees right through all civilised and intelligent pretences. In this manner, Mann expands on Kracauer’s key concept of the Expressionist cinema movement as directly expressing the collective neurosis gripping Germany after World War I, which finally malformed into susceptibility to Nazism.

Mann’s concept of the Keep nods then back to the Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) and Metropolis (1926), films that offered their stylised physical world as discrete emanations of human will and mind, beset by insane and sclerotic sectors. The Keep’s interior recalls the cavernous zones of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1923), and the windmill in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) where the good doctor performed his experiments, with alternation of spaces vast and cramped, soaring and warped, fashioned with rough and inhospitable brickwork. In most classic Expressionist Horror the weird world presented in them was the world nonetheless for the characters who exist in them, except notably in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari which laid down the template but also revoked it by presenting the key drama as the ravings of a madman. Mann does something similar in the opening moments of The Keep by emphasising Woermann’s act of seeing the village and the Keep, presenting his drama as subliminal, with a sense of passing through a discrete veil between waking and oneiric states, and everything encountered beyond there is operating on an unreal level. Whilst Kracauer’s thesis that Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari expressed a collective wish for a paternal dictator to restore shape to reality remains largely unconvincing, Mann puts it good use, correlating the perverse mental projections of the Expressionist style with the reality-distorting influence of Molasar. At the same time The Keep is also a movie that was, in 1983, a work defining a stylistic moment in moviemaking, which it quite obviously belongs to with its obsessive use of diffused lighting effects and backlit shots, as well as the dreamy slow motion and music: Mann follows Das Boot not just in casting Prochnow but in annexing its blithely anachronistic electronic score.

It’s often hard to exactly pinpoint in a compromised work like The Keep where exactly directorial intention and jarring interference diverge: what is apparently true is that Mann was forced to cut the film down from two hours to just over an hour and half. Eva’s swift seduction by Glaeken is often taken to be one sign of editing, but frankly it seems to me like one of the more purely Mannian elements of the film: near-instantaneous fusion of lost and needy souls is common in his movies, like John Dillinger’s swift claiming of Billie Frechette in Public Enemies (2009). There are however snippets of interaction between Eva and Glaeken in the film’s trailer that certainly suggest their scenes were cut down. The rough transition around the one-hour mark more clearly demonstrates interference. What’s presumably supposed to be the insidious infiltration of the village by Molasar’s influence comes on far too suddenly, particularly Fonescu’s pivot from kindly, good-humoured friend of Cuza to a ranting loony who barks zealous scripture at him. Soon after, in a moment difficult to parse on initial viewings Eva goes to Fonescu for aid only to find he’s sacrificed a dog on the altar of his church and is drinking its blood from a goblet. There was also a scene of Alexandru being murdered by his sons with an axe.

Given Mann’s stylisation, however, the jagged editing and resulting elisions really only reinforce the generally unmoored mood of the tale, the sense of obscene things lurking in the corner of the eye and numinous forces working relentless influence on the merely human. What was lost from the film through cutting, as well as some of the integrity of the last act, was Mann’s attempt to film the idea of evil as a miasmic influence, meant to mimic the fascist sway picking at the stitches of society and stampeding the world towards barbarian ruin. On the other hand, most of that stuff is supernal to the essential drama: Kaempffer and Woermann’s deaths transfer the weight of the story on Cuza and Eva. Moreover, it’s apparent that when faced with cutting the film, Mann often chose to jettison plot sequences to concentrate on moments commanding his bleary and submerged sense of atmosphere – that long shot of the fishing boat sailing into the dawn, for instance, kept instead of a moment taken from the book where Glaeken kills the captain of the boat who tries to doublecross him. Glenn, the top-billed actor, is nonetheless barely in The Keep for most of its first half, and even when he does arrive at the Keep he remains detached, ambiguous: authentic good is as alien as pure evil.

Glaeken seems to wield some sort of psychic power over Eva, brushing a hand over her eyes to make her sleep as they together in bed, a subtler but equally coercive force to the one Molasar wields. Glaeken senses through Magda the nature of her father’s compact with Molasar, and when Cuza takes a chance to leave the Keep with the German guards insensible under Molasar’s influence, Glaeken warns him about Molasar’s true nature and need. Cuza refuses to believe him, and drops hints about his presence to Kaempffer, who immediately sends some of his men to bring him in. When Eva frantically protests the arrest and gets into a tussle with the soldiers, Glaeken, to protect her, begins tossing the soldiers about like nine-pins, only to be machine-gunned: splotches of luminous green blood appear all over his torso and he refuses to die, until he plunges into the ravine and finishing up sprawled on a ledge where the Nazis presume him dead. Molasar’s subsequent slaughter of the remaining Germans clears the way for Cuza to descend into the cavern and locate the talisman, which he then carries back to the surface, whilst Glaeken revives and begins climbing the jagged ravine wall.

