LA MAISON DU MYSTÈRE (EPISODES 8–10)

Episode 8: Champ clos (No Way Out)
Episode 9: Les Angoisses de Corradin (The Agonies of Corradin)
Episode 10: Le Triomphe de l'amour (The Triumph of Love)

(House of Mystery). James Quandt ventured into La Maison du mystère at last year's Bologna Festival of Restored Cinema and emerged to tell this tale: “Once hooked on Alexandre Volkoff's 1923 serial La Maison du mystère, I shed all semblance of reserve and gasped, sighed, and yelped unashamedly....Superbly restored in 1987 by the Cinémathèque Française, this was clearly a case of ‘honey, where you been hiding?'...so fabulous is its twisty tale about two childhood friends who become adult rivals for the same woman. (The good guy is played by Ivan Mosjoukine, he of the combusting eyes and gift for disguise. (See him also in Volkoff's Casanova, July 31.)) A proverbial cliffhanger, the film packs many of its astonishments into the early sequences: a murder framed in the viewfinder of a camera;...an overhead shot that reveals the police almost subliminally materializing from night woods and encircling the doomed man and his wife like some figuration of fate from Lang or Murnau. But it saves a few things for later (such as) a thrilling police chase culminating in a group of escaped prisoners forming a ‘living bridge' over a chasm....Shot with panache and acted with burning intensity, La Maison du mystère is one hell of a house.”

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