Unfinished empathy? Queen Kelly (1929), BFI with Neil Brand and Pamela Hutchinson

 

A work of barbaric splendour…

LA Times

 

Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum and I don’t just mean Ed Sheeran here. There was a bleak strand of early twentieth century art that contended not just with unprecedented global tragedy but also the loss of faith in Gods and governments: godlessness is next to heartlessness and so it goes. As ever you could escape to fantasy but there were some pointing straight into the heart of darkness even as they did so. This was not so much Victorian gothic as post-war-punk with stories showing that the sun will, in all probability, not come out tomorrow as things brewed in what proved to be merely the long halftime between wars to end all wars.

 

As Pamela Hutchinson suggested in her excellent introduction, Queen Kelly was possibly part of one of these strands, the theatre of the cruelty, certainly in style if not deliberate intent. Erich von Stroheim was developing his cinema whilst, at the same time as in Europe, Antonin Artaud was evolving his Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté. Here Artaud detailed the aims of evoking a visceral reaction from his audience by means of presenting a wordless humiliation for his characters. Empathy would be our weakness as we engage with the basest levels of humanity through the look of degradation. Or, to put it another way, be repulsed by Tully Marshall’s gurning face as the revolting Jan Vryheid, as he licks his lips in anticipation of marrying Gloria Swanson’s help-less Patricia “Kitty” Kelly with whom we couldn’t sympathise more.

 

After a failed romance with a very handsome prince, Kitty is called to Poto-Poto, an area of a town in Tanzania, to visit her dying aunt. Now, such contact, normally signals an unexpected windfall, but this is not Hollywood as we know it, it’s Von’s version and Kitty’s aunt has summoned her with the strangest notion that she should marry her nightmarish protector and Tully surely never worked so hard to be so thoroughly unlovely. Kitty has not just loved and lost, she has been physically abused and driven to the point of attempted suicide. Now, after hope is offered, it is not just pulled away but replaced with a Tully worse than death. Cruel and absurd.

 

How did Kitty end up so far away from the good grace with which she started the film and her promising love match…? Queen Kelly is a confounding film in every respect and so much so that it is not surprising that it was never properly finished let alone released: it was too much for its star and its producer not to mention the looming approbation of the all to easily offended Will H. Hays. Had he had to pass the film after the introduction of the 1934 code he couldn’t as he surely would have fainted in the first few minutes of screentime for an over-exposed Seena Owen as mad Queen Regina V.

 

 

The full story of this film is well beyond the terms of reference established by the “editorial board” of this blog – partially-informed hot-takes won’t cut it and it is also such a complex and un-historied part of cinema history that you’d need a whole book and a mass of library time to do it justice. Luckily esteemed film writer, historian and programmer Pamela Hutchinson has provided just that and it is a page-turning joy with eye-popping revelations that connect three most interesting characters in ways that haven’t been done before. On the Writers on Film podcast, Pamela says that there’s a Netflix biopic of Joe Kennedy due which start in the early thirties. Well, they really ought to revisit the script as this book would itself make a great film. Hollywood has never been that great about filming itself but maybe it’s been short on real stories? Here’s one!

 

 

Pamela was on hand to introduce the film and to explain how her painstaking research was similar to that informing the team from Milestone, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller: Swanson’s extensive archive including von Stroheim’s original script as well as a surprising amount of materials retained (given their general business practice of the time) by Joe Kennedy. A 4k restoration has been produced and was premiered last year in Venice, some parts are still missing – not everything was filmed for a start – and so there are new intertitles and gaps filled by recycling footage and stills which gives the flavour of the full film which now runs at an hour and three quarters. The Great Footage Fetishist (a marvellous pun from Von Stroheim’s nemesis, Irving Thalberg) would have had it at three times that length but you can’t always get what you want Erich… as you well knew by this point. And yet, still you tried…

Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron at the peak of Kiity and the Prince's romance

 

Reviewing the films of Erich or “Von” as he was abbreviated by close friends and enemies, you encounter the rich irony of a man who claimed to be of Austrian noble/military background (opinions vary) and yet who wanted to capture reality on screen like no other. Watching Greed, you feel the lunatic urge to acquire money tipped over the edge until it dooms the main characters in that classic ending. Blind Husbands (1919) in which he starred showed again the unlimited cruelty of humanity whilst Merry-go-Round, a film he was unable to complete due to Thalberg sacking him, still carries his mark as all manner of cruel horrors are inflicted on poor Mary Philbin’s character.

 

That Swanson chose Von for this project showed she wanted his skills if not his budgetary control. She had just had a hit with the then almost unfilmable Sadie Thompson – a story of prostitution which other studios tried to stop for tactical reason* but which allowed her to play a more mature role. It was a success and it’s hard to believe she was still just 28, somewhere between Sadie Sink and Sydney Sweeney in today’s money but a star in ways that have no contemporary equivalent.