Mann offers one of his signature sequences here, a mesmerically constructed climactic running montage set to intensifying music, later exemplified by the likes of the hero’s Iron Butterfly-scored dash to the rescue in Manhunter and the clifftop chase in The Last of the Mohicans. Mann cuts between Glaeken hauling himself up the ravine face, still covered in glowing green blood (a touch notably recycled by Predator, 1986), whilst Cuza retrieves the talisman, which Molasar can’t even look at. Cuza climbs up through the cavern, a vast, eerie space filled with unknowably ancient ruins and signs of mystique-ridden history, all set music sampling operatic choruses and a church bell-like propelling rhythm. Striding down a corridor as he re-enters the Keep, Cuza’s progress is marked by the crosses on the wall glow in reaction to the talisman’s passing. Glaeken, after escaping the ravine, opens the case he carried to the Keep and removes what appears to be a simple metal tube, actually a weapon capable of destroying Molasar. This passage is one of Mann’s greatest units of filmmaking, and reaches its apotheosis as Cuza reaches the atrium, only to meet a dazed Eva, who tries to stop him removing the talisman. Molasar, watching on as the two struggle, commands Cuza to kill her and continue out.

As if in humanistic rewrite of the Abraham and Isaac myth, Cuza turns on the monster and demands of it, “Who are you that I should prove myself by killing my daughter?” before insisting that if the talisman is Molasar’s, he should be able to take it out himself. This marvellous climactic moment closes the loop on the moral drama before the supernatural battle can occur, as Cuza’s faith in men is proven right by his own deed, refuting the famous test of Abraham’s faith whilst sticking up for the nobility of the reasoning person. McKellen’s challenge to the monster, shouting “Take it!” with the ferocity of hero facing down a demon, is every bit as epic as McKellen’s confrontation in the guise of Gandalf with Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring some seventeen years later. Infuriated, Molasar reduces Cuza to his crippled state again, but before he can kill Cuza and Eva, Glaeken walks in with his cosmic bazooka, fitting the talisman into its muzzle and unleashing energy rays that charge the crosses and drive Molasar back into the Keep. Of all the sequences in The Keep the finale was the most crudely curtailed by Veever’s death, production quagmire, and Mann’s own creative uncertainty. What was intended to be an epic showdown was reduced to a straightforward scene where Glaeken, despite knowing that “when he goes, I go,” as he tells Eva earlier, nonetheless confronts Molasar with the intention of annihilating him.

Mann interpolates flash visions that hint at alien origins for Glaeken, whose physiognomy changes to match Molasar’s (Molasar already resembling Glaeken in turn in his complete form, nudging the refrain of dualistic kinship), and a close-up of his eyes as he wields the energy weapon sees a kind of mesh grid has been exposed on them. When Molasar tries to hit his foe with an energy pulse as Glaeken glances to make sure the Cuzas are safe, Glaeken responds by blasting a hole through Molasar, who returns to a formless state and is sucked back into the cavern. Glaeken, after giving a last, forlorn gesture to Eva, is then sucked in after him, disappearing through the cavern door amidst blinding white light. And yet, once again, apart from the rather jagged edit in the brief combat of the two beings, the climax feels more consistent with the movie as it stands than a more drawn-out fight would have. The proper climax of the story we’ve been told is Cuza’s challenge to Molasar, proving that Molasar cannot ultimately corrupt everyone. Glaeken’s arrival merely delivers the coup-de-grace, although this comes complete with a memorable vision of his weapon gathering power, pulling in energy with a rising whir before unleashing primeval force.

