“Flesh and Fantasy,” Charles Boyer’s first movie as producer-actor, is a picture with the theme that dreams, the occult and any wishes you may have floating around you are big as life and twice as handsome, and with some morals like faith in yourself will drive the pixies away; do evil things and you will look as ugly as Hitler; you can make your dreams come true if you try—none of which, unlike Lassie, comes home. It is a chaotic smorgasbord of meshed-geared thinking and bad movie-making but it is also interesting. Movies with deep thought, morals and the occult, or anything except physical action, are as rare this year as hen’s teeth, and especially so when containing the gushing energies and naïveté of Mr. Boyer’s film.
“Flesh and Fantasy” is one of those four-in-one movies, which Boyer’s director, Julien Duvivier, continues laboriously to love, where four little movies are hung from the thread of one of those awesome ideas you get in the middle of the night, such as, it just goes to show what funny tricks life can play, and in which Mr. Duvivier plays Mr. Fate or fairy godmother to the studio’s star list. Here the thread—read in three stories by David Hoffman (the gnomelike man who played Radek in “Mission to Moscow”) to dream-fearing Robert Benchley—is the idea that dreams and palm-reading aren’t to be tossed off frivolously, nor, on the other hand, accepted wholesale. In the first one, a mean, ugly slavey, who is about to commit suicide, is given a dose of Lloyd C. Douglas oil—do good and you’ll look good—and a beautiful mask to wear to the Mardi Gras for two hours. So she shelves the meany role for the time, has a beautiful spirit for two hours, and gets a real, live fella and a beautiful face (Betty Field’s). In the second act a talented palm reader, played by Thomas Mitchell, tells the lawyer, played by Edward G. Robinson, that he will eventually be a murderer. And after Fate robs the lawyer of two likely prospects who will not be missed by anyone and by their death would have relieved him of his Fate, he gets hysterical and murders the palm reader! The third act concerns a tightrope walker (Charles Boyer) who has a dream in which he falls from his rope. For the next three reels he has quite a time with his tightrope walking.
The main thing about the movie is its chaos. Actually the idea of the validity of the corporeal and non-corporeal as expressed in the title runs consistently enough through all the stories, but it has been used as a gullible, unimaginative person would use a patent medicine he has been told will work on everything from the common cold to rickets if he uses it often enough and doesn’t ask any questions. The first episode, except for a couple of early, noisy dashes somewhere, is a straight, if trite, moral fable; the second and third, which are better simply from being more than a radio skit accompanied by scary, watery snapshots, have only a touch of morality, but enough to confuse everything, and their strokes of fate occur unrestrainedly whenever they are needed to keep a superficial story going. Then the clever ending turns up, and you are left, having witnessed two long, dull stories spiced with heavyweight sleight of hand, with nothing at the end and having been neither surprised, enlightened nor excited in transit. The material it uses, which is so old and undistinguished, is not heightened by its supernatural jazz, and the result of the jazz projects no meanings, emotionally or intellectually.
Mr. Duvivier’s movies, which are so intoxicated with whimsy, are in themselves extremely pedantic affairs, unimaginative, and lacking in lightness, taste or charm. When the palmist tells Lady Mildred Platz that she will soon hear from her husband whom she hasn’t heard from in seventeen years, the radio answers immediately that someone bumped into the missing Arctic explorer, Harold Platz, at the North Pole and that Platz would now address his radio audience. You can’t blame Lady Platz for fainting. The material of the movie is the prim, stuffed-shirt elegance of an era even Hollywood has forsaken, when heavy, obvious sentiments were expressed with extreme seriousness and enthusiasm. The shipboard romance between the tightrope specialist and the reformed diamond thief, which ends with the girl being led off to prison and her tightrope lover beamingly awaiting the day when she will be paroled, will make you feel old. Betty Field contemplates suicide with the persistence of an air drill and Mr. Robinson does his victim in with enough force and perspiration to kill a battalion of palmists—yet not for one second do you feel you are seeing anything but a particularly enthusiastic character actor’s rehearsal. At no place is the treatment imaginative enough to justify whimsy. Mr. Duvivier’s wand is like a crank.
November 1, 1943