 

Kitty is a nun as the film opens, an innocent but playful novice in the mid-European country of Kronberg which is of no fixed period as per the conventions of the time. It is ruled over by the mad Queen Regina V – is there any other kind? – who seethes with clothes-less rage in her boudoir with only her pet do for coverage. She may be the boss but she cannot quite control her intended consort, Prince Wolfram (handsome Leicester-born Walter Byron) who spends his time acting like a bachelor rather than a fiancé.

 

Seena Owen: nothing says "mad Queen" so much as a cat in the bath...

He does at least take his military duties seriously and out leading his troop across the country roads he encounters Kitty who catches his eye when her bloomers fall down. I’m no expert but I wasn’t sure that nuns ever wore bloomers but in Kronberg apparently they do and the results lead to Wolfram putting them in his saddle bag – the sure way to any girl’s heart. It’s a funny sequence and shows how Von was adept at the sweet as well as the sour: military progress halted by the stirrings of the heart. We know he’s setting us up for a fall but the higher fly the hearts of the Prince and his increasingly lapsing nun, the harder they will fall.

 

So, it proves as, after finally finding her clothes, Regina V starts making arrangements, moving the date of her marriage forwards and otherwise closing down Wolfram’s room to manoeuvre. Everything comes to a head with the most sadistic twist as she chases Kitty away with her whip, spittle flying from her face of fury as she shows no mercy. The movements of the film are slow but symphonically structured so that when such twists occur the audience is dragged down with them.

 

Most of the existing film is set in Kronberg and there is proportionately less in Africa partly because Swanson, having realised that her character’s taking over management of her aunt’s “hotel” actually meant brothel and this was so well presented as such by Von that she called him a madman and asked Joe Kennedy to fire him. On budget alone this was justified as with only less than half the film completed – it was supposed to run to five hours – Von was already overbudget for the whole thing.

Here's Tully!!

The new Milestone Film’s “reimagining” improves on their previous efforts with the inclusion of some new materials and new title cards based on Von’s scripts. We see enough of Poto-Poto to really feel Kitty’s fall to the ultimate depths in no small part due to Tully Marshall’s exuberant evil. It is at this point that we’re almost without hope, we are in the Cruelty sweet spot exactly as Von intended and that is the biggest compliment you can pay to the work of Milestones’ Doros and Heller. They also bring out the full flavour of what is an extraordinary and powerful performance from Swanson and the role she fought so hard to see preserved in some way. It’s here Gloria.

 

Neil Brand, so steeped in the musical language of Hollywood composition, was the perfect accompaniment to the grand statement in its need for an emotional anchor as well as expression. How do you add flavour to the intensity on show, how do you not over-play when the going gets Tully and when The Faces are so loud and expressive? Neil knows and this was a masterclass of composed improvisation and quicksilver composition supporting and glorying in Swanson!

 

I want to watch it all over again.

 

*The Curse of Queen Kelly, Pamela Hutchinson Sticking Place Books (2026)

 

You can order the book direct from the publishers here where you’ll also find more information and wonderful reviews, it is sincerely one of the best books on film of recent years.

 

Von directed some very relaxed performances too!

NB These screen grabs are from the new trailer for the restoration which give some idea of how good the results now look! 

The English Job… The Girl with the Pistol (1968), BFI Monica Vitti: Creative Force

This highly entertaining film was screening as part of the BFI’s season Monica Vitti: Creative Force which gives some of us Antonioni obsessives the chance to see the actor’s broader work, and here we see the gift for comedy which is hinted at in parts of L’Eclisse perhaps but here is given full rein in what is now a period drama of swinging London and a Sicily nursing a Victorian hangover with a Cosa Nostra side-salad. I was sat next to an Italian family who got all of the jokes before the punchlines but overall, the packed NFT1 audience had a hoot – laughing at us then and us now, Monica’s sardonic star power eternally self-aware and simply cool.

It was a treat to see this modish diva playing amongst fabulous locations from moist Georgian blocks of Edinburgh then on to a grimy Sheffield still choking on the smoke of large-scale steel manufacture. A good portion of the film I set in Bath, as ornate as many an Italian city, then to London and then Brighton with the old pier still standing. We also had a rollcall of leading men for Monica to play with including Tony Booth (Cheri’s father), Johnny Briggs, Corin Redgrave and Stanley Baker – guess which one ends up with the girl?

Given all this, it’s surprising that Mario Monicelli's film wasn’t released in the UK but it did very well in Italy and Vitti won the Accademia del Cinema Italiano David di Donatello for Best Actress whilst the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. Having seen so many British comedies of this period, it’s altogether more coherent in tone and fundamentally ridiculous rather than just trying to fit in current cultural references. In this way it reminded me of Tinto Brass’ Col Cuore in Gola (1967) which was partly filmed at the legendary International Times fundraising 24 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace (John Lennon was there, Syd’s Floyd, Soft Machine et al). Counter-cultural history, right there in the background… Brass caught the moment when almost no one else did and his compadriot catches the background hum of a country yet to realise what is happening to it below the top-leve glamour of the moment.

