Category: Film review

Der Skandal in Baden-Baden (1929; Ger.; Erich Waschneck)

First, a warning: this post contains no image captures. I watched the film courtesy of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, whose staff kindly allowed me access to a copy of an as-yet-unreleased restoration from their collection. As I obtained my viewing copy via these means, I will refrain from posting images—so you must rely on my description to whet your appetites. With that said, we can proceed…

Brigitte Helm starred in three films made during 1928. First was the remarkable L’Argent (1928), followed swiftly by the unremarkable Die Yacht der sieben Sünden (1928). Her final film shot that year was Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. This film had neither the prestigious cast and director of L’Argent, nor the pulpy glamour of Die Yacht der sieben Sünden. It premiered in January 1929, the first of her last three final silent films released that year. I’ve written about her last two: Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna and Manolescu elsewhere on this blog. The director of Der Skandal in Baden-Baden, Erich Waschneck, began his career as a cameraman in 1920-21. By the middle of the decade, he was directing a number of minor Ufa productions. Indeed, if it weren’t for the presence of Helm, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden would also be deemed a minor film. (It’s fair to say it is a minor film even with her in it.) The story is based on Georg Fröschel’s novel Die Geliebte Roswolskys (1921). This had already been adapted for cinema in Felix Basch’s eponymous film of 1921, starring Asta Nielsen and Paul Wegener. I have not seen that version, but descriptions of it suggest a rather more complex plot and characters than the simplified storyline of Der Skandal in Baden-Baden.

The plot of the 1929 version is straightforward: Vera Kersten (Brigitte Helm) is an out-of-work dancer who chances to meet the British millionaire John Leeds (Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur). He pulls some strings and she ends up with a manager, Edgar Merck (Leo Peukert), and a gig at the festival in Baden-Baden. But Merck exploits Vera’s passing acquaintance with Leeds for his own financial gain, hoping to frame her in a fraud scheme. This also has the effect of sabotaging Vera’s romance with Baron Egon von Halden (Henry Stuart), who believes she is having an affair with Leeds. At Baden-Baden, Vera achieves a small triumph in her dance performance, but Merck’s machinations cause the high society crowd to believe she is a gold-digger, exploiting first Leeds and now Egon von Halden. However, Leeds himself turns up at the end of the film and clears everything up: Merck is arrested for fraud, the gossiping crowd learn the truth, and Vera and Egon walk away to rekindle their romance.

Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is barely 75 minutes long and there is no dawdling. It is concise, compact, neat. It’s a minor film, but well-made and well-performed. The real interest (for me, at least) lies in the role Helm gets to play. After being cast as varying kinds of vamp in Metropolis (1927), Alraune (1928), Die Yacht der sieben Sünden, and L’Argent; or as rather angelic innocents in Metropolis (her dual role as the “good” Maria), Am Rande der Welt (1927), and Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927), her role in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is notably every-day. She is working class, poor, jobless. Indeed, Vera in this film is something of a Cinderella role: the poor aspiring dancer being transformed into a society belle, only for the threat of her new life to disintegrate overnight.

In the opening scene, Vera is gazing over the dull rooftops from her garret in a cheap rented apartment. She is framed within the frame of the window. We’re invited to look at her and contemplate her own contemplation. Helm brings with her a certain star quality: not just her good looks, but a way of holding herself, and of holding our attention. When we cut back inside to see her small room, she turns away from the window. When she comes into view properly, we see she is holding a cat in her arms. Here is one solitary creature showing sympathy for another. There is something a little feline about Vera, too. (Reviewers were often comparing Helm with cats in her other roles.)

When she walks the streets in search of work, the way she is framed by the camera that tracks alongside her shows off her profile. Vera might walk quickly, but she is downcast. Helm’s famous profile is not thrust forward to meet the world, but reacts to it timidly. Her failure in several job agencies sends her out onto the streets again. It is by chance, on a road, that Vera enters the life of the millionaire John Leeds. Ostensibly, he runs her down in his car. The device for getting the pair to meet would be more complex if Leeds was actually the driver of the car, but he isn’t—it’s being driven by a chauffeur. What is interesting is the ambiguity of how Vera ends up walking across the road. Head downcoast again, she is wandering more slowly this time, without direction or destination. She walks across the road without looking up. It isn’t a busy street, but a sideroad somewhere on the edge of town. Is she (as it seems) purely distracted or is she (consciously or not) suicidal? I’m not sure the film knows, or lets us know. So much of the film is concerned with showing how events are always out of Vera’s control. A suicidal mentality would be definite, an act of someone finally wanting to take a decisive step. But Vera seems to wander haphazardly into her fate. The choreography of the scene makes little of the near-fatal accident: the editing is economic, not feeling the need to portray the accident as a dramatic set-piece. It just happens.

Vera’s lack of agency continues in the next scenes. For Leeds now makes decisions for Vera, who is at first nervous—clearly, she is wary of his intentions. (And, clearly, she knows what men usually want in return from women for whom they do favours.) She is given new clothes, and the presence of John Leeds gains her immediate work, and the attention of an agent. But this lucky chance is never without strings: her association with Leeds (made public by a press photographer who follows them) immediately results in gossip, and Merck, the agent she gains, wishes to exploit her for fraudulent ends. Her agency is curtailed throughout the film, always by men.

Vera’s romance with Egon, which also triggers a minor subplot involving the jealousy of Egon’s current female companion Fernande (Lilly Alexandra), begins when the two meet by chance on the train to Baden-Baden. They encounter one another again at the local golf club. Vera is dressed sportily, but unshowily: beret, jacket, and a skirt that might pass for “practical”. (That she isn’t decked out in finery doesn’t stop all the local gossips from referring to her as Leeds’s “protégée”.) Egon asks to give her her first golf lesson. We watch her being shown how to tee off. It’s pretty perfunctory stuff, but I think that’s the point. Helm is no longer swathed in luxurious fabric, seducing men to their doom in raucous surroundings. She’s an ordinary woman, undertaking ordinary actions. It’s not a great meeting of souls on screen, but a tentative encounter that the couple slowly nurture. Their hands meet when they both reach for a golf ball. They have a private moment of conversation. Fernande and her friends glimpse this and take it for more than it is. And this is rather the point: everyone in the film seems to think Vera is a vamp, when in fact she is an honest, working-class woman. Brigitte Helm’s role and performance goes against the grain of her star image. Indeed, the film is about the price paid by people who assume that a woman’s “star” status implies a kind of prostitution. Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is about the injustice of being confused for one’s (manufactured) reputation, and the way a woman’s identity is shaped (and judged) by others.

The one sequence where Vera performs a form of glamorous seduction is when she dances at the festival venue in Baden-Baden. The dance itself is a little underwhelming, and it hardly makes the most either of Helm herself or the possibilities of the performance as a set-piece. In 1929, at least one critic compared her unfavourably to Leni Riefenstahl, whose own dancing pedigree (and all-round athleticism) was much stronger than Helm’s. In Der heilige Berg (1926), Riefenstahl’s character is introduced through an astonishing dance shot in silhouette against the crashing waves and rocks of the coast. It’s a much longer sequence, a full set-piece in itself, and makes her character a kind of mythical archetype. There is nothing like that in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. Helm’s solo number occupies only a little over a minute of screen time and the dancing is banal. It’s a kind of freestyle prancing, much of its impact being through the diaphanous skirt and wrist puffs Vera wears. The latter floats and exaggerates the movement, making more of the dance than the dancer’s body itself.

(A sidenote here: I’d be very curious to know what kind of music accompanied this sequence in 1929. The film was first presented in Berlin with a score by Artur Guttmann. Guttmann had worked as composer, arranger, and conductor for many Ufa films by this point. He had conducted the premier performances of Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Lang’s Spione (1928) (both with scores by Werner Richard Heymann). He had also produced scores for Hanns Schwarz’s Die Csardasfürstin (1927, based on Emmerich Kálmán’s operetta of the same name), Gerhard Lamprecht’s two-part Der alte Fritz (1927-28), and Artur Robison’s Looping the Loop (1928). I have no idea how much, if any, of his music from the silent era survives. What kind of music did his score for Der Skandal in Baden-Baden contain? In particular, for the dance scene, did Guttmann use anything from the familiar ballet repertoire, or something more exotic or abstract? Or was the music his own composition—and in what style?)

But the point of the dance sequence is that Egon is looking on, enraptured. Waschneck cuts between Vera, Egon, and the pianist—excluding the rest of the audience. One shot of Vera begins in close-up before she pulls away across the stage. It’s not a subjective shot (Egon is the other side of the stage pit, in a private box—there’s no way Vera could be as close to him as she is to the camera). But it is a kind of imagined, willed subjectivity: it’s the view that Egon would surely like to have. And it also gives the impression that Vera herself wants to get close to Egon. So yes, an effective moment of framing and staging—but on a modest scale. I suppose “unpretentious” is the word I’m looking for to describe it. This sequence is also one of the few where Vera has a kind of agency: she has centre stage, she performs the number that proves her artistic worth. But of course it’s also for an audience that judges her, and an audience that will soon turn against her.

If Der Skandal in Baden-Baden isn’t glamorous or glamorizing, this does not mean that it isn’t a good-looking film. It is. The cameraman was Friedl Behn-Grund, who (despite having shot several films by 1928) was still very young: he was only 22 when he shot Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. There are lots of interesting shots on location around Baden-Baden, with some nice summery exteriors. (Part of the film’s charm is not being set in Berlin. It’s curious to see a kind of provincial German clubland in the late 20s.) There is also some nice low-key lighting in the nighttime exterior scenes when Vera and Egon kiss. But there are almost no tricks pulled with lenses, focus, or elaborate movement. I’d hesitate to call so light a film “realist”, but the glamour we glimpse in the festival setting does not extend to the way it is filmed. It’s a temperate film as well as an unpretentious one.

But Der Skandal in Baden-Baden does have occasional scenes where the presence and role of the camera becomes more complex. There is a clever moment when we see a letter being written. It is addressed to Vera and its contents imply that the writer is romantically involved with her. We watch a hand sign the letter: the name is signed “John”. But then the camera tilts back and tracks away from the letter. We see the writer: it is Merck. It’s a nice way of making the writing of text more visually interesting, more significant.

Merck fakes this letter from Leeds to Vera to imply that she is his mistress. He shows it to Fernande, who shows it to Egon. Merck even vouches for its truth. The consequences are again related through a letter and another interesting visual treatment of text. Egon writes to Vera to tell her that they shouldn’t see each other her again. When Vera reads the letter, we see her shock and sadness in a close-up. She reads the letter again, and now there is an extreme close-up of the text: the lens scans the first lines almost word-by-word: “Merck has confirmed to me that you are, after all, in a relationship with John Leeds.” It’s the only extreme close-up in the film and the effect is startling: by reserving this level of proximity to this one shot, it has maximum impact.

I should also mention other members of the cast. Henry Stuart is charming, if a little bland, as Egon. He has little psychological depth, but he’s convincing enough. As Merck, Leo Peukert is smarmy and creepy without exaggeration. As Leeds, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur is rather anonymous. In fact, the most memorable member of the cast beyond Helm herself is Adolf Edgar Licho. He plays one of the agents at the start of the film. Licho played Jeanne Ney’s uncle in Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, where Pabst provides him with a role of utmost sliminess and greed. His appearance in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is not quite on the same level, but it’s a clear echo of it. His agent is a cigar-chewing creep, who eyes Vera up and down. He gets her to raise her skirt to show him her knees, her thighs… It would help her get along if she were a little “nicer” to him, he says. Licho’s bald pate, stubbly round face, and bulgy little eyes make him a superbly unpleasant presence on screen. When Vera tries to smile, we see a whole history of the exploitation of aspiring female performers under creepy male managers. That Vera seems to know what’s expected of her makes the scene more unsettling, more upsetting, than it might otherwise be. Helm gives us a history of Vera, but also a history of women, that goes beyond this scene to countless other moments prior to this. When the scene fades to black, we wonder if Vera is forced to perform any other kind of favour for the agent. It’s one of the few moments of real depth or bite. It presages the way Vera will be judged as the kind of woman who performs exactly this kind of favour to get her new dresses and position in society.

So, despite its lightness, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is an interesting film. Helm’s character is noteworthy for being a more down-to-earth character, one who feels the pressures of the patriarchal world: the male agents who judge her, and the male patron who “rescues” her but whose intervention opens her up to accusations of selling her body, and the society gossips who stand ready to judge and condemn her for her relations with men. Though we can (simply because she is Brigitte Helm) imagine she is a star being waiting to be found, the film never lets her character have control over her life. Her position as a woman at the mercy of male judgement (for good or ill) is a common theme in many of Helm’s films. Der Skandal in Baden-Baden provides Helm an unpretentious modern setting to show a more restrained performance. Of course, the film does get to clothe her in more expensive attire once Leeds has paid for it. But she doesn’t use her costumes for writhing seductively (cf. Alraune) or mooching in glamorous boredom (cf. L’Argent). Indeed, her showiest costume is used for her stage performance and never worn again; you might even see it as a practical outfit in the sense of it being (technically) workwear. She’s never less than interesting to watch, and I did so gladly.

In sum, I cannot say I was greatly moved by Der Skandal in Baden-Baden, but it was charming and engaging and I’m very happy to have seen it. It is striking that this film has been the most difficult (not to say utterly impossible) to see among all of Helm’s silent work. As far as I can tell, it has never been reissued in any format since its first run in 1929. It made only slight impact at the time, and since then it’s been something of a footnote in the few accounts of Helm’s work. As I’ve argued here, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is an interesting film and deserves some attention. The FWMS restoration is due for completion in spring 2024, so I hope it gets a proper release for live and/or home audiences after that.

Paul Cuff

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Luciano Palumbo, Carmen Prokopiak, and Marcel Steinlein of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung for their help in answering my questions and providing me access to the film.

On rewatching L’Argent (1928; Fr.; Marcel L’Herbier)

In 1928, Marcel L’Herbier undertook the most expensive film of his career. His adaptation of Zola’s novel L’Argent (1891) transposed the action to contemporary Paris. As well as shooting in the real stock exchange of the Paris Bourse and on the streets of Paris, L’Herbier had a series of fabulously large and expensive studio sets designed by André Barsacq and Lazare Meerson, constructed at Joinville studios. His chief cameraman was Jules Kruger, who had recently led the shooting of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927). Seeing the astonishing range of mobile camerawork in the latter, L’Herbier wanted to take advantage of every possible visual means of capturing the febrile atmosphere of the financial market and the machinations of his fictional protagonists. All this came at a huge financial cost to the production. L’Herbier allied his company with Jean Sapène’s Société des Cinéromans and the German company Ufa in order to guarantee his costs, cast foreign stars, and achieve European distribution. He spent the huge sum of 5,000,000F, much more than intended. (Though, for context, Gance spent 12,000,000F on Napoléon.) When the film premiered, it was around 200 minutes long. It was cut for general release to less than 170, and what survives in the current restoration is a little less than 150 minutes. Thankfully, what does survive is in superb quality—and the Lobster Blu-ray released in 2019 presents the film in an excellent edition…

The title of my piece this week is “rewatching L’Argent” because I do not intend a detailed review of the film. For a start, it’s too long—too complex, too interesting for me to do real justice to. (I know that if I tried, I’d end up writing more than anyone would want to read.) Instead, my reflections are inspired by being able to watch this film in a different context to that in which I first saw it. That was at least fifteen years ago, at the NFT in London. I saw the film projected from a superb 35mm print. The music was a live piano accompaniment. There were no subtitles, so instead someone in the projection booth read translations over the intercom. I won’t deny that this was a hard task to do convincingly, and that the person doing it failed utterly in this endeavour. It sounded like a playschool performance, only executed by an adult. If you’re going to present a film this way, either read the lines utterly without emotion or emphasis, or get someone who can actually emote. (I long to have experienced a live performance of L’Herbier’s L’Homme du large (1920) that took place at the HippFest festival in 2022, for which Paul McGann read live narration. The titles for that film are long and visually elaborate. You need to see them in the original French designs, so having an acoustic layer to the experience—one performed by a professional actor—must have been wonderful.) The screening at the NFT was someone trying to read the lines with emotion and emphasis but who had no experience as a voice performer. It was terrible. It lasted for two-and-a-half-hours.

The music

So where better to start with my experience in 2023 than with the music? As I said at the outset, my memory of this film is with a piano accompaniment at the NFT. Inevitably, I remember nothing of the musical accompaniment. (And frankly I wish I remember less about the awful translation accompaniment.) The music for the new restoration is by Olivier Massot, recorded live at a screening of the film in Lyon in 2019.

The score is for a symphony orchestra, including a prominent part for piano and various kinds of percussion. The orchestration is deliciously lithe and alert. The orchestra shimmers, shifts, glistens, growls, thunders. The writing is more chromatic than melodic: there are very few recognizable themes, as such, but the textures of the orchestra—particular instruments (harp, bassoon, tubular bells), particular combinations (high tremolo strings, descending piano scales)—recur through the film. Large church-like bells sound out at climactic moments, while the reverberative tubular bells give a cool, intimate sheen to smaller scenes. Indeed, the percussive element create some fabulous effects through the film. I particularly love the combination of piano and percussion to evoke the tolling of a clock near the start of the film, when Saccard faces ruin. Massot has bells in his orchestra, but here he chooses to mimic their sound indirectly. It’s a wonderfully sinister, almost hallucinatory acoustic: it sounds like bells tolling, but it’s something more than that—the grim dies irae melody is a kind of inner soundscape. I also love how the music is often brought to an abrupt halt for the ringing of a smaller (real) bell: at the first meeting of the bank’s council, and later with the ringing of various telephones. It really makes film and score interact in direct instances, as well as the constant ebb and flow of music and image. Then there are occasional lines for a muted trumpet that hint at the popular soundworld of the 1920s, while there is a jazz-like pulse to the grand soiree scenes near the end of the film, and woodblock percussion that characterizes the scenes set in Guiana. Throughout, the piano provides a kind of textural through-line: it dances and reacts to the film, and also to the orchestra. It’s never quite a solo part with accompaniment, but forms a part of the complex tapestry of sound that the orchestra produces. I do love hearing a piano used this way, and Massot has a fine ear for balance.

In this recorded performance, the Orchestre National de Lyon is conducted by the highly experienced Timothy Brock, and it’s a committed performance, very well synchronized. (One wonders how much, if any, work was needed to rejig the soundtrack for the subsequent home media format.) But like all silent film scores recorded live, it suffers from the weird acoustical effects of coughing, murmuring, and various other extraneous sounds of shuffling, shifting, dropping etc. As I have written before, this remains a very strange way of watching a film at home. The noises are familiar from a live screening, but on Blu-ray it’s a little surreal: you can hear an audience that you cannot see. And while I’m sure the film performance in 2019 ended with rousing applause, the soundtrack on the Blu-ray fades swiftly to complete silence. That said, you do get used to the extraneous sounds as the soundtrack goes on—but it’s an oddity nevertheless.

The Blu-ray edition also includes an alternate score compiled by Rodney Sauer and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra. Per my usually comments (and with all due awareness of my innate musical snobbery), this “orchestral” score is banal and entirely inadequate for the intensity, scale, rhythm, and energy of L’Argent. Switch between audio tracks at any point in the film and listen to the difference in tone, depth and complexity of sound, and musical imagination. The Massot score has the benefit of a full orchestra performing a score that is alive to nuance, that is constantly evolving, shifting, changing gear; the Sauer score is pedestrian, humdrum, lagging infinitely behind the images.

The camerawork

And what images they are! I’d forgotten just how extraordinarily restive the camerawork is in this film. You’re constantly surprised by the way the perspective shifts, leaps, realigns. There is a constant sense of movement in the camera and the cutting. Sometimes there are rapid tracking sots, vertiginous shifts up or down through crowded spaces; at other times there are sudden, short moves: intimate scenes are suddenly recomposed, reframed, redrawn. Kruger’s camera is often on the prowl, waiting to pounce on characters. Suddenly it was spring to life and track forward from a long- to a medium-shot. The focus warps and shifts from scene to scene. One minute the lens is squishing the extremities into blurry outlines, the next everything is crystal clear. The camera is mechanically smooth, then handheld. The lines are straight, then deformed by a close-up lens. It’s wonderfully difficult to unpick the variety of devices used across just one sequence, let alone the film.

