The following account of mine is as much a revelation as a review, but is necessary, due to the unusually complex nature of this particular movie's release. So let's begin with the revelation before moving on to the review.
Based upon the decidedly strange yet engrossing gothic novel of the same title by Jean Ray (originally published in French in 1943 but which I've read and own in its subsequent English-translation edition), the early 1970s dark fantasy/horror movie Malpertuis stars Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire (Hampshire actually playing no fewer than 5 different roles within it!), and several notable French, Flemish, German, and North American thespians. But the reason why it is something of an oddity, production-wise, is because there are at least three different released versions of it presently available.
There is the original 100-minute English-language version, known as the Cannes version (CV), due to its debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972 (and which has since been dubbed into other languages too). There is also the 120-minute Director's Cut (DC), which is in Dutch with English subtitles, and was released in 1973 but subsequently lost for many years until lately rediscovered (and again dubbed into various other languages). And then there is the 90-minute English-language ex-rental big box VHS video version (VV) released in 1987 (ditto regarding its having been redubbed too) and pictured at the beginning of this present Shuker In MovieLand blog article of mine. What is so odd, however, is that each version contains segments missing from the others, which means that there is no single version of Malpertuis that contains ALL of the segments from it.
Consequently, even though it is shorter than the DC, the CV contains segments not included in the DC. In particular, those sections featuring singing are very truncated in the DC, but they are present in their entirety in the CV, as is the absolutely crucial climactic scene where the hero suffers the fate of all mortals who look into the eyes of a gorgon. For whereas this is not actually shown in the DC, it is shown in the CV, and also in the VV. Conversely, the VV totally lacks the final twist-in-the-tail scenes – see later – present in both the DC and the CV (although this is no bad thing, as in my view they ruin the movie's ending and have no relation to the book's plot at all). Incidentally, there is also an American version, retitled The Legend of Doom House, but which (if any) of the three above-discussed ones this version corresponds to remains undetermined by me at present (I've read several contradictory accounts online regarding which version this is, so I'll reserve judgement until/if ever I am able to watch it personally). Anyway, enough about the variety of versions out there – what is Malpertuis actually about?
SPOILER ALERT – IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THIS MOVIE'S PLOT AND CRUCIAL REVEALS, READ NO FURTHER!
Directed by the celebrated Belgian film director Harry Kümel, Malpertuis in all of its versions is a much-modified, exceedingly abridged take on Ray's original novel (the latter being far too complex both in content and in structure to attempt a description of here, so I won't).
The movie begins with a sailing ship arriving in dock at Bruges, Belgium, where some rowdy sailors swiftly disembark for a night's drinking and debauchery at a local bar/brothel/dance hall. Hiding behind some barrels at the dock is a very unsavoury-looking man, Charles Dideloo (played by Michel Bouquet), and his younger co-conspirator, Mathias Crook (Daniel Pilon), waiting for one particular figure to appear – that of a young blond-haired, blue-eyed sailor named Jan (Mathieu Carrière). When Jan does appear, he declines to go carousing with the other sailors, stepping off the ship alone instead, and briskly sets off in the direction of his family home, unaware that he is being surreptitiously followed by Dideloo and Crook. Suddenly, Jan stops and asks a man what has happened to the house that used to be on the spot where they are right now, explaining that it was his family home, and is shocked to learn that it fell down some time ago and was entirely razed.
Looking away, thoroughly bemused, Jan sees in the distance the back view of a young woman whom he believes to be his sister, Nancy, so he pursues her through various winding lanes, while he in turn is still being pursued by Dideloo and Crook. Just as Jan draws near to her, however, she opens a door and steps inside a building – and when Jan does the same (followed as ever by Dideloo and Crook), he discovers that the building is none other than the brothel where his fellow sailors were heading to.
And sure enough, here they are, but when Jan tracks down the woman he believes to be Nancy, he finds that she is in fact a singer and prostitute named Bets (Sylvie Vartan). Moreover, because Bets takes a liking to him, and seems willing to offer him her services for free, Jan soon finds himself pitted against her angry pimp, and when Dideloo slyly offers the pimp a thick leather cosh, he loses no time in viciously striking Jan in the face with it, but with such force that the heavily-bleeding young sailor falls to the ground and loses consciousness.
