Don't be judgy… The Hangman (1928) with Colin Sell, Kennington Bioscope

 

This was a Weimar surprise unearthed on 35mm from the BFI’s archives by the diligence of Tony Fletcher and given its first outing in many years in front of an audience who hadn’t seen it including fearless accompanist Colin Sell! We only had Tony’s word for it but as MC Michelle Facey pointed out in her introduction, there were plenty of quality elements in this tale of crime and punishment and a story that whilst it could be predicted was still so perfectly timed that it allowed a warm glow for the audience much in need of it given prevailing weather conditions in the capital.

 

The Hangman aka Der Henker or Der Staatsanwalt klagt an in German was directed by Theodor Sparkuhl and Adolf Trotz, being the former’s only directed film although he had an incredible career as a cameraman for everyone from Lubitsch in the teens through to Hollywood and some ground-breaking film noir. He has some good ideas here and perhaps the presence of Trotz indicated that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in the role but the results are certainly very interesting.

 

It is a tale of two women or rather four with two men of honesty and rigid morality caught up in a web of bad luck and passion all of whose fate is in the hands of chance as much a judgement. It is also a tale of two very different bars, one a dive joint offering “Varieté” on tatty posters in its grimy windows plus drinks and a good time down below, the other a kind of Weimar dream bar called Spiders with webbed interior design to match and a circular serving area at the centre to which men are inevitably drawn.

Andrée Lafayette

At the heart of this particular parlour, we find the warm smile of French actress Andrée Lafayette who plays the perfect host: a beauty who welcomes her male customers and yet maintains her distance only sipping the champagne they gulp near the centre of the web. She is asked if she is happy doing this work and smiles “not really” but she’s the consummate professional doing what she needs to get by.

 

Also doing the same but in a more precarious environment is Kiki (Irm Cherry) who works as a hostess in the less salubrious venue where she must fend off the attentions of drunken middle-aged men such as the captain played by Georg John who is harmless enough especially when compared with the villain played by Fritz Kampers. She has set her sights higher though and is in love with the tall and prosperous-looking brother of Andrée’s character played by Spanish actor and former FC Barcelona player* (oh yes!) Félix de Pomés. Sorry, there are so few character names, this film is barely out there online and I’m trusting on memory: such is the thrill of the Bioscope and films that only exist on celluloid. Welcome to the future-past of physical media.

 

Now… all of these connections will be vitally important when I outline the plot and this will then revolve around the imposing presence of public prosecutor Leander played by the sharp-featured Bernhard Goetzke a man who looks like he’s walked straight off the Mount Rushmore of chiselled Weimar actors leaving Emil, Conrad and Fritz stuck to the cliff face. Leander is a stickler for the word of the law if not the spirit of justice and as the film begins we see him sending yet another guilty party to their end with the Weimar Republic having retained the death sentence after much debate; the guillotine was the favoured method.

 

The many faces of Félix de Pomés, from the Nou Camp to Hollywood!

He's not a man who can’t let his hair down though and meets Andrée’s character when dragged down to the bar by a colleague. Pretty soon he’s regularly called to the bar to find out more about this fascinating woman who retains such dignity in the face of the inebriated and weak of character.

 

Elsewhere her brother is less restrained as he finds Kitty in the arms of a customer and following the drunken man outside, there’s a scuffle and the older rival falls unconscious to the ground. Sadly, for him, he awakes to find himself being robbed by the aforementioned villain who hits him harder causing him a fatal blow on the back of the head. After the thief makes his escape the body is found and, being the decent man he is, Félix’s character believes he is responsible and confesses.

 

The circumstantial evidence is strong and this confession surely marks this as an open and shut case but, driven not only by her concern for her sibling but also her growing affection for Leander, Andrée’s character determines to try and persuade the prosecutor of the need for understanding in what seems to be a crime of passion as well as an accidental death. As things progress there is some nice interplay between the two leads and even some lighter moments courtesy of Leander’s housekeeper (Anna von Palen) who sees her role being usurped by her employer's new romantic interest. There’s also excellent support from the siblings’ mother, played by Antonie Jaeckel, who has previously been estranged for a long time from her daughter.

