Director: Georges Méliès

Cast:  Georges Méliès

Le diable au couvent is another Georges Méliès movie that shows him growing more ambitious in all areas of his filmmaking. This movie runs for three minutes, rather than the simple one-minute efforts he’d been producing up until 1899, but Méliès struggles to come up with a plot that can fill that kind of running time. Le devil au couvent is quite an entertaining little movie, nevertheless, which has the devil appearing in a church and assuming the identity of a vicar in order to terrorise a group of nuns. Having scared them off, he makes himself at home by furnishing the church with gargoyle statues and then summons up a few imps from down below. It’s not long before the forces of good start fighting back, however, and although the devil puts up a good fight, he’s eventually overpowered and banished back to Hell. One of Méliès’ better movies, Le diable au couvent is filed with his trademark energy and ingenuity.

(Reviewed 25th August 2014)