LA GRANDE FROUSSE
(“The Big Fright”)
Production: France, 1964
Director: Jean-Pierre Mocky
Category: Crime/Terror
One of only two features to be based on the novels of Jean Ray (the other being Harry Kumel’s Malpertuis), La Grande Frousse is based on Ray’s La Cité De L’Indicible Peur (“City Of Unspeakable Fear”), written in the 1940s. When a forger escapes from the guillotine, a police inspector tracks him down to the provincial town of Barges, a weird community whose residents all live in fear of a sinister, predatory beast which apparently roams the surrounding countryside. An alcoholic doctor, a love-sick butcher, and other absurd figures add to Mocky’s anarchic concoction, which mixes elements of farce and the grotesque. Sadly, for its initial release in 1964, the film suffered from poor editing at the hands of its distributors, who tipped it towards slapstick. When the rights reverted to Jean-Pierre Mocky in 1973, he reconstructed the film as he had originally intended it, reinserting some cut sequences, giving it the title of the novel on which it was based and tilting its equilibrium back to the black.
Posted by Neuro-Toxx
