Le Diable au coeur (1927)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

Immediately before working on his magnum opus L'Argent (1928), the film for which he is most revered, Marcel L'Herbier contented himself with the slightly more modest feat of directing superstar Betty Balfour in an unashamedly populist melodrama, of the kind that predominated in cinema at the time.  Nicknamed the British Mary Pickford, Balfour was then at the height of her popularity, indeed the most popular actress in Britain.  Not even Alfred Hitchcock could resist making use of her talents, giving her the lead role in his early romantic comedy Champagne (1928).  In Le Diable au coeur, Balfour is cast alongside another icon of the era, Jaque Catelain.  He appeared in virtually all of L'Herbier's silent films and, dubbed the French Rudolph Valentino on account of his immense vitality and astonishing good looks, he was just as bankable a star.  With Balfour's casting guaranteeing a wide distribution for the film outside France, Gaumont's British subsidiary willingly stumped up some of the finance, making this a somewhat easier ride for the director's own production company Cinégraphic than previous projects.

This was not the first of L'Herbier's associations with Gaumont.  It was his first collaboration with the company - L'Homme du large (1920) - that established him as one of the leading French filmmakers of his day,  This film's success resulted in the director making four other films for Gaumont, the most notable being his avant-garde masterpiece El Dorado (1921).  It was the lack of creative freedom he experienced whilst working for Gaumont that prompted L'Herbier to found his own film production company in 1923, but the economic realities of such a move drastically limited his choice of subjects.  To keep his company solvent, the director was soon bound to the fad for romantic melodrama, mostly drawn from popular literary works.  Lucie Delarue-Mardrus's now totally forgotten novel L'Ex-voto (published in 1922) provided the story for the last of L'Herbier's silent melodramatic crowdpleasers, Le Diable au coeur, before he tackled the anti-capitalist epic for which he is now best remembered.

Le Diable au coeur and L'Homme du large have many points in common - both are set in an anonymous coastal town in Northern France, and the untamed primal power of the sea features highly in both.  These similarities led to unfair comparisons being made by some critics when the later film was released, with the result that it is still considered one of the director's weaker offerings.  Certainly, Le Diable au coeur is a far more conventional film for its time, with scarcely a sign of the avant-garde stylisation that distinguishes L'Herbier's earlier, more experimental work.  The homespun plot (of the soapy love-conquers-all variety) would have appeared dated even at the time L'Herbier made the film, and in the hands of a lesser director the result would have been a piece of pedestrian ephemera that would no doubt have faded into obscurity within a month or two of its release.

It is L'Herbier's well-developed humanity and flair for visual drama, coupled with the extraordinary on-screen rapport of his two wildly contrasting lead actors, that makes Le Diable au coeur a significant cut above the average melodrama, not the director's best work but still one of his warmest and most engaging lesser films.  With much of the film shot on location in the northern French town of Honfleur, it offers a genuine slice of Normandy life, complete with depictions of colourful local customs such as the votive offering in which sailors have their precious ships-in-bottles blessed to protect them from the furies of the sea.  The impressionistic devices that L'Herbier employed so freely on his silent films (superimposition, skewed camera angles, flashbacks, camera motion) are used sparingly, only when the narrative requires.  As a result, the film has a far more naturalistic, down-to-earth quality than much of the director's earlier work and anticipates the marked departure from overt stylisation in his subsequent sound films.

Le Diable au coeur stands apart from most of Marcel L'Herbier's other work of the 1920s in two important respects - its liberal use of humour and its strikingly realist compositions.  The comic slant predominates in the first few reels of the film, allowing the lead actress to indulge her obvious penchant for visual comedy as a spirited mischief maker who brings as much manic disorder to her hometown as she does to her shockingly ill-kept household.  With Monsieur and Madame Bucaille showing parenting skills that would shame even the Thénardiers (the former being perpetually drunk, the latter incapable of using even a broom), Betty Balfour shows all too graphically what may result if a pathologically troublesome child is spared the rod.  There is much to laugh at as this pint-size demonic miss (clearly the bastard offspring of Dennis the Menace and Beryl the Peril) leads her gang of short-trousered anarchists in a truculent crusade against the well-washed and virtuous.

The humour doesn't end when the inaptly named Ludivine has her damascene moment after the innocent she had wished dead is miraculously restored to the land of the living.  A rush of guilt, with possibly a nudge from Eros, and Ludivine instantly transmogrifies into the perfect little girl, so that her manic energy and innate bossiness are now used for nobler ends - to get her slovenly parents and brothers to convert their pigsty dwelling into a home fit for a prince.  There's more than a touch of Chaplin in this hilarious volte-face, with L'Herbier and his star actress milking the humour for all it is worth.

