A Woman of the World (1925; US; Malcolm St Clair)

My exploration of more Pola Negri films continues with an adaptation of Carl van Vechten’s novel The Tattooed Countess (1924). This Paramount production was directed by Malcolm St Clair, a veteran comedy actor and director, but someone still relatively new to feature films. But as its star, Negri was a growing box office attraction—and the film plays up her status as an exotic outsider in America…

A Woman of the World (1925; US; Malcolm St Clair)

The opening title: “The Riviera—Where one may start a love affair—or end one—in surroundings beautiful enough for either occasion.” Closeup: drinks are poured, raised, returned to the table. One hand takes another. Finally, a man’s face lowers itself into the frame to kiss the woman’s hand. The framing makes his appearance faintly comic, faintly sinister. His smile is lugubrious. The couple step over to the veranda edge, overlooking the sea. But already the woman is unconvinced. He’s whispered this line to other women, she says. She leaves and we stay with the man: we see his self-satisfied grin, his finishing off the glassful of liqueur. Inside, he returns to the woman and takes her in a kiss. And as he does, we cut to a door opening: it is Countess Elnora (Pola Negri). Her face moves through a series of thoughts, emotions. She already wore a smile when first we glimpsed the face, but as the door swings open the smile fades, then some other notion flickers at its edge. It is a different kind of smile: a knowing, resigned, tired flicker of a thing. Like an acknowledgement of what she already knew, or expected. The couple, in each other’s arms, look up. Now it’s their turn for smiles to change, fade. Elnora moves to a photo given “to my beloved—for eternity”, removes it from its frame, and tears it up.

“Dearest, I was merely playing—a moment’s diversion—a woman of the world should understand.” I like it when a film’s title appears in the film, especially when it’s italicized like this. The phrase disguises its misogyny and cruelty with an apparent compliment. But it’s a compliment that serves to categorize and thus control its subject.

And we do not yet know Elnora. Indeed, we know her only by her image, and by the image of Negri we bring to the film. There is something as yet unmasked, unrevealed about her in this first scene. Negri’s hair is like a kind of black helmet, a sheening, almost threatening bob-cut. It’s like a kind of defence, imprisoning as it is protective. And look how she pours herself a drink in her room, and takes her time to elongate the studied sorrow of her mouth before taking a sip. And now she laughs, tipsily, as the man comes in and takes her in his arms. “I knew you’d understand. You’re mine for eternity”, he says, smarmily. She lets him closer to her face, then belts him across the cheek. “Eternity! A week ago I tattooed my arm as proof of my love for you—branded myself with your crest—and today…” She speaks through her teeth, white against lips that are almost black. “—woman of the world, yes; but not the world’s woman!” She ejects him from her room, as her servants are busy packing her things. She’s going to the far side of the world, “to forget”.

Cut to the far side of the world, somewhere in the American mid-west, “Maple Valley”, where everyone knows each other’s business. Two women sit knitting on their porches and gossiping, gossiping in a needling kind of way, each showing off that they know the truth behind each other’s small talk.

The Countess is in the paper, due to visit her cousin (by marriage, the paper adds in an aside), Samuel Poore (Chester Conklin). It’s a different world, a different genre, here in Maple Valley. Sam Poore is a figure out of Keystone: balding pate, a huge black moustache, thick round spectacles, braces getting snagged in a fence, struggling with an absurdly large garden tool. [After viewing the film, I was gratified to find my instincts correct when looking up the cast: Conklin was one of Mack Sennett’s original Keystone troupe.]

The gossips provide us with more background info: Attorney Granger is “hot after vice”, has “lovely morals”, and spends time “snoopin’ around the dance halls”. Here is his assistant, Gareth Johns (Charles Emmett Mack), with his belle, Lennie Porter (Blanche Mehaffey). They want to go dancing, but Granger wouldn’t like it.

The Countess arrives. It’s late, dark. Her nervous smile fades away. Her cab gets stuck in traffic outside the dance hall in town. There, Granger (Holmes Herbert) is frostily observing the crowd. Now he sees a cigarette being held out of the cab window by an elegant, gloved hand. He immediately goes up to her, shouts, and informs her: “We don’t want loose women from other towns here.” Elnora smiles. Or rather, Negri smiles—for it’s as if the challenge from this man has awoken her persona, which now creeps into her face and smiles a familiar smile. Free of the forgettable man in the opening scene, she now looks in control of herself. Look at her poise, her slightly lowered lids, her stillness set against the trail of smoke from her cigarette. Already she has the upper hand: she informs Granger that she’s come from Italy and asks him to direct her to her cousin’s “chateau”. Granger looks embarrassed, incredulous. From his stern, powerful disposition he’s now an awkward, fidgety figure. We glimpse Elnora’s face as the cab drives off: watch that smile, those cat-like eyes, shadowed, narrowed. Granger’s body turns away, but his eyes follow the cab.

Next morning, the gossips are keen to pry into the new arrival chez Poore. With bumbling, shuffling, and slang, Sam tells the Countess that breakfast’s ready. Elnora now her arm around Sam, promises him that they’ll be “what you say—great pals”, and enters the breakfast parlour.

She’s wearing an amazing black dress, with huge sleeves covered in a bright flower pattern. Sam’s wife (Lucille Ward), plainly dressed, sees how eager he is to please the countess. Comic flirtation on his part, frowning disapproval on hers. And then Mrs Poore sees the tattoo on Elnora’s arm. “I did it for a man I loved”, she explains, and at once a dreamy sadness permeates her face. It’s a face we’ve not seen since the first scenes. Suddenly she shakes it off into a polite smile. But Mrs Poore is concerned about what the neighbours will think. “That’s nothin’”—says Sam, “I knew a lady that had the names of the whole Seventh Infantry tattooed on her!” It’s a great line, but immediately segues into talk of the moral puritanism of Granger (of which Mrs Poore approves). The newspaper says Granger is busy “snatching cigarettes from the lips of women and threatening jail for their escorts”. Elnora smiles. “He has lovely eyes”, she says, to Mrs Poole’s surprise (and now it’s her turn to flash a knowing look at Sam, to raise her eyebrow; it’s a lovely bit of performance, saying to us as much as to Sam, “she moves quick”).

The “wit, beauty, and talent” of Maple Valley assemble to meet and greet the countess. Elnora hides her tattoo in layers of jewellery. She descends the staircase, enters on Sam’s arms. She looks like a million dollars. But talk is all of the local water works, built by Granger and as mighty as “Niagry Falls” for the townsfolk. Now Granger is here, and Elnora’s eyes are on him, then flash to one side. She pauses to think a moment, and her face tells us it’s a happy scheme. Then just as swiftly her face transforms. She puts down her glass and begins her performance. Her first prop: a cigarette, which she puts seductively in her mouth and asks Granger to light—which he does, to the consternation of the locals. They have something more to talk about when Sam whispers that Elnora has a tattoo. In a panning shot, we see the rumour spread around the room. Elnora is flirting with Granger, cracking jokes, but then suddenly serious when she fears she’s insulted him. But Sam interrupts, saying that Elnora has been nominated “Queen of the Bazaar” for the opening of the Water Works.

Next day, as the neighbours gossip, Granger asks Gareth to help him interpret Elnora’s comments. “Gee, Mr Granger, I hear she fell for you!” Granger’s face softens. He blinks rapidly. He looks suddenly coy, almost feminine. He’s persuaded to send flowers.

Meanwhile, Elnora is dreamily reading in a hammock. She’s wearing (and here my couturial illiteracy tells) a kind of lacy, frilly summer dress. Her body has become a kind of soft, fluffy expanse. Gareth brings her flowers from Granger, but is so smitten by the barefooted Elnora that he ends up sat on the ground, helplessly entertaining Elnora, who idly brings her lips to the flowers and grins flirtatiously.

So Granger looks uncomfortable when Gareth dreamily recalls his time Elnora. And he’s right to be suspicious, for the next scene shows the pair walking in the parkland of Maple Valley arm in arm. But Gareth is so awed by her that he finally admits it was Granger who sent the flowers, not he. Close-up of Elnora, and Negri packs as much delighted (and delightful) cunning into a few seconds of celluloid as seems possible. Ah yes, we read her lips, and she bits a fingertip for a moment, before another flick of the head brings in another nuance to the scene; it’s almost as though these little switches in expression keep us from her, making sure she’s always one step ahead of us, one idea further on. She does it again, in turning back toward Gareth. Then she throws her whole body into her next gesture, turning away and rushing over to a tree. “But poor Mr Granger”, she says—as though the man won’t stand a chance against her. (And surely he won’t.) She throws her head back against the tree, and looks so desirable that Gareth himself hurls himself into her arms. But she’s still in control, almost smiling in pity at the young man—until she sees Granger driving past, and sees that he has spotted the couple in their embrace. She runs after the car, but it’s too late.

The Bazaar. Elnora sees the prize event: “meet a real countess, price 25¢”. Dressed in her finest, most alluring outfit, her face suddenly drains of pleasure. She looks around her. The gossips are gathering. St Clair puts in some good gags. The first is via titles: an old man with a hearing trumpet asks if people are saying she’s a “prude”; Gareth explains they said “tattooed”—“but she’s a wonderful woman!” The second is visual: the two neighbours are nodding with pursued lips and judgmental expressions; St Clair dissolves to an empty rocking chair on their porch, then back to the women: the nodding of the chair becomes a kind of emblem for the unchanging attitude of the gossips.

Enter Granger. The crowd is too busy meeting Elnora, who is being pressed by an old man to show him her tattoo (he offers to slip her another two cents for the privilege). Angry, Granger shouts: “HEAR ME! We are gathered to honor a decent enterprise—not to exploit a tattooed Countess!” Elnora’s eyes flash with anger. And when we cut back to her, she has tears in her eyes. She leaves, as Granger rebukes the townsfolk for letting “a woman like that into your Christian homes”. Gareth leaps to his feet: “I’ll make you apologize to her—you muck-raking, psalm-singing hypocrite—”. They trade insults, threats, and Gareth storms out. The local gossips confront Granger: “With seven decent spinster ladies of the Civic Club right here in town, you fall in love with a foreigner and get jealous of a—boy!”

Elnora tells the Poores she’s leaving town. Sam comforts her, saying the tattoo is nothing to be ashamed of—“it’s artistic”. He then pulls up his sleeve to reveal a long tattoo of a train and carriages all the way along his arm. Elnora laughs, and it dissolves the tension marvellously—especially the way Negri laughs, which always seems so winningly, so honestly, without any pretence. Sam shows her more: the train continues all the way across one arm and along down the other. Elnora is in stiches when Mrs Poole walks in. But her reaction is not like that of the gossips, and Lucille Ward’s performance is not only naturalistic but sympathetic. It’s a sign of how well managed these performances are—and how well St Clair manages the film’s tone—that these potentially one-dimensional characters now feel like actual human beings.

A moral council is held. The elders—all old men—demand Granger face the countess before them.

Gareth comes to the Poore house and finds Elnora packing. Once more she’s having to run away. But Gareth begs her to take him with her, saying she’s his only friend—and that he loves her. He rests his head on her shoulder. Suddenly Elnora looks older, wiser. And (snatching the very thought from my head as I began to write this down) she says: “You must stay—remember me—remember me as half lover—half mother—”. It’s an extraordinary title, and one that complicates both characters. Much like the fleshing out of the Poores, so now we suddenly have the possibility of Gareth having an inner life. Where is his mother? Does he have a family? The film can’t quite build on this, but just the ideas it raises are intriguing. (One can imagine a different scriptwriter or filmmaker making all these supporting characters even more interesting.) At the very least, Elnora’s line brings a strange kind of moral weight to what follows.

Elnora (and a gossip from across the way) watch Granger approach the house. Gareth—afraid that Granger will run him out of town—is made to hide behind a curtain. Elnora prepares herself by lighting a cigarette, only to pointedly put it out when Granger starts talking. He has come to warn her of the elders wanting to force her out of town. “—and you have thrown no stones?” she asks. They reach a kind of understanding—but there are other issues at play. For a start, Elnora must quickly hide Gareth’s hat under a cushion as they talk. And despite the danger of discovery, just as Granger is about to leave, Elnora offers him her hand and he stays longer. Suddenly, he’s on his knees. “—don’t crucify me with ridicule—I have no excuse—only when a man suppresses love it turns to hate, fanatic reform, hypocrisy.” Again, this title carries an unexpected weight for this apparently “light” film. And the film, I feel, hasn’t quite earned the right to mobilize all these terms. Or at least it hasn’t quite built enough before it to bring their full force to bear on the end. “Heaven help me—I love you!” he says, pleads almost. And Elnora weakens. Her face is disarmed with emotion. They fall into each other’s arms. (The curtains are tensed with Gareth’s gesture of agony.) “Promise that whatever happens you will—believe in me.” (The curtains go limp.)

Elnora goes and opens the curtains to reveal Gareth. Somehow the dynamics make a weird sense. Here is the younger man, caught in his infatuation with an older woman. “I tried to trick you”, she explains, “—to save the boy—but I couldn’t—because—” (we cut back to see her face before the final words) “—I love you”. The older man (whose look of confusion, anger, somehow emphasizes his age) gets up and goes to the door. Gareth leaves, forlorn, but Granger too wants to leave. Without histrionics—with small gestures, like the pulling of his sleeve, the clutching at his hand—Elnora begs him to stay. Now it’s necessary to lip-read. “You…” he seems to say, before we cut—this next shot a close-up of Elnora, with his face in the top-left of the frame. Though this shot provides only a side-on view of his face, the word I think he says is “harpy”.  That the film refuses to dignify the word with a title makes its use more powerful. The silence of the image means that only Elnora can hear it, be affected by it, feel its weight, its misogynist nastiness. The look on her face as the word is spoken conveys all of this. It’s like she been physically wounded. Granger leaves. We see the last moments they are together in close-up: it’s a close-up of their hands, his on the handle, hers grabbing at his.

But go he does. “That woman is shameless”, he tells Sam, and threatens them if they try to protect her. And Sam again appears more human, more sympathetic as the film goes on—for he appears confused, reluctant here. His performance in the first half of the film was broad, comic. Now it’s detailed, naturalistic. There’s a close-up of his reaction, and he just looks sad. So too with his wife, who appears at the top of the stairs. They talk to each other but instead of superfluous titles we just watch their faces and eyes to know what’s being said, and the tone of it. For Mrs Poole is almost in tears as she tells Elnora that she can stay. “This is our home—and all the Grangers in the world can’t budge us.” She goes and retrieves a whip, threatening to go and thrash Granger—but Elnora takes it from her. “Leave him to me—I am the cause—and I will be the cure!” (As if the melodrama of this final exchange is too much, St Clair diffuses it with a gag in the last interior scene: Mrs Poole goes downstairs to find Sam with a shotgun, likewise in a rage against Granger. But as they talk, he accidentally fires the gun, and they end up leaping into each other’s arms in alarm.)

Back to the moral council, and Granger resigns his position. “Until an hour ago I was one of you—parading my virtue—crying for victims—yipping for blood—”, he says, let someone else drive her out of town.

Elnora enters and immediately commands the room. She lets rip with a speech, only the last part of which is titled: “—but do no fear that I will take away your only text—my mark of shame—I’ll leave another to remember me by—” And then, in a quite breath-taking extended take, she proceeds to whip Granger in front of the moral council. We see the impact of the lashes on his body and face, even though he remains still. Then there are close-ups up Elnora as she wields the whip, and of Granger as the whip lashes his face—leaving a diagonal mark of blood across his forehead and cheek. This last blow makes Elnora stop in horror. She drops the whip. Granger picks it up and offers it back to her. But she has her hand over her face and walks away. Then—and I really didn’t know what might happen at this point—Granger marches up to her, grabs her, and kisses her passionately. Amazing! Exit the moral council, leaving the couple in each other’s arms. At last, we cut closer, and see their desperate embrace—and I found myself suddenly, quite by surprise, very moved by the sight of them locked together like this, Elnora’s face overcome with emotion.

Dissolve to the back of a cab with “Just Married” on the back. Again, St Clair produces a fine gag at this point that is also a lovely commentary: we see empty rocking chairs on the neighbours’ porches, each seemingly rocking of their own accord. It’s as if the gossips can’t bear to look, but their spirits—and their judgmentalism—go on animating the space around them, go on taking their familiar place in the world. Is it reassuring that the gossips have gone, or do we understand from this that their gestures somehow outlast them?

In the cab, we see the happy couple. And Granger looks less stiff, less formal. Holmes Herbert’s performance can at last—and only in this last scene—relax and relent. He’s got a sense of humour, too, for he smilingly reaches into his pocket to withdraw a cigarette case. He offers a cigarette to Elnora, whose eyes turn to him in delight—and love. And it isn’t even that the cigarette is so important (she ignores it anyway), but the gesture itself. They embrace, and Eleanor lifts a bouquet of flowers to cover their kiss. It’s a neat act of modesty, privacy—for this final moment when the couple can be together, and start a new life together. But the film’s last word goes to Sam, who watches the cab drive out of Maple Valley, and is splashed with mud as Gareth and Lennie ride by on their bike. It’s a disarming way to end the film, as if it daren’t quite take itself too seriously. You sense that life will go on in Maple Valley, much as it did before: Sam is once more a Keystone figure of fun, almost looking to camera after the mud splatters his shirtfront. And what of the moral council, the gossips? They too, I suppose, will go on. THE END.

This film took a while to win me over. What unsettled me a little was the tone: is this a romantic comedy or a romantic drama? But gradually the film managed to convince me that its competing aspects—a romance, a moral story, a comedy of manners—could work together. The comic characters attained greater heft: the gossips became emblems of small-town small-mindedness, the Poore couple became sympathetically generous. What begins as a comic set-up of a glamorous foreigner in Midwest America gradually and effectively escalates into a wider conflict of cultural values: between religious puritanism and social liberalism, between patriarchal power and female independence. The film builds up the weight of the drama so effectively that I was both surprised at its climax and also (ultimately) convinced it worked. What starts out as comic gossip at the Poores’ welcoming party gradually becomes genuinely threatening xenophobia and misogyny. It actually reminded me of Sjöström’s The Scarlet Letter (1926). A Woman of the World certainly might have less emotional impact (not to say cultural clout), but the two films each tackle a small town judging and condemning a woman for what they see as moral crimes, i.e. her independent sexuality.

Pola Negri embodies the film’s handling of tone. The whole drama condenses in the way her smile can turn into sorrow, in how she can be both seductive and vulnerable. The opening scenes give context to the Countess’s otherwise privileged position: she is treated badly by a man interested only in her as an object. And when she arrives as the glamorous foreigner in Maple Valley, she soon becomes the victim of wider social prejudice. When the council talk of “running her out of town”, the threat is physical—I wondered if we’d actually see a mob wielding pitchforks and flaming torches at the end.

There’s also a parallel with Negri’s career. Indeed, press coverage for A Woman of the World focused more on Negri herself than the content of the film. Ivan St Johns wrote an article titled “How Pola was Tamed”, claiming: “For three years they tried every means to tame that fascinating tiger-cat—Pola Negri. And now the funniest thing in the world has happened. Pola has licked herself—with her own sense of humor” (Photoplay (January 1926): 53). Seemingly, Negri had frustrated many directors and crews by her timekeeping. But for this production, she was convinced that self-deprecation and humour were the way to win over her colleagues. So she began cracking more jokes, being more familiar, and arriving early. The story even got visualized in some drawings that Malcolm St Clair did on set, published under the title “The Transformation of Pola” (Photoplay (April 1926): 76).

(By the way, this image took me a bloody age to find. The reference to it in a piece by Diane Negra gives the incorrect date for the source [January 1926 rather than April 1926]. Then it turned out that the colour scanned collection of Photoplay from January-June 1926 on archive.org was missing the pages on which this piece was published! However, I found an alternate version of the issue in monochrome elsewhere on archve.org. You’re welcome.)

The position of foreign stars in Hollywood was often fraught with difficulties, exacerbated by their treatment in the press. Many European actors who came to Hollywood ended up being typecast as exotic foreigners on screen, just as many directors found themselves recreating European settings in Hollywood backlots. The attitude to their screen selves impacted the way they were seen in the press. Negri was not alone in attracting attention for being not just “different” but “difficult” compared to her American peers.

The occasional hostility towards foreign stars (and directors) gets sublimated into the drama of A Woman of the World. Negri represents an alien lifestyle to the world of smalltown America. She looks different, behaves differently. Her persona really is a world apart from anyone else on screen in this film. It’s much to Malcolm St Clair’s credit that he makes a subtler, more surprising drama out of what could be a rather crude conflict between character “types”. Negri, of course, provides the countess with a real sense of inner life (more than just a sense of her having desires). But by the end of the film, I believed that Gareth, the Poores, and Granger also had inner lives—when all these characters (the younger lover, the comic smalltown relative, the bigoted attorney) could so easily have been one-dimensional. And, of course, Negri whips her way through to Granger’s heart—taking a savage kind of revenge on her fiercest critic.

Whatever the attitudes to Negri, contemporary reviews of A Woman of the World were positive. Photoplay describes her as “[t]he fascinating, continental Pola”, playing a “dangerous, cynical, tempestuous Italian countess”. St Clair is credited “for the restraint shown in the small-town scenes and types that must have tempted exaggeration.” More revealing is the brief review’s last line: “Not for the children” (February 1926: 50). Another contemporary reviewer, Epes W. Sargent (how does one end up going by the name “Epes”?), said that St Clair painted the film with “broad comedy strokes” because the theme of moral hypocrisy “is too mentally subtle for pantomimic expression”. The result is “a vivid story with a wealth of comedy relief most of which is genuinely amusing.” He particularly credits Chester Conlkin, sporting “an almost impossible moustache”, for providing the laughs (Moving Picture World (26 December 1925): 303).

Though it’s mentioned in various accounts of Negri, early stardom, and European émigré films, A Woman of the World doesn’t seem to have received a great deal of attention since 1925. Nor, one might say, have many of Negri’s Paramount films. She made 22 films for the studio, of which only six survive. Of these six, few have been restored and none have been properly released on DVD/Blu-ray. The copy I saw of A Woman of the World came from a grey-market DVD derived from a grotty nth-generation print. I’d love to see it restored, and a good score might also give it more emotional weight. But even in its reduced visual circumstances, this film still won me over. Negri’s performance can pierce even the murkiest of copies, her eyes are still flashing and alive nearly a hundred years beyond the film.

Paul Cuff

The Woman He Scorned (1929; UK; Paul Czinner)

I’ve been revisiting lots of early Lubitsch films recently, and it occurred to me that my knowledge of Pola Negri is confined almost exclusively to these German productions of the late 1910s-early 1920s. Negri’s silent filmography features a huge number of missing films, and many of the surviving pictures from her career in the 1920s are available only in copies so grim to watch that I have stayed clear. But one title intrigued me enough to take the plunge. In 1929, Negri was at a strange, transitional stage of her career. Having been in Hollywood since 1922, by the end of the decade Negri had married the Georgian “Prince” Serge Mdivani, broken with Paramount, and retired to France. However, the retirement was short-lived. She suffered a miscarriage, while her husband gambled away his money. So, she returned to work, and made her last silent film in the UK. This would be one of the many British-German co-productions produced in the late 20s. Alongside Negri, it starred the Swiss actor Hans Rehmann and the British Warwick Ward—both of whom appeared in a number of German films of the period. Its director, Paul Czinner, was Austrian—though it’s difficult to know what to call the many artists who were born anywhere across the expanse of the former Austro-Hungarian territories, and who went on to work across Europe. Czinner was born in Budapest, educated in Vienna, spent most of the silent era working in Germany—and (since he was also Jewish) would emigrate to the UK in 1933 to escape the Nazis. His first “British” film was also Negri’s last silent. Much of the production was filmed in Cornwall, on what must have been a very small budget—but it still packs a punch…

The Woman He Scorned (1929; UK; Paul Czinner)

The sea. Waves breaking. In the distance, a lighthouse. Closer and closer, until we’re right up next to the lamp. The younger of the two lighthouse keepers, John (Hans Rehmann), goes to the harbour to get his telescope fixed. Views of the harbour, murky against the bright expanse of sea. The camera pans, and pans again. The filmmaking is economic, the spaces quickly introduced. We are inside the opticians. The keeper tries the lens, approves, steps outside. The focus shifts: we see through the window to the street, where he turns his lens across the town. And now the camera pans per the view of the telescope. Czinner plays with a subjective glance of the town, but soon the camera is panning and cutting quickly. Where are we? There are no explanatory titles, just images. We see café signs in French, but this is the only hint of location. The quick cutting makes this town almost alien. We cannot settle our eyes, take it in. We’re in the midst of the streets, an impressionistic account of space. Czinner shows off the wider seascape with stylish movements, but the mood is bleak: the sky is overcast, the sea churning, the rocks dark, the town overlooked by factory chimneys, the streets full of shadow.

Now we’re with Louise: Pola Negri. She’s pinning pictures up on the wall (a modernist collage above, a classical nude below). She’s smoking. Her dark hair is dishevelled. Her eyes dark. A black neckband highlights how pale and slender her arm and shoulders seem. The camera is tilted. It’s intimate, off-kilter. She winds a gramophone and sits at a mirror. She applies mascara. A man appears in the mirror. The camera flexes, half looks up. It’s Max (Warwick Ward). The dingy bar. Tilted angles. Max with cigarette, with a flash of cash. He looks greasy, hard-up. He drinks, smokes, gambles.

John enters the “Bleue Paradis”. Around him, it’s a den of vice. Female shapes are scrawled on the wall. He sits, drinks. Titled angles, mirrors, smoke. Women approach, kick out their legs. The walls loom down. Enter Louise, the camera slanted as she comes down in feather boa and hat, smoking, drinking. Close-ups of dancers, attitudes. She goes up to the lighthouse keeper. She raises her eyebrow, gives him the eye, turns, turns again, looks at him through his telescope, drinks his drink, shows off her cleavage, waves her boa at him. She sits on his table, forces him to look at her. The camera pans 360 degrees as she does a turn round the room. She’s the life of the place, turning the room into her own parlour. The cutting becomes quicker, the camera moving from faces and gestures around the room. There are no intertitles. We’ve had no intertitles since the first scene of the film. It’s pure visual filmmaking, and it’s superb.

Louise sees John get out a banknote. She snatches it, twirls it round it, makes him grab for it, then pushes it down her cleavage. She puffs out a great bloom of smoke toward his face. She moves closer. So does the camera. The camera is high, now low, now peering over shoulders, now switching focus. Max is half directing her from the next table. He loses patience.

Now Max and Louise are dancing. He is aggressive, she dives away, returns. Their dance shows their power relations: he grabs her, she swirls away, he grabs her again. They fight. He hurls her across the room. John stands, moves to threaten Max. Close-ups of faces, closer and closer, all from tilted angles. Louise looks on, her face drained, surprised—and taken, taken with the stranger. John leaves and Louise follows, a silhouette down the street.

Max is slapped gently awake from his stupor, exits, enters the same street. The pair are ahead of him and hide in the shadows. Louise is following the keeper, desperate. “Take me! Take me!” She’s saved $100 and will give him everything. The camera tracks in front of them, capturing his flight and her determination. She stumbles, falls. She’s pleading. “Max will kill me!” she says, and it’s the first time we’ve seen a character’s name spelled out on screen. The keeper strokes her hair, calms her. Overcome, she sinks back against the steps. He folds her boa into a makeshift pillow, slips some money into her purse, and takes to his boat to leave.

The sea is swooshing past. The wind rises. Birds flock around the mast. The camera bobs, is assaulted by waves. The sea hurls itself against the dock. The camera grows seasick: shots of sea, sky, boat, hands, waves, foam. Rapid cutting. John is overboard. He prays to God: he will save the unfortunate if only his life is spared. The skies calm. Czinner dissolves from the roughing waves to the static image of the married couple—and the two images overlap, the mobile waves and the immobile couple. It’s a moment before you realize it isn’t a photograph but a moving image, so still do John and Louise look. The camera pans to the others at the table, first left, then right, then tracking back: a bizarre, entirely frozen crowd. As the camera tracks back and back, a dark figure crouches in the foreground: it’s a photographer, who snaps his shutter, and suddenly the scene comes alive. It’s an extraordinary little scene, so strange and sinister. What is the future of this frozen marriage?

They come home. Louise wanders around, at a loose end. She sits on the bed, huffs and puffs in—what? Boredom? Frustration? The husband walks up and down. Louise wipes her nose on her wedding dress. “Anything to drink?” she asks. She lights a cigarette, as her man paces up and down. He goes to the window, looks out. Louise throws off her veil and gown, shouts at him. John doesn’t hate her, he says, but worries he’ll do her no good. But suddenly she is tender, and he too. She wants him to forget her past.

The waves break upon the shore. The camera pans around the bedroom. Louise is in bed, cosy. She reaches in her half-sleep to the pillow next to her. Where is he? She gets up, sets kettle on stove, lights a fire. The camera pans around the room, watching her busy herself with wifely duties: but she’s in a flap, dropping things, in too much of a hurry. A cat is eating an egg she’s dropped. The fire is too strong. The kettle is too hot. She’s spilled the milk. She’s cut her finger on the breadknife.

She goes out, to the shore. She wanders over the rocks, out towards the lighthouse. People stare. She makes the same visual and spatial journey as made by the camera in the opening of the film: the same shots, now occupied by her. She shouts up to her man: why didn’t he eat before leaving? His life is tied to “the blue paradise”. (This is the name of her former brothel, and John’s phrase seems to make her look down in fear, or regret, or shame.) But he’s smiling at her care for him, and she busies herself making her man and the older keeper some tea. The older man looks at Louise’s legs—or is it the high heels she’s worn to climb over the rocks to reach them? He’s laughing at this strangely allied couple: the gruff sailor with lipstick on his cheek, and the housewife in heels and makeup who’s climbed out to the lighthouse. John wipes away the trace of the kiss, just as Louise hides her hurt as she turns and puts on her shawl, offering a smile as she leaves. He runs after her, gives her money to buy new shoes and a scarf. She goes away, over the barren rocky landscape inland.

Back home, she sits and takes off her stockings and shoes. In the mirror, she looks at herself. The camera cuts closer, and closer still. She wipes away a beauty spot, her lipstick, a smear of mascara. She ties her head in a scarf, hides her hair away. She is transformed. She smiles at herself, and it’s a warm, surprised, happy smile. It’s a beautiful scene, and touching.

So Louise is at home, with flowers, with kittens. The camera once more pans around to follow her domesticity. It’s better done this time, and her husband arrives to embrace her—and it’s a warm embrace. They’re both smiling for the first time. She cuts his butter, hands him the bread. She’s gazing at him, lovingly. “It’s been three months”, she says, and finally she feels he had confidence in her. They go together through the village, and rather than stare at her the locals smile and doff their hats to the couple. They embrace on the beach, and she nestles her head against his neck.

But who is this following her on her return to the village? It’s Max. He noses around town, sees the photo of the wedding on the noticeboard.

Cue a scene of Louise singing, wordlessly. She’s interrupted by the cat, then by Max. He appears first as a silhouette on the wall. He’s threatening. The camera is tilted again, as it was at the brothel. “What do you want?” “You!” But the neighbour is at the door. Louise ushers her out. Max has hidden on her bed, and makes himself comfortable to sleep. Louise implores him to leave. He gets up, his huge shadow trailing him around the room. The police are after him. Louise is on the floor, the tilted camera looming over her—she’s desperate, oppressed within the frame. She will find John (the first time he’s named) and tell him everything. But Max wants money, time to rest, and doesn’t trust John to be told. He tells her to turn off the light. So the only light in the room is the intermittent flash of the lighthouse: it’s a beautiful moment.

Next morning, the neighbour sees Max leave the couple’s house—and sees the wanted poster of Max, freshly plastered to the wall. The village is in uproar. The policeman comes to Louise to ask about Max. She’s wrapped in her black shawl. She looks so vulnerable, so cold.

Back at the lighthouse, John sees Louise arrive by boat. She breaks down in tears, throws herself into his arms—tells him about Max. It’s all done in a single take, without titles—her face says everything. She lied to the policeman not to save Max “but to save my happiness”. John demands she denounce Max if he turns up again, and she swears—her hand raised in tentative agreement. She’s afraid to go back to the village (and the villagers), so stays with John at the lighthouse.

But here’s Max, whistling from the gate of the lighthouse. Louise creeps out, to make Max go away. She gives him money, demands he go away on her boat. As the wind whips her hair, she looks on at the men fight. John tells her to go away forever, calls her a whore—and the word hurts her. She drags herself away, away to the water’s edge. She gets into the boat. The villagers and police arrive, and as Max flees, he falls to his death. And Louise? The waters are raging, a storm building. She rows. The skies darken. She hears his words again. She is alone with the camera, her face in the leigh of the light. She flings aside the oars. She stares at us. What do we think of her? Cut back to land, where John is on the shore, his back to us, staring out to sea. We see an upturned boat on the shore, amid the foaming waves. The sea and sky are dark, but a patch of sunlight catches the white hull of the boat. Waves break over its back. The camera holds upon the image—holds, and holds… FIN.

An excellent film. Czinner makes the most of his small cast, low budget, and coastal locations. The deserted Cornish (or should that be “French”?) streets are turned alternately into idyllic retreats or threatening, noir-ish mazes. The locals are friendly but can turn into a mob. From the dark world centred on the brothel, we go to the windswept expanses of sea and sky around the village and lighthouse. This society may be remote from the lower depths of the brothel, but it can still judge and condemn individuals. Louise is dominated by Max in the brothel, but married life with John carries its own burdens. And the elements are there all around, threatening and buffeting Louise in her new life.

At the heart of the film is Pola Negri, who is always compelling. To see her smoking, dancing, flirting, and fighting in the brothel scenes is a thrill. And to see her find something that might be love, and to make somewhere that might be called home, is moving. Though I can imagine other stars of this period in similar roles, I cannot imagine them doing quite what Negri does here. Gloria Swanson, in her more daring outings, such as Sadie Thompson (1928), might have pulled it off—but her glamour is of a different order to that of Negri. Glamour is a kind of presence, but I don’t know if it’s the word I’d use to describe Negri’s presence. Thinking of slightly later films, you might imagine Marlene Dietrich taking on this role of prostitute-turned-housewife. But Dietrich (at least for Sternberg) likewise has a kind of glamour that doesn’t thrive in the climate of a film like The Woman He Scorned. She’s impeccable, even in poverty, even in exotic locations. I could imagine Dietrich in the brothel of Czinner’s film, but not on the streets even immediately outside it. Perhaps my imagination here is too limited to the impeccably arranged mise-en-scène of Sternberg films, and I do Dietrich a disservice, but somehow I can’t see her being so open to the elements as Negri. And I couldn’t imagine Dietrich convincingly becoming a housewife for a lighthouse keeper, which Negri does—or at least conveys her own belief in being that role. Negri is a messier screen presence, more able both to be convincingly violent and convincingly tender. Dietrich never moves me; impresses, yes, but never moves. (But I suppose, her films with Sternberg are not meant to move you in such a manner. Doubtless Sternberg might scoff at my talking about his films in such a way.) Negri has a bodily presence; she’s more than an image, more than a luxurious piece of the mise-en-scène; she’s able to be raw. Though I love her presence on screen, I can far more easily imagine her walking off screen, off set, and onto the real streets than many of her contemporaries.

Not that The Woman He Scorned is just Negri. The world around her is atmospheric, and the performances around Negri set the limits of her world, the horizons of her expectations. Warwick Ward is pleasingly greasy, selfish, and violent—while still looking like he might, once, have been charming. As John, Hans Rehmann is solid if not remarkable. Frankly, I’d need to see a better-quality print to better follow his facial and bodily performance. For much of the film, he is the cool, collected presence against which Negri’s more expressive performance contrasts. It’s the point of his character to be emotionally reserved, almost stolid. John understands the duty of marriage, but not the reality of love. Rehmann certainly has the physical build to convince as a sailor, and he conveys the conflict between his good intentions and social prejudices well. He has the bulk to protect Negri from the outside world, but also the bulk to exclude her from his inner world.

All of which brings me back to the production itself. Czinner’s camerawork is fluid, expressive, articulate. There are only a handful of intertitles in the whole film, and you’d virtually be able to cut them all and still have a coherent narrative. So articulate was the film that (even watching it in appalling quality), I didn’t feel the need to ask questions about the names of the characters or the location of the film. However, trying to do the most basic research on background to the film has proved illuminating—and confusing. I’ve titled this entry The Woman He Scorned, but is this even the correct title for the film? The BFI lists no less than seven alternatives: “Hunted”, “Traquée”, “The Street of Lost Souls”, “Rue des Âmes Perdues”, “Son dernier Tango”, “The Way of Lost Souls”, “Seat of the Fallen”. In her memoirs (Memoirs of a Star, 1970), Pola Negri calls the film “Street of Abandoned Children” (334) and claims the film was retitled “Seat of the Fallen” “in England and America” (338). It’s a marker of the film’s status on the borders of silence and sound, as well as between UK, European, and US markets, that it should bear so many aliases. Released in 1929 as a silent film, then swiftly reissued with a soundtrack of music and effects, it is currently available to watch only in a murky print with French titles. (These titles have themselves been digitally replaced with English for the sake of the shitty DVD I watched.) And who wrote the script? The BFI page says Czinner wrote the scenario, but other sources credit Charles E. Whittaker—an Irish writer and producer, whose company was the British element of this British-German coproduction.

So, if I refer to this film as The Woman He Scorned, I do so because it seems the most succinct summary of its story—and because all these talk of “streets” and “ways” raises the question of the film’s setting. Where, exactly, is the film meant to be set? The street signs in town are in French, but the wider view across the harbour looks more like south-west England—and the village around the lighthouse is clearly Cornish. In his biography of the actress (Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale, 2014), Mariusz Kotowski describes Pola’s character as “a Marseille prostitute” and John as “a law-abiding sailor with strong convictions” (163). Fine, but are we meant to be in Marseille in the opening scenes? And how far away is the lighthouse from the town? If this man is John and not (for example) Jean, what nationality is he? The synopsis provided on the BFI database describes John as “a French lighthouse keeper”. The more clarity you seek, the more confusing things get.

Negri’s memoirs offer some nice details around the production (though no clarification about some of the above ambiguities of setting). She recalls the Cornish location shooting thus:

We were quartered in a quaint little old village inn and naturally the natives were enormously curious about us. Many of them had never seen a motion picture and were not quite certain what was happening in their midst, except that it must be something of satanic design and could well bring bad luck to all who came in contact with it. Even without being accompanied by all of our strange equipment, actors would have been rumored to hold black masses and be practitioners of witchcraft. Add the cameras and lights and make-up and we must certainly be doing the devil’s own handiwork. As a result, it was initially very difficult for our production manager to persuade the locals to appear as extras, but raising the fees performed the miracle of lifting the curse of working with us. (339)

Negri even records the camera crew being assailed by “local men bearing down upon us armed primitively with pitchforks, rakes, spades, rocks, clubs”, their women and children marching behind them, “babbling in that almost unintelligible Cornish accent” (341). (Their crime was filming on the sabbath day!) What Negri does confirm is that Czinner did film some material in France, around Marseille:

The difference between the tiny immaculate Cornish fishing village and the teeming French port was a study in opposites. We were shooting in the actual Rue des Infants Abandonées in the heart of the red-light district. It was a narrow street in which prostitutes openly promenaded or else sat in windows lustily hawking their wares to lonely sailors off ships from every country in the world. (342)

But how much of this footage is in the film? And is the film—as I watched it—complete? Clearly, The Woman He Scorned needs restoring. Are there missing intertitles that would help explain the setting and character names? Are here any differences between the UK and international versions of the film? Is there any alternative footage or variation in editing? Is the ending the same in the other versions? But if I want answers to these questions, it’s because the film intrigues me. Lean, low-budget, and narratively simple, it’s nevertheless a stylish and emotionally engaging film with a great central performance.

Paul Cuff

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition left Plymouth on 8 August 1914, a few days before Great Britain declared war on Germany. Leading the expedition was Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose goal was to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. His ship, the Endurance, held 28 men, 69 dogs, and a cat. One of those men was the Australian photographer, Frank Hurley. As the ship sailed south, first to Buenos Aires, then to South Georgia, and finally into the Weddell Sea, Hurley filmed a record of the voyage. By the end of 1914, the Endurance was in the midst of thickening fields of ice and a long way short of its destination. Soon the ship was imprisoned and adrift in the frozen water—and Frank Hurley clung on to his film even as the expedition looked as though it might be doomed…

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The opening title is a painted design, complete with portrait of Shackleton, the Endurance, and a small group of penguins. It thus unites the film’s subjects: a record of one man’s most famous exploit, the record of a ship’s fate, and a glimpse of Antarctic nature. The opening text says the film presents “a wonderful and true story of British pluck, self-sacrifice and indomitable courage”. (The text made somehow safer, softer, by the painted icicles, by the painted penguins standing like a kind of audience at the bottom of the frame.)

Portraits of the leaders: Shackleton, Captain F. Worsley, Lieutenant J. Stenhouse, Captain L. Hussey. The men are smiling, laughing; Hussey his playing his banjo. It’s informal, matey, but the men are in military uniform, linking their bravery with the wider bravery of the war. Now the men are shown in Antarctic dress, against the painted snows of a studio; they smile, aware of the comic falseness of this show they’re putting on for the camera.

But here is reality: the Endurance setting off from Buenos Aires. (See that stern? You can recognize it from the photographs taken in 2022, 3,000m below the surface—where now resides the bodily ghost of this living image.) The world as it was, in late 1914.

On board, the camera captures the awkward limits of the deck and the dozens of dogs whose kennels line the sides. The watery horizon bobs in the background. The dogs are being fed. The dogs are being groomed. Puppies born are sea are introduced to the pack. The dogs are seasick. (Suddenly, that madly bobbing horizon attains more significance.) A dog called “Smiler”. The title asks us to “watch carefully” to see him smile. (It’s a mad grimace, not a smile.) But I like being addressed in this way, enjoined to notice something that the crew noticed 112 years ago—and being able to see it on screen, and to be curious and amused as the crew were curious and amused 112 years ago.

Here is Hercules, “the strongest dog in the pack”. We are asked to watch his condensed breath to see how cold it was: to get a sense of the feel of the air, the density of the cold. And here is that breath, longed since exhaled, still blooming white on film. Odd, and oddly moving, to watch the rate of a dog’s breath, the motion of his living body—all this time later.

Shackleton takes a reading from the sun, his eyes almost glancing into camera as he looks up from the binnacle. The film has many of these curious awkwardnesses: of the crew members going about their business, but suddenly becoming aware that they are now performers, performing for the camera, for audiences, for the future, for all eternity.

Icebergs glow green. The sea is pale grass. But just as the landscape feels distant, apart, somehow lacking or ungraspable in its paleness—the ice often a kind of visual absence on screen—Hurley captures the most extraordinary series of shots in the film. He must have climbed the mast, have clung on with his legs as he held and cranked the camera with his hands. Thus, he looked down to the foremost part of the Endurance. We see another man, a blue silhouette, legs akimbo, straddling a tiny platform suspended from the bowsprit. And below him, the ice-covered sea. Hurley knows he’s got the perfect shot: look at the way the shadow of the bowsprit is at the bottom left of frame. The shadow serves to show the nature of the ice below it, to emphasize the hoped-for momentum of the ship. It’s also a kind of image being produced by the ship: the ship and its shadow is a neat metaphor for the very film we are watching. Look how the top corners of the frame are rounded by the aperture: the close border intensifies our concentration on the front of the ship. What follows is a sequence of spliced-together shots wherein the whole drama of the voyage is contained in a single image. Can the ship keep going? How long will the ice break and make way for the vessel? The man on the bowsprit looks over his shoulder. You realize he’s sat facing the ship, to observe the hull’s stability in breaking the ice. Under him, the blank ice splits to reveal the deep blue of the sea. The marvels of toning, here: the colour dye clings to the black tones of the image, leaving the highlights untouched. So the sea is deepest blue, and the gradations of the ice—from bright white to tainted blue—are shown in the range of tone. It renders the drama of ice tangible in colour: you can feel how thin is the ice, but also get a sense of how cold is the sea.

This short sequence—occupying barely a minute on screen—is doubly arresting for the sense of time it captures. Hurley splices four shots together, letting each run directly into the next. As the breaks in the ice draw attention to the space being traversed, so these filmic cuts are fissures in time. Slabs of history appear in each shot or are erased in the gaps between.

Next, we see the bow ramming its way through the ice. It’s not as dramatic as the previous shots, but then you realize that Hurley must have suspended himself from the same place on the bowsprit we have just seen filmed from the mast—and suddenly the very act of filming provides the drama. There are eleven shots in this sequence: it must have proved a more illustrative set-up for Hurley to demonstrate the mechanics of the ships progress.

When Hurley cuts back to the view from the mast, the sequence as a whole attains even greater weight: for now when the ice splits before the bowsprit, the film carries with it the impetus from the last shots. The audience is given more of a sense of the stubbornness of the Endurance, the way it bludgeons its way forward. There follow more shots from the mast, each following directly from the last. At one point, you see the shadow of the mast from which the scene is filmed swing across the bottom of the frame: the ship is changing direction, the sun passing over its shoulder. And as it does so, a split in the ice flashes darkly through the ice. (I think I could watch these miraculous shots forever, they’re so hypnotic.)

Hurley casts his eye over the side: a view of seals mobbing their way through the water. And now huge icebergs; they are as wide as whole regions, as high as mountains; the water on the sea, combined with the orange tinting, gives them real mass on screen. Now the image is blue-tone-pink, a combination I always love to see—though here the effect is lessened by the fact that Hurley uses it to colour a still, rather than moving images. Already the film is running out of film to record its adventures. It’s a kind of visual arrestment that augers the spatial arrest of the Endurance. The film continues until it becomes stuck fast.

Indeed, the very next shot is of the icebound ship, borne aloft on frozen waves. Closer views show the crew at work, pickaxing the ice in a vain attempt to make a channel for the Endurance to escape. Huge saws appear, each pulled and pushed by half a dozen men. Then the ship pulls back, gaining space to charge. We see Shackleton on the bow, looking anxiously down into the waters. The ship’s “charge” looks pitifully slow: we’ve seen the men at work, and know what effort it has taken to break up even this much ice. The Endurance swings toward the camera, whose presence suggests a kind of full stop, a point where the ship surely can’t pass. And it doesn’t. Instead of filming the inevitable halt, Hurley cuts to a title: “All progress at an end”. In the next image, the stillness is captured by a still: the expedition really has come to a halt.

We see the ship in stasis, the crew too—lined up for a photo. (Hurley is the only absentee, the title tells us: again, a reminder of the somehow independent, detached existence of the camera.)

A new life, of obdurate isolation. Water must be taken from the frozen snows and brought on board. We see the endless manual labour of keeping life going. Life keeps going onboard, too: here are a new batch of puppies, which will spend their whole lives in and around this same space.

Animals also come in the form of our first glimpse of live penguins: a surreal group of onlookers to the marooned crew. But it is to the dogs that Hurley keeps on returning: we see them being taken to work on the sleds, and it is the dogs who enable the film’s only land-based tracking shots. The camera is perched on a sled, watching the teams race along the ice. Now the dogs are playing with the crew, being manhandled for the camera to show off their size and thickness of hair.

What kind of film is Hurley now making? The expedition has come to a halt. We see the ship stuck by day, and by night we see a still (taken “with eighteen flash lights”) of the ship’s ghostly form in the blue-black intensity of permanent night. What else can Hurley film? We see a primitive tractor at work, but it looks more like play: the vehicle is puny beside the Endurance, punier still in midst of the frozen wasteland. So Hurley shows us dredging for underwater life (which a title reassures us is of great scientific importance), and a man sifting the catch. Creatures too small to show on film are imprisoned in jars that will never reach a laboratory.

The ship is being lifted out of the sea by the mounting ice. The process is too slow to film, so Hurley shows us the aftereffects: the ship being tilted, twisted, jostled. All hope is lost, a title relates (how much time passes between shots, here?) and the dogs are among the contents of the ship being slid via canvas sheets onto the ice for safety. More shots, the time between which marks the slow death of the Endurance: we see successive views of the ship, lower and lower in the frozen water, her masts snapping and tumbling, then sawn for wood by the crew.

The film, too, breaks down. Not only are we given still photographs instead of moving images, but we are given paintings instead of stills. The most miraculous part of the expedition goes entirely unfilmed: the crews’ slog across the ice, the setting sail on small boats, the landing on Elephant Island, the parting of the crew into two groups, Shackleton’s journey over 1,300 kilometres to South Georgia to get help, and the return to Elephant Island to rescue the last group of the crew.

We are also denied the story of how Hurley’s film came to survive at all: how Hurley himself broke Shackleton’s orders; how he stripped off and dived into the icy waters swamping the Endurance to rescue sealed containers of filmstock and glass slides. He risked his life to get the film off the sinking ship, and again by jettisoning food to make way for his negatives on the sleds and boats in which they made their perilous journey to safety.

Instead of all this, the film offers a retrospective return to the locations of the unfilmed drama: to the starkly beautiful parts of South Georgia where Shackleton and his five companions came and crossed to reach help. And we see Stromness Whaling Station, as bleak a place as you can imagine: dark wooden huts, trails of smoke, and the steaming carcasses of whales lying in the harbour. We see the stripping of blubber, which is as gruesome as it sounds. It was here that Shackleton first made contact with the outside word. What a strange paradise this dreadful place must have seemed to those men.

As if in answer to the grim sight of hacked-up whales, Hurley returns to living nature: to frolicking seals, to birds of all kinds. Despite the film’s narrative having diverged entirely, Hurley clearly enjoyed some of the shots he took. He finishes one sequence on seals with a long close-up of one scratching its chin and belly, to which Hurley appends the title “End of a perfect day.” There follow many views of penguins: penguins running, penguins staring at the camera, penguins mothering, penguins swimming.

It’s a shock when the film returns to its narrative of Shackleton: for we suddenly get views of the triumphant entry of the crew of the Endurance into Valparaiso aboard a Chilean tug, in May 1916. So much time has passed since we last saw contemporary footage of the crew that it’s hard to reconcile ourselves to the tone of the ending: “Thus ends the story of the Shackleton Expedition to the Antarctic—a story of British heroism, valour and self-sacrifice in the name and cause of a country’s honour. The doings of these men will be written in history as a glorious epic of the great ice-fields of the South, and will be remembered as long as our Empire exists.” So say the last titles, followed by a view of a sunset at sea. THE END.

South is a flawed film, narratively speaking, since it cannot represent the most famous part of the expedition’s story in any but the most inadequate terms: paintings, stills, and summary titles. Of course, the footage was exhibited in a variety of ways in the silent era—including illustrated lectures, complete with narration. We’re also left with more questions that the film (as it stands) cannot, or dare not, answer. What happened to all the dogs once the crews decided to sail for land? (They were all shot, of course.) What happened to the crew when they returned to war-torn Europe in 1916-17? (Hurley himself became a war photographer of great renown; but the others?) What was the effect of the years-long isolation on the crew of the Endurance? (The film cannot scratch the surface of these men’s inner lives.) Later, fictional, films would try to investigate these ideas. But the mere existence of South is a kind of triumph, given that Hurley had been ordered to abandon all his images with the wreck of the Endurance. It is also a triumph of images: the views of the outward voyage and entrapment are spellbinding, and offer an amazing glimpse of what many of the men on screen might have believed was a doomed expedition.

It’s worth noting that among the many extras on the BFI release of the film are nineteen minutes of “unused” footage taken by Hurley. But clearly the footage was used, as it comes complete with the same painted title designs seen in the film itself. (Though the booklet notes say the footage is “tinted and toned”, in fact it is monochrome.) In her liner notes, Bryony Dixon says that “the negatives [of South] were reused multiple times to tell the story in different ways”, including a 1933 sound film, Endurance. So which version does the additional footage come from? The booklet tells us not. It’s a shame the footage was excluded from the 1919 version of the film, as there are some curious scenes. We see more studio footage of Shackleton and co., acting awkwardly for the camera against painted icebergs. Then there is a game of football held on the ice, haunted by the imprisoned silhouette of Endurance in the background. There is closer footage of the crowds in Valparaiso (was it deemed less heroic to see the curious faces in the crowd, staring at the camera?). Then there is a more extended final scene of the sunset at sea. I wondered if the idea of a sunset was Hurley’s dig at the idea of “as long as our Empire exists”. In the alternate version, the sense of humour is underlined: for the sunset is seen through a porthole, the glass of which is then shut, followed by the shutter itself. It’s a kind of double eclipse, and a wittier way—visually, if not thematically—to end the film than is apparent in the 1919 version.

But I mustn’t complain, for the BFI’s presentation of the film is superb: the footage looks beautiful, and Neil Brand’s score (for chamber orchestra) is excellent. Such documentary films can be a very difficult project to score, but Brand keeps up with the images, and makes a coherent whole of the film’s disparate material. My final word must go to Frank Hurley, whose strange, beautiful images still captivate. They, at least, have outlived the Empire.

Paul Cuff

Das Weib des Pharao (1922; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

In 1921, Paramount set up what they called the European Film Alliance (EFA). It was staffed mainly by ex-UFA employees and designed to be a US foothold in the German film industry. It would guarantee US rights for German exports, as well as produce and distribute films. Thanks to the exchange rate at the time, they were 300% cheaper to make in Germany than in the US. The system was designed to bypass import restrictions: even if they were financed with US money, the films they produced were made in Germany and thus didn’t count as imports. All of which brings us to one of the major films made by EFA…

Das Weib des Pharao (1922; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

The orchestral prelude sets the scene. The music is the original score, by Eduard Künneke: it’s music that is big, lush, flavoured with orientalist harmonies. The film’s main theme, first spelt out quietly in the strings, then loudly in the brass as the main titles appear. We are promised a drama in six acts. Everything suggests scale, length, expense…

The darkness splits open: a huge set of curtains part to reveal grovelling subjects. It’s a great effect, teasing us with the outside world, with the promise of mighty sets yet to be fully revealed. Cut to the Pharoah, Amenes: it’s Emil Jannings, looking meaty, immense, shaven. Here’s his chief advisor, Menon, played by Paul Biensfeldt—and played in a slightly arch, slightly camp, slightly comic fashion. He hands a scroll to Amenes. There follows the rather silly business of the intertitle showing us the hieroglyphic document, before a dissolve reveals the translated text. (Here’s the plot, folks…) King Samlak of Ethiopia wishes an alliance, and offers his daughter Makeda to Amenes for his wife—to seal the deal. Amenes chuckles. Menon joins in, but a little too much—a swift look from the Pharoah makes him cut his joy short.

Meanwhile, the construction of the treasury has gone awry. The chief architect, Sotis, enters to tell the bad news, begging for mercy (and time) for his workers to complete the job. But Jannings raises a threatening eyebrow, and the architect exits.

Outside: the conditions of the workers are causing unrest. Look at the way the womenfolk spill down the steps, beneath the huge walls of the city. Here’s the film’s budget on show: bricks, mortar, and extras. Hundreds of women crash like a wave at the bottom of the palace steps, then ascend; then stop; then recoil at the presence of the Pharoah. As the orchestra rumbles to silence for a moment, the crowd falls to its knees. A woman ascends the steps: “Think of the children!” she begs. The Pharoah, magnificently isolated in an iris-framed close-up, looks imperiously indifferent.

A priest advises him to make a sacrifice to the gods. Cut to a simply gorgeous interior, tinted red. Smoke trails drift up through the massive space, swathed in shadows. It’s a fabulous image, beautifully lit—an orientalist painting come to life. But when it comes to the business of what goes on inside such a space, the scene immediately loses some of its impact: for Lubitsch must cut closer to the fawning of Jannings & co. on the floor, holding silly poses. The sets are more impressive, more affecting, than the action here.

So, to the king of Ethiopia: Paul Wegener in (yes, it was inevitable) blackface. Wegener is a large man, and this is a large performance: the king is made comic, almost grotesque. His huge wig makes him a kind of dark lion, and with the huge feathers in his mane, and his body swathed in beads and patterns, he is eye-catching in every sense. His daughter Makeda is surrounded by maids. It’s a deliberately comic scene, and it is as though Lubitsch is trying his best to enliven these otherwise cardboard characters.

Cut to the river, where one of Makeda’s servants, Theonis (Dagny Servaes), is gathering water. On the river comes Ramphis and his crew. The music makes this more beguiling than the image suggests: for Künneke’s orchestra glitters and shimmers, suggesting both the rhythm of the oars and the light on the water (neither of which Lubitsch makes much of).

Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), a worker on the treasury, swims ashore—so taken is he with the beauty of Theonis. And the music swells and gives this faintly silly scene some heft. For it’s difficult to take Liedtke’s haircut and the slightly stilted performance of Servaes quite seriously. Theonis is like a walking sculpture: beautiful but awkward, moving to hold a pose. Ramphis is big, bold, recognizably human—but too showy, with no finesse. These two contrasting performances stand awkwardly next to one another on screen. It’s flirtation of a kind, but brief and unconvincing. Much of the ensuing material is missing, so we get stills and superb music: Ramphis and Theonis escape together and it’s the end of Act 1.

Ramphis’ father Sotis reluctantly brings accepts the Greek girl, and here—in this miniature sitcom of father, son, and new girlfriend—is the first glimmering of Lubitsch’s “touch” in this film. “Do you not even want to look at her?”, asks Ramphis, tickling his father’s arm. It’s a silly, sweet little gesture in the midst of all the massive sets, massive crowds, massive orchestral exoticism.

Speaking of which, here they are again: the exterior of the palace in all its massive glory, the crowds watching King Samlak’s arrival. Are we in a Fritz Lang film? Touches of DeMille, of Griffith—but perhaps the touches of campness in Biensfeldt and Wegener help to undermine the pomp of it all. For Wegener is very funny (if only he weren’t in blackface), his exuberance itself the point of this sequence: the two kings don’t quite get on. Jannings is reserved, gloomy, sinister. Wegener is all grand gestures, huge steps, swishing cloak (and what a fabulous piece of costume is the cloak). Cue massive crowds, huge throne rooms; living tableaux; piles of gifts. (Look at our budget! Look at our designs! Look at our extras!)

Thank goodness for the next scene. It’s all rather more Lubitsch, in the way we might come to understand him: two lovers under the eyes of a stern parent, flirtation over a boardgame. The music is also more relaxed, swinging into a lilting, almost music-hall style beat (Künneke’s strength was comic musical theatre, after all). But it’s also over all too swiftly, and feels underdeveloped. (Lubitsch would fashion a whole scene and several jokes out of this kind of set-up in later films.) Sotis is falling asleep, so the lovers wander off into the streets.

Meanwhile, the Ethiopian royals are interested in the treasury looming out of the gloom—a huge Sphynx head, that also overlooks the next scene of Ramphis and Theonis. Again, Künneke’s music makes the scene more than it is: the “love” scene simply isn’t intimate or moving. More successful is the approach of the lovers to the treasury, which (we have already been told) is a capital offence. They are caught and brought before the Pharoah, who immediately falls for Theonis.

I say “falls for”, for that is a literal description of the plot turn: but it’s a look of almost comic lust that overcomes Jannings as he gazes at the girl. It’s one of many instances where the performers (and, as ever, the music) are working hard to tell you what’s happening when there is so little emotional nuance to make you feel what’s going on. End of Act 2.

The musical introduction is simply gorgeous, more moving and enthralling than what’s on screen. What’s on screen is the Pharaoh’s attempted seduction of Theonis. He offers to spare Ramphis’ life if she will submit to the Pharoah. The girl throws herself against the wall. The Pharoah falls back, looks sad (well, frankly, he looks constipated). It’s like watching an opera, only the characters aren’t singing. That’s the issue: the emotion isn’t coming from the performers. They are gesturing correctly, moving correctly, doing everything that you should expect: but it all seems like they’re going through the motions. They’re not transmitting anything. There is no depth. It’s all surface. The wonderful music makes this all the more apparent: the score is doing all the real work, fashioning all the real emotion. Which is fine, but shouldn’t we be getting something from the screen? More than just the great lighting, the great sets, the great show of composition and shadow? You can’t just blame Jannings for what’s happening: it’s Lubitsch’s fault too. Can he help it? Surely he can, for both the historical setting and the performance of Jannings works much better in Lubitsch’s earlier Anna Boleyn (1920). In that film, the king’s smile means so much more: the fear that his smile instils. To be a woman and smiled at by Henry VIII is a kind of death sentence. It’s a fantastic way of uniting a kind of Lubitsch “touch” (the suggestive smile) with the historical drama (the lethal consequences of the smile). In Das Weib des Pharao, there is no complexity or nuance. I believe in Henry VIII as a character, but I do not in the Pharoah Amenes.

Here is Jannings, moping in the gloom, then moping in the dawn. The sun rises. We see the real sun, then the effect of the light entering the Pharoah’s chamber. It’s beautiful, but it’s—what? It’s superficial. What is the effect for? It makes me think of a scene change in act one of Verdi’s opera Jérusalem (1847), which consists of two minutes of music, a musical depiction of sunrise (in the score, the number is simply called “Le lever du soileil”). The scene is not in the original, Italian, version of the opera (I Lombardi¸ 1843). The French version of the opera was refitted for the sake of the bigger budget, bigger stage, bigger effects at the Paris Opera. Verdi wrote the sunrise scene in Jérusalem purely for the sake of the set designers showing off how they could produce a lighting effect on stage. As it happens, Verdi also takes spectacular advantage of the expanded orchestra he could use at the Paris opera: wonderful, deep blasts of sound from the trombones (not in the orchestra for the Italian version of the score) underpin the sunrise sequence, allowing it to both blaze and boom at the same time. But despite how great the music is, it’s there purely to show off what’s on stage: nothing happens in the scene other than the visual effect. So too in this scene in Lubitsch’s film. There’s no point to this other than to show time has passed: it’s there really to show off a lighting effect. And the lighting effect is great, don’t get me wrong. But what’s it doing? What’s it bringing? It’s cool to look at, and Künneke does something similar to Verdi in his orchestration of this sunrise, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just stuff happening.

The execution is about to take place, a huge edifice to lower a giant slab onto poor Ramphis. Again, it’s great to look at but not dramatic enough. There’s no real tension (unlike, for example, Griffith’s famous execution sequence in Intolerance, made several years earlier), and the plot swiftly moves on: Theonis accepts the Pharoah’s deal. So the Pharoah half-mopes, half stumbles to his new bride and mutters “I love you!” in one of the least convincing “I love you”s I’ve seen in a while. Again, it’s not Jannings’ fault: what can he do with this script? It’s all gesture, as cardboard as the characters. It moves correctly, is constructed correctly, but has no nuance, no depth, no feeling.

So too with the next scenes, of Ramphis being taken away, of the Ethiopians’ anger, of the marriage itself: beautiful lighting, great music, but… To paraphrase Wagner (writing on grand opera, the genre of Verdi’s Jérusalem), it’s all “effects without cause”. So too with Ramphis at the quarry, where he’s sent in punishment. Nothing here convinces, despite the scale: the fighting is perfunctory, the weapons too well designed for their silhouette (nice crescent!) and not for their usage (crap swing!). Weirdly, the sight of half-naked workers with silly haircuts wielding clubs reminded me of nothing more than the early scenes of Carry On Cleo (1964). Lubitsch finds some great angles to show off the scenery, but the film has already lost me emotionally—I simply don’t care that Ramphis escapes.

The new queen goes down well with the populace: she eases tensions by embracing the worker’s child earlier shunned by the Pharoah. But now the Ethiopians are invading, and the treasury workers are rebelling. Time for Jannings to start ramping up his performance. He’s obsessed but weakening, powerful yet grovelling before his desires. (Künneke’s music belongs to a far better film in these scenes, or at least to an opera where the Pharoah might sing convincingly—even if the words are tripe. Here, it is only Jannings falling about on set. It’s not the film’s silence that’s the problem, but the fact that it doesn’t utilize it fully.) So jealous is he that when Theonis refuses to swear loyalty even unto Amenes’ death, he entombs her in the treasury. The Pharoah then forces Sotis to show him the secret entrance, then blinds this poor architect so no-one else will ever be shown how to find it. It’s all pretty gruesome, but even that fails to entice. The stakes get higher, and so do the number of extras: every spare hand is crowding the screen as the Egyptian army is led out.

Ramphis finds his blinded father, but I am not moved. The armies fight, but I am not moved. Amenes is defeated, but I am not moved. Ramphis finds his way into the Treasury, but I am not moved. But yes, I am obliged to say how well-lit it is here—this chiaroscuro tomb, this incredible set, those steps cut out of the night, that glowing bier laid out at the base of the image. But what’s the point when the drama is now so unenthralling? Ramphis lifts a knife to kill his former lover, still believing her to have betrayed him. What can Harry Liedtke do to make this scene work? Not this, not those bulging eyes, not that moribund gesture. No, no, no. The story seems to want to become a kind of savage epic, but it has nothing of the sustained, brutal horror of Lang’s final scenes of Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924)—though Kriemhild herself looks rather like Theonis does at times in Lubitsch’s film, with those long plaits and cool demeanour. So we watch Ramphis turn into a leader, hide the population from the Ethiopians, then launch a winning attack—and we feel very little. End of Act 5—and I’ve already lost track of where the other acts went.

The “judgement of the dead” on Amenes. It’s another fabulous image: the stillness, the smoke, the silhouettes, all back-lit perfectly. So the old pharaoh is obliterated from public memory and Ramphis is proclaimed the new king. But Amenes is back! He’s not dead, and now Jannings stumbles back in a new guise: the dishevelled, comic, grotesque remnant of nobility. (He’ll play this kind of part infinitely better, in an infinitely better film, Murnau’s Der letzte Mann, in 1924. That’s the kind of film that makes best use of Jannings. See also Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928).)

Amenes shows up in time for the giant celebrations, made spectacular in the scale of sets lit by torchlight and tinted pink and green. But who believes him? Machinations take place, gestures are made. Ramphis responds with even broader gestures, broader eye-bulges. He must make way for Theonis’ true husband. She acquiesces. The crowd reacts. They don’t like it one bit!

The denouement wants to be Shakespearean—the usurped king returned, the queen defiled and stoned to death with her lover, the restored king dying and falling from the throne as the crown is placed on his head—but it’s a strangely underwhelming ending. Everyone dies, but I’m not moved. I’m not even shocked, as in Kriemhilds Rache, which is similarly brutal to its main cast but with far more bite, more purpose, more panache. So Jannings lies dead at the base of the dais, and the orchestra thunders out its main theme. ENDE.

Das Weib des Pharao is an interesting film, historically. A flagship production for EFA, it remains a startling instance of Germany making a Hollywood-style ancient spectacle along the lines of DeMille. Indeed, this German film received its world premiere in New York in February 1922—it’s Berlin premiere was in March. But despite its scale and the effort put into its exhibition, Das Weib des Pharao was only moderately successful in America.

I looked to see what coverage the film got in Variety, which does indeed relay the release of “Loves of the Pharoah”(as Das Weib des Pharao was renamed for the US market). Lubitsch made his first trip to America for the film’s premiere, but it didn’t go well. In an article titled “German director, Lubitsch, regarded unkindly, he says” (I love that “he says” in the title!), we read: “Following a long conference among Famous Players officials and his friends, Ernest Lubitsch, the German director of ‘Passion’, ‘Deception’ and other foreign film spectacles, sailed for home, giving as his reason he was regarded as an unfriendly person and an enemy of the American actor” (Variety, 3 February 1922, p. 45). The article cites “unpleasant, if not threatening” letters and phone calls lodged against Lubitsch, so it’s no wonder he didn’t bother to attend the premiere. Interesting to note that at this time Lubitsch is known as a director of “foreign film spectacles”, the article citing Madame DuBarry (1919; released in the US as ‘Passion’) and Anna Boleyn (1920; aka ‘Deception’) as his most noteworthy films. The piece continues: “His decision again brought to light the situation as to German films here and the very slight effect they have had on American conditions. Bookings of ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ have been only $78,000 up to last week, and the comparative flop of ‘Passion’, ‘Deception’, ‘The Golem’ and others has been commented on” (ibid.).

Clearly, Das Weib des Pharao was up against some stiff competition. It was also being reshaped for the US market. Variety reveals that “Loves of the Pharoah” has “been given a happy ending by the simple expedient of leaving off the epilog” (ibid.). In March, Variety reports that the film was “running continuously noon till midnight, played to almost $8,500 in five days, at 50 cents top matinees and $1 nights” (3 March 1922, p. 46). But it was also up against Rex Ingram’s The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921), which was still raking in nearly $40,000 per week—a whole year after its premiere. Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) was also in cinemas, making steady (if not spectacular) money.

Das Weib des Pharao stands as a testament to the ambition of Paramount’s European enterprise, and to its failure. EFA only lasted one year, going bankrupt (amid much scandal) in 1922 after producing just five films, none of which had the hoped-for success. The failure of EFA to establish a US base in Germany led to a different strategy, one that would reshape the industry landscape by the end of the 1920s. Rather than take Hollywood to Europe, Europeans would be lured to Hollywood: cue the great wave of European talent arriving in Hollywood from the mid-1920s onwards. Including, of course, Ernst Lubitsch.

By the time he arrived, the kind of cultural feedback loop (Hollywood influencing Germany influencing Hollywood) exemplified by Das Weib des Pharao was already bearing fruits. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) was surely influenced by the set design and scale of Lubitsch’s film. Having just now refreshed my memory of DeMille’s film (see below three images from the film), it makes a curious companion piece to Das Weib des Pharao. The Ten Commandments is (spoilers alert) sanctimonious guff of the highest order. It’s worth stating that Lubitsch’s film is free of the nasty, preachy ideology of The Ten Commandments. You might want to read the violence and mob mentality of portions of Das Weib des Pharao in terms of contemporary politics in Germany or elsewhere, but the film surely has no real interest in complex analogies or political subtlety. If it does, it’s so superficial as to be without impact. If this is me finding another “lack” in the film, I much prefer its lack of politics to the puritanical, vengeful grudges that DeMille’s film nurses against its characters. The Ten Commandments certainly has a message, but it’s one of the crudest imaginable.

The score for The Ten Commandments was written by Hugo Riesenfeld (1879-1939), who had also compiled the music for “Loves of the Pharoah” in 1922. Riesenfeld was an Austrian composer who had emigrated to America in 1907, becoming a prolific composer and arranger of silent music scores. Among many others, he wrote music for films by DeMille, Raoul Walsh, James Cruze, Frank Borzage—but his most famous (which is to say, most heard) score was for Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). I presume that Riesenfeld may well have compiled his score for “Loves of the Pharoah” without Lubitsch’s supervision. (Though he would have the chance to consult the director when he arranged the music for Lubitsch’s last silent film, Eternal Love (1929).) Riesenfeld’s score for “Loves of the Pharoah”, like that version of the film itself, is not available for study—and I can find no information whether the music survives or not.

However, what does survive is the score Lubitsch himself commissioned from Eduard Künneke (1885-1953) for the film’s German release. Like his contemporaries Franz Lehár (1870-1948), Oscar Straus (1870-1954), and Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953), Künneke was famous as a composer of operettas. And though these composers’ chosen genre remains classed as “light music”, each of these figures were superb craftsmen. (For me, Lehár is one of the supreme musical talents of the early twentieth century.) By 1920, the symphony orchestra was the most amazingly diverse instrument, and just because a composer specialized in “light music” didn’t mean they handled the orchestra any less well than a composer of symphonic or operatic works. Künneke achieved his greatest hit with Der Vetter aus Dingsda (“The Cousin from Nowhere”) in April 1921, so his engagement on Das Weib des Pharao later that same year was when he was at the height of his popularity. His score for Das Weib des Pharao shows his talent not merely for sumptuous orchestration and “big” sound, but also for lighter, more lyrical sections—even a moment or two of comedy. Though Künneke would write music for German sound films (including adaptations of his operettas), Das Weib des Pharao would be his most substantial film score—and, indeed, his longest purely orchestral work. (Anyone seeking to hear more Künneke could do no better than find his few other orchestral works: a charming piano concerto and his orchestral Tänzerische Suite from 1929—the latter a purely delightful example of Weimar-era popular dance music.)

A final word on the 2008-11 restoration of Das Weib des Pharao. The German Blu-ray is a superb presentation of the film, coming with a huge range of language options for its titles (all of which are coded as subtitles, but designed to appear as full titles on the screen—all rendered in the appropriate style and colour). The image and sound quality are excellent, and this is an exemplary version of a silent film on home media. And one of the most interesting extras on the disc is a filmed concert of the main feature, allowing you to experience Das Weib des Pharao as a primarily musical event. You can see how complex is the interaction of conductor, players, and image—and how the notations of the score are modified to align sound with image. I wish all major releases of silents had this option: it reminds us that this isn’t a soundtrack but a performance, that the context for the music was in its live presentation before audiences. This version of Das Weib des Pharao is (excluding the Vitaphone soundtrack for Eternal Love) the only release of a Lubitsch silent with its original musical score. How many others survive, and how many other companies will take the trouble to record the music with such care and attention?

I’ve made my views clear already, but just to reaffirm: Das Weib des Pharao isn’t a great film. It’s great to look at, but not to sit through. I’m very happy for others to write about the sophistication of its design, its use of crowds, the influence of (for example) DeMille and (more generally) Hollywood staging and lighting on this German film made with American money—all this is true and interesting, but what counts ultimately (at least, for me) is that the film isn’t affecting, moving, enthralling. Without a genuinely emotive human drama at its centre, all the many fine qualities of this production are for nought.

Paul Cuff

Sherlock Holmes (1916; US; Arthur Berthelet)

Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893. But although he professed no interest in writing more stories about his famous character, he didn’t mind making more money from him. A play based on Holmes was mooted, planned, then put off. It was then taken up by the American actor and dramatist William Gillette. Seeking to make the stories more appealing to audiences, Gillette took plenty of liberties with the source material. Concerned over the denouement he was planning, he cabled Conan Doyle and asked: “May I marry Holmes?” Conan Doyle replied: “You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.” So Gillette did. His play Sherlock Holmes (1899) was ludicrously successful, and Gillette had played Holmes over 1,300 times by the time a film version of the play was produced by Essanay Studios in 1916. Long considered lost, the film was rediscovered nearly a hundred years after it was made. It offers the unique opportunity to see the early twentieth century’s most successful Holmes…

Sherlock Holmes (1916; US; Arthur Berthelet)

“This film is an exact reproduction of the play that has been performed to great acclaim for the past five years throughout America and England. The actors in the film are the same ones from the play.” So says the opening title. For whatever reason (did they count only the most recent run of performances?), the play in its various guises had been running for 17 years by 1916. Perhaps saying “This play has been running for 17 years” would make it sound rather passé?

Here is William Gillette as Holmes. He’s given his own introduction on screen. Holmes is in his den, surrounded by scientific equipment. He’s even wearing a full lab coat. A phrenological skull sits on a ledge. It’s a great image, and Gillette looks every inch the character: the face, the posture, the build.

And now for the plot. Oh dear. Well, it’s a chunk of “A Scandal in Bohemia”, rendered more respectable. Instead of Irene Adler bearing the letters written to her personally by a prince, the equivalent character is killed off before we even start the film. Her innocent sister Alice Faulkner possesses them, but is pursued by the prince’s agents (again, the writer of anything “indiscreet” is pushed out of sight). But it’s the Larrabees and their compatriot Sid who muscle in on the act to capture Alice and her letters first. Cue endless opening and shutting of doors, listening through keyholes, standing up and professing innocence, opening and shutting more doors, clasping hands, putting on and taking off coats.

But here’s Holmes again, in Baker Street. We aren’t shown the outside of his quarters, yet; indeed, this film tries not to show us too much of the world outside at all: for Chicago is clearly not London. The apartment is small, simple; there’s a small table, a comfy chair, a fireplace. But who else is around? Mrs Hudson? No. Watson? No. But Billy’s here! Yup, Billy. You remember Billy, right? (Uh, no.) Well, here he seems to be a servant. He ushers in… Watson! Finally, here’s Watson. In the role, Edward Fielding looks as Watsony as one might wish: good-natured, smart, moustached. He goes upstairs. Holmes welcomes him, shows him the plan of the Larrabee house he’s about to enter. They talk. Holmes dresses. Watson stays behind. “Let me recommend these books while you wait for me”, says Holmes. And in one of the most dramatically pointless scenes in the film, he looks for a book, finds one, lights a cigarette, and sits to read.

Cut to the Larrabees, trying to find the letters. Sid turns up. More walking into rooms, looking through secret windows. While they scheme, their servant Forman watches. Forman is an agent of Holmes. More intrigue. Upstairs, Alice is locked in her room. Another ancillary character, the French maid Thérèse (why French?) “feels sympathetic toward unfortunate Alice”. So she lets Alice out of her room. Alice comes down. More professions of innocent outrage.

But here’s Holmes! Look at the way he holds himself as he comes to inspect the exterior of the house. Gillette is tall, upright, domineering. Look at the way he holds his cane. The character has a past in this body, in these gestures. It’s a pleasure to see him just stand there, making himself prominent. He also spends most of this film in impeccable clothes. Almost too impeccable. No wonder he needs a servant in Baker Street to help dress him.

When Holmes appears at the door, one of the gang describes him as “A tall, thin man… about forty, with a smooth face… wearing a long coat and carrying an ebony cane.” The description is almost accurate (Gillette was already in his sixties by this time); but why are we bothering to read it? We’ve just seen what she sees, after all. This first part of the film wastes a lot of time. The gang now spend forever working out what to do. People open and shut doors, whisper, wring hands.

Forman lets Holmes in (a full two minutes after he has rung the doorbell). Holmes comes in. When the others are out, he examines the room. The camera tracks from right to left to follow him, then dissolves to a medium shot as he examines door, piano, safe. It’s about the only scene in the film where the camera moves: it’s quite a nice move, allowing Gillette’s performance the space to unfold, to (quite literally) track his movements across the scene. But the film has scant close-ups, either of faces or (more significant in a detective drama) of details (clues!). Holmes confers with Forman, while upstairs one of the Larrabbees dresses as Alice to try and fob him off. The scene drags on so long there’s a reel-change halfway through, as Holmes waits for something to happen. Holmes gets Forman to start a fire and thus reveal where Alice has hidden the letters. But he is so moved by her tearful reaction that he lets her keep the letters. (Gillette plays this emotion very subtly, with a simple downward dip of the head.) Holmes leaves, having neither rescued the girl nor the letters. There’s yet another pointless scene of Sid being caught trying to nab the letters as Holmes leaves. We’re 38 minutes into the film, and essentially nothing has happened. All the characters are where they started, with little having been achieved.

Pity poor Watson, who’s still reading a book. He leaves, as he “really can’t wait any longer”. (I know the feeling, doctor.) The Larrabees say they will contact Moriarty, “the Emperor of crime”, to help them.

Holmes returns to Baker Street. Billy helps him disrobe and put on a spectacular smoking jacket. He lights a pipe and reflects. Alice, meanwhile, is reflecting too. A superimposed vision of Holmes appears. She goes goofy, dreamy. He, too, “starts to dream” back in Baker Street: “Through the blue haze, he sees the sweet figure of Alice Faulkner.” Oh dear, oh dear.

Now to Moriarty (Ernest Maupain), in his underground lair. It’s a chiaroscuro scene, dark apart from a few patches of light, the faces of Moriarty and his henchman. Moriarty keeps “a small burner” built into his desk, “to keep his papers safe from prying eyes”. It’s an absurd device, which characters have to make great effort to lean into to pretend it’s effective. Its real function is an excuse for Moriarty to be lit from below and appear more sinister. Moriarty tells them to get rid of Forman and that he will deal with Holmes.

So Forman is set upon, but the French maid sees this and rushes to tell Holmes. But here is Forman, who is still not dead. But he’s immediately set upon—again!—when he goes outside, as Moriarty makes his way over. This encounter (much revisited in later adaptations) eventually turns into a crude, tedious melodrama as a fight between Billy and Moriarty’s sidekick goes on downstairs, and the professor quizzes Holmes upstairs—then tries and fails to wield a gun. Even the slow dissolves to details—Moriarty pausing to take off his scarf, Billy later confiscating his gun—are weirdly portentous without real purpose. Moriarty tries to shoot Holmes yet again, but Holmes has arranged for the bullets to be removed. Yet again a great deal of coming and going has happened for little purpose.

Next comes a famous sequence from the stage play: the escape from the Stepney Gas Chamber. All the criminals show up, shadowed by Alice (wasn’t she supposed to be imprisoned in the Larrabees’ house?). Yet another unnecessarily longwinded series of people coming and going. A whole gang, including Moriarty are crammed into the scene. Everything is gone over time and again, which makes their plan’s failure when Holmes turns up all the more absurd. It all takes so long: Holmes wanders around; Larrabee smokes; Holmes wanders around; then they don’t speak. Larrabee is literally tapping his fingers with boredom on his leg. Holmes finds Alice tied up (but apparently unguarded) and is then ineffectually set upon by some roughs: rather, just one rough, as the others prefer to stand back and gurn sinisterly rather than help. Next comes something that I imagine worked very well in the theatre: the lights go out, leaving only Holmes’ glowing cigar end to guide the thugs. But the cigar is perched on a ledge, and Holmes is already outside. Holmes sends Alice off in a cab, then gets the police to arrest the gang. (He himself stays outside to look smug—but Moriarty has escaped.)

Now for a scene with Watson in his office. “221B Baker Street had been set on fire, so Holmes has been seeing his clients in Dr Watson’s office.” That the film makes no effort to explain this event, let alone show it, is baffling. Baffling too is when Sid turns up to make a signal at the window. Why? All that happens (eventually) is that one of the Larrabees turns up. Did that really need all Sid’s antics to set up? But here is Holmes in disguise (the camera dissolves to a closer view to admire his ridiculous false nose). More coming and going. The Larrabee again signals at the window, but why is still not clear. Moriarty is disguising himself as a cab driver (with a ridiculous moustache and eye patch), but Billy has spied this and lets Holmes know. With the aid of Forman (who is apparently still not dead), Moriarty is caught and led away.

Watson and Holmes talk. Holmes sets up yet another elaborate scheme for being overheard, this time by Alice. Watson smiles. “You’re in love!” he says. Gillette makes this utterly un-Holmesian scene touching: he reaches out and clasps Watson’s pocket, nodding. He plays it so subtly—his eyebrows tensing, his mouth pursing a little—that you almost forget what a garble is the surrounding drama. So there’s more coming and going with the prince’s agents, and Alice eventually enters and gives Holmes the letters—which he then gives back to her, and she gives them back to the agents. Holmes reveals that it’s all been a trick to get her to do this. He says he will “say goodbye and leave forever”. But she asks him to stay, for “we still have many things to say to each other”. They go to the fireplace. “And Holmes stayed”, states an intertitle. THE END.

Lord, what a mess of a drama. It’s what Watson (if he’d been given a proper scene) would have called “ineffable twaddle”. Endlessly elaborate set-ups, endless minor characters, endless comings and goings—all for the inanest of results. I still can’t believe Watson spends the first TWO REELS of this film sat in a chair, reading, waiting for Holmes to speak to him. It’s symptomatic of how many early Holmes adaptations side-line Watson’s character. The Anglo-French series made by the Éclair Company (eight films, 1912-13), for example, or the German series Der Hund von Baskerville (six films, 1914-20), each do without Watson altogether. Gillette’s 1916 film at least includes Watson, but he serves no dramatic purpose whatsoever. The tiny moment when Holmes reaches out to Watson near the end of the film: that’s the only moment of genuine friendship, of believable feeling, in the entire film. I know I’m writing from a point of view in time when the Holmes-Watson relationship has been the mainstay of most adaptations from the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films onwards, but even so—this 1916 version is so contrived, so filled with uninteresting minor characters, that it misses the chance to develop the one genuine relationship it has on screen.

But for all its ludicrous clunkiness as drama, this film does have one great facet: William Gillette really is a superb Holmes. His cool, reserved performance is marvellously subtle and understated. It’s a reminder that such performers and performances could and did exist at the dawn of the twentieth century. When the word “theatrical” is used to describe early film performances, it’s usually a criticism. Here is a performance honed 1,300 times on stage since 1899, and it’s the most naturalistic, convincing thing in the film. It’s fantastic to see all the trademarks of later Holmeses here: the smoking jacket, the pipe, the deerstalker, the magnifying glass. Even if they serve a stupid plot (or have nothing to do with it), the scenes where he’s mucking about with test tubes or stalking about a room are superbly played. Clearly, Gillette’s understanding of Holmes—his imagining and/or adapting of Holmes—chimes with that of our own era over a century later. Not only this, it’s almost certainly helped define the look and mood of many subsequent Holmeses. Gillette’s play would be readapted for John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes (1922) and influence countless other versions later. (Other writers have surely asked even bolder questions than Gillette’s: “May I marry Holmes?”—and had no need to wait for Conan Doyle’s reply.) It’s strange that Gillette’s dramatic construction—the excess of characters, of melodramatic bustle—is so at odds with his performance. On screen, he’s so calm, cool, collected. He can command a scene even by doing nothing. Which is not to say he’s without humour or wit. There’s a very pleasing smirk (nothing more than a turn of the lips) that we see whenever he has outwitted one of the villains. (Strangely, these moments reminded me of Rupert Everett as Holmes in the one-off BBC drama Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004). Something about the height, presence, and control of Gillette—coupled with the hint of cool smugness—brought Everett to mind.) So, here’s to William Gillette the actor—but not the dramatist.

The version released by Flicker Alley is the restoration from 2015. This was based on the only surviving version of the film, a print found in Paris of the French serialized version from 1920. Strange that this should be the only copy that survives. For as a serial, the film surely doesn’t work: it’s so meandering, it lacks the structure or cliff-hanger endings of a true multi-part drama. Next to the contemporary serials of Feuillade, Sherlock Holmes is a pale crime thriller indeed. By 1920, the time of its release in France, it must have seemed rather old fashioned. But in its favour is that the print is gorgeous to look at. The film is richly photographed: the textures are thick, deep, and enhanced by the tinting. The images have real presence. But the drama does not.

Paul Cuff

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929; Ger.; Hanns Schwarz)

It’s 1929 and Erich Pommer has just returned to Germany from Hollywood. He’s keen to introduce sound to the Ufa productions, and he has earmarked the talented Austrian director Hanns Schwarz to direct the sound musical Melodie des Herzens (1929). But first, the pair embark on Ufa’s last big silent release…

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929; Ger.; Hanns Schwarz)

Over the opening credits, the waltz plays. Look how the music seems to match the style of the titles, their sense. The font is a little old-fashioned, elaborate. But the text manages to flow, a feeling enhanced by the way each title dissolves into the next. It’s already an elegant world, a graceful one. But it’s also sad, transient. The waltz slows, becomes a kind of elegy.

The opening shot is of a clock. It’s old fashioned. Figures of a man and woman twirl. Elsewhere, a bath is being run. The camera tracks backward and pans to reveal a series of details; we see the elaborate breakfast table, the silk sheets recently vacated, the curtained walls, the spacious reception room (and yes, I love that the camera wobbles just the smallest amount as it moves in-between rooms: it speaks of the heaviness of the equipment, the effort of moving it, the determination to complete this fabulous shot); still moving, the camera finds the inhabitant. Her back to the camera, here is Brigitte Helm. The music brings in the main theme. It’s a glorious moment.

There is a cut. We see Helm from the front. There is a rose at her lips. She looks dreamy. She is dreaming, a daydream of someone we have yet to meet. When she looks to her left, we see her in profile. Is it my imagination, or is Helm even more beautiful than usual? She looks vulnerable in a way I’ve not seen before. I associate her with those pencil-thin eyebrows, raised in determined desire. Fritz Lang made her a star in Metropolis, but that film is such an oddity, filled with cold formality, with exaggerated tableaux and exaggerated performances—and all exacerbated by the faster-than-life framerate (seemingly in accord with its makers’ intentions)—that it’s difficult to get over, to get past. Even in some of Pabst’s films, Helm can relapse into a kind of archness that is very pleasing and striking on screen, but doesn’t always engage you in a complex, emotional way. But here, in Nina Petrowna, from this very first moment, it’s like she’s a different person, a different presence on screen. And it’s a private moment, this scene of her on the balcony. She’s not putting on a show for someone, or for the camera. The music dies away. Nina looks up.

The cavalry is on parade. The orchestra strikes up a march. But look at how Schwarz frames this scene. The horses and men are behind a high, dark, imposing fence. Who is being held off from whom? (As the narrative unfolds, we realize that both our lead characters are limited by the roles this society gives them: the confines of army life are as imprisoning as the confines of Nina’s apartment.)

On the balcony, Nina appears curious, but only mildly so. For she turns away to walk back inside—only, she cannot. Her silk throw is caught upon the balcony rail. She turns round and struggles to free it. The parade continues below. And now she looks more carefully at the men. Look at the way her face changes. She breaks into a kind of smile. But again, it’s a private smile. She’s not smiling for someone, but for herself. There is a vulnerability here. A delicious touch of backlighting haloes her uncombed hair. She throws the rose at one of the cavalrymen. It lands in his lap; surprised, he looks up and sees Nina. In each of their faces, we see a kind of childish delight. His wide-eyed surprise becomes a boyish grin. Her smile is almost a giggle, and the way she raises her hands up to her face is so gauche, it’s the gesture of a much younger girl. As if to underscore the innocence, Schwarz cuts from these close-ups to a wider shot of the parade disappearing round the corner—all overlooked up a stone cherub, who looks like he’s reaching out to touch one of the men. It’s an arresting image, sweet and sad. Sweet, because it’s an image of innocence; sad, because the men are out of reach—and because the glitter of armour makes them impregnable, cold, brittle. (Sad, also, because I’ve seen this film before, and I know what it all means.)

Nina shakes her head a little and goes back inside. Cue: the man of the house. A rich man, from the cut of his tunic; an important man, from the emblems on his shoulders; a wealthy man, from the way he is so at ease in the luxurious apartment, from the way he strides up the staircase. He has instant access to the inner rooms, to Nina’s hand, offered to his lips from the privacy of the bathroom. (His name is Colonel Beranoff, but the film purposefully denies us this for the moment.)

In the off-duty rooms of the barracks, we see the cavalrymen at ease. But the music tells us this is a military space: snare drum, marching rhythm, brass footsteps. The cavalryman we recognize from the parade is introduced—but not by name (more on this, later). He is merely “this young’un”, newly arrived in St Petersburg. His comrades (all moustached, unlike the cleanshaven youth) will show him the town. They take him to a nightclub.

The night club. Schwarz begins with a shot of fish in a shallow pond. It’s a curious image to begin the scene. It’s another image of entrapment, the fish behind their glass wall. The camera tracks back to reveal the luxury around them. The music is elegant, easy; another waltz, softer, sadder. The soldiers enter. The elder men show their innocent comrade the ropes. He kisses the hand of a woman, who seems to have been waiting for soldierly company. But as he lifts his head from her hand, his eyes catch sight of movement above him. In a balcony overlooking the hall, Nina and her companions are settling down. The cadet is all wide-eyed surprise again and, as in his first sight of Nina, breaks into a boyish smile. He is caught by surprise, by desire—by a desire not sought, but happened upon. (His comrades knew they’d find company; he was not looking for Nina.) His comrades look up to see who he’s seen. A fabulous shot through the jets of water from the fountain: the images is neatly divided so that we see distinct the two balconies, one with Nina, the other with a stranger. And oddly it’s the stranger who gives a Brigitte Helm-like look of desire back down at the soldiers (the raised eyebrow, the narrowed eyes; it really is very “Helm”). The soldiers mistake her as the object of their friend’s look. And it’s now that they name him: Michael Andrejewitsch. It’s one of only two times that he’s named in the film, and this first time is in the context of mistaken identity and desire.

Michael orders a rose, which he now holds to his lips—just as Nina spots him. The high/low spatial dynamic of their initial encounter is recreated: Nina again on a balcony, Michael below. But this time Nina is not alone. Her look of desire is seen by the man next to her: her lover, Colonel Beranoff. It’s a revealing shot: for it shows us the source for Nina’s (literally and metaphorically) “high” position. It’s not her table, it’s Beranoff’s; it wasn’t her apartment balcony, either: it was his. It’s another sad moment. And look how the two people falling in love are framed: she overlooked by the man who effectively owns her, he overlooked by the fountain, framed by water, looking small and vulnerable and out of his depth (socially, yes; romantically, yes; and, most certainly, financially).

And, oh goodness, yes, please look at Helm’s face in this scene. She starts to convey her desire—less girlish than in that first encounter; it’s more of the look we associate with Helm from other films: the eyebrows, the tilt of the head. But no sooner as she expressed this look—a look of desire, certainly; but, more than that, a look of agency, of will—than she relinquishes it. It’s a beautiful moment of performance. Just see how that clear sense of wanting drains from her face. It’s not that she ceases to desire Michael, but that she realizes that the man sat next to her will not allow it. She cannot express her longing, for her longing is prescribed. So she immediately adopts her casual, disinterested persona for Beranoff—you can see her shake off her self and become another. “Is he a good friend of yours?” the colonel asks, nodding down to the tiny figure below. Oh, just a childhood friend, she says—she lies. (As I rewatch this scene, I’m almost convinced Helm is speaking in English. It would make sense, as she’s speaking to the English actor Warwick Ward. How interesting that this first “lie” is itself spoken, albeit silently on screen, in a second tongue.) Nina is performing, and Beranoff knows it. Ward’s performance is excellent: so knowing, so charmed in his lover, yet so unbelieving. “A charming lie”, he says. “Are you jealous?” No, he isn’t—and to prove it, he invites the cadet up to their private room. (There are two other men at their table, but the camera and Nina hardly concern themselves with their presence. Nina is worried what’s happening down below.)

The exchange between them is overlooked by the colonel. He’s almost amused—almost. But he leans against the wall, casting a shadow—occupying space. He doesn’t have to say anything for his presence to be felt. And look at Helm’s face: hiding her emotion from Beranoff, resenting his presence, and falling for Michael. They waltz, and the camera moves. The piano is being played on screen, and all that’s left in the theatre is the piano below the screen. One of the colonel’s companions turns off the light. It’s ostensibly to make the effect of the punch flambee more noticeable, but it has the effect of giving the illusion (only the illusion) of intimacy in the room. Nina and Michael are in silhouette against the balcony; Beranoff becomes a dark shadow against the wall. (The scene also presages the electricity going off in the lovers’ flat, later in the film.)

The colonel quickly tires of their dance and turns on the light: the waltz ends. The young couple looks embarrassed. Nina’s face falls: once more she must hide her feelings, play the game. She dons her fur coat; she looks extraordinary. We see Michael’s eyes on her, then they fall away to the floor. What is he thinking? Well, we surely know: it’s like her downcast eyes just now, it’s the feeling of desire creeping up on him, and the sadness of unfulfillment. But Nina gives him a knowing look. Their farewell is brief. We don’t see what’s happened, initially, for Schwarz cuts to a close-up of Michael. It’s another marvellous little moment, this look on his face—and Francis Lederer’s performance is pitch-perfect. It’s innocence and expectation mingled, longing and trepidation at the same time. The camera follows his eyes as he looks down: Nina has placed a key in his hand. (And oh, the music—it’s just perfect. The waltz ebbs and flows below the image, romantic and melancholy. It’s drifting above the image, sympathetic but distanced, knowing but detached.)

This same mood is carried into the next scene, when Michael havers outside Nina’s villa before using the key to enter. The music here is cautious, almost anxious. Michael’s entry is the opposite of Beranoff’s: the colonel swept upstairs, but Michael hesitates at every step.

And here is Nina, opening the door. She, too, is half knowing, half hesitant. She knows what they both want but is not sure the hows and wherefores—and what it might mean. Michael is all boyish hesitancy. Nina offers him a seat, a closer seat. Why not sit next to her? She goes to him.

“You must have wondered about my strange invitation—” she says. He coyly shakes his head, grinning like a child whose smugness gets the better of him. Cut to Nina, whose smile fades, slowly, who looks away. This is a perfect scene, a perfect performance. You know everything about Nina’s life in the way her smile fades, right here. You know that she likes Michael, that she desires him physically, but that she hoped for more than just physical love. And the look on Michael’s face—that suggests he is not as innocent as he seems, that he assumes she is a certain kind of woman—hurts her. She worries that he thinks he has won the right to her body, that she is no more than a body to him. And the slowness of this realization, the way it imbues first the close-up of her face, then the shot of them sat together, says so much about her life. Surely now we understand her relations with the colonel, which is more of a transaction than a relationship? Surely we can fill in the blanks of how she has had to get by until now. We have not seen her in the company of friends, only the colonel’s friends. Does she have friends? What has happened to her family? The fading smile here, it seems to me, is a very lonely thing indeed. She thought she might have been connecting to someone, only for this connection to be another transaction. (It was this moment that made me fall in love with the film. Suddenly, a whole stratum of feeling is revealed beneath the surface.)

“I think it’s better if you were to leave”, she says. Now it’s Michael’s turn to realize what’s going on, how much his little grin and his little shake of the head has hurt her, wronged her. They shake hands, and as they touch the clock chimes. The montage of the clock from the opening scene begins again, and the film changes once more. Nina moves close to Michael, and they dance to the music of the clock. What are we to make of this? It’s a delightful scene, but it’s something else. Schwarz cuts from the clockwork man and woman twirling to the dance of the human couple. Is Nina simply fulfilling Michael’s expectations? Does she lead her life with a kind of mechanical drive, an ingrained habit?

“Actually, you could spend the night here”, she tells him. She goes for champagne (seeing and hiding a picture of Beranoff en route); they drain their glasses; he refills the glasses and she looks at him. The music moves from tension to something tender. Nina lies back on the bed. She’s putting on a seductive face (more Helm-like). Michael looks at her. “You must be very tired, Madame— —?” (That double extended hyphen is a lovely touch in the original title. I love a good hyphen, it’s so gestural.) The question makes Nina cease her seductive performance and sit up. She agrees it’s bedtime. He makes to leave, and we see Nina shake her head. Is he so innocent? She makes excuses about him not being about to leave: what would the neighbours say? The villa is large. She leads him by the hand to the next room. Michael looks around, in wonder. It’s clearly the nicest bedroom he’s ever been in. Nina says goodnight and leaves. But she goes only to the other side of the door. Each one listens to the other through the door, hesitant. Nina stands. The clock ticks. She quietly opens the door. Michael is asleep in a chair. He hadn’t dared even go into the bed. She looks at him sleep, almost shaking her head.

The camera finds them the next morning. She has slept on the floor by the door, and he finds her there. They are suddenly both children, innocently waking and then picnicking their breakfast on the floor.

Beranoff walks in. The colonel makes the immediate assumption that Nina has slept with Michael. “I hope, officer, that you are as pleased with her as I’ve been!” he says. (Incidentally, Michael is addressed by his rank of “Kornett”, the lowest rank of commissioned officer in the cavalry. He is, technically, an officer—but only just.) He leads Michael out, warning him that “Women and officers should have only one master!” It’s a line that reveals just what he thinks of Nina, and women in general. Beranoff next shouts at Nina, asking her to invent some new lie to explain herself. So she tells him that she cannot lie, since she loves Michael—and says he spent the whole night with her, sleeping apart. The colonel laughs and applauds her “lie”. Just as Michael made assumptions, so does Beranoff. He offers Nina the chance to leave, but she must also leave “his” diamonds, “his” furs. The full extent of her position, her lack of power, is revealed.

Michael, meanwhile, is caught by a superior officer coming back to the barracks late. “Women, no doubt the reason for your being late, are worth nothing”, the officer explains.

Nina arrives at the barracks, and of course Michael gets into her carriage. There is a long, long moment as they say nothing—until she puts her hand in his. She takes him to her apartment—her apartment. It is bare, dark, small. Michael looks around him. “You live here now, Nina Petrowna?” It’s the first time anyone in the film has spoken her name, and it comes now—when Michael realizes what she has given up, and what kind of life she has led until now. You can see him realizing it on his face. He looks adult, for once, and when he smiles it’s out of respect—an adult emotion. They kiss, and there is a propulsion to their embrace. It’s like an obstacle has been overcome, they are ready for one another.

They are living together. Nina is peeling spuds. There is clock on the wall, a simpler clock: instead of the elaborate mechanics, a small bird pops out to call the hour. There is no wine, they don’t have enough money. But Nina lays the table and looks truly happy. And Michael can afford to buy only one flower to bring home for her; but he looks happy. Nina plays their waltz. It’s a lovely scene, for the orchestra in the theatre must stop and wait: the solo piano takes over and mimics the attempts of Michael to learn the tune on screen. It’s lovely, too, for the way it’s played. The lovers are still having fun, enjoying being next to one another, giggling, joshing. Their bodies are in synch. Michael wears his uniform in a casual way (you sense he’s wearing the hardy coat for warmth in a cold apartment) and Nina’s hair is loose. So there’s a touch of studentish-ness about them, a little shambly, a little boisterous. Nina is called to the door. The orchestra resumes its accompaniment, only for the piano to try—and fail—to play with it, as Michael fluffs his playing.

Nina must lie again, a well-intentioned lie. For the electricity is about to be cut off, and she can’t bear to tell Michael how much money is owed. The lights go off as Michael fumbles with the piano. The scene harks back to their first dance in the dark. There, the piano waltz was stopped by the lights going on; here, it’s stopped by the lights going off. Nina pretends the outage is for Michael’s sake: a surprise dinner with candles. “Isn’t it beautiful?” They kiss, and Michael accidentally breaks her bracelet. Wanting more light, he goes to the switch and the truth is out. There is a long close-up of Michael, realizing what’s happening. Nina looks at him (another tender, sad close-up of Helm) and Michael promises to make enough money once he’s promoted. He sees her battered shoes, and the scene ends with his eyes in thought and hers looking away in contentment as she strokes her hair.

The officers’ casino. Michael joins a table. His face is boyish enthusiasm, excitement. Beranoff comes over, sits. Drinks are poured. The night goes on, turns to morning. It’s a scene out of Joseph Roth: the young officer trying to keep up with his peers, being out-played and out-drunk. So Michael cheats, and Beranoff sees him. Beranoff makes to leave. He puts on a fabulous coat, a fabulous hat. His status is on show (immaculate frockcoat, medals, buttons, aiguillette, sabre), as is Michael’s low rank (simple tunic, unembellished). He confronts Michael with a pre-written question that he only has to sign. It’s the first time we see Michael’s simplified name: M. Rostof. He has signed his own suicide note, for this is “the only solution possible for an officer”. But Beranoff makes him an offer: report to his flat tonight…

Cut to Nina, joyfully expecting Michael’s return. The phone rings, and Beranoff makes an unspecified threat about Michael’s career. So Nina arrives chez Beranoff. She is cold, dignified. But she tries to hide her shoes from Beranoff’s gaze. But in every scene with Nina, we know Beranoff to be knowing, shrewd, observant. He plays his hand perfectly: shows Nina the confession, the card. She looks at him harshly, but then goes to the window and cannot hide her tears. So Nina makes the deal Beranoff has forced her to make: she will save Michael by giving him up, and report back to the villa. When Michael comes in, Nina has left, and he accepts Beranoff’s apparent change of heart with that same, boyish expression that he had when he thinks luck is on his side. And on his way home, he goes into a shoe shop.

We know what will happen next, but it’s still hard to watch. Nina is alone. Their plates have already been laid out on the table. She has decorated Michael’s with sprigs of flowers. She strokes his empty chair. She extinguishes the candles. Now she must lie again. But first Michael presents her with a gift. The look on Nina’s face—wiping away tears when Michael cannot see… She unwraps the box. Look at her face, her hands—she is so happy. And Michael too grins with satisfaction. She cradles the shoes, strokes them; but her face hardens. She swallows. The music slows, turns to a minor key. “It’s very nice of you, Michael, that you’ve bought me a pair of shoes…” (and we see her face again; her eyebrows arching, something like forced cruelty taking hold of her—a performance taking shape) “…but do you think that I would wear such common shoes?” She stands, chucks the shoes onto the chair, and walks away. It’s such a devastating moment, to watch her break his heart—and to know that hers is already broken. There is a close-up of Michael, clearly hurt, clearly very hurt—hurt in such a way that he can hardly move; it’s all in the eyes, the slightly open mouth, not knowing what to say. “That’s not all Michael!” Nina adds, spinning round. And her face is almost disbelieving, almost surprised at her own performance. “I must finally be honest with you. I’m tired of living in this poverty.” Her arms swing, she arches her back. Michael comes over. “I need the wealth, the splendour, the villa…” It would be too easy to feel more for Michael in this scene, were it not for what he does next: he shoves Nina, shakes her against the cabinet. It’s the act of a child, not a man. It shows how immature he is. It tempers our sympathy with him and switches the emotional focus of the film back onto Nina. This is her film, after all. And it’s her performance here, in this scene, that we realize the “wonderful lie” she’s telling. You can tell how much it’s taking out of her: she’s almost lopsided, leaning on the sideboard for support while lurching her shoulders forward and throwing back her head. She says she’ll sell off everything she’s given him—she means Michael to think this refers only to her body, but we know it’s far more than that. Michael rushes out, and Nina is left at the shut door, leaning against it to keep her from collapsing. Cut to the cheap clock on the wall, with its little bird emerging to cry the hour.

And Schwarz dissolves from this clock to the clock we recognize from the opening shot of the film. If the clock seemed charming or silly when it first appeared, it now feels tragic. For the image has now attained its true significance, its full weight of meaning. We know the clock belongs to Beranoff more than to Nina: it is Beranoff who has determined the rhythm of Nina’s days, the timeframe of her life. The mechanical lovers are condemned to repeat their dance, which can never alter. Time is prescribed, movement is predetermined. So we see the mechanical couple waltzing once more, and the camera once more tracks back across the villa’s interior space to find Nina at the balcony, once again with a rose in her hand. Snow lines the streets. Here comes the cavalry. She looks for Michael, finds him, throws the rose. He ignores it, ignores her. We see the cherub, once more reaching out for the receding column of men. Nina turns, slowly, almost limping back inside.

The image of the discarded rose, lying on the snow, dissolves onto a huge bunch of fresh roses—and the camera tracks back to reveal them in Beranoff’s hand. He runs upstairs, bursts into Nina’s room and sees her lying on the couch. He’s all smiles. He throws the roses one by one over Nina—and now his face changes. There is a close-up of Nina, eyes closed. In the score, the solo violin was playing over a few sparse, pizzicato chords in the strings; now the music simply stops. Beranoff sees the empty vial on the floor. He drops the roses. The camera moves up from the vial on the floor, up along the line of Nina’s hand and arm, drooping from the couch, up to her face, then tracks left along the line of her body; we realize she is wearing black, and the roses strewn over her unwittingly fulfil the funerary rites. The camera still moves along her body, as the orchestra resumes its course—playing now a slow, funereal march. The camera reaches Nina’s feet and stops: she is wearing the shoes that Michael gave her. A slow, slow fade to black. ENDE.

I was very taken by this film the first time I saw it, and rewatching it has reinforced my appreciation. Most of all, I admire the performances. Francis Lederer gets his role as the young officer just right: it’s a perfect rendering of someone of that age, of that rank. He’s keen but gauche, clumsy but tender, greedy but shy. The performance could easily be silly, exceeding in any one of the conflicting emotions; but Lederer keeps everything in check, nothing is overdone. Warwick Ward plays the colonel with every bit of charm, superiority, and knowingness the character demands. He never has to emote, to shout or scream: the point of such a figure, of a man of this rank and wealth, is that he never has to emote or shout or scream to get what he wants.

And of course, there’s Brigitte Helm. I never thought I’d be moved like this by her on screen. Fascinated, yes. Enticed, yes. Delighted, enthralled, yes. But really moved, no. This film shows Helm at her most subtle, most empathetic. Of all the films of hers that I have seen, this is her most nuanced performance—aided by the superb direction. Those early scenes with Michael in the club and then in Nina’s apartment are so, so touching. It’s almost like we watch the star persona (her “role” as kept woman) fall away to reveal the young woman beneath. Several of the contemporary reviews I’ve read compare her unfavourably to Greta Garbo. It’s true that Nina is a role Garbo would have taken had the screenplay been realized in Hollywood. But I’m glad it wasn’t, and I don’t think (as some German critics did) it does Helm discredit to take it on. Though Garbo was only a few months older than Helm, somehow I can’t quite think of Garbo being the child-like host of Michael for their picnic in her apartment. Rather, I can’t imagine being surprised by the transformation in the way that I was with Helm. It’s a subtle, sophisticated performance, by turns fierce and vulnerable.

Of course, the whole film looks stunning. The sets are gorgeous, the costumes exquisite. It’s a rich, complete world on screen. Nina’s apartment, the nightclub, the barracks, and the snowy streets outside are all coherent spaces, each suggesting their own context and history. And the way the camera glides through these spaces, or glances from one space into another, is fluent, expressive, articulate, meaningful. The cameraman was Carl Hoffmann, one of the great names of German filmmaking in the 1920s and beyond. If he had shot nothing else, Hoffmann would be renowned for being the chief cameraman on E.A Dupont’s Varieté (1925) and Murnau’s Faust (1926) (to say nothing of his earlier work with Fritz Lang). If Nina Petrowna does not have the spectacle or scale of these earlier films, its images are nevertheless as stylish and delicious as anyone could want. I particularly love the dark limits of the film’s frame, the way the iris gently shapes the images. It’s most visible in the darker interior scenes, further excluding everything beyond the frame from our eyes. The outside world seems less interesting. And I’m more than happy to forget what’s beyond the screen, the scene, the performers. (Most especially, that first time they dance, or their first night together.)

In all this, it might be easy to forget the director: Hanns Schwarz. Lots of reviewers dismissed him as a merely superficial, decorative director. But it’s unfair to think the film would work merely by dint of its sets or camera movement, as if the performances fall into place without someone human directing them. So, yes, I credit the film’s success to the guiding power of Schwarz. And although the story might be a variation on a familiar theme from literature or cinema, it’s still moving and well realized. I wouldn’t argue that the film is “great” in the sense that other films of the late 20s are great. It’s not setting out to change the world or revolutionize camerawork and editing. It’s not what it sets out to do, but how it does it that makes it great. I can’t imagine it being done better.

Saying how good the film looks, I should say (as my images suggest) that I was watching Nina Petrowna via a version broadcast on Swiss television many years ago. On a smallish screen, it looks fine—and certainly shows how good it should look. (I also have a friend who saw the film on 35mm when it was shown in London in 1999-2000, who confirms that it does indeed look superb on the big screen.) A newer restoration of the film was completed in 2014-15, which is listed as being slightly longer than the version I’ve seen. (Although this always depends on the framerate of either version.) To finish, I can at least show one frame from the new restoration. Interestingly, you can see more information in the frame from the broadcast copy: the still from the DCP has slightly cropped the image to lose the rounded corners of the original aperture. Shame. Give me my rounded corners! Give me more Nina Petrowna!

One of the other great pleasures of the broadcast copy I saw is the original orchestral score by Maurice Jaubert. The soundtrack was recorded in 2000 for its broadcast on ARTE, Dominique Rouits conducting the Orchestre de Massy. Interestingly, the Jaubert score was not the one performed in cinemas for its Berlin premiere in 1929. There, the score was by Willy Schmidt-Gentner—and contemporary reviews all say how wonderful it was. I’m curious to know if it survives, but the Jaubert score is so good that the film can thrive without the “premiere” music. This was Jaubert’s first film score, and his only one for silent film. It’s built around a few melodic themes, all of which are instantly memorable and which vary and develop over the course of the film. It’s wonderful the way it wrings so much out of a simple set of melodies, by the way it changes instrumentation—moving from the full orchestral sound to smaller groups of strings, and even down to solo piano. Like so many scores of the period, it doesn’t try to hug the images too close: the music drifts over the film, creating mood, filling out the emotional resonance of the scenes. I catch myself humming bits of it very often. I hope a new recording is made for the new restoration—and that the film gets a proper release on Blu-ray someday. It’s very much worth it.

Paul Cuff

Abwege (1928; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

I couldn’t summon the will to write about something “seasonal” (i.e. Christmassy) this week, so I went back to revisit something I saw earlier this year. (Although I suppose, as the central section of the film is a party scene, it might have some vague seasonal rhyme with New Year.) We’re in Germany in the late 1920s, so it’s odds on that whatever we see will be a quality production. We’re in the hands of G.W. Pabst, which suggests directorial excellence, and we’re in the company of Brigitte Helm, which promises…. well, ahem, good things.

Abwege (1928; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

The opening title makes it clear whose picture this is: “Brigitte Helm in Abwege”. It’s a matter-of-fact style font, spelled out in a cool blue. I’m used to a certain kind of green for German intertitles of an earlier period (1910s-early 20s), but I like this blue.

The first shot shows us Brigitte Helm, or rather, her image. The artist Walter is drawing Irene (Helm) in profile: she’s the star, the central concern, and here she is. Walter is fond of Irene and doesn’t hide it. Irene knows it and demurs, just a little; but Liane, her friend, enjoys sitting in on their unspoken flirtation. Walter invites her to his studio. Liane seems keen for Irene to accept. There’s something curious about Liane (Herta von Walther). Her short, black hair, her dark, eyes, always narrowed in—how to put it?—receptivity. It’s not as though she’s sinister; but there’s something about her that makes her look as though she has a scheme on the go. With the cigarettes, short hair, and chic dark look there’s also a touch of the “intimate female companion” visible in other characters from films of this period (think Augusta in Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929). It’s like she’s seducing Irene through Walter.

There is a close-up of Irene, mulling over the idea of seeing Walter—imagining it, and perhaps its possibilities; but her face suddenly changes, her eyes widen with delight, and we realize she’s seen something at the other end of the room. Yes, indeed: her husband arrives home, and for the first time the camera gives us an establishing shot of the whole interior space. Up till now, it seemed as though we were in a sitting room. But the long shots reveal its context. First, we see the huge space extending to the glass doors that mark the entrance. Second, the camera looks back at the reception area where Irene and friends are sat. It’s dwarfed by the space around it, by the grand staircase extending over it. The furniture is huddled into this far corner; the rest of the space is empty. Apart from the curtains in the snug corner, the walls are bare, the space free of “soft” furnishing. Floor and walls are tiled. It looks like a medical facility.

Irene’s husband arrives. He kisses her, but when their lips meet Pabst cuts back to Liane lighting a cigarette. It’s a rhyme on their rival lips, a play of rival habits. The film has offered us no introductory titles to anyone so far. The only list we’ve seen is the opening credits. So although we’ve read there that Irene’s husband is “Dr Thomas Beck”, and presumably therefore a professional doctor or academic, the film makes us work out—visually, silently—what this means in terms of the relations on screen. So here is Liane, offering a cigarette to the doctor; he refuses, but a look from his wife (of hurt, disappointment, embarrassment) makes him take one out of politeness. The history of this group, the internal tensions, is all here for us to see in a few well-chosen, economic gestures of set design, performance, and editing. Even the doctor’s sense of detachment, or superiority, is here: for Pabst frames the doctor taking the cigarette from a slightly low angle, almost akin to Liane’s point of view. He’s all profile, and behind him is the well-machined, well-designed staircase, angling away to the top of the frame. It’s all very cool, reserved. Smoke drifts from the bottom of the frame. He looks away from its source, from Liane. When finally he takes a cigarette and smokes, he is still looking away from Liane. But Pabst doesn’t look away: he cuts back to Liane, amid the cushions and comfort of the only soft-furnished corner of the room, grinning in her small, but significant, moment of triumph. (My word, this film really is well directed.)

Liane has invited them to a part at the Eldorado, but the doctor has asked Irene “a hundred times” not to “associate with that woman”—and does so again now. Irene goes to say goodbye, sadly, to her friends. At the door, she shakes her head: she can’t come out tonight. Walter kisses Irene’s hand, a little too long. Liane asks Irene “why do you allow yourself to be locked away like this?”, and the words are made all the stronger for taking place at the glass doors of the entrance. Earlier, I said the interior looked like a medical facility, and now my impression is reaffirmed: the glass doors mean that Irene, inside, can be observed from outside. A space that offers scant comfort (in terms of furniture, homeliness, the bustle of everyday life) also offers scant privacy. Irene withdraws. She stands at the glass doors and it’s as if she is under observation in a facility.

But Pabst again does something interesting. As Irene stands at the doors, the film cuts back to her husband finding Walter’s drawing of Irene. He looks at her profile, and the viewer (if not the husband) realizes that Irene is caught between the roles given to her by two men. From the square sheet of paper on which Irene’s face is framed, Pabst cuts back to the square frame of the glass door behind which Irene stands. Both are frames through which Irene is observed (and, of course, we too observe her through the frame of the cinema screen). If she is trapped at home by her husband, the alternative is to be trapped in her admirer’s designs.

Irene herself picks up this theme in the next scene, accusing her husband of “locking me away”. The phone rings, and it’s more work for the doctor. He talks and examines his files, while Irene sits on his desk and glares at him. The camera cuts between close-ups of the files, the husband, and Irene. You might call the cutting here a kind of “free indirect” style, whereby the film shows us the character’s thoughts and feelings without ever quite being subjective. “This is where our marriage is!” Irene roars at the end of this little montage: has the editing prompted her cry, or were was the editing prompted by her feelings? Still he ignores her, so off she runs.

In Walter’s studio, we see more images of Irene: her face is being crafted, improved, ready to be fed into the rack of the printing press. It’s a faintly threatening image: that it precedes Irene’s arrival suggests she doesn’t quite know what’s coming. Nor does she know what’s following her: a cab with her husband. He is in his own frame now, the jealous husband, behind the glass cab window. His fur-collared coat is dark, brooding. It’s the only thing “soft” about him, even his house. It might be a sign of tenderness, of a desire for something soft and yielding, but the coat makes him look threatening: his clean-cut profile and slicked-back hair brooding over his tall, black form. He’s in marked contrast to Walter, the artist, who has donned his white studio coat. In his room, the large canvas and papers are matched by the pale sheets over the large skylight. His whole room is dominated by his craft. Irene’s face is being pressed onto a sheet. Now Irene enters. She sees her image strewn about the room. She is flattered, pleased; she demurely hides her emotion from Walter in the background, but Pabst captures the look in the foreground. When Irene sits beside Walter, she gives vent to her anger—but Pabst offers no title to translate her emotion; Helm can say it all with her performance, her face, her hands, her shoulders tensing and untensing, her body writhing even while sitting. Walter seizes his chance, and suggests they escape together to Vienna. Irene writhes into—and then out of—Walter’s embrace. (Truly, no-one writhes like Brigitte Helm.) For the first time, she’s showing off the clingy sheen of her dress—and the fact that she has the sensuality to wear it like it’s meant to be worn.

But the doctor watches still. And now he’s up in Walter’s studio, and hears him ordering the train tickets (the “sleeper” service is as suggestive a kind of ticket as any scriptwriter might cite). His entrance sends papers blowing across the room. It’s the first time the doctor seems more than merely morally assertive: here we realize he’s physically powerful, and the artist Walter looks weedy when he stands to confront him. The doctor walks stiffly, upright. He takes off his hat. Will he punch him? Pabst fades to black. (The film cannot yet show us the doctor doing something physically assertive. Throughout the film, it’s as if we’re supposed to take him as a virgin, as someone never quite capable of a physical act of intimacy with his wife. Is that it? Does she just want him to desire her physically?)

Irene is alone at the station; but not quite alone. Her husband arrives. It’s cold. It’s cold not merely because it’s evidently winter (the light, the trees, the clothes); it’s cold because suddenly the tinting has gone. This is the great advantage of tinting—and here it’s a subtle range of colours (sepia, yellow, pink, turquoise), almost like inky washes over the image: warmth and cold can be added to the tonal range, or created by transitioning from colour to monochrome.

The interior confrontation scene is introduced via the glass doors: first, Thomas steps through them to deliver Walter’s letter to Irene (the letter is a meek apology, presumably dictated to him by the husband); then, Irene goes through another set of sliding glass doors to read it, and presses her body against the wall, fists raised in anger. The husband looks guilty. But what will he do? She—well, we—are crying out for him to be human, warm. Go and kiss her, man! Show her you love her! Come on! He comes to the sliding doors. She runs to them. An embrace? No! He’s got his massive coat on again. “You’re going out now?” Irene asks, as incredulous as we are. A chance for tenderness is gone. Both regret it. The husband doesn’t go to his club, but slinks upstairs. As with the moment Irene reads the letter and presses herself against the wall, Pabst here uses a handheld camera to show the husband going upstairs. In both cases, it’s just for a moment: the camera pans, but clearly trembles a little as it does so. It’s a moment—two moments, in a visual rhyme—that introduces uncertainty, disequilibrium. Both characters are about to go off the rails.

Upstairs, the husband is alone with his shadow in the bedroom: the tinting is gone again, it looks extra bleak and cold. Downstairs, Irene descends in an astonishing dress (more on this in a moment), only to find a friend of her husband (councillor Möller) at the door. So surprised is he by her appearance and dress (and the doorman has already convinced him that Dr Beck has already left), that he allows her to invite him along to a nightclub. The doctor observes from the upstairs window, leaving it open as he slumps back onto a comfy seat.

The Eldorado is in full swing. It’s tinted a gentle pink, suggestive of warmth, and this is the first time we’ve seen crowd of people, the sense of this being a city, and the specific city of Berlin in the late 1920s. It would be a delight if it weren’t for the two sad figures on the side-lines: Walter, already drunk, and an anonymous woman (later identified as Anita), who looks not only intoxicated but world-weary to the point of moral collapse. We also glimpse two well-dressed, slightly effete, men smoking and drinking together; I say “men”, but one looks to be in his mid-teens; are they a couple? This nightclub is an ambiguous space. It’s joyful but sad, it’s a place where men and women meet, but also a place where other couplings are possible.

Enter Irene. Now let’s talk about what she’s wearing. You can glimpse the pale, silky something beneath her equally silky, fur-lined jacket, itself a kind of show-offy cut. She looks like a kind of dark-furred powder puff. And look at her hat! It’s a kind of glittering skull-cap, with two large fluffy tassels dropping like dogears on either side. It’s a mad ensemble, and Irene looks faintly frightened to wear it all as she crosses the dance floor.

It’s an amazing sequence, for Pabst now fully utilizes the handheld camera. (I say “handheld”, but it’s more likely to have been a chest-mounted camera, such was the weight of the apparatus and the difficulty of having to hand-crank it.)  As Irene pushes her way through the throng, the camera struggles to keep her in focus; it’s buffeted by the crowd, it tries to keep steady while showing us the effort needed to do so. Irene is trying to reach Liane, who is dancing in the heart of the crowd. When they go and sit at a table, Irene looks calmer. Her coat is removed, and she brushes back her hair: behold, Brigitte Helm. The silky something is now seen: a sleeveless dress, with a triple-wound pearl neckless and substantial, bejewelled wristlet to compliment it.

The nightclub sequence that follows is remarkable for intercutting lots of complex little subplots and characters. We see councillor Möller, for example, assailed by bob-cut flappers and embarrassed to be recognized elsewhere by someone he knows. Drink steadies his nerves, but also introduces him to other forms of temptation. When he joins Irene and co., he sees something fall down the back of Liane’s low-cut black dress and fears to go to the rescue—before letting something else drop there so he can have a rummage (much to Liane’s amusement). Meanwhile, at a neighbouring table, the boxer Sam Taylor observes the cool profile of Irene and begins throwing streamers over her. And on the fringes, Anita tries to score a hit (or hit it off—for money?) with various shady characters moving between various groups of people.

While all these little dramas play out, Pabst resumes the main drama of the night: Irene’s flirtation with Walter. When she first sees him, it’s as if Irene remembers that she’s Brigitte Helm. From across the room, she goes what you might call full-Helm: the slightly squinting eyes, the arched eyebrow, the power-pout, the arched back. It’s a glorious moment. To cap it off, she drains her glass—and then grabs Liane’s friend to dance and make Walter jealous.

Things start to get strange. Vendors are selling sinister child-size puppets at the tables. (We see Sam Taylor playfight with a half-naked, hairy-chested puppet version of himself.) Anita crosses Irene’s path and Liane explains that she’s after “a magic potion that carries souls up to heaven”. As Liane’s friend kisses her arm, Pabst cuts back to the doctor at home, shivering in the blowy room. At the party, Anita slips a note to gain some of her potion. Irene wanders off to sample the “potion” that Anita offers. They disappear into a curtained chamber. We see Möller, happily but unstably drunk; he’s there to make us a smile a little, and to contrast with the more serious events unfolding around him. For here is Irene, emerging through the curtains, her head slumped onto her chest. It’s like the familiar Helm writhe has been arrested halfway through and her body is stuck in a twisted shape. Her head lolls, but she tries to dance again—until she passes Walter. The two, now equally addled, stare at each other for a moment before Irene grabs another man (a stunted, almost expressionless old man with a Prussian moustache) and launches into a wild, twirling dance. When she swirls into her seat again, her mannerisms are the familiar Helm-isms, rendered even more mannered. A moment of sobriety comes as Anita passes in the arms of a dancer. It’s as if we see Irene in the future. To underscore the notion of this possibility, Irene finally asks Liane who is this woman. Only now, many scenes into the sequence, are we told: “She was the wife of the banker Haldern… who shot himself when she left him”. Irene runs out, horrified.

At home, she finds her husband immobile in the freezing room. She fears he’s dead, so is hugely relieved when he opens his eyes. She closes the window, warms his hands, takes off his coat. The film might end here, surely—if only he’d take her in his arms. But when they prepare for bed, and Irene slips invitingly between the sheets, the doctor finds the weird doll of the boxer and storms out angrily.

Irene collapses in a torpor, then wakes the next morning to find the gang from the club serenading her bedside. The room fills with liqueur and cigarette smoke, and the sight of Möller in Liane’s arms. Irene looks upset, more so when her husband walks in. The doctor tells them (sarcastically) to act as if they were in their own home. Irene stands and yells at him: “You’re no man!” (Still he refuses to assert himself physically, and the sexual connotations of these moments of refusal/reticence speak volumes about the marriage.) “You’re sick, my girl”, the doctor explains, to Irene’s fury. Sick? She’ll show him “sick”…

Pabst cuts from the limp boxer-doll on the floor to the real boxing ring. (More handheld camerawork here as Sam fights a black boxer. It’s as if the dance floor and boxing ring are equally spaces of dangerous thrills.) Irene is there with Liane, looking on. Irene’s dress is now a silky black cape, her headpiece a kind of false black bob, with glittery brow. (She’s turning the Helm-dial up to about 8 at this point.)

Irene takes Sam up to Walter’s studio: ostensibly for a portrait, but really to engage in complex flirtation and jealousy. (Meanwhile, Liane warns the doctor that his wife may be about to do “something silly”.) In the empty studio, it is Sam who is the cause of danger: he carries Irene to a bed and looms menacingly over her. Irene ceases her performative flirtation and becomes genuinely frightened. Pabst again uses the handheld camera to make the threat real, a kind of extension of the danger of the dancefloor or boxing ring. (And the unsteadiness of the frame reminds the viewer of those first scenes that set the plot in motion: the reading of the letter, the retreat of the husband to the room.) Walter arrives just in time. Irene is dishevelled, in tears. But Walter is too petty to go and comfort her. He petulantly throws his portraits of her on the floor. Irene blames him for what’s happened, only for him, in self-pity, to explain that he can’t offer her the lifestyle of her rich husband. Irene forces herself into his arms and—for the first time in the film—presses a kiss on him. But just as Pabst interrupted Irene’s marital kiss in the film’s first scene, so now the extramarital kiss is interrupted by the husband at the door. Walter is afraid, but Irene can’t suppress a smile. She quickly strips down to her chemise and makes Walter open the door. It’s a striking, candid moment of her longing for him: her eyes say it all, as she stares intently at him. As I said before, it’s as if her marriage is yet unconsummated; she’s stood there waiting for Thomas to… well, do something. But again he refuses, walking out of the scene.

Time passes between scenes. Walter has been asked to appear as a witness in the Becks’ divorce hearing. Irene wears a black veil, as though in mourning. Her eyes are sad, sincere, even if she can’t speak. Finally, outside, in the corridor, the couple approach each other. She swears she was not unfaithful, but the court has already ruled: they are divorced. But the pair are happy. Alone together in the hall, they sit on a bench. She rests her head on his shoulder. He tells her he loves her. When they kiss now, it has passion in it. It’s a kind of first kiss. When will they get married? “As soon as possible!” Irene exclaims. ENDE.

A very, very good film. Helm embodies her character’s emotions: she’s caught between wanting to express her sexuality (the desire for sex itself) and the fear of losing a marriage that might yet be saved; she’s alluring and unsatisfied, daring and timid; she wears astonishing clothes, but only intermittently knows how to mobilize their effect. As her husband, Gustav Diessl likewise manages to be both physically imposing and emotionally reticent: we spend the film waiting for him to align both body and brain with his wife. And though the narrative might seem conservative—the (un)married couple (re)united at the end, the idea of marriage itself reaffirmed—there are so many interesting, unsettling things bubbling away through the film. Even if it reassures us that husband and wife should stick together, the film is also quite clear about the need for appetites to be tested and satisfied.

The title itself—“Abwege”—might translate literally as “Mistakes” or “Wrong Ways”; when released in Anglophone markets, it was retitled “Crisis” or “The Devious Path”. Yet the word “Abwege” is one of those suggestive, faintly enigmatic German compound words. “Ab” is a preposition, a kind of directional prefix (“from” or “off”), and “Wege” the plural of “Weg”, i.e. “path/track” (hence the English word “way”). The illustrative phrase you find in dictionaries is “auf Abwege geraten”, to “go astray”. Both the official English titles for the film fumble with the subtle sense of movement, of deviation, implied in the German original. I’ll bet whoever came up with “The Devious Path” was quite pleased with themselves; but it sounds too much like the title of some government-sponsored anti-drugs film. Abwege is not a salacious or moralistic film in that way; this is Pabst, after all, not DeMille. The film’s first intertitle, “Brigitte Helm in Abwege”, is almost an extension of the film’s name: something akin to “Brigitte Helm is going astray”. Again, it’s an instance where reading a subtitle doesn’t evoke the same sense as the original title.

But my word, the film looks fabulous. It’s not a huge studio spectacular, but the sets are superbly designed and always expressive. The Beck household is big and cold; the nightclub set a swirling nest of bustle. Pabst lets performers, sets, and editing tell the story: there are remarkably few intertitles. After the opening credits, all the relationships between the characters are told entirely visually—Pabst sees no need to reintroduce anyone with a title. He trusts us to be intelligent, to see—and interpret—what’s being shown.

The restoration notes also mention that the film was tinted when first released in 1928, so the restorers have added tints in line with “the conventions of that time”. How many films of the period are still shown in monochrome prints when they were intended to be tinted? It’s a frustration that even new releases on home media (I’m thinking especially of the Feuillade serials from the 1910s) forego tinting altogether. In the case of the Feuillade serials, the restorers not only have plentiful evidence of the “conventions of that time”, but even incomplete tinted copies of the serials at their disposal—yet still they choose to release a monochrome restoration. (If you’re not going to tint your restored version, at least show us an extract of the tinted copy/copies as part of your extras—don’t hide the evidence!) So it was nice to see a restoration where a little conjecture is used to enhance the image as it would have been enhanced in the period it was made and released.

