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There’s also a subversive element to the players, a mockery and peasant disregard for authority which anticipates non-conformist beliefs to come. The backdrop with the burning female saint has an enthroned king to the side gesturing his approval whilst a flunky does the hot and dirty work and fans the flames to enhance the spectacle. The woman’s sanctity is made evident by the golden headdress of her halo and the angel reaching down her hand in preparation to usher her into heaven. The king and the state he commands is thus portrayed as the villainous party, creating martyrs of holy innocents.

In the show they put on outside the walls of the town, silent comedy angels suspended in the air (flying Keatons or Chaplins) deliver boots up the backside to prowling baddies who look suspiciously like castle guards. Again, there are parallels with The Seventh Seal. In Bergman’s film, the players’ life affirming farce is disrupted by a procession of self-flagellating penitents, who oppose it with their own theatrical spectacle of wailing and suffering. In Demy’s film, the players put on a show for the wedding feast which makes play with the story of Eve’s temptation of Adam. Here, a giant hopping apple and a frustrated serpent arrive too late to perform their assigned roles.

Eve is beaming and caressing her rounded belly while Adam stands to the side, looking very pleased with himself. There’s no hint of sin or shame in this Garden, over which the painted figure of another female figure looks with an approving eye. The players and artists are associated with a more Marian worldview, heralds of a female future in which male power holds less sway. This is in marked contrast with the Bishop’s wedding ceremony, during which he venomously hisses about Eve’s curse and voices the Church’s abhorrence of female sexuality.

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au centre :Jack Wild - Gavin l' apprenti de Melius

*

Demy displays a subdued sense of rage against his authority figures throughout, but it bubbles to the surface in the final scenes. His fairy tale certainly possesses a very adult subtext, engaged and angry. It has some of the spirit of Angela Carter’s worldly recasting of the old stories – sharp and wise. The cast of fairy tale villains, shaded incontemporary colours, are given particular prominence in Demy’s sombre fable. But we start with the wagon of a travelling troupe of players trundling across the countryside, the painted cloth backdrop of a beatific female martyr smiling in the flames like a bright sail helping them along the way.

The painting is almost like a precognitive representation of Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake in 1431, many decades after the mid-fourteenth century setting of the film (the post-credits historical screed informing us that the year is 1349). They pick up two further travellers as they approach Hamelin: a peddlar pilgrim, hawking relics and crusade souvenirs; and Donovan’s mysterious troubadour, the sharply pointed prow of his cap shading his gaze. The piper’s fey, otherworldly character is underlined by the magical storm which flashes around the encampment the night after he joins them.

Theatrical lighting illuminates the stage set, its artificiality lending the scene an eerie charge, as if we were on the borders of some otherplace. This motley group are strongly reminiscent of the wandering players in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. They too are seen as innocents, free from the corruption of the world they move through and open and generous to those they meet. The pilgrim offers a more worldly perspective akin to that of the knight’s squire in Bergman’s film. They are a band of outsiders, whose lowly, vagabond status is made abundantly clear to them as soon as they arrive at the gates of Hamelin.

The bawdy, knockabout popular entertainments they put on in front of their large Marian screen purvey a different, more honest and open vision of the sacred to that put forward by the Church. It’s a vision which finds the sacrosanct present in the common experiences of everyday life, in the pleasures which the Church would taint with sin.

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au centre :Hamilton Dyce - l'éminence représentant du pape

*

*

A Papal envoy, carried into the town in a palanquin resembling a wooden coffin, is a representative of an echelon of power far surpassing the provincial concerns of the Hamelin elite. His demand for soldiers for the Pope’s expansionist campaigns makes it clear who is really in control, and prompts further scheming. There is no money to pay men to goto war, and not enough of them to spare anyway. Franz comes up with the idea of a children’s army. Their innocence can be exploited by offering them worthless fool’s gold,which he will force the alchemist to forge. Implicit contemporary parallels are drawn with Vietnam, and the young me drafted to fight there.

