After sending shockwaves
through the French film industry with his still gruesome and visually striking
gothic horror disfigurement thriller Eyes
Without a Face, French auteur Georges Franju decided to try something a
little lighter with his next picture Spotlight
on a Murderer. While still of the
thriller genre, Eyes Without a Face caused
such a stir that it made sense to backpedal somewhat. An ensemble, even sexy black comedy/thriller steeped
in gothic horror tropes about a band of heirs struggling to find the sickly and
mysteriously missing Count Herve de Kerloquen with the news that he cannot be
declared legally dead until five years later, leaving the group’s inheritances
under lock and key. To try and make ends
meet at the Count’s scenic chateau, the group tries to reshape the location
into a profitable tourist attraction, if only people would stop turning up dead
in the process.
A kind of impish send up of
the murder-mystery noir while also channeling his own brand of gothic
black-and-white visuals, Georges Franju’s Spotlight
on a Murderer which doesn’t come anywhere near the unfathomable visceral
horrors depicted in Eyes Without a Face comes
across as fun little romp in the director’s sadly short lived canon. Feature fine performances by it’s international
cast including the mad scientist from Eyes
Without a Face as the mercurial Count Kerloquen, a haunting score by the
great Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia;
Doctor Zhivago; Jacob’s Ladder) and handsome location photography by Marcel
Fradetal, the film posits itself somewhere between gothic suspense and
deliberately exploiting the clichés of the Agatha Christie subgenre for highly
entertaining effect.
Watching Franju’s film,
which reportedly did not take off at the box office upon initially release
before the director’s career quietly fizzled out, I was reminded of The Haunting and even Murder By Death. Gathering together a band of outsiders with
their own respective closeted skeletons into an old dark house/mansion/castle
is as old as The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case
and while Spotlight on a Murderer doesn’t
quite go for the belly laughs of the Laurel and Hardy comedy, it does dip it’s
toes in kindred waters. Fans of Eyes Without a Face shouldn’t expect the
explicit gore from that film and instead are encouraged to put their feet up
and kick back this time around and enjoy the whodunit murder mystery dark
comedy at hand. Not a groundbreaker by
any means but a swell time in the annals of early 60s French suspense comedies.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki