Rating: B-
Dir: Juan López Moctezuma
Star: Claudio Brook, Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman, Max Kerlow
a.k.a. The Mansion of Madness
This was Moctezuma’s feature debut, after having worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky as a producer on El Topo. You can probably tell, because this has a similarly surreal approach. I actually think I preferred this: if you’d hardly call it down to earth, he does at least keep a couple of toes on the ground. I definitely preferred it to the director’s best-known film, Alucarda, though both contain similar quantities of madness. I think this strikes a better balance between visual style and narrative, albeit still certainly skewed towards the former. Despite being over fifty years old, I did feel it had a strange and unexpected contemporary relevance.
The central character is journalist Gaston LeBlanc (Hansel), a journalist who has travelled to France. He intends to write about the asylum run by Dr. Maillard, which uses novel methods to treat the insane. That’s putting it mildly: he basically indulges their delusions, because he’s not really a trained medical professional. He’s inmate Raoul Fragonard (Brook), a bandit who has led a rebellion and is now pretending to be the doctor, locking the real physician (Kerlow) away in the facility’s dungeons. Maillard’s daughter, Eugenie (Sherman), escapes the same fate only by faking madness. LeBlanc falls for Eugenie, and seeks to escape with her. When that is thwarted, they seek to join a counter-revolution, with the aim of overthrowing Fragonard and returning Dr. Maillard to his position of authority.
It was based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. It’s “lunatics have taken over the asylum” narrative has been seen as a sardonic commentary on the politics of the time, but now, it seems more directly obvious. Society currently nods approvingly at many things which were previously seen as mental illness, indulging certain people’s beliefs regarding their self-image. It’s what we see in effect here. The fake Dr. Maillard allows the man who identifies as a chicken, for example, to behave as one, with no attempt to rein in the obviously ludicrous nature of the belief. The parallel to modern society and its “tolerance” is remarkable, given the age of the movie.
Visually, it’s a treat too, Moctezuma making the most of an abandoned textile factory (top) to create tableaux of insanity in a variety of forms. The script is also poetic: despite being a Mexican production, it was made in English, though the version released in the United States was edited down by sixteen minutes – I’ve not been able to find the full version. Witness the description of one asylum project: “If all things go according to plan, it will become an integral part of man’s nervous system, a metallic womb uniting man to the universe, burning snakes curling around the pillars of a new myth.” Inevitably, it can’t quite sustain itself. If I’d not want to reside in this mansion permanently, it is definitely an interesting place to visit.