romantic conventions
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Liebmann, Yves Mirande, and Hans Müller
(screenplay), Robert Siodmark (director) Tumultes (Tumult) / 1932
Tumultes (Tumult),
the French version of Robert Siodmak’s 1932 German film Stürme der
Leidenschaft (Storms of Passion) is often described as being a dark
noir of “murderous rage” which demonstrates the inescapable passions of
uncontrollable criminality. As one such correspondent wrote:
“Set almost entirely at night or in shadowy
gloom that seems to press in upon the characters, Tumultes is a dark
film both thematically and optically. It doesn't leave you with a good feeling
about the human race. We are, in Siodmak's vision, wretched creatures,
imprisoned and ultimately destroyed by our lowest impulses. Twice in the film
Ralph [Boyer’s character] gets free from captivity. But his freedom is
illusory. His obsessive jealousy and pride, centered around the femme fatale
Ania, make his downfall a grim inevitability.”
I’ve not seen the German version, which, long thought to be lost was
found eventually with kanji side-titles in Tokyo’s National Film Center, but
the French version, staring Charles Boyer is actually nothing of the sort. Or
perhaps, as often happens, I just read it quite differently.
Whereas some of these commentators, accordingly find Boyer’s character
as unlikeable and assess the ordinarily suave actor’s attempt to play a tough
criminal character an ill fit (I presume they are forgetting Boyer’s 1944 role
as a truly disgustingly obsessed villain in Gaslight) he is presented in
the film I saw, in fact, rather as a
quite likeable being from the very first frame as, working in the prison
kitchens, he tosses in some flavoring to the soup, adds salt to the meat which
he slices up in larger chunks than usual, and ladles out to certain
prisoners—in exchange for a single cigarette from each—an extra portion, the
latter for which he is caught by the authorities and chastised. As he explains,
his mother as always described him as a soft touch. Soon after, Ralph Schwarz
is, in fact, released early from prison.
Ralph’s only desire is to return to his lover Ania (Florelle) and when
the neighboring women get wind of his return, they’re all so delighted they
shout over to one another through their open windows to share the news. And no
one seems more pleased for Ralph’s return that the chef of the local
cooperative bar, “Emma” Emmerich (Louis Florencie), the film’s “pansy” figure
who is so excited and overwhelmed with the news that his pal has been released
that he is having difficulties getting orders out of the kitchen, making time,
nonetheless, to flamboyantly announce his new plans for the grand festival he’s
organizing which will involve the whole community, including Ania singing.
Obviously Ralph is far cleverer than the dense-headed Biberkopf, but he
is ignorant when it comes to his blind love for Ania, who has been cheating on
him with a photographer, Gustave Krouchovski (Thomy Bourdelle) having taken
several nude photos of her which she hides by sending them off with her best
female friend, Yvonne (Clara Tambour) for safe-keeping.
Ralph seems more interested in meeting up with his old criminal gang,
who appear to call each other by feminine nicknames (at least in the
translation I watched) than in having sex with Ania. When she plants a lipstick
kiss upon his cheek, he slaps her, having evidently forbidden her to wear
cosmetics. And he is even more consumed by the mail he has received in his
absence, particularly when he reads a note from his friend asking him to help in
the release of a parentless boy from prison, Willi (Robert Arnoux). Indeed,
pretending to be a local cashier, he achieves the boy’s release only to be
disappointed that the kid isn’t better looking (“Poor boy. You’re so
ugly.”)...and brighter, as if he were taking custody of him for his personal
delectation.
As for future criminal plans, when his friends suggest the heist of a
local bank through the tunnels via a local candy store, he declares it far too
dangerous and perceives their planning to be elementary, something that will
take many more months. His “friends” determine to proceed without him, using
the upcoming festival as a kind of cover, hoping to arrive by its end after the
robbery to establish their innocence.
Indeed his “friends” have also betrayed him by refusing to reveal that
he is playing the cuckold to Ania. And when Willi, who is brought the first
night home to live with Ralph and Ania, discovers the truth by observing
Gustave hiding in their apartment when Ralph returns home from his meeting,
Ania threatens to kill him if he reveals the fact.
Meanwhile, at the festival, Ralph discovers that the others are robbing
the bank at that very moment, rushing off to help them knowing that the police
will soon be alerted of their acts. By pretending that he is a guard at the
bank, he tricks the police to ignore the alarm going off at that very moment,
and rushes to help his friends escape from the tunnels in which, after using
explosives incorrectly, are now trapped—events which, according to critic
Christoph Huber, appear only in the French, not in the German version. He later
again pretends to be a police guard sending away the police van off so that his
acquaintances can escape.
Throughout this misogynistic tale, the only truly fatal flaw that
possesses Ralph Schwarz is his almost incomprehensible commitment to the woman
he believes he loves. Like a tragic operatic figure, Ralph is wed to
conventional heterosexuality despite the fact that the movie keeps suggesting
that he is desperate to pull away from it, even when, after he has killed
Gustave in revenge and the police come looking for him—oddly, for stealing the
coat, not the death his has facilitated—he appears to have shacked up with
Willi, accusing him of not caring anymore about him, and finally disavowing the
faithless Ania and any other woman in his life.
Like a drug, however, he cannot resist the lure of her deceitful love,
sending Willi on a voyage to bring her to his hidden encampment. Like
Wedekind’s Lulu, she seduces the boy instead, handing the address Willi has
provided her over to the police.
Ralph is arrested and sentenced to six years in prison, Ania and her new
lover Willi now believing they are free of this passionate mad man. Yet the
indomitable Ralph escapes, returning for further revenge. In a brutal fight
outside of his former flat, he nearly kills Willi but once more cannot bring
himself to destroy another man, leaving him alive while trying to convince
Willi of his own folly since he is certain that the woman will eventually
betray him as well.
When yet again Goebel arrives to arrest him, the idiot romantic finally
seems prepared to leave all the tumult of the world of “normality” forever,
destined to return to a prison where he can remain locked away in a society in
which he can openly express his kindness and friendship to those of his own
sex.
In
sum, while superficially Siodmak’s work is a grand expression of a passionate
heterosexual male who is disappointed that his woman “done him wrong” again and
again, it is finally a rather gynophobic homily against womankind. In his
behavior we finally recognize the “hero” of this tale as a manically closeted
queer, a man who actually gets on well with those of his sex if they simply
return his love and admiration. From the wide open world of normative heterosexuality,
this film shows Ralph endlessly pushing at the door wherein lies the realm of
the “other,” finally entering therein after having come to terms with his
inability to live in the normative sexual world. As Ania recalls, “Ralph always
said he was happiest living in jail.”
Los Angeles, August 21, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2021).
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