Haceldama ou Le prix du sang (1919)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

In view of the high esteem in which Julien Duvivier is held (Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman both rated him as one of the world's foremost cineastes), it seems paradoxical that all of his early work - the twenty-two silent films he directed between 1919 and 1929 - is completely overlooked in all but the most thorough accounts of his filmmaking career.  The realist drama Poil de Carotte (1925) may be referenced, but it is rare that any of the other 21 films are brought up for consideration.  This is partly because Duvivier had very little commercial success in the silent era, with the result that he remained an unknown quantity until he had his first box office hit in 1930 with David Golder.  A more likely reason is that the director was much keener to experiment with styles and genres than he was in developing his own unique aethetic, and it was only after he had begun to limit his scope that he found a style and format in which could excel, from the mid-1930s onwards.  Even then, he remained a filmmaker of extraordinary range and versatility, making him an easy target in his later years for those who saw a lack of cohesion and unifying principle in his work.

Early in the 1930s, Julien Duvivier notched up a series of successes - David Golder (1930), Poil de carotte (1932) and La Tête d'un homme (1933) - that rapidly established him as one of the foremost French film directors of his time, and he went on to achieve even greater success with his poetic realist masterpieces - La Bandera (1935), Pépé le Moko (1937) and La Fin du jour (1939).  In the 1940s, despite an ill-judged attempt to make a name for himself in Hollywood, he still managed to deliver a series of fascinating psychological studies - Lydia (1941), Panique (1947), Au royaume des cieux (1949) - and he remained a highly successful filmmaker throughout the 1950s and '60s.  There's no question that the corpus of Duvivier's sound films are of a much higher level than his early silent offerings, but are the latter really so bad that they deserve to be forgotten in their entirety?  If all you had to go on was the director's first film Haceldama ou le Prix du sang you would find it hard to answer this question in the negative.

Julien Duvivier directed his debut piece in 1919 at the age of 22.  Previously he had served a term as an assistant at Gaumont to three very distinguished filmmakers - André Antoine, Marcel L'Herbier and Louis Feuillade.  Not long after WWI, he was invited to direct his first film by Gaston Huon, a recently demobilised camera operator in the French army who had just set up his own film production company in Bordeaux, Burdigala Films.  At the time, French cinema audiences had succumbed en masse to the craze for American westerns, of the kind that were being churned out at a colossal rate of knots by the prolific American filmmaker Thomas H. Ince.  Duvivier's brief was to write and direct a western set in the Corrèze, a totally unspoiled region of French countryside that would have the same impact on the cinema screen as the vast open plains of America's Wild West.

The film that Duvivier came up with - Haceldama ou le Prix du sang - is essentially a bog-standard melodrama of the time, with elements of the popular 1910s western somewhat artificially bolted on to make it more appealing to a contemporary cinema audience.  (The film's title derives from the potter's field - the so-named 'Field of Blood' - which Judas bought with the money he obtained for betraying Jesus Christ and where he hanged himself from a tree.  Religious themes constituted a large part of Duvivier's silent oeuvre, culminating in his grand Biblical triumph Golgotha (1935).)  Haceldama was both a commercial and critical flop, so much so that its director considered it a mistake and practically disowned it in later years.  Duvivier made one further film for Huon - La Réincarnation de Serge Renaudier (1920).  All trace of this latter film perished in a fire that destroyed Burdigala's premises and drove the company out of business.  Duvivier later hired Huon as cinematographer on Maman Colibri (1929), his last - and arguably finest - silent film.

Being the first film of one of France's directing legends, Haceldama ou le Prix du sang is of historical significance but it is by no means a masterpiece.  The unsophisticated narrative is not helped by its author's clunky attempts to crowbar over-used western motifs into it, although technically it is something of an achievement for a first-time filmmaker.  The bravura quality of Gaston Huon's ambitious camerawork makes up for Duvivier's shortcomings as a writer and director, filling the screen with some stunning panoramas of the Corrèze countryside, spell-bindingly beautiful with its dense forests, deep valleys and forbidding mountains.  This is as much Huon's film as Duvivier's, and it is the former who is most deserving of our praise in summing up the film's modest accomplishments.

