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

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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.