The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Georges Vaultier and Sandra Milovanoff

Index: That's a Wrap!

I’ve already reviewed a 1925 René Clair film for this project, The Crazy Ray, but he shot that a year earlier, along with his debut, a surreal short called Entr’acte. This full length feature continues his love affair with fantastic cinema with a film that plays out like The Invisible Man but with an unusual spiritual twist.

Initially, however, it’s a routine melodrama about a young lady’s hand, which makes the eventual shift all the more wild. She’s Yvonne Vincent and she’s very much in love with her fiancé, Julien Boissel, a successful businessman who’s just as in love with her. Unfortunately, a scurrilous publisher, Gauthier, wants to marry her too and his claim wins out because he has blackmail material on her father, some sort of shady deal he made when he was a diplomat.

There’s a bit more depth than that because Julien has made a major deal as the film begins that all the papers are happy about except the Streets’ Echo, run by—guess who?—Gauthier! So Julien therefore has a pair of grudges against the man about to steal his fiancée.

It’s all grand melodrama, all of it unfolding in single room sets that are far more spacious than my entire house. Everything looks huge and it surely feels huge to Julien and Yvonne, played with due grandeur by Georges Vaultier, almost at the end of his five film career, and a Russian actress, Sandra Milovanoff, already an important name in French cinema.

The bottom line is that Julien is a depressed man and he plans to drown in misery forever, when Jacqueline, his cousin, invites him to the Moulin Rouge, in which gaiety and buffoonery apparently drive the cares of the day away.

Of course, he aims to drown his sorrows, but Dr. Robini offers a different solution. He’s “an eminent brain specialist”, as well as a “student of philosophy” and, overhearing Julien’s state of affairs from a nearby table, offers a solution to take away all of his sadness.

And now, a third of the way into the movie, things get weird! A policeman walking his beat sees five top hats appear on the ground neatly lined up in a row. A man reading the paper in the park runs when it catches fire. A car drives away on its own. And there’s a weird robbery at the Moulin Rouge: all the coats and hats in the cloakroom are whisked away into thin air right under the unwitting attendant’s nose.

In 2025, our initial thought has to be that an invisible man is responsible. After all, we saw it all happen and there wasn’t anyone there to do it, just subtle cuts that betray the technique the filmmakers used. In story, there’s nobody. However, I wonder what audiences thought in 1925. Wells’s The Invisible Man was published in 1897 and was translated into French in 1901 so the idea was out there, but it remained just a book until the Universal film in 1933.

If we hadn’t already guessed that it’s Julien, the fact that the papers are reporting that he’s missing ought to help us reach that point, but explaining how and why is another question entirely. Fortunately, we have Jean Degland to help us out, in the recognisable form of Albert Préjean, who played the lead in The Crazy Ray.

Deglan works at the Streets’ Echo but wants out, as that it’s a yellow rag and he’s already stopped his boss raping Yvonne in his office. However, he knows there’s a story in Julien so he goes to extraordinary lengths to obtain an interview, climbing to his apartment and then Dr. Robini’s residence like a human fly, where he finds Julien dead.

And with that cliffhanger, I’d shut up about the story so you could discover the secret for yourself, but everything from IMDb to the film poster spoil it, so I guess I’ll fill you in, as Dr. Robini promptly does to Deglan.

Julien isn’t dead. He’s merely in a hypnotic sleep that allows his spirit to escape his body and wander around unhindered, astral travel, if you will. We can initially see his spirit as it wanders, but he can also manipulate physical objects. That becomes clear when he draws a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

The problem is that he realises he’s having a whale of a time and figures that he hasn’t got any worries when he isn’t a physical being, so decides to stay free. And that’s a huge problem for Dr. Robini, who has an apparent corpse in his house of a man who’s reported missing.

If you think about all that, you can probably come up with the rest of the script yourself, if you don’t limit your ideas. It’s not all about an eventual happy ending for Julien and Yvonne. René Clair throws in humour and danger and suspense and action too, all the ingredients for a busy genre film that we weren’t expecting in the first half hour of grand melodrama.

I had a blast with this film, which continues some of what René Clair did with The Crazy Ray but at longer length and with more coherence.

There’s another mad scientist who manages to do something of great import but struggles to undo it again. There’s lots more weirdness in Paris that warrants the primitive but often effective special effects work of someone that I can’t praise, but at least the people get to see its results this time. There’s another man in a strange situation who relishes the escape from reality and the sheer freedom. And there’s the city of Paris itself, less of an overt backdrop in this film but with some scenes looking notably familiar. For instance, is the driverless car the same one the pilot stole from outside the same building in The Crazy Ray? I should compare.

There’s also a strong sense of visual style in a variety of designs. The houses we visit early on are vast and traditional, echoing spaces of old world charm and affluence. Of course, the Moulin Rouge is a riotous place to party, with the girls dancing in oceans of streamers. Later, we visit the Rue Barree, an underground and avant-garde bar with reality off the menu.

It’s the sense of humour that guides the film though. Early on, there isn’t any because it’s a grand melodrama where everything is serious and both heartfelt and heartbreaking. Julien’s discovery of freedom as a spirit accompanies a shift to pixie-like humour for a bevy of surreal pranks. The shift to the final act isn’t just back to serious but in a much darker way, delicious irony mixing with black humour in a thread to take us to the autopsy table and beyond.

I’ve seen and enjoyed later René Clair films, both in France, like À nous la liberté, often seen as his best work, and in the U.S., like I Married a Witch with Veronica Lake. Both are definitely more sophisticated movies but I’ve loved these two quirky and free early genre flicks. Now I’m aching to see Le voyage imaginaire next year!