 

Irm Cherry wearing a hat in 1928.

The narrative flows with Sparkuhl and Trotz mixing the growing injustice, the family and romantic ties in with solid control and building up the tension as the legal rock meets the moral hard place… It’s heart-felt and heart-breaking when you look forward to the tens of thousands who were to be sentenced to death under the next regime in Germany.

 

The film features lots of pleasing late silent camera movements with clever reverse shots of the characters in the bar and tracking shots as Leander walks with his love. There is also some expressionist overlays as Leander walks dazed through the city streets contemplating what he has become in a literal tumult of conflicted emotions, the pavements and houses revolving around his intense confliction.

 

Colin Sell accompanied sight unseen and provided marvellous flourishes to adorn the twisty tale as the honesty and dogged morality of both men threatens to doom one and kill the other. We shuffled nervously in our seats as the climax approached and well… let’s hope someone else screens this film before too long! It was a hit Tony, a palpable hit!

 

Tony Fletcher also presented the first part of the evening with a look at films made at Fort Lee near New Jersey in the period before Hollywood with excerpts from the fabulous double Milestone/Kino Blu-ray Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee which he had procured in Pordenone.

 

New Jersey, not Hollywood, was the real birthplace of the modern film industry. Fort Lee — just across the Hudson from the Bronx — became a key site for early film production. During the 1910s, motion pictures were a major part of suburban New Jersey community which looks much more like the old country than the dusty modernist landscapes of California. It’s a bit more built up these days and we saw a poignant documentary film showing the decaying lot in excerpts from Theodore Buff's Ghost Town (1935).

 

"Forget your land I have a nice hat..."

The Curtain Pole (1909), a short comedy directed by D.W. Griffith with an uncredited Mack Sennett as a man who search for the titular pole leads to chaos also including Florence Lawrence. The Indian Land Grab (1910), a young Indian chief goes to Washington to stop a land grab and is almost knocked off course by the daughter of the land grabber in question who is instructed to use her womanly wiles to distract him. A shock of the old certainly but the audiences were apparently more upset about the genuine romance that develops between the two than the film’s call for fairness to native Americans. Go figure

 

Talking of shocks, we also had an extract from the legendary The Vampire (1913) which featured an outrageously sexualised dance with Bert French and Alice Eis which captures the essence of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem describing the dangers of women of a certain sort. The dance is watched by Harold Brentwell (Harry F. Millarde) making him consider his relationship with Sybil the Vampire (Alice Hollister) and I can’t wait to find out what happens… The poem and the story were used as the basis of Theda Bara’s A Fool There Was (1915). Women were to blame for so many things back in the day.

Bert French and Alice Eis were once arrested for performing this dance on stage...

 

John Sweeney accompanied and I had to check that his keyboard was not aflame for the above dance sequence, he plays so well anticipating the rhythms and the emotional movements in ways that really help us to connect with these archaic sensibilities, the media meets an audience who are moved to the 1910s as much as the history comes to us now. Here, actions and piano speak more eloquently than words ever could.

 

Yet another special event at the Cinema Museum and thanks to the cast and crew who enabled us to see this long-hidden film. No archive is too deep or too dusty to prevent the determined search of the Bioscope’s researchers!

 

You can order the set from Amazon.com at reasonable rates as well as from Kino in the USA. It’s worth it for The Vampire dance alone but Fort Lee remains a major part of cinematic history!

 

Andrée Lafayette also appeared in the 1923 Hollywood adaptation of Trilby the second of many Svengali features... EYE have a copy!

* Señor de Pomés played for FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol (Barca’s reserves) in the 1910s, during the sport's amateur era and he also played for Catalonia, the national team who strangely, unlike Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland don’t get to compete at World Cups. He was also a skilled swordsman who featured for Spain in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. The Hangman was one of his first feature films and he made over 70 more into the late sixties, including King of Kings (1961) and Lost Command (1966).

28 appearances and one goal for Barça!