With the arrival of the rats and thepanic over the spread of the plague they bring in their wake, the cynicism and self-serving actions of the Hamelin authorities reaches a new, murderous pitch. Franz’s insistence that Melius, the alchemist and apothecary, devote his attentions to the creation of the fool’s gold for his children’s crusade rather than concoct a preventative medicine to protect against the plague shows a willed blindness. It’s a blindness which gives precedence to short-term capital gains over the management and care of the natural environment.

Again , a concern very much in tune with the times, and the dawning awareness of impending ecological crises. The dark and unsparing representation of the hypocrisy and viciousness of power which lurks behind the grotesque surface of the film’s colour-coded villains reaches a climax with the burning of Melius at the stake. His heresy is the assertion that the plague is caused by natural means, and can thus be cured by natural methods. The Church claims it is a curse sent by God, and rests its authority on such a position. The Bishop is not about to have his authority challenged, and pronounces sentence with scarcely a moment of reflection. He is backed up by the Baron and Burgermeister, Church, State and Commerce uniting to serve their own interests.

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The Baron is obsessed with building a new cathedral in Hamelin, facing his castle. This is not so much a monument to the glory of God as a further expression of his power and his preening ego. The Bishop is obviously keen to encourage this, as it would enhance his own prestige. But he is aware that the mad Baron has no practical idea of the costs involved, and the Burgermeister and his guild heads have already taxed every possible local resource. The half-built cathedral façade, with its idle workers and wooden winches and scaffolding, is like an unfinished set. It could perhaps be seen as an admission of budgetary limitations, or as a pointed rejection of Hollywood historical spectacle.

The economic exhaustion which the extravagant fancies of the Baron has created has hints of the 70s downturn (although the ’73 OPEC oil hike had yet to make its devastating impact), with images of builders sitting disconsolately inactive about the site striking a resonant note. The rising towers of the cathedral could also be seen as a reflection on the greed of property speculators in the 60s and 70s, erecting grandiose buildings in prime locations and then letting them lie empty for years while they waited for rents to rise, and for sufficiently wealthy tenants to move in.

The high-rise modernist office block Centre Point, in the heart of London, was one of the most notorious cases. It lay empty for some 5 years after its completion in 1967 at a time when unemployment and homelessness were rising steeply. The cathedral is only ever seen in the form of its architectural model, or as an elaborate cake produced for Franz’s wedding, another sign of its cynically political provenance. The cake’s delicately iced rose windows and arched doors are shattered by the rats which emerge from within, causing the whole structure to collapse in a symbolic rubble of crumbs and sugary dust.

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Diana Dors  : dame Poppendick / John Hurt  : Franz et Cathryn Harrison : Lisa

*

All of these exaggeratedly self-interested and power-hungry characters, with their various political ambitions, parallel the powers at play in Ken Russell’s The Devils, released a year earlier in 1971. Russell’s film is entirely dissimilar in tone, but does bear comparison in its use of stylised costume and set design and in its clear parallels with contemporary social, political and military conflicts. Both films are, in their own ways, intensely moral, and unafraid to declare their allegiances, even if this results in a certain schematic division into good and evil.

The various powers in Hamelin all have their own schemes, put forward by their leaders. They conspire together in order to realise them, and to maintain their position. Burgermeister Poppendick and his wife wish to graft themselves onto an aristocratic family tree. To do this, they are prepared to marry off their daughter, still a child, to the slimily unappealing Franz. In this way, Frau Poppendick will also have her lover on hand, even if he would by then be her son-in-law. Franz’s aside to the Bishop during the wedding feast makes it clear that he too is fully aware of this, but chooses to tactically turn a blind eye.

