Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1930)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

In common with the author's most famous novel (Le Fantôme de l'Opéra), Gaston Leroux's Le Mystère de la chambre jaune has enjoyed many screen adaptations, the most recent being the whimsical 2003 version directed by Bruno Podalydès.  Just five years after the novel was first published in 1908, Emile Chautard made the first silent film adaptation in France, and this was such a success that he remade it in Hollywood in 1919.  The first sound version was directed by Marcel L'Herbier, at the time when he (along with every other film director on the planet) was still coming to grips with the challenge of migrating to sound cinema.

Throughout the 1920s, Marcel L'Herbier had been one of France's leading avant-garde filmmakers and he achieved enduring esteem with his silent masterpieces Eldorado (1921), L'Inhumaine (1924) and L'Argent (1928).  In common with all of his avant-garde contemporaries (including Jean Epstein and Abel Gance), L'Herbier suffered a creative lapse in the transition to sound from which he never recovered.  Whilst he had some notable commercial successes in the sound era, none of his sound films match up to the brilliance of his earlier work.  Le Mystère de la chambre jaune and its sequel Le Parfum de la dame en noir were two of L'Herbier's most popular sound films but artistically they are pigmies compared with what had gone before.  The main interest that these two films have today is in showing how L'Herbier coped (or rather, failed to cope) with the switchover from silent to sound cinema.

If Le Mystère de la chambre jaune was a milestone for L'Herbier (proving he could make a successful sound film), it was far more so for its energetic lead actor Roland Toutain, who became an overnight star as the journalist-cum-sleuth-cum human grasshopper Joseph Rouletabille.  In his youth, Toutain had fancied himself as Douglas Fairbanks - climbing up the Eiffel Tower (from the outside) and jumping onto the roofs of moving trains was how he liked to spend his idle hours.  Cinema offered him the chance to live out his Fairbanks fantasies 'for real' and after L'Herbier gave him his first break he quickly became French cinema's premier actor-stuntman, the Jean-Paul Belmondo of his generation.  Today, Toutain is best known for playing the aviator André Jurieux in Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939), but at the height of his popularity he was as well-regarded for his dynamic performances in action roles as his future protégé Jean Marais.

Toutain's Rouletabille looks more like a cross-between Tintin and Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout than anything Gaston Leroux may have created.  He's so wildly animated that every other member of the cast looks like a stuffed corpse that has just been taken out of the deep freezer and forced back into life by a pair of high voltage electrodes.  You'd think the amateur sleuth has a chronic aversion to standing still or believes his legs will drop off if he attempts to walk across a room in a normal manner.  Instead, he jumps in and out of shot as if propelled by invisible springs, walks on his hands when there is no reason to do so and leapfrogs over the furniture as if it is all just gym equipment.  He can't even be bothered to use the stairs; instead, he'd rather take a five metre vertical descent, landing on his feet before zipping across the set like a human bullet.  And if you think this is impressive, just wait until you see what he gets up to in Le Parfum de la dame en noir.  Roland Toutain isn't so much an actor as a sauterelle manqué.

And it's a good thing that Toutain is so full of beans, otherwise the film would have been excruciatingly lifeless.  The fault lies not with L'Herbier but with the cumbersome recording apparatus he and his technical team are struggling to get some decent use out of.  With the camera far less mobile than it had been in the era when actors spoke with their hands rather than their mouths, L'Herbier had to make do with static set-ups, and in doing so he became far more reliant on set design, camera angles and lighting to make a visual statement.  This presumably accounts for the film's expressionistic feel, which is noticed in many other early sound films, a visual style from which the film noir aesthetic gradually developed.  With its shadowy, cavernous sets, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune has an uncanny similarity with Universal's early horror films, with a laboratory set that bears more than a passing resemblance to that seen in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931).  When the camera does move, it does so with a startling effect - note the scene in which it turns through 360 degrees in the mysterious yellow room of the film's title.  This sequence conveys a terrible feeling of confinement, which is sustained for the rest of the film by some highly atmospheric lighting and camerawork.

Sound allowed L'Herbier to credit his cast and crew verbally, dispensing with those old-fangled written credits altogether (save the one which identifies the film's producer).  It's a gimmick that Sacha Guitry would later use on a number of his films, although it's a shame that only the faces of the actors appear in the opening credits (camera operators Léonce-Henri Burel and Nicolas Toporkoff are hidden behind their cameras and L'Herbier himself is represented by a clapperboard).  Using sound to convey dialogue was enough of a challenge for most filmmakers at the time; it is to L'Herbier's credit that he also uses it to create tone and atmosphere.  The best example of this is in the scenes leading up to the first murder attempt.  One dark night, an unnamed lab assistant is at his work when a sense of foreboding suddenly overtakes him, his fears stimulated by the ominous cries of a cat rising above the relentless whistling of the wind.  The shadow of a man with a rifle is projected onto a wall, like the Grim Reaper, heading ever nearer...  Needless to say, this spine-chilling build up surpasses everything else that follows and the ensuing murder mystery, stiffly performed by actors who clearly have no future in sound cinema, would have been unbearably dull without Roland Toutain's incongruous acrobatics.  Thank heavens for human grasshoppers.

Film Synopsis

Mathilde Strangerson, the daughter of an eminent scientist, decides she cannot go through with her marriage to Robert Darzac.  Having broken off her engagement, Mathilde returns to her father's mansion and narrowly escapes being murdered in her own bedroom by an unknown assailant.  The police are called in but are totally baffled.  At the time Mathilde was attacked, her bedroom was completely sealed, with no means by which anyone could enter or leave the room.  Liking nothing better than a good mystery, the journalist Joseph Rouletabille shows up and starts his own investigation.  Suspicion immediately falls on Darzac, but after the latter has been taken into police custody Mathilde is attacked a second time.  On this occasion, a murder is committed...