Tempête (1940)
Directed by Bernard-Deschamps

Film Review

Having failed as a film director (his ambitions were too great, even for Hollywood in its heyday), Erich von Stroheim frequently suffered further ignominy as an actor, appearing in films to which a more discerning artiste of his standing would have given a very wide berth.  Tempête is the nadir of his screen career, a shambolic muddle of a crime drama which not only succeeds in making von Stroheim look ridiculous, it also has much the same affect on his illustrious co-stars Arletty and Marcel Dalio.  Directed without any detectable sign of ability or commitment by Bernard Deschamps (one of the creators of the widescreen process), the film is further blighted by a script that seems to have been chaotically thrown together without the least idea of story structure or narrative plausibility.  André Cayatte had a hand in the script, which is apparently adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novel Ferragus, just a few years before he made his directing debut with another (slightly more bearable) time-shifted Balzac adaptation, La Fausse maîtresse (1942).  Going by these early cinematic offerings, Cayatte might well have been advised to stick with the day job.

Tempête begins with a somewhat superfluous prologue in which a hideously blacked up von Stroheim attempts to make his fortune by selling a hair-straightening product to African Americans who appear to want nothing more than to adopt the trim coiffeur of their Caucasian counterparts.  Even those who are not slavish adherents to the now endemic cult of political correctness can hardly help feeling queasy when confronted with the spectacle of bad taste that comes their way in the film's opening few minutes.  Von Stroheim's imitation of a black American was presumably intended to be humorous but somehow this evil concoction of boot polish and ham can hardly fail to offend.

And it doesn't get any better (well, not much).  True, there is fun to be had (at least for the male spectators) in watching Arletty effectively reprise her part in Marcel Carné's Hôtel du nord (1938), posing suggestively for the camera in the scantiest of costumes and getting knocked about the set by her partner, Marcel Dalio.  Although her character is a pretty lame archetype, Arletty is just about the only thing the film has going for it and she delights both with her presence and her two musical numbers, to say nothing of her fetish for farm animals.  How odd that after brightening the first two thirds of this terrible film and giving it a thin veneer of respectability, she suddenly disappears for no good reason in the final third.  She probably had better things to do with her time.

Once Arletty has completed her star turn, we then have to sit through the unedifying spectacle of von Stroheim dying the slowest of deaths after Dalio, at his absolute worst, has managed to chew up every square inch of the scenery.  Relief, if you can call it that, is provided by some pointless cutaways to a bored André Luguet looking like a man who is wondering if he has made the right career choices and Annie Ducaux trying hard not to look like an actress who has lost the will to live.  Julien Carette is totally wasted in what is no more than a bit part and Jean Debucourt, an esteemed character actor and leading light of the Comédie-Française, hasn't much more to do than act as Luguet's sounding board.  So badly served are the cast by this film that it is like watching the thespian equivalent of a chain gang.   The confusion we see on screen is probably a reflection of the greater confusion taking place outside the confines of the film studio as the world rushed towards war, but this doesn't excuse the wholehearted lapse into mediocrity that is Tempête.

Film Synopsis

When his latest scam in America attracts the attention of the police, international con artist Korlick beats a hasty retreat to Europe, where he has no difficulty finding investors for his phoney project to construct an artificial sea in the Sahara Desert.  His latest moneymaking scheme is put in jeopardy when a spineless blackmailer named Barel threatens to expose him.  Korlick's main concern, however, is that his daughter Jeanne is married to police chief Pierre Desmarets, who is determined to bring him to book...