La cigarette (1919)
*** (out of 4)
Pierre (Gabriel Signoret) is an older man who works as a museum director and is also married to the much younger Denise (Andree Brabant). Before long Pierre starts to believe that she's having an affair with a famous tennis player so he's influenced by the story connected to a mummy at his museum. Pierre plans to poison one of his cigarettes and then add it to a bunch where he never knows when he will die.
This film was directed by Germaine Dulac, a French woman who worked as a critic, a poet and she also made a handful of films. I had never heard of this film until it turned up in a box set of movies directed by females and I must say that while the movie had some flaws it also had a pretty interesting idea and it made for a very entertaining movie and one that deserves to be better known than it is.
What I liked most about this film was the story itself. I thought the whole angle with the mummy and its story was interesting and I liked the story around a man wanting to kill himself but not know when. Adding one poisonous cigarette to dozens of them and then just smoking them at will was a good concept. Of course, I think the film would have been even better had they tried to bring some tension out of this scenario.
With that said, the film was extremely well-made and I like the touches that Dulac brought to it and especially how the old man story was told. Both Signoret and Brabant were very good in their roles and the film was fast-paced for its 51-minutes. Fans of silent cinema will certainly want to check this one out.
