Takaisin elämään

"Destiny" is a total mess, and if you know its history, you'll understand why.

The last 30 minutes of the film were intended to be the first story in a four-story anthology movie called "Flesh and Fantasy," directed by Julien Duvivier. The studio apparently thought it was too dark and weird for audiences at the time to handle, so they lopped it off. But they had this 30 minutes of movie they couldn't do anything with. So they hired a new creative team to add new content, fluffing it out into a roughly 60 minute feature. So if the last half of the movie seems like a totally different film from the first, that's why.

I saw this as part of a double feature with "Flesh and Fantasy" at the Noir City film festival in Chicago. Eddie Muller of TCM was there to introduce it, and he actually apologized for the first 30 minutes of this film, but promised us all that it would be redeemed by the last half. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I enjoyed the added on portion of "Destiny" more than any other part of "Flesh and Fantasy." It's definitely more pedestrian than Duvivier's film, but it feels much more like the kinds of noirs I'm used to, which is what I was there for. "Flesh and Fantasy" doesn't feel like a film noir at all, and neither does the last half of "Destiny," so to see it at a film noir festival felt like a disappointment that the B-movie quality of "Destiny's" first half partially made up for.

Grade: C+