A cut above… His Majesty the Barber (1928) with Donald Sosin, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming, Day Four

Swedish comedy, it’s what we live for isn’t it, but there’s ample evidence that it’s not all thousand yard stares, dying in the snow or being chased over ice floes by wolves. Take this film, a perfectly ordinary tale of a man who may, or may not, be an actual barber and who is operating as a street hair-stylist in complete ignorance of a royal heritage that might immediately make him question his choice of career. Sounds plausible doesn’t it but director Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius* has some form in this arena having produced the marvel of mirth that is A Sister of Six (aka Die sieben Töchter der Frau Gyurkovics, aka Flickorna Gyurkovics) an extraordinarily silly film that featured Britain’s Queen of Happiness (no, not Camilla Parker Bowles but Betty Balfour!).

As with this early concoction, HM the Barber is what was termed a euro-pudding in the days before the English got very unnecessary about such mixed ingredients. Luckily, GB was not involved and this film was a coproduction between Sweden and Germany not to mention Tirania, that ancient state nestled in the lower regions of the Ruritanian Alps.

There was an international cast too with Swedes Julius Falkenstein (known from films by Lubitsch, Murnau, and Lang), actress-director Karin Swanström (whose last directed film was the marvellous Girl in Tails (Flickan i frack) (1926), and the teen Brita Appelgren, who, born in December 1912. must have been just 15 during filming; a scandic Loretta Young in looks and youth. She gives a remarkably mature performance and I had her at least in her twenties…

 

“I have forgotten Gösta Ekman’s blue eyes, / for your South American-Spanish charm.”

Enrique Riveros and Brita Appelgren: combined age 36

The romantic hero/barber/potential Prince Nickolo was played by the Chilean actor Enrique Riveros who was much older at 21 and bizarrely touted as the Swedish Valentino. There was a poem in the Swedish program booklet which compares him favourably to other home-grown stars but, Ekman’s one thing, surely Lars Hanson was beyond this comparison. Marketing folk eh? He ended up working with Jean Renoir, Alberto Cavalcanti, and, Jean Cocteau, enjoying a decent career across Europe.

The German, Hans Junkermann plays the key role of André Gregory, the local barber and is the centre of much comedy as well as the underlying plot.

 

We begin with some missing footage, covered for by production (?) screen shots showing the arrival of handsome young Nickolo (Enrique Riveros) who is returning back to his village after completing his university degree. He seems to distract a young woman driving a car, Astrid Svensson we later learn played by young Brita Appelgren, who almost crashes into an explosives store, or what appears to be. It’s not the best of starts for this attractive young couple but so it goes.

 

Karin Swanström and Julius Falkenstein

Nickolo may be postgraduate but he hasn’t forgotten how to handle a pair of scissors and greeting his Grandad André in his shop, mid-shave, he immediately tries to take over. André wants him to better himself but first the young man wants to cut hair to help the old man. Whilst they lose their first customer arguing over this – he finishes off his own shave in the end – Nickolo’s radical hair technology – he can cut a “shingle” and puts up a sign announcing this fact and his newly-arrived expertise! This works with the local youngsters and one is especially keen, Karin (Maria Paudler) a friend of Astrid, who arrives to see that the man who is cutting her new style if the one who almost caused her to crash. She laughs cruelly as his air of confidence seeing him placed in the lowly circumstances of a hairdressers.

 

Long hair – A woman’s most beautiful asset!

I, Sophie Svensson, was by the age of twenty COMPLETELY BALD.

I have obtained my 160 centimeter long, naturally curled, GIANT-LORELEI-HAIR by daily use of the – by myself invented – patented SOPHIE SVENSSON’S HAIR TONIC

 

The reason for Karin’s social confidence is soon revealed as she is the granddaughter of hair tonic millionaire Sophie Svensson (Karin Swanström) whose premature Alopecia areata led her to fame, fortune and a huge mansion. She also has expectations of a noble marriage for Karin and has lined up Count Claës-Adam Edelstjerna (Julius Falkenstein) as the perfect noble suitor not that he impresses Karin who rather quaintly wants to marry a man she likes or, failing that, is at least a king.

Brita Appelgren

Now, it’s funny she should mention that, but Grandad André knows more about this topic than he lets on and it’s something to do with his so-called Grandson. A ship from his home country of Tirania, arrives and he meets with two former government ministers von Alyhr (Georg Blomstedt) and General Kirwan (Fritz Alberti) who are working to reinstate the monarchy, desposed twenty years earlier, and keep on turning up in Sweden to ask for “contributions” from André.

 

The target is now close and so André asks his friend Sophie Svensson to loan him the money to help fund the coup… the bonus for her being that Nickolo, who Karin now much prefers to the old Count after an ice-breaking adventure in which the couple get marooned on a rock, is the nobility she’s always dreamed of… Or is he?

 

The film has some delightful interplay between the characters and the comedy morphs into something like a thriller as betrayals are revealed. It’s great fun though and the cast are a joy throughout.

   

Hans Junkermann and Karin Swanström

 As with every country invested in the fantasy state business, Sweden had its own reasons with royal marriage speculation of the time ending with Princess Astrid of Sweden married Belgian’s Crown Prince Leopold, which may account for the choice of name for the film’s female lead? As for the Belgian royal family, perhaps the least said the better given the activities of the Prince’s grandfather King Leopold II. Royal fantasy always outstripped the inconvenient truths of royal reality.

*Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius also wrote the script for one of the greatest Swedish silent films, The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924) as well as two other adaptations of Selma Lagerlöf’s work Ingmar's Inheritance (1925) and To the Orient (1926). All three featured the legendary Swedish prima ballerina and actress, Jenny Hasselqvist which gives me the excuse to reproduce a couple of shots of her dancing on an English beach in 1919.

 

She’s dancing for joy as she knows the SFI restoration of Gosta Berling is out in the world and that, sooner or later, it will be screened in a cinema in which I am sitting. Tack så mycket!!