When he finally awakens, Jan thinks at first that he is in his own room within his family's home, then remembers that his home has been demolished, but standing close by, and delighted to see him, is none other than Nancy (role #1 for Susan Hampshire). When Jan asks where they are, he is filled with dread when Nancy confesses that they are at Malpertuis – a huge, shadowy mansion of countless rooms and chambers, labyrinthine corridors, endless spiral staircases, and an ominous, evil reputation, where his sinister, occultist uncle Quentin Cassavius (Welles) lives.
However, it soon transpires that Cassavius is gravely ill, and it was he who had sent Dideloo and Crook on a mission to secure Jan by whatever means necessary and bring him back to Malpertuis before he, Cassavius, expired (he had even supplied Dideloo with the fateful leather cosh for this express purpose). Also currently present at Malpertuis are a motley assortment of other relatives, as well as a number of servants in residence, all of whom will shortly be gathering around his death bed to hear his last will and testament. Cassavius has lived a very long and extremely successful life as a merchant traveller and much else besides, so they are all well aware that he is exceedingly rich. As a result, even though they all detest him just as much as he detests all of them, they have always kept on sycophantically good terms with him in the hope of inheriting a portion of his immense fortune one day. And now, finally that day has come.
For not long after Jan's arrival, Cassavius's health deteriorates sharply, so the entire household is ordered to attend him for his will's reading, carried out by a formidable man named Eisengott (Walter Rilla). It soon transpires that Cassavius's amassed fortune is even greater than any of them has ever suspected, and when the will reveals that it is to be divided equally between everyone present, they are all ecstatic – until the final clause is read out. For it stipulates that in order to be eligible to receive their bequeathed portion, every one of them must move into Malpertuis straight away and spend the rest of their lives there, never leaving its grounds. Groans of shock, despair, and disbelief echo throughout the room. The clause also states that if the last two survivors there are a man and a woman, they must marry.
Cassavius looks at his beautiful young niece Euryale (Susan Hampshire in her second role), sitting next to Jan, and expresses his hope that they will one day wed each other. A mysterious figure who never looks directly at anyone, always communicating with her face and eyes lowered, Euryale is told by Cassavius to stay behind when the others leave at the end of the will's reading, after which he asks her to bring him release. Cassavius looks directly at Euryale, she lifts up her face, and stares into his eyes…
Jan is now forced to inhabit Malpertuis alongside his grotesque relatives and its equally weird servants. They include a creepy, crazed taxidermist named Philarette (Charles Janssens), obsessed with creating new stuffed specimens and who speaks to Jan about his fine bone structure and flayable skin with an unsettling enthusiasm; three severe sisters perpetually dressed in black, one of whom, Alice aka Alecto (Hampshire's third role), is passionately drawn to Jan; the ostensibly mad Lampernisse (Jean-Pierre Cassel), a pathetic youth dressed in rags and ever fearful of the impending night, who hides in a dank cave-like hole at the end of one corridor and desperately shields his candles from being blown out by a mysterious unseen force; plus a seemingly semi-resident clergyman who never stops eating, and an ugly old servant woman constantly bickering with her doddery husband, who do all the menial work needing to be done at Malpertuis.
During the coming days, weeks, months (the viewer never discovers how swiftly or slowly times passes inside the grim walls of Malpertuis) Jan finds himself trapped on all sides by the varied attentions of Hampshire's three competing characters – his loving sister Nancy, the enigmatic Euryale, and the amorous Alice. In addition, all manner of bizarre and macabre happenings occur.
For instance, Jan finds a vault containing Cassavius's coffin, but when he prises the coffin open he is shocked to discover that Cassavius's corpse has turned to stone. Philarette shows Jan a series of bottles containing the preserved remains of imperfectly formed homunculi that he and Cassavius created, only for Jan to discover later that not all of the homunculi created by them are failures. Nancy is in love with Mathias Crook and announces that they are renouncing their inheritance and quitting Malpertuis, shortly after which Mathias is found murdered, suspended above the floor by a stake driven through his forehead. Yet, incredibly, a little later he reappears alive, albeit more like a mindless automaton now than a real man. And Alice takes her terrifying, nightmarish revenge upon the repulsive Diderloo, who has been insisting upon receiving sexual favours from her. But even greater horrors are still to come.
