Flesh and Fantasy

An ancestor of Trio, Flesh and Fantasy is a splice of three separate stories. Trio, however, is a trilogy, Flesh and Fantasy an anthology. The only things these three tales have in common are a supernatural fizz and heavy-handed direction. Director Julien Duvivier (Un Carnet du Bal, Tales of Manhattan) pioneered the splicing art, but he keeps fantasy firmly earthbound in this 1943 effort. Granted, the writing is usually abominable ("Remember the boatman's song at twilight at Amalfi, the scent of orange blossoms on the road to Damascus," etc., etc.), but the absence of a light touch accentuates triteness and makes the melodrama ludicrous. Although Robert Benchley amusingly bridges the three tales, Duvivier seems to take the stories themselves far too seriously. In fact, you can never be quite sure at what effect he is striving. If it's simply entertainment, he is only partially successful.

To emphasize the occult, the stories are dressed in all the horrors of a Penny-dreadful--fog, train whistles, echoing voices, mist shrouded waters--and it all seems too heavy for the stories to bear. The worst sufferer is a drab little fable with the moral the Beauty Lies in the Heart. With the aid of a spectral Samaritan, Dorothy Fields proves the point by shedding the bags under her eyes when she learns the meaning of love. Duvivier makes the whole thing pretty intense, with the actors expressing utter banalities with deadly seriousness. When the embittered hero, for example, declares: "I wanted to be President!" he sounds as determined as Harold Stassen.

The other two stories are more effective. The last tale, about an aerialist who dreams of falling and tempts fate by recreating the setting of his fall, is quite intriguing in the circus scenes. But even in 1943, much of the plot and dialogue must have been dated, particularly the fade-out with the hero promising to await the parole of his love, a reformed jewel thief. Charles Boyer, however, is debonair on a tight-rope, though he delivers even the silliest lines with a straight face.

The story taken from Oscar Wilde's "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is the best by far. Its success is due to a good plot, some humor in the script, and the presence of pros like Edward G. Robinson, Thomas Mitchell, and C. Aubrey Smith. The brief scene in which the latter extolls the beauty of death while Robinson decides to murder him is a delightful mixture of the macabre and the amusing. But even Robinson, as a man compelled to realize the prophecy of a palmist who sees murder in his hand, gets tiresome in interminable chats with his inner self. And finally, the heavy hand descends again in a lurid and protracted climax.

What the stories tell you about the corporeal and uncorporeal world is hard to say. Disregarding the irrelevant moral of the first, I suppose they warn against either laughing off the occult entirely or swallowing it whole. In any case, you reaction to all this may very well depend, as Benchley remarks at one point, on the state of your digestion.

With the feature at the Brattle is an excellent short on Moroccan dances which somehow escaped the eye of the Boston Censor.