Silent Alarm.

The German silent cinema was (and remains) one of the most interesting collections of work done on film. The Erich Pommer productions, Caligari, Metropolis, Variety, Asphalt and the rest, set a standard of skill and imagination that Hollywood was pressed to match, even though they kept on buying Pommer’s talents away from him. 

 

However if you consider the filmographies of the major performers from this period, an enormous number of unfamiliar titles come up. There’s always the hope that these will be lost masterpieces but, even when they are not, what these people got up to remains fascinating.

Giftgas of 1929 is an oddity directed by Mikhail Dubson, one of the rare European leftists who put it where their mouths were. He served out his subsequent career in the Soviets. A Late German silent free of almost all the "Expressionist" cinema trappings, the film is  played in August Rinaldi’s (seven films that year) rectangular would-be realistic factory and home decors. An unsophisticated message piece, it brings an A feature cast to a predictable plot.

  Hans Stüwe

Idealistic chemist Hans Stüwe (Tschaikowski in Carl Froelich’s 1939  Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht) delights in completing his formula for a revolutionary fertilizer and is congratulated by supervisor Alfred Abel, (the father from Metropolis) who was once characterised to me as “the German Gielgud.” However Alfred’s report to the board of (legendary Max Reinhardt actor) Fritz Kortner’s Ten Straaten Corporation alerts them to the possibility of using the formula as Vita, a Weapon of Mass Destruction - “only a small amount would be enough to destroy a whole city.”  While they plot mass human killings, one director reprimands an associate for not considering the director’s poodle - not over blessed with subtlety this one.

Immediate developments are encouraging. The Company’s stock  goes up 160 points and the workers are delighted with a fifteen percent rise. Stüwe is rewarded but outraged at the use of his invention, so Abel dismisses him and appoints a bald successor.

Facing penury while raising their small child, Hans’ wife Lissi Arna (Dämon des Meeres, The Squeaker) goes to see the board members, trying to make them relent - scene of the Buddha ornament on the table resembling its owner and being filmed from behind when he refuses. She is reduced to selling on the street the flowers the factory sends to win back Hans. He is outraged again. 

Giftgas - Vera Baranovskaya

 An accident in the “perfume” section of the chemical works kills worker Gerhard Dammann and his angry wife, peasant-featured Vera Baranovskaya blames Hans. I started to register that the scenes with Baranovskaya were the best parts of the film. I should have recognised her as the name character in Pudovkin’s Mat/ Mother, who had a later career in Europe. She turns up later again in Litvak’s Mayerling without my having spotted her there either.

Her shift from the indignation, which makes her break out her dead husband’s straight

razor, to sympathy with grief striken Arna tending the child, is surprisingly the most effective section of the film and this when Baranovskaya is up against the heavies doing their showy turns, Kortner smiling while smoking and inserting his monocle at the same time and Abel offering his head stroking or hand raising "halt" gestures familiar from Metropolis.

 

There’s a track along the workers lining up for protective masks which run out. One desperate man moves on Lissy to get her mask (good scene).  We get an abrupt change to a mix of montage and the Gance J’accuse with train passengers and their pet parrot and the driver overcome by the fumes, alternating indignant citizens and streaming city lights to represent the effect of poison gas. “We accuse!” This is not bad.

The film’s laboratory toxic gas finale is a Teutonic mob panic disaster sequence that places it in a  line with the 1915 William Wauer Der Tunnel re-made in 1933,  Metropolis, Gold 1934 and Kurt Maetzig’s 1950 Der Rat der Götter/ Council of the Gods. Throw in an end  that will turn up again in This Gun For Hire.

Giftgas puts established figures of the German entertainment scene alongside Baranovskaya in a simple minded but occasionally attention getting message piece.  It remains an intriguing record of major talents trying for significance.

