The greatest movie ever made..!

Beautiful, moving film.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

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.

Trivia buffs may like to note that even as Maurice Tourneur was shooting this Gothic tale for Continental in Paris his son Jacques was shooting Cat People in Hollywood. This is a very superior piece of Gothic if anybody asks you; it bows to convention insofar as in a lonely inn subject to power failure a stranger narrates the story of how he, as a struggling artist was persuaded to 'buy' for peanuts a 'talisman' in the shape of a severed human left hand from a restauranteur. Of course his fortunes did improve dramatically and equally inevitably the piper came round one day to collect the payment for calling the tune. In a masterstroke the 'devil' takes the shape of a Caspar Milquetoast, a bowler-hatted bailiff who informs our hero that the 'price' doubles every day he keeps the hand. Naturally his mistress chooses that moment to take it on the Jesse Owens with his savings leaving him to face a mounting bill. In a second masterstroke the artist (Pierre Fresnay) comes face to face with previous 'owners' of the hand, beginning with a monk who declined to use his artistic talent for the good of God. Our artist finds that he must stump up - if you'll forgive the expression - the collective tab for all of these previous owners. Made under German occupation it would not have been hard in 1943 to locate a hidden 'message' here but sixty years on it still works as a psychological horror story. Excellent.