THE SORCERER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 526, 22 July 1949, Page 12

THE SORCERER

(Discina-Exclusive Films) HRISTIAN-JACQUE, ~who directed this film for Discina in 1944 (earnest students of the cinema may recognise it more readily under the title Sortiléges), belongs to the second flight of French directors, has a welldeveloped pictorial sense, is inclined to be weak in characterisation and superficial in his effects, and produces films which show fairly wide variation in quality. At least, that is as much as I had learned about him from casual reading, but until I saw The Sorcerer I knew nothing about him "of my own knowledge" as the legal phrase has it. 6 It was not difficult to discover evidence of the tendencies and characteristics I had read about, but on the other hand not easy to be sure that these did not obtrude because they were sought or expected. The Sorcerer, in spite of good acting by Lucien Coedel in the title-role, is little more than a melodramatic shocker, though possibly it might sound a little better in the original French. I was most disappointed, however, by the photography. My first impression was that since the film was made during the Occupation, the poor definition of most shots might be due to the indifferent quality of the film available at the time. A film cameraman with whom I discussed this point, however, was of the opinion that the poor reproduction was due to printing from a second duplicate negative. Whatever may have been the cause, it quite spoiled the effect of many scenes which appeared to have been carefully staged by, camera-man and director., A good deal of the photography was merely clever, but there were moments which must originally have been both beautiful and dramatically effective, The setting of the story is a French mountain village, the time a century ago (a safe remove from any French filmmaker working in 1944), and the theme . embraces jealousy, superstition, witchcraft and murder. Properly handled, these elements might have made an arrestingly dramatic story, but an apparently irresistible pre-occupation with the macabre-blood dripping from a sacrificial pigeon, a frozen corpse staring glacé-eyed from a snowdrift, the sorcerer himself jerking like a marionette as he hangs by the neck-in his blazing barn-overlays the whole with a thick dressing of grand guignol is not likely to attract those who have supped their fill on subtler horrors. The Sorcerer was an interesting experience, but not an indispensable one.