Les vampires (1915)'s activity - page 2

The initial surprise when watching Louis Feuillade's seminal silent serial Les Vampires is that it's not about vampires at all. Rather, this is a convoluted crime thriller in which journalist Philippe Guérande and his comical sidekick Mazamette fight a criminal gang known as the Vampires. There's nothing supernatural, even if the villains have an innate propensity to seemingly come back from the dead. An ancestor of television far more than it is a precursor to more immediate matinee serials, each episode features and resolves a crime, with time moving, sometimes in bounds, between chapters. While Guérande (Édouard Mathé) is the hero, it's Marcel Lévesque's camera-mugging Mazamette who is more memorable. I could not have guessed that this minor character from chapter 1 would become this involved, but Lévesque has such a great (French) face and humor, they had to expand his role, I bet. But even so, it's Musidora as the intense, anagramatic Vampire agent Irma Vep who steals the show, managing to outlive several Grand Vampires, a mistress of disguise, cat burglar, and as hard a dame as any in cinema. Feuillade's pace doesn't feel too slow even if he lets dialog scenes play without inter-titles for realistic lengths of time (a French lip-reader could reconstruct a full script), and I like his use of blue tints to indicate darkness, great for blackouts where the baddies can pull a fast one - while we watch! But generally, there are some good stunts, engaging performances, intriguing puzzles (not easy to make sense of such things in the silent era, but Feuillade manages it), and some pretty clever Mission: Impossible-type plots. Worth the 7 hours, and having that music wired to your brain for a still-unknown length of time.