Crimes and misdemeanours… In the Eyes of the Law (1919) with Stephen Horne, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Any suffering is easier to bear if the goal is great…

 

More Asta magic that turns what could be a melodramatic take on Crime and Punishment into something altogether worth watching. The secret of her success and lasting impact certainly wasn’t the scripts she was given or the directors she worked with but the ways she was able to create character and to self-direct… can you imagine her working with Griffith or DeMille? She did work with Lubitsch but that film sadly no longer exists and it would be especially interesting to view now as she was very much the established star… It’s also such a shame that her Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler are no longer with us, but so it goes.

 

Here she delivers yet another distinct performance, from metropolitan newspaper reporter flirting easily with her co-worker, and fiancé, so naturistic you feel like you’re intruding… to a committed newshound on a case, exposing inequality and ruinous criminal practice to an avenging angel who effects change but at a moral and personal cost.

 

The statement at the top is something her character says near the end and isn’t that far away from Friedrich Nietzsche's words, He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How… a very apposite and necessary sentiment given the time after so many had died for Kaiser and country, a film made in the early days of the Weimar Republic when Germany was in recovery. Bruised and unbowed depending on your point of view.

 

In the Eyes of the Law (Nach dem Gesetz) is directed with fluid precision by Willy Grunwald, who worked with Nielsen on a number of films during this period and was obviously trusted to let the Danish diva get on with the real magic. There are, nevertheless, some well-constructed sequences and he really does show her to best effect as the film reaches its climactic sequence.

 

The film is presaged, as a number of Nielsen’s were, by some glamour shots of the actress smiling direct to camera and smelling a large bunch of roses, this is, as usual, a very knowing moment that seems to suggest that audience complicity is already guaranteed…

 

Asta’s Sonja Waler is dressed in some style as she breezes into the newspaper offices to briefly flirt with Arthur (Fritz Hartwig) before typing up her copy. The opening of the film feels like a rom com with some superb street shots of bustling Berlin – the locations are a glimpse on a lost world with cinematographer Max Lutze capturing the city in motion and one particularly delicious shot of Sonja and Arthur enjoying a champagne lunch high up in a café overlooking one of the main streets.

 

Lutze also captures the couple eating their sandwiches on the roof of the newspaper, Asta opening the bread to see what’s inside, an everyday action that almost no one else would think of. From a distance they spot her brother Eric (Otz Tollen) and doctor, with his colleague, Albert Holm (Theodor Loos). They invite them up and learn about Holm’s latest breakthrough which could greatly help the large numbers who are dying from lupus (remembering again that this was also the time of the Spanish flu pandemic).

 

Sonja wants to help raise the funds Holm desperately needs but her editor is less keen until she finds a way of popularising it. Never short of ides she decides to visit a wealthy industrialist whom she finds mid-argument with his son (Henri Peters-Arnolds). Her curiosity peaked by the elder man’s refusal to provide any further financial support, she follows the young man to a dingy part of town and a meeting he has with a money lender, Heere (Guido Herzfeld) who is bleeding his client dry.

 

Soon afterwards she hears that the youngster has shot himself, the latest casualty of the loan shark’s greed. Meanwhile, she visits her brother’s clinic and sees for herself the sad deaths of his patience, all of which could be preventable if funding could be made available.

 

Then Sonja’s aunt is ill and she is to travel to see her with her mother (Georgine Sobjeska) – she has not got long to live. It is then that Sonja, spurred on by the extremes of injustice, decides on an almost perfect plan to help the needy and punish the guilty… and it’s pretty ingenious at a time when not all such things were as well thought out – so props to writer Louis Levy!

 

The New Cinema Review said at the time that Nielsen’s “internalized play… makes one forget the shortcomings of logic ...” and you can say that about so many of these films although, this caper seems secure if only Sonja’s conscience allows it to be. There must be a reckoning of course and there’s a dogged policeman played by Bernhard Goetzke … so, once again we are treated to the actor’s emotional pyrotechnics; she never disappoints and, again, this is Sonja’s agony… unlike any other character I’ve seen.

 

Stephen Horne accompanied with Asta-assurance on piano, flute and accordion, and again one felt that different mix in his call and response with the action on screen. It’s been a full on three days of Nielsen films and we’re all deeply invested at this stage.

 

You still have time to experience the Asta impact as the films run until 15^th March. Booking and details on the BFI site.