The career of René Clair followed a similar trajectory. After his initial sound films in France attracted international acclaim, Clair was lured to England in 1935 to direct the comedy The Ghost Goes West for producer Alexander Korda’s London Films. The film tells the tale of an eighteenth-century Scottish laird who dies with his honor besmirched and so haunts his castle until the blot can be lifted from his name. Over a century later, his debt-ridden descendant sells the castle to an American businessman, who has it torn down and reconstructed in Florida.
The ghost, however, continues to haunt the relocated castle, to the general consternation of all concerned. The Ghost Goes West was a substantial hit, and Clair, who at one point during production became so annoyed with Korda’s interference that he threatened to bolt, soon set his sights on Hollywood, where he thought he would have more artistic freedom and better technical facilities and distribution.
It
Clair manages to make a potentially grisly situation into a light, frothy comedy; people are trapped on an island while a homicidal maniac kills them off one by one, the twist being that the killer is one of the ten, and a race soon develops to unmask the murderer’s identity. Using his customary reliance on tightly synchronized musical cues and sight gags, and shooting almost entirely on indoor sets (even for the exterior sequences), as was Clair’s custom, the director gives the film a light, fantastic touch that seems simultaneously unreal and yet beguiling.
The picture was Clair’s most successful in the United States, and perhaps his most fully realized since À Nous la liberté.
He stayed in
His work in France, in its original form, is playful, light, and graceful. His sound films after the early 1930s fail to live up to his early promise.
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