In the Bourse itself, the scale of the film—the crowds, the energy, the technological trappings—are at their most impressive. This is a real space made surreal by the way it’s shot. The camera spins upwards to the apex of the ceiling, then looks down from on high, making the crowd of financiers look like microbes swirling in a petri dish. Elsewhere, the camera is suddenly looking down from high angles, or else craning upwards from floor level. It’s an omnipresent viewpoint, operating from anywhere and everywhere.

I was also particularly truck by the nighttime scenes staged in the Place de l’Opéra. The fact that these scenes were shot at night is extraordinary, and that they look so dynamic and alive with energy is dazzling. (There is one rapid tracking shot through the crowd, lights gleaming in the far distance, that looks like it’s from a film made thirty years later.)

Throughout, L’Herbier’s cutting is dynamic to the point of being confusing. He almost has too many angles, too many perspectives, to juggle. He not only cuts from multiple angles within the same scene but intercuts entirely separate spaces. The dynamics between the various financial parties and their dealings are illustrated by cutting between these spaces. It saves on unnecessary intertitles, though at the risk of confusing the spectator. (I must say that I understand almost nothing about the financial aspect of the plot. At a certain point, references to bonds, shares, stocks, markets, exchanges, currencies etc just washes over my head. I’d be curious to know from someone who understood such things how coherent the film is in terms of its economic plotting.) There are even sporadic moments of rapid montage (per Gance) but this is never developed or made into an end in itself. Undoubtedly influenced by Napoléon, I think L’Herbier was right not to go “full Gance” and pointlessly mimic the montage of that film, which is used to very different effect (and in very different context) than this drama. L’Argent has a strange, compelling energy all of its own.

The sets

The design of this film is always eye-catching. From the massive scale of the party scene near the end (huge dance floor, cubist ponds, a wall entirely occupied by organ pipes) to the offices of Saccard that are sometimes cavernous and other times crowded. There are billowing curtains, diaphanous curtains, glimmering curtains. Light plays about shining surfaces or creates swirling shadows. Whole walls are maps of the world, doors opening and closing inside hallucinatory cells. The sets and lighting combine to make every space strange, arresting, interesting.

I’d also single out Baroness Sandorf’s lair, which is like something out of a Bond film. A card table is lit from within so that the shadows of hands cand cards are projected on the ceiling. The walls of one part of the room contain the backlit silhouettes of fish swimming in a aquarium. My word, the set designers had fun here. It’s just the kind of space you’d want to find Brigitte Helm in, holding court. It’s chic, cold, absurd, captivating.

The cast

The film wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t for Pierre Alcover’s performance as Saccard. His is a superb, domineering presence on screen. His physical bulk gives him real heft, but it’s the way he holds himself and moves that makes him imposing: he can dominate a room, a scene, a shot. He’s smarmy when he needs to be, but can just as easily become threatening, scheming, brooding, energetic, resigned. He can bustle and rush just as well as he can mooch and shuffle and slouch. Strange to say, I don’t think I’ve seen him in another film. (The only other silent I have with him in is André Antoine’s L’Hirondelle et la Mésange (1920), which I have yet to sit down and actually watch.)

As the effete, elder banker Gunderman, the German actor Alfred Abel is suave and sinister. It’s a quiet, controlled performance. His character is so calm and collected, and Abel always keeps his gestures to a minimum. The occasional flash of an eye, the hint of a smile, the slight nod of the head, is enough to spell out everything we need to know. He’s not quite a Bond villain, but he nevertheless has a fluffy pet, a dog, that we see him fondling at various points in the film.

I turn next to Brigitte Helm because she is, alongside Alcover, by far the most exciting performance in the film. As Baroness Sandorf, she is draped in expensive furs or sheathed in shimmering silks. Her eyes out-pierce anyone else’s stare and her smile is a double-edged weapon. The way she walks or sits or stands or lies or lounges is so purposeful, so designed, so compelling. Even sat at a table across the room in the back of the restaurant scene, she’s somehow magnetic. She really was a star, in the way that I take star to mean—someone whose presence instantly changes the dynamic of a scene or shot, whose life seems to emanate beyond the film. But despite being the face of the new Blu-ray cover for L’Argent, and leading the (new, digital) credit list at the end of the restoration, she has surprisingly few scenes—and not all that much significance in the plot. Perhaps more of her scenes were in L’Herbier’s original cut of the film. Either way, I spent much of the film longing to see more of her.

Conversely, as the “good” husband and wife ensnared by Saccard, I find Henry Victor (as the aviator Jacques Hamelin) and Marie Glory (as Line, Jacques’ wife) much less interesting. Their love never quite convinces or moves. I also found an uncanny resemblance between Marie Glory and L’Herbier’s regular star (and lover) Jaques Catelain. (And once observed, I couldn’t un-observe it.) I requote Noël Burch’s comment here on Catelain resembling “a wooden Harry Langdon”, and for the first half of the film I find Glory no less unconvincing. But as the film continues, and she becomes a more active agent—or at east, an agent conscious of her manipulation by Saccard—her performance finds its range and becomes more dynamic and engaging. But I still never buy into her marriage, which I suppose is an advantage to the extent it makes her appear more vulnerable once her husband is away—but undermines the fact that she is so steadfastly loyal to him. I know for a fact that I’ve seen Marie Glory in other silents, but I simply cannot bring her performances to mind. The lack of warmth or genuine feeling in this central couple if a problem for me. I find many of L’Herbier’s films emotionally constipated, and L’Argent is no exception.

One other cast member to mention is Antonin Artaud as Mazaud, Saccard’s secretary. I find it very strange to watch Artaud in such an ordinary, unengaging role. Strange, even, to see him walking around in a perfectly ordinary suit. His presence—his familiar, compelling face—is welcome, but I’m not sure I can appreciate why he was cast. (His performance as Marat in Napoléon, the year before L’Argent, and as Massieu in Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the same year as L’Argent, really overshadow this almost anonymous part of a bank assistant.)

Summary

Yes, I enjoyed rewatching this film. But I won’t deny that it has a certain coolness that stops me from truly loving it. I feel that way with much of L’Herbier’s work. To utilize what the translator D.J. Enright once said about fin-de-siècle literature, the films of L’Herbier tend to combine the frigid with the overheated. There is a surfeit of design, of aesthetic fussiness, but a dearth of humour, of human warmth. L’Argent is his broadest canvas, and it contains the most energetic, diverse, dynamic filmmaking of his career. It needs this formal invention to keep the story alive, for a film that revolves around financial transactions is at constant risk of becoming dull or incomprehensible. It’s like watching a three-hour long game of poker without knowing the rules. My attention never drifted, but I was close to being bored—despite the many wonderful things to look at, and the wonderful ways the film invents of looking. The film’s romantic storyline of the pilot and his wife is lacklustre, especially next to the sizzling chemistry between Alcover and Helm. Their scenes crackle and I wish there had been more of them. Would the 200-minute version of the film offer a more balanced drama, or would it exacerbate the distance between me and it? For all my reservations, it’s still a magnificent work of cinema.

Paul Cuff

Inferno: Short Films & Fragments, 1903-1924 (Filmarchiv Austria, 2012)

Filmarchiv Austria produces a number of DVDs (and, latterly, Blu-rays), and one series of releases goes under the name of “CinemaSessions”. These editions combine rare archival prints with new soundtracks, usually experimental/electronic. In the third release of this series, we are given a 40-minute programme of short films and fragments that share the themes of fire and colour; the soundtrack was performed/recorded live in 2011 by Peter Rehberg.

Un Drame dans les aires (1904; Fr.; Gaston Velle)

The film starts with footage of an actual balloon gently rising from the ground. But instantly we cut to a studio backdrop of stationary clouds, before which two bright officers in too bright costumes scan with their telescope the non-existent world below. Cutaways to irised views of the sea, to an anonymous cityscape. But lightning flashes across the sky (or at least, a scratched bolt across the celluloid) and rain pours down. Reality changes. Gone are the human crew. Now a model floats up, moving wildly, is cut in half by a bolt. The screen erupts with fuscia-red blooms. (How quickly things escalate and fall!) The balloon tumbles into the sea, which becomes real—or real water, at least, in a real tank, against a makeshift backdrop. And the film goes to the trouble of washing itself with a blue tint, so we feel a little of the cold and the shock and the aura of this unlocatable sea. A rower desperately pulls the two survivors from the water. The film is very short, and disaster occurs very suddenly. Such are the bizarre shifts in tone and form between shots that anything at all might happen next. The film could be of any length, could open and follow any narrative possibility.

L’eruzione dell’Etna (1910; It.; Socièta Anonima Ambrosio)

The world is a fug of noxious red. When it’s dark it’s a bloody coagulate. When the sky registers enough light, it’s a violent magenta. Colour soaks into the rocks, into the soil. Little dashes and specks of people provide scale, a sense of time. Titles assure us the local populace are “terrified”, but we see them going calmly about their business: cutting and moving trees, or just standing and watching the smouldering spectacle. The 35mm has temporal footprints upon its surface: a run of horizontal lines, white cuts that scurry up the frame. And at the edge, the border of the image looks more like lava, looks more threatening, than anything we see on screen.

L’Âme des moulins (1912; Nld./Fr.; Alfred Machin)

This film has the intense clarity of a nightmare. The exteriors are crisp. The northern light is cold, acute. It cuts sharp contours of the windmill. The stencilled colours are gentle. They sometimes kid you that reality has been captured honestly, not mimicked in retrospect. Such is the way a nightmare tricks you, by casting a spell in which you might just believe. The story is simple and brutal. A boy builds a model windmill. It’s his joy. In the background is the real windmill where he and his parents live. A beggar approaches. A crutch helps bear his weight. His limp is aggressive, assertive. Unlike the boy and his parents (who wear clogs), the beggar has a peasant’s leggings. He’s a figure not out of a postcard, but out of reality—somewhere beyond the cosy little world of the family. Father and mother turn him away. He tries again. The father knocks him down. The beggar shakes his fist at the windmill, then batters the boy’s windmill—mercilessly upending it, beating it to splinters. The father strikes him again, and once more the beggar raises his fist in threat. It’s an image of unrepentable fury. The film is mute, this world is mute, but that gesture—the arm extended, the fist clenched—is as articulate an expression of rage as we need. Beware this man. In silhouette, in the cold northern light, the beggar sits at a distance. Again, the raising of the arm, the clenching of the fist. Each time, the threat assumes more menace. The boy dreams of his toy windmill, his arms reaching out to the split-screen vision. A sinister visual rhyme with the beggar’s outstretched arm. And a presage of the finale. For the beggar is on his way, a creeping shadow against a supernal sky. The composition here is a touch of genius: both beggar and windmill are part of the same silhouetted plane. It gives the impression of the beggar being larger than the mill itself. The real-size windmill looks as vulnerable as the child’s toy mill. This is a fabulously nightmarish image, with its blue-tone-pink colour pattern. Where toning and tinting overlap, they turn the silhouetted plane deepest purple. The clouds are a glowering violet. And what kind of moon sets this sinister pink? This is a time for nightmares. The beggar is crouching at the base of the windmill. The fire he starts glows the same pink as a distant patch in the sky. No fire is this colour—yet here it is. The interior fills with smoke. The family flees. But the camera watches, and watches, as the windmill is consumed by fire. Now the frame is washed rose-red. Sky and reflected sky are a blank wash of colour. Flames and smoke are reflected in the still canal. The family hold each other, weeping. The composition mirrors that of the beggar, contemplating the mill. That image was blue, this image is red.

Le Chaudron infernal (1903; Fr.; Georges Méliès)

Two turquoise devils are torturing women. One is bundled into a sheet and tossed into a cauldron. An eruption of red flame. Others are led in, then fed into the vat. The lead devil (Méliès himself, one presumes) capers and cavorts. Is he quite in control of his experiment? In the air above him emerge three pale shapes. These apparitions are impossible to capture with frame-grabs: they are as soft as will-o’-the-wisps, morphing and moving with each frame. The impression they make is only evident when you watch the film itself. The rest of the image is clear, crisp, filled with stage-set lines. But these forms are ethereal, like rags floating in water. They are floating, waving. Do they have wings? Are they souls? wraiths? The devil cowers, scurries back and forth. The angelic forms burst into flame. The devil hurls himself into the cauldron and the film explodes.

La Légende du fantôme (1908; Fr.; Segundo de Chomón)

From its very first image, there is something extraordinary about this film. It is in a semi-stable state of decomposition. It is an arrested death, a suspended transformation. Elaborately stencil- and hand-coloured throughout, the different layers of chemical treatment each have deteriorated at different rates, in different ways. Comprehensible figures appear in landscapes of marbled, mottled uncertainty. Parts of the image are positive, others negative. It is uncannily beautiful.

The first shot tests our comprehension. A woman stands at a window. Outside, gothic ruins—and a pale shape fluttering in a halo of darkness. The film skips, leaps. One cannot trust the continuity of such a world. Who is “Zoraida the witch”? Their motto appears: “A thousand years you shall err and be jinxed, you who despised me.” The words are as cryptic and mysterious as the images. In the gothic graveyard, the woman investigates an open tomb. Figures emerge from the background: a dozen grim reapers, the colour of glowing parchment. Dark haloes flutter about their bodies. On stage, such grand guignol ghouls might look ludicrous. But here, in this film, they are majestically creepy. Then a figure of stupendous horror rises from the open tomb. See how the folds of its winding sheets glow sickly gold. And look how it seems to emerge from a different plane of reality. Its tomb is a dim, faded photograph—a photocopy of a photocopy. But the phantom is a burnished, three-dimensional force rising from the centre of the image. (I’m already running out of ways to describe how extraordinary this looks.) The skull-faced phantom—the witch? Zoraida?—issues instructions: “You shall find the devil, challenge and defeat him. He then will hand you the light that cannot be extinguished. Use it to reach the bottom of the sea. Look for the black pearl and return it.” These are lines one might remember from a dream, or a nightmare, words that make no sense outside of the dream itself. The wraiths are transformed into female warriors with winged helmets, glowing gold. The woman herself assumes the mantle of a warrior. In this astonishing film, I now expect nothing less than inexplicable transformations.

“Satan gathers his forces”. We are in hell. Fire, skulls, pitchforks. A mass of devils, of women with flowing hair. (Hell is both a second-rate Parisian theatre and a first-rate Renaissance painting.) Satan embarks, followed by devils, followed by a train of rather bored-looking women. Inside a waterlogged cave, a moving cavalcade, a carnival of flaming torches. Satan and his posse of women ride a stupendously entertaining vehicle: a Model-T Ford truck transformed into a Louis XIV bedspread. The face of a moustached devil on the front, a sinister rising run at the back, it rumbles forward—surrounded by flare-wielding devils and pretty dancers. Satan lives in a tunnel and emerges in a morphing ball of marmalade-coloured fire. The outside world is a clotting brown, a warped memory of rocks and greenery.

Somehow—and the film has either lost interest in narrative sense, or else there are missing scenes—the woman from the opening scene wins the favours of Satan. She carries in her hands “the light that cannot be extinguished”. At the entrance to another cave. From a smoky maw, a frog leaps forward. He too wears a dark halo that havers about his body. He motions for the warriors to follow him. We are under the sea, surrounded by elaborate cut-out jellyfish, cut-out pearls, cardboard shells. The frog hops in the background. A queen and her female retinue greet the woman. The queen gives the woman the black pearl. The woman flirtatiously thanks her. They embrace, there is a kiss of the hands. It’s disconcertingly flirtatious. Are we to assume the woman has been transformed into a male warrior? There are no answers, for the film becomes a stage-show underwater world: screens rise, part, rise again. Backdrops change and there is a huge parade of creatures, crawling and marching and swimming from either side of the set—and the inevitable line of flowery maidens.

We return to the overworld. Here the film loses a little of its magic, but none of its charm. For the satanic vehicle has lost its majesty: it’s now all too obviously a truck with a bedsheet flung over its carapace. The sheets don’t even cover the front wheels. Perhaps it’s deliberate. Perhaps it was a mistake. (If it was a mistake, imagine how awful for the makers to see it when going through this scene frame-by-frame to colour it!) But now we return to the gothic graveyard. The woman lies before the tomb of the phantom, who emerges in a terrifying bloom of winding sheets. But when the phantom drinks from the black pearl, it is transformed into a man. The transformation is rendered sublime by the decomposition of the colour on the 35mm copy. Here the body of the man is as delicate as tracing paper. His hair and clothes are dreamily soft, but the feather on his hat is strangely sharp. He is a ghost in the effort of attaining solidity. The gothic arches behind him are legible, but he is oddly amorphous. He turns to the camera. What kind of expression is this? No doubt it’s meant to be one of delight, but how can we not be frightened? What kind of power has he harnessed? Was he not a witch just now, a dreadful phantom? Why has the woman given him body? And what of the woman? She lies now beside the open tomb, as the army of grim reapers gathers with flaming torches in the background. What has happened? What happens next? What forces have been unleashed? Is this the triumph of Zoraida? And shouldn’t we be afraid? The film ends.

Namenlose Helden (1924; Aut.; Kurt Bernhardt).

This was once a feature film and is now a peculiar montage of truncated scenes. We see preparations for “the storm”. The footage is taken from newsreels of the Great War. We see planes, airships, enormous guns. A woman stands guard at a barrier, then collapses. Onlookers push past. We see the woman in an unconvincing apartment, badly lit. A doctor stands by, shaking his head. A child stands awkwardly at the edge of frame. The battlefield, another world. A soldier at the frontline. Pink sears the screen. Clouds of gas drift across wasted landscapes. Flamethrowers streak the rubble. Figures from the real world ignore the camera, while the soldier from the fictional film is given extended close-ups. He receives a letter: “Hansel is doing better again, but our dear little Fritz has died of his burns. I am very sick and…” He takes an age to screw up the paper, to scream. The performance is committed, embarrassingly raw. He sees a vision of his son(?), first smiling, then his face covered in burns. The screen shares the searing pink of the battlefield. The man’s tears shine. He is in the battle. The soldiers from the newsreel past advance towards their unseen enemy, long since triumphant. The man is in a shell hole. There is an explosion. Hands grasp at the soil. The next day, the man is the lone survivor: his face covered in streaks of blood, he shouts then collapses. Elsewhere, a writer records the great victory of the battle. Contentedly, he blows a smoke ring. We see the dead of the battlefield. The film ends.

Well, this is a strange and fascinating programme. The first two films are not especially interesting (L’eruzione dell’Etna is less compelling than its title suggests), and the fragments of Namenlose Helden do not suggest a particularly good film. But Le Chaudron infernal has some great effects, and L’Âme des moulins and La Légende du fantôme made a very strong impression on me. Segundo de Chomón does demonic trick-films like no other (not even Méliès), and I found La Légende du fantôme as grippingly strange and compelling as anything I’ve seen from the second decade of cinema. The chemical instability of the images creates an uncanny magic that adds to the film’s appeal. This film was the heart of the programme, and the one film which really justified releasing the compilation on DVD.

In terms of image quality, these films looked good when I saw them on my television screen—but now that I come to go through them on my laptop to get some image captures, they look less so. Many of the films do not survive in the best quality, and the video transfer does them no favours. What’s more, it’s a shame that there is a copyright logo in the top-right of the screen throughout. It spoils the extraordinary visuals of these films, the colour and texture of which are meant to be the main feature of this programme. Is this watermark really necessary? Other films in the series, and titles produced by Filmarchiv Austria more generally, do not have the logo. Why must it appear on this release? It’s something I’d expect to find on videos on the archive’s website, but not on films presented on a commercial DVD. In terms of sound, Peter Rehberg’s electronic music didn’t leave much of an impression on me. It’s not quite sinister enough for some of the films, not light enough for others—and never captures the rhythm of the visuals. But as a wash of electronic sound it’s hardly the worst accompaniment I’ve heard for silent films.

These reservations aside, I did get a lot of pleasure seeing these films. This DVD contains some fabulous curiosities, the images of which will linger in my memory.