Mann instead, typically, places the weight of the scene’s power and meaning on the intensity of the gestures and visuals, particularly in Glenn’s deliberately stone-faced yet delicately plaintive characterisation as Glaeken finally proves he’s a true white knight, fearlessly eliminating the evil despite knowing it will cost him everything, leaving behind Eva screaming in dismay. A TV reedit of the film, screened a few years after The Keep’s theatrical release, sported a restored coda based on the novel’s ending, in which Eva descends into the cavern and finds Glaeken still alive there, restored to mortal form. This was excised from the theatrical release, an odd move in itself, as presumably movie studios would usually take the more clearly upbeat ending. The movie proper instead concludes on an enigmatic note, as Fonescu and other villagers, now free of the evil influence, rush to help the Cuzas, and Mann offers a final freeze frame of Eva staring back into the Keep, as if hoping, or sensing, Glaeken is still within, still existing in some form. Again, Mann’s choice here prizes evocation over literalism, with the surging, soulful music and the image of Eva capturing an iconic impression, of triumph bought at a cost, and love as strong as death. The Keep is undoubtedly an untidy, misshapen work, but it’s also a uniquely potent and densely packed work of brilliance, and to my mind close to ideal of what a Horror movie should be.

1930s, 1940s, German cinema, Historical, Horror/Eerie

Fährmann Maria (1936) / Strangler of the Swamp (1946)

Director: Frank Wisbar

By Roderick Heath

Frank Wisbar is today a fairly obscure name in the roll of classic film directors, and yet lovers of horror cinema still remember him for making two of the genre’s finer deep cuts, each film a variation of the same story, made ten years and continents apart. Born in Tilsit, Wisbar (or Wysbar as his name was originally spelt) was conscripted in World War I and stayed in the army until the mid-1920s, before he went into the film industry. He served as production manager on Leontine Sagan’s legendary lesbian-themed drama Mädchen in Uniform (1931), a success that gave him a shot at directing, debuting with the adventure-comedy Im Bann des Eulenspiegels (1932). Wisbar quickly earned the ire of the oncoming Nazi authority by making Anna und Elisabeth (1933), a follow-up to Mädchen in Uniform with the same stars and gay subtext. To play nice with Goebbels’ new Ministry of Propaganda, Wisbar’s next film, Flag of the Righteous Seven (1934), was an adaptation of German-language Swiss writer Gottfried Keller about romance, bourgeois mores, and regional life in the 1800s. The film won an award at the Venice Film Festival, and Wisbar’s career struggled on for a few more years. Wisbar was however to remain deeply at odds with the Nazis, in part because his wife Eva was Jewish: the state stripped him of his passport and forced the couple to divorce, and after he was finally blacklisted in 1938, Wisbar fled the country. He became an American citizen and found a niche making low-budget features and then TV shows in Hollywood. Eventually returning to West Germany in the 1950s, Wisbar found new but strictly domestic success there again with works about dark chapters in the war like the Battle of Stalingrad and the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, an adaptation of Wolfgang Ott’s grim precursor to Das Boot, Sharks and Little Fish (1957), as well as post-war issue movies, before his death in 1967.

Fährmann Maria, or Ferryman Maria, could well stand as the last authentic product of the classic German cinema age, that time when the national industry that stood so tall between the Great War and doomed by the rise of Hitler. The great, endlessly influential German Expressionist movement in film kicked off by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) represented the kind of dark, sombre, highly psychologised drama the Nazis instinctively hated, and Fährmann Maria kept something of that style’s essence alive in a time when it had become verboten, although carefully mediated through a nominally more realistic, folksy approach, exploring a supernatural tale in a manner that also evokes a bygone sense of the Germanic landscape and communal identity: the word heimat, homeland, which was for the Nazis a talismanic phrase becomes a mystically tinged destination in the film. One supporting character, a boozy but good-natured fiddle-player (Carl de Vogt), evokes a cheery, open ideal of the parochial character as he’s constantly held up in his desire to return to his home by his love of the jug and a good time playing for people. And yet an undercurrent of intense unease and dislocation defines Fährmann Maria as it takes on a classic motif in German storytelling, the encounter of a young woman with Death personified in a battle between love and nihilism. That motif of Death and the Maiden was born in Renaissance art and transmitted through music like Schubert’s pieces of that title and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Fritz Lang had used it as the basis of his omnibus film The Weary Death (1921), and F.W. Murnau had transformed Dracula into a variant on it in his Nosferatu (1922). Fährmann Maria’s exceptionally simple dramatic landscape, which isn’t actually based on any specific folk tale but evokes many, nonetheless aims to synthesise an ideal variant on this basic conflict that could well have dropped from the lips of some grandmother around the campfire some starlit walpurgisnacht.

