The Mask of Dijon (PRC, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

tThe film my husband Charles and I ended up watching last night was The Mask of Dijon (also called The Mask of Diijon, with two “i”’s), and like the YouTube post of Val Lewton’s and Robert Wose’s Mademouselle Fifi we watched recently, it had come from a TV showing in either Portugal or Brazil since it was hard-coded with Portuguese subtitles (which, by the way, spelled Diijon’s name with the double “i”). It was made in 1946 at the ultra-cheap PRC studio after even Stroheim’s previous employers, Republic, had bailed on him after four quirky films: The Lady and the Monster (the first film of Donovan’s Brain, with Stroheim miscast as a mad scientist who keeps the brain of a dead super-rich tycoon alive via electricity and chemicals, then finds himself being taken over tepepathically by the brain), Storm Over Lizbon (essentially an unauthorized sequel to Casablanca), Scotland Yard Investigator and The Great Flamarion (a very unlustly neglected film noir directed by Anthony Mann and featuring Stroheim, Dan Dailey and Mary Beth Hughes.tthe last of whom gives a full-throated femme fatale performance rivaling Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour). The Mask of Dijon was the only film Stroheim made at PRC and his last American movie except for Sunset Boulevard; after the liberation of France he headed back there and only returned to Hollywood one last time for what Stroheim called “that lousy butler part” in Sunset Boulevard. (Stroheim managed to put his creative stamp on Billy Wilder’s classic; it was he who suggested to Wilder that his character, Max von Mayerling, write fake fan letters to Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, to bolster her illusion that she was still famous.)

The Mask of Dijon is basically a semi-remake of Stroheim’s first sound film, The Great Gabbo, made in 1929 by a short-lived studio called Sono-Art World-Wide Pictures (which alas had the rotten luck to start up just as the Great Depression hit) and Stroheim got his life partner, French actress Denise Vernac, into the cast as Denise, feckless girlfriend of Danton (Mauritz Hugo). It begins with a scene in which an innocent young woman, Vickie (Jeanne Bates). Is about to be guillotined. The opening sequence is so horrific, and so tautly directed and photographed with extreme close-ups of the terrified onlookers at the gruesome spectacle, that I suspect Stroheim had a hand in the direction and PRC’s all-purpose photographic consultant, Eugen Schuftan (Fritz Lang’s special-effects person on Die Nibelungen and Metropolis), shot it. In fact, quite a few scenes in The Mask of Dijon look like the work of more talented people than the film’s director and cinematographer of record, Lew Landers and Jack Greenhalgh. Vickie’s head is duly severed from her body and lands in the basket set up for that purpose, only as soon as it lands the head smiles and it’s revealed that this was all an illusion. The scene was set in a magic shop owned by Sheffield (Edward Van Sloan, the only other actor in this movie at or close to Stroheim’s level of talent), who has constructed this illusion in hopes of getting Dijon (Erich von Stroheim) and his wife Vickie to return to live performing. Dijon was acclaimed as the world’s greatest magician until he abruptly retired a year ago to study hypnotism; he believes his researches will enable him to overcome the limits of physical space and achieve a kind of spiritual power that will allow him to impose his will on other people.

Unfortunately, as the film begins Mr. and Mrs. Dijon are running out of money and the landlady at the boarding house where they live, Mrs. McGaffey (Hope Landin), is hounding them for the months of back rent they owe her. What’s more, Vickie is falling for another boarder, John Holiday (William Wright, one of the many surprisingly homely men who got male leads at cheap studios like PRC). John is, it’s hinted, Vickie’s ex-boyfriend, and it’s clear he wants to get rid of the “ex” part of that. He gets a job as piano player and bandleader at a Hungarian-themed restaurant called the Romany Gardens (and it’s a good thing that this film was made on a PRC budget because the set for the Romany Gardens looks like a real community restaurant and not an airplane hangar done up in art deco). He offers Dijon a job there, and Dijon performs a hypnosis act ini which Vickie poses as a random volunteer from the audience and he’s supposed to suspend her from a chair, only he loses control and she falls to the floor. The audience laughs, the irate and typically irascible cub owner (Antonio Filauri) fires him on the spot, and Dijon thinks John set up the whole thing to embarrass him publicly and get Vickie to leave Dijon for John. Dijon wanders the streets and at one point goes into a coffee shop for a doughnut; a stick-up artist (Anthony Warde) tries to hold up the place but Dijon hypnotizes him into giving him the gun and giving the money back to the counterman (George Chandler). Dijon then hypnotizes Danton (ya remember Danton?) into committing suicide by jumping off a bridge. As Vickie leaves him and moves in with her sister Lisa, Dijon crashes the place and hypnotizes her into taking part in an elaborate murder plot. His plan is to plant a post-hypnotic suggestion in her mind so she will beak into Sheffield’s shop, steal a prop gun he’s loaded with real bullets, then go to work at the club (where John has got her a job singing with his band and doing two quite good songs, “White Roses” and “Disillusioned”, by Lee Zahler) and shoot John in mid-performance.

Only the plan goes awry when Vickie picks up a blank-loaded gun by mistake and John is fortunately unharmed. Dijon grabs a gun with real bullets and flees, the cops in hot pursuit, and they finally corner him in Sheffield’s shop. Well, anyone familiar with chekhov’s principle that if you introduce a gun in the first act it has to go off in the last can guess what happens here: ultimately Sheffield’s cat trips the mechanism working the guillotine trick and Dijon is killed by the guillotine blade (which it was already established is real and dangerous even though the whole device was built for a magic trick). The Mask of Dijon is a frustrating movie because some parts of it are quite good, and the whole business of Stroheim losing his love interest and falling from the heights of stardom to the depths of privation and despair when his wife and co-star leaves him for a younger, hunkier man had been done earlier in The Great Gabbo (in whch Stroheim’s character was a ventriloquist, not a magician). In his 1932 film with Greta Garbo, As You Desire Me, Stroheim had also played an insanely jealous husband whose much younger wife leaves him for someone else (in that case, Melvyn Douglas in his first of three films with Garbo). Parts of The Mask of Dijon look like the typical works of Lew Landers and parts of it look almost noir (even though, unlike The Great Flamarion, The Mask of Dijon is not a film noir). It’s one of those promising but frustrating “B” movies which give you the impression that with just a bit more care from the filmmakers, this could have been really special instead of just another film with a few promising twists.