Film Review
In the six years he was in France before his departure for America at the
end of the 1930s, the German-born film director Robert Siodmak lent his talents
to around a dozen films that pretty well encompassed all popular genres,
from musical comedy to melodrama and crime-thriller.
Mister Flow,
made at the halfway point in Siodmak's fruitful Parisian sojourn, is a curious
hybrid piece that vaguely resembles an American screwball comedy of the early
1930s whilst presaging the gloomier noir offerings of the director's subsequent
years in Hollywood. Anyone familiar with Siodmak's grimly atmospheric
American thrillers -
The
Spiral Staircase (1945),
The
Killers (1946),
The Dark
Mirror (1946),
Cry of
the City (1948) - cannot help but be surprised by the exuberant
sense of fun that carries
Mister Flow along on its ditsy and implausible
narrative course. Here Siodmak shows his lighter side, aided and abetted
by three of the decade's French acting legends: Edwige Feuillère,
Louis Jouvet and Fernand Gravey.
Mister Flow is adapted from one of Gaston Leroux's lesser known novels,
first published (a decade previously) in serial form in the newspaper
Le
Journal, under the title
La Véritable histoire du célèbre
Mister Flow. The adaptation was undertaken by Henri Jeanson, who
also scripted Siodmak's subsequent
Le Chemin de Rio (1937),
although he is best remembered today for the poetic realist films of the
era that he worked on, Julien Duvivier's
Pépé le Moko
(1937) and Marcel Carné's
Hôtel
du Nord (1938). Great dialogist though he was, Jeanson
was never at his best with comedy and his strained humour (heavy handed,
predictable, at times bordering on the infantile) is one of the main reasons
why
Mister Flow fails to come anywhere near to being a comedy classic,
or indeed a classic of any kind.
Siomak makes a reasonable fist at juggling the contrasting comedic and dramatic
elements of this quirky Jekyll-and-Hyde film, although he is clearly more
interested in atmospherics than narrative, happily playing with lighting
and camera angles in a way that clearly anticipates the full-bodied noir
masterpieces he would go on to make in the following decade. The stylishly
realised courtroom scene at the end of the film is a case in point - this
deserves to be in a more sober film and the inclusion of humour in such a
scene feels almost indecent. Left to his own devices Siodmak would
doubtless have made this a straight thriller, akin to his later (and far
superior)
Pièges (1939),
but any ambitions in this vein are mercilessly thwarted by his principal
cast, who leave no doubt as to the film's real identity - a lively farce
of the kind that was popular in France of the mid-1930s. The film's
'double visage' mirrors the shifting character of the eponymous Mister Flow,
a non-too subtle rip-off of Maurice Leblanc's fictional thief Arsène
Lupin, here portrayed with exquisite charm (and a pleasing note of mischief)
by the great Louis Jouvet.
Jouvet appears in only a few scenes (mostly at the top and tail of the film),
but it his dignified, slightly incongruous presence that redeems an otherwise
silly entry in the
comédie-policière line. There's
plenty of fun to be had in the sparkling rapport between Fernand Gravey and
Edwige Feuillère (an inspired pairing that could easily have given
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn a good run for their money) - Gravey is
as smooth as ever he was (and funny with it) and what red-blooded mortal
could resist Feuillère, the most sensual and alluring of French film
divas? Yet, entertaining as the erotically charged Gravey-Feuillère
double act is, it is only when Jouvet comes into shot that
Mister Flow
rises above the merely mundane and hints at the better film it might have
been with a more coherent script and more consistent direction. It's
an odd muddle of a film, but an enjoyable one for all that.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
It is with great reluctance that Antonin Rose, a struggling young barrister
in Paris, agrees to take on the case of Achille Durin, a valet accused of stealing
a tie-pin from his employer, Lord Scarlett. The impecunious lawyer
is duped into purloining a suitcase that will prove Durin's innocence, but
in doing so he falls foul of a ruse concocted by the world-renowned burglar
Mister Flow! By the time Antonin realises that Durin and Flow are one
in the same man, he is in the arch-criminal's power and easy prey for Flow's
even more devious partner-in-crime, the delectable socialite Lady Helena
Scarlett. During her stay at the casino resort of Deauville, the latter
succeeds in making the naive lawyer a willing accomplice in her nefarious
exploits, with the result that Antonin soon risks being mistaken for Mister
Flow...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.