In Wheeler Auditorium
Admission $4:00

"Premiered in the summer of 1942, at the grim mid-point of the Occupation, La Nuit Fantastique was rapturously received by contemporary film critics.... In retrospect, it's easy to understand why.... A kind of surrealist screwball comedy, it's part Man Ray, part My Man Godfrey.... La Nuit Fantastique's tale of a young man's somnambulistic pursuit of the phantom beauty who haunts his dreams provided just the premise the director needed to exert his taste for the non-naturalistic treatment of sounds and images. L'Herbier toys with disembodied noises, reversed soundtracks, slow motion, superimpositions and multiple exposures. At one point, the movie's hero, played with his customary suavity by Fernand Gravey, asserts that this is his dream so he can do anything he wants within it, and this is clearly an extension of L'Herbier's own attitude towards the film at hand. The decors deliberately defy any notion of realism-the magician's lair with its...litter of decapitated mannequins, the most vertiginously romantic plaster-and-papier maché Paris rooftops since early René Clair....
"The script...shows the same high-spirited exaltation of form over sense.... In the midst of the film's most touching love scene, Gravey declares to Micheline Presle that he loves her now and always, in the past, present and future-and also in the subjunctive, which is difficult to do. Loving her is one thing, but grasping her is another matter entirely, since the Presle character is a phantom of quicksilver volatility.... This elusive creature even shares the same name with the heroine of My Man Godfrey, and Presle's performance is startlingly reminiscent of Carole Lombard, all breathless, high-pitched exclamations, and irrepressible animation subverting her chic manner." --Stephen Harvey, Museum of Modern Art
L'Herbier, whose 1929 L'Argent screened here recently, was a master of the Twenties' film impressionism. He recreated this creative milieu for the first time since the Twenties in La Nuit Fantastique, bringing to life, as Georges Sadoul points out, his own youthful dreams in those of his protagonist. "L'Herbier had wanted to call his picture The Tomb of Georges Méliès, as a tribute...to the conjurer of the Robert Houdin Theatre, and the ‘trick' inventor of the charming (1902 film) Trip to the Moon." -Sadoul in "French Film"