Jan briefly escapes from Malpertuis when its inmates turn upon the clergyman, with the doddery old manservant breathing fire upon the crucifix that the clergyman holds out before him in a desperate but vain attempt to ward them off, but he subsequently returns (the DC contains a lengthy scene presenting his time outside Malpertuis that is entirely omitted from the other two versions), whereupon he hears Lampernisse piteously crying out his name. And when Jan finds Lampernisse, he is lying prostrate on the floor, bleeding profusely, and more dead than alive, with a huge eagle perched upon him, feasting upon his liver!
Transfixed by this terrifying scene, Jan doesn't see Philarette behind him, who seizes Jan, stuns him with a blow to his head, and drags him into his workshop, where he clamps him face up on a table with shackles round his wrists, ankles, and neck. Philarette then sharpens a scalpel and is about to make the first incision beneath Jan's eyes in his bid to skin him alive when a voice calls him by name. Philarette looks up, startled, in the direction of the voice, and promptly turns grey. He then falls over onto the floor, breaking up into several section as his body hits the ground, having turned to stone.
The voice was that of Euryale, who now tells Jan not to look at her, as she releases each of his shackles with a single touch. She then tells him to follow her, that it is time for him to learn at last the secret of Malpertuis.
They enter a room where a long table is covered in a sheet. Sitting together in a row along the table's edge are the occupants of Malpertuis,, but all of them are immobile, as they too are now stone. Euryale explains that many years ago, Cassavius and Philarette visited a small island in the Ionian Sea where the last classical Greek gods still survived, though their powers were greatly depleted due to mortals no longer worshipping or believing in them. Thanks to his occult powers and the taxiderm capabilities of Philarette, Cassavius was able to capture all of them, and preserve them for all time by having Philarette sew them inside human bodies. He shipped them like a lowly herd of cattle back to Malpertuis, where they have been forced to serve him ever since.
Euryale walks up to each figure in turn and pulls off its sewn-on face, revealing its true face and identity as a Greek deity (although, bafflingly, in most cases the names by which she refers to them, and thus reiterated here by me, are actually those of their Roman counterparts!). With dark irony, the ugly female servant turns out to be the goddess of love and beauty Venus, her doddery but fire-breathing husband is the fire god Vulcan, Matthias is the sun god Apollo, the three sisters are the three Furies (with Alice/Alecto personifying Revenge), Dideloo is the messenger god Hermes, his conniving wife Sylvie is the goddess of magic Hecate, and poor Lampernisse is none other than Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from Heaven to give it to humans but was thereafter punished for all eternity by Zeus who sent a voracious bird of prey to tear out and consume his perpetually-regenerating liver every day. (Moreover, in the novel, Eisengott is revealed to be Zeus himself, but again enslaved by Cassavius.)
Incredulous at such astonishing revelations, Jan turns to Euryale, stating that if all of this is true, then who is she and why did Cassavius not enslave her too. Euryale replies that he did not dare to, because her power has remained undiminished. Instead, his plan was that she and Jan would wed and give rise to a dynasty of demi-gods to rule the world, but Cassavius had never anticipated that she would not just wed Jan but also actually fall in love with him, thereby bringing him both love and death. For as Euryale now tearfully informs Jan, she is a gorgon.
Jan knows the terrible danger that he is in, but is compelled to look into Euryale's beautiful yet deadly face. Their eyes meet (and in the CV and VV, the viewers see his skin turn grey, but this brief yet crucial reveal is inexplicably absent from the DC).
The scene then switches abruptly to a brief clip of the supersonic jet Concorde in flight, and then to the inside of a mental institution, where Jan is sitting talking to a doctor. Except that now he is not Jan the sailor, but is instead Jan a besuited computer expert, who has been cured of delusions in which he had been imagining that the Greek gods had been abducted, sewn into human bodies, and enslaved. He is now ready to be released. A nurse (Hampshire yet again) is in attendance for a short period, then the doctor receives a message that Jan's wife has arrived to take him home.
