The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Maxa Head Wound

The Most Assassinated
Woman In The World
(aka La Femme La Plus
Assassinée Du Monde)
2018 USA Directed by Franck Ribière
Belgium/UK/USA
24th August screening at FrightFest 2018

I’ve talked about Paula Maxa on here before.

Almost two years ago I reviewed a really great book called Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 (which can be found here) and buried somewhere in the middle of it I had this to say...

“... a particularly interesting performer called Paula Maxa who met with an unfortunate demise 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways on the stage of the theatre and was also the victim of a stage rapist attack at least 3,000 times. I would love to see a full biography of this lady emerge some day. As it is, the writer reprints, in a later section, a longish and autobiographical newspaper story of her early years from the time, although I can’t really hazard a guess as to the truth of the claims made by Maxa here. This amazing little article written in her own words certainly whets the appetite for more information about this sensationalist performer who seemed more than happy to play and wallow in the kind of unsavoury elements found in the plays in which she performed.”

Now, The Most Assassinated Woman In The World isn’t a biography of the actual person per se but it does use the memory of the real life person to unwind what is, in essence, a kind of giallo tinged thriller set on and around the stage at the famous Grand Guignol of Paris. A tale in which Paula Maxa, played with much screen presence by an actress called Anna Mouglalis, becomes the central figure, used by the writers and director to weave a tale which is much less about trying to explain the truth of this lady and more about using her legend to conjure up an atmosphere of the milieu in which she found herself.

And I can’t actually blame the writers for doing so, it has to be said.

My reason for this is because there seems to be very little known about the lady in question beyond her public facade. Or, more accurately, much known through her own efforts to promote herself which, as far as I could tell, amounts to obviously fake flights of fancy presented as fact, which I myself find less credible, even, than some of the stuff the great Salvador Dali used to claim about himself over the years. She doesn’t even have her own page on Wikipedia, just a brief mention on a page about the theatre most closely associated with her name, so I fear any attempts to research a proper biography of her will probably have found any trails leading to the person behind this theatrical icon have long grown cold (that being said, I think there may be a French language attempt at a biography but I can’t find an English translation to be able to read what it says about her).

But, as long as there are works which mention her or use her in such a way as she is used here, she isn’t going to be falling into complete obscurity just yet, I suspect.

Ribière’s film is impressive, opening with an old, often Victorian, horror trope of a lady walking down a dimly lit street on a night shrouded by fog, as she hears the clicking footsteps of someone following her through the lonely lane. The presence of such a well worn cliché is not so impressive but the flawless and entertaining execution of it here certainly is and, as the film wears on, we get embroiled in a series of real life murders taking place in the vicinity of the Grand Guignol and we follow the footsteps of a crime reporter called Jean, played by Niels Schneider, as he looks for a link between the murders of the grizzly spectacle of the theatre and tries to discover if the real Parisian murders are somehow linked or inspired by them. And, of course, he also becomes the love interest for Paula Maxa as he seeks an introduction to her and strikes up a relationship, of sorts, with her as the film plays on.

The film itself plays out as an elaborate set of tricks on the audience which are a direct parallel, in a way, to the trickery and sleight of hand effects which the Grand Guignol used on a nightly basis. As we are treated to re-enactments of a couple of the little vignettes (in style at the very least) which were so popular at the time, we are let in on the secrets of their execution while at the same time, the director tries and, sometimes, succeeds to use ‘similar in spirit’ cinematic tricks to wrong-foot the audience and pull them into the illusion which lies at the centre of the movie.

Now, I have to admit that, one of the first times he does this I was not that impressed. An early scene which presents itself at first as a flashback to a younger, long dead character in a mirror got my guard up almost instantly as I realised that the director was trying to use the mechanics of the old Groucho/Harpo mirror sequence from Duck Soup to surprise the audience and... sure enough, I was less than astonished. I think, perhaps, this was because the person in the foreground being reflected could not, exactly, match the movements of the person in the mirror. However, the director uses much of the trickery and deception throughout the movie with a defter hand and, although I would possibly condemn this in other films for being too obvious and condescending, I think they all get away with it here because the subject matter is so close to that kind of audience manipulation that it rings truer than it would in other movies. There’s a lovely shot, for instance, where Paula and Jean are laying upside down on a bed with their heads at 180 degrees from each other while the camera spins around slowly as they converse to keep them near the top or bottom of the frame. Which is okay and at first seems a little over contrived until the director pulls back the camera completely to reveal the artifice of the shot and you realise... yeah, contrived is definitely the word but, deliberately so.

