The fall of France in the first year of the Second World War didn’t mean the end for French cinema. Both authorities in Vichy’s puppet regime and the German occupation zone were keen on keeping the population content by providing cinema entertainment, and the US entry into the war on the side of the Allies had temporarily deprived French filmmakers of their Hollywood competition. Despite serious war-related deprivation, French cinema continued to make films, some of which would become popular and later appreciated by film critics and historians. The best known of them all is Les Visiteurs du soir (“Evening Visitors”), a 1942 period fantasy drama directed by Marcel Carné, also known by its later international title The Devil’s Envoys.
The plot is set somewhere in France in May 1485. The Devil has sent two of its envoys to make people miserable. They are Gilles (played by Alain Cuny) and his androgynous female companion Dominique (played by Arletty), who, posing as troubadours, come to the castle owned by Baron Hugues (played by Fernand Ledoux). The Baron, a widower, has his beautiful daughter Anne (played by Marie Déa) engaged to Baron Renaud (played by Marcel Herrand), and he is celebrating by setting up a days-long feast and bringing in any entertainer he could find. Gilles and Dominique fit the bill and use their guise to start working on their mission. Dominique switches to an undoubtedly female look and manages to seduce both Hugues and Renaud, causing an increasingly bitter rivalry between the two. Gilles is supposed to seduce Anne, and he does, but in the process, he himself falls genuinely in love. This is seen as an act of defiance by his master, who comes to the castle in the form of a dark-clad wandering noble (played by Jules Berry) to take matters in hand personally.
The script for Les Visiteurs du soir was written by Pierre Laroche and Jacques Prévert, the latter being known as Carné’s collaborator and a founder of Poetic Realism, a 1930s French cinema movement that gave rise to some of Carné’s most popular films like Port of Shadows. With its medieval setting and fantasy characters, this film looked completely opposite to Carné’s pre-war work. This wasn’t an accident. Carné deliberately chose a distant historic period in order to provide some sort of escape for his audience and, what was even more important, had less to worry about from Vichy regime censors. This, on the other hand, meant that the film required extra effort with costumes, props, and sets, including the reconstruction of a medieval castle that was based on the 15th-century manuscript illumination Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The result is nevertheless very impressive, even more so in light of the fact that Carné had to deal not only with large logistical challenges but also wartime deprivation, often having to hide rationed food from some 2,000 usually very hungry extras.
Les Visiteurs du soir, like Carné’s previous films, features a very good cast. Arletty, one of the greatest stars of the 1930s and 1940s, plays a very interesting character that is both a sort of vampish femme fatale and a more enigmatic figure, ambiguous in terms of gender identity and moral alignment. Alain Cuny, on the other hand, is less impressive as the devil’s envoy who becomes more of a conventional romantic protagonist, and the same thing, to a degree, can be said of Marie Déa, who, however, makes the film’s melodramatic content easier to accept due to her more natural and down-to-earth sort of beauty. Yet, the efforts of these actors are often compromised by dialogue that at times sounds too theatrical and an uneven script that seems overlong. It takes almost an hour before things become interesting, mostly thanks to the arrival of the Devil, played brilliantly by Jules Berry, an actor who had played the psychopathic Valentin in Daybreak, Carné’s previous film. Berry’s performance was so strong, intimidating, and entertaining that many critics and film scholars after the war saw his character as an allegory for Adolf Hitler and, consequently, the entire film as Carné’s comment on the sorry state of affairs in his country under the Nazi yoke. Carné, however, denied any political context to his work. Whatever the truth may be, audiences in occupied France widely accepted the film, making it the most popular French film during the Occupation. Its success allowed Carné to launch another project that would be finished after the war under the title Children of Paradise and later enter history books as his greatest work.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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