La Proie du vent (1927)
Directed by René Clair

Film Review

After the commercial failure of Le Voyage imaginaire, his most ambitious film so far, director René Clair was more or less driven to commercial cinema for his next film.  Adapted from L'Aventure amoureuse de Pierre Vignal, a now all-but-forgotten novel by Armand Mercier, La Proie du vent (The Prey of the Wind) is a routine melodrama of the kind that was immensely popular with cinema audiences at the time.  Assisted by Georges Lacombe (who later became a successful director himself), Clair made this crowdpleaser for Films Albatros, a company based in Paris that was staffed mainly by Russians living in exile after the 1917 revolution.  At the time, the company was managed by Alexandre Kamenka, who had a reputation for allowing his directors considerable artistic freedom, providing their films made a healthy financial return.  After this, Clair directed two further notable films for Albatros, Les Deux timides (1928) and Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (1928).

In later years René Clair would be extravagantly dismissive of La Proie du vent and did everything he could to discourage others from watching it.  He may have resented making the film, which offered far less scope for creative mise-ne-scène than the three remarkable fantasy offerings that preceded it - Paris qui dort (1925), Le Fantôme du Moulin-Rouge (1925), Le Voyage imaginaire (1926).  However, conventional as the film's subject matter may have been, Clair had ample opportunity to foist on it his avant-garde credentials and, in doing so, he crafts one of his more intimate and humane works.  Directed and edited with obvious flair, La Proie du vent bears a favourable comparison with similar upgraded melodramas signed by Clair's contemporaries, Jean Epstein and Marcel L'Herbier (who both had successful stints at Albatros).

The film makes an instant impact at the start with a montage of aeronautical shots that Clair realised with the help of his friend, Albert Préjean, a veteran WWI pilot who went on to become a popular screen actor.  After a lengthy prologue, the drama begins in earnest with the central protagonist, an aviator named Pierre (played by Charles Vanel), caught in a wind storm and forced to land his plane in a country estate.  Before he knows it, Pierre is convalescing in a huge château under the care of a benevolent aristocrat named Elisabeth.  (The later role went to the English actress Lillian Hall-Davis, who also featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Ring (1927) and The Farmer's Wife (1928)).

It is at this juncture that Clair springs his first surprise on us.  Surreptitiously, Pierre takes hold of his hostess's cigarette, and whilst she is out of the room he caresses it suggestively before raising it to his lips and taking a luxuriant drag.  It's remarkable how much raw erotic power Clair and his lead actor manage to pack into this seemingly inconsequential sequence - it strongly evokes a similar scene in Clarence Brown's Flesh and the Devil (1927) in which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert drink from the same wine goblet.

Not long after this, Clair treats us to another bout of unadorned eroticism.  This takes place within a deeply troubling flight of fancy in which the aviator imagines spying on the object of his desire through her bedroom window, before succumbing to lust and throwing himself on her like a wild animal.  Frenetic camera movement brings a terrifying burst of emotional intensity to the sequence, which concludes with Pierre's rival (Jean Murat) drawing a gun on him and shooting him.  The Freudian imagery may not be subtle but it is savagely effective and shows just how intoxicated the protagonist is with his raging desire for his aloof hostess.

It is Clair's skill at getting us to see things from his protagonist's point of view that makes La Proie du vent such a compelling and disturbing film - not the tame melodrama that we might have expected.  In this he is magnificently assisted by his lead actor Charles Vanel, who is cast against type as a sympathetic romantic, having played villains of varying degrees of nastiness for several years.  Vanel's expressive features and subtle gestures are all that Clair needs to guide us into his character's troubled soul and therein witness the desires and doubts that are driving a man to desperation.

The aviator's surging passion for Elisabeth is arrested twice - first by the imagined confrontation with her brother-in-law, then with a chance encounter with her sister Hélène, a wraith like creature played in a way that evokes both sympathy and suspicion by the hyper-charismatic Sandra Milowanoff.  We recognise Hélène as the unnamed woman in the film's prologue, an unfortunate in a crowded prison who is persuaded that her husband has betrayed her and abandoned her to buy his own freedom.  Pierre's compassion and confused feelings for Elisabeth prevent him from seeing what we see - a woman afflicted with an acute mental derangement.  Once again, he succumbs to a primal impulse, this time to save a vulnerable creature in distress.

There is a terrible sense of inevitability in the tragedy which then ensues, as the aviator allows his emotions to override his reason.  This leads directly on to the film's thrilling climactic sequence, a hell-for-leather car chase in which Clair uses camera motion and inter-cutting brilliantly to ratchet up the tension and build to a wildly vertiginous crescendo, reminiscent of the dramatic climaxes of L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (1924) and Epstein's La Glace à trois faces (1927).  After this directorial tour de force, what follows can only be an anti-climax, but Clair manages to pep up the final passages of the drama with some moments of genuine poignancy.

In one quiet scene, Pierre is shown contemplating a goodbye letter from the wrongly suspected Elisabeth.  Rather than show his face, the camera focuses our attention on his hands as he slowly caresses the letter and folds it up.  The aching sense of loss that Clair manages to convey in this simple way is extraordinary.  We are coerced into willing the film to end happily, and of course this is what Clair delivers (as no doubt his contract with Albatros stipulated). The director's trademark humour only surfaces right at the very end of the film, with a visual gag that allows him to dodge an obvious cinematic cliché.  As an unwelcome interloper over-cautiously tip-toes away from the reunited lovers, we are mercifully spared the rush of tacky sentimentality that a lesser filmmaker might have inflicted on us.

Saddled with an all-too-conventional narrative that follows an all-too-predictable course, La Proie du vent was never going to be René Clair's finest film, but what the director manages to do with it, exercising to the limit his flair for cinematic innovation and appreciation of human psychology, is surely impressive.  Whilst most of Clair's other silent films overawe us with their poetry, scale and visual artistry, this meticulously crafted little crowdpleaser does much more to engage our compassion and concern for human frailty.

Film Synopsis

Pierre Vignal is on a flying mission over a country in Eastern Europe when his aeroplane gets caught in a violent wind storm which forces him to effect an emergency landing on the densely wooded grounds of a large country estate.  After the crash, he is found and nursed back to health by a beautiful young countess named Elisabeth.  As he recovers, Pierre finds himself strongly attracted towards his kindly benefactor and senses that she too is in love with him.  One night, when Elisabeth fails to keep an appointment with him to play chess, Pierre imagines spying on her in her bedroom.

In his fantasy, the aviator becomes aroused by the sight of the woman's naked form and forces his way into the room, only to have his desires violently frustrated by her protective brother-in-law, whom he now regards as a dangerous rival.  That same night, Pierre is wandering the empty corridors of the sprawling château when he has a strange encounter with another woman.  Introducing herself as Elisabeth's sister Helène, this visibly distressed woman insists that she is being held a prisoner against her will by her husband and sister.

Moved to pity by the stranger's distress, Pierre agrees to keep a rendezvous with her later, suspecting that she has something of great importance to say to him about his hostess.  When they next meet, Helène reveals that her sister and husband are traitors to their king and intend to murder her.  Her only hope is to escape with Pierre's help.  The aviator has no choice but to assist Helène in her bid for freedom, not knowing that this drastic enterprise is futile and destined to end in tragedy...