The sexual hypocrisy of the powerful, who put on ostentatious masks of piety and rectitude, is revealed in the end when Franz reaps his just reward and catches the plague whose proliferation he has enabled. The black circle which almost instantaneously appears on his cheek resembles the patches dotting the faces of the characters in Hogarth’s moral fables; patches which cover syphilitic scars.

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The prevalence of British character actors heightens the air of grotesquery. Roy Kinnear, as the Burgermeister Poppendick, brings his usual comic mannerisms into play. He is every inch the businessman who has made his pile through dodgy dealing, and is shifty, opportunistic and completely untrustworthy. He’s also utterly ineffectual as a public figure, and offers muttered asides as to the helplessness of it all. Diana Dors plays his domineering wife Frau Poppendick, one of the bellowing, comic shrews she specialised in during the 70s. She shifts with complete assurance between red-faced shrieking and saucy, winking lasciviousness, and its clear that she’s having a bit on the side with Franz.

The thickly curling horns of her wedding bonnet, shaped like indulgent French pastries, seem to mock her cuckolded husband, whose gnomish, priapically extended fez is a pathetically overcompensatory response. Donald Pleasance’s Baron is a mad, muttering recluse, retreating to the shadowy spaces of his castle, and ultimately to the shuttered nook of his coffined bed. His dank lair is covered with morbid murals of devils and skeletons, promising diverse varieties of detailed torment.

They are the outward projection of his clammy, twisted mind. Peter Vaughan’s Bishop is a guiltily perspiring serpent, desires as tightly constrained as his face-hugging costume. They are transformed into poisonous bile which his religious authority affords Papally sanctioned expression. John Hurt’s Franz, the privileged scion of the Baron, is poutingly sullen, lighting up only with the sadistic satisfaction he derives from the cruelty which his inherited power and its attendant aura of fear allows him to indulge.

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The costumes of the Hamelin worthies are exaggerated and highly theatrical, and make it clear that Demy’s middle ages are defiantly non-naturalistic – a land of fable rather than historical verisimilitude. They are also buffoonish outfits, casting the figures of authority who wear them as grotesques, caricatures of their own warped desires and ambitions. The Burgermeister and his wife’s social aspirations are displayed in the absurd extravagance of the hats they struggle to keep aloft during the tactical marriage of their young daughter to the slimy Franz, the Baron’s son (a mercenary wedding of new money and bankrupt aristocracy).

Diana Dors (as Frau Poppendick, the wife) in particular carries spectacularly over-the-top headgear throughout, which she manages to keep admirably well-balanced. The portable marquee which tents her features with such ostentatious modesty early on could be seen as a satire on Hollywood medievalism, with its queens and princesses in conical turret bonnets trailing wafty clouds of gauze. The Baron has a spritish, tapering cap which looks like it's been soaked in algae, or is some fungal growth sprouting from his pate. His bullying son Franz has rolls of green cloth layered in foppish folds atop his floppy, patrician mop.

The bishop has his papal hood rising in a mitred, scarlet shield, but his face is also shrouded in a nunnish wimple. These fools’ caps are designed to conceal and disguise, or connote status, but only serve to emphasise the wearers’ vanity, pretension or madness. The players, on the other hand, have loose tunics which hide nothing, and Melius, the alchemist who is the town’s figure of learning and reason, dresses in a simple and noble robe.

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Jacques Demy’s 1972 film The Pied Piper is a countercultural take on the legend which in some ways comes a little after its time. Donovan’s fey troubadour is a figure from 1967 rather than the early 70s, when the zeitgeist already blew a little more harshly, the idyllic summer a memory eclipsed by subsequent unrest, fragmentation and narcotic drift. The dream of a medieval age of pageantry is thus as much a dream of the 60s ideals which were seeming ever more remote.

The generational and ideological divide which marked the decade is here represented by the forces of the church, the armed state and the newly ascendant business class, who are ranged against the artists and philosophers (the peasantry don’t get much of a look in, here). These powerful Hamelin cliques are conveniently colour-coded (although not to the extent of having their faces painted blue or red, as Demy pigmented his servants and soldiery in his 1970 fairy tale Peau d’Ane, or Donkey Skin).