 

Pet Shop Potemkin… Battleship Potemkin (1925), BFI Blu-ray

 

Eisenstein apparently said that the film should have a new soundtrack for every decade to complement his imagery, which has remained so fresh and vivid...

Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boy

From the West End to the Odessa Steps is a long way and yet there’s clearly an affinity between the lads from North Shields and Blackpool with the location and its most famous representation on film in Sergei Eisenstein’s ground-breaking film. The duo were originally commissioned to write a score for in 2003 and Neil Tennant describes his and co-writer Chris Lowe’s view that the film represented a romantic notion of a “good revolution” that chimed with a time when many in the West were looking for positive change and peace. Twenty years later and we are ever more in need of giving peace a chance and this release is as timely as ever, were you to share the view of its call to flip the revolutionary/evolutionary coin one more time.

 

In 1925, Soviet Russia was a quite different place to the country that was to emerge after years of Stalin’s eventual dictatorship and bloodletting in the name of progress. It was less than a year after the death of Lenin and the country was less restricted and controlled than it was going to be. There were still elections for example and this year the Communist Party’s share of the vote fell from 88% to 66% of the Moscow Soviet with 2,554 Communists and 1,308 members of other parties. Even this was described by the New York Times as a better result than the Bolsheviks had expected given “… the silent struggle between the Soviet Government and the peasants…”.

 

Culturally, there was still the need to revisit the reasons for the revolution and the Tsarist injustices that led to someone like Stalin spending half of his life as a penniless revolutionary in and out of prison and exile battling against a regime that was desperate to modernise but also intent on suppressing the freedom of expression and intellectualism which went hand in hand with education. Born twenty years after the Georgian Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, who grew up in genuine poverty, the bourgeois Sergei Eisenstein was also dedicated to the cause, leaving his studies in the former St Petersburg to join the Red Army in early 1918.

 

The post-revolutionary Russian Civil War was largely over by 1922 with the defeat of the Ukrainian and Caucasus separatists but, with as much as 12 million casualties, the Revolution was far from secure. Eisenstein had begun working in the theatre and film producing propagandist material during his time in the army and by the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 uprising, having already made the full-length feature Strike (1924), was commissioned by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to make a film of one of the key moments of that revolt.

 

The Soviet Union had only just been established in December 1922 and, following Lenin’s death, a troika was established to rule consisting of Deputy Premier Lev Kamenev, Comintern Chairman Grigory Zinoviev and General Secretary Stalin. The former two stepped down in spring 1925 in opposition to Stalin’s isolationist doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” which also alienated Trotsky and those who believed in the more Marxist purity of permanent revolution… Stalin would still take the rest of the decade to cement his position as dictator and the rest is murderous history on an unprecedented scale but, at this point, the revolution was still to be celebrated and it’s purpose restated for a war-weary populace who could still express themselves through the ballot box for the Third Congress of the Soviets of the USSR, which still featured a choice.

 

So, this film is very much of 1925 as much as it is about 1905 and, as Mr Tennant says, is a tribute to the people and their solidarity in resistance.  Battleship Potemkin remains one of the most controlled of films with precise rhythms that still carry force and which still catches the viewer off guard with even Joseph Goebbels later admiringly declaring that no one with any pre-existing political leaning could watch it without wanting to become a Bolshevik. One of the reasons for this is its restraint, with the naval commanders and the Cossacks bad and brutal enough but believably so: only following the orders of a failing regime. But what really works is Eisenstein’s portrayal of the ordinary individuals caught up in these events`- people who had no option but to make a stance against intolerable conditions and a regime blind to the suffering of its own people.

 

The men of the Potemkin represent Russia in microcosm living in institutionalized poverty, cramped together in hanging bunks, exhausted from the failed war against Japan and fed maggot-ridden rations. Tempers boil up and the captain calls his company to a meeting during which a line is drawn and he orders his troops to execute the ringleaders. In a tense face-off, communicated through the rapid cuts and escalating tension that is Eisenstein’s trademark, the marines cannot fire on their comrades… the mutiny begins.

