RvB's After Images: Ten Days Wonder

If you have Orson Welles and a candelabra, you've pretty much got your movie done already, as we can glean in this still from Claude Chabrol's 1971 Ten Days Wonder a.k.a. La Decade Prodigeuse. It's by a long chalk Claude Chabrol's most bizarre film, even though it comes from a relatively normal source: a 1948 pulp novel by the duo of mystery writers known as "Ellery Queen". Not having read the book, I can only wonder if the novel was existentialism disguised as pulp, or if the essentially blasphemous nature of the story kept it from being adapted into a film back in the 1940s. It would have been a crazy hunk of film noir. This is a plot that needs every shadow it can get, but Chabrol was working in the lurid Technicolor of the early 1970s, a color scheme that's worsened in the grimy prints and in bad home video transfers upon which this film is most commonly seen. Thanks to the scratches, the surface grime, and Chabrol's discomfort with the English language, Ten Day's Wonder takes some getting used to. At 3am, Ten Days Wonder would look like a masterpiece.

At noon, when I saw it, it's camp that stays compelling because of the deep-dyed conviction brought to it by Welles. Everyone knows the story of the film student gone to heaven, to find that the Heavenly Throne is located in the middle of a replica of Xanadu from Citizen Kane: "That's where God lives. He's delusional, he thinks he's Orson Welles." Here's the movie where Orson Welles thinks he's God, and he has more than a few of the characters here convinced that he is. Blackout: "This wonder, as wonders last, lasted nine days." (The slang expression "nine days wonder" meant a scandal that came and went with the newspaper headlines.) We begin in a cheap hotel somewhere on the Rue Bayard in Paris. Charles (Anthony Perkins) wakes up with blood on his hands and no good idea of how he got there; the tilt-a-whirl camera indicates his head is still spinning.

On an impulse, he calls up Paul (a dashing Michel Piccoli) who was his former philosophy teacher. There seems to have been some amount of corruption in the instruction involved, since Charles calls Paul "my evil influence," but Charles is too loco to be trusted; he threatens Paul with a mallet: "If I broke your head with this, it wouldn't grow back." In fact, Charles begs Paul to accompany him for a visit to his father's house. Once we get there, it's easy to see why Charles needed help to visit the old man. The father Theo Van Horn (Welles) is a raving eccentric, a self-made millionaire who demands that everything around his estate be from the year 1925, as if he were Robert Crumb or something. His wife Helene (Marlene Jobert) is the exception to the rule, since she was born far later than 1925; the freckled, slender redhead is a former child bride whom Theo groomed for the position of his wife.

From Theo's name (derived from "God" in Greek), to Helene's personal account of their courtship ("he was my God"), to Charles' mad sculptures, depicting a toga-wearing Theo in colossal height, holding a thunderbolt, we get the picture of megalomania far beyond the reach of even short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. But Theo is a jovial God, and the soul of courtesy, as long as he's obeyed. What Theo doesn't seem to know is that Charles is sleeping with Helene. (The incest is cleansed, slightly, by the information that Charles is an adopted son.) Charles wrote love letters to his stepmother, and an unknown blackmailer stole them; to raise funds to pay off the criminal, Charles, Helene and Paul break into Theo's safe and steal his money. As amateur detective and outsider to this family, it is Paul who discovers the mathematical pattern behind the seemingly random events during the ten days of the action.

Once upon a time, Welles played The Shadow, a superhero who had the ability to cloud men's minds. He couldn't be seen, but you could hear his voice in the back of your head. In a scene when Theo calls on the phone, Welles' incomparable voice echoes as if it were coming out of the walls of his Jazz Age estate. You can see why Chabrol goes in for the old monster-movie effect of resounding theater organ on the soundtrack. He needed music to match Welles's rumble. At this stage Welles was, of course, extraordinarily fat, even if he knew how to wear that lard like a king's ermine mantle...and he had a million-dollar beard, badger striped and, indeed, the size of a genuine badger. He wasn't afraid to call attention to his bulk: Theo excuses himself from a picnic by remarking, "You don't expect a man of my size and years to squat in the grass, nibbling sandwiches"

Even if Anthony Perkins is, as always, nervous as a finch--he played people who were Poe characters transported to the 1960s--one look at Theo makes it clear why his father has the drop on him. Who knows what personal history the two had off screen, considering Welles had directed Perkins in a first-rate but little seen adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. Here they are together, like the overbearing Herr Kafka and his frightened son Franz. If Kafka's works are comedies of crawling humans dealing with the demands of an incomprehensible, capricious God, this movie has some of that spirit. Chabrol's angle in this strange entertainment is a little harder to figure. The hardest-working man in French showbiz is, says one critic, "enigmatic". He's made so many movies that his particular themes and concerns aren't easily mined. Critic David Thomson has an idea that the power of persuasion has an especially lethal force in Chabrol's mysteries and thrillers, such as Les Biches or Le Boucher. It's not what you do on your own that matters, it's what you can be made to do.

Ten Days Wonder's thesis is clear in the end, and to avoid spoiling the film I have to get a little vague: Chabrol teases us with the idea of sin being God's fault, something evil placed under our feet or in our grasp. The sinner is responsible for succumbing to temptation, but a really all-powerful being could have got rid of that temptation in the first place. Forcing the false God Theo to admit to this paradox gives Paul the moral victory; score one for the human race. Ah, perhaps it's not deeper than those Star Trek incidents where Captain Kirk used to argue delusional computers and Laurence Luckenbill's Sybok alike into admitting they weren't really God after all. As for Welles, he still had 15 years left to put the fear of God into the world and into other actors. His last role was as an angry planet called Unicron; I won't be the first to observe that after playing a planet, there were no other parts grand enough for Orson Welles.