A strange case
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A strange case |
| Original title | Drôle de drame |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1937 |
| length | 105 (original) 100 (German verse) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Marcel Carné |
| script |
Jacques Prévert based on the novel His First Offence (1912) by Joseph Storer Clouston |
| production |
Édouard Corniglion-Molinier Charles David |
| music | Maurice Jaubert |
| camera |
Eugen Schüfftan Louis Page Henri Alekan |
| cut | Marthe Poncin, Marthe Gottie |
| occupation | |
| |
A strange case is a French feature film with strong socio-critical and satirical elements from 1937. Directed by Marcel Carné play Françoise Rosay , Michel Simon , Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault , the leading roles.
action
London, at the end of the Victorian era . The botanist Irwin Molyneux and his wife Margaret are worried about money. Outwardly, they try to maintain a world of decency in a neat bourgeois ambience, in truth neither of them know how they will survive the next time - if it weren't for Molyneux's second existence: he writes crime novels under the pseudonym Felix Chapel, and not at all times so unsuccessful. The source for his invented stories is the girl Eva, who is housed by the Molyneuxs, who in turn receives her inspiration from the milkman Billy, who is in love with her, a bubbly, young man with a lot of imagination. This is the starting point for a story from the English bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, which is not exactly poor in absurd and bizarre ideas.
From his pulpit the Bishop of Bedford, Archibald Soper, blows the hunt for the author Chapel and his works and railed that he had committed grave sins with his "perverted" novels, since Chapel's murder stories not only prevent people from reading the Bible , but rather the instructions for the supposedly “perfect murder”. To make matters worse, Archibald Soper is Irwin's cousin, who in turn does not know about Molyneux's double life and second existence as the author Felix Chapel. The bishop is a hypocrite and hypocrite and invites himself to dinner with his cousin on the very day the cook in the Molyneux house quit. The landlord absolutely wants to maintain the facade of a well-to-do, financially secure botanist, and so Madame, willy-nilly, as the landlady has to take on the role of cook and, before the bishop approaches, secretly prepares the meal to be served and desired by the bishop, "Duck up Orange ”, the specialty of the renegade cook served by Eva, who had been converted into a“ maid ”. But since Madame cannot possibly be at your service as a cook, since something like this is not appropriate "in better circles", the botanist-wife Margaret must have vanished to the public. But how should Irwin explain the sudden "disappearance" of his wife? The wife is gone from one day to the next, the husband writes detective novels with murder and manslaughter as the central ingredients, and the police have been hunting a sinister mass murderer who is making the area unsafe for some time. This ominous mélange means that Monsieur Molyneux alias Chapel now comes into the focus of all considerations against his will and becomes a prime suspect for the atrocities of the bloodthirsty rascal.
Cousin Bishop, of all people, makes the horses shy and believes Margaret Molyneux has been promoted to the afterlife by the herbalist husband, an expert in plant poisoning, and then switches Scotland Yard on, which radically uses the botanist's entire greenhouse when looking for a suspected corpse plowed up. These actions in turn cause Monsieur and Madame Molyneux to flee in a panic from their no longer so intimate home. You stay in a hotel in the Chinatown. There Margaret met a much younger man who immediately fell in love with her. How can she suspect that this is the mass murderer William Kramps, who is intensely wanted by the police and who, in his madness of love, always wants to call the beloved "Daisy" because he has always wanted to love a "Daisy"? Things get more complicated when the viewer learns that Kramps really wants to get Felix Chapel aside and ambush him at home, fearing that the author with his clever milkman crime novels will sooner or later bring the police on his trail. To make the mess perfect, a newspaper comes on and calls on the well-known author Chapel to help out with the murder hunt. The embarrassment is perfect when it turns out that Chapel's crime thriller "inspirations" grew on the dung of the young housemate Eva, who in turn only passed on the hair-raising ideas of Billy, the milkman in love.
The finale will again take place in the Molyneux house; this is where the most important protagonists meet. Margaret Molyneux, who was missing or believed dead, suddenly reappears, bright and very alive, and the bishop and the police are embarrassed to the bone. Then finally, with bike by hand, William Kramps trundles in and claims stiffly and firmly that he mistakenly murdered Monsieur Molyneux and not, as intended, Felix Chapel, and then thrown him into the Thames. In the end, the police lead him away, followed by an angry mob. So he is "ultimately also the one who has been betrayed and is persecuted with a sigh of relief as a troublemaker of civil calm."
Production notes
A curious case was filmed in the Pathé studios of Joinville-le-Pont in May and June 1937 and was premiered in Paris on October 20, 1937. In Germany, the film was only shown after the war, on April 30, 1953. The TV first broadcast took place on New Year's Eve 1968 in the 3rd program of the WDR .
Alexandre Trauner created the film structures . The young Jean Marais can be seen briefly in a tiny appearance .
Reviews
“An intelligent and grotesque comedy of a thoroughly anarchist style. The representatives of the state authority, the bishop and the police, appear hypocritical and stupid; the good citizen Molyneux anxiously guards the secret of his double existence and feeds on the ideas of his milkman; the newspapers let themselves be bluffed by a bluff; and only the belly ripper Kramps acts 'sensibly' and with internal logic. "
“A grotesque burlesque story that Marcel Carné translates into a happy, anarchist film with lots of humor and brilliant social criticism. Bourgeois morality breaks several times in this crime story and becomes a satirical picture of society. Intense intelligent tension. "
"'A strange case' was a chaotic, turbulent and pitch-black comedy with anarchic-burlesque features, in which every apparently clear figure goes through new changes and hardly any person is what they seem to be."
“An alleged murder is the focus of this cheerful anarchist crime comedy by the master duo Marcel Carné / Jacques Prévert. The whole thing is not only grotesquely funny, but also extremely exciting. Carné shows bourgeois morality in keeping with the times. Because the film was made at the time of the Popular Front government. "
"Bizarre crime thriller, full of elegance and wit."
"... icy tormented farce."
Web links
- A strange case in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ cit. n. Dieter Krusche (with Jürgen Labenski): Reclams Filmführer, Stuttgart 1973, p. 290
- ↑ A strange case. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .