User Reviews

Zecca was Pathe's lead director for the first five or ten years of the 20th Century and he did a lot of experimentation with cutting and editing. Many of them were dead-end experiments but some survived and lend a different air to modern French productions.

In this movie he undertakes to go against Georges Melies' magic-and-spectacle production, using lots of double exposure, trick cuts and elaborate sets to illuminate this parable of a man who travels through the Devil's Seven Castles (the Seven Deadly Sins) until he is rescued at last by a beautiful young woman representing, no doubt, Virtue. The backgrounds are just as elaborate as Melies', although not as polished in execution -- the giant frog-like critter that represents Gluttony, devouring everything and everyone is pretty much obviously a sloppily-rigged thing. Nor does Zecca use as much undercranking in his shooting. The result is that Melies' work has a lot more energy and verve.

The signs indicating which castle the particular scene is set in keep changing: sometimes French, sometimes English, sometimes German. Was this deliberate, to avoid having to restage these elaborate scenes for each market, or were there originally different versions for each market, with this version a compilation of existing prints?

Although this film did not appear in the US until 1904, the Pathé catalogue dates it as 1901, very early indeed for such an ambitious 11 minute spectacular. The blurb indicated that it consisted of no fewer than 40 tableaux.

The truth is probably that it dates (in different states) from both 1901 and 1904. It is based on an old féerie by Adolphe d'Ennery and Charles Clairville that had been a success in the Paris theatre in the 1840s and again in the 1870s. But Zecca used these féeries as a means of keeping Pathé productions up-to-date and, conscious of the success Méliès had had in the US market, made efforts, particularly after 1903, to make the productions or elaborate. There was also a mounting pressure from the "art film" movement in France that tended in the same direction and to which Pathé was particularly attentive. There are several examples of films from around 1901 that were similarly remade in 1904-1906.

Féeries reflect a nineteenth-century taste that was already old-fashioned by this time but they did in some way represent a plastic spectacle that was suited well to the screen and several theatres had commissioned films to incorporate in their own spectacles (one find examples of such commissioned pieces both amongst early Gaumont films and in the work of Méliès). The form had relatively little influence outside France except perhaps in the work of Edwin Porter in the US (films like his Jack and the Beanstalk).