Histoires extraordinaires (1949)
Directed by Jean Faurez

Film Review

Jean Faurez's Histoires extraordinaires is pretty unique in French cinema, the only example of a portmanteau horror film (if we overlook the subsequent 1968 Anglo-Franco-Italian film of the same title directed by Federico Fellini, Louis Malle and Roger Vadim).  Although anthology films would become enormously popular in France in later decades, at the time Faurez made his film, in the late 1940s, the genre was quite rare and seldom (if ever) delved into the realm of the fantastic.  Alberto Cavalcanti's Dead of Night (1945) was the first horror anthology film, and it would be two decades before the British company Amicus started churning out its horror anthologies, beginning with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965).  For some reason, this kind of film never caught on in France, which makes Faurez's film all the more interesting.

Histoires extraordinaires takes as its starting point Thomas De Quincey's famous essay On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, using this as an effective framing device and the subject for the first of four meticulously crafted short films on the theme of murder.  The three tales of suspense and terror that follow this nerve-racking introduction are taken from Edgar Allan Poe's short stories The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado and Thou Art the Man.  It is these three chilling excursions into macabre fantasy, so evocative of Poe's work, that make the film worth revisiting.  There is an undercurrent of black humour to all of them, but each is swathed in dark and fearful expectancy, with at least one moment that is guaranteed to chill the blood.

The film's retelling of of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart is the creepiest of the four stories and is on a par with Jules Dassin's earlier adaptation for MGM.  The confined setting, eerily photographed as a Gothic fantasy, and terrifying close-ups of the victim's film-coated eye take on a nightmarish reality as the protagonist (an unhinged Guy Decomble) succumbs to insanity.  The Cask of Amontillado is much lighter in vein and, with a tipsy Jules Berry merrily arrayed in a fool's apparel, might well be mistaken for a comedy, until Fernand Ledoux gets out his trowel and starts to immure his co-star.  As Berry slowly disappears behind a wall of stone the humour gradually melts into horror, and the fact that Ledoux had no apparent motive for bricking up his drinking buddy (apart from the fact that he is a totally irritating personality) heightens our revulsion.  It's a crude metaphor for the kind of thing that goes on quite a lot in showbusiness, apparently.

The last of the four stories (based on Poe's Thou Art the Man) is the most rewarding, a deft murder mystery that has a particularly macabre ending.  A man named Truffaut kills a friend for his fortune, arranges for someone else to be arrested for his murder, and gets a nasty comeuppance when he opens a crate of wine.  To say any more would be to give away the film's chief surprise.  Suffice it to say that the quaint little shocker this segment has in store is virtually unrivalled in French cinema.  Bizarrely, having subjected us to this gruesome litany of bloodcurdling crime, the film ends on a light note, its framing story wrapped up with an odd musical number composed by Van Parys.  Deliciously weird, a total one-off, Histoires extraordinaires has for too long been buried (like the unfortunate Fortunato) in its nitre-encrusted crypt.  Its transmigration onto DVD is long overdue, so that we may follow Poe's example and go on dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before...

Film Synopsis

France, at the time of the Second Empire.  One dreary night, three gendarmes regale a new recruit with tales of murder and intrigue with which they have had first hand experience.  Once the terror of Paris, Guillaume the Ripper revelled in his murderous art, but by prolonging the agony of his final victims in a girls' boarding school he brought about his own downfall.  Then there was the madman who murdered his old employer because he could no long endure the accusing vulture-like stare of one of his eyes.  Having disposed of the body, the lunatic was so tormented by the sound of a beating heart that he confessed his crime to the police.  Most bizarre was the case of Fortunato, who, having been led into a wine cellar in a drunken state, was casually immured by a supposed friend of his, apparently for no reason whatsoever.  Most macabre of all was the mysterious affair involving Barnabé, a wealthy Englishman whose unexplained disappearance benefited a friend named Charles Truffaut.  At a banquet organised by Barnabé's valet, Truffaut gets a nasty surprise when he opens a crate of Château-Margaux...