Then there’s Richard Eichberg’s 1923 Fräulein Raffke which has Dr. Caligari himself, Werner Krauss going all out as Business Czar Emil Raffke with a desk full of telephones (nice multiple exposure of world activities surrounding his close up). I always thought of him as the German cinema’s most effective performer. His Iago walks all over Emil Jannings’ Othello - in a classic rivalry.  

Surprisingly in this film Hans Albers does rather better as a seedy, monocle (again) wearing aristocrat. This is the earliest of Albers’ work I’ve seen and it offers him in an entirely different persona. If it’s not being doubled, he also gets to strike out in heavy surf in his black one piece.

The opening has promise - lines of flunkies, bathing beauties, a palais de danse and lots
of acting from Krauss continually adjusting his comb over. 

Russian poster for Fraulein Raffke.

 

Krauss’ daughter Lee Parry (wife of director Eichberg), then considered a great beauty, derisively mimes Hans screwing the monocle into his eye. Hans has designs on the Raffke fortune via a marriage to Parry and Werner is on board, planning an entry into the nobility through Hans’ title. However Lee forestalls the plan by a hasty (vignetted on black) wedding to Werner’s secretary Harry Hardt. Werner is all set to announce the Albers' engagement at the lavish diner with its line of synchronised waiters pouring champagne, when Lee declares herself already married. She gets banished from the palatial Raffke home.

However Werner has nor really abandoned her and has slipped cash to an associate to sink into Hardt’s business. When he learns he is a grandfather, the magnate goes to the humble family residence embracing the baby but is turned away by Hardt. This upsets Werner no end and he has the associate demand back the cash advance, though he knows it will mean ruin for his son in law.

Unable to meet his commitments, Hardt leaves the family apartment to earn enough to support his family. So that her child will not suffer, Mother Lydia Potechina has been secretly slipping Parry Deutschmarks. Albers comes on benign and gives her money against a surety which must be co-signed by Krauss and Lee forges her dad’s signature.

We get one “Expressionist” rectangular decor sequence when the postman continues to push Hardt’s letters under the empty flat door. When Hardt returns to find them on the mat, his family is no longer there. Attempts to  contact them are repulsed by Krauss.

In the film’s one surprise, Hans produces the incriminating document at a moment when the discovery of the  faking could be devastating, only to rip it up in Parry’s presence. Hans’ Gypsy sweet heart Vivian Gibson sees through the move as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Raffke family and puts a round into Hans, giving him a chance to do an great acrobatic death fall.

However growing child Loni Nest, misses daddy and sets out with the family dog to find him,
getting drenched and catching fever. The family is re-united by this crisis - implausible happy ending.

Parry in outsize string and fabric hats goes the range from the laughing center of attention for the pack of Krauss’ clerks and distributing bon bons among the kids who swarm over the then luxury car, to suffering raising a baby in domestic penury.

The production is quite ambitious with big, none too imaginative sets and hoards of extras. This one has community with the contemporary melodramas of Michael Curtiz and Cecil B. De Mille - there's even a Golden Calf ball - but at this length, it's not as much fun.

Fraulein Raffke - Hardt, Krauss, Parry, Potechina, Nest, Albers

Eichberg is something of a disappointment. A major player in the pre-WW2 period, the few of his films that do remain in circulation are ordinary, though he worked with legendary stars - Krauss & Albers, Anton Walbrook, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong.

The You-Tube copies on both of these are poor. Pity the effort didn’t go into them rather than the beautiful restoration of draggy Algol - Tragödie der Macht. Fraulein Raffke has two language captions - German and French. If you can’t deal with either of those, the information above should carry you through a viewing.

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2021

Leander Glittering.

The 1939 Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht / The Life and Loves of  Tschaikovsky, It Was a Gay Ballnight / It Has Been a Glittering Night of the Ball  must rate as the most kitschy film of all time, a Nazi German account of Pjotr Iljitsch Tschaikowsky’s secret love for the wife of a rich Russian, backed by the composer's music and mounted on a grotesquely grandiose scale.

