User Reviews

The scope of the film, covering over 18 years, deserves to be treated as a serial. Essentially a murder mystery with the gardener, an amateur photographer, taking a picture of a murder The murder is seen reflected in the lens of his camera.

Naturally an innocent man is arrested - and convicted of the murder.

There is a tremendously innovative wedding sequence, filmed as though it were a zoetrope.

The film shown at MOMA was tinted. With 150 people present, the audience began clapping at the end of chapter 3 and didn't stop until the final chapter.

An art film shot as a serial. An imaginative wedding scene shot in silhouette, begins a tale of murder blackmail and romance covering a period of about 18 years, ending around 1923. The film had the MOMA audience breaking out into applause at the end of each chapter, starting from about chapter 3. At the June 28, 2003 showing at the Gramercy Theatre in New York, only 2 people left of the 150 people who came to see the film, and they came back to see the end of the film. A remarkable feat since the film ran over 7 hours. The film was projected at 22 frames per second. At a 16 frame per second speed the film takes over 9 hours to view.

Although not a standard cliffhanger type serial, the storyline is so intriguing that the audience came back early from the two intermissions.

When you consider that this seven hour episode film has been lost for ` eighty years, you realize how sloppy the business of keeping the best movie material circulating really is.

A great outing for Ivan Mosjoukine who managed to become the mega heart throb star of Tsarist Russia and, a decade later, European film, this one has him as part Ulysses, part Othello, battling broad shouldered Charles Vanel (youngest I've ever seen him) - jail breaking by stealing a train, punching it out on the top of a mountain, being a master of disguises and goodness knows what else in the hours missing represented by inset titles, in the feature version .

The star is riveting as he always was. The support are great. The production values superior and the direction imaginative. This is a film which would delight audiences who snooze through THE LAST LAUGH or BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and any scheme of values that gives those priority over it is suspect.

Fortunately MAISON DU MYSTERE survives in the superior print restored by Rene Lichtig for Langlois' French Film Museum. The sad part is that so many people who would have loved this have never seen it and probably never will.