Carnival of Sinners (1943)

Painter Pierre Fresnay (Brissot) arrives at a secluded mountainside hotel that has been cut off by an avalanche. He carries a box with him and has a rather unpleasant attitude which alienates him from the other guests there. The police may or may not be on his tail as they arrive to ask about a man they have been chasing. When his box is stolen by supernatural forces, he decides it is best to come clean and tell his tale. We are then thrown into a flashback story that explains his life and how he came to have this box, and what its significance is as well as what is inside. It's a story of selling your soul to the devil and things come to an end at this mountainside hotel.It's a good film that keeps you gripped. Fresnay is thoroughly dislikable at the beginning of the film but due to his predicament he wins you over and you understand why he is this way. A small man in a bowler hat, Palau, seems to follow him around. His appearances keep the tension going as he can change fortune but not necessarily in a good way. Fresnay has this box that gives him instant success, wealth, love, etc but it comes at a cost. His love interest is Josseline Gael (Irene) who is pretty straight-talking and whose behaviour also seems influenced by whether or not Fresnay has the box. Her real life story is interesting as she was married to a member of the French Gestapo and was jailed the following year to this film being made. She was subsequently stripped of her French citizenship whilst her husband was executed by a firing squad in 1946.An annoyance at the beginning of the film is that everyone speaks too quickly so that you just about have time to read the subtitles let alone look at the picture of the actor's faces speaking the lines at the same time. It can be frustrating. You need to accustom yourself to this and then things get OK. The plot's theme is interesting and there are good sequences including a line-up of masked men, all previous owners of the box, who have a brief tale to tell. Fresnay's ability comes from painting with his left hand and he signs his name as Maximus Leo. Is this name significant? Yes it is.What would you do if your debt kept doubling everyday and the debtor required payback? Easy, go to the bank and get a loan. Not sure why Fresnay didn't do that. But, then again, the devil doesn't play fair, so would probably conjure up a bank shortfall on that day. Maybe the best thing is to just enjoy the success you've got while it lasts. Fresnay fights back.

Undoubtedly an interesting film from Maurice Tourneur and made the same year his son was in the US making Cat People. The father about 70 when he made this made mostly silent films, the sound ones coming in his later years and to make things more difficult this would have been in occupied France. For me it seems too arch, his style clearly rooted in the silent era there is a tendency for slow methodical explanation and a certain amount of repetition. In an otherwise amazing scene towards the end, we see the chain of people that have been involved in the deals with the devil and it seems incredible today that we would have to go through every single one's story. All the subtlety of his son's film making is missing here and whilst as I say it is interesting to see it can seem like a long 80 minutes.

A well done, very imaginative story, variations of which have been done many times, but not with the style and touch of a Tourneur. Both father and son had made quality pictures enriching the lives of moviegoers for decades, and here is another. Jumping ahead a few years for a comparison, "Carnival Of Sinners" is like a feature-length 'Twilight Zone' TV show, but you would have to see this picture to appreciate how far superior it is.Brissot(Pierre Fresnay) is a painter unsuccessful in most everything he attempts - until he buys a 'talisman', a hand in a box from someone glad to get rid of it. Of course, the hand is cursed. The film starts at the end as he is relating his tale to a group at a mountain resort, and from thereon the story is as gripping as it is bizarre, and there is no letup. I don't summarize movie plots in reviews (I leave that to all other contributors), but this picture is an edge-of-your-seat story throughout its 78 minutes, which fly by.Very surprising to think that there are only 5 other reviews and only 394 ratings for such a terrific picture. Congratulations to TCM for dusting this one off. I am always delighted when I can see a great movie I hadn't seen before - and done with such style and competence. But with the Tourneur name on it I should have expected same.

Down on his luck and trying to change it, a man acquires a cursed hand said to accomplish that and finds it to come true, only for the devilish owner of the hand to appear to him looking to collect on the final aspect of the deal.Overall, this was a very puzzling effort as there's some great stuff here and some really troubling stuff. The troubling stuff is off to a start right away, as the main gimmick of this is that it's supposed to be the lead recounting his story to the group in a remote mountain lodge, yet it takes a good while to start off the story-telling which really throws the pacing to this one all over the place. Rather than be introduced to everything quite quickly, the dragged-out pace early on makes the first half seem quite overlong as it sets up his new lifestyle change and the resulting situations that spring from that. After that, it gets a lot better when the Satanic angle finally gets played and that sets off a lot of good stuff, from being tormented by the ever-increasing amount needed to end it all to the string of luck that comes to an end through his meddling is all in good fun, and when that gets to the finale with the assembled owners in masks recounting their fates, it's when this one really gets going and delivers some fun. All in all, it's problematic but not too bad.Today's Rating/PG-13: Violence.