The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower

Duvivier's huge body of work ,as far as the silent movies are concerned,is not well known:"Poil De Carotte" ,"Au Bonheur Des Dames " and that's it.The only available copy of " Le Mystere De La Tour Eiffel " is Dutch ,and ,although it's got a running time of two hours +,a big hunk is missing,considering the script which features a chamber of tortures where the hero is imprisoned notably.

The story is thoroughly implausible ,worthy of Feuillade's extravaganzas in the precedent decade ;even Souvestre and Allain who wrote "Fantomas" would not write such a far-fetched plot ,absolutely impossible to tell ,and anyway my good friend Writer's Reign already wrote an adequate summary.Let's note however that that "La Compagnie De L'Antenne" in the FRench synopsis has become Ku -Klux -Eiffel (sic),which makes sense ,for these sinister persons are dressed like the maleficent American KKK;that the young boy who plays Reginald ,Jimmy Gaillard ,would become an actor when he grew up (notably in "Gringalet" or "L'Amant De Borneo" );that the fortress of Roche Noire" has a strange architecture inside and that it's got a strange window:when you try to open it,bars appear.The (Klu- Klu-Eiffels) shadow graph is a trick Duvivier would use again much later in one scene of "L'Affaire Maurizius"(1954)

The best of what remains of the original work is the final scenes ,on the Eiffel Tower ,where Duvivier already showed he would be one of the greatest French directors of all time.He filmed the famous tower in a way that is almost frightening: the steel frames ,the cables ,everything creates a new world where men are like spiders on a giant web ,while the crowd looks like ants on the Champ De Mars.

It's not a particularly Duvivier-like piece. Without going into detail about the plot, it's easiest to understand it in the context of the growth of the thriller in this era, from writers like Buchan to Oppenheimer to Greene and film makers like Feuillade and Lang, to Hitchcock. It has the typically melodramatic, rococo menace of the earlier workers, including an evil organization (in the Dutch titles and their English translation, "The Knights of the Ku-Klux-Eiffel" in black-and-white robes with pointy hoods), combined with a little mustachioed man (Tramel, who prospered more in sound films, taking the lead in the sound version of Crainquebill), ending in the big set-piece ending atop the Eiffel Tower, reminding me most strongly of the ending of The Naked City.

I trust that my hitting these points shows its relationship to other, better-known thrillers. It is on the issue of pacing that it falls down. There are numerous chase sequences, most of which seem to run interminably. It is only with the final chase atop the Eiffel Tower that it becomes clear that these other chases are shot and timed to that final chase, with the deliberate pace of the cog railroad on the tower and the tiring, slowing clambering of the villain up the girders. The structure of the plot is not advancement or retreat, it is recapitulation, like THE BIRDS, or even THE EVIL DEAD. By the end, even the beautifully shot final confrontation was mildly wearisome, and the ending seems more like a baseball game called on account of rain, rather than a winning run.

Duvivier would return to these issues, with better writing (Simenon) and a structure that more effectively showed the inevitability of fate. By the time he was working with Jean Gabin, he had a protagonist who knew his fate and struggled in vain against it. Tramel is more a comedy character stuck in a serious world, the inverse of Buster Keaton. He triumphs because that's the way these things work out, not through any virtue of his own, not even stubbornness. By the time the final chase ends with the villain losing his grasp of the girders like Norman Lloyd's fraying coat, it's a conclusion like the Great War: exhaustion.

Perhaps this was the point of the movie. If so, the characters seem blithely unaware of it. It may be valid, but in a world of unending recapitulation, it will all have to be done again later.