Paul Cuff

The Signal Tower (1924; US; Clarence Brown)

In 1923, budding director Clarence Brown signed a contract with Universal Pictures. After working on the courtroom drama The Acquittal (1923), he persuaded studio boss Cale Laemmle to fund a production set on a remote railway in the mountains. The film was to be an adaptation of a short story by Wadsworth Camp called “The Signal Tower”, published in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1920. Brown and his team headed to Mendocino County, California, where much of the film would be shot on location. The cameraman was Ben Reynolds, who had filmed all of Erich von Stroheim’s Universal films up to this point—and had recently finished shooting Greed (1924). Brown and Reynolds made the most of their setting, combining the mechanized world of the trains with the natural beauty of the mountain forests. Released in August 1924, The Signal Tower was acknowledged for its technical sophistication and boosted the profile of Brown—who would soon be called to work with bigger budgets and bigger stars.

The story is simple. David Taylor (Rockliffe Fellowes) lives in a remote house in the Mendocino Mountains with his wife Sally (Virginia Valli) and child Sonny (Frankie Darro). He works from midnight until noon in the railway signal tower at the base of the mountain, while his old coworker (and reliable lodger), “Uncle” Billy (James O. Barrows), operates the noon to midnight shift. When Billy is pensioned off to New York, his replacement is the caddish Joe Standish (Wallace Beery), who also becomes their new lodger. Cousin Gertie, who is staying with the Taylors, takes a shine to Joe—but Joe has eyes for Sally. At first David doesn’t believe that Joe has bad intentions, but when Joe makes a move on Sally he is ejected from the Taylor house. During a stormy night, Joe turns up drunk for his shift, so David must remain behind to try and derail the carriages before they smash into another train. Joe takes the opportunity to invade the Taylors’ home and try to assault Sally…

The Signal Tower may have a conventional narrative, but Brown gets the most he can out of the theme of a family under threat. What struck me throughout was the use made of location shooting. The first few minutes of the film consist of a lengthy series of shots showing the way the trains move through the mountainous, forested terrain. Regardless of one’s cultural interest in steam trains (Brown loved them, having an engineering background), the trains are nevertheless of dramatic importance in this sequence: they used to show the gradient of the land, the difficulty of passing from one section to the next, the nature of the track and how it is managed by the signal towers.

I have rhapsodized often enough about sunlight filtering through trees in silent films—but this is another beautiful example of how natural light, combined with deft composition and subtle tinting, produces a glorious vision of the remote forests. Brown related to Kevin Brownlow how he and Reynolds got up at 5 a.m. to photograph the first trains coming through the mountain forests with the sun rising behind them and filtering through the trees (The Parade’s Gone By…, 145). The effort was worth it.

See also how well the film integrates its titular setting into this landscape. After following the track and trains, we see the signal tower itself. We see outside it, inside it, through it. The glass windows surrounding the raised cabin offer a perfect integration of interior and exterior space. Brown took great lengths to get this set right, even fitting amber panes of glass to the tower when the exposure from natural sunlight was too much (ibid.).

The only other major interior setting in the film is the family home, just across from the signal tower. A title describes David’s home as the “terminal point” of his world. It’s a place of refuge. The interiors are a cosy den: the glowing hearth, the comfy chairs, the freshly-baked cakes.

But viewed from outside it feels very different. Brown shows us exteriors view of the house many times across the film. In some shots, the camera is closer to the bridge. We see David cross the stream at the end of his shift: it’s an image of comfort, of retreat. But look again: other shots are taken from further away. The camera lets the dark trees intrude on its view, emphasizing the isolated setting of this refuge, its vulnerability. And our perspective is influenced by the wording of the title that introduces us to David’s wife Sally. We read that she is “unconquered by the stagnant loneliness”. “Stagnant loneliness” is a fabulous phrase, one that hangs over what we see. It swiftly invites us to question David’s own mental image of home and work. Clearly, however well she copes, Sally is aware of the isolation of her home and the threat of external forces.

It is this tension between what characters see and what we see that characterizes much of the drama of The Signal Tower. The film is about a man whose duty it is to see danger, but who spends the first half of the film ignoring the warning signals from his own family. The film even makes David spell out the idea of duty taking precedence over everything else to his son. He tells Sonny that a signalman must know his line is clear before he can perform any other function. The seriousness of this idea is underlined by a flashback/fantasy sequence of a train crash (told with models); it’s quite a terrifying vision to impart to a child. But, of course, this warning David issues to his son about duty is the very conflict he himself faces at the end of the film. And though David is a reliable and dutiful man, he is also shown to be blind to other forms of danger. Immediately after the story of the signalman who forgot his orders, David once more goes to work. Look how Brown frames the family’s farewell: the group’s embrace is in the background, far enough away that it almost seems out of focus; while in the foreground, two dark branches threateningly cross the composition. It’s a curious, odd perspective—almost as though someone is watching them from the edge of the woods. There are threats lurking that David does not suspect.

If the rural isolation is sinister, the actual villain of the film turns out to be urbane. Wallace Beery’s Joe is an object of consternation for David when the former turns up for work in dapper suit, shoes, and hat. He looks totally alien to this environment.

His position within the family home, as the Taylors’ lodger, is likewise conspicuous—more so, since their last lodger was the elder Billy. Sally says Billy has “been like a father to us all”, and Billy himself has all the attributes of a loveable, rural oldster: the white hair, the little spectacles, the pipe, the stoop, the odd gait, the gentle smile. (He even gets the soft-focus treatment to make him look more huggable.) The film plays with how sinister Joe might be, since he is the subject of comic flirtation from Cousin Gertie when he first moves in. Joe’s magic tricks and fondness for Sonny offer a superficial air of innocence—but the way David keeps reassuring Sally that a man who likes children etc is “usually on the level” increases our suspicion (if not David’s).

The film offers us another external perspective when David and Sonny have a conversation with a passing engine driver, their friend Pete (J. Farrell MacDonald). Pete already knows Joe’s reputation and refers to him as “that railroad sheik”, the title italicizing the latter word for added emphasis. It’s another visual signal for us, the audience, to observe. We know by now that we shouldn’t trust Joe, but David seems oblivious to the warning signals. He blithely says that this “sheik” will be lonely now that Cousin Gertie is leaving. When Pete is about to ask David what this means for Sally, he is suddenly interrupted. A dribble of dark liquid falls over his forehead and face. It’s a strange, totally unexpected moment. Brown holds the close-up of Pete for several seconds and we’re left in the dark as to what’s going on. The sinister apparition of dark, sticky liquid could be a moment from a horror film—but what might be blood turns out to be engine oil, spilled by Sonny who’s playing in the engine. The shock becomes a moment of comedy, but it doesn’t quite diffuse sinister sense of threat that Brown creates with the image.

The scene is a kind of premonition, borne out by subsequent events. That very night, indeed, Joe makes his first move on Sally. And “move” is the right word, since Brown uses a tracking shot for the first time in any interior scene in the film. In a neat shot/reverse shot, the camera slowly recoils before Joe and creeps up upon Sally. It’s a threatening movement, and draws us uncomfortably closer—and closer—to Joe. His flirtations (especially with Gertie) have been mostly comic or ineffectual, but now the physical threat of his intentions is revealed. Beery can do bluff comedy, but the sheer bulk of the man makes him an imposing screen presence—especially when, as here, he fills the screen. His prim little moustache—like the stripes of his shirt or the gleam of his shoes—at first gave him an appearance of comic misplacement in this remote, rural environment. But now—as Joe looms in close-up—the moustache seems to emphasize his mouth, the curve of his lips, the broadness of his face as a whole.

These tracking shots presage the external danger of the last sequence. For this nighttime climax, Brown mounts the camera low down on the front of the engine: we hurtle though the dark landscape at breakneck speed. These tracking shots are exuberantly wild. We can hardly make out the terrain through which we plunge. Only the pale streaks of the tracks guide us through the gloom. It’s like all the menace of those slow tracks in the earlier scene with Sally/Joe are now fully unleashed. The external threat of the runaway train bearing down on David carries the horrible power that threatened—and, in the final scenes, threatens again—Sally and Sonny.

The intercutting of Joe’s attack on Sally and David’s desperate attempt to break the line and derail the runaway train is further complicated by the complex series of cutaway to different spaces. We see glimpses of telegrams from the various signallers, switchmen etc of the railway, together with the operatives themselves. You get some sense of the network of information going back and forth, as well the physical actions at ground level. Amid the skill of this sequence is a notable appearance on screen of Clarence Brown himself. We see him in the role of an anonymous signalman who tries (and fails) to stop the runaway train before it reaches David’s position. If there is irony in this first appearance (the film director as powerless agent), Brown’s second on-screen apparition is more subtle. For the author of one of the telegrams sent between the signallers at the end of the film is called “Conductor Brown”, a neat alternative name for director Brown. If David has been blind to the danger of Joe, here he takes care to receive instructions from the higher authority of conductor/director.

Indeed, it’s also noteworthy that David himself does not (cannot) come to the rescue of Sally herself. This is clearly the right moral decision (one life against the dozens or hundreds on the colliding trains) but presents the possibility of the price he must pay for duty. If “conductor Brown” appears in the telegram to issue clarification, the director Brown works to hide the climax of the struggle between Sally and Joe. This is revealed only later in flashback, so even when the runaway train is successfully derailed there is still tension hanging over David.

What saves Sally is actually the fact that Sonny ignored David’s instruction. David gave Sonny an unloaded gun to take back to the house, to make Sally feel reassured. But unbeknownst to him, Sonny also takes one bullet and loads the gun. What will save the day is also a foolhardy decision. There is a scene of comic tension when Sonny plays with the loaded gun, pointing it into his own face to look down the barrel. Thus, even the way the film finds to rescue Sally is through David’s blunder and Sonny’s near-disastrous recklessness.

When Sally arrives and relates how she shot Joe, the relief is subtly undermined in the way Brown frames the last shots of the family. Rather than the warm comfort of the home (which has itself been violated by Joe’s brutish assault through windows/doors), the family is reunited outside the signal tower, in the dark and the pouring rain. It’s a bracing kind of reunion, with father and mother and son being soaked in the cold. According to Gwenda Young, there was to have been another shot here:

Brown offers a final shot of the restorative embrace among husband, wife, and child, but he obscures our view by placing a hulking train in the foreground. It was a mark of Brown’s succinctness that he could encapsulate the film’s core theme of human (and familial) vulnerability in the face of the inescapable encroachment of modernity using just one shot. When Brown’s boss Carl Laemmle Sr. viewed the film, he was reportedly baffled by this scene, regarding it as a deliberate (and perverse) attempt to obscure, symbolically and visually, the ‘view’ of the restored family. Interestingly, his son Junior instantly understood what Brown was trying to achieve, and on his insistence, the shot was retained. (Clarence Brown, 44-45)

But I can’t see this shot in the 2019 restoration. Young derives her information from an interview Brown had with Brownlow in 1966, so perhaps this was a false memory—or this particular shot is missing from the current restoration.

What the surviving film does offer, however, is an even more threatening final image. Though we have seen the flashback to Sally shooting Joe, the film closes with an image of Joe escaping into the sodden forest. It’s a wonderfully expressive image, presenting a kind of vortex receding from foreground to background: the layers of tangled, sodden undergrowth and foliage lit by lightning or obscured in the dark. Successive layers of trees narrow our view: they form a kind of natural iris, leading the eye to the rear, where a circular gap in the leaves reveals Joe. The way he is framed here—his dark body against the dim blur of the clearing beyond—makes him the focus of the shot; but you realize that he’s looking at us, turning to give us a last glance. What really makes the shot is the way you can see Joe’s breath billowing out in the dark: it’s such a fantastic detail to include. It makes him a smouldering beast, retreating into the night. This final image is hardly comforting. The family is reunited, but the villain survives. Sally is saved from any guilt at having killed a man, but at the price of sending him out into the world once more. The family seem oblivious to Joe’s presence in the forest. Only we can see him, and he us. There’s an odd kind of complicity in this exchanged glance: we acknowledge Joe, just as Joe acknowledges us.

This 2019 restoration—from Photoplay Productions and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival—was based primarily on a 16mm print released in 1928 as part of Universal’s “Show-At-Home” series, with missing/damaged shots from another 16mm print of this same version. The restoration notes say that the film was originally 6207 feet, 6162 feet of which have been preserved in this version. The print looks very good, and I often forgot I was watching something from a 16mm source rather than 35mm. There are some scenes of inferior quality, but overall the texture of the image is very good, most especially for the exteriors.

The music for this restoration was written by Stephen Horne and performed by Horne and Martin Pyne. These two players swap between four instruments: the main part is for piano, with sections accompanied by drum kit, flute, or accordion. The main combination of instruments is piano and drum kit, which produces a marvellously evocative tone and timbre for the film. Listen to the opening sequence, the way the drums are about to evoke the texture and timbre of steam and mechanical movement, while the piano takes up the melodic line. The melodies are inflected with a slight ragtime lilt, which is a delight. Horne includes passages for flute (associated with Sally and the home), while Joe’s introduction gets accordion—a nice surprise, carrying a louche suggestiveness in its sliding wheeze. Altogether, a very effective accompaniment.

So there we are. The Signal Tower. A good film. And it’s certainly a more complex film than its story might suggest. Gwenda Young calls The Signal Tower “the first of Brown’s more personal films” (Clarence Brown, 45). Brown creates a rich sense of place, using and framing its locations in expressive ways. His careful compositions and camera movements make us question the assumptions of David. There are many deft touches that change our perspective on events and characters. But what it doesn’t offer is a wider perspective: there is little sense of the outside world this particular place. The Signal Tower uses its setting for drama, not social critique.

For example, David’s 12-hour shift sounds pretty brutal, but he never complains and seems to function perfectly well. Within the film, there is scant acknowledgement of how/when Dave or Sally (or Sonny) actually sleep. Sonny is put to bed once, and Sally spends one night(?) with him—but I was left curious as to how the 12-hour shift pattern works in a practical sense. The organizational hierarchy that demands its employees work like this is likewise never interrogated. Even when David’s long shift would potentially influence his behaviour/actions in the climactic scenes, the film doesn’t pick up on this. He is forced to work for more than twelve hours after Joe quits, but nothing is made of his (presumable) exhaustion as he battles the elements, the rails, and the spectre of Joe’s attack on Sally.

But if the film doesn’t offer a more complex social world, its concentration on the central drama makes it very effective.

Being familiar only with Brown’s later silent films (from The Eagle (1925) onwards), I am now very curious to see more of his work from this transitional period in the early/mid 1920s. In particular, I long to see a good quality version of Brown’s The Goose Woman (1925). I know that the film has been restored and shown in recent years, including with a piano score by Carl Davis. Here’s hoping that this and other neglected Clarence Brown films from the 1920s will get a proper release.

Paul Cuff

References

Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By… (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

Gwenda Young, Clarence Brown: Hollywood’s Forgotten Master (Kentucky UP, 2018).

Brüder (1929; Ger.; Werner Hochbaum)

Why did I choose to watch this film? Well, frankly, I was in a bad mood. I started the day in triumphant spirit, having received an unexpectedly early delivery of Dreyer’s Die Gezeichneten (1922). This was the DVD edition produced by ARTE, including a score for the film by Bernd Thewes that I’d never heard. Much to my delight, the back of the box said: “Untertitl: Englisch”. I sat down to enjoy the film. It started. There were no subtitles. I really had been looking forward to seeing (and hearing) Die Gezeichneten, but my German isn’t up to the task of reading the many lengthy titles of this film. After a bleak morning the next day trying and failing to synch up the soundtrack with the video from the DFI Blu-ray release (the intertitles are a different length, the DFI splitting them into multiple titles for the sake of accommodating their dual Danish-English translations), I was in a bad mood. I needed to choose another film to watch. I wanted something angry, bleak. It should be tonally similar to the anticipated grimness of Die Gezeichneten and tonally similar to the irritation of my mood. Hence, Brüder: a film I knew nothing about, other than it seemed moody, bleak, and had a score of equal abrasiveness. Bring it on.

Brüder (1929; Ger.; Werner Hochbaum)

The opening credits are broken up with images—little vignettes in themselves—that foreground the film’s strange tone, it’s blunt and sometimes disjointed editing. “Der Film”—one title announces, before we cut to a shot of two men, one in shirtsleeves, the other in uniform, facing each other. Superimposed in the space between them, the word “Brüder” appears and barges its way forward until it threatens to burst out of the screen. Next, a line of workers, hand in hand, a strike line, stand against a black expanse. They are looking straight at the camera. It’s a weird, intense opening. Then we cut back to more text, and you realize that this is a continuation of the sentence began by “Der Film”, then bridged by the superimposed “Brüder” and subsequent shot: “is based on authentic elements and relates an episode from the dock workers’ strike which took place in Hamburg in 1896-97.” After more credits, a title announces: “This film is an attempt to create, with simple means, a German proletarian film. The performers are dock workers, workers’ wives, children, and other common people. All of whom were appearing in front of a camera for the first time.” The cast list credits no performers, simply listing their roles.

Act 1. “The history of humanity is the history of its class struggles”. (I’m braced!) “On a winter morning in 1896.” Shots of Hamburg harbour. Ice-coated water. Turquoise tinting. Even the glints of sunlight are cold. Dark boats cross the harbour. Clouds of vapour from their stacks. The dockland on the horizon. Industrial chimneys, industrial cranes. Closer shots of the sea, the waves lifting the coating of ice. Strange, viscous ripples on the water’s surface. Gulls, tugs, liners, smoke. The quay. The houses. Rooftops coated in snow. Dark, cramped streets. Nineteenth-century tenements. Washing on the line. Factories. A newspaper drifting down an empty street.

A policeman, conspicuous by the quality of his uniform, the sheen of his spiked helmet. A close-up of his face dissolves slowly onto that of a stone lion. Shots of show-covered monuments to the nation, to the war dead. A statue of Wilhelm II in close-up, the camera tracking back, then panning around the police station; sleeping officers, a tired-looking desk clerk. Nameless men, sleeping in their uniforms; helmets on a cupboard, a sword against the wall.

Now cut to another illustration on another wall: an image of liberty urging on a crowd. Another reverse tracking shot, the camera pulling back to reveal the main protagonist’s apartment: The nameless docker sleeps on a sofa, his wife in a single bed, his mother with their child in another single bed. The wife coughs and the camera awkwardly pans down and up the length of her sleeping body: we see the size of the bed, the stiffness of her limbs, the lack of space all around her.

The town clock strikes five in the morning. The clock in the apartment strikes five. The grandmother gets out of bed, puts on her slippers, lights the lamp, goes to the tiny kitchen, lights the stove. The man washes in a sink, towels himself down. In close-up we watch his mother’s ancient hands making the morning coffee, buttering thinly sliced bread. They sit together and eat: one slice of bread each. He sprinkles a pinch of salt on the buttered bread. The camera takes in their breakfast in a single shot: the rationing of the butter, the dividing of the coffee into a flask for him to take to work. Close-ups of their few words; no intertitles. Back to the establishing shot (which establishes only the extremely limited confines of the kitchen table in the corner of the room), a few more unsubtitled words, then he puts on his hat and jacket and heads out into the snow. The mother, wife, and child sit in the main room and eat their slices of bread. The cat laps at a cup. End of Act 1, an “act” that has consisted in the recording of remarkably prosaic details. It’s just everyday life, the morning routine, presented without embellishment. It’s plain, sparse, terse.

Act 2. The docks. Men crowd onto the decks of roofless ferries and are taken across the water to work. The water is black beneath the ice. The smoke is white against the city, black against the sky.

In an office, a clerk bows before the portrait of the Kaiser, then places the day’s papers on a desk and leaves.

Workers unload the cargo from large ships. It’s daylight now, but the although the tinting has gone the monochrome shots of the docks are just as cold. The dockers wear flat caps, or protective sheets to carry the sacks on their heads. The foreman pushes them on. The workers are angry. The docker leads a delegation to demand a pay rise. He speaks bluntly, the film’s titles render his words briefly. A bearded official sits at the desk below the image of the Kaiser. The gilt of its frame, and the painted gilt of the Kaiser’s uniform, are the only glimpses of luxury we see in the film. The pay rise is rejected: the money is to be reinvested, but not in the workforce.