After a 1865 set up with Walter Slezak’s dad as a benign pianist filling in the background, we get to dignified Zarah Leander entering a masked ball where a swarm of uniformed couples are waltzing to Tschaikovsky, while limber young cupie doll ballerina Marika Rökk breaks ranks and does her thing solo. Turns out that Leander and Tschaikovsky / third billed Hans Stüwe (Richard Oswald’s Cagliostro) have a secret thing that her husband Aribert Wäscher (Pola Negri’s Charles Bovary), who’s supposed to be in Odessa, doesn’t know about. 

However he shows up before the midnight unmasking, taking the fun out of the reunion.

Stüwe’s agent and his publisher Paul Dahlke are not getting behind him because that costs money, so Zarah, in between a couple of numbers vocalised in glamorous mid shot, hits on the idea of bank rolling his career out of the house keeping on the principal that Wäscher is too rich to know.

Rökk & Rasp - rauschende Ballnacht.

This provides the film's far fetched dynamic. If Zarah leaves home, the enabling funds will dry up and the Tschaikovsky genius will never be known. Enter dastardly (aren’t they all?) critic Fritz Rasp (Metropolis)  barely recognisable. His allegations cause Stüwe to slap him, meaning Fritz has to demand satisfaction. However rather than face our hero on the field of honor, he rats him out to the husband. Interestingly, the film only comes to life during Rasp’s few scenes, a notable tribute to the great actor who manages to shine in all this big budget mediocrity.

To avoid scandal, Stüwe hastily marries Rökk, abandoning his bride on their wedding night for her to rush off into the snow in her fluffy white number and celebrate with the drinkers. There follows the composer’s exhausting tour of Europe with double exposed musicians working through The Pathetic Symphony.

Stüwe & Rökk - rauschende Ballnacht.

All come back exhausted and Karl Hellmer, who makes an impression as Tchaikowski’s servant, drops with Cholera which his heedless master contracts coming to his aid. Tearful deathbed scenes follow.

All this is mounted on a massive scale - a regiment of dancers, an orchestra where Stüwe conducts a battalion of violinists, a functional steam train covered in snow and massive wedding cake decorated decors. Frau Leander registers like a Teutonic, singing Greer Garson and the whole film is a glum match for then contemporary MGM costume musicals like Maytime and Song of Love which drew so much derision in their day. Metro after all put Julien Duvivier and Victor Fleming to work on The Great Waltz, so determined Nazi A List director Carl Froelich is out gunned as he tries to demonstrate his master craft and good taste, deploying all this over production. It appears to indicate the point where Nazi film making plunged after a quiet lively opening for the Third Reich.

  Leander - rauschende Ballnacht

Poor Dr. Goebbels. Despite his determination to show the superiority of the German culture of which he had been made supremo, Leander his most popular star was Swedish, even if their radio refused to play her records after the war, his Führer’s favourite movie was Lives of a Bengal Lancer and down the road Helmut Käutner was going to turn Guy De Maupassant, an author who’d been banned for decadence, into Romanze in Molle, the most impressive film made on the Doktor’s watch. He must have woken up in the mornings and wished he’d been given Agriculture and Fisheries.

By comparison, good taste was the last thing the makers of The Music Lovers worried about and they weren’t going to misrepresent the composer’s sexual preferences either. Their effort is much more fun than this stodge.

Leander's popularity was able to survive her association with Nazi filmaking and two Douglas Sirk movies. Marika Rökk managed to hold down leads dancing through post war musicals directed by her husband Georg Jacoby. Outside of Rasp, everyone else faded.

Transit's copy of Ballnacht has their excellent sub-titles and the film is on You Tube.

                                                                                                                                                                                                        Music Lovers - Richard Chamberlain  

 

Barrie Pattison 2021

Molnár

Molnár

    

Dramatist Ferenc Molnár has a long running association with the movies. IMDB lists 119 adaptations of his work, though the more recent ones all seem to emanate from his native Hungary where he, Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz had once participated in the country’s WW1 boom in film production.