The setting is a small village and the nearby ferry crossing that traverses a wide river, the few landmarks in the midst of a landscape of wavering, wind-ruffled pines and twitching reeds, and patches of sucking marshland. The rope-guided ferryboat is tended by an old man (Karl Platen), who maintains the service day in and day out, shuttling people from one bank to the other. The river is borderland between two unidentified regions. A mournful song about a ferry crossing resounds under the opening credits: in the transposition into the first proper scene this song is revealed this song is being performed by the fiddler as he’s shuttled across the river by the old ferryman. The ferryman mocks the fiddler for the ease with which he gets waylaid by his appetites and his rootless habits, and explains that the fiddler’s very coin represents the last payment he has to make to own the ferry outright. That night, the old ferryman is awakened by the dull ring of the ploughshare that serves as the gong for service on the far side of the bank, and he hauls himself out of bed to answer it. When he reaches the far shore, he is intimidated by the grim-faced, black-clad man (Peter Voß) he picks up, and as he labours to get the ferry back to the other side, his tugs on the guide rope become increasingly laborious and strained, until he keels over dead from heart failure, and the mysterious man in black begins to pull the ferry back the other way. The old man has been claimed by Death.

This early sequence is a superb display of technique from Wisbar. Having established the eerie, somnolent, exposed mood of the ferry’s surrounds, he intensifies for physical effect as he cuts between the old man’s face, his hands on the rope, and the implacable visage of Death, the lateral movement of the camera obeying a rigorous left-to-right viewpoint on the ferry’s motion, capturing the sense of strain and the failing pulse of the old man, matched to a shimmering, atonal score, until his hands cease to work properly. Death catches him and lays him down gently, a peaceful fate met at the very apotheosis of the old labourer’s life, his death at the moment of his triumph both a stinging irony but also a deliverance from any form of disappointment. Enter Maria (Sybille Schmitz), every bit the old man’s opposite, a young woman without a home or community, but destined to step into his shoes and face a rather different confrontation with Death. She wakes up after spending a night sleeping in the barn, pausing to listen to children singing in their school house, the pleasure and impossible distance of such inclusivity written on Maria’s face. Wisbar constantly evokes the folk tradition he’s burrowing into here through song and music, arts that bind together communities but also transcend such boundaries – the indolent fiddler is always half-heartedly trying to get home but is just as happy and seemingly more successful out of his native land – as a form of cultural currency people exchange. Maria enters the village and ducks the local policeman, long used as she is to trouble from such earthly powers. The mayor sees her doing this and makes light fun of her, before challenging her to take over the ferry, a job no-one else wants because “the Evil One haunts the far bank,” to prove she can make her stand.

Maria takes on the job, and quickly becomes an object of fascination for some, including a local landowner (Gerhard Bienert) who regards her and questions her brusquely, but soon proves to be establishing romantic rights over her. One night Maria, like her predecessor, hears the ploughshare ring on the far bank, and goes over to fetch her fare. At first she sees no-one, but then spots a man (Aribert Mog) crumpled on the ground: he mutters something fearful about being pursued, and she speeds him to the other bank as a squad of black-clad men on horseback dash through the neighbouring woods and line up on the shore, watching their quarry glide to safety. Maria stashes the young man in her hut and looks after him as he’s badly injured. The man recovers and they fall in love, but then he lapses into a fever and she’s forced to tend to him during his raving dissociation. She must also keep him hidden from locals like the fiddler, who, drunk and boisterous, wants to cross the river, and then the landowner when he comes around to invite her to a village dance. But during the night, Maria answers the gong and picks up the man in black, whose unnerving visage Maria instantly recognises as bringing evil intent for her lover, and the man quickly announces the fugitive is the object of his search. Trying to lead him astray, Maria escorts him into town and becomes his partner in the dance. This infuriates the farmer, who had deduced Maria had a man in her house, and, believing the man in black is him, publically brands her a slut whilst also inadvertently informing Death his prey is back in her abode.

