Tricks of the trade… The Magician (1926), with Stephen Horne, BFI, Michael Powell

Stephen Horne had a meeting in the evening with a dark figure at a crossroads and rumour had it, not for the first time given his uncanny ways with multiple instruments, melody and improvisation. Before his renewed pact with Faust in Guy’s Chapel though, he was on the Southbank with piano, electronic keyboard, accordion and flute accompanying more evil acts as Paul Wegener got all unnecessary with Alice Terry in Rex Ingram’s The Magician.

The last time I saw this many keyboards they were being played by a man in a sparkly cape called Rick, but that’s where the comparison ends as Stephen’s music was as usual, submerged imperceptibly within the extraordinary action on film. The wider Paul Wegener’s eyes, the more skill required to musically anchor the events on screen to our suspended disbelief; to calm and not just flavour the extravagance. Even the film is aware of its own sensationalism with Alice Terry’s character describing Wegener’s as looking “… as if he’s stepped out of a melodrama”, he stops, looks disgruntled and with a swirl of his cape, walks off. No one can fault Paul’s timing!

I have form with this "…weird, fantastic, adequately suspensive, and shivery…” * film, having backed Redwood Creek Films, 4k restoration of a 16mm print on Blu-ray and then gone after the WB Archive DVD as it was from a tinted source following recommendation from Mr M Fuller of Bristol. So, this was my first time with the BFI’s 35mm monochrome print, which comes in at 88 minutes according to the notes, vs the Redwood 80 and WB 79.

Paul Wegener 

The film was being screened as part of the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season as it was the first film on which Michael Powell worked on with Rex Ingram. This was during the young man’s time in the south of France, staying with his father who owned an hotel near Nice and who got him his introduction to Ingram and his crew according to Thelma Schoonmaker’s testimony last week. Writing in his autobiography, Powell couldn’t recall whether he’d co-written with Ingram in adapting W. Somerset Maughan’s story which, in his view, “defeated him; and his own good taste”.

For Powell The Magician was a naturalistic production, with its actual locations featuring Paris, Monte Carlo and villages around Nice, jarring with the more effectively gothic studio creations, especially Professor Haddo’s tower and the lighting from John Seitz all too bright for such a shadowy tale. Ingram had been inspired by German horror epics such as Nosferatu and Faust (there goes that man again) but it was Powell who eventually used German technicians to realise his expressionistic ambition in the Red Shoes and even The Small Back Room. Clearly, you learn as much from mistakes as from success and this film helped cement some key lessons in Powell’s mind which is why this film fits so well with the BFI’s Cinema Unbound, especially as I watched Colonel Blimp on 35mm immediately afterwards.

The Magician is undeniably a fun film though and is almost Todd Browning strange and proto-Universal odd. All begins artistically enough with sculptor Margaret Dauncey (Alice Terry) moulding a huge clay statue of Pan which is of such a scale that I really doubt she’ll be able to get it out of the room. Also present is Margaret's painter friend Susie Boyd (Gladys Hamer) who provides the first moments of light relief as she changes the title of an abstract painting from sunrise to sunset over the Seine.

Iván Petrovich and Alice Terry consider the nature of melodrama...

I was right about the scale of the work though for the clay suddenly cracks and the giant head falls onto Margaret threatening more than just her promising career. Her spine damaged only the state-of-the-art intervention of handsome surgeon Dr Arthur Burdon (Iván Petrovich) saves her with an onlooking doctor praising his skill as almost magical.

Also watching – really, really, wide-eyed – is Professor Haddo, who plans on actual magic, and more, with this most attractive of patients. The operating theatre is the strangest of places to pick up potential subjects for hypnotism and heart donation but it’s the early worm who catches the worm even though Margaret and Dr, Arthur soon begin a romance. Haddo meanwhile discovers the rare recipe for creating life in his local library of such things and makes his plans to, literally, steal Margaret’s heart.

After engineering a chance meeting in the park, Haddo then turns up at a visiting circus as the young couple along with Susie and her quirky pal (played by Michael Powell, who also plays a shaven-headed clown) watch a snake charmer. Haddo, has some words with the Indian, before picking up the snake and holding it to bite his hand, within seconds he makes the bite disappear, but the snake then bites and almost kills the charmer’s assistant. He’s either a genuine magician or a master of prestidigitation.

L'après-midi d'un faune à la BFI. Deux faunes en fait...

Haddo then makes a visit to the young woman’s apartment and proceeds to hypnotise her, using the completed head of her sculpture to present her with a vision of a pre-code Hell in which people seem to be doing exactly the kinds of things that got them sent there in the first place. He urges one especially lithely demonic, dancing faun (Hubert I. Stowitts, an American dancer at the Folies Bergère), to make his moves on Margaret who succumbs in ways that would dismay William Hays… Henry Lachman claims to have directed this saucy Sabbat section and it’s like a visit from a completely different film with no bearing on plot, just an excuse for sensationalism: yes, you guessed it, the future of cinema!

After all, do as thy wilt shall be the whole of the law as Aleister Crowley said and the occultist was certainly an influence on the production “…being quite a vogue among impressionable undergraduates…” according to Powell. Haddo was one of Crowley’s pseudonyms and he was clearly the inspiration for Maughan’s original character after the author met the mage in Paris in 1908 and took against him. In terms of Wegener’s portrayal, Powell was not alone in thinking the German lacked the Englishman’s wit as Crowley unsuccessfully filed an injunction to prevent the film’s premier in France. Lighten up Al… let them do as thy wilt man.

Back in the film, Margaret and her good Doctor plan to marry but on the morning of their ceremony, Arthur discovers that she has not only been whisked away by Crowley Haddo but has married him. Convinced that her will is being controlled, he begins to search Europe for them finally tracing them a year later to Monte Carlo where Haddo is using Margaret to somehow fix the odds at the gaming table presumably to fund his greater plan. Oh, he’s clever this one…

I watched Queen of Hearts (1949) just before, cards and magic on my mind...

Arthur and his friend Dr Porhoët (Firmin Gémier) set out to foil the Professor and the closing segment is full of classic horror tropes right down to a lightning-illuminated tower and an eager “Igor” played by Henry Wilson. It’s high camp and schlock horror but this is one of the places were that all began, missteps and all. James Whale certainly took notes and the influence can be seen in both Frankenstein and Dracula.

Wegener does get the job done, ham included, and Powell was certainly not impressed with saying his "one expression to indicate magical powers was to open his huge eyes even wider, until he looked about as frightened as a bullfrog." Terry also doesn’t always fit the mood but then a) she is in a hypnotic trance for half the film and b) that mood is a moving target in a story with so much range… from the sublime to the gore blimey as my Nan would say. Yet it is partly down to this very experience that Powell was able to manage such extremes with so much ease in Blimp and his other major works with Pressburger.

Before all that, Powell was to feature as comic character Cicero Simp in the Riviera Revels travelogues – called Travelaughs ha-ha! - directed by fellow Ingram alumni Harry Lachman. Two were screened before the main features, No. 9: Cold Feats (1927) and No. 10: Fauny Business (1927). Powell does all his own stunts and these are delightful snippets of a very British nature. It’s hard to underestimate the influence of “daft” on the great man’s work. 

And there is so much more cinematic magic to follow in this season of all seasons.

Mickey was taking notes.

*Lawrence Reid, Motion Picture News

My stash of The Magician home media.