Tag: Pola Negri

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

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