From the twenties to the fifties, Hollywood recycled work from the studio owned script libraries. This is one of the things that makes the output uniform. Molnar was no exception, with multiple versions of his “Liliom”, "Olympia", "A testör/ The Guardsman” and “A Pál utcai fiúk /The Pal Street Boys.” Probably the most revealing is the treatment of his "A hattyú" as The Swan.

The version people are most likely to have come into contact with is the MGM 1956 spectacular. It was a prestige undertaking of the Dore Schary administration and has top budget elements including European locations and big studio constructions to go with what is probably the best casting the piece ever got. Grace Kelly, who had done the lead in an Actors Studio TV production, is the right age and filmed gorgeous. Louis Jourdan manages sickeningly sensitive-handsome.  Brian Aherne, Jessie Royce Landis, Estelle Winwood and the loudly trumpeted American debut of Alec Guiness also figure.

The plot has throneless Princess Kelly being put in the path of royal heir Guinness by her deposed monarch-mother Landis and, when he shows no interest, they wheel in the nephews’ fencing tutor Jourdan to make the visiting royal jealous. Of course romance sparks between Kelly and Jourdan.

The Swan - Jourdan, Vidor (seated) and Kelly

The film is at best a practice run for the studio’s much more stylish Gigi which made better use of Jourdan. Charles Vidor, then considered the go-to director for Culture after his work on the 1945 Chopin subject A Song to Remember, just strands the talented cast and Molnar plot in a sea of production values. Someone should have told them about Vidor’s directing Gilda.

What caught my attention however is the discovery of the 1930 version hidden away on You-Tube under its alternative title One Romantic Night. This is notable, if for no other reason than being the last major film to star the luminous Lillian Gish. Don’t try searching her or Molnar or “The Swan”, the title on their copy.

The makers are struggling to come to terms with sound, starting with Russian violins swelling as the door opens into into Rod la Roque, the Prince of Moravia’s drunken party where Rodla is doing his best to be animated as a road show Erich Von Stroheim version of the royal. He tells them to keep going for the next four days till he can get back, after off-loading another princess his (off screen) family has set him up with.

Lillian Gish

Just like the first run audience, we wait to see how Gish will handle speech and there she is, the princess in the distant palace radiant and assured, being coached (“Don’t you want to be a queen?”) by mother Louise Dressler no less, on getting alone with the visitor prince in the studio exterior rose garden. This incidentally is the plot of  Edmund Greville’s 1947 Pour une nuit d'amour with Dressler excellent, anticipating the Sylvie role. 

Meanwhile tutor Conrad Nagel is teaching fencing to the royal nephews, who will finally be the only ones to see him go. Rodla arrives and gets along nicely with Lillian, dismissing officer Edgar Norton who has been set up to call him out of the Rose Garden meeting with her. Rodla’s arrival spurs Conrad to compete, when he is called in to accompany her to the ball and they develop a mature passion.

There are a couple of nice scenes with Padre-uncle, Australia’s own O.P. Heggie, who decides he can’t get stern with Conrad when his passion seems so understandable. ”You two brave children!” Similarly Rodla attempts to humiliate Nagel (“You forget yourself!”) but re-assessing the situation, backs off and Lillian packs to leave with the tutor. She is only diverted when it looks like a (non existent) princess will snag Rodla, after he sends himself a fake telegram stoking Lillian’s competitiveness - unsatisfactory way to alienate the sympathy Gish has built. Her “This is the first time I’ve seen a man in love and he happens to be in love with me” sounds like a rather winning piece of original Molnar.  She handles it with just the right touch of pride and confusion. There’s also a Beatrice and Benedict and a Nicolas and Alexandra to convince us of the literacy of the team.

One Romantic Night - Heggie, Billie Bennett, Dressler, Gish & La Rocque.

Despite a switch of directors from Paul Stein to George Fitzmaurice, it all unfortunately plays like a piece of Broadway theatre that they turned the cameras on - fade in on each new scene and the characters start talking. There is a ball (complete with the tracking simulating the dancers passing Nagel ). In their all white outfits Gish and La Rocque look like they are posing for a wedding cake. 

