Drôle de Drame-1937

In an age of anxiety leading to WWII filmmakers in France coped as best as they could. Judging from Drôle de Drame it would seem Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert looked past their everyday milieu and set in another era and clime. They set their sights across the Channel and show how silly the Edwardian London was.
A botanist who moonlights as a writer of lurid whodunits , having to cope with a nosy bishop and a psychopath on the loose, is bizarre even by today’s standards. A silly premise it may be as far as the story and ‘types’ are but it is a near classic. No mistake of that.
Carné -Prévert would go on to make a few enduring classics like le quai des brumes(1938), les visiteurs du soir(1942), and les enfants du paradis(1945). A threat of another world war is gone and age old anxiety is still around but we manage nevertheless to move on. Cinema has ceased to be as forceful or creative medium that touched our lives as before. The aforementioned films are a precious record of history of our world reinvented for celluloid.
These films are as tragic as drôle de drame is a black comedy.
The film is strong with such fine actors like Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. The story by minute descends into a calculated chaos and the viewer’s all attempts to predict the direction it takes are foiled by the deranged view of life each character seem to display in response to situations. We can sympathize with a bishop who denounces the prurient interest of his flock in penny novels serializing detective dramas. But if he were to suspect the worst in his cousin and ready to use an impossible subterfuge to visit his home, his sanity may be called to question. Similarly we have a respected botanist whose passion in lucid moments is for his mimosa and it is understandable if he would require an outlet for creative congestion of his brain. He has an alter ego and he is Felix Chapel, who is the subject of the Bishop of Bedford’s wrath. Dr. Molyneux merely has found a way to buy himself some peace from his wife and his neighborhood. This sedate creature who passes his life quietly in harmony with his mimosa nevertheless revels in blood and gore, albeit written by his double Felix Chapel.
It turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who's madly in love with her. If he has his wife killed off as an excuse to explain a domestic inconvenience we may say for sure there are some loose cannons around and things go from bad to worse. Eventually Scotland Yard is called in to clear things up. How these square off their combined derangement is what makes the film memorable.
Summary
England, the early 1900s. Irvin Molyneux is a quiet botanist who secretly writes pulp fiction under the pseudonym Felix Chapel. His books raise the ire of Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford. Soper invites himself to dinner at the Molyneux’s home one evening, at a time most inconvenient to him. His servants have walked out on him forcing his wife to double as the cook. Molyneux's clumsy attempt to account for the absence of his wife arouses the bishop's suspicions. When he sees Molyneux mysteriously leave the house that evening, he contacts Scotland Yard, convinced that his cousin has murdered his wife. Later, when the Molyneux couple are away from home and the scrutiny of the press, Irvin Molyneux, as Felix Chapel, is invited to write an account of the mysterious Molyneux affair on the scene of the presumed murder. Disguised as Chapel, Molyneux returns to his house, which has been taken over by the police who are still investigating the alleged crime. He does not realize that the psychopath William Kramps, the notorious butcher killer, is in the area, determined to kill Felix Chapel. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Bedford realizes he must return to the houe of Molyneux in disguise...


The film bears affinity to the films of René Clair or Marx brothers as far as to include it as genre of comedy but it is vitriolic all through.
Cast
Michel Simon as Irwin Molyneux alias Felix Chapel
Françoise Rosay as Margaret, his wife
Louis Jouvet as Archibald Soper
Jean-Louis Barrault- William Kramps
and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Billy
Directed by
Marcel Carné
Produced by
Edouard Corniglion-Molinier
Written by
J. Storer Clouston (novel)
Jacques Prévert (adaptation)
Music by
Maurice Jaubert
Cinematography
Eugen Schüfftan
Running time
94 min
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