The police station. The camera titles down from the bust of the Kaiser to the moustached face of an officer. His men—including the docker’s brother—look tired. They salute and wearily about-face.

“After 36 hours of toil”: a shift change. The turquoise tinting has returned: it’s the evening, which is indistinguishable from the morning. Weary lines of workers leave the boats, tramp up gangways, over footbridges.

Act 3. The return home. Snowbound streets. Greyish sludge along the narrow paths. Darks lines of indistinguishable tenements. The child on the steps outside the apartment. Her father greets her, goes inside—straight to the kitchen table. A pan of food and a cup of coffee is instantly provided by his mother. The docker eats in silence, alone, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, mopping his brow. But the bread falls from his hand. He falls asleep at his meal.

A line of dockers arrive, ascend to the flat. They sit on what we know is the man’s bed, the only space in the house. Look how Hochbaum frames them: the men gathered around a tiny table, while the wife lies in the neighbouring bed, her face just in frame on the right. Only when the labour leader arrives, and gently taps her on the shoulder as he passes, does anyone acknowledge her presence in the room. (But the camera has noticed: it cannot not but notice, the room is so small.)

The dockers, at the main protagonist’s urging, agree to strike. Close-ups of his face, from below, earnest, impassioned; of hands clasped. The editing is awkward, unpolished; the shots hold a little too long, or not long enough.

The meeting of the workers. Real faces, working faces. Faces that have known manual labour their whole lives. Close-ups of men speechifying, waving fists. They agree to strike.

“And all the wheels stood still.” Details of the silent port: ships sat in the tides of ice. Unmoving trains. A man standing at the dockland gates, holding a placard that says: “Strike”. End of Acct 3.

Act 4. The clock strikes five. The docker turns over and goes back to sleep. But his mother still gets up and goes to the kitchen. She gently strokes the loaf of bread. She knows it will have to last now that their income has ceased. It’s a potent image, and one of the ways in which Hochbaum gently complicates the narrative. The men take action, but the women in the household take the consequences.

The docker’s brother—the policeman—comes to visit. On the way in, he passes an old man on the stairs, still buttoning up his trousers, who barges the policemen aside. It’s a marker of the brother’s outsider status. (But the scene also reveals what the tiny door is outside the entrance to the docker’s apartment: it’s a toilet shared by the other residents in the block.) It’s the first time we see the family together. The toothless mother smiles and shakes the brother’s hand. “Brother!” he says, stretching out a hand to the docker. Hochbaum shows us the hand extending into the frame, the brother sat moodily in the corner of the sofa—refusing it. When the policeman puts his hat on the table, the docker picks it up and puts it on the floor. The film’s obsession with the significance of uniform is shared by the protagonists. Now the docker’s little girl comes to make friends with her uncle, but she too is manhandled away from the policeman. As he leaves, his hand is again refused by the docker. (But not by his mother, who shakes it, then sits sadly on a seat by the door, head downcast.) Even outside, the policeman is insulted: “Down with the police!”, a child has scrawled on the wall. And the strikers on the street spit in his wake.

But it’s the next scene that carries more weight. For the mother goes over the household supplies. She looks at the stump of bread, at the few cubes of meat in a metal bucket in the kitchen, at the smear of butter (just lard?) in the pot, at the few pennies left in her purse. She sits alone, a close-up of her ancient hands resting in her lap. The docker’s wife coughs, a thin trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth. The mother sits by her bedside and finds two tiny bottles of medicine. They are nearly empty. She puts a few coins next to them, just as she had counted the coins in the kitchen—it’s ostensibly for her calculations, but also for our knowledge. This second showing of money is not the subtlest shot in the film, but the next shots are: we see the mother stroke her daughter-in-law’s hand. It’s one of the only moments of tenderness in the entire film.

The next scenes show more contact, this time violent: strike-breakers accost the dockers at the gates. But the strike is continued. End of Act 4.

Act 5. Christmas. Shots of snow-covered statues, memorials. The docks still unmoving, the streets still empty. The docker’s mother is putting decorations on a tree. Her granddaughter smiles up at her, and at the little angel she puts on a branch. The tree is small, the decorations sparse. The camera—handheld (for the sake of space, if nothing else)—awkwardly pans around the room. In her sickbed, the wife smiles. The docker returns. He’s about to grab the tree and throw it to the ground, but he sees the look of delight in her daughter’s face and relents.

Christmas dinner is about to be interrupted. The family are eating but the police are on their way. The police come in. There is a struggle. The tree falls to the ground, the angel hurled across the floor.  A montage of violent gestures (imperfectly shot, imperfectly edited). The docker tripped, falling, the ceiling swirling, a nail in the wall, his hand flung up, now covered in blood; the wife striking out, being shoved away, dragging herself across the floor; the policeman’s boot crushing the angel, whose banner “Peace on earth” is left pasted to the floor. The old woman hunched on the ground, head down.

At the station, the docker is one of several taken into custody. His brother is left in charge, as a band of dockers sing a protest song outside the station—and the other officers stand guard. “Brothers!, “Freedom!” The words are flung across the screen, part song, part slogan, part though process: for the two brothers stand—per the opening shot of the film—and the docker is ushered out to freedom. As a scuffle breaks out outside the jail, the fifth act ends.

Act 6. Back in his apartment, the leaders of the strike gather. The grandmother leads the little girl into the kitchen and lights the stove. We see her counting the few remaining beans and dutifully grind them.

The docker is thinking, and Hochbaum superimposes a montage of scenes from the film over his brow. But the police are here, and the others protect him. The camera slowly pans down an arm, a hand slowly clenching into a fist. Then the docker’s hand touches his, and the camera pans (again, agonizingly slowly) up his arm to his head: we see him shake his head, then speak: “We are making a mistake and struggle in vain against isolated individuals. Stay true to our ideas, forge a powerful community. Then, time and collective strength will get the better of the system, and the future will be ours.” So he says, speaking the message of the film. He allows himself to be led away and, in a prison cell, his wife visits him and sneaks a newspaper into his hand: the strike is over. The docker looks away.

Cut to a flag, the shot tinted red, rising, followed by more text: “On February 8, 1897, the central strike committee published an appeal that ended with a prophetic look in the direction of the future: This eleven-week struggle cost harm and sacrifices of all kinds. It was necessary! Thousands and thousands of spirits that had been asleep until then, the souls of thousands and thousands of women, and maturing youths have been, during these weeks, set ablaze by the spark of enthusiasm.” Iris-in on the red flag. ENDE

Hmm. Well, this film is a decidedly mixed bag. The shots of the docklands are superb: all the atmosphere of place and time are there; the ice-covered waters, the snow-covered streets; the dark tenements, the blank skies, the smoke and dirt. I could have watched a montage of these documentary shots for a long time, so rich and deep was the photography and so starkly beautiful were the images. But even if the photography is excellent, the film as a whole is uneven and often bordering on amateurish. Whenever the camera tracks or pans, it is so slow as to be awkward: and the more meaning the director wishes to convey, the more the effort involved undoes any effect the shots might have. The final scene of the dockers resolving to shield the main protagonist is a case in point: the way the camera takes an eternity to tilt down the man’s arm to see (again with utmost slowness) his fist clench makes the moment so ludicrously portentous that it fails utterly to have any emotive impact. Soo too in the Christmas Day arrest, when the action is too slow, the cutting too imprecise, and the matching of action and image incredibly clumsy.

Hochbaum treads in Eisenstein’s path, both with the casting of non-professionals and in the use of symbolic details (Brüder’s red-tinted flag is surely taken from the red-coloured flag rising at the end of Battleship Potemkin). But whereas Eisenstein’s editing is incredibly dynamic, and his matching of action and image exhilarating and articulate, Hochbaum’s editing here is clumsy and heavy-handed. Indeed, the attempt to use editing and imagery to make his points goes against the realist atmosphere created by the locations and the casting of this self-identifying “German proletarian film”.

For the performers in this non-professional cast have wonderful faces, and (just as with the landscapes) I could spend a lot of time happily just studying them move and live on camera. The grandmother especially carries so much sense of a life and past in the way she holds herself and moves. But the main docker is not particularly arresting as a performer, and—even when he is just sitting, doing nothing—he feels less engaging than the woman playing his mother. When Hochbaum gives us dramatic close-ups of him speechifying, it’s a little underwhelming. I’d rather have spent my time with the women and child and seen how they went about their business. Surely it’s a failure of the film to adequately engage us with the people on screen: this is meant to be their story, as embodied by real dock workers. But I was never quite engaged by the human drama. The moments of human life were too dominated by clumsy message-making. I loved the scenes without any dialogue, more so because the dialogue itself was slogan-speak not real human speech. When nothing happens in this film, it’s beautiful. But as soon as the film attempts dramatic action, it becomes clumsy and heavy-handed.

Brüder was Werner Hochbaum’s first feature film, his only other silent productions being the short documentaries Vorwärts (1928), Wille und Werk (1929), and Zwei Welten (1929)—none of which I have seen. His cameraman was Gustav Berger, who appears to have worked on no other films other than those few silents by Hochbaum. All these silents were made under the aegis of “Werner Hochbaum Filmproduktion”, suggesting their independence from mainstream studios. The only information I can find on Hochbaum’s early career is in Klaus Kreimeier’s The Ufa Story (California UP, 1999, 287-88, 311; see also the German Wikipedia page on him). Hochbaum seems to have had an interesting life. Though homosexual, he was married to a dancer who died young in 1922. In 1923 he was tried for (and acquitted of) treason, suspected of being a spy in the pay of France. And despite being decidedly left-wing (working for Social Democrat papers in the 1920s, making “proletarian” films like Brüder), Hochbaum stayed in Germany after the Nazis came to power and continued to make films for UFA. But he was subversive enough as an artist to be expelled from the industry in 1939 by the Nazis. Conscripted into the army, he was ultimately excused duties on health grounds—and died in 1946 of a longstanding lung disease.

Given the rather obscure production, I suppose it’s a kind of miracle that Brüder survives, and in such good visual quality. The restoration notes for this version—broadcast on ARTE—state that the film was submitted twice to the censor, first in April 1929 (at 1722 meters) then in August 1929 (at 1989m). The original negative is lost and only copies of the first version of the film survive. The copy as restored by Filmarchiv Austria and the Deutschen Kinemathek in 2021 is 1732m. The copies used for the restoration must have been first-generation prints, for the film looks wonderfully sharp and textured. For me, the location photography is the film’s main appeal.

The score, from 2021-22, is by Alain Schmidinger and performed by members of the Berliner Philharmoniker. The ensemble (twelve players in total) produces something between a soundscape and a score. It blends real instruments with synthesized sound effects and, at two points near the end of the film, extracts from a recording of Telemann’s Oboe Concerto in C Minor (TWV 51:c1). Apart from the latter, the soundtrack is growling, bleak, restless, angry. The score certainly has an ebb and flow, but the tone scarcely changes: only the degree of aggressive angst varies. Walking down a street? Acoustic angst. Confronting your boss? Acoustic angst. Buttering bread? Acoustic angst. Punching a policeman? Acoustic angst. Settling down to sleep? Acoustic angst. The score has no tenderness. Not that the film has a lot of tenderness, but those moments which do—all involving the women—deserve some reaction, some softening, of the score. Quite why it includes the chunk of Telemann—surely extracted from another recording—is a mystery. For the contrast between Telemann’s concerto—all baroque elegance, restrained melancholy, emotive textures—and Schmidinger’s harsh, abrasive soundworld is so vast that it almost serves to make the citation seem ironic. Is it meant to enrich or undermine the emotive scenes around Christmas that it accompanies?

In summary, Brüder was a mixed experience for me. I certainly enjoyed aspects of it: the location shooting was fascinating to watch, as were some of the performers. But the film is very clumsy. It shows us a realistic world, but it cannot mobilize it into a convincing or emotionally complex drama. What moved me about the film were incidental details, its setting, not the narrative. But in one sense Brüder fulfilled its contact: I wanted to be gloomy, and it gave me my gloom.

Paul Cuff

Sången om den eldröda blomman (1919; Swe.; Mauritz Stiller)

By 1918, Mauritz Stiller was one of Sweden’s leading filmmakers. He had joined Svenska Bio in 1912 and worked variously as actor, screenwriter, and director. After making dozens of shorter films in a variety of genres, he was tackling larger subjects with bigger budgets. His next production would be his largest to date: an adaptation of Johannes Linnankoski’s Finnish novel Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta (1905). In June 1918, Stiller began shooting his exteriors around the river Faxälven, and the nearby towns of Långsele and Sollefteå. The production lasted until August, taking advantage of the lengthy summer evenings and natural locations. Shot by Ragnar Westfelt and the great Henrik Jaenzon (brother of the equally great cameraman Julius Jaenzon), the film would show off the technical prowess of Swedish cinematography and the beauty of the country’s landscape. After finishing shooting the interior scenes in Svenska Bio’s studios in Stockholm, the film was released in April 1919. The musical accompaniment for its first screening was created by the Finnish composer Armas Järnefelt—the first score specially written for any Swedish film. Stiller’s production was a tremendous critical success, both within Sweden and throughout Europe. The strategy of adapting Scandinavian literature for the screen came to dominate Stiller’s work and that of Swedish cinema into the 1920s. Indeed, by the time Sången om den eldröda blomman premiered, Stiller had already nearly finished shooting his next film, Herr Arnes pengar (1919)—an adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel. The first of many…

Sången om den eldröda blomman follows the adventures of Olof (Lars Hanson), son of the wealthy farmers of Koskela. Tempted first by Annikki (Greta Almroth), he then attracts the attention of Elli (Lillebil Christensen). The pair are caught in a compromising situation by Olof’s mother (Louise Fahlman), and both Olof and Elli are ejected from their homes for their behaviour. Each goes in a different direction from their village, Olof going to work as a log driver on the river Kohiseva. Here he encounters the proud Kyllikki (Edith Erastoff), who he decides to impress by riding on a log through the Kohiseva rapids. Their romance blooms briefly, but Olof feels he cannot settle and—after a fight with some locals and a confrontation with Kyllikki’s father (Hjalmar Peters)—heads to the city. Here he drifts into a seedy underworld of brothels, where he encounters Elli. This chance meeting drives each to despair at where their lives have led: Elli kills herself, an act which drives Olof back to his homestead. He finds that his parents have died, so he returns to the one woman who was prepared to live with him: Kyllikki.

Having recently watched Stiller’s Gunnar Hedes saga (1923), I can say that Sången om den eldröda blomman has a more engaging story and fewer storytelling impediments. The film shows its literary sources only in the poetic titles that begin each “chapter” (in fact, each reel of the original seven-reel film) and, unlike in Gunnar Hedes saga, there are no awkward visual metaphors inserted into the telling. Though Stiller simplified the story of the original novel—which is more of a Don Juan narrative than the film—it still has a sense of ebb and flow, together with a cumulative power by the final two chapters.

It also made me think this must have been a more personal endeavour for Stiller. The Finnish source material for Sången om den eldröda blomman has some clear emotional resonances with Stiller’s life. Like Olof, Stiller was an outsider: he was an orphan, a Jew, a homosexual, a Finnish-Russian filmmaker working within Sweden, then a Swedish filmmaker working within Hollywood. His childhood was defined by his mother’s suicide and his early adulthood by having to flee to Sweden to avoid conscription in the imperial Russian army. He had to rebuild his life in a foreign land to which he was in every way a foreigner. Sången om den eldröda blomman shows us a man forever on the move, first being ejected from his maternal home, then finding itinerant work in places on the outskirts of towns. He is always on the outside: he meets lovers in remote patches of forest, perched on hills away from civilization. We see him on numerous doorsteps, facing rejection: on the steps of his native Koskela, on the steps of the Moisio farm, in the doorways of the city streets. He doesn’t have a home, a place to settle. Spending most of his time with menfolk at work, he nevertheless sits awkwardly among them: he is prone to rash acts, he gets into fights, he lashes out in rage. (Stiller himself had a famous bad temper.) The story may not have a neat trajectory, but its episodic nature slowly builds up a compelling characterization.

Which brings us to Lars Hanson. Of those that I’ve seen of his performances, this is perhaps my favourite. He’s incredibly beautiful to look at, and manages to present aspects of youthfulness and of experience. There are scenes when he looks barely twenty, and others when he might be forty. The narrative offers him great scope to show off his range. He is by turns wilful, impetuous, violent, tender, vulnerable, grieving, joyful. His performance—and the performances across the cast—are naturalistic, free of odd tics and too much exaggeration. There is an emotional transparency throughout: Hanson signals what his character is feeling through subtle gestures rather than melodramatic ones.

In the penultimate chapter of the film, the scene in which Olof confronts himself in a mirror is a superb combination of performance and direction. Stiller only lets Olof—and us—sense the mirror by framing it almost side on, on the wall overlooking the character. Olof starts to turn his head right, then left. He turns up his collar. Only now does Stiller cut to a frontal view of Olof and the mirror. The glass is angled downward to avoid revealing the camera shooting the scene, but it also serves as a brilliant way of suggesting Olof being overlooked: the mirror is practically peering down at him from the wall. And Hanson’s doubled performance is marvellous. Stiller now cuts between Olof in the room and the reflection in the glass. For the latter, he keeps the corner of the frame in view. The way the reflected figure reaches out, it seems as though the hand might even stretch beyond this frame, into the real space of the bar. And Hanson’s performance as the reflected Olof is wonderfully sinister: it’s an exaggerated version of the facial range we have seen, but only slightly. The raised eyebrow, the widened eyes, the furrowed brow—they are both recognizably his, but weirdly, disturbingly different. Even without the trickery of the mirror scene in Der Student von Prag (1913), this scene is a perfect moment of cinematic uncanniness.

If there are scenes of such complex staging and framing, there are also plenty of rougher, less tidy, aspects of Sången om den eldröda blomman. It’s more of an outdoors film, and there is a kind of roughness in the editing that seems to suit the episodic nature of the story and its rural setting. It’s not merely that Stiller is working outside the so-called “rules” of “continuity editing”. It’s also that he has no interest in neatness or prettiness for its own sake. Stiller is not interested in spatial continuity, but emotive continuity—Stiller places the camera where is needed, where he wants, not where it should go.

Just look at the last scene, set at the Moirio farm, when Olof comes to claim Kyllikki and must confront her father. The interior space is filmed from the outside, then through doorways, then from both behind and in front of Olof. Stiller has interest in showing the initial framing: it echoes the various earlier scenes in which Olof has stood in doorways, always coming or going, and in the mirror scene where his presence within the frame on the wall finally “reveals” what he has become. But once Olof has entered the space, Stiller cuts according to feeling. We see Olof from behind, looking out into the room; then from front on, his back to the door he has just come through. Once Stiller gets all three characters inside this space, he cuts freely from whatever angle he chooses. He wants us to see the emotion on their faces, the way they stand according to each other. It doesn’t matter if it means cutting across lines of sight or viewpoint. Such editing is dynamic, even if it is sometimes disconcerting—perhaps even because it is disconcerting. After all, the scene is about rearranging expectations: Olof is returning to Kyllikki, Kyllikki is disobeying her father, her father and Kyllikki finally discover the history of Olof’s family. Why not film this scene of changing roles, of upended assumptions, in a way that pays no heed to established space or perspective? The scene works. That’s all that matters.

I’ve said that Sången om den eldröda blomman is an “outdoors” film, but this undersells what it achieves with its exterior shooting. Quite simply, this is one of the most beautiful, immersive natural environments you could hope to see on screen. I’ve already gone through the film three times for this review, and every time I gape in wonder at the richness of the photography. Though just about every shot is populated by at least one character, the whole film is defined by the world we see around them.

Olof meets Annikki just as he has felled a tree. They sit surrounded by immense pines, suffused with warm summer light. When they dance, they do so against great expanses of grass bordering by the river. When Olof encounters Kyllikki, we see the farmland behind her, the river before her; the rose garden and the rose itself becomes the place and emblem of their romance. When Olof rides the rapids, we see the huge expanse of water, the shifting tempo of the river, the rocks of the valley, the forests at its edge.