There are also some nice scenes of murder and suspense where the film almost goes into 1970s giallo territory, with Keren Ann’s lovely score rising to the occasion in such moments to complete the illusion that we’ve just accidentally wandered into a Dario Argento or Sergio Martino movie. And, like these sequences, the film as a whole has a certain atmosphere which is never quite rendered fake to the central figure and doesn’t really ever get dull. It has a sense of verisimilitude which holds the narrative together even though, as you continue your journey through the film, the majority of said narrative is revealed to be so much smoke and mirrors, depending on your reading of the films final scenes.

I was perhaps a little disappointed with the aftermath of the denouement of a certain scene containing what is, for the movie, Paula Maxa’s last appearance at the Grand Guignol (although certainly not in real life, as the film-makers will tell you with a little summary at the end). I was pretty sure I knew where the narrative would be heading after the latest theatrical portrait of a ‘Maxa grizzly demise’ and, sure enough, it did exactly what I thought it would with the characters. Even so, the end is not so bad and certainly fits in with the way the rest of the story has been framed and presented. A particularly telling moment is in a mid-post-credits scene where a variation of the opening sequence is replayed and the audience are reminded of the danger of believing all that they see.

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World is a nicely presented, slick homage to both the ‘idea’ of Paula Maxa and the Grand Guignol where she flourished. Its an entertaining film and definitely worth a watch for lovers of the form and for those who want to catch up a little on the history of blood and gore which found its way into horror movies. There’s even a scene where Jean takes Paula to see the newly opened 1932 Fay Wray/Lionel Atwill two-strip technicolour movie Doctor X, which should bring a smile to the face of anyone familiar with these kinds of genre movies. This one gets a hearty recommendation from me and, if we are lucky enough in the UK to actually get this one either properly released in our cinemas or put out on a nice Blu Ray format disc, then this one is definitely worth a look, I would say.

So that was my first film of five in this weekend’s FrightFest and I will, hopefully, be publishing a few more reviews from the festival over the next week or so.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

Theatre of Fear And Horror

Gore Play

Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 
Expanded Edition by Mel Gordon
Feral House (revised edition)
ISBN: 978-1627310314

Grand Guignol is one of those terms which I’ve heard bandied about in various critical writings on literary and cinematic horror works for a long time. It’s almost  an overused cliché (although I am more than happy to use it myself when it gets the message across) and though most people understand it and the origins of the term, it’s nice to finally be able to have a book which takes you briefly through the 65 year history of the venue and all that it stood for. I, myself, first became acquainted with the term when some very small amount of information on it was available in either the first or second room of the Museum Of Moving Image (MOMI) on the Southbank when it opened in 1988 (a wonderful, if not always accurate, film museum in London which was, shamefully, ‘temporarily’ closed in 1999 and subsequently never re-opened).

Now, thanks to the kind Christmas gift giving of a very special friend, I have explored the story of the shows performed there in this great book, Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962, by Mel Gordon. The tome is split up into a few interesting sections and the first one details the entire saga of the venue with a few notes about what it was before it played host to the horror shows and then going on to detail important playwrights and the varying attitudes of their works, plus the reception of those works with the general public at large.

For those who don’t know, the Grand Guignol was a theatre in one of the raunchier, perhaps I should say sleazier, districts in Paris which would run programmes of short vignettes, usually involving themes based around sexuality but, most importantly, often incorporating lashings of gory violence with the, presumably very skilled, performers having to get their timing and sleight of hand as good as any stage magician to be able to pull off the trick of realistic eye gougings, acid burns, cuts, tears, limb lopping and the like to a fully expecting, but not always necessarily prepared, public.

Named after Guignol, the popular Punch and Judy character from Lyons, the theatre and its programme was so popular in France that it was listed in guide books and had audiences flocking from all around the world to take in the, mostly, unique and horror filled sketches, night after night. The real acid test for the actors and actresses, though, was the amount of faintings they had per night as a benchmark of their performance skills. As the writer says, “Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.”