The baron and his enforcers wear a mouldy green broken up by sloping military stripes. The cardinals and bishops are wrapped in scarlet, their perspiring faces peering beadily out from capacious hoods. The merchants wear black jerkins (or a more plush red for the higher amongst them) which give them a puffed-out, preening look.

The travelling theatre troupe which comes to town have their own loose uniform of striped tunics, but the colours are varied and natural – sky blue, blossomy peach, earthy brown and mossy green. They are colours which reflect the landscape which they pass through, and in which they make their camp each night, and suggest that they are more at home here than in the cities and towns where they go to perform.

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A pied piper named Donovan.

Author: dbdumonteil
25 May 2002
 

Donovan sings three songs :outside the wonderful "sailing homeward",he performs two ditties "I'm the pied piper" (obvious) and "life has her (!) ups and her downs".It was filmed on location in Germany"The pied piper" ,like "Peau d'âne" which was released the year before, is a fairy tale ,but the mood is drastically different:I would say that "peau d'âne" is a movie for children that can appeal to adults,and "the pied piper" a movie for grown -ups which can appeal to children."Peau d'âne" is the bright Renaissance,with its châteaux de la Loire such as Chambord,and the forest and the country are not hostile,it's a providential world."

The pied piper" is the dark Middle Ages;the beginning might have been influenced by Bergman's "the seventh seal":the wandering entertainers ,the plague ,the "sorcerer" ...The screen play is almost an original one:the famous legend lasts barely ten minutes ,the rest of the plot is completely new and extremely pertinent.
Two worlds clash in Demy's work: the world of Melius the jew,that of an embryonic science and a desire to explain the things and to react to them:he comes much too soon and anyway the Jews suffered persecutions in those troubled times too:think that Louis IX,King of France of the thirteenth century ,forced the jews to wear the "rouelle",a sinister ancestor of Hitler's yellow star.And he became Saint-Louis, canonized by the Catholic Church.

And there's the world of the bishops,sinister characters dressed in red,red as blood,who personify intolerance and ignorance :unlike Melius,they react to the bubonic plague by saying it's a God-sent ordeal,because men are sinners,they do not have to understand but they must be ready to repent and to mortify (self-flagellation).The wedding is revealing as well:listen to the bishop,the way he speaks to the bride:she is an impure human being,whose only way is to follow her husband's rule:till 1215,woman had no soul!

Demy expresses his disgust with the famous scene of the wedding cake: big rats appear,they had entered the cathedral-pastry.It won't be long before the magnificent dessert crumble .And it will not be long before Hamelin itself and its hypocrite priests crumble like Sodom .So the pied piper is like God's angel ,leading Lot out of this doomed place.The children are the just men,sometimes sacrified as Hurt's unfortunate bride ,a child herself -a girl used to get married at an early age in those ancient times.

Demy 's pessimism,which passed for melancholy in "Lola" , muted in "les parapluies de Cherbourg",seemed to disappear in "les demoiselles de Rochefort" and "peau d'âne", is glaring in "the pied piper".This is probably his darker work.Thus ,one can forget his return to the ponderous comedy with Deneuve and Mastroianni in 1972"."The pied piper" remains an overlooked,ignored work.How many Demy's fans do not even know that this film exists?I urge them to see it,it's an essential part of his work,and maybe his swansong,because he was never to reach such heights afterward.

Author: Lee Eisenberg (lee.eisenberg.pdx@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA
3 June 2006

A previous reviewer said that this version is probably closer to the original version of the story than any other version with which we're familiar in this day and age. Given the portrayal of the bubonic plague, I would have to agree. And it only adds to the movie's quality that they cast Donovan as the title character. I should warn you that this movie is rather dark - but never gross - and not even trying to be "cute", so don't expect that. Also starring Jack Wild, John Hurt and Donald Pleasance.One other thing is that "The Pied Piper" is (as far as I know) not officially available on video or DVD. It is available in the video/DVD store Movie Madness, here in Portland, Oregon. If you're ever in Portland, you should come to Movie Madness.