Conversely, when Olof enters the city, at his lowest moral point in the film, the streets are encased in darkness: there is no sense of sky, of space. Furthermore, it’s raining for the only time in the film. The city glistens with a kind of sweat. Clothes and attitudes and morals are all affected by this dark, grim, sodden climate.

All this sense of place, of time, of atmosphere and mood, is enhanced by the tinting and toning. The whole film is in some way coloured, giving an even greater sense of tone and warmth to the images of landscapes. From memory, the restoration from the 1980s was coloured via the Desmet process, a rather crude method of overlaying a colour image on top of a monochrome one. This results in some rather thick, flat colours in many of the earlier restorations of Swedish silents of this period. The earlier restoration of Sången om den eldröda blomman that I’d seen looked far muddier, had far less depth and detail to the colour. In particular, the rapids sequence is utterly transformed by the 2017 digital restoration: the subtle blue toning brings out all the depth and texture of the rocks and trees in the background, leaving the highlights of the swirling, foaming rapids deliciously white. The images are so crips, so detailed, so textured—it’s a real revelation.

But what really, really makes the images in this film work is the score. My word, I’ve been waiting a long time to hear this original score. I’m familiar with some of Järnefelt’s orchestral music, but this score represents the largest work of his I know—indeed, it’s the lengthiest single work in his entire oeuvre. He studied in Berlin and Paris in the 1890s, then (with his wife, the singer Maikki Järnefelt) lived in Germany and worked as a rehearsal pianist and assistant conductor in several opera houses. Returning to Scandinavia, he earned a growing reputation as a conductor, first in his native Finnish city of Viipuri (1898-1903), then in Helsinki (1904-07), and finally at the Royal Opera in Stockholm (1907-32).

Järnefelt never wrote an opera, but he did write much incidental music for the stage—ideal training for silent film music. Being possessed “by an insane Wagner fever” as a youth (and mounting numerous opera productions of Wagner during his time in Helsinki), there are some aspects of recurring motifs in his score for Sången om den eldröda blomman (see Korhonen, 4). There also seems, to me, to be at least one direct nod to Wagner in the score, albeit a subtle (which is to say, quiet!) one. The lengthy passage for solo oboe at the start of the seventh, final, chapter is surely influenced by an equivalent scene in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845). Act 1, scene 3, of the opera opens with a lengthy, seemingly improvised, passage played by a shepherd, who sits alone on stage. (In fact, his “pipes” come from an offstage cor anglais.) The image of the lone shepherd is matched on screen in Stiller’s film, as is the fact that the hero of the film is, like Tannhäuser, a man torn between restless physical wants and the desire to settle and find love. Like Tannhäuser, Olof is a pilgrim returning to his home from the “sinful” city. (The title of the film’s final chapter is “The Pilgrimage”, after all.)

But this talk of Wagner is misleading, since Järnefelt’s score is far lighter than Wagnerian music-drama. It’s written for a small orchestra, with parts for flute, oboe, two clarinets, two horns, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, harmonium, first and second violins, viola, cello (En afton på Röda Kvarn, 216). In style and tone, it evokes the soundworld of Scandinavian—specifically, Finnish—“national romantic” music. The music is evocative of time and place, somewhat nostalgic even, and makes plentiful use of folk tunes and “rustic” timbres. The use of harmonium as part of the orchestral texture is a particular delight: at times it hints at a religious mode (Olof at the graveyard), at others it evokes the sound of an accordion (the dance scenes). There are leitmotivs for various scenes/characters (Elli and Olof, Olof and Kyllikki), but they are deliberately clear and simple to follow—again, this isn’t a Wagnerian score.

Indeed, the simplicity of the musical structure (which uses plenty of repeats, as well as recurring motifs) was necessitated by the arduous process of composing music for a silent film in this period. Järnefelt later recalled:

I had to build up metre by metre, bit by bit. I received a list of the principal scenes of the film and their durations; but that information proved to be quite wrong, as the film was screened at a much faster pace, and I was horrified to discover how poorly music and image went together. I was obliged to shorten the score. Never in my life had I had to write music in such a way, that I was forced to confirm to the tempo of events—I, who am used to setting the tempo myself! In the end, it all finally worked out. (qtd in Korhonen, 6)

It did indeed “work out”. Though following the broad strokes of the action on screen (the rhythm of the dances, the rivers), and often evoking the sounds occurring in the scene (the sound of the fiddler, the distant hymn from a church), the music is more interested in providing a wider tonal sense of mood for each scene.

Listen to how the score introduces the Moisio farm, where Olof will see and fall for Kyllikki. Under the strings, piano and woodwind spell out a undulating motif; it’s like the burble of the river in the distance, or like the wheatfield that we see rippling in the wind. With this music, the image becomes one of dreamlike wonder. I’ve said how Stiller’s editing is sometimes “rough”. I might better describe it as “open”. The lack of clinical continuity means there is more room for the landscapes to dominate our sense of place, to define a broader imaginative geography. Wherever Stiller places his camera, there is something marvellous to find. Each new shot seems to reveal some new angle, to open some new window onto this world. I could just stare and stare and stare at these landscapes forever.

Look at the scene when, after proving himself worthy of her, Olof tries to explain why he cannot stay with Kyllikki. They are sat in a forest clearing, overlooking the great swathe of valley and river in the distance. It is evening. The light is exquisitely warm, diffuse. The amber tinting makes you feel the warmth radiating from the trees, from the hills in the distance, from the two bodies at the centre of the image. Järnefelt captures all of this perfectly: in his orchestra, the strings are a bed of calm. It’s an acoustic impression of sunset, of a kind of summery hum, sweet and sad and tired. Over this sound, a solo clarinet casts a slow, dreamy melody and is eventually joined by the violin. The two instruments then engage in a languorous, anxious exchange above the hushed strings. The lovers are gently haloed by the evening sky behind them. Christ, Jesus, it’s beautiful to look at, to listen to. I could perch here forever with these lovers—long dead, now—and watch them talk in silence, and listen to the music float over these golden images, arrested from the past. Scenes like these are why I love silent cinema. Iris-out to black.

I must conclude by saying something about the restoration itself. The film was digitized in 2017 by Svenska Filminstitut from “a 35mm b/w dupe negative and a tinted and toned positive nitrate”. In terms of content, it’s the same as the version restored in the 1980s that has been available in various guises since then. But for its presentation on Netflix, there are no notes on how this version compares to that seen in 1919. Looking up the film on the Swedish Film Institute database, I find that the original length was 2657m (across seven reels). The database gives a projection speed of 16fps, making the film 145 minutes when first shown. As presented on Netflix, there is no technical information about the sources used for the 2017 digitized version. How long is it in metres? What frame rate does it have? How does it relate to earlier versions of the film? These are the kinds of questions that must be asked of any silent film, and any decent restoration should be accompanied with at least a few notes on its history. Frustrated by this, I looked elsewhere and spent a tiring but ultimately rewarding morning digging out more information…

My starting point was the CD release of the complete orchestral score (available on the Ondine label). I say “complete”, but Kimmo Korhonen’s liner notes for the CD release are far more informative on this subject than any online notes about the film restoration. Korhonen refers to Ann-Kristin Wallengren’s thesis on music in Swedish silent films, which contains a chapter on Sången om den eldröda blomman and the history of Järnefelt’s score (En afton på Röda Kvarn, 210-45). The music was performed at screenings across several Swedish locations, and was still extant as late as 1931, when Järnefelt conducted extracts of the score for recording. After this, nothing more was heard until the 1980s. As Wallengren relates:

When I started my research, the sheet music for Sången om den eldröda blomman was considered to have been lost long ago. However, after many long telephone conversations, the Finnish Broadcasting Company were quite surprised to find in their holdings the complete orchestral parts. However, the score was still missing. On a loose sheet among the orchestral parts, it was noted that the score and conductor’s part were lent to the composer in 1938. By searching for survivors in Järnefelt’s estate inventory, I found the material in the possession of a relative who kindly lent everything for copying. The score and conductor’s part are now also available at the Finnish Broadcasting Company. (En afton på Röda Kvarn, 214)

After finding this material, a version of the score was assembled for performance in 1988. But by this time, a significant portion of the film had been lost. Sången om den eldröda blomman was released in its full length in April 1919, then rereleased in a shortened version in June 1920. Neither the 1919 nor 1920 versions survive compete, so the 1988 restoration was nearly 45 minutes shorter than Järnefelt’s score, which accorded to the version of 1919 (ibid., 213). Further versions of the score were made to accompany the 1980s restoration. This included an edition by Robert Israel, who worked directly from Järnefelt’s manuscript to prepare the score for a live performance in Helsinki in 2006. A decade later, a new arrangement of the score was made to accompany the new digital restoration of 2017. For this, Jani Kyllönen and Jaakko Kuusisto also worked from Järnefelt’s manuscript score, and the orchestral parts preserved from the original performances in 1919. The recording made in 2018 claims to offer the exact orchestration that Järnefelt presented in 1919, even if not all the music written for the film can be accommodated in the surviving film material. (It’s a shame that the double-CD release couldn’t include more of the music either!)

As so often, this complex history is not even hinted at in the online publicity for the 2017 restoration—at least as far as its release via Netflix is concerned. Another (minor) frustration with this presentation is the way Netflix have encoded the subtitles. The translations seem passable (though the informal idiom of much of the dialogue is lost, as is the lyricism of the poetry), but the timing and placement of the subtitles make it difficult to follow all the original information on screen. This is because the subtitles are held on screen for the whole length of the original title (which is more than enough time to read each line in translation), leaving no time to look at the original text alone. And because the subtitles don’t bother translating the actor credits that appear at the bottom of many titles, you can’t actually read the original text: the credits remain buried under the subtitles. Thanks to this technical decision, I was unable to see the name of the main characters being introduced (together with the name of the performers). It’s such a simple thing but getting it right would have made a big difference to the viewing experience. I do hope this is fixed if/when the film gets a physical release.

On the theme of new presentations for Swedish silents, the Järnefelt score made me want to hear more contemporary music arrangements from this context. Even if specially written scores like Sången om den eldröda blomman are the exception for Swedish films of this period, how many compiled scores (i.e. cue sheets) survive for other films—and therefore could be recreated? Wallengren’s thesis mentions dozens of films for which the musical cues are known to some degree. But Sången om den eldröda blomman is one of the only examples where the original music has been used for a digital release. Many Swedish silents on DVD have modern scores by Matti Bye, whose work was attached to numerous restorations from the 1990s-2000s. These are perfectly acceptable scores, but I find aspects of them very frustrating. Bye has a habit of instructing his string section to improvise atonal chaos at moments of suspense (the image of carriage wheels in Körkarlen (1921)) or high drama (the fight scene in Gösta Berlings saga (1924)) that I find very distracting. These outbursts of musical violence are at odds with the rest of the scores and sit uncomfortably with the films themselves. More broadly, Bye’s music rarely moves me in the way the films do. I’d be deeply curious to experience the films with the kinds of music that audiences might have heard in the 1910s-20s. For the premiere of Victor Sjöström’s Körkarlen at the Röda Kvarn in Stockholm, on New Year’s Day 1921, music was arranged by Eric Westberg. This was based around the music of Ture Rangström, together with works by Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Saint-Saëns, and Reger. With respect to Matti Bye, I’d rather hear music by any of the above.

And if, as Wallengren outlines, this was the standard mode of presentation for films presentation in silent-era Sweden, then we should try and recreate it. If films by Sjöström and Stiller had assembled scores rather than original ones, then it’s a valid and important historical task to recreate what these might have sounded like. Wallengren also explains that even music specially written for a particular film was frequently reused to score other films. Thus, Järnefelt’s music for the rapids sequence in Sången om den eldröda blomman was reused for the similar scenes of the rapids in Stiller’s Johan (1920)—together with six other lengthy pieces from his work. Several of these same pieces were reused for Stiller’s Gunnar Hedes saga and again for Gösta Berlings saga. This kind of borrowing even extended to imported film music. For use in performances of Gösta Berlings saga, music was also taken from the score arranged by Louis Silvers and William F. Peters for Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) (En afton på Röda Kvarn, 141). I’d love to see all these films with the music arranged for them at the time, even if it means hearing the same pieces used and reused in different ways. It’s gorgeous music, so why not hear it more often? When else will you get a chance to hear new recordings of Järnefelt’s work? And beyond the familiar soundscapes of Grieg and Sibelius (or even Nielsen), Scandinavian orchestral music of the early twentieth century—by Hugo Alfvén, Kurt Atterberg, Rued Langgaard, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Ture Rangström, Johan Svendsen, et al.—is a great, untapped resource for anyone wishing to arrange contemporary music for silent films.

If I’ve talked about the music for so long, it’s simply because it made such a huge impact on my viewing experience of this film. Seen and heard in this quality, Sången om den eldröda blomman is hypnotically beautiful, emblematic of all the great qualities of Swedish cinema in its “golden era”. I was utterly entranced. With Järnefelt’s original score restored, this is the single best presentation of any silent Swedish film I know. More restorations like this, please.

Paul Cuff

References

Kimmo Korhonen, ‘Song of the Scarlet Flower: A Pioneering Nordic film score’ (trans. Jaakko Mäntyjärvi), Liner notes for Armas Järnefelt: Song of the Scarlet Flower (Full score to the 1919 film), Ondine, ODE1328-2D, 2019.

Ann-Kristin Wallengren, En afton på Röda Kvarn. Svensk stumfilm som musikdrama, PhD Thesis, Lund University, 1998 [available online].

Casanova (1927; Fr.; Alexandre Volkoff)

In 1926, Ivan Mosjoukine was at the peak of his career. He had just starred as the titular lead in V. Tourjansky’s Michel Strogoff (1926), an epic adventure film that proved a success in both Europe and Hollywood. A contract with Universal was the result, but Mosjoukine would make one last film in France before he left for America. It was to be produced by Ciné-Alliance, a company founded by Noë Bloch and Gregor Rabinovitch, with financial support from the Société de Cinéromans and UFA. In all aspects this was to be a pan-European film, with cast and crew coming from France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Poland. The director, Alexandre Volkoff, had come to France with Mosjoukine and a group of fellow Russian emigres at the start of the 1920s. Together, they had made the serial La Maison du mystère (1922) and the features Les Ombres qui passent (1924) and Kean (1924). Across five months of shooting in August-December 1926, Casanova was shot on location in Venice, Strasbourg, and Grenoble, and in studios at Billancourt, Epinay, and Boulogne. Six months of post-production followed, including the lengthy process of stencil-colouring several sequences, before the film’s premiere in June 1927—but it wasn’t until December 1927 (a full year after shooting ended) that it was released publicly in France. By this time, Mosjoukine had already gone to Hollywood—and come back. The one film he made there, Edward Sloman’s Surrender (1927), was hardly worth the trip. (“Catalog it as fair to middling”, wrote the terse reviewer in Variety (9 November 1927, p. 25).) So Casanova was both the last film Mosjoukine made before his Hollywood debacle, and the first film he released on his return to Europe.

The film follows Casanova’s succession of adventures across Europe. In Venice, we see his affair with the dancer Corticelli (Rina de Liguoro), his abortive duel with the Russian officer Orloff (Paul Guidé), and his assignation with Lady Stanhope (Olga Day). Harried by the gendarmes of Menucci (Carlo Tedeschi) for his debts and supposed involvement in the “black arts”, he travels to Austria. There he encounters Thérèse (Jenny Hugo), whom he tries to save from her brutish captor the Duc de Bayreuth (Albert Decœur). Thwarted in his attempt, he encounters Maria Mari (Diana Karenne) and, in disguise, follows her path into Russia. In Russia, he charms the Empress Catherine (Suzanne Bianchetti) and witnesses her overthrow of her mad husband, Tsar Peter III (Klein Rogge). Re-encountering both Orloff (Catherine’s lover) and Thérèse, Casanova finds himself on the run once more. So he returns to Venice, where it is carnival season. Here he finds both Thérèse and Maria, as well as the authorities and his old enemy Menucci. Maria, furious at Casanova’s interest in Thérèse, ends up helping the authorities capture Casanova. However, with the help of Thérèse, he escapes from prison and sets sail for adventure beyond Venice…

First thing’s first: Casanova looks beautiful. The Flicker Alley Blu-ray presents a new version of a restoration originally completed by Renée Lichtig in the 1980s. Lichtig herself spent years tracking down various prints of the film to reassemble, including one reel of remarkable colour-stencilled material. I had seen Lichtig’s reconstruction of Casanova on an old VHS and was tantalized by the glimpses of sets and locations on screen. But though I knew the story, I wasn’t prepared for just how good the film now looks in its latest digital transfer. The sets are sumptuous, as are the costumes. This is a world on screen that is simply and absolutely pleasurable to behold. The scenes shot in Venice are a joy just to look at: Volkoff composes his exteriors with great care and fills his scenes with life. His cameramen were the experienced Russians Fédote Bourgasoff and Nicolas Toporkoff, together with the Frenchman Léonce-Henri Burel—one of the greatest cinematographers of the age. Thanks to a production that stretched from summer to winter, the film also gives us all the seasons: from the sweltering city of stone in Venice to the hazy forests of Austria and the snows of Russia.

Among all these exteriors, the nighttime sequence at the carnival is the most captivatingly beautiful: here are lanterns blushing pink, fireworks bursting red and gold, costumes glowing in otherworldly yellow.

Sadly, the other colour sequences in the film remain missing. Extracts from one such sequence—the grand ball in Catherine’s court—appear in colour in Kevin Brownlow’s series Cinema Europe (1995). That material comes from a 16mm print in Brownlow’s own collection, which evidently wasn’t used for the new restoration of Casanova. Perhaps the restorers did not know of it, or else the 16mm print is too fragmentary (or not high enough quality) to incorporate into the 35mm material. (Actually, looking at the image captures side-by-side, I see that in fact the 16mm copy shows more information in the frame than the 35mm copy used for the Lichtig restoration. Was this taken from an earlier/better source than the 35mm?) Either way, it’s a shame that this—and any other colour-stencilled scenes that may have existed—do not now survive. (I’ve always thought that the opening credits—Casanova’s name lit-up like fireworks—would have at least been tinted, if not colour-stencilled. The scene uses footage from the nighttime firework display that, later in the film, is elaborately stencilled in colour. Wouldn’t this film show off how colourful it is from the very opening images?)

But is Casanova anything more than eye candy? What kind of film is it? Well, it isn’t quite a biopic, it isn’t quite a romantic melodrama, it isn’t quite a historical epic, it isn’t quite a comedy, it isn’t quite a fantasy. It’s a blend of all the above. It’s a picaresque, episodic adventure with various subplots tying together the lengthy (159 minutes) narrative. And despite being a “light” film, it isn’t without a kind of cumulative substance.

The heart of the film is Ivan Mosjoukine. He revels in his changes of costume, his multiple roles as lover, fighter, comedian, magician. And the film plays along, performing trickery of its own to help him make his escapes.

Early on, he frightens Menucci by performing a magic trick. Growing to enormous proportions, he puffs out into an absurd, leaping balloon in wizard’s costume—his face a bloated ball, tongue waggling from cavernous mouth. The film reveals the outlandish mechanics of the trick within the world on screen (his two female servants inflate him with hidden tubes), but also executes its own cinematic trick: for an in-camera dissolve hides how Casanova removes the skin-tight face mask that enables his wizardry. Mosjoukine even plays up this piece of subterfuge: at the end of the dissolve, he seems to shake off the effect of the transition. It’s as though he’s merged not just from a costume, but from the celluloid mechanics of the trick.

This scene is also emblematic of the number of jokes in the film. For despite the huge amount of money on show in its locations, sets, and costumes, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. From farcical scenes of disguise, elements of slapstick, to delicate moments of performance, Casanova is full of humour. Most of it is good-natured, but one crude element is the way the film uses Casanova’s black servant Djimi (Bouamerane). Though Djimi gets some good laughs by his reactions to Casanova’s behaviour, he’s also subject to several jokes based on the colour of his skin. He’s often treated like an animal, at one point even being made to chew meat from a bone like a dog. That the child is in blackface hardly helps these jokes land.