A typical tale, as described by Mel Gordon, can be found in this brief synopsis to a seasonal play, for instance... A Christmas tale of a poverty stricken woman in the last stages of pregnancy, unable to find someone to take her in (as Mary and Joseph were able to in their day), murders her child and throws the remains to the pigs in the fields while carols sound from the neighbouring village.

And there are a lot worse, in some ways, than this kind of thing in here and that, I think, is why various writers and critics over the years have used the phrase to metaphorically describe the sheer visceral horror of certain scenarios in art.

Gordon traces the origins of this tradition and shows how the horror and sexual content escalated when new writers and owners were brought in. Originally the plays were conceived as being new, unflinching and naturalistic tales which, obviously, included these strong, graphic elements as part of their daily bread. He also mentions a particularly interesting performer called Paula Maxa who met with an unfortunate demise 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways on the stage of the theatre and was also the victim of a stage rapist attack at least 3,000 times. I would love to see a full biography of this lady emerge some day. As it is, the writer reprints, in a later section, a longish and autobiographical newspaper story of her early years from the time, although I can’t really hazard a guess as to the truth of the claims made by Maxa here. This amazing little article written in her own words certainly whets the appetite for more information about this sensationalist performer who seemed more than happy to play and wallow in the kind of unsavoury elements found in the plays in which she performed.

The book also tells of the complete failure, despite its quite unparallelled success in Paris, that the Grand Guignol met with when the plays and actors toured in other countries such as Canada, America and over here in England. It’s also implied that, in some cases, these failures were quite possibly brought about by the xenephobic critics who may have had something against the idea of the French coming to their country. It also cites various foreign censorship bodies watering down the content of the shows in their territories as another reason why the touring thespians were forced to close their doors due to poor turnouts before their full season had finished.

After the story behind the venue, its performers and plays, we then get a lengthy section of brief synopsis of around 100 of the plays... of which there seem to have been many thousands. The summaries are rarely more than one or two short paragraphs each but they do serve to give some flavour of the breadth of grotesque pleasures which were on offer on a nightly basis. It also makes one wonder why nobody has tried to bring back a modern version in various theatre districts around the world... I would love to go and see one of these disturbing evenings myself. Ah, well... burlesque seemed to be making a comeback a few years ago so, perhaps, someone will get around to Grand Guignol.

After this section we get an archival essay on the nature of fear and the way in which people lap up horror and death by one of the vignette writers of the time. Reading it, the justifications could have been written by anybody working for the old Universal horror movies in the 1930s and their direct cinematic descendents. Actually, the cinematic legacy is briefly mentioned in the book, in a chapter discussing the influences on films like Robert Weine’s The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari (one of my favourites), which, it argues, owes as much, if not more, to Grand Guignol than it does to German Expressionism.

The book also has a number of attractively reproduced colour plates of posters advertising the theatre over the years and there are also a fair number of monochrome photos throughout, showing details of some of the acts (so if you want to see grainy pictures of actresses having their eyeballs seemingly pierced by knitting needles, then you will find that kind of stuff in here). This is all followed up, at the end of the book, by the reproduction of the scripts of two popular Grand Guignol plays, both of which feature some nasty deaths to various protagonists and antagonists. I’m reliably informed that the scripts are from different plays depending on whether or not you get this new, revised edition of Gordon’s book or an earlier version.

And the book then ends, quite abruptly, on the final grim moments of the last reprinted play.
A common problem when I read books on an aspect of cinema or some other topic in which I am, fairly, well versed is that I usually find lots of incorrect things passed off as facts and it mostly really annoys me. I found none of this in Mel Gordon’s tome and the writing style was quite accessible throughout. Of course, my unfamiliarity with the subject matter in the first place leaves me in the position of not being able to recognise any bloopers within the pages even if they were there but, heck, it’s just nice to be able to read a book and not worry about that stuff for a while.

Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 is a truly brilliant book and I count myself lucky to have received this splendid tome for Christmas. If anyone is already interested in this kind of horror theatre or has heard the term ‘Grand Guignolesque’ used to the point of insanity in various writings on the genre, then I would urge those of a sound mind to take a look at this volume. It’s an easy, uncomplicated read and it’s full of knowledge... just what a good book should be.