Watching this recently, I remembered certain scenes from when I watched it as a child of about 7 or 8, some twenty-five years ago. That is testament to how effective some of The Pied Piper is. Indeed, in some ways it hardly qualifies as a "childrens' film" at all, as it starts with a picture of a heretic being burned at the stake and ends with the death of one of the main characters by the same means. Clearly Demy had Bergman's The Seventh Seal in mind for the general feel of the film, which stresses the irrationality and brutality of the times.

 However, the screenwriters and Demy add another ingredient - the political chicanery of the Church, the aristocracy and the merchant class, sometimes colluding together, at other times each promoting their own special interests. It's not difficult to read the film as a quasi-Marxist parable about feudal society, and the film-makers clearly intended something of the sort. If that makes it all sound very heavy, actually the film is fairly fast-moving and fun, especially because of the wonderfully comic grotesque playing of Donald Pleasance and Roy Kinnear.

Fans of these actors should definitely seek this film out - Pleasance is as good as he was in "Death Line" (AKA "Raw Meat") made about the same time, and Kinnear is nearly as good as he was in "Juggernaut", another overlooked but very interesting British film of the early 70s. There is also a very good performance from Michael Hordern as the rationalist alchemist, one of his better and most substantial but unfortunately least known performances. Nostalgia fans can also take pleasure in remembering a time when Jack Wild, made famous by "Oliver", was considered a star.

The Pied Piper deserves its mixed critical reputation. Demy does not here have the firm control over his material he had in earlier films. The main flaw is the total lack of characterisation of the Piper, and the terrible non-acting of the folk singer Donovan in that role. His musical interludes are just embarrassing and the worst thing about the film (for a similar ruining of a otherwise thoughtful historical film by a miscast singing star, see 1969's "Where's Jack?" with Tommy Steele).

This is a pity as the socio-political stuff at the edges of the film, plus the costumes and scenery, are very good indeed. Overall, this is certainly worth a watch if it turns up on TV or you might, as I did, seek it out on a secondhand VHS cassette. It is not a major film but it's an endearing oddity, and certainly a must-see for Demy students or fans of Brtish film in the early 70s.

Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls
15 October 2007

Back when I was a (allegedly disturbed) young child, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" was my absolute favorite fairy-tale. I owned many tapes that were filled with bedtime stories and fairy-tales, but I mostly just listened to "The Pied Piper" because it featured fascinatingly morbid topics like the black plague, child abduction, rat infestations and a mysteriously sinister guy playing the flute. I was always convinced the premise of Robert Browning's eerie poem could form the basis of a series of unimaginably dark horror movies, but unfortunately there aren't that many.

This British production, filmed on location in Germany, is a pretty great version but it's incredibly obscure for some reason and I spent an awful long time purchasing a decent copy. Now that I finally own it, I'm both thrilled about re-experiencing the familiar story lines as well as surprised about discovering entirely new story aspects I wasn't even aware of. The new (to me, at least) elements mostly handle about political and religious hypocrisy, so I presume that is the reason why they weren't included in any of the fairy-tale versions I grew up with.

But it remains a fascinating story and a fabulously engaging film, only suffering from obvious and regrettable budget restrictions. Director and co-writer Jacques Demy had a clear and personal vision of the story, and it's definitely not a movie for young children to watch. Although never graphic or repulsive, "The Pied Piper" thrives on a disturbing atmosphere and it never evades any controversial themes, like the abuse of political power by the Catholic Church and the arranged marriages with minors. Donovan is excellent as the Piper, passing through Hamelin with a family of traveling circus artists.