Wisbar seems to have been chiefly under the influence of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) with this film, adapting aspects of its aesthetic, like Dreyer’s use of carefully stylised location shooting to create a different brand of crepuscular atmosphere to the heavy stylisation more typical of the Expressionist mode, and utilising Schmitz, who had played a woman suffering a vampire’s attention in Dreyer’s film. The troubled Schmitz had difficulty landing lead roles in the Nazi-run film industry in spite of her talent because she hardly looked the Aryan heroine, but Wisbar’s casting of her here turned this into a strong subtext lurking behind her character’s yearning for a place and role in the world, whilst also exploiting her specific, wounded beauty in a manner that perfectly suits her character. Maria is caught in the void straddling zones cultural, political, sexual, even life and death. Her tentative smile and large, melancholy eyes describe the strain of her life even as she goes about her work with stoic resolve and tries to keep a flame alight in her spirit. It’s clear she’s fended off a hundred men of the landowner’s ilk, but lets a real smile appear like a spring dawn on her face as she falls for the handsome stranger who embodies all the things she has never had but is forced to join her in this psychic no-man’s-land. Maria, usually dressed in gypsy-like garb that suggest the reason why she’s such an outsider, appears before her lover clad in a new dress, albeit a piece of garb that, with its ruffled collar, seems almost anachronistic even for the film’s vaguely nineteenth century setting, as if casting herself in a role outside of time. And that’s exactly where she is: Maria, whose name instantly evokes religious dimensions, takes over from Charon, shuttling souls between worlds across the Styx, giving her some unspoken form of power that lets her challenge Death himself.

Wisbar’s off-screen troubles lend credence to the hints constantly given throughout Fährmann Maria that he’s not just describing some historical fantasia, however. Although possessed of some lightly used supernatural powers, Death is personified as a resolutely tangible force kept at bay by the rules of the physical world he manifests in, an implacable agent for a dark and oppressive realm. Maria’s lover is specifically characterised as fleeing a repressive government, hazily defined as an imposition of invaders he and his patriotic friends want to drive out, whilst the citizens of the village regard the far shore as a place where the Devil has made dominion. The film’s most powerful images, of the horsemen pursuing the young man ride out of the forest and perch on the shoreline staring at the couple in the ferry, and the first appearance of Death in his trim, black, semi-military uniform, regarding Maria with blood-freezing severity, evoke a definite sensation of totalitarian menace lurking just beyond the limits of the frame and definition. In one scene the young man, in his fever state, begins to enthusiastically sing one of the patriotic songs he and his fellows use as an anthem, suggesting the Nazi love of such anthems twisted into a grotesque dirge that drives Maria into weeping despair. Maria is left cut off from all communal aid as Death realises her deception, even muffling the sound of the church bell she tries to ring to rouse the villagers to the deadly being in their midst with his power, literalising the feeling of being stranded in the midst of a country suddenly wilfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the new predations of power quickly becoming everyday fact. Maria is compelled by Death to lead him through the swamp between the village and the ferry. Maria makes the self-sacrificing gesture that is always the key to the Death-and-the-Maiden tale, and as she prays that her gesture protect her lover, she leads Death along the treacherous path through the swamp, tricking him into falling into the black mud, where he sinks silently into the murk, whilst she manages to keep her footing and escape.

The final shots of Fährmann Maria see Maria and her lover crossing the river along with the fiddler and gazing out upon Maria’s new country, a grace note that seems a fulfilment of the patriotic dream of reclaiming the homeland, but with the vital, sneaky corollary that it’s a victory of the exiles and outcasts over the forces that oppress it. Wisbar’s visual sensibility is attuned to the horizontal in landscape and movement, a particularly tricky art to master for filmmakers working with the boxy classic Academy ratio, and fitted specifically to the environs Wisbar deals with here, the flat, semi-desolate spaces around the village and the glassy waters of the river, the to-and-fro motions of the boat and of Maria’s queasy dance with Death at the village dance filmed alike, the camera’s very range of movement communicating the stark, transfixing linearity of life in this space that finally, towards the end, gives way to the promise of gold sunlight on rolling mountains. Wisbar’s journey, at least for the time being, went in the opposite direction to his two heroic lovers, going into exile and soon finding his real reunion with his wife impossible. A decade later, Wisbar found a niche in the so-called “Poverty Row” studio PRC after a long period on the beach trying to get residency and a work permit. His first American film had been a teen crime potboiler, Secrets of a Sorority Girl (1945). For his second, he leveraged the notion of remaking his best-known work, and the result was entitled Strangler of the Swamp.