The film's other notable asset is its lead player, Séverin-Mars, a prolific and highly regarded stage actor who had an immense impact on early French cinema in the 1910s.  It was Abel Gance who made the best use of Séverin-Mars's talents, in films such as La Dixième Symphonie (1917), J'accuse (1919) and La Roue (1923).  Sadly, the actor died in 1921 at the age of 48, not long after he completed his one and only film as a director Le Coeur magnifique (1921).  If there is one reason to watch Haceldama ou le Prix du sang today it is savour the virtually unrivalled power of Séverin-Mars as a screen actor at a time when the art of serious screen acting was still very much in its early infancy.  In the film, he plays a Silas Marner-like recluse who can only bear the company of his young ward and is tormented by remorse for a crime he committed long ago in his past.  Landry Smith isn't a particularly sympathetic character - he is all too eager to pick a fight with strangers and growl at stray dogs - but Séverin-Mars has such a commanding presence that we are compelled to empathise with him, even before the nature of his supposed crime is revealed to us.  In the big close-ups - which Duvivier uses with remarkable skill and discernment - we see a man haunted by a guilt that will not go away, a man craving atonement as a starving man aches for nourishment.

Séverin-Mars has such a powerful impact on the spectator that every other member of the cast is dwarfed by comparison - a reflection of not only their inferior acting ability but also Duvivier's pretty lousy characterisation.  The worst offender is Camille Bert, who plays the central baddy Bill Stanley, a supposed Mexican goucho who is in cahoots with Landry Smith's housekeeper to rob him of his fortune.  Dressed head-to-foot in the accoutrements of the traditional American cowboy, adopting all the familiar mannerisms and poses of the traditional American cowboy, and doing his level best to convince us that he is beyond doubt the traditional American cowboy, Bert looks as shockingly out of place in this creaking Feuilladesque melodrama as Ridley Scott's homicidal Alien would be in a Miss Marple murder mystery.

Camille Bert isn't helped by the fact that not only is his character totally unconvincing (Bert bears not even the slightest resemblance to a Mexican), he is also saddled with a subplot with doesn't make any sense at all and seems merely to have been thrown in at the last minute so that the film attains its desired seven-reel length and so just about qualifies as a feature.  The dastardly plot hatched by the villainess Kate Lockwood is to kill and rob her employer.  Now, there are several ways she could go about doing this, but the one she opts for is just about the craziest one she could have dreamed up.  She invites a former beau from Mexico, Bill Stanley, to come over to France, dressed as conspicuously as is humanly possible, and then, in the dead of night, for no apparent reason whatever, they abduct their intended victim's ward and drive off into the mountains.  When the kidnap attempt is thwarted after a long cross-country road chase the villains simply give up and suddenly vanish from the picture - they've done their job, to pad out the film's middle section, so they are now embarrassingly redundant.

As the two romantic leads Minnie and Jean, Suzy Lilé and Jean Lorette serve the film somewhat better than the truly execrable Camille Bert, although both actors are equally let down by the horrendously derivative nature of the plot and they struggle to make more than a fleeting impression in their lazily borrowed archetypical roles - Lilé the gutsy Perils of Pauline heroine (so gutsy that she instantly faints when the villain touches her for the first time) and Jean her dashing hero (a would-be assassin who is prone to the wildest of hallucinations).  Pearl White and Douglas Fairbanks would hardly have faired any better in these roles.  No surprise that Lilé only ever appeared in this one film; Lorette cropped up in minor supporting roles in about a dozen other films before going completely off the radar in 1927.

Haceldama ou le Prix du sang has many obvious shortcomings on the writing and acting side, but what is perhaps most objectionable about the film is the lazy way in which the familiar western tropes are slotted in, by a director who clearly has no aptitude for or interest in making a western.  When Bill Stanley is first glimpsed by his co-conspirator, he is seen from a distance in silhouette, seated on his horse on the crest of a hill.  This is about as impressive as the character gets - seen any closer, he has even fewer dimensions than the two he is initially granted.  Then there's the obligatory bar-room brawl in which the bad guy and hero try unconvincingly to knock each other senseless - it's more Carry On Cowboy than The Oklahoma Kid.  No western would be complete without a standoff, two characters taking turns to point their pistols straight down the barrel of the camera - not because it serves the narrative in any way but because it kind of looks good on the screen.  The western allusions are so hammy and incongruous that they very quickly become excruciatingly funny.  Far from posing any serious kind of threat, Camille Bert's soi-disant Mexican outlaw becomes nothing but a pathetic comicbook cut-out.  Throughout, he really does look like a chronically bad actor who has wandered onto the wrong set, but the camera keeps turning regardless.

It's not all bad, however.  Not quite.  To some extent, Duvivier does manage to acquit himself partially with his attempts to capture on screen the intensely tortured psychology of his leading protagonists Landry Smith and Jean Didier.  The degree of Smith's guilt complex is palpably felt in the scene in which, whilst reading a book, he looks up and sees the spectre of his dead former associate.  The hallucination is triggered by Smith's reading of the scene in Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar where Brutus is visited by the ghost of his slain friend.  As an ironic twist, the man that Smith imagines to be a ghost is in fact his faithful manservant, who has come to announce the arrival of the dead man's son.

