The Pied Piper

The process is from Picasso's Famille de Saltimbanques to Bruegel's The Triumph of Death, Browning's poem is just a starting point for the removal of the harlequin's makeup. "The year of the Black Death" (1349) is the perfect time for bringing out the malignant side of Jacques Demy's enchantment, a troupe of traveling actors in the hippified Dark Ages pick up the Pied Piper (Donovan) on the way to Hamelin. The hamlet is sullied even before the rats appear—the sniveling burgomaster (Roy Kinnear) is about to marry his barely pubescent daughter (Cathryn Harrison) off to the bloodthirsty scion (John Hurt), whose baronial father (Donald Pleasence) builds cathedrals to evade hellfire. "Salvation is a costly business nowadays." The rabbinical alchemist (Michael Hordern) urges rationalism and gets roasted for his trouble, his young assistant (Jack Wild) is an aspiring artist whose sketches don't much impress his sweetheart. Pestilence awaits in the wings, a foreboding jest is half-heard during wedding preparations: "Have the swans arrived yet?" "No." "What about the vultures?" "Oh yes." Demy the melancholy conjurer in the wake of Russell's The Devils—the vivid colors here are Inquisition reds amid torch-lit darkness, out of the cathedral-shaped cake pours a swarm of rodents. The Piper revives the wan maiden and drives away the vermin, and his reaction to the burgomaster's perfidy, simultaneously tender and sinister, shows that the filmmaker picked Donovan not for "Mellow Yellow" but for "The Hurdy Gurdy Man." "What a waste of time to be unhappy..." The debt to The Seventh Seal is returned in Fanny and Alexander, further consequences are felt in Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and Robbins' Dragonslayer. With Keith Buckley, Diana Dors, Peter Vaughan, and Peter Eyre.