The basic plot remained the same: after the death of a ferryman serving a remote town, a young woman named Maria takes over his job and finds herself battling a malign spirit for the life of the man she loves. Working with one of PRC’s famously stringent budgets – none of their films, supposedly, cost more than $100,000 – Wisbar transposed the story into a much more overtly theatrical and classically spooky setting, a bayou swamp choked with reeds and vines traversed by the ferry. Strangler of the Swamp strongly contrasts Fährmann Maria in its approach even as its mood of dislocation and morbid romanticism is retained, whilst the alterations to the story point to a different set of animating concerns for this take. Here, the spectral figure isn’t Death itself but the shade of a man killed by his community, and the death he brings serves a programme of retribution. At the outset, the dead body of a villager who has died in the swamp is brought back to town, where the townsfolk begin to argue frantically about their circumstances: several similar deaths have taken place, all seemingly strangled by vines or reeds wrapped around their necks in grotesque approximation of a hangman’s noose. Many think they’ve been living under a curse ever since the former ferryman, Douglas (Charles Middleton), was lynched as a murderer.

Most of the men involved, including the mayor, Sanders (Robert Barratt), anxiously repudiate the notion even as they clearly live in fear of whatever lurks out in the bayou awaiting them, whilst the women of the village form a determined front, heading out into the swamp to strip down the noose that was used to kill Douglas. Joseph the ferryman (Frank Conlan), whose testimony was vital to identifying Douglas as a killer and who stepped into his post eagerly, sheepishly objects to the women’s proposals that he offers himself as sacrifice to the spectre to mollify its rage: “I’m only seventy! That’s not old for a man! I have plans for the future.” But soon enough, responding to the clang of the gong on the far side of the swamp, he encounters Douglas, a hollow-eyed wraith emanating from the shadows to deliver up stern pronouncements of waiting punishment: Joseph tries to toss the noose the women left on the ferry overboard, only for it to snare on a log, wrap around his neck, and strangle him, thus fulfilling Douglas’ design without any actual violent act. Amongst Joseph’s papers is discovered his written confession to the murder Douglas committed, as well as his admission that he framed Douglas to get his job. But the wraith is hardly satisfied with his death, and continues to await chances to kill off the rest of his lynch mob and their descendants. Joseph’s granddaughter Maria (Rosemary La Planche) arrives in town, hoping to find a place to settle after leaving a life of toil and alienation in the big city. Shocked to learn of her grandfather’s death, she nonetheless determines to take over his job as ferryman. She soon meets Sanders’ son Chris (Blake Edwards – yes, that Blake Edwards) and falls for him, but the curse is hardly averse to tormenting a pair of young lovers.

Wisbar had joined Edgar G. Ulmer in productive exile at PRC. Like another émigré Fritz Lang’s Hollywood debut, Fury (1936), Strangler reads in part as a condemnation of lynch culture in the US, whilst the decision to locate the story in one of his new country’s more primal backwaters echoes Jean Renoir’s venture into similar climes for his American debut, Swamp Water (1942). Strangler of the Swamp might also have represented an attempt by Wisbar and PRC to tap the same well Val Lewton’s horror films had so lucratively drilled for RKO, with a similarly literate, carefully stylised script to the kind Lewton liked, although Wisbar’s concrete approach to the supernatural stands somewhat at odds with the airier, more suggestive Lewton touch. The style here is also quite different to the restrained, deceptively naturalistic approach of Fährmann Maria, here turning the limitations of PRC’s productions into an asset by employing one spectacularly dreamlike, claustrophobic locale, where the totemic hangman’s noose dangles in the wind from an old gnarled tree, the rickety docks for the ferry jut into misty waters, an old, ruined church looms skeletally in the distance, and the town huddles on the fringes. Wisbar’s fluidic camerawork is still in evidence, tracking the course of the ferry across the swamp with cool regard, if not as carefully tailored to fit the geography physical and mental of the story. The guilt and paranoia experienced by the townsfolk has infected the land about them, and Wisbar goes more a sense of gothic entanglement befitting a dense and miasmic sense of corruption, the overgrown weeds of the psychic landscape. He often uses superimpositions to obscure the images, the appearances of Middleton’s withered, eyeless ghost masked by haze, the reeds and foliage of the bayou crowding the frame, as if animated and determined to invade the human world that clings to this landscape.

