Heaven and hell battle for the soul of scar-faced Frank Davis (Erich von Stroheim) in Pierre Chenal’s La foire aux chimères (US: Devil and the Angel), a painful study of obsession (“I will destroy every obstacle to our love”) and abandonment that includes one of the most stunning climaxes of the noir cycle. The angelic Jeanne (Madeleine Sologne) works as the potential pin cushion of the devilish knife thrower Robert (Yves Vincent) at a Parisian circus sideshow; since she’s blind, she can’t see the knives approaching, nor can she see Frank’s disfigured face approaching when he charms her at a local fair. Blind and ugly are a marriage made in heaven, but heaven crashes to earth once Frank is lured into criminal enterprises to pay for the extravagant lifestyle he’s promised his new wife. What’s worse, Jeanne’s blindness proves to be temporary just as handsome Robert re-enters her life. Von Stroheim is extraordinary as the tormented Davis, metamorphosing from confident business manager to infatuated schoolboy to desperate husband to raging maniac. The expressionistic score — strings rise and bows scrape — augments the expressionistic sets: the hellish circus tent, the heavenly nightclub, the covetous fog at night. For the final tumultuous sequence, Chenal utilizes Dutch angles almost exclusively, the tilted camera, crashing score, and frenetic editing building up to a crescendo of his pain.