Not long afterwards, Jean Didier is similarly afflicted by projections of his subconscious mind.  Conflicting feelings of a nascent romantic attachment and a burning desire for revenge play out before Jean's eyes as the apparitions of Minnie and Landry Smith suddenly show up before his eyes - Duvivier clearly had a thing about Shakespeare's ghost device.  As Jean moves to strangle Smith, the image vanishes and reappears in another chair - and then there are two Landry Smiths seated in adjacent chairs!  By skilful application of techniques pioneered by Georges Méliès a decade previously (stop-motion photography and double exposure) Duvivier conjures up a powerful scene in which Jean Didier's moral confusion is portrayed with a harrowing sense of reality.  This is as good as the film gets.

Duvivier's brief association with Louis Feuillade probably accounts for the obvious Feuilladesque nature of the adventure-oriented plot with its unnecessary episodic four-act structure and exuberant breakneck chase across the French countryside.  Pointless as the chase sequence is, it allows Gaston Huon ample scope to demonstrate his virtuosity and flair as a camera operator.  With the camera mounted on moving vehicles, the film suddenly comes alive at the sheer accelerating pace of the action.  Much of the chase is shot from a long distance away at a high vantage point, so that the characters are little more than tiny specks slowly working their way across the field of view, totally dominated by the impressive landscape.  If this had been the film's only nod to the classic American western Haceldama ou le Prix du sang would have had far more credibility.  There are moments when the bold panoramic views have such a dramatic impact that the name John Ford comes momentarily to mind.  Eight years later, Duvivier takes us on a similarly picturesque road trip through rural France in Le Mystère de la Tour Eiffel (1928), a far more successful attempt at a Feuillade pastiche.

Haceldama has some visually stunning passages but every time we begin to acquire a germ of admiration for the film the plot intervenes and brings us back to our senses.  So annoying are the half-hearted attempts to ape the old American western that we scarcely have a chance to see what the film is really meant to be - a cogent morality play on the futility of revenge.  The only aspect of the ramshackle narrative that appears remotely inspired is its neat circularity - the story ends with a man of evil intent arriving on a boat from America and it ends with another man going into exile in search of atonement.  For a directing debut, Haceldama ou le Prix would seem to be the mother of all curate's eggs - excruciatingly bad in parts, but still eminently watchable and with a few tantalising glimpses of the true artistry and depth of human feeling that Julien Duvivier would bring to his later, more mature works.  Maybe starting his career with a half-cocked cowboy pastiche wasn't such a good idea but it at least got the ball rolling.

Film Synopsis

Jean Didier, a young man in his mid-twenties, has one objective in life: to find and kill the man whom he believed drove his father Pierre to ruin and suicide.  To that end, he travels to a remote part of rural France, where his intended victim - the wealthy Landry Smith - lives in seclusion at a château deep in the Corrèze countryside.  Smith enjoys a peaceful retirement in the company of his young ward Minnie Pestrat, but he is still haunted by the ghost of the man whose trust he betrayed - Pierre Didier.  Unbeknown to Smith, his housekeeper Kate Lockwood intends murdering him for his fortune.  In this, she has enlisted the help of a ruthless Mexican cowboy, Bill Stanley, nicknamed The Wolf, who has just arrived from America.

By chance, one of the first people Stanley meets in Corrèze is Jean - they happen to end up boarding at the same inn.  As he explores the region, Jean comes to the rescue of a man who is being fiercely assaulted by a peasant.  He is shocked to discover that the man he has saved is none other than Landry Smith, although this intervention has allowed him to gain his enemy's confidence.  During a visit to Smith's château, Jean meets and instantly falls in love with his ward.  Afterwards, conflicting feelings torment the young man, but his desire for vengeance gains the upper hand.  He confronts his host and reveals his identity as the son of Pierre Didier, before dealing him a violent blow with a candlestick.  At this precise moment, Stanley has succeeded in abducting Minnie and is making his escape in her automobile.

Alerted by the sound of the departing vehicle, Jean sets off in pursuit on a motorbike.  A long chase across countryside ends with Jean rescuing Minnie from her abductors.   On their return to the château they find that Landry Smith has merely been stunned by the blow to his head.  Regaining his senses, the old man confides in Jean the terrible circumstances that led to Pierre Didier's untimely death.  His story begins 25 years ago, when Smith fell in love with Didier's young wife.  The result of this short-lived liaison was a baby boy that Pierre Didier raised as his own son.  In truth, Jean Didier's father is none other than Landry Smith!  So moved is he by this sad tale that Jean is impelled to forgive his enemy.  Realising that Jean and Minnie are meant for each other, Smith gives his blessing to their union and goes off alone, to begin an exile in a distant land where, one day, he will find peace of mind.