Louis Feuillade’s Tih-Minh is a serial thriller that gets more fascinating and suspenseful with each chapter. One of its most surprising elements is that the heroine is a woman of mixed French and Vietnamese ancestry, played by an actress who fits that bill.
Now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber is a dazzling restoration of this 1919 film, and it pretty much looks like it was shot last week instead of over a century ago. On second thought, that’s not true. If it were shot last week, it mightn’t look as good.
Issued in weekly installments of about half an hour each, Tih-Minh begins with a prologue explaining that the tall, dark, handsome, and famous explorer Jacques d’Athys (René Cresté) has returned from the French colony of Indochina (now Vietnam) to his fabulous seaside mansion. There, he’s greeted with joy by his grey-headed mother (Adeline de la Croix) and lovely sister Jeanne, played by an actress billed as Mlle. Lugane.
Two arrive in the coach with Jacques. One is his manservant Placido (Georges Biscot), who’s both comic relief and a brave sidekick who throws himself into fights. In the cameos that introduce the main characters at the start of the prologue, he’s the only one who mugs and winks at the camera, while the others strike dramatic poses. He’s engaged to Rosette (Jeanne Rollette), a dimpling dumpling of a maid who bashfully throws her apron over her face at random moments.
The second arrival is Tih-Minh (Mary Harald). She’s introduced as an “Annamite”, an archaic word for Vietnamese. She’s a small, shy, delicate woman in silks who’s soon Frenchified under Jeanne’s tutelage. The first thing to be said about Tih-Minh is that she doesn’t look especially Asian, and no attempt is made to make her up as such. The second thing to be said is that we’ll learn her father was a French judge who was murdered by one of the villains.
The third thing is that, although little is known about Mary Harald beyond the handful of films she appeared in, she seems to have been born in Hong Kong to a French father and a Vietnamese mother. In his commentary, historian Tim Lucas refers to publicity that stated as much and added that Tih-Minh was claimed as her real mother’s name. She was cast in several Asian roles in her brief career, making her one of the first partly non-Caucasian stars in French cinema, and the evidence of Tih-Minh is that she was a wonderfully effective actress.
Masquerade is one of the main plot motifs of Tih-Minh, especially among the villains. The head villain is billed as “the Asiatic Kistna” (Louis Leubas), and the film makes no effort to render him “Asiatic” beyond having him wear a beard and turban. When he removes them after a few chapters, we learn he’s really a German spy who was never Asiatic, so it’s a good thing no further makeup was used. These casting and story choices help the film play well to modern audiences.
The other villains are Dr. Gilson (Gaston Michel), a thin, bearded fellow revealed to be a German spy named Marx, and the Marquise Dolores de Santa Fe, played by tall, striking, broom-haired Georgette Faraboni, as though walking in a trance while receiving signals from the other world. That’s not far off, for she’s got some sort of telepathic powers and is being manipulated in trances engineered by Kistna. Luckily, she comes under the sway of a good-guy hypnotist, Dr. Clauzel (Marcel Marquet), who has a more effective method of mystically waving his hands over her head.
Clearly, none of this is credible, but why should the viewer wish for credibility? Feuillade was hailed by the original Surrealists for the deadpan strangeness of his scenarios, and Tih-Minh is utterly wild while remaining fluid and coherent. It may go without saying that no matter what happens, nobody ever calls the police.
The bulk of the story takes place two years after Tih-Minh’s arrival, as a kind of souvenir of Jacques’ travels. Having deposited her at the house, he takes off for another two years of wandering with Placido, whose girlfriend is amazingly patient. Now he’s come home a second time with a McGuffin, a specific copy of a Sanskrit book with secret information scribbled on the flyleaf.
The sinister trio in the chalet next door are after it, and one of the first things they do is give Tih-Minh a potion that gives her amnesia and makes her wander like a somnambulist. It will take a few chapters for her to recover her speech and memory, thanks to the ministrations of Dr. Clauzel, and she’ll become active in seeking vengeance for her dead father and confronting the villains.
Tih-Minh spends her time getting kidnapped, escaping, shooting at people, and literally hanging onto the edge of cliffs. Shot in fabulous locations around Nice, it’s all exciting and gorgeous, sometimes breathtaking. The final spectacular chapter is as extravagant in its tragedies as its happy endings.
Kudos to the editing and deep-focus photography by Léon Clausse, which we’d never be able to appreciate without this meticulous 2018 restoration by the Gaumont Company. Feuillade’s straight-ahead visual style combines imaginative staging with clever narrative choices to reveal or conceal information. He injects moments of gratuitous beauty and subjectivity, such as the idea that the amnesiac Tih-Minh wanders in a desolate landscape. Julien Bory’s modern score uses diverse sounds, including washes of ambiance.
Gaumont released Tih-Minh on a French Blu-ray. The print was later licensed in the UK by Eureka. Lucas’ Eureka commentary, which discusses details from the serialized newspaper tie-in, has been ported over for Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray. He traces connections with Indian literature and argues that British agent Sir Francis Grey (Édouard Mathé) foreshadows James Bond. He describes a fascinating and controversial lost film with Mary Harald, Édouard-Émile Violet’s Li Hang le cruel (1920), in which the titular villain and other Chinese roles were, in fact, played by Chinese actors. Here’s more curious evidence of early French features using ethnically correct casting, no matter how over-the-top the story is.
Gaumont decided not to restore the original tinting of Tih-Minh, instead letting the film play in black and white. This allows us to see all details with clarity, but the trade-off is the absurdity of having characters walk around in broad daylight while pretending it’s night. In theatres, a blue tint would have been used. In this aspect, therefore, the serial isn’t quite restored to what viewers in 1919 saw. We might wish the tinting had been optional, even though that would have doubled the number of discs.
Presented on two discs, Tih-Minh is a 12-episode series running for almost six and a half hours. That’s longer than a night’s sleep for some of us. Obviously, the serial was never meant to be experienced as a single torrent, a cataract, an avalanche. Our binge-happy era makes such a thing possible, but maybe Feuillade’s dream should still be experienced, like laudanum, in discreet doses that will linger in our brains until the next fix.