The result makes Strangler of the Swamp something like the platonic ideal of a dankly atmospheric, low-budget horror film. Severed from the culture and place that informed Fährmann Maria’s folkloric lustre, Strangler refits the story for a place that seems to hover right at the edge of liminal reality, a psychological neverland. That said, the story fits with surprising ease into the dramatic landscape of America’s backwood regions and the stark, moralistic, often supernatural flavour of songwriting in those areas – Woody Guthrie, Jean Ritchie, or Robert Johnson could readily have sung of a similarly elemental tale. Perhaps a seed was planted here for the later burgeoning of backwoods horror as a permanent sub-branch of Hollywood horror cinema. Thematically, Strangler of the Swamp diverges tellingly from its predecessor. Wisbar’s PRC stablemate Ulmer had made his statement of utter moral exhaustion with his famous noir Detour a few months earlier, and Strangler, although ultimately not as nihilistic, seems similarly like a meditation on the psychic landscape left by the war: by the time Strangler was made, the Nazis had fallen and their crimes had stained the soul of humanity. Whereas the community in Fährmann Maria is essentially ignorant and innocent of the uncanny drama unfolding in its midst, Strangler in the Swamp is about vengeance reaching out from beyond the grave to attack a communal guilt – the evil is no longer an invasive one but internal, and the theme of the sins of the father is introduced as Maria and Chris must fight to escape the debt of their parents.

In the climax, Wisbar revisits the moment from the original when Maria finds she can’t make a sound ringing the church bell and stages it more expressly as sequence depicting social exclusion, as Maria dashes through the village trying to find aid, only to have doors and windows slam shut and curtains drawn by the vengeful spirit’s power, shutting off all recourse for his outsider heroine. Both films obviously share a female protagonist who proves that love is stronger than death and offers her own life in place of her man’s, and in Strangler Wisbar takes this theme of feminine strength further. Maria here meets initial doubts she can do her job but readily adapts to it, but the menfolk of the town are variously foolish, self-deluding, and corrupt, where the women are generally wiser and try to act against the curse where their men obfuscate and deny the problem. Chris’s father objects to his relationship with Maria because he knows she’s the granddaughter of a killer, where his mother (Effie Parnell) recognises her character and encourages the match. When Sanders tells his son he can’t marry Maria, Chris retorts that his own father took just as big a part in murdering Douglas, setting in motion the first rumblings of the generational conflict that would define so much of the post-war age. The town lost its church to fire, the ruins standing in moody isolation out in the swamp embodying the wreckage of the local culture’s ethical standing, and Sanders proposes, instead of rebuilding it with the money the town has collected for the purpose, that they use the funds to drain the swamp instead, his onwards-and-upwards rhetoric exposed as an attempt to avoid reckoning with the past.

One significant disparity between Wisbar’s two films is that La Planche, although fairly good in the lead, isn’t nearly as enticingly enigmatic or camera-fixating a presence as Schmitz (sadly, both women also died young), and the standard of acting in Strangler, although competent, is merely customary for a low-budget film of the time and place – even the very young Edwards is too callow to make much of an impression. On the other hand, Strangler isn’t weighed down by the smarmy folksiness of the earlier film’s fiddler character. The finale suffers from the hampered staging dictated by the limited setting, involving a lot of stumbling around in dry ice-clogged corners of the set trying to make it look like action is happening. Nonetheless Strangler of the Swamp stands as an example of what a real director could manage with even the most cynically straitened production of the day, a delicious visual experience that offers a real jolt of Wisbar’s poetic streak, and one of the few major horror films of the ‘40s not to have Lewton’s name attached. As in Fährmann Maria, Strangler’s Maria, exhausted by her frantic and desperate efforts to help Sanders in protecting his injured son from the wraith, offers herself in her lover’s place fends off dark fate amidst the sanctified ruins of the church. But Strangler pushes the import of the sacrificial gesture more strongly than Fährmann Maria, in a narrative shaped by a more personal and urgent sense of responsibility: where in the earlier film Death is outwitted by a touch of native guile as well as the ardent honesty of Maria’s prayers, Douglas is mollified by the gesture and dissolves in the night as Maria gives a benediction for his aggrieved soul. In Strangler, the victory feels quite different, as Maria must redeem the whole community through a selfless act, receiving a forgiveness that cannot be asked for, only granted by the aggrieved dead. Maria triumphs over entropy in her personification, however straggly and assailed she seems, of the finer elements of human nature and of woman herself, a detail that points up the irony in her job title. She is the being who encompasses life, death, and rebirth, who spans both shores.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Nazism

The Damned (1947) / Rider On The Rain (1970)

The Keep (1983)

Fährmann Maria (1936) / Strangler of the Swamp (1946)