Carnival Of Sinners

Carnival of Sinners (La Main du Diable) (1943)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035017/

Runtime: 80 minutes

Directed by: Maurice Tourneur

Starring: Pierre Fresnay, Josseline Gael, Noel Roquevert, Guillaume de Sax, Palau

From: Continental Films

For a movie I hadn’t heard of before it played on TCM a few weeks ago, pretty good. This was a DVR watch last night and the plot description was the main reason why I gave it a shot. Turns out, the movie is also on the Criterion Channel but I saved some bandwidth there.

Said plot: Mostly told in flashback, the tale concerns a talisman which will bring a user much prosper & fortune, for the price of a penny. Of course it’s much more complicated than that and there’s a far greater price to be paid. Roland Brissot is a pretentious painter who isn’t all that good. One night, a chef offers him the talisman: a severed hand! He needs to sell it at a loss or he’ll “be damned… for all eternity.” Despite seeing a severed hand move around on command, Roland purchases it. He’s a jerk when he’s poor so imagine him successful. “The Devil to pay” is literally a phrase said, and he doesn’t have a good time. There is a supernatural character, their identity a subversion. 

It's a movie successful enough to make someone becoming left-handed creepy as hell, and the same for an ill-fated visit to a fortune teller. Naturally, Carnival is a Faustian tale so there are few surprises but the flavor of it was still tasty. The director was Maurice Tourneur-yes, Jacques’s father. Many of his films were from the silent era yet he worked until the late 40’s. Without providing details, during the scene that provides the backstory of the appendage, there are some nightmare-inducing masks. This isn’t blood-curdling horror, although the scenario is a nightmare and there are enough strange moments where I can say there are no regrets in this October viewing.