Jan turns around and there is Charlotte his wife (played by... – guess who!!). After embracing, they walk down some corridors towards the exit, during which time they pass a number of hospital staff and patients who look exactly like various residents from Malpertuis, before finally reaching the exit door. Jan opens the door and steps through – only to find himself back inside Malpertuis!
Jan spins around, but the door behind him has gone, replaced by a brick wall, and his wife has gone too. He turns back again, and sees a figure approaching him, walking down the corridor in which he is now standing inside Malpertuis. As the figure draws nearer, Jan realizes that it is himself, but dressed in the attire that he was wearing when residing in Malpertuis. The camera closes in upon the eyes of the approaching Jan as the movie ends. Make of that what you will!
Believe it or not, my above overview is only a very brief summary of this movie's incredibly complex, convoluted plot, which contains many twists and turns not mentioned by me here, and includes aspects (particularly the ending scenes in the hospital and onward, which are not even included in the VV) that make no sense to me at all. Does it mean that the entire movie is the sick fantasy of a deranged mind, all illusions and dreams, where nothing is real?
Malpertuis in all three of its versions is undoubtedly one of the strangest movies that I have ever seen, but also one of the most fascinating, and is visually gorgeous, with vibrant colours and lavish sets. No less sumptuous is the sweeping score by Georges Delerue. Susan Hampshire performs admirably in all of her multiple roles (most notably in a drawing room scene at Malpertuis that features three of her characters interacting together, truly a cinematographic triumph in its day). Even so, I am at a loss to know the purpose of this exceptional casting anomaly – why couldn't the five different roles have been played by five different actresses, or is there some deep inherent symbolism at play here that I have entirely overlooked? Also, in the Dutch DC, Welles as Cassavius is dubbed by someone with a voice far less distinctive than his deep, rich, unmistakable tones, which is a great shame, and means that you need to watch the CV if you are to fully experience Welles' dramatic performance both visually and aurally.
Due t0 the unparalleled problems that I've had in obtaining watchable examples of it (see below), I've actually viewed this film variously in its entirety or in parts more than half a dozen times now in the past few months alone (each time in order to determine whether the DVD or video in question played properly throughout), so it is indelibly imprinted upon my mind now! Even so, I've never grown tired of watching it, because there is so much to take notice of that this extraordinary film definitely bears several viewings in order to do it justice. Speaking of which:
Thanks to Facebook friend Steve Short, several months ago I was able to view the DC online with English subtitles. And after a very long search (which involved purchasing and viewing a set that proved to be faulty, so had to be returned for a refund), in late March 2021 I was finally able to buy and watch a fully-functional example of the 2-disc DVD that contains not only the DC but also the CV, which I'd never previously seen, thereby enabling me to compare and contrast it directly with the DC.
However, I am still having no luck whatsoever in obtaining a fully-watchable example of the VV. Another FB friend, Neil Edmond, kindly gifted me one that he'd bought at a market quite some time earlier but had never watched. Sadly, however, when I tried it out, it wouldn't play all through – nor would three other ones that I've bought online lately, all needing to be returned for refunds after having watched or part-watched each one of them. And a third FB friend, Andrew Moriarty, has been looking for it for ages in his huge movie collection but without success as yet.
So does anyone have this ex-rental big box VHS video in fully-playable form that they may be willing to sell me, so that I can finally view this missing piece of the Malpertuis movie jigsaw in its entirety? I've seen the first half (four times!) and the end (once), but not most of the second half. Also, it would be great to add it to my Malpertuis collection. Many thanks in advance for any possible help.
Finally, if the thoroughly mystifying Malpertuis intrigues you, why not click here and watch an official English-language trailer for it on YouTube? (Or click here to watch the same trailer in French but with better picture quality.) You know it makes sense – but whether or not this movie will do so for you is another matter entirely!
And to view a complete listing of all of my
Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