Finally, the music. I watched this film via the restoration shown (and streamed) at Pordenone in 2020. This had music for piano by (I believe) Mauro Colombis. Which was fine. Like most semi-improvised piano scores, it was perfectly acceptable. It was… just… well… fine. But I longed for an orchestra, for something as rich as the photography, as supple as the performances, as enticing as the characters. Unless it’s a through-composed score with striking melodies or invention, you’re never going to remember a piano score. You might remember it being good, it suiting the film, but in all my years of watching silent films I can only remember one piano score— Neal Kurz’s for the English-language restoration of Dreyer’s Michael (1924)—and that was because it was through-composed, and cited numerous classical works with which I was already familiar (Schubert, Tchaikovsky etc), pieces which were already great before appearing in the film. It’s always the case when I watch a great film, I want a great score to go with it and do it justice. Imagine my delight when I found that there was an excellent, a really excellent, chamber orchestra score for Abwege written by Elena Kats-Chemin—and that it was on YouTube for me to see and hear. (Notably, it was written in 1999 for a broadcast of the film on ARTE, a version that uses different titles than the newer restoration.)  The music is everything it should be: it follows the film, but not so closely that it feels cloying—it floats carefully above the images. It’s restless, rhythmic, but still melodic; with its lilt and dance-inflected feel, it fits the setting and the period. It’s also emotionally intelligent; it moves you when it need to. I love the cool, reverberating sheen of the glockenspiel—most especially when Irene emerges from the curtained room, filled with chemical heaven. (The ARTE soundtrack must have been recorded live, for there are plenty of coughs and acoustic shifting and shuffling that a proper studio recording would have avoided. But there is good atmosphere, and perhaps the performance benefits from being live and engaging with its audience.) If the film gets a proper release on Blu-ray, I do hope the best score is reunited with the best image. Without an official release on home media, there’s only so much patience I can muster to resynch the video of one rip with the audio of another…

What else to say about Abwege? Pabst’s great, Helm’s great. It’s a really, really good film.

Paul Cuff

Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)

Well, it’s been cold lately, so I thought I’d watch something icy. I’m a sucker for anything that calls itself (or has retrospectively been called) a “mountain film”, and the fact that this one is subtitled “an Alpine Symphony” makes it even more appealing for me—as does the fact that the original orchestral score is part of the film’s restoration. And (spoilers alert) I was very, very happy with my choice.

Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)

Two climbers, a man and a woman, ascend towards the Liskamm mountain in the Alps. And that’s all the plot outline you need…

The film announces itself as “An Alpine Symphony in pictures / By Arnold Fanck”. Fanck is aiming high, even before the first image hits the screen. Richard Strauss’s tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (1915) was still a recent cultural phenomenon in 1921, and quite the most famous work with that title. That, too, is a depiction of the ascent and descent of a mountain, starting at dawn and finishing at nightfall. (Though Strauss also saw it as a philosophical allegory of man’s post-Christian moral evolution, planning initially to call the work “Der Antichrist”, after Nietzsche.) Fanck’s film is likewise both a literal depiction of an ascent and a rumination on the power of nature. Like Strauss’s tone poem, Fanck’s film is divided into movements (six “Acts”) and has its own score, by Paul Hindemith (of which, more later).

Many silent films begin by introducing us to its cast via close-ups and written credits. Fanck does the equivalent for mountains (“The Giants of Zermatt”). Each is given an introductory title (i.e. “Weisshorn 4511m” / “Breithorn 4171m” etc), followed by a majestic shot of the peak. It’s a brilliant series of shots, each one carefully framed (sometimes with masking), with clouds and mist speeding by the summits. The music swells and thunders in conjunction with the images, articulating in sound the sense of visual threat, of material might. The mountain at the heart of the film is the last to be named: “Liskamm, called the ‘devourer of men’, 4538m”. Yes, here is the star of our film.

Such is the film’s relative interest in humans and mountains that the only two characters in the film go unnamed, and are merely introduced with a shared introductory title (“Players: Hannes Schneider, Ilse Rohde”). Indeed, the humans are never once given a close-up in the whole film: Fanck is interested in them only as a means to construct his “symphony in pictures” of the mountains. They provide us with a narrative and (at various intervals) a means to reflect on the process of filmmaking on location.

Perhaps this is why the “dialogue” (such as it is) is so perfunctory. I say perfunctory, it’s actually very lengthy—but it’s a kind of narrative guide more than a real conversation. The first such title sets the tone: “I’m going to the Betemps Hut. Do you see over there at the foot of Monte Rosa? I’m staying there by myself. No-one comes up here so late in the Autumn. One shouldn’t go climbing in the mountains alone. It is too dangerous. But it is beautiful.” He’s clearly not trying to chat her up. As if to confirm this, his follow-up is: “There, through this wild glacier full of crevasses, the path leads up to the Liskamm. There one looks down from a height of more than 4000m into Italy. Would you like to come with me up to such heights? But the air is thin up there.” See what I mean? It’s not exactly flirtatious. He then invites her to join him in the morning for the trek, following it up with an intertitle so long that it has to scroll down the text to fit it all in a single screen: “Do you see how the Liskamm is smoking? The Föhn wind is blowing over from Italy. I’m afraid it will be a stormy passage tomorrow morning. The Ice Giant isn’t as harmless as it looks. Many who have encroached upon its giant crevasses and icy walls have never returned. Thus Liskamm is known as the devourer of men. The ascent of Liskamm is attained more infrequently than all the other mountains in this area.” Just as Fanck shows the visual “conversation” between the two climbers in a single shot, so the textual “conversation” is really just a monologue. The film has no interest in either figure as a character, and Fanck offers no attempt at a visual dynamic between them: this scene has no close-ups, indeed no cutting at all.

So what is the film interested in? The scenery. My god, yes, the scenery. I’m not sure how much more I can say about the film’s narrative, save for the fact that its imagery is unendingly mesmerizing. I could easily have taken a capture of every single shot of this film. From the moment the journey starts, the screen is filled with wonderful, striking images. The woman traverses a glacier to reach the hut, and we see the expanse of undulating snow and ice with the dark mountain flanks growing in the background. Daylight is a glowing, golden yellow tint. That evening, we see their destination glowering red. When they set off together, the moonlight makes the world turquoise.

Given that the views are entirely dominated by ice and snow (i.e. white) and rock (i.e. black), it’s worth reflecting on why the entire film is tinted and toned this way. In the first instance, there is a practical advantage in colouring monochrome images: in the context of endless white vistas, tinting reveals subtle nuances in tone that the eye might miss in pure black-and-white. (Fanck’s later films would overcome this partly by being shot on more sensitive filmstock.) Then there is the need to demonstrate the passage of the day, which has a narrative purpose (the added drama of the climbers having to spend a night in the mountains). But the main reason is, I think, more poetic than practical. A film that calls itself an “alpine symphony” clearly has ambitions beyond documentation: Fanck wants to show what it feels like to climb a mountain. The film’s titles move between very practical explanations of what we are being shown (placenames, altitudes, technical equipment) and evocative descriptions. Thus, when the climbers set off the title introduces the sequence: “The shine of the alpine moonlight lies magical and unreal over the frozen world of the eternal ice.” Even the titles are tinted green: typical of many German films of the period, but also integrating Fanck’s text into the coloured world of the film.

So, we watch the climbers negotiate the fissures and rock, wending slowly across the screen, shot-by-shot up the mountain. Sometimes Fanck lets the whole manoeuvre unfold in a single, unadulterated shot. Other times, he will subtly remove a section from the middle of a scene to speed up the climbers’ progress. It’s an utterly absorbing process. Not only the danger and daring of the climbers, but the means of their climb is fascinating. It’s extraordinary how little equipment they have: just some goggles, a length of rope, spiked boots, and an ice pick that doubles as a walking stick. Much of the time they aren’t wearing gloves, and one can only marvel at the hardiness (and leatheriness) of these mountainfolk. (It’s only when the storm descends late in the film that anyone even bothers to put on a scarf.)

What are we watching? Is this a documentary? Is it fiction? The question seems to be raised by Fanck, too. For although he creates a kind of dramatic narrative, he is also interested in the process of filming what we are watching. About halfway through the film, we suddenly see a man lugging a camera and tripod on his shoulder. He climbs an icy peak, sets up the camera, and begins turning. Fanck’s own camera pans right to show what the camera is filming. It’s such a strange, delightful moment to step out of the fictional world—only to realize that the camera is itself part of that world. You realize that we are seeing one scene of precarious filming via a second scene of precarious filming. Fanck makes us realize the difficulties of filming the very scenes we are watching. (According to his own account, Sepp Allgeier was exhausted after three days of carrying his camera up the mountain. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he wanted some record of their collective exertions within the film itself.) A title then announces: “Shadow play in a crevasse” and we see the silhouette of cameraman and climbers united within the same frame. The shadows of the climbers wave for our benefit (or is it for the cameraman?). I’m still unsure quite what to make of the scene, other than to say Fanck clearly liked the image and thought “why not, I’ll include it in the film”. It turns the film into a meditation on its own making, and (I think) very effectively makes us even more impressed by the logistics of what we see. The very next scene involves the climbers hacking steps into the ice up the side of a frozen cliff face: every metre must be carved to traverse it. And thanks to the previous scenes, we immediately think of the difficulty of carrying two cameras up the same path—and of trying to film the process while suspended over an abyss.

Soon, we are offered extraordinary views of cloud-filled valleys and gleaming peaks. The figures become Caspar-David Friedrich’s “wanderer above a sea of fog”, only the tangible danger of the setting makes the image even more compelling. It’s both romantic vision and practical achievement: tiny figures stand in the thrilling, terrifying context of nature. It’s the real world and it’s sublime.

On the descent, Fanck is (or tries to be) dramatic by showing one of the climbers fall into a crevasse. But it’s done in a single take, in a long shot, and the drama is only achieved by an explanatory intertitle. It’s actually difficult to tell whether anything untoward has actually happened, or if it’s been staged for the camera. It’s less impressive than the very real leaps we see both figures make across ravines, and the extraordinary ascents and descents along sheer cliffs of frozen rock. Similarly, when the storm comes and the two climbers are forced to spend the night in a small rocky ledge, it’s not very dramatic. Even if it’s real, Fanck does not have the interest (or the filmmaking ability) to make the scene more troubling, thrilling, frightening, or even comic. The camera simply records their actions in a single take, with titles doing the rest of the work. It’s difficult not to see such scenes in the light of his later—explicitly fictional—work, where the personal drama of his characters is forced to become more complex, even if on the basic level of more complex (which is to say, any) editing.

Where Fanck does try to ramp things up is in the descriptive titles. Thus, when they descend we are told: “In the last rays of the sinking sun the pair are locked in a struggle with the terrible wall of ice which they must conquer before nightfall.” And then we are asked to view the surrounding shots of the landscape with a poetic sensibility: “Shadows of storm-driven clouds flit like ghosts through the nightmarish Labyrinth of jagged ice walls and dark, gaping fissures.” When the climber falls, we are told that “only the rope saves them from certain doom in the dark abyss of the eternal ice.” And at night, the world beyond the ledge is described through words before being shown through images: “Above them the Föhn roars over the icy peak and whips the endless masses of clouds normally encamped like a lurking monster over Italy, over the mountain tops. Woe betide the mountaineer who is caught by this storm high up on the exposed ridge.”

What also makes the film more dramatic, more poetic, more evocative is the music. The score—for chamber orchestra, augmented by piano (and, I think, harmonium)—is by no less a personage than Paul Hindemith. I admit that Hindemith is not normally my cup of tea, but this is a delightful score. It’s got a small set of melodic themes, not leitmotifs, exactly (the film’s dramatic structure and characterization are not developed enough for a truly integrated musical design), but variations that come and go according to the overall mood of the scenes. What’s delightful about the way it functions is the freedom Fanck’s images give the composer. This isn’t a feature fiction film, it’s an “alpine symphony in images”. The music is thus detached from the images; or, at least, the music is not obliged to follow an intricate series of narrative happenings on screen. Scenes of climbers slowly traversing a landscape, of equipment being tested, of passing of clouds—these are not quite “events” in the usual, dramatic sense. So the music moves like a weather system over the images: floating above them, sometimes innocuous, sometimes playful, sometimes threatening. The musical texture builds, thickens into a storm of sound; then ebbs away, thinning until the images are left to carry the heft of the drama on their own merit. The fact that the music of this “alpine symphony in pictures” is on an entirely different scale to Strauss’s purely musical “alpine symphony” is to its great advantage. Unlike Strauss, Hindemith doesn’t have to bombard the cinemagoer with sonic torrents; he can suggest them, carrying enough weight of sound to make an impact at the right moments (the opening titles, the sights of mountains, the scenes of genuine danger) while at other times pulling back to sparse textures that are more like a hum, a distant sound carried on the breeze. (In these moments, I treasure his use of the harmonium; it’s like a kind of musical wheeze, a squeeze of sound blown through an alpine fissure.)

In the final act of the film, the climbers descend successfully, of course, and then bid goodbye with a disarming casualness. (Again, Fanck’s later work would go all-out to provide more dramatic pay-offs to the same basic plot devices of climbing and descending a mountain.) But then the film ends with an astonishing series of images, preceded by an equally extraordinary title: “And the clouds surge around the lonely summit of the Matterhorn, from time immemorial onwards into gloomy infinities, until someday its giant body is gnawed and corroded by ice, cold, and storm and it falls into ruins.” Fanck hurls us forward in time to the disintegration of the very rock on which he stands to film the scenes. He also speeds forward through time on screen: the clouds surge in time-lapse photography, washing and breaking like waves around the peak, until finally the mountain seems to wrap itself in a shroud and disappear. THE END.

This is a tremendously good film. The photography is exceptional, the pace never hurried. We follow the progress of the climb with an appropriately measured tread. The music is superb, floating across the visual landscapes in a way that enhances the images without ever trying to outdo them. I also think the lack of characterization is one of the film’s strengths. In Fanck’s later films (I think especially of Der Heilige Berg, 1926), we get characters who are sometimes more symbolic than real, or else so banal they might as well be cardboard cut-outs. At either extreme, they occupy so much screen time that their symbolism or their banality becomes wearying. But with Im Kampf mit dem Berge, we never have to take the climbers as anything more than climbers. There is a pleasing matter-of-factness that allows the viewer to become entirely absorbed in the procession of images, in the depth and richness of the screen landscapes. Frankly, I’m happy that the stars of this film are the mountains. There is a scene right at the end of Act V, and the start of Act VI, after the climbers spend the night on the mountain, where we watch the morning sun slowly spread over the mountainside. It’s time traversing an unpopulated world; unpopulated save for the camera, that is. The music creeps into life, building from the wheeze and rumble of harmonium and piano up to the bright blaring of brass. It happens so slowly, and with so little regard for any sense of human life: it’s slow time, deep time, caught on camera. It’s simply fabulous. When everything looks—and sounds—this good, I can do without characters entirely.

Paul Cuff

Gunnar Hedes saga (1923; Swe.; Mauritz Stiller)

I saw the film via the streaming service of the Bonn International Silent Film Festival this summer. I didn’t make many notes “live”, so what follows is not as detailed as previous entries…

Gunnar Hedes saga (1923; Swe.; Mauritz Stiller)

Gunnar Hedes wants to be a musician, but his father dies and his mother wants him to go into business to save the family house. But when Gunnar falls for the orphan Ingrid, he decides to choose music over business and embarks on a wild scheme to win a fortune by herding reindeer…

The opening titles tell us the film is “freely adapted” from Selma Lagerlöf’s novel by Mauritz Stiller. It’s always interesting to see the way a filmmaker can insert their name into the credits when adapting a literary text. Given the tense relationship between these two authors, it’s no wonder that Stiller had to emphasize his artistic license from the outset. It’s a boast and an excuse.

Little Gunnar dreams of his grandfather the fiddler and legendary reindeer-rustler, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the Munkhyttan estate house. Miss Stava, the family’s old housemaid—who almost stands in for a kind of Lagerlöf -style female narrator—tells Gunnar the tale of his grandfather. The picture on the wall comes alive: within the inner frame, the grandfather plays his violin; beyond the inner frame, a vision of reindeer fills the rest of the film’s frame. It’s a neat encapsulation of Stiller’s art: exterior spaces flooding into the interior world of the boy’s physical and imaginative space. It also encapsulates the functions of the film’s music: bringing to life pictures in the frame. If the boy longs for an escape from reality, we soon understand why. For Gunnar’s reality is a world where the bourgeois adults (as exemplified by his mother) are cold, judgemental, and restrictive. “Gunnar is not going to be a violin player and a dreamer, but a practical man, who can one day take over Munkhyttan!”

Cut to the adult Gunnar (Einar Hansson), who is forced to study mining instead of his beloved music. A letter arrives, dragging him back home: his father is dying. We see the father die, but the following scenes are missing—so the restoration gives us just the titles, which survive without a visual context. There is something moving in the way the film offers just these intertitles. We read, then, that the father has left debts, and that the estate must get rid of some of its staff. The falling apart of Munkhyttan is given a kind of reconstructive equivalent by the missing footage.

The Blomgrens—travelling performers—arrive with an orphan they have taken in. She is Ingrid (Mary Johnsson). The Blomgrens are the antidote to the Hedes: free-talking, freewheeling, artistic. Even their horse, Lady Hamilton, has personality: she doesn’t budge without a musical soundtrack, so the Blomgrens must take it in turn to play the harmonica while they travel.

When the performers arrive in the courtyard of Munkhyttan, Gunnar is daydreaming of his grandfather playing the violin: his tiny figure appears superimposed on the desk. But he is woken by reality: it is Ingrid playing the violin. Gunnar races downstairs and joins in, playing the waltz from Gounod’s Faust and nicknaming Ingrid “Marguerite”. He explains that she was “a young girl who loved Faust and saved his soul with her love.” (Hint, hint.)

Gunnar’s mother comes outside and smashes the violin. Not just that, she stamps on it. It’s a great scene, and a brutal assertion of parental power. Realizing it was Ingrid’s violin and not her son’s, she instead gifts Gunnar’s violin in its stead: an act of spite disguised as an act of charity. Mother and son have a furious argument. Ingrid enters, hoping to return the violin to Gunnar, but falls in a faint at the family’s feet. She is taken in by the estate’s old steward, while Gunnar’s mother ejects him from Munkhyttan without a penny.

Gunnar takes up as a strolling musician and, on a train, ends up entering into a business deal with strangers to herd reindeer in order to make a quick profit. There follows a long section of the film in which we follow the reindeer herd across stunning landscapes. The film’s main set piece takes place when a snowstorm strikes and the lead reindeer makes a dash for it, dragging Gunnar across the frozen landscape and depositing him in a snow drift. When he wakes, he hallucinates a vision in the horns of a deer. The vision is, frankly, confusingly rendered via superimposition: it represents a fire at Munkhyttan, where Gunnar’s mother is trying to beat Ingrid. I wonder if this scene is in the novel (Lagerlöf liked her premonitions, so it strikes me as possible): it feels shoehorned into the scene. It didn’t relate convincingly to the rest of the film.

Ingrid’s own vision in the next scene is more interesting: the vision of an old woman as the personification of sorrow gives Stiller the chance to play with interior/exterior spaces. The woman and her bear-drawn sled appear to dissolve as a vision into Ingrid’s room, but (in reality, as a production still suggests) the bed has surely been relocated into the exterior space itself. (The wall dissolving away is an exceedingly brilliant effect.) Stiller cuts between a medium shot of Ingrid with the sled in the background to close-ups of Ingrid with the bedroom behind her: she is weirdly in these two spaces at the same time. The sled then appears inside the room itself, and slides out of frame as if further into the house, completing this strange transformation of spaces.

As elsewhere in the film (and in Lagerlöf’s work, and Stiller’s adaptations thereof), the vision is a premonition. As Gunnar is revealed being borne by misfortune, so Gunnar returns to Munkhyttan in a state of mental derangement. He refuses to sleep in the main house and soon escapes into the countryside. There is a lovely scene where he stares at his reflection in a river, and where he is found by Ingrid—the only person he seems to trust. Together they gather some gleaming rocks, which Gunnar believes are coins. He hopes to buy back Munkhyttan, which is being sold off by his distraught mother for want of funds.

But despite the time he spends with Ingrid, Gunnar is divorced from reality. In despair, as Munkhyttan is about to be sold, Ingrid tries to drown herself—but is rescued by the Blomgrens, who are once more on their summer tour. The scene is set for a return to the start of the film: this time it is Ingrid who plays the music from Faust, and it is this music which awakens Gunnar from his mental torpor. Gunnar’s mother finally blesses bother her son and Ingrid, and the Munkhyttan estate is miraculously saved: the rocks Gunnar gathered when mad are in fact valuable, and enable a new mining operation to bring them a fortune. The End.

A good film? Yes, but not a great one. If my description of Gunnar Hedes saga is less lengthy than with previous posts, it’s because I found the film less interesting than many I’ve watched recently. Perhaps it would make a difference if more of the film survived: only 70 minutes remain from the original 100. Would the various premonitions/visions have made more sense with more scenes around them? Perhaps, but I don’t think my wider reservations would be solved with more plot. I didn’t find the story especially engaging, and I was moved only occasionally. Likewise, I found the performances only occasionally moving. This film was Einar Hansson’s first leading role, and he only got it because Lars Hanson proved unavailable for the film. Perhaps this was a happy accident, for Einar Hansson is a much more boyish Gunnar than Hanson would have been. (The former was thirteen years younger than the latter.) Through Hansson, I can believe in Gunnar’s youthful enthusiasms, and he has a kind of sad, silly charm when playing mad in the latter half of the film. But I find Mary Johnsson rather stiff and doll-like. Her way of holding a gesture for too long, even her stilted way of playing the violin, inhibited rather than evoked feeling. Her performance often made it difficult to feel for her, or to believe in her inner life and emotions. I don’t think it’s her fault: she’s clearly been asked to perform this way. The sheer beauty of the way she is filmed almost underlines the limitations of the performance: the cinematography is lavishing so much attention on her face and hair that it forgets that more is needed to move the viewer.

But I should spend more time on the cinematography, which is stunning. Julius Jaenzon was the great cameraman of Sweden’s “golden era” of the 1910s-20s, and his work here is superb. I’ve mentioned the close-ups of Johnsson, which are often breathtakingly beautiful (aesthetically, yes, but not emotionally engaging for the drama itself). But the real stars of the film are the landscapes. The reindeer herding scenes contain some extraordinarily beautiful exteriors. Jaenzon captures the light shining off water, snow, and rock in an almost unearthly way. The tinting makes everything gleam and glow, while also enhancing the texture of the elements. I’d love to see these scenes on a big screen.

