(1952)
Dir - Erik Blomberg
Overall: GOOD
The full-length debut from Finish director and cinematographer Erik Blomberg and staring his wife and co-scripter Mirjami Kuosmanen, The White Reindeer, (Valkoinen peura), is an occasionally idle yet beautifully photographed fairytale. Set in Finland's Lapland, Blomberg indulges nearly every shot of frostbitten mountains and reindeer herders working in the frozen landscape wonderfully so. Kuosmanen makes for an ideal ice queen who is both lovely and mysteriously threatening, plus the tribal soundtrack by Einar Englund creates a relentlessly tense atmosphere. Though the current restoration of the movie only runs a mere sixty-eight minutes, the story based on Sámi shamanism and Finish mythology is too simple to remain properly engaging throughout. There are enough captivating moments, but to be fair, they are also surrounded by monotonous ones. The cold, desolate scenery is not enough to consistently maintain the bewitching spell otherwise apparent. As a horror outing from a country that hardly if at all ever produced any especially in the 1950's though, it remains an assuredly recommendable curiosity.
(1955)
Dir - Henri-Georges Clouzot
Overall: GREAT
Almost unarguably the most famous French thriller ever produced was Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot's follow-up to the equally lauded The Wages of Fear. Rare for its time and still for today, there is no dramatic musical score on hand and this ingredient alone could not possibly make the numerous, anxiety-mounting moments more perfect. Sans a prolonged set up where the three main characters and their personalities are explicitly stated, nearly every proceeding scene is expertly hear-racing. By the time the film indulges in its most straight-horror components, (namely the famous ending), few films of its kind truly deliver such dread quite as successfully. Many of the plot points, (all adapted here from Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud's 1952 novel She Who Was No More), have been liberally re-textualized ever since, but the story itself actually takes a backseat to the mostly masterful presentation. There are instances where Clouzot takes perhaps too much time building near-suffocating tension and it can be argued that the twist finale becomes obvious a few minutes too early, but the overall structure is so well done and the macabre details so memorable that the movie's reputation as a masterpiece is easily justified.
(1959)
Dir - Jean Renoir
Overall: MEH
One of the very rare television movies in Jean Renoir's filmography, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier, (The Testament of Dr. Cordelier, The Doctor's Horrible Experiment, Experiment in Evil), is the writer/director's modernized interpretation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Working with such source material that had already been done to exhausting death by the late 50s, Renoir's take on it plays with the chronology of events somewhat, only revealing what any viewer already knows in the final act and then proceeding to retract with a series of flashbacks over a confessional recording. Also, Renoir himself appears in the beginning in a mock-behind the scenes scenario where he arrives at a television studio to introduce the film, which serves no real purpose besides adding a couple minutes to the running time. Jean-Louis Barrault's performance is acceptable, but his Hyde/Mr. Opale is too goofy most of the time, gyrating his shoulders along to the likewise inappropriate silly music accompanying some of his scenes. The few transformation moments are pretty lackluster as well, a far, far cry in comparison from the utterly superb ones in the 1931version from paramount.
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