However the film has another claim on our attention. It is designed by William Cameron Menzies (in his then collaboration with Park French) Every time there’s a new change of scene, the settings earn another little gasp - particularly the observatory terrace with it’s piled up staircases and a telescope against a studio sky, that evokes Menzies' Things to Come. The finale, where the betrothed couple drive off, represented by a soso model shot of a toy car going down the painted country lane, prompts us to query whether the entire film was shot in the studio.

One Romantic Night makes an interesting comparison with Borzage’s near contemporary film of Molnar’s Liliom, both not completely tuned to a movie audience but more intriguing than many more cinematic productions.

Unfortunately watching the film now is something of a downer, knowing the miserable trajectory all the leads' careers would follow soon after it.

The You-Tube copy has quite good visuals but loses sound in the middle for about a minute.         

The Swan- Cortez & Howard.

Movie versions of "The Swan "get better the further back you go. Dimitri Buchowetzki’s 1925 Hollywood silent is the best we’ve got. The palace intrigue comedy shows a lighter touch than the director’s German Emil Jannings vehicles and, once he hits his stride, monocled Adolphe Menjou is able to carry the playboy prince role with style. “The lorgnettes are on us Wunderlich” he tells aide Mikhael  Vavitch, faced by the crowded ball room.

The opening contrasts the disturbance created by having a blood royal visitor in the Beldonia  palace (“He stretched his feet and rolled over” the servants relay in awe) with the assurance of tutor and fencing instructor Ricardo Cortez teaching the two young princes and telling the stylised story (small number of performers against black) of the princess loved by the page who is betrayed by the evil jester and has his head chopped with a large broad sword.

This sets up an unwelcome, sombre expectation. It takes a while to realise that Buchowetzki’s take on the Molnar original is going to be romantic and amusing. There is a Blue Danube ball room scene which doesn’t run to a decent wide shot of dancers and palatial ballroom. Prince Menjou chases Countess Helen Lee Worthing into the studio built garden - kiss with close-up of feet lifting. 

Adolphe Menjou

Frances  Howard, who was Mrs. Sam Goldwyn, is a plausible Swan princess - with the birds of passage flying over her. Menjou makes the shift from spoiled and lecherous heir-apparent to pathetic to quite sympathetic, with some skill. It gives him the edge on glum Cortez in a felt hat.

Menjou sets up a royal picnic to be with Worthington and invites  Cortez along because, as a commoner he’s not a person and will not draw comment squiring Princess Howard. Things go wrong (of course) with a deluge having Ricardo and Frances shelter in a convenient wood cutter’s cottage where Ricardo declares his love. They are joined by drenched Adolphe and his squeeze, proving unable to adjust to the rudimentary comforts.

Next day Crown Princess Ida Waterman, Adolphe’s mum shows up and arranges the marriage to Howard and that night Adolphe carouses with his uniformed officers, inviting Ricardo along because they number thirteen, only to announce his plans to continue with his little ballet girl after the marriage. Outraged, Ricardo insults him and sabres are shared out with Ricardo knocking Adolphe’s from his hand, telling him he’s drunk. Colonel Vavich (excellent in Victor Fleming’s Wolf Song) takes over - a surprise Michael Curtiz style duel compete with silhouettes and shadows on the wall, ten years before Curtiz got around to his. The other versions could have used a good saber duel.

Adequate, mainly studio filming. A couple of the character people register - notably Waterman and Vavich. Parading ranks of uniformed extras are missing and the film lacks the scale of comparable productions like Stroheim's The Merry Widow or Rex Ingram's Prisoner of Zenda. The only imposing decor is the corridor between two tall doors. We do get another silent movie model clock tower - or is it the same one back again.

The DVD on this title is fair.

Mapping the progress of film activity through comparisons like these has an appeal of it’s
own - an add on to the pleasure of watching the work.

Barrie Pattison 2021