And I’d love to know what music was intended to accompany the film. The Bonn performance I saw streamed featured excellent music for violin and piano, as played by Günther Buchwald and Neil Brand. Sadly, the only soundtrack to accompany the film in its official online life (on the Swedish archive site www.filmarkivet.se) is by Helmer Alexandersson, which is more of an acoustic wash than a composed score. It’s reverbed to the max, leaving you with a dreamy, echoey drowsiness that quickly disintegrates in the memory. It’s like musical mulch. Not even the blizzard sequence awakens the soundtrack into more than a few deeper washes of sound. More to the point is that the music specifically cited by the film (and played on screen) is not used in the Alexandersson score. Buchwald/Brand carefully cite Gounod’s melody when required, and work the piece into their score in a very effective way. Why couldn’t Alexandersson? It’s not as if Gounod presents a copyright issue. (It’s a bugbear of mine when new scores ignore the music on screen. For example, the TCM restoration of The Mysterious Lady (1928) issued on DVD has a score by Vivek Maddala that ignores the music from Puccini’s Tosca that is shown being performed on screen, first in a theatrical performance and later on the piano. The opera is a thematic touchpoint of the film and to substitute it with something else—not to mention something infinitely blander—is baffling. I’m lucky to have seen the film performed with Carl Davis’s score, which quotes from Tosca and is by far and away musically superior.)

But one point to raise is with the choice of Gounod itself. A brief search in the text of the original novel seems to suggest that Lagerlöf made no mention of Faust, so perhaps the musical motif was one invented by Stiller. (Lagerlöf was unhappy with Stiller’s changes to her text, to the point of threatening to publicly disown her involvement with the film. Not having read the novel, I am unable to say which changes are obvious.) Gounod’s melody is a famous one, but also superficial: it’s a repetitive dance motif. It’s famous enough to be recognizable when played in the scene (and in the cinema) but it’s not a piece with any emotional weight. Indeed, Gounod’s opera had become a sort of joke for bourgeois taste: by the end of the nineteenth century, it was one of the most-performed operas ever written. In Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923), the artistic wife plays Debussy at the piano while her boorish husband wants to go and hear Gounod’s Faust in the theatre. (Dulac even gives us a visual parody of the singers belting out tunes that were by now a kind of cultural cliché.) The kind of cultural division between Gounod (bourgeois, populist) and Debussy (refined, modernist) is a key marker of the divide between husband and wife in Dulac’s film. (And yes, Madame Beudet is another film where the new score, by Manfred Knaak, doesn’t bother citing the music being played on screen.) Stiller’s film was released in the same year at Dulac’s, and it’s curious to observe the way these films use Gounod in very different ways. The fact that the climactic emotional scene in Gunnar Hedes saga is achieved through the citing of a banal piece of music seems odd, and contributes to the reasons why I wasn’t as moved as I felt I could and should have been. The idea of a Marguerite saving Gunnar’s soul was cited rather than developed, and the well-worn melody seemed to suit the facile way the film wrapped itself up.

So, in sum, a film worth seeing—but mostly for the exteriors, where Stiller (like Gunnar) seems freer to express himself, and where Julius Jaenzon’s cinematography is at its very best.

Paul Cuff

Carmen (1918; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

To begin, a confession: I’ve never got on with Bizet’s Carmen. I think I’ve listened to Bizet’s Ivan IV more times than to Carmen. Even for exotic scoring, I’ve more often revisited Djamileh, the one-act opera Bizet wrote immediately prior to Carmen. (In general, I can live my life without castanets and tambourines, thanks.) That I simply don’t find Carmen moving, that I find the music all verve and no magic, is, I know, an absurd, sacrilegious view. It’s why I’ve never been tempted to go and read the Mérimée novella on which the opera is based, and why I have no great investment in pursuing all the cinematic renderings of the story. That said, I have seen Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen (1915), which lives in my memory only as being beautifully lit and tinted; and also the Chaplin parody of DeMille’s film, Burlesque on Carmen (1915), which I remember being tiresome even at two reels. I’d be curious to see the Raoul Walsh adaptation from 1915, starring Theda Bara, but alas it is lost—presumably forever when Bara’s back catalogue went up in flames at the Fox studios vault fire in 1937. Jacques Feyder’s version from 1926 is on my “you really should watch this” list, though I have listened to the original orchestral score by Ernesto Halffter (which is very nice, and not based on Bizet). All of which is to say that I had never done more than speed through a very grotty print of the US version of Ernst Lubitsch’s film adaptation of Carmen on youtube. However, when a new restoration of the original German version of the film was shown, I thought I would revisit my impressions (and prejudices). So here goes…

Carmen (1918; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

The story is French, the setting Spanish, but here is CARMEN spelt out in German titles. And here is Pola Negri as Carmen, introduced in the credits with a wonderful shot of her in the half-light, as if just emerged from the curtains in our darkened cinema. She is half facing the inner world of the film, half looking out at us. She’s smiling, or is she smirking? Already she is the self-confident, knowing gypsy figure—alluring, teasing, self-assured. But just as the image beings to fade away, her mouth straightens; the teeth still gleam, but it’s no longer quite a smile. What is that look? As if in answer, here is the next title: Harry Liedtke as Don José. His introductory image has none of the playful ambiguity of Negri as Carmen. José stares fixedly beyond us, away from us. His chin is almost tucked into his neck. He frowns. He looks pissed off. He’s less dynamic. He seems stuck in his expression. In her introduction, Negri seems capable of movement; her very pose suggests she’s ready to issue a sarcastic comment or give us a pinch. Liedtke seems fixed, unyielding. His is the last on-screen character introduced, for next we are given a shot of the director himself, Ernst Lubitsch. He’s in his study, smoking. He doesn’t look up from his script, but he knows we’re there. Lubitsch the comedian and actor is quietly promoting his dramatic credentials: the serious author, the well-read filmmaker. (Some day, I will write a post on silent directors who open/end their films with images of themselves: it’s an interesting device.)

So to the drama. José arrives home from leave to his fiancée Dolores. We are dumped into the plot immediately. (Though it’s already changed aspects of Mérimée’s novella, making José more respectable at the outset; even Bizet’s opera doesn’t show us José’s home life.) Lovely warm tinting: brighter yellow for exteriors, warmer amber for interiors. It’s a way of making northern Europe look like southern Europe.) The household is full of laughs and smiles and kisses; but a huge crucifix looms over them on the wall (José looks at it briefly as he stretches and grins). The lovers are supposed to be watching the stove, but are too busy kissing; the mother smells burning and rushes over. (A comic scene, but the setting of the stove is darkly mirrored later in the film when Carmen and José melt lead.)

“José is the darling of the village”, we are told: everyone gathers around to hear his tales. He’s a different figure from the one we have seen in the credits: for now, he is animated, laughing, smiling. But a message arrives announcing his promotion and demanding his immediate presence with his regiment. “Will you stay faithful to me, José?” asks Dolores. He and his mother laugh, but—well, we know what story this is. Even the question implies an alternate answer.

We cut straight to Seville, where José is on guard—and Lubitsch is showing off the size of his sets and numbers of extras. A grand parade of children precedes the adults, then a military band. Impressive scenes of bustle and crowds around the tobacco factory that overlooks square. (The scene goes on a while with marching back and forth: it’s ostensibly for the on-screen crowd’s benefit, but it’s for ours too.)

There’s Carmen, at the heart of a group of women on the balcony of the factory. Lubitsch cuts immediately to José reading a letter from Dolores, warning him about local women. From the balcony, Carmen drops her comb and is swiftly surrounded by men wanting to help. In the orchestral score, her theme strikes up like a slap—the same slap she gives to a man who tries to flirt too much with her. Now she’s beside José. Did I say “beside him”? No, she’s more than that: she’s overlooking him, right up against him. She drops a flower from her garland so that it tumbles over his arm onto the floor. He picks it up (but only when he thinks he’s unobserved) and inhales it, stuffs it into his face, then into his tunic. He’s lost already.

Inside the factory. Another huge crucifix on the wall, overlooking the rows of women along the work benches. Carmen receives a note from “her cavalier” asking her to meet him at night. The note is snatched by another woman. Carmen is furious, more so when the woman says everyone knows what sort of woman she is. Carmen clambers over a table, hurls herself into the fray. Lubitsch cuts to the exit: women pour from the factory door. It’s comic how long the camera stays to watch them. (The music too is an endless repetitive flow.) They plea for help from the guards. Carmen is being tussled between women and half undressed by their clutches. She’s ordered by José to follow him. “I’m happy to follow you!” she says, her face opening into a hungry smile.

The holding cell. Carmen calls José “her golden officer”. When José comes to take her to gaol, she presses herself against him. It’s a fabulous performance, the way she flirts with him as her hands are tide, as she bites the flower from his tunic. “Let me slip away and I will love you unto death!” It’s as much a threat as a bargain.

Carmen runs away, down endless sets of steps, ahead of the guards. The locals guide the pursuers the wrong way. (Another divergence from book and opera, where Carmen is freed by José; in Lubitsch’s film, she escapes by her own cunning.) Hands still tied, Carmen removes the barricade to a gate with her teeth. She enters the den of Garcia. (He has bedraggled long hair, a huge black eye.) The den is tinted a murky pink—a pink that’s hardly pink, that might once have been pink. The wash of colour suggests old warmth, sweaty warmth.

José is reprimanded. How could “a strapping fellow” like him be given the run around by a mere girl? (The officer hasn’t met Carmen, clearly.) He is stripped of his rank.

Carmen thinks it worth helping José in prison. The news of his arrest is brought by a street urchin, a young girl whom Carmen kisses and cuddles brusquely. (It’s one of the few moments in the film where Carmen exchanges a kiss without any kind of bargain or ulterior motive.) At the prison, Carmen flirts her way past the guard, with cat-like rubbing and winks. Negri’s performance is big. She gets laughs from the sheer glee of her characterization: it’s outrageous what she, what Carmen, can get away with. Already she’s inside the guard’s room, climbing all over him. A wonderfully silly close-up of the guard who is left open-mouthed at being kissed by Carmen. Besotted, he dutifully delivers a package to José from Carmen. José opens it and inside cake finds note to use file included to saw through bars. Carmen has laid out all the directions for his escape, disguise, and flight to safehouse, while she distracts his guard.

That night, more comic antics with the guard and Carmen. She smothers him, bounces on his knee. It’s a ludicrous scene, but the performances sell it: Negri starts as a kitten clambering over her master, but by the end of the scene the guard is the kitten and she’s feeding him bits of food. (Meanwhile, in the cell, a superimposed vision of José’s fiancée, who appears and then dissolves away; she gently reaches for his sleeve; it’s unexpected and oddly moving. José too is shaken.) The guard returns to Carmen and reports that José snores like a rat. Carmen reacts and the whole tone of the scene is changed: she hurls him aside, throws his papers in the air, storms out. She is angry with him, but also at José for ignoring her plan for his escape.

Back in José’s hometown, Dolores tells José’s mother that she will visit Seville, from whence they have had no news from José. The scene is again dominated by the crucifix on the wall behind the women.

Carmen is summoned to dance before Colonel Rodrigues at his headquarters. Garcia’s wife drags her from bed, winks and nudges her—they’ll be well paid.

The night of the feast: a tracking shot back from the heart of crowd (the Colonel) across the boisterous scene—but not much more is made of the camera move. (The camera can afford to be static when Carmen herself dominates the film.) José has been released and is now on duty for first time; on the way in, Carmen sees him and mocks his low rank. Her smile is beginning to carry more meaning than mere comedy. The prison guard was a comic figure and her insults to him can be discarded; but what of her slights to José? Carmen performs her dance: it’s a whirlwind of gestures. She occupies the frame, stretching her limbs as if to touch every part of it. Legs spread, arms spread, twirling, standing on a table above the crowd. An officer takes her away into corner where they embrace. But Carmen tells his fortune: “beware of back haired girls for they will bring you death”. (The orchestra slides into a strange harmonic no-man’s-land.) José sees her leave under amorous eyes of another man.

Later, José is disappointed to discover a woman waiting for him at the gate is his fiancée, Dolores. He’s guarded, fobs her off.

A tavern, filled with smugglers. Carmen will be part of their plan to smuggle goods past the city gates.

Meanwhile, José is reluctant to meet his fiancée—and now it’s Carmen’s turn to appear in superimposed vision, smiling next to him; he ducks out of his meeting with Dolores—and goes to the smugglers’ tavern. Carmen approaches and launches herself onto his face. It’s a kiss like a slap. She’s sat on the table and she dominates the scene, as ever. The way she throws her head back in laughter is exhilarating. (See how Lubitsch makes the dynamics of the scene more interesting by cutting back to the lonely-looking Dolores in the other tavern.) Now Carmen resists the advances of José, bending her back. But the call to barracks sounds, and Carmen now wants him to stay—a wonderful fanfare from the orchestra, it’s as threatening and weird as the push-and-pull of their physical back-and-forth on screen. Carmen says José might “get a spanking” if he’s late, and laughs: but he takes it seriously as an insult. Look at the way their arms wrench back and forth: a suppressed sexual violence in their gestures. Carmen is triumphant with her gang, as Lubitsch cuts back to José’s sweetheart, still waiting in the other tavern. An older soldier tells her that José is on guard at the gates this night.

By the gates, Dolores approaches and José looks dead behind the eyes when she kisses him. Carmen and the smugglers approach. Carmen laughs from the undergrowth, approaches hands on hips—taking up space within the frame again. She mocks his sweetheart; José grabs Carmen by the wrist. The smugglers look on, amused by Carmen’s game. The couple half-fight, half-embrace. José is on his knees, kissing her feet. She has won. And so the smugglers approach. José spots the danger, but Carmen wrestles him away, forcing herself upon him in a rocky alcove. “I am no longer an honourable soldier, Carmen!” “Sweets regards await you tomorrow”, she says, running away.

(Meanwhile, Carmen’s place in town has been found by a soldier, who reports this to the officer from the feast.)

In the market the next day, José struggles to pay for some food for Carmen. She loads him up like a camel (a crescent helmet instead of a hump) and takes him back to her place with the Garcia clan. Carmen gives the old woman a bottle of spirits and chucks her out. A game of cat and mouse. But who is the prey? Their kisses are violent. She wants to read his fortune, prising open his fingers to paw his palm. (Outside, the officer is on his way.) But instead she decides to pour lead to read the future in its shape. They go to the stove. The tinting is red. It shows us fire but foretells blood. They pour a portion of lead into water. They reach into the bucket to retrieve the resultant shape: it’s a gleaming conglomerate of bones, a cross stuck in its side, a skull grinning at its centre. Carmen and José each hold one end of the lump of portentous metal. They share a close-up, each looking in trepidation at each other. Carmen says the signs bode ill and warns him not to die because of her. It’s uncomfortably intimate, this sharing of fate. But now José says he’s so happy he doesn’t care and makes Carmen dance. She leads him about the room; he gives up playing his guitar, he cannot keep up with her. The camera takes in her weird dance as the officer approaches from the street, passing the drunk old woman on the steps. He walks in on their embrace. She says the good little doggie must beg before its master, which infuriates José. Carmen lifts the sword into his hand. The soldiers fight, and she too aides José in the blows exchanged. The officer falls. It is unclear who issues the fatal blow.

Carmen and José flee. He is wounded. They go to the smugglers. The corner he is given is dingy, dark; the wall looks as though it has spatters of dark mould or blood upon it. Is the smuggling life not good enough for him? What do you expect, Carmen says, given that he’s a murderer now. And the close-up of her saying this, cool, detached, is chilling. (The score hushes to a rumbling bass note, to sparkling shards of Carmen’s melody.) Carmen is so cool, smoking her cigarette. “So go” she says, opening the gate to José, who says they should go their separate ways if they cannot lead a different kind of life together. But he pauses in the gateway. His arms open wide, his performance so unlike her coolness—so much less convincing than her when going “big” in performative terms. (But this makes sense on screen: José is always a weaker character, less reliable, than Carmen.) Negri’s naturalistic now, walking with a manly swing of the shoulders. She goes back to the smugglers, smokes a cigarette, plays cards with them. Cool as anything.

At night, the seashore. Packages being brought onto the land. A marvellous sea, spilling over the rocks. A thin line of smugglers carrying boxes and barrels. It looks genuinely dangerous. There is Pola Negri, wading through the angry, milky tide. (An extra glances at the camera—and surely those behind it—as she passes, as if to say she only just made it, or even to chide the director for making them risk their lives.) Lovely silhouettes of the smugglers against the cave entrance and rocky path up the hillside.

Here is Carmen. And there is José, lying in a stupor. Carmen says she must go to Gibraltar on business. (José is so desperately uninteresting; you can see why Carmen is only after his utility; how could he ever match up to her?) They walk a little way over shards of rock. José begs, clenches his hands. “I am a free gypsy child”, says Carmen, and anyone who tries to force her hand “has lost the game”. José reminds of his sacrifices: an abandoned mother and fiancée. Carmen shows annoyance, but concern too: where will this game end?

The bay of Gibraltar. Carmen in a brilliant little hat, waist sash. Carmen is flirting with another officer, getting him to light her cigarette. Back to José, lying on a rock, looking not bored but boring. Carmen is flirting with the officer. She shoves his face down toward her feet and smokes her cigarette: it’s a fabulous moment.

Later (and what has happened in between?), Carmen is outside with the officer. She exchanges amorous glances with the champion bullfighter, Escamillo. A close-up of each: frank inspection. (In the orchestra, the woodwinds purr.) She approaches, lets her eyes linger, then walks on by. She gets Escamillo to follow her. She’s dressed up. Is she a little too vulnerable like this? Yes, she looks almost nervous in his company. The score flutters, ghosts its themes, her theme. There is something off with the music, and with her.

In a rocky pass, the smugglers shoot down riders. The passengers emerge from the carriage. It’s Carmen and her officer beau, now her victim. He is led away. José leaps in to kiss her. Her arms go limp. He’s such a drag now. He handles her briskly, going off to defend the officer. A pathetic burst of fellow-feeling toward a soldier? He ties his hands, places on the blindfold. But the offer finds his way to one side, cuts the ropes on a rock, escapes, brings reinforcements. The soldiers arrive in numbers. A gunfight. Carmen takes aim, fires. In the fight, José is wounded. The smugglers flee. One hurls himself to his death rather than surrender. (The stakes are being raised in the drama. It’s no longer a case of flirtation with danger, or choices leading to future danger: Lubitsch’s film shows us banditry, whereas Bizet’s opera merely suggests it in dialogue.)

Seville, the day of the bullfights. José is scraggy, groggy, in his stained corner bed. Where is Carmen? She is dressed up to the nines. Escamillo has invited her to ride in his carriage. There is a medium close-up of José: he finally looks convincingly deranged, dangerous. He grabs her and plonks her down onto his grotty bed. A short of the two of them: he is at his worst, she at her best. She looks bored with him. He knows she’s betraying him with a bullfighter. “Yes!!” she shouts. He threatens her with a gun. “Shoot!!” she cries, stretching herself out across the door: occupying space again. He grovels like a dog burying his head into the corner of the room.

The bullfighters’ parade. Carmen triumphant in Escamillo’s carriage. Lubitsch cuts between Escamillo and Carmen in church, keeling before an altar, and José and a smuggler in his grotty corner. The smuggler says he can’t stand seeing Carmen “betray” José. Carmen looks vulnerable (yes, vulnerable) in Escamillo’s embrace. “May the Madonna protect you”, she says, and promises to meet him here after the right. She totters. She’s become a schoolgirl. The bullfight, intercut with José stumbling into witness Carmen at the ringside. Escamillo victorious. He salutes the crowd, salutes Carmen, is given her fan.

José is by the curtains at the rear of the stands. (Think back to the opening credits: there, too, he was stood in front of black curtains.) There is Carmen. José peeps out from behind the black curtains. Now she must go from vulnerable to—what? Defiant? Yes, but she looks afraid. Even her angry rebuttal of his embraces is nervous. She trembles. She looks round. “Yes, I love him—as I never loved before!” Their last embrace, José and Carmen. The knife appears from behind her back. We watch her face as she receives it. It’s a horrible, protracted scene: we watch her life ebb out of her body across the duration of the shot. She falls. Even in her last moments, she’s occupying space; her death is a slow-motion dance, her arms stretching out to fill the frame. (Even the sight of Carmen’s armpit hair here is itself a kind of marker of her kind of femininity.) On the floor, on a heap of dirt, her eyes are open but twitching. José hurls himself onto her body and weeps. ENDE.

This was a film that I wasn’t expecting to find gripping, but gripped I was by the end. I aim to re/watch more Lubitsch silents for this blog, but I’d cautiously say that this is my favourite of his silent German dramas (as opposed to comedies). As with Anna Boleyn (1920), it’s a film where Lubitsch’s “touch” is visible in the way it highlights drama through comic touches, by allowing heightened performances to dominate. In Anna Boleyn, it’s the smile of the King (Emil Jannings) that spells doom for his subjects: his desires dominate his world and its inhabitants. In Carmen, it’s the sheer expressive freedom of Pola Negri that will bring about her character’s death. The chief pleasures of both films are these central performers, for which Lubitsch allows space to develop. In Carmen, Negri’s fabulous expressiveness totally dominates the film. It’s fun to watch her having fun, fun to watch her manipulate others. (Describing it as such, you can see how the narrative might have been recrafted into a comedy.) That no-one else can get close to Negri’s on-screen panache is fitting. José’s rising fury is a reaction against her own self-assertion of independence; it highlights his own reliance on her, his weakness and vacillation.

I must also mention the new score for this restoration, by Tobias Schwencke. It is more than merely “fitting”. Though it uses the main themes from Bizet’s Carmen, it accentuates the film’s differences with Bizet’s opera and makes it an independent work. Over the restoration credits at the start, the music gently rises—whispering the main theme, as though it were a memory, or a foreshadowing. And over the end credits, after the brutal ending, the music is a strange, gentle lullaby, a music box rendering of Carmen’s theme. I found it weirdly moving. And moving in a way that I have never found the Bizet opera: perhaps I need to see an operatic Carmen to appreciate her presence? Thanks to Pola Negri, I have an interest in Carmen.

Paul Cuff