La Main Du Diable

(1955) ****

Roland Brissot bursts into a busy inn one night. He's missing his left hand and tucked under his arm is a box, and he desperately wants to know whether there's a cemetary nearby. When told that there isn't, he sits back, deflated. Then the power goes out momentarily. When the lights come back on, Roland discovers to great alarm that his box is now missing. Now totally out of sorts, and caving to the pressure of the intrigued hotel guests he tells his story.

Little over a year earlier, Roland was a mediocre painter with no money and no reputation. A chef at a restaurant offers him a fantastic solution to his troubles. For a half a penny, he sells Roland a magic hand that will bestow great talents upon him. It works: a year passes and he is now a staggeringly famous and visionary painter. The night of the greatest exhibition of his career, he meets a bookish little man who explains that the true cost of Roland's talisman is far higher than he'd been led to believe.

I debated whether to even bother writing about the intro at the inn since only one important plot point takes place there. But the amount of detail popping in the background throughout La Main Du Diable is really impressive, and any worthy discussion of how wonderful this movie is has to acknowledge it. For example, zoom in and keep an eye on what's happening through the windows in the back of this shot:

And that's just what I could fit into one .gif on Giphy -- there's at least 20 more seconds of it in the film. I thought for sure there was going to be a scene after this that featured Roland sprinting in a panic around all those carnival floats and explosions. There's no way, I thought, that the filmmakers would go to so much trouble to make a carnival parade just to have it pass by in the background of an uncrucial scene in the middle of the movie. But no, that's exactly what they did. Roland steps into the dining room and that's the last we see of all those floats. But we don't care, because we just get more lovely little details once Roland opens the door.

Masked and seated at a long table are the ghosts of all of the former owners, dating back decades, of Roland's magic hand. For the next few minutes we're treated to a charming montage of each of their experiences with the hand -- each man's rise from obscurity to sensational wealth and success. Spoiler alert: things don't end well for any of them.

Ordinarily, I'd be like, "a flashback within a flashback? Fuck off" -- but the flashbacks are all composed of these adorable dioramas where the actors and extras take up only a smidgen of screen space, and director Maurice Tourneur uses the rest of the screen space to tell stories with shadow play. Seriously, look more closely at that beheading .gif and notice the bottom left corner that there's an audience watching, clapping as the head hits the ground. Because of the relative sizes of actors set in the frame, we can easily imagine a whole concert hall full of people watching that guy's head roll away. And all that energy is packed into a 10 second clip with like 15 actors, sandwiched in with a bunch of other clips with different art and just as much depth.

It's like with the crowd at the inn that we meet in the first few minutes: do we need all that? To get to know any of those people? Not really. But who cares? I was cool with Tourneur loading as much of these whimsical details into his movie as he could stuff in there, all because the main force of it -- the central story line and all of the acting -- is so good and so much fun. Remember the movie Snake Eyes, how amazing that opening scene is, and how much of a mess the rest of the movie is? This is not that. La Main Du Diable takes its goofy, sprawling opening, and parlays it into scene after scene of highly entertaining story, and dazzling detail. I'm thrilled I took a chance on this one.