The men run riot and soon gain the upper hand by throwing the officers overboard. Soon the red flag flies over the ship but not long after their leader Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) is gunned down, shot from behind by Commander Golikov (Vladimir Barsky). His body hangs grotesquely from the rigging before falling limp into the murky waters: the revolt has its first martyr.

Free of naval authority, the crew, now led by Chief Officer Giliarovsky (Grigori Aleksandrov), take the Potemkin to Odessa. They are welcomed by the people of the town who come to pay their respects to Vakulinchuk. There are lingering shots of his body holding a candle and the masses staring in awe at the dead man – every new system needs to celebrate the fallen and there are obvious echoes of Lenin’s recent demise and subsequent display in death.

Celebrations soon shift to panic with the troops massing in line to shoot down the men women and children on the Odessa Steps. The camera tracks alongside the soldiers’ murderous march placing the viewer in the centre of the tragedy hoping for the survival of each individual highlighted in the slaughter. The soldiers force the people down the steps and towards the welcoming blades of mounted Cossacks… there is no mercy in this symbolic display of the reality of uprising and reprisal.

The Tsar may have regained control but Russian society was changed for ever after the 1905 Revolution and the lessons of solidarity in the face of state oppression were not forgotten. In the absence of any significant changes, Tsar Nicholas quickly backtracking on any concessions, the revenge of the intellectual classes and the proletariat was inevitable and then came the Germans...  The film closes with a segment as poignant as the steps as the battleship heads to face the Russian fleet: will they be blown from the waters or will they find merciful solidarity? Whatever happens next is based on actual events.

The score from the Pet Shop Boys, which by the director’s instructions should already have replaced in 2015, does the difficult job of connecting the modern viewer with these 120-year-old events and it is surprisingly cinematic given the Boys’ pop credentials. They’ve always been the smartest of duos with musicality and insight beyond most in the hit parade and here they are sympathetic to the original intent whilst also attempting to highlight the more timeless elements of this “good revolution”. It’s a “commentary” that occasionally jars when the synthesisers start to drive – as in Men and Maggots – but you soon get caught up in the swirl of Lowe and Tennant’s clear passion for this film.

Dresden in 2017

Torsten Tasch orchestrates their themes in forceful ways for the Dresdner Sinfoniker which, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, add the forceful cinematic drive required to match Eisenstein’s on-screen intentions and display. It’s vibrant and inventive and still feels fresh twenty years on from the original composition… the same period in time between the uprising and the film. Even amongst changing musical fashions the Pet Shop Boys are themselves starting to feel time-less and their music still has the capacity to uplift as on the closing For Freedom, an eternal Song for Europe...

The inclusion of Hochhaussinfonie (2017) showing the Dresdner Sinfoniker and PSB preparing for an epic presentation of their score and the film in the middle of a former East German housing estate, shows the enduring importance of the film and live accompaniment. It’s a compelling work of art in itself which allows much interaction with the residents who all have memories of the former soviet-led regime in Germany.

It's full of poignant individual stories and shows the power of artistic endeavour to uplift and reframe even during the most isolating of circumstances… so many single women, widows, living in what resembles a giant memorial to communist design. As Neil says in the film, these people revolted against authoritarian rule in the end and the hope is that, whilst history never really repeats, there are patterns that re-occur. Resistance and sacrifice are always victorious but all they can do is but people an opportunity. This may lead to worse things or it may not, but you have to hope that one day things will not only change but for the better.

 

Special features

• Hochhaussinfonie (2017, 68 mins) a documentary explores not only the complexities of the Dresden concert, but also the residents and their lived experiences of a very different time
• Trafalgar Square highlights (2004, 4 mins): a short film capturing the build-up and performance as Pet Shop Boys premiered their newly composed score for Battleship Potemkin with the Dresdner Sinfoniker in London
• CD featuring the score by Pet Shop Boys and Dresdner Sinfoniker
• Trailer (2025)
• Limited edition only... Fully illustrated booklet featuring new writing by Chris Heath, Sarah Cleary, and Neil Tennant, plus a previously published essay by Michael Brooke, notes on the special features and credits

The set is available from the BFI Shop and all good retailers!