The Devil in the Heart (1927) User Reviews

Clean language, dreamlike soul

[chaos-rampant · 15 January 2016]

L'herbier is less forward visually here than in L'argent the next year, less about motion in the eye and more about knots of tangled fate. It's melodrama in a small coastal town about a fisherman's daughter who falls for an orphaned boy she has taken in their house.

But if you look, the main device that gives the story shape is dreamlike, in tune with French notions of the time about eyeing turbulent soul and how this mode would resurface years later in the next great French school of Rivette and Resnais.

So a girl who is boisterous and careless, we see her running with a coterie of boys around town happy to cause mischief. He is the exact opposite, serious and dutiful about helping out his fisherman father. Her disdain for that life of responsibility is summoned early when she breaks a window in their house and the boy slaps her. Spiteful, the girl wishes they die.

The karmic chain in motion is a tempest out at sea the next day that shatters lives and breaks up his home.

This is followed by the most dreamlike scene where she lays down outside a church, drifts to sleep and in the next beat the boy has been summoned back to her; salvaged from the wreck that morning and has come to pray. In essence we have layered dreaming about a girl who takes him in and comes to find out about love and responsibility. Other dreamlike digress: inside a club where she finds him cavorting with dancers as what she fears, her parents happily acceding to marriage as what she hopes for.

We have less interesting stretches about a lecherous clubowner who plots to win her over with money and much dismay as she must rush to claim her own fate before it's decided for her. It happens out at sea with turbulent waters; once more someone is left behind and he comes to her.

So we have clean language and melodramatic plot, ordinary for the time, the way it's structured though so that we receive dramas of love along with the mind that creates internal currents of them is forward- looking. This is the language Celine and Julie would be written in, one of the very best.

Less Avant-garde, More Humanistic

[FerdinandVonGalitzien · 30 October 2009]

Herr Marcel L'Herbier, an excellent French director of the silent era, made his most important works during the 20's of the last century. These are astounding silent oeuvres in which the modern, fashionable artistic tendencies that were in vogue in those early days are much in evidence. These avant-garde works have remarkable art-decó settings and are highly appreciated nowadays by silent connoisseurs for their modernity and Herr L'Herbier very personal style.

"Le Diable Au Coeur" (1928) is, in some ways, a completely different film in comparison with those avant-garde and "modern" films mentioned before; this time Herr L'Herbier forgets those fashionable experimental tendencies for the sake of a most conventional and realistic setting of a little French fishing town.

The beautiful maritime background and the little seaside village where the main characters live, condition the life and troubles of our heroine, Frau Ludivine Bucaille ( Betty Balfour ) . She is a madcap girl who leads a gang of boys who play continual childish pranks in the small village. She lives with her father and her two brothers (who are terrors like herself).She will maintain a troubled love relationship with Delphin ( Herr Jaque Catelain ) until, acting on the advice of her father who is looking out for his own interests, she gets engaged to Gaston Lauderin ( Herr Leo Da Costa ) an old satyr and owner of the town tavern.

This Herr Von can say also that "Le Diable Au Coeur" tells a conventional love story that from time to time seems monotonous and gives to this German count a feeling of "déjà vu" but thanks to Herr L'Herbier's skillful artistic intentions and the emphasis he gives to village life (very credible atmosphere with a strong regional flavour) and an excellent gallery of supporting characters, the familiar love story floats along on the waters of realism.

The beautiful scenery was photographed by an excellent trio, Herr Lucien Bellavoine, Herrr Jean Letort und Herr Louis Le Bertre, who capture the proper maritime background from the beautiful harbour to the decadent tavern. The art direction adds immeasurably to the film's effectiveness.

"Le Diable Au Coeur" is a remarkable film, less avant-garde, more humanistic than l'Herbier's other works but just as memorable ( as a curiosity, this film was produced together with UFA and Gaumont-British ). It depicts the greed, ambition and the human miseries of men, primal human feelings that can found in the most avant-garde of settings or in the life of a small town by the sea.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count has other fish to fry.

Humansitc mon cul - as Zazie might have said

[kekseksa · 6 February 2017]

One can see very easily how it came about, but the fact is this is a rather unfortunate misjudgment based on a misunderstanding.

Marcel L'Herbier, one of the most distinguished French directors of the period, had produced two wonderful films in the decade - L'Argent and L'Inhumaine, classics of European cinema with a soupçon of the avant-garde. But such films, however successful in Europe, would never have a chance in the US market. So what L'Herbier seems to have done here is to try and produce a very conventional (a bit painfully conventional) US-friendly sentimental drama, capitalisng on the fact that British actress Betty Balfour had a slightly spurious reputation of being "a British Mary Pickford".

But their is a blatant mismatch. The style of the film is very European, non-realistic (especially in the early scenes), a sort of prefiguring of poetic realism), deep focus, snatches of impressionistic montage, often superb to watch. But the story is completely unworthy.... One has the impression that serious film-makers are putting their art in the service of making a film for idiots. Happy End and all.

And I think that is pretty much what L'Herbier intended and pretty much sums up the European attitude towards US films (then and now). But it is founded on a misunderstanding (which is why it doesn't really work). US films were puerile in content, it is true, and often mawkishly and falsely sentimental (precisely the effect that US studios insisted upon). It is also true that they were stylistically very limited as the corseting of "realism" was pulled ever tighter.

BUT (and it is a very very big but because it is the key to US cinema not merely of this period but throughout its history), US films are to a large degree driven by their limitations rather than by their strengths, in the sense that their quality lies in the extent to which they are able to run agsinst their own grain, evading the banal expectations of the producers and often, for that matter of the audiences. Unlike in Europe where films weer and are generally a product of the co-operation of producer and director, in the US they are typically the product of a conflict between producer and director. Sometime this was straightforward open warfare (s between Thalberg and Von Stroheim), a war which in the end the director would also end up by losing but often it was a more asymmetric struggle fought with sleight of hand or word (as with a director like Lubitsch or a writer like Hecht) which the producers (like the US military) were less competent to deal with (or even understand).

The best US directors and writers, however seemingly obedient to their masters, had already learned by this time to build in a sort of against-the-grain subtext to their films (often cynically exploitative but very effective) and it is that mildly subversive subtext that added the "salt" to the stew and meant that the films still worked despite their puerile content.

L'Herbier has quite ably copied the US format while very ably opening out the style in a way that US directors rarely dared to do (Vidor's The Crowd is the obvious counter-example in the same year - but flopped). But L'Herbier has forgotten the "salt". The films, despite it lively beginning, is thereafter direly slow and lacks any real sharpness or tension. As a result we have a beautifully-made film that simply doesn't work either in European or in US terms.

But the failed attempt does help us to understand a lot about the difference between European and US films (then and now) and how the former could sometime fail despite their excellencies (the Europeans found it difficult to ignore the rich US market) and why the latter often succeed despite their quite evident failings.