Past Misdeeds: Diary Of A Madman (1963)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section (like, for example, why I didn't even mention Guy de Maupassant's original story in this one).


France in the 19th Century. A group of mourners attend the burial of magistrate and hobby criminal psychologist Simon Cordier (Vincent Price). Cordier left the group his diary - of course containing the mandatory horrible truth - to explain some strange occurrences surrounding his last few months. Thus endeth the unnecessary framing device and the actual action (or what goes for it here) begins.

Cordier, as one of the men who had sentenced the murderer Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens) to death, is invited by Girot to visit him a few days before his execution. The murderer had always stated that he wasn't to blame for his deeds, but was coerced to them by an invisible, evil force that controlled him. Not surprisingly, Cordier never did believe this story, and isn't getting any less sceptical when Girot now repeats it. Alas, Girot is telling the truth, as his greenish glowing eyes when the ranting session turns violent only too clearly demonstrate.

Cordier manages to survive Girot's attack and knocks the man out. Afterwards, however, the magistrate's life turns strange. He can't stop thinking about what Girot told him; the killer's process files mysteriously appear on Cordier's desk; the locked-up portrait of the magistrate's long dead wife and child reappears at a place in his study where it hasn't hung for more than a decade. Eventually, a mocking voice out of nowhere (Joseph Ruskin) introduces itself to Cordier, and explains that it is an Horla, a creature from another dimension that feels drawn to evil - in Cordier's case his feeling of guilt for having (or only thinking to have, the film's not really clear about that) driven his wife to suicide after the death of their child, for which he held her responsible - and uses mind control to let the evildoers do more evil. Which, frankly, seems a bit unnecessary and a mite illogical, what with them supposedly being evil already. Now, if the film would explain that the Horla feeds on the darker human emotions, this whole thing would make a bit more sense, but Diary's script doesn't believe in doing things the sensible way.

To prove its point, the Horla puts the mind-whammy on Cordier and makes him crush his budgie to death. The very next day, the magistrate does the sort of logical thing people in horror films never do - and that seems quite out of place in a movie typically as thoughtless as this one - and visits a psychiatrist.

The Freud surrogate recommends Cordier to take some time off from his exhausting job, and spend some time sculpting as he had done when he was younger. It's a decent idea, really, or rather would be, if the Horla weren't an actual living being instead of a hallucination.

In his new life as an amateur artist, Cordier soon enough meets and is instantly smitten by artist model Odette Mallotte (Nancy Kovack). She's just trying to sell him a picture she modelled for, but instead  of buying it, he decides to hire her as a model for his first new work. What Cordier doesn't know is that Odette is married to the penniless painter Paul Duclasse (Chris Warfield). That's alright, though, because Odette would be perfectly willing to leave her husband for a richer one, especially one as malleable as Cordier seems to be. Unfortunately, the Horla has rather more unpleasant and violent ideas about what Cordier should do with Odette and Paul.

You'd think that a somewhat larger and somewhat more reputable studio like United Artists would have had no problems emulating the success of AIP's (and Roger Corman's) Poe adaptations, especially when they were willing to hire the star of these films, the greatest actor in horror film, Vincent Price. Alas, the studio heads must have somehow overlooked that the quality of the AIP films had quite a bit to do with Corman's enormous creative powers (and at that point in his career, his willingness to use them) and scripts that were written with actual intelligence and care.

In the place of the visionary Corman, UA set Reginald Le Borg, a director who had begun his career cranking out indifferent films of every genre for Universal, and went on to crank out equally indifferent TV jobs for the thankless grind of 50s TV. One can't help but suspect he worked cheap and fast, without that nasty habit of still trying to make a movie worth watching the Corman bubble had brought to AIP. "Indifferent" is also a fine word to describe Le Borg's work here. There's not exactly anything wrong with the man's direction; there is unfortunately, nothing right with it that exceeds pointing the camera in the right - though never an interesting -direction and having competent lighting, either. In not a single scene does the director seem interested in building a mood - be it a spooky one, an ambiguous one, or a dramatic, an exciting or a just plain entertaining one. The camera points, Le Borg shoots, and that's all. For some reason, he also lets his actors pretend the French currency is called "The Frank" (yep, just like the first name), because there's nothing that makes fake France more believable than not even trying to pronounce it (or any of the character names) right.

Fittingly, Robert E. Kent's script is just as indifferent, and badly structured too boot. Too many scenes are completely superfluous, or tend to run on long after they have expressed what they wanted to express (which never is much, anyhow).

The script's troubles begin with the utterly unnecessary framing device that might as well just not be there, for all that it matters to the proceedings, and continue into that most cardinal of all scripting sins: setting up interesting psychological circumstances for a protagonist and then deciding to just not do anything with them, because one would prefer some stiff operatics about a gold-digging woman, her painter husband and the woman who truly loves him. No, I have no idea why I should care about the painter's best friend/would-be wife either - the film certainly isn't telling me. It's all just a draggy mire of misused opportunities.


And - worst of all - not even acting hero Price seems to be immune to the air of boredom surrounding the film. He's not bad, mind you, he's just neither using his control of thespian nuance, nor his patented thoughtful overacting. The star is mostly just there, going through the motions, getting paid. I won't blame Price much for not giving a good performance here, though. Even the most enthusiastic actor can do only so much surrounded by people caring so little about the quality of the film they are making.