But there is also plenty of visual sophistication. Volkoff also uses some inventive montage and photography for many sequences. There is extensive use of mattes, masking, superimpositions, soft focus—as well as tinting, toning, and colour—to manipulate the images, creating atmosphere and mood. The camera is mobile (with some subtle and some dynamic tracking shots), placed at interesting angles (e.g. dug into the ground to film the horses leaping overhead in the chase sequence), and even handheld (for the carnival dancers).

A notable sequence involving all these elements is in the Austrian section, where Casanova is in his room at night. He paces towards the camera, which keeps him in close-up by tracking backwards. Women fill his mind, and the screen: superimposed all around his head. (Again, think how difficult this is, technically: each image of each woman filmed separately, then the multiply-exposed celluloid re-exposed for the scene with Mosjoukine in the centre.) He bats them away, as though they were really there—and they are really there in the frame, after all. Then he approaches the crucifix on the wall, the camera tracking forwards to frame it in close-up. Is the rogue adventurer about to pray? Cut 180° to Casanova, who stands before us as if in confession. But instead of praying, his eyes immediately dart away from our gaze. He then nonchalantly flicks off two fake beauty spots from his cheeks. It’s a strange moment of reflection before the camera, which has taken the spatial place of the crucifix in front of him. Is he self-conscious before us? Before the cross? He clasps his fist and pounds his chest. But if this seems like the start of some kind of private emotional outpouring, it is swiftly allayed. For his eyes once more dart to one side and he cocks his head: he’s heard something. Intercut with Casanova in his room, Volkoff shows a series of brief glimpses into another space. Each of these images—bare feet running across a floor, a chair falling over, hands raised in fear, boots advancing, two figures wrestling—appears in soft focus, the diffuse lighting making each appear tangibly out of reach; these are visual equivalents of muffled sounds. Only the last image, of Thérèse’s mouth opening to scream as hands reach for her throat, is in strong contrast and clear focus. For this image is the visual cue for the piercing sound of her scream. Casanova rushes in to save Thérèse from the Duke of Bayreuth.

This sequence has captivating visual appeal, and it points to the greater emotional attachment Casanova has for Thérèse—as does the elaborate tracking shots of them racing through the woodland roads, her narration appearing in superimposed titles over the passing forest. Casanova may be a rogue, but he also performs good deeds and is susceptible to real feeling. Earlier he has defended a beggar violinist against some rich drunks, and later he risks his life—and abandons his lover—for the sake of Thérèse. Their last scene together intercuts extended close-ups of their faces, Casanova slowly growing more teary-eyed. Mosjoukine’s performance in this shot is strange and beguiling: his eyes narrow just as the tears seem about to fall; it’s as though he’s both willing and curtailing his tears at the same time. It’s the one moment in the film where we get a glimpse of something deeper in his character.

On the theme of emotional tone, I must also discuss the new score for the film by Günter A. Buchwald. I first saw Casanova with an orchestral score by Georges Delerue, dating from 1985. Delerue treated the film as nothing more than a confection of pretty pictures: his music is repetitive, twee, and entirely without substance or interest. The Buchwald score is much more varied, inventive, and tonally adventurous. But I still don’t quite like it.

Buchwald’s score is for small orchestra, but he reserves the sound of this ensemble for the scenes of great drama or the beginning/conclusion of important sections of the film (e.g. the opening, the arrival in Russia, the return to Venice). In-between, the music has a more chamber-like sonority, with much use of the harpsichord. It follows the film’s incidental scenes with incidental music: frequent changes of gear, of mood, of timbre. Though Buchwald quotes various classical pieces (by Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Monteverdi), it keeps a sense of ironic detachment from the period of the film: this is neither a recreation of the sound-world of 1760s Europe, nor a recreation of the sound-world of 1920s France. (The original score for the film in 1927 was arranged by Fernand Heurter, and I can find absolutely no information about it at all.)

The result is that the score often feels (to me) rather meandering. It doesn’t help that the orchestra—especially the string section—sometimes struggles to keep together. (I am assuming this is a performance issue and not a deliberate compositional choice.) The score frequently demands the highest register of the strings, which taxes the players’ cohesion. Certain passages (most noteworthy in the emotional climax of the film, when Casanova says farewell to Thérèse) sound scratchy and thin. Then again, in his liner notes to the Blu-ray, Buchwald points out that he sought an almost atonal aspect for some scenes, such as those in Russia with Peter III, so perhaps the astringency I noticed in many places was a deliberate choice. The score was recorded in January 2021, and Buchwald writes that the orchestra was playing for the first time in a year—and doing so with masks and social distancing. These are hardly ideal conditions for sightreading and performing a new score, so perhaps this is also evident in the recording.

What’s missing for me in the music is any kind of sincere emotional engagement. One might argue that this is the film’s problem: it doesn’t have great emotional depth or resonance, so why should the score? But the film is consistently beautiful and beguiling, qualities this score often lacks—indeed, qualities it seems to eschew. Rather than tie the film’s episodic narrative together, the music emphasizes its discord. The score spends much of its time ironically underlining the action. It’s often spiky, acerbic. When it assumes the musical style of formal elegance (the dance themes for scenes in Austria or Russia), it does so ironically: undercutting the rhythm with deliberate slurs or dissonant harmonies. In many ways, it’s the opposite of the Delerue score. The latter smoothed over any sense of drama or tension, whereas Buchwald emphasizes every possible discord.

Just listen to the way he orchestrates the escape of Casanova and Thérèse from the inn in Austria: continuous snare drum; high, angsty strings; Casanova’s main theme rendered dissonant; even the lovers’ kiss is accompanied by a solo clarinet melody that is hardly a melody at all. Everything is unsettled, anxious, chromatically restless. Or in the last part of the film, when Casanova sings to the crowd in the carnival: here Buchwald gives the trombone the part of the voice, but the trombone deliberately slurs and bawls, while a disinterested rhythm shivers through the strings. An intertitle tells us the crowd is spellbound by the singer, but the music sets out to undo any spell he might cast over us. This is a score working against the spirit of the film.

Though Buchwald’s orchestra includes both a mandolin and harpsichord, it avoids citing much music of the film’s period setting in the 1760s (i.e. the late baroque and early classical era). The only piece that is played in its entirety is the opening movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto alla Rustica (in G Major, RV151). This is used for the gorgeous “dance of the swords” sequence, where Volkoff combines elaborate lighting and composition to frame the dance in silhouette and shadow behind screens or cast upon walls. But the piece of Vivaldi used for this four-minute sequence is barely a minute long, so Buchwald not only has to repeat the entire movement but play this “Presto” at a pace so sluggish that it takes nearly twice as long as intended. Thus, the original impetus and shape of the music is changed in a way that makes it less effective for the sequence in the film. There is no climax, no sense of shape that matches Volkoff’s complex montage. The dance, after all, becomes more provocative and enticing—the reaction shots of the male spectators becoming more regular, more intense. (Lest it be thought that using such a well-known work is detrimental, for its inclusion in Cinema Europe in 1995 this same sequence was accompanied by Carl Davis’s arrangement of the third movement of “La primavera” from Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni. It works perfectly.)

This Vivaldi movement is the only lengthy musical citation in the film, and I’d be tempted to say the only sincere citation. Most examples are very brief, sometimes just a few bars in length, and serve as punctuation marks—often ironic. Thus, the opening theme of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 (1878) appears in one of the climactic scenes in Russia, but no more of that piece is used again. It’s a kind of announcement of grandiloquent, romantic fate that the score has no interest in taking up and developing. Likewise, Buchwald quotes the Monty Norman/John Barry “James Bond theme” (1962-) for the moment when Casanova slides down a snowy slope to avoid his pursuers in Russia. I confess this moment made me writhe with displeasure. It struck me as emblematic of the way the score ironized the film more than it supported it. So too the way Buchwald uses Monteverdi’s opening toccata for L’Orfeo (1607) in the last section of the film. The delicious back-and-forth echo of sounds in this fanfare is transformed into the soundscape for a drunken tavern scene. Monteverdi’s rich major tones morph into the minor and slip out of rhythm; and the addition of a glockenspiel introduces a harsh, brittle sound that further destabilizes the music’s harmonic integrity.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that this is a cold score for a warm film. Casanova is a fresco of fabulous settings, of rococo costumes, of comedy and romance. I’ve always imagined it being accompanied by something equally filled with warmth and colour. It occurs to me now that the film is a successful imagining of late eighteenth-century drama in a way that Robert Wiene’s Der Rosenkavalier (1926) is an unsuccessful imagining. I mentioned in my review that Richard Strauss’s score is in every way superior to Wiene’s filmmaking; the music for Der Rosenkavalier deserves to accompany something better. What it deserves to accompany, in fact, is Casanova! Strauss provides the kind of emotional richness (and sheer sonic beauty) that’s lacking in Buchwald’s score. But I do appreciate that responses to music are very personal, so it may be that others delight in and savour Buchwald’s score much more than I do. It’s just that I’ve been waiting to see Casanova in its best quality for much of my adult life, and I wish I’d been truly moved. And I feel I could have been moved with a different score.

Despite my musical reservations, I’m immensely pleased that Casanova has finally received a release on Blu-ray. I hope that the next Mosjoukine film to receive full restorative treatment will be Tourjansky’s Michel Strogoff, another work restored by Renée Lichtig in the 1980s. The copy I have (digitized in the mists of time from an archival VHS) features an orchestral score by Amaury du Closel, but I suspect that any future release will substitute it for something else. Closel’s music is strong, though it ignores many of the clear music cues on screen (bells, trumpets) in a way that irked me when first I saw it: Tourjansky’s montage deserves music that really engages with it. I’m curious if Michel Strogoff can offer a more substantial emotional world than Casanova. I’d love to see it in a version that does it full justice. If it looks anything as good as Casanova, it’ll be a real treat.

Paul Cuff

Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928; Ger./In./UK; Franz Osten)

In 1924, a London-based lawyer called Himanshu Rai travelled to Munich. He had founded the Great Eastern Film Corporation and was hoping to join forces with European partners to make films inspired by tales from world religions. Rai met two brothers: Franz and Peter Osten, who together ran the firm Müncher Lichtspielkunst AG (Emelka). Rai and his Indian collaborators—scriptwriter Niranjan Pal and designer Devika Chaudhry—joined forces with the Ostens and their technicians and left for India. In 1925 they made Prem Sanya/The Light of Asia (1925), shot entirely in India using an entirely Indian cast. Its success in Europe encouraged Rai and Osten to team-up again, this time bringing in the support of the UK company British Instructional Films (BIF). BIF started life producing non-fiction films but by the mid-1920s they had begun making features: dramatic recreations of battles of the Great War. But the project they embarked on in 1927-28 was hoped to have a wider appeal. Described as “A Romance of India”, with a screenplay by William A. Burton based on a play by Pal, this film would again be shot in India with an all-Indian cast. Filming took place in and around Agra, with the Maharajah of Jaipur permitting the production to use the historic Mughal palaces as their setting. Set in the early seventeenth-century, the story offered ample opportunity to show-off the settings, costumes, and lore of historic India…

Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928; Ger./In./UK; Franz Osten)

I will let you know the whole story, since it retells the inspiration behind one of India’s most famous landmarks: the Taj Mahal. In Pal’s partially fictionalized version, the child princess Selima is found amid the wreckage of an ambush. Taken home by a potter, she is adopted and raised by his family. The adult Selima (Enakshi Rama Rau) becomes the object of infatuation of the potter’s son Shiraz (Himansu Rai). But she is spotted and kidnapped by a gang of slavers and eventually bought by an agent of Prince Khurram (Charu Roy). Shiraz finds his way to the city where Selima is now part of the Prince’s household, but is unable to intervene as she and the Prince fall in love. This in turn frustrates Dalia (Seeta Devi), a general’s daughter who had hoped to marry the Prince. With the help of her maidservant (Maya Devi), she forges a pass to let Shiraz into the palace—where he is caught with Selima. The Prince orders his execution “under the elephant’s foot” (yes, literally) but when he learns the truth of Dalia’s scheme—culminating in the poisoning of her maid to leave no trail of evidence—he lets Shiraz go. Selima’s true identity is discovered and—since she has royal blood—the Prince is now free to marry her. Eighteen years pass, and Shiraz—now blind—helplessly pines for Selima. When the latter dies and the Prince commissions a design for a monument in her memory, Shriaz’s model is chosen. The two men build the Taj Mahal. THE END.

Well, so much for the story. Being more a kind of extended fable, the characterization is not the most complex imaginable. So, what of the performers?

Let me start by saying that the least appealing aspect of this film is Himansu Rai’s performance. It’s as ineffectual as his character is weak and mopey. There’s no depth or intensity visible in his performance. He doesn’t move expressively, either with his body or with his face. He occasionally holds out his hands or stands still or drops his head a little. And it’s not as if he is restrained in the sense of naturalistic performance. He’s just giving us the basic markers of emotion: but not emotion itself.

Nor did I particularly like Enakshi Rama Rau as Selima. I wonder if this is in part because of the story and the limitations of how the screenplay deals with the cultural politics (I’ll come to this later). As the film never really challenges any of the authorities or institutions, what can Selima do but be demure and wait for external intervention to aid her? But even within this context, Rau’s performance doesn’t offer great range or expressivity. I think Osten’s direction must surely contribute to this. We get glimpses of Rau’s gorgeous eyes, but she spends so much of the film looking down, looking away, covering herself with a veil, that we never get to linger on her face and see her emotions.

This is not the case with Seeta Devi, whose performance as the scheming Dalia is by far the most engaging in the film. You can read the thoughts pass across her face, the emotions light up her eyes. The camera knows what to do with her, too: it gives us plenty of closer shots to show her expressions, her gestures of impatience, seduction, desire, anger. Devi is absolutely magnetic: not merely beautiful, but agile and demonstrative—she’s truly communicative on screen. It’s noteworthy that the film’s titular hero is not used as the face for the BFI’s poster, nor still the film’s leading lady. Instead, it is Seeta Devi who takes centre stage, and anyone looking at the re-release posters or the Blu-ray box would think that she plays the character called Shiraz. Devi was Anglo-Indian, born Renee Smith, and I noted when watching the film that she’s one of the few people on screen who I could lipread speaking English. Doing a little digging online (weirdly enough, on her French Wikipedia page), I find that Devi spoke neither Hindi nor Bengali—and that this was one of the reasons her career in India petered out swiftly after the arrival of sound.

As Prince Khurram, I found myself increasingly drawn in by the performance of Charu Roy. He is understated but in a much more successful way than with Rai or Rau. Roy has a great natural warmth on screen, and he radiates a quiet authority and sense of calm. His is not the most complex of characters (none of them are, to be fair) but he gives a very clear sense of personality, of status, of purpose. I wish Himansu Rai had even a tenth of Charu Roy’s on-screen warmth. Even the minor characters—the Prince’s chief guard, Dalia’s servant—are more expressive, memorable, convincing, than him.

I haven’t said anything much about Franz Osten’s direction. For much of the film, I wasn’t really thinking about it. Everything was neat, concise. But everything was dominated by the settings. The first portion of the film is all exteriors: Shiraz’s small village, the arid landscapes around it. Osten lets the setting do the talking, so much so that I felt a sense of detachment from what was going on in in the drama.

Even when we enter the city of Agra and the beautiful palace interiors and exteriors, the very formality of the surroundings dominated the tone of the drama. Everything is very neatly laid out, with plentiful use of shots that look through archways, down avenues, throughs doors and gates.

Only when the intrigue with Dalia got going did I start to be fully engaged. Here at last was a character with a bit more personality, more of a sense of a human being rather than a storybook figure (the poor potter, the abandoned princess, the noble prince). It is her actions that also seem to inspire Osten to be a bit more inventive. When Dalia forges the stamp on the pass for Shiraz, we see her in a mid-shot crouched by the chest with the official stamps. Osten cuts to what appears at first to be a blank screen. A second later, Dalia’s hand (we know it’s her hand because of the number of jewels it bears) appears slowly from left of frame, passing the document to another hand that appears from the right. Cut to a close-up of Shiraz, waiting at the wall to receive the letter. It is silence, I think, that makes the shot of the hands so startling. The transition is purely visual, and although it offers narrative continuity (the document being forged, the document being transported, the document being delivered), visually the out-of-focus background of a white wall is a stark disruption from the last shot of a dark interior space. Without any kind of background sound—even the gentle hiss of an unoccupied soundtrack—the cut to the white space is startling. Later in the film, Dalia’s thought process is shown through superimposition: we see the document again, the hands, the destination, the threat of discovery. All this is indicative of the more dramatic elements of the story: it is Dalia who tries to change events, to rely on her own wit rather than the will of Allah or the whims of the Prince. Thus Osten must make more of her, more of her agency. When she is removed from the film, the remainder of the story once more becomes a rather uninvolving series of pictures.

This brings me to my major reservation about the film. The film deliberately refuses to interrogate the world it shows us, the world whose cultural/political shape it relies on as the basis of its story. If the setting in seventeenth-century India is meant to avoid the awkwardness of contemporary, twentieth-century history (i.e. the British!), then it also creates other kinds of cultural awkwardness. In the first place, we are presumably meant to be as outraged as Shiraz that Selima has been enslaved, but the film never interrogates slavery—it cannot, since the Prince himself is the chief slaveowner of the state and buys Selima as one among many young female slaves. Indeed, Shiraz himself—at the slave market—shouts that Selima should not be sold because she has been kidnapped, not that slavery itself is an outrage. (He offers no opinion on any of the other poor wretches up for sale.) What’s more, when Selima refuses to give herself (i.e. her body) to the Prince, he replies that he has power enough to force her to take what he wants. The threat of rape is glossed over, as is the implication that that’s how the Prince has operated and continues to operate. The film doesn’t seek to find any complexity or trouble with the way this world works, nor do its main characters: Selima isn’t shocked or defensive with this threat, but simply says that whatever else may be taken, her heart cannot. And the Prince still is prepared to use great cruelty: to have the elephant crush Shiraz to death for not explaining himself, then (eighteen years later) to have Shiraz blinded with a spike so he can’t out-do his design for the Taj Mahal. Each time he relents, but clearly he remains prepared to use violence. His goodness is (albeit vaguely) emphasized by others in their descriptions of him (he is liked by his people etc). But he’s a “good” prince who practices slavery and threatens rape, torture, and death. In short, he should be a more ambiguous, complex character than the film is prepared or able to make him.

Neither does the film show interest in interrogating Shiraz’s actions. After all, Shiraz abandons his poor family to chase after Selima; he doesn’t say goodbye, nor does he ever send word to say what happened to him or to her. Nor does the film question why Shiraz turns down the money offered him by the Prince when he proves Selima’s royal status. Might he not send something back to support his family in his home village? Indeed, the film is populated by characters who passively accept what happens to them. Selima herself is lucky enough that she likes her enslaver, who is (when not torturing or enslaving) kind. Only Dalia has any kind of interest in upsetting the status quo, but she herself is prepared to murder her servant to save her own skin. Dalia is the only character apart from the Prince who wants to exert agency, but even she is trapped within the patriarchal order that can dispose of her on a whim. (She is exiled by the Prince, who says he never wants to see her face again; the film duly complies.) The film isn’t interested in challenging any of the systems it depicts, neither the slavery nor the royal autocracy that are essential elements of the world on screen.

The score for the 2017 restoration of Shiraz is by Anoushka Shankar, with a mixture of Indian and western instruments. (The notes also say that the music was arranged and orchestrated by two others, Danny Keane and Julian Hepple, so I’d be curious to know how this was organized. “Arranged and orchestrated by” is a common credit for scores from the 1920s, but for a new score it is much less so.) The music is absolutely sympathetic to the setting, and I enjoyed how it emphasized subtle elements of rhythm on screen without attempting to mimic everything that was happening. That said, the way the music floats over the images increased my sense of detachment from the drama for a good chunk of the film—but this is far more the film’s doing than the score’s. I didn’t even mind the presence of some chanting during the climactic scene with the elephant. Normally, I dislike voices in scores for silent films. And the fact that I took against the Nitin Sawhney score for Osten’s next Indian film, A Throw of Dice (1929), for the very reason that he includes an irritating trope of whispering voices in the soundtrack, means that I was surprised that I wasn’t bothered by the voices in the score for Shiraz. What makes the different is that Sawhney uses voices in a kind of sonic superimposition over the orchestra: it is a sound element that can only exist via the digital manipulation of volume and balance. This struck me as being entirely alien to the period, turning a score that could be performed live and have a life within a cinema into a soundtrack for DVD. This is a silent film, damn it, not a soundtracked one. But the voices in Shiraz are part of the live performance of the score. They sound from within the orchestra, not from an imposed wash of acoustic sound. While not exactly being a “period” score, it doesn’t deliberately emphasize acoustic aspects that could only derive from the present.