The burgomaster and the Baron (another splendid role for versatile super-actor Donald Pleasance) supposedly run the secluded little town, but they mainly obey the will of the uncanny red monks that always look over their shoulders. The friendly Jewish alchemist Melius is concerned about a threatening outbreak of the Bubonic plague, the power-hungry son of the Baron (John Hurt) is about to wed the under-aged burgomaster's daughter for financial reasons and the Pied Piper is the only person capable of freeing the town from its rat infestation.

The script of this film is well filled and requires your absolute full attention, but the elaboration of the different story lines is highly compelling and the dialogs are enchanting. The costume designs and scenery are terrific and genuinely take you back to the dark and unsettling medieval times. Donovan, primarily a singer, also provides the film with a couple of great songs (most notably "They Call me the Pied Piper" and "Life has its ups and downs") and there are at least two near-brilliant and unforgettable sequences. Namely the rats breaking out of the wedding cake and a harrowing execution scene near the end. If you own "The Pied Piper", it's definitely a film to treasure.

The bubonic plague often began with the death of the rats before it spread to the people. This movie's version of the pied piper seems far closer to the origin of the story than anything else I've seen.

Author: TrevorAclea from London, England
2 December 2009

Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper is neither musical (though there are three songs) nor children's film, more an almost resigned fable about the foibles of human nature. The Piper isn't even the main character. Rather it's an ensemble piece, with the town of Hamelin, with all its pettiness and everyday corruptions, that takes centerstage. It's the kind of film that could only have been made in the 70s, set in a vividly realised medieval world that at times threatens to make Monty Python and the Holy Grail look glamorised, though it doesn't revel in the filth or the grotesque.

Aside from the travelling players, almost everyone is out for whatever they can get - even Donovan's piper, for all his hippie folkie songs (and there are only three of them) wants a thousand gilders for a spot of pest control he knows won't prevent the plague from coming to Hamelin, while Donald Pleasance's baron won't pay up because he's bankrupting himself buying his way out of Hell by building a cathedral for the Church. The Church would much rather he provided them with troops for another civil war ("The Pope wants a new emperor because the emperor wants a new Pope.").

Even the nominal love interest is far from a Disney princess, but the Burgomaster's bored young daughter bartered to the baron's callous son (John Hurt) for political power by her father (Roy Kinnear) and for a bit of adultery with the husband-to-be by her mother (Diana Dors). It's not so much a portrait of superstition versus reason as one of superstition versus superstition with the hint of the seed of reason that may take generations to flower: as Michael Hordern's Jewish alchemist tells his inquisitors, where once he had hoped the world would learn from his discoveries, now he can only hope the world learns from their mistakes.

The film isn't entirely successful by any means, but it's constantly fascinating and even manages not to seem as clumsy as most Euro-puddings - in this case an English picture (one of David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson's first) directed by a Frenchman and shot in Bavaria on some excellent locations - probably because it keeps the cast almost entirely British so there's no jarring clash of accents. Donovan's not exactly a great actor but he's mostly harmless as the Piper (although his wardrobe isn't terribly pied), though he's infinitely less hopeless than Patsy Puttnam in a thankfully brief role as the player's wife.

Jack Wild shows his limitations as the most famous cripple in fairy tales, Richard Eyre has a nice turn as an increasingly disillusioned pilgrim, Peter Vaughn brings the church into disrepute as a pragmatic Bishop and it's strangely appropriate to see John Hurt playing Pleasance's son considering the way his career has evolved into a modern-day Pleasance's as a stock feature in undemanding low-budget movies.Long out of circulation, Legend's extras-free Region 1 NTSC DVD isn't a great transfer but it's acceptable enough considering the film's rarity and Paramount's disinterest in releasing it themselves. In France the film is available in an English-friendly 10-disc boxed set of Demy's features. Very unusual and worth a look.

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Michael Hordern  : Melius