La Dame de Malacca (1937)
Directed by Marc Allégret

Film Review

In the 1930s, Marc Allégret directed a number of films that are rightly considered classics of their time - Lac aux dames (1934), Sous les yeux d'occident (1936), Entrée des artistes (1938) - but there are many others which have fallen by the wayside.  Amongst those that now languish in obscurity there are several little gems waiting to be rediscovered, including La Dame de Malacca, a quality melodrama featuring two of the biggest French stars of the decade, Edwige Feuillère and Pierre Richard-Willm.  A prestige production, Allégret brings to it the visual flair that is readily apparent in his better known films, and also his distinctive form of romanticism.  In contrast to the bleak fatalism seen in poetic realist films by Julien Duvivier, Jean Grémillon and Marcel Carné, the protagonists in Allégret's melodramas are victims not of fate but of social convention and human intolerance.

Adapted from a novel by Francis de Croisset, the film exemplifies the kind of torrid colonial melodrama that was enormously popular in France (and also in the English speaking world) in the latter half of the 1930s.  In addition to numerous films set in the North African colonies - including, notably Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) - there were many, similar to La Dame de Malacca, that ventured to the Far East, other examples including Marcel L'Herbier's Forfaiture (1937), G.W. Pabst's Le Drame de Shanghaï (1938) and Jean Delannoy's Macao, l'enfer du jeu (1939).  Thanks to Jules Kruger's proto-noir cinematography and some impressive art design, Allégret's film evokes the fragranced mystique of the Orient, together with a stifling sense of the unease that comes with an unfamiliar culture, witnessed by the primitive spectacle of a cock fight in a crowded gambling den.  Against this exotic background, a fairly conventional melodrama acquires a new and exciting dynamic, a familiar story revitalised by an unfamiliar setting.

Edwige Feuillère's stock in trade was playing women who made a habit of defying social taboos in the pursuit of personal fulfilment.  On stage in the 1940s, she triumphed as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux camélias, and most of her best screen portrayals took in characters of a similar hue.  In La Dame de Malacca, Feuillère's sensual outcast doesn't only commit the social faux pas of adultery, she does so with a man of another race, a far greater crime in the eyes of her straitlaced peers.  This is by no means Feuillère's most controversial role -  she would later be cast as a lesbian schoolmistress in Jacqueline Audry's Olivia (1951) and a craddle snatcher in Claude Autant-Lara's Le Blé en herbe (1954) - but such was the stigma surrounding miscegenation at the time that audiences would have been shocked by her character's passionate liaison with a dark skinned foreigner, even if the dark skinned foreigner in question was played by a distinctly non-Oriental-looking Pierre Richard-Willm.  Whilst certain aspects of the film badly date it (the plot is pure hokum, too many of the characters are blatant stereotypes), it does have many redeeming qualities, its prime asset being an utterly captivating central performance from one of the unrivalled divas of French cinema.

Film Synopsis

Audrey Greenwood is glad to leave behind her a dull and uneventful career as a teacher at a provincial school as she embarks on a new life as the wife of Major Carter, a British Army officer.  The couple are soon on their way to Malaysia, so that Carter can take up a post in a British colony in the small state of Malacca.  During the long sea journey, Audrey makes the acquaintance of Prince Sélim, the heir to the Malay throne.  Life in Malaysia does not seem to agree with the spirited young woman.  She gets herself into trouble by taking photographs of the natives, disregarding their religion, and then causes tongues to wag in profusion when she begins an intense love affair with the prince.

By now, Audrey's indifference towards her husband has turned to outright contempt when she realises what an unscrupulous opportunist he is.  The humiliating intervention of Lady Brandmore, the prim and proper wife of the province's governor, merely furthers her standing as a social outcast.  Driven from the husband she can no long tolerate and the hypocritical society she now despises, Audrey becomes ever more isolated and soon falls dangerously ill.  It is the prince who comes to her rescue, and by accepting his hand in marriage she is finally able to get her revenge on all those who sought to drive her from polite society...