I enjoyed Shiraz, more so as it went along. And while I have reservations about some of the performances and the lack of depth in its story, it is nevertheless a very beautiful film to look at. Much of the restoration derives from the original 35mm negative and looks stunning. You’ll struggle to find a sharper-looking print of a film from this era. I makes me want to revisit the other films produced by this Indian-European collaboration. A Throw of Dice is at least on DVD, but Prem Sanya can still only be seen in off-air copies derived from its broadcast on ARTE from 2001. Nevertheless, I promise to seek out and comment in the future…

Paul Cuff

Anna Boleyn (1920; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

By the start of the 1920s, Ernst Lubitsch was not yet thirty years old and he stood at the top of the list of German directors. He was working with extraordinary speed and skill, producing seven films in 1919 and a further five in 1920. He was making shorter comedies, longer fantasies, historical epics. One month, he was working with a small cast on location in the Alps. The next month, he was constructing elaborate sets in the studio, or herding hundreds of extras through parkland. He was trying his hand at everything—and succeeding. In July 1920, he embarked on “A historical drama in six acts”. The script was by his regular collaborators Hanns Kräly and Norbert Falk, the cast was led by Emil Jannings and Henny Porten—both of whom had starred in Lubitsch’s various productions of the last year. With the aid of UFA’s clout, enormous sets—a tournament ground, palatial exteriors, half a cathedral—were constructed in Berlin-Tempelhof. Kurt Richter and Ferdinand Bellan took charge of the designs, Hans Poelzig the props, Ali Hubert the costumes. Four thousand extras—mostly unemployed—were gathered to populate the scenes. The budget was 8,500,000DM. We can glimpse Lubitsch on set thanks to the trade press, which followed this huge production with interest. Thus can we see him, shirtsleeves rolled up in the summer heat, standing on a pile of timber, presiding over the rising walls of his sets. And there he is, observing the arrival of Friedrich Ebert—President of Germany; Jannings and Porten gather for a photo, but Lubitsch keeps his eyes on the volatile crowd he has assembled—will they start a riot? (Kreimeier, The Ufa Story, 58-59) Evidently, Weimar politics is seething at the fringes of this film; but the film itself, its vision of distant history, foreign history—what lies therein?

Anna Boleyn (1920; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

Opening titles. The colour is c.1920 green and the font is c.1530 gothic.

We are at sea. A marvellous close-up: Anna bobs up into frame, then down out of it again. The motion of the sea is comic, but unsettling. The cabin throws Anna around, has her at its mercy. (And of course the first close-up detaches Anna’s head from her body, something that prefigures her fate; it contains the beheading that the last scene of the film denies us.)

Henry Norris greets her at Dover. We are ashore, with fine sets, fine crowds, glimpses of masts. The courtyard of the Norfolks’s house is full of texture, the house with paintings. Anna is kissing Henry Norris, who dashes off, leaving her at the window, still happy and untroubled.

At court, chez Queen Catherine and Princess Marie. A room of stern women, impeccably dressed. They await the King, the prospect of whom produces looks of fear on the women’s faces.

Henry VIII: Emil Jannings, cutting up a great slab of meat. (I thought of making a joke about this first appearance of a “giant ham” on screen, but decided against it; you can make your own.) And this is as perfect a piece of casting as you could want. As a performer, Jannings is ambition personified, appetite exteriorized. He’s utterly uninhibited. Look at how well fitted he is to this costume, to this part. Look at him drink from that enormous flagon of ale. Look at him feed his jester. (Paul Biensfeldt plays sidekick to Jannings here, as he does in the same way in Das Weib des Pharao; he’s all camp obeisance, playful subservience.) See the look of angry boredom that comes on his face to hear of the queen. And look at the enormous pie, out of which comes a white-clad wench for Henry to carry off.

The throne room is coldly formal. Banners, halberds, windows shaped like blades. The king must be summoned. The jester does his part, singing a comic song about poor Catherine (as Henry kisses his pie-wench). Biensfeldt has a marvellous turn, his face going from smug self-satisfaction at his witty song to mortal terror as the king takes the joke badly. He’s whipped and left whimpering as Henry storms out.

Enter the king into the queen’s room. He rolls his eyes at her chastisement, but then sees the tail of a dress caught in a door: it is Anna. He opens the door. Anna retreats, bows. The king looks over his shoulder. The roomful of ladies-in-waiting look back at him. He slams shut the massive door. He’s all smiles, now, as he approaches Anna—and Anna can’t help but smile a little, too. Nor can we, as Henry flirts with her, for Jannings’ performance is so winningly—how to put it?—apparent. It’s very Lubitsch, in fact, this transparency of desire, this delight in open expression of appetite. “Is the lady afraid of me?” She demurs. “You won’t run away from me again, then?” Henry kisses her hand, opens the door for her to leave. “My niece”, Norfolk explains. “A beautiful niece”, says Henry. Lubitsch ends the scene with black masking that descends from the top of the frame. It’s like the camera itself is winking. What can I say, other than that the scene makes me smile, that Jannings makes me smile, and that a “historical drama” film that can make you smile like this has something about it?

Exterior scenes. Henry with the queen but his eyes are roving elsewhere. Look at him strum his knee impatiently. Anna plays ball in the park. She accidentally hits the ball too far: it hits Henry, who comes over. “You would have lost your head— —if it wasn’t so beautiful”. Note the double extended hyphen. I’ve talked about punctuation in silent titles before, and here is another example of the way it functions to emphasize the intonation of speech we cannot hear. Henry starts with a threat, only to offer a complement. It’s the whole film in a sentence, in a grammatical pause. Henry is a comic flirt and a deadly threat. His smile carries this double meaning. So Henry plays ball with Anna. The ball goes into a bush. Anna runs to the bush, Henry too. (And pause here to observe how beautiful the greenery looks on screen: bright, eye-popping detail of sunlight amid the dark leaves.) The king steals a kiss. (Just now, the jester pops up from the bushes as a witness. He functions for the film as he does in court: to appear and offer an ironic commentary. Here his knowing look is a kind of nod to the audience, as if to say: “we all know what’s afoot here!”) The pair emerge; the queen faints; Anna is shunned.

Norris writes to Anna that he will come to her that night, in a black cloak. So Anna waits. A black-cloaked figure climbs in through a window. It’s the king! Anna recoils. Henry’s smile is eager but threatening. (Look how he’s framed: the sculpture around the recess is of fruit. You can see a pear and grapes in the corner of the frame. It’s a visual nod to hunger, appetite.) Anna pushes him away. The king purses. He will have her, he says, even if it costs him his crown. Norris sees the king slink away, and though Anna begs him to stay he runs away. Norris’s readiness to think ill of her goes against him. Anna takes against him, says all she’d have to do to be queen of England is say: “Ja!”

The king tries to write a love letter but cannot get past the first line. He screws up the paper and storms out. When we next see his handwriting, it is a letter to Catherine saying that he will divorce her. The royal couple argues. He thrashes the table. The queen sees Anna, motions her away. I wish Henny Porten were better able to move me. For despite the pressure from the King and her uncle—their faces either side of her shown in an uncomfortably close masked shot—her performance doesn’t win my heart. But perhaps it isn’t all her fault. Does Lubitsch give her enough time alone on screen? Does he give her an extended close-up? She needs time alone on screen to show a subtler, deeper range of emotion. Without this, she must endlessly swoon, bow her head, close her eyes, go limp. But these are theatrical devices. They might catch my attention in the back rows, but on film they are indicators of emotion, not emotion itself. She is told she must take the crown, that her duty is to provide England with an heir to the throne.

A sinister, beaky priest announces the divorce. But a fatter priest, emissary of the Pope, comes to spoil Henry’s plan. Henry is comically bored by Catherine’s entreaties (he leans back in his chair, in splendid isolation, isolated further by the circular masking). And he stands proud, defiant, against the anxious faces of the court.

Norris hears the news. It is too late. (And neither his performance nor Polten’s in their shared, brief moment of mutual grief are moving—and this is a problem for the film.)

The wedding day. Guards ensure the crowd cheers. Huge castle walls. Sinister forests of pikes. It’s a threateningly full world on screen. As the King descends, the crowd cheers—then falls silent for Anna. The soldiers motion. The crowd cheers. Henry raises an eyebrow in triumph and turns to Anna: “See how they cheer you?” It’s another moment when we delight in the performance, here a double kind of performance—for the king knows as well as us, as Anna must too, that he’s lying through his teeth. And we can admire the crowds, and the jumble of houses, the cobbled streets, the sunlight and shadow. Look how Lubitsch frames the approach to the cathedral, and the interior itself: it’s painterly, symmetrical, austere. A riot breaks out as the wedding takes place. Princess Marie enters and shouts abuse at the new queen.

Anna is unhappy, and she carries her visible distress into the wedding feast. Henry eats, then looks to his bride and whispers something in her ear. There is no title to spell it out, but the next scene takes place in the bedroom. In fact, the bed we first cut to is Norris’s. He has been wounded in the riot, but now the jester brings a gift to him and says that Queen Anna wishes him a speedy recovery. Only after this glimpse of the bed she would rather share does Lubitsch cut back to the bed Anna is obliged to occupy: the King’s. Henry awaits. He’s all smiles. He asks her if she’s happy. “After all, I’m the Queen of England”, she says. But she looks terrified. We know why, and the awfulness of what she must go through is implied well enough. But I don’t think it’s reticence or the worry with tone that prevents Lubitsch going further. There are no telling close-ups of Anna or Henry: their scene plays out a single mid shot, and Henny Porten gives us all the signals of distress. But it’s not as affecting, nor as chilling, a scene as it might be, should be, and it’s the limitations of the film—of Lubitsch, at this point in time, in this genre—that make it so.

The next day, Henry flirts with Anna in front of his male courtiers by approaching her with a dagger and surreptitiously cutting her thread as she works on her needlework. They laugh at her surprise, but it’s a marvellously sinister scene. Smeaton reads a poem to Anna; the jester gurns in disgust; the king kicks him aside. Norris enters but Henry bids him leave. Smeaton observes Anna’s look toward Norris, and the jester warns Anna to beware of Smeaton.

Outside, Smeaton tempts the king to hold a spring festival to lift his spirits. The king kicks the ground, until the idea of women in scanty costumes seems to appeal. His face contorts into a comically grotesque grin. And when the festival takes place, the king amuses himself with one of the female dancers. Smeaton tries to seduce the queen, who faints and is carried back by the king (who has unceremoniously dumped his dancer to the floor).

Anna is pregnant, and the look on Henry’s face when he is told is one of immense self-satisfaction. (But even while all this is going on, I feel the film has already played its hand. It has nothing more to add to what’s already been shown. The look and feel are of an impeccable, traditional staging. It’s what you might see on stage, or at the opera, but without the benefit of singing. If only this film was given an orchestral score for its Blu-ray/DVD release. The piano score is entirely inadequate to the scale of the production. More elaborate music would surely help.)

But… it’s “——— ein Mädchen ———” You thought the double extended hyphen was significant? Well check out these bad boys: no less than six double extended hyphens! Now that’s what I call emphasis. It’s a nice little detail amid the extraordinary scenes around it: the crowds, the exteriors overlooked by enormous place walls. The design is simply exquisite: everything looks so real, so weighty, so textured. But the king is furious at the news of a girl, and orders the cheering crowds to be sent to the devil. Anna herself swoons at the king’s reaction, swoons in a way that is entirely gestural, superficial, unmoving. She doesn’t get to have any fun. Unlike Emil Jannings, whom we see now flirting with a lady-in-waiting, Lady Jane, then being gloved and booted by four servants simultaneously (a delightful image, the king spreadeagled, the servants bustling around him). And the king leaves his child to cry while he flirts with lady Jane again. Anna is goaded by her uncle, who says she must fight to maintain her position.

The hunt. Wide open spaces, horses everywhere. (But not a patch on the menace, the strangeness of the hunting scene in Der Student von Prag (1913).) The king at rest. The woods are so beautifully photographed, it’s a shame the drama itself is less enticing. Anna encounters Jane, whom the king believed her to be when she kissed him.

Smeaton goads Norris before the king, and then sings a taunting song before them both. Norris fights Smeaton, but Smeaton takes his revenge by telling the king of Norris’s love for Anna—and lying to say that they are still lovers. The King goes to look at his infant and asks Jane if the child bears him any resemblance. Anna breaks the pair up just as Henry is getting touchy-feely with Jane, but Jane says she’s only serving her as Anna served Catherine. (The film makes Jane the pushy, manipulative, ambitious counterpart to the innocent Anna.)

A joust, and yet more fabulous set design: the jousting courtyard a kind of pit overlooked from all sides by huge galleries. There is a plot to kill Norris in the joust, and Anna’s reaction to his being struck convinces the king of her guilt. It’s all very… unmoving, uninvolving.

So Henry takes up with Jane, and makes her uncle assist in getting Anna to confess her guilt. Her uncle, it should be said, is fantastically sinister: a permanent scowl, narrowed eyes, lank greying hair. At the trial, Smeaton accidentally indicts himself and is taken away for torture. There’s a brilliant shot, looking down a dark corridor, as Smeaton is led to the chamber: the huge doors open, and his destination is illuminated, as are all the tools of torture on the wall. Smeaton confesses and is then dragged away. And when Anna demands Smeaton confess before her, her own doors are flung open to reveal the hanging body of Smeaton at the back of the scene. These two moments—of the torture doors opening, and now of Anna’s doors revealed the hanged man—are the most concise, chilling moments in the film. There should be more of them!

Anna awaits her fate. She swoons, falls into the arms of a priest, bangs at the doors. And it’s all less moving than those two shots of Smeaton’s torture and death. Anna is led away by men in black hoods, and the film ends as she walks off screen to her the block. ENDE.

Reviewing this film was a strange experience. I had seen it once, many years ago, and never felt a particular urge to revisit it. But I remembered Jannings’ smile, that hungry smile, which spelled desire and fortune and death all in one. It wasn’t until I found myself invited onto the wonderful How Would Lubitsch Do It? podcast that I returned to the film, and it was both a pleasant surprise and a mild disappointment. A pleasant surprise because Jannings’ smile was still there waiting for me, and a mild disappointment because I had forgotten what a trudge are large portions of the film.

What’s lacking—I feel, now—is an emotional vent for the film’s melodrama. Preparing for the podcast, I relistened to Donizetti’s Anna Bolena (1830). The main protagonists—Anne, Henry, Jane (Anna, Enrico, Giovanna in the Italian)—undergo the same historical crisis as in Lubitsch’s film. Anna is likewise an innocent victim of scheming, though Jane is a slightly more complex character in the opera. And Henry is given much less time in the limelight, and (unlike Jannings) he cannot raise a laugh—even an ambiguous one. The setting of Act 3, scene 3 (the last in the opera), is the Tower of London. Outside is the noise of crowds cheering King Henry and his new bride, Jane Seymour. Inside, Anna appears. She is in a state of delusion, imagining that today is her wedding day to the King, and that the cheering is for their marriage. It’s a scene of extraordinary coloratura singing, one in which all the pent-up rage, fear, and longing pours out of Anna and fills the auditorium. Where is there anything like this in Lubitsch’s film?

This question reminded me of something that Andrew Britton wrote about melodrama and “the woman’s film” (“A New Servitude”, 24-63). He describes the mode of such films: dramas centred on women, where “the excess of the heroine’s intensity” becomes the dominant subject (37). Thus, he draws a direct comparison between film melodrama and the historical operas of Donizetti. “[T]he metaphor of persecution” in film melodrama is a direct inheritor of “the classical operatic theme of the heroine’s decline into madness and delusion”:

the echoes of the convention of the ‘mad scene’ are especially pronounced in D.W. Griffith’s melodramas with Lillian Gish, which are in themselves one of Hollywood’s main links to the nineteenth century. Gish’s hysteria in the closet in Broken Blossoms (1919) and the baptism of the dying child in Way Down East (1920) are, in effect, mad scenes, and in the famous sequence with the bouquet of flowers in A Woman of Affairs (1928), the convention passes from Gish to Garbo. (39)

All of which is to say that this “mad scene”—per Donizetti or Griffith—is precisely what’s missing from Lubitsch’s film. Lubitsch doesn’t give Henny Porten the scope accorded to Gish by Griffith. Porten clearly had a wider range of performance than shown in Anna Boleyn. In Lubitsch’s Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920), filmed within the same year as Anna Boleyn, Porten plays two sisters—Gretel and Liesel—and this dual role offers her far more scope to show off her range. She’s by turns exuberant, clever, subtle, violent—and always funny, always eye-catching. It’s a more “operatic” performance in many ways than in Anna Boleyn (albeit more Rossinian farce than Donizettian tragedy), but the exaggerated comedy style of the film provides ample frame for this to work. Lubitsch was clearly more successful in producing emotion in comedy than in drama.

If this is obvious to us now (just as the comparison between Lubitsch and Griffith seems ill-conceived), it was not in 1920. With its multimillion budget, Anna Boleyn was the kind of prestige historical drama with which Germany might rival the Hollywood productions of the period (see Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 70). Oddly enough, the history depicted was itself a source of debate in the German press. From some quarters, there was controversy at the idea of putting so much money into the depiction of non-German history on screen. Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote that German films should concentrate on German history and myth (e.g. his own Der Student von Prag). But Lubitsch wrote back in the press, saying that “The history of all nations belongs to the world!” (qtd in Hake, Passions and Deceptions, 123). Quality was what mattered, and a German film of this scale could hold its own on the international market. Whatever their opinions of the film, the domestic press was agreed that Anna Boleyn set down a new standard for the scale of German cinema.

Indeed, it was precisely this sense of scale and quality that led to Lubitsch being called “The Griffith of Europe” in the US (Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 71). Anna Boleyn was duly imported and retitled “Deception” for its North American release. The reviews highlight many of the themes I touched on above. “As entertainment it is slow going”, said a critic in Variety, “but as a vivid historical document it is valuable.” If the picture “dragged”, the performances made it worthwhile:

Emil Jannings (an American, by the way, who has studied under Rinehardt [sic] in Berlin), gave an amazingly capable portrait of the loose, merry, sensual Henry. Than his performance, nothing better has ever graced the screen. Equally effective was Henny Porten. The first view of her reveals a woman without much claim to beauty, but the distinction and power of her portrayal get to you. It is not her fault that she has not epitomized Anne Boleyn as her co-star has the king. The sympathy here is thrown to Anne. History’s record hardly Indicates she deserved it.  (Leed., “Deception”, 40)

Aside from the remarkable claim that Jannings was American(!), and the casual insult thrown at Henny Porten, you can sense the same reservations viewers today have about the film. Jannings has character and material to get his teeth into; Porten does not. More pertinent in the Variety review is the subsequent comment about the film’s likely commercial fate: “Its success in anything but first run houses in larger towns is doubtful” (ibid., 40). This prediction proved accurate. In the wake of the Great War, various groups were campaigning against the presence of German films on American screens. Variety mentions that “Passion” (i.e. Madame DuBarry, 1919) and “Deception” went down well better when “no mention was made that these films were made in Germany” (10 June 1921, p. 33). But even this was not enough to save them outside the big cities. Even those German films that proved a “hit in New York” still “flopped in out-of-town territory”—“Deception” included (Variety, 25 November 1921, p. 44). But the film still made an impact in influential places. As of 1924, “Deception” was one of Mary Pickford’s ten favourite films (Howe, “Mary Pickford’s Favorite Stars and Films”, 29). And it would be Pickford who was instrumental in luring Lubitsch to Hollywood…

It is a great irony of Lubitsch’s career that the films that convinced Hollywood of his worth—Carmen, Madame DuBarry, Anna Boleyn, Das Weib des Pharao—are among the least known, the least liked now. Of the little that is written on Anna Boleyn, most of it is devoted to context rather than text (e.g. Hake, Passions and Deceptions, 114-38). Historians write around a film when they have no interest in diving into a film.