One of the film's achievements is that this torrent of comedy early in the film is effectively balanced by a far more sober realist portrayal of life as experienced by most ordinary people living in a Normandy town of this time.  The film's unapologetic split character (reflective of Ludivine's own shocking dual nature) is most apparent in the sequence where a sombre column of fisher-folk cross the town upon hearing news of a maritime tragedy.  The sense of anguish felt by the bereaved fishermen is bizarrely amplified by L'Herbier's decision to intercut these moving images with shots of Ludivine leading her noisy gang in another part of town.  So intensely expressive are the pictures, so effective is the editing, that you can literally hear the clamour of the urchins' din breaking into the doleful silence of the mourning mariners.  The dialectic montage technique that Sergei Eisenstein employed to such devastating effect on Battleship Potemkin and Strike just a few years previously is put to good use here to underscore two ideas - the terrible precariousness of the lives of those who live by the sea, and the truly appalling nature of Ludivine before she undergoes her painful transformation into the virtuous woman.

The casting of Jaque Catelain opposite Betty Balfour is, on the face of it, an absurd pairing of polar opposites, but it proves to be the film's winning card, the contrasting personalities and acting styles serving to stress the gulf in morality and maturity that initially separates their two characters whilst reminding us of the power of love to bridge this yawning chasm.  Catelain was renowned at the time for the sensitivity and depth he brought to his screen performances, and as the hopeless victim of fortune Delphin he is at his most sympathetic - which is partly why Ludivine's gratuitous ill-treatment of him at the start of the film is so incredibly hard to bear.  It is Delphin's aura of saintly goodness that make it plausible that he should act as the catalyst that will release his tormentor's inner goodness.  As we begin to see Ludivine in a new light, Delphin's own character flaws come to the fore - his willingness to give in to adversity, his inability to follow his own heart and (worst of all) his fits of jealousy that almost drive his beloved into the ready arms of the libidinous skunk Landerin (a deliciously vile André Nox).

Whilst the plot is formulaic to a fault, it allows both of the gifted lead actors to demonstrate their extraordinary range.  Betty Balfour was never subtle but she handles her character's gradual development from demon to angel with such skill that it is hard not to be moved and deeply gratified by the end result.  Jaque Catelain is no less worthy of praise for the way in he reveals his own character's inner turmoil as the vicissitudes of life and love tear into his tender soul.  Delphin's metamorphosis in the film's spectacular denouement (surely the grandest finale to any Marcel L'Herbier film) - from forlorn orphan of the storm to death-defying hero of the moment - is as melodramatically excessive as Ludivine's, but it provides the perfect resolution, with virtue triumphing over not only the untamed forces of nature, but also the even more terrifying impulses that lie within us all.  The creaking plot mechanics may date the film somewhat, but as a hymn to the transformative power of love, Le Diable au coeur has a timeless, keenly felt resonance - of the kind that is rarely encountered in silent film melodrama.

Film Synopsis

The Bucailles are a poor, slovenly family who live in a small town on the coast of Normandy.  Lacking parental discipline, the mischievous daughter Ludivine and her two younger brothers misbehave constantly, with the result that their household is in a constant state of mess and pandemonium.  Ludivine revels in this domestic chaos and she brings as much confusion to the town with a gang made up of the more untameable children of the region.  One of the gang's favourite targets is the respectable Leherg family, who live in a nice tidy house and say prayers before dinner.  What fun it is to attack their house with stones!  One night, the gang gets too carried away and a window is smashed, leading the Lehergs' son Delphin to mete out a due chastisement to Ludivine in front of her brothers.  So ashamed is she of this public rebuff that Ludivine make a wish later that night, invoking the dark powers to kill the fisherman Leherg and his over-righteous son.  Not long afterwards, the two men are caught in a storm at sea and are feared dead.

Stricken with guilt, Ludivine immediately becomes a different person.  She is overjoyed when Delphin is found to be alive and well, although his father was not so fortunate.  Delphin's losses accumulate - his mother dies of grief and he has to sell everything, including his house, to pay off the family debts.  Hearing that the young man is planning to leave the area, Ludivine persuades her parents to allow him to live with them - after she has made the house fit for a decent person to want to inhabit.  Touched by the girl's show of kindness, Delphin agrees to move in and he soon discovers that he has developed deeper feelings for her.  Little does he know that Ludivine feels just the same way about him, but when she sees him in the company of a dancer at the local bar one night she flirts with the philandering bar owner Pierre Lauderin, who resolves to add her to his list of easy conquests.  Lauderin makes a public demonstration of his interest in Ludivine by offering her a small yacht, which the girl's parents regard as an engagement present.

When the prospect of marriage to the bar owner is raised, Ludivine refuses point-blank, but, realising that her parents desperately need Lauderin's money to clear their debts, she has no choice but to accept.  Heartbroken, Delphin leaves the town and sets off to begin a new life far away.  Receiving a farewell letter from the rejected lover, Ludivine knows that she cannot bear to be parted from him, she sends him a note imploring him to meet her at an agreed spot further down the coast.  On the fateful day, the young woman sets out to sea in her new yacht, not knowing that the lecherous Lauderin has stowed aboard.  As a fierce storm breaks, Ludivine loses control over her boat and is helpless against nature's fury and the lustful intentions of her enemy.  Just when all appears lost, Delphin suddenly appears and comes to her rescue.  On their safe return to terra firma, they marry and make a votive offering to the Virgin Mary for sparing their lives.