Would better music help? And what of the original score from 1920? The DVD/Blu-ray features the 2006 piano accompaniment by Javier Pérez de Azpeitia, which (at least when experienced at home) lacks the presence and scale of the film. In 1920, there was an orchestral score by Hans Landsberger. Landsberger had written the music for Der Golem (1920) earlier that year, which had been greatly praised in the press. It was not an assemblage of existing music, but an original score. “If you have heard Der Golem with this music by Landsberger”, a contemporary said, “you can no longer imagine it with any other.” Landsberger created “striking and memorable” themes for the main characters, using them individually or in counterpoint like contrasting leitmotivs. The reviewer praises Landsberger’s “original” orchestration, his “melodic richness and unerring way of building up dramaturgical tensions” (“Der Golem”, 1-2). This score was reconstructed and performed (and possibly recorded) in 2021, which sadly postdates the (re)issue of the film on Blu-ray in both Germany and the UK. Maddening! Why can’t companies wait a few months for better elements to become available?

Given the success of Landsberger’s music for Der Golem, it’s surprising that I cannot find any contemporary press review that discusses his work for Anna Boleyn. Neither the short reviews in Vorwärts (“Filmschau Anna Boleyn”, 4) or Vossische Zeitung (My., “Anna Boleyn”, 4), nor the much longer pieces in Film-Kurier (L.K.F. “Anna Boleyn”, 1-2) and Das Tage-Buch (Pinthus, “Aus dem Tage-Buch”, 1634-36) so much as mention the composer’s name. The Film-Kurier piece even lists members of the audience—politicians, figures from the arts and film (including Pola Negri)—to emphasize the scale of the gala premiere, but still doesn’t mention the presence of the orchestra or music. Curious, and disappointing. Such is the lack of information on the music, I have no idea if it survives in any form whatsoever. I’d love to hear it and see if it makes a difference to the film.

For its release as “Deception”, Hugo Riesenfeld assembled another score, most likely a compilation rather than an original work. (I note, in passing, the existence of another opera, Saint-Saëns’ Henry VIII (1883), that shares much the same plot as Lubitsch’s film. I have listened to three different versions of this, including a recent reconstruction of the original, longer version of the score—but I still find it a little dull. Nevertheless, it would be a possible source of musical borrowing for a contemporary film composer.) Whatever its nature, the score for “Deception” goes without detailed mention in the press. In Variety, adverts for the first run of screenings in New York say that Riesenfeld “is to stage a special show to precede the film” (29 April 1921, p. 44), which suggests one of the many theatrical embellishments meted out to films for their prestigious first run. (For its US premiere, Das Cabinet der Doctor Caligari (1920) had its narrative reframed by scenes with dialogue performed before/after the film.)

How far could a good orchestral score save Anna Boleyn from its own dramatic limitations? The beauties of Eduard Künneke’s music for Das Weib des Pharao didn’t make me like that film any more—indeed, it tended to exacerbate the deficiencies of the drama. Perhaps no-one mentioned the Landsberger score for Anna Boleyn because it was a dud? Maybe one day it will be unearthed, and we will have the chance to judge for ourselves. It will be some years before I have an urge to watch Anna Boleyn again, but a new score would make me revisit it sooner…

Paul Cuff

References

“Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam: Ufa-Palast am Zoo”, Film-Kurier (30 October 1920), pp. 1-2

“Filmschau Anna Boleyn”, Vorwärts 64 (16 December 1920), p. 4.

Andrew Britton, “A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film” (1992), in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne States UP, 2009), 24-63.

Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

L.K.F. “Anna Boleyn: Die Festvorstellung im Ufa-Palast am Zoo”, Film-Kurier (15 December 1920), pp. 1-2.

Sabine Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton UP, 1992).

Herbert Howe, “Mary Pickford’s Favorite Stars and Films”, Photoplay 25.2(January 1924), pp. 28-29, 105.

Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, trans. Robert & Rita Kimber (California UP, 1999).

Leed., “Deception”, Variety (21 April 1921), p. 40.

My., “Anna Boleyn”, Vossische Zeitung 610 (15 December 1920), p. 4. NOT ISSUE 612, 16 DEC

Pinthus, “Aus dem Tage-Buch, Anna Boleyn”, Das Tage-Buch 51 (31 December 1920), pp. 1634-36.

The Three Musketeers (1921; US; Fred Niblo)

Don’t make this film! That was the advice of exhibitors, producers, and advertisers to Douglas Fairbanks when he mooted the idea of making a costume picture. He asked around his friends and peers, figures in the studios, and even commissioned a survey to get a wider sense of popular opinion. Everyone said no. “Having made sure I was wrong,” Fairbanks later wrote, “I went ahead” (qtd in Goessel, The First King of Hollywood, 257). The film was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), and Fairbanks pulled out all the stops to ensure his production matched the scale and sweep of the original tale. Lavish sets, big crowds, gorgeous costumes, plentiful stunts… The total production costs were almost $750,000—a staggering sum for 1921. But the film was a huge success and reeled in $1,300,000 to Fairbanks’s company, as well as large profits to United Artists and any number of exhibitors who had booked the film. The success of the film encouraged Fairbanks to make even bigger costume films. The decade saw him embark on the huge productions like Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), films which dwarf even the scale of The Three Musketeers. So how does the latter rank alongside Fairbanks’s other swashbuckling films of these years?

Rather well, I think—but with some reservations. The film was directed by Fred Niblo, and in visual terms it feels rather safe and stolid. Fairbanks spends the film leaping, dancing, skipping, and hurling himself about the sets. But the camera barely moves, barely even dares offer anything in the way of dynamic editing. It’s as though Niblo is afraid of losing sight of the bigness of the sets, or of any kind of visual movement detracting from the movement of the performers.

Niblo wasn’t known for his imagination, even in his earlier films. Kevin Brownlow writes that “Niblo’s style was usually lifeless”, producing “his usual series of cardboard pictures”—as evidenced in the Fairbanks vehicle The Mark of Zorro (1920) (The Parade’s Gone By…, 414). Only in the interior scenes with the various courtly intriguers—Richelieu, Queen Anne, King Louis—does Niblo offer closer shots, details that develop character or situation. (For example, Richelieu is seen petting cats, and we later get close-ups of his hand pawing/clawing at the arm of his chair, much like a cat plucks at a piece of carpet.) But the photography is strong, and there are some lovely exterior scenes in the countryside. Niblo gives us a good number of vistas down tree-lined roads, and you sense the scale of the journeys—the distances—between D’Artagnan’s home in Gascony, the city of Paris, and the remote ports of France and England.

And even if I have reservations about the direction, that’s not why we’re watching The Three Musketeers. It’s Fairbanks who is the life and soul and purpose of this film. I couldn’t wait for him to appear (the opening scenes setting up the intrigue are very stilted and slow). And as soon as he does—sat legs akimbo on the floor, listening to his father’s tales of Paris—I’m grinning as he grins, and marvelling at everything he does. He makes even the simplest actions look balletic, and the most complex feats of strength look simple. He leaps onto and off horses, backwards and forwards; he jumps up walls, climbs over rooftops, jumps from battlements, swings from windows, slides down bannisters—and all with elegance, with style, with joy.

We are told early on that he’s been taught to do everything with pride, to accept no defeat, to fight back at every opportunity. And so he does, crossing swords first with the Cardinal’s guard Rochefort, then with the Musketeers, then (alongside the Musketeers) with the rest of the Cardinal’s men. Look at the way he evades the latter, first by hurling himself around with sword in hand, then by sheer pace. When he runs from a mob of them in once scene, he skips in glee when he knows they can’t catch him. It’s such a lovely detail, and makes us marvel not merely at his physical prowess but the lightness with which he uses it.

I must also mention Fairbanks’s moustache. This was the film that inspired him to grow it, and he kept it for the rest of his life. It gives him a more continental look, but it also makes his face more complex, more interesting. It’s like a punctuation mark or accent for his smile. The film doesn’t offer that many close-ups of him, but there is one gesture that he makes several times in the film. It’s when D’Artagnan senses something is awry, or that he’s scented a clue to the intrigue. He rubs his nose on one side, as if to suggest he’s got a sniff of something interesting. I don’t think it quite works, and it’s an awkward equivalent of something that could be done by or with a close-up. It’s not as subtle a trait as used in The Thief of Bagdad. There, Ahmed (Fairbanks’s character) makes a clasping gesture with his hand to signal desire. The gesture is used to signal his urge to steal purses etc, but then—in a brilliant touch—to signal his desire for the Princess. But Raoul Walsh frames the gesture much more convincingly than Niblo does its equivalent in The Three Musketeers. There’s also a striking visual equivalent for the olfactory sense suggested by the gesture in the earlier film. In The Thief of Bagdad, when Ahmed smells freshly-baked bread, Walsh cuts via a focus pull from Fairbanks to the loaf of bread. It’s like a different sense takes over from the visual until the visual can reassert the reality of the scene to reveal the source of the smell. It’s such a lovely moment, and there isn’t anything as sophisticated or visually inventive in The Three Musketeers.

Beyond the more daring tone of The Gaucho (1927), Fairbanks’s on-screen involvement with women tends to be more comic, innocent, and flirtatious than sexual. His romantic gestures—kneeling, spreading wide his arms, pressing hands to heart—are earnest, old-fashioned; even a kiss is a rarity. In The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan falls for Constance Bonacieux (Marguerite De La Motte). The way it’s done is charming: she drops her ball of thread, and he picks it up. From two different directions across town, they wend their way toward each other, following the thread. But she snips it off, and he loses track of her. Then, when he finds her again, he is looking for lodging. Two neighbouring houses have signs offering accommodation. Constance goes first in to one house, so D’Artagnan bounds up to the door; but then Constance goes into the next one, then back again. What to do? Bold and direct, D’Artagnan simply asks her which house she lives in—and goes in. It’s a lovely sequence, and its tone is comic, the romance having a rather childlike element. Later on, when D’Artagnan chases after Constance in the palace, Captain de Tréville leads him by the ear back to the King: Fairbanks is a naughty child, whose knees we then see tremble as he is presented to King Louis.

Elsewhere in the film, the sexual politics of the novel are elided or softened. (Care was certainly required to make the source material acceptable to the censors, but you sense that Fairbanks wasn’t interested in romantic melodrama so much as adventure.) Milady de Winter (Barbara La Marr) and D’Artagnan exchange flirtatious glances early in the film, and D’Artagnan will eventually surprise her in bed in order to retrieve the diamond broach she has stolen from the Queen—but (unlike in the novel) they never get involved. Even the affair between the Duke of Buckingham (Thomas Holding) and Queen Anne (Mary MacLaren) is remarkably chaste. King Louis himself (Adolphe Menjou) is jealous of the Queen’s private affair, but his jealousy is not emotionally complex (and hardly inflected with sexual interest).

Indeed, the King’s emotional moods—his jealousy, anger, suspicion—are mainly focused on the figure of Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel De Brulier). De Brulier is the most perfect imaginable casting: his gaunt cheeks, long face, distinctive nose, and narrowed eyes. He would reprise this same role alongside Fairbanks’s older D’Artagnan in The Iron Mask (1929), as well as in two sound adaptations of Dumas’s novel. As mentioned before, he is a feline presence on screen. His thin profile, his shoulder-length hair, and his floor-length robes give him a feminine air. Indeed, he spends more time on screen with the King than the King spends with his wife—and he is surely a kind of devilish substitute. There is something almost flirtatious in the way Richelieu needles the King about his Queen. Later in the film, when D’Artagnan flatters Richelieu to delay his scheme to murder him, De Brulier’s performance grows subtly camp. Richelieu suddenly comes over all coy and flirtatious. The handkerchief he has been holding is a signal to his guard to shoot D’Artagnan; but once D’Artagnan begins flattering him, he swiftly withdraws it, and it becomes a kind of girlish accessory. Richelieu is always a magnetic presence on screen. And I can imagine a different director, in a different kind of adaptation, making more of De Brulier than in this film.

D’Artagnan himself enjoys the boys’ club atmosphere of the barracks and the all-male rooms of his friends. Much of the middle of the film is light on plot, instead setting up the relationship between the musketeers. We see how they get by with no money, gambling, borrowing, bluffing. (There’s a nice scene where they successively blag their way into the kitchen of two monks and cadge a free dinner.) It sets up a pattern that would be repeated in Robin Hood, Fairbanks’s next film, where Robin embraces the all-male company of his “merry men”. In that film, Sherwood Forest becomes a giant playground for the antics of Fairbanks and co., who leap gleefully around their idyllic world like ballet dancers. In The Three Musketeers, there isn’t quite the same sense of scale—but the central group of four male friends is the focus of much of the film’s jollity and camaraderie. It’s all very charming, but it lacks emotional depth. Only in The Iron Mask does the friendship of these characters come to mean and feel more: that whole film attains greater weight by being about ageing, and by the sense that there can be no sequel.

The new Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers is by the Film Preservation Society, who also produced the 2021 restoration of the film. Visually, it’s a great treat to look at. The lavishness of the costumes and scale of the sets really comes across. As well as looking sharp and rich and textured, the image benefits from the warm amber tints for the daytime scenes—and subtle blues for the nighttime scenes. Noteworthy in particular is the recreation of the original Handschiegl colour process. When D’Artagnan leaves Gascony, his horse is described as “buttercup yellow”. All the villagers en route and in Paris point and laugh at this extraordinary animal, so much so that when D’Artagnan arrives in Paris he immediately sells the animal to buy a hat. It’s a running gag for several scenes, and one which was visually inexplicable in monochrome restorations of the film. Thankfully, a fragment of a first-generation 35mm print was discovered in 2019 that revealed how the gag was supposed to work: via the Handschiegl process, the horse was quite literally coloured buttercup yellow. The 2021 restoration had digitally recreated the effect, based on the surviving 35mm fragment, and suddenly all these scenes make sense: the film was always designed to have this additional colour element, and all the on-set performances are geared towards this post-production effect.

Finally, I must mention the film’s musical score. It’s a habit among many labels—especially, it seems to me, North American ones like Image and Kino—to describe the soundtracks of their releases in unhelpful terms. As I have written elsewhere, reading in the DVD blurb that the release contains the “original orchestral score” is no guarantee that the soundtrack actually features an orchestra (Cuff, “Silent Cinema”, 287-93). Too often you have to read the small print to discover the truth, e.g. “original orchestral score, arranged for solo piano”. The back of the Blu-ray for The Three Musketeers states that the 2021 restoration is “graced by an orchestral score performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. Pause for a moment to consider the word “graced”. Yes, we are indeed more than fortunate to have the “orchestral score”, and it must be an orchestral score because it’s performed by an “orchestra”. Surely! Right? But the small print, in this case the liner notes by Tracey Goessel, make it clear what this actually means:

The Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble, would have been heard with the road show release, and is available on earlier DVD releases. Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra has created a score consistent with what would have been available to a smaller (in this instance, six-piece) group of musicians for the film’s general release.

Ah. Oh dear. So the “orchestral score” with which this restoration is “graced” is not actually written for or performed by an orchestra. It’s a score compiled from existing material, arranged for a six-piece ensemble. Fine. Disappointing, but fine. You clearly have a budget, and you have to stick to it. But what about the claim that the Louis F. Gottschalk score is available on earlier DVD releases? (I note that it doesn’t “grace” those earlier DVD releases.) Well, the back of the 2004 Kino DVD of The Three Musketeers states the following: “Original 1921 score by Louis F. Gottschalk, arranged and performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’.” Don’t you just love the inverted commas around the name of the “Orchestra”? Because of course this “orchestra” is not an orchestra. The “Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra” is a euphemism for one man and his synthesized MIDI files. So, no, “the Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble”, is not available on earlier DVD releases. It’s never been available because no-one has ever used an orchestra to record it. I’ve listened to the synthetic version on the Kino DVD and I in no way consider myself to have heard “the Louis F. Gottschalk score, orchestrated for a large ensemble”. I wish I had heard it, but until I’ve heard it performed by “a large ensemble” (does this mean an orchestra, even a small one?) I reserve judgement.

Back to the 2021 restoration of The Three Musketeers, it doesn’t help clarify matters that the Mont Alto Orchestra calls itself an orchestra in the first place. The orchestra’s homepage—their equivalent, I suppose, of the DVD small print—describes them as “a small chamber group”; the roster of musicians’ biographies numbers just five. Even in the 1620s (the time Fairbanks’s film is set), a group of five or six people would blush at calling themselves an “orchestra”. The musicians we see on screen playing for the royal ball at the end of the film (there are about ten of them) form a larger group than we hear performing on the soundtrack. A century later, a small court orchestra might expect to field twenty players, while the larger ones double or treble that number. By the 1820s, a symphony orchestra was beginning to be standardized and you would hope to have forty or fifty players. By the 1920s, you might have a hundred or more players for larger orchestral or operatic works. Film orchestras of the era varied in size according to their venue, but the premieres of big films like the Fairbanks super-productions of the 1920s would have been big events with musical accompaniments to match.

As Jeffrey Vance documents, the premiere of The Three Musketeers was a lavish event, featuring a spoken prologue and “a full orchestra” performing the score (Douglas Fairbanks, 120). Though Vance judge’s Gottschalk’s score “particularly weak in the action sequences, and utterly unable to capture the comic aspects of the action”, he also reminds us that “Fairbanks’s increased involvement with the music and exhibition of his productions began with The Three Musketeers” (ibid.). For Robin Hood, Victor Schertzinger arranged a score “for eighteen players” (ibid., 145). The cover of the 1999 Kino DVD (the soundtrack of which was replicated for the 2004 reissue) says its restoration features “the Original 1922 Musical Score in Digital Stereo”. Of course, you must read the small print on the back to see that Schertzinger’s multi-part score is performed not by an orchestra but by Eric Beheim on “a MIDI-based synthesizer system”. Schertzinger’s score (as Vance says) certainly sounds repetitive, but how can I properly judge it as synthetic pulp rather than orchestral fibre? The way to make these scores more musically viable is not to reduce them, but to expand them—reorchestrate them to make the best use of the original material. Finding a compromise too often means doing something cheaper and less complex. (As a sidenote to this, the 2019 restoration of The Thief of Bagdad uses Mortimer Wilson’s original orchestral score. This version was broadcast on ARTE a couple of years ago but has not yet received any home media release. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all Fairbanks’s silent epics restored complete with the music that their creators intended to hear?)

The Sauer score for The Three Musketeers is perfectly good, although it often lags behind the pace of the action and can never capture the scale of the film. Six musicians can’t conjure a sound world as rich and detailed as the visual sets and crowds of extras. You need an orchestra. You need something that will sweep you up in the adventure of the film. This six-piece band can only gently suggest that you might like to come along. And although the more intimate scenes in the film don’t obviously cry out for a full orchestra, I do confess that my heart sank to hear Sibelius’s heartrending Valse triste (op. 44: no. 1, 1903-04) in the reduced circumstances of a six-piece band. Only a small portion is used in the scene where Buckingham and the Queen meet for the first time, but I wasn’t moved by the scene or even by the music—I was moved by the plight of what should be a full string section of forty or more players reduced to a single violin and cello.

But much of this is, I’m sure, down to my individual taste/snobbery. I know orchestras are expensive beasts, and that hiring them and recording them is beyond the budget of most labels. I don’t mind a score for a small chamber group, but please call it a score for a small chamber group. If it isn’t being performed by an orchestra, you’re not offering us an orchestral score.

I’m sorry to have gone on so much about the score, but I do get fed up with labels overpromising and underdelivering. The Three Musketeers is still a lot of fun, and looks as good as we can hope on this new release. Here’s hoping a new restoration of Robin Hood will follow…

Paul Cuff

References

Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By… (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

Paul Cuff, “Silent cinema: Material histories and the digital present”, Screen 57.3 (2016): 277-301.

Tracey Goessel, The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015).

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley: California UP, 2008).