Ultimately it’s a film of liberation for Vitti’s character, Assunta Patanè whose traditional Sicilian situation – family, men, an imagined and real, Greek Chorus of disappointment – weigh too ludicrously heavy on her ability to grow up. Director Mario Monicelli creates a mood not unlike Almodóvar’s early sexual farces with the same logical illogic as found in Vincente Aranda’s early work in a Spain still ruled by Franco’s censorship. The Italians had no such restriction and, whilst this is a joke at Sicily’s expense, it does have the general messaging about men and women’s role in (Catholic?) society.

This latter point is not made lightly and it was only in 1965 that the case of young Sicilian Franca Viola had been in the news after she refused a matrimonio riparatore with the man who had raped her and kidnapped her when she was just 17. This would have left her as a dishonoured woman who, having had sex out of marriage, was supposed to marry her assailant. It sounds mad because it is and it is worth reading up on this instance which had a huge impact on Italian law as well as the lives of those involved.

 

This cause celebre informs the seemingly incomprehensible opening when Assunta is kidnapped by mistake and then seduced by Vincenzo Macaluso (the excellent Carlo Giuffrè) who really wanted her cousin but makes do with what has been “delivered”. At the start there is the seemingly ridiculous sight of a group of men dancing together on a village rooftop as Assunta and her friends watch from a room across the way… dancing before marriage being almost as much of a crime as sex?

 

It’s useless, you look at me with dead fish eyes… I’m an honest woman!

After the deed is done Assunta finds that Vincenzo has fled to England leaving her and her family dishonoured. Her fiancé can not marry her and she cannot be a part of society until she has righted the wrong and, as there are no men in her family she is given a gun and sent to track down and assassinate the man who did her wrong.

Only now do we get the title sequence as the train departs, the ferry crosses and we’re whizzing through the British countryside up to Edinburgh where Vincenzo is to be found. It’s a long way from Polignano a Mare in Apulia where the initial scenes were shot to Waverley Station and the Scottish capitol’s stone streets have barely changed. Assunta approaches a woman in a pink coat who is looking for a housekeeper – “mi scusi, Mister…” (Vitti’s Itanglish is a delight throughout) and asks her the location of the Capri Restaurant where her target is working. And then we have it, MONICA VITTI walking around Edinburgh including some unsuspecting by-standers.

There’s a man, dressed as a woman…

She stops at the junction of Upper Bow and Johnson Terrace before spotting the Capri. Vincenzo is too quick for her and takes his leave … and this is very much the way as our heroine begins an educative journey across the country to find herself as well as her man. Travelling Britain doesn’t always work this way but Assunta’s contact with the welcoming intellectuals of the Sullivan family is the beginning of her sentimental education. She works as a maid for them and encounters The Kilt for the first time at their party, running off to the kitchen to burst out laughing. It was a different time.

Vincenzo calls from Sheffield in the middle of the party and as Assunta passionately remonstrates with him in the living room, Mrs Sullivan translates her half of the conversation as their guests sit aghast.

So to the Steel City, absolutely covered in industrial grime, where she finds a man called John (Booth) wearing fine Italian shoes and ill-advised white jeans and working on his E-Type Jaguar – the symbol of Swinging Sixties success. Luckily John speaks some Italian and takes her to a disco where they ask about Vincenzo and, after Johnny Briggs get’s too fresh she insists on her new English man giving him a hiding. They go to John’s terraced house – they’re all black, says Assunta – agreeing on separate rooms then watching rugby on TV.

What sort of a man are you? I don’t understand. You look. TV. Two hours…

A rugby match takes them to Bristol where Assunta sees the object of her murderous attention as an ambulance man. She finds out which hospital he works at and is off to “Barts” in Bath… where she encounters handsome Dr Osborne (Stanley Baker) and a man called Frank (Corin Redgrave) who has just tried to take his own life. Assunta gives him some of her blood and she listens as he drives her around Bath about his unfaithful lover and the reasons for his broken heart…

The same skills of emotional control and almost burying her thoughts in drama films also allow Vitti to hit the mark with so many punchlines… for this level of farce to work you just have to take it seriously and she’s within the unreality and without the need to labour the points which – perhaps with the quicker reaction times of my Italian neighbours to each zinger – makes them funnier.

Her conversion to an English-speaking, liberated woman by the last section of the film, allows her effortless sophistication to counter-balance Vincenzo’s old school thinking as he attempts to woo her back as his “property” … it’s fascinating watching her in character work these scenes on two levels… is she reverting back to old certainties or planning moral revenge?

 

We saw a sparklingly digital copy of a new 4k restoration which brought Monica and Swinging Sicily to life and really brought out the contrast between sun-drenched Mediterranean starch and Great British grey days. Some fabulous pubs and cars were also involved and I particularly liked Stanley Baker’s Rover and Booth’s E-Type Jaguar – he always was a flash get!

 

 

12,000 mm under the sea… Wonders of the Sea (1922), Horne and Bockius, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2026

J.E. Williamson's career is emblematic of a period in filmmaking, long past, when pioneers were part-scientist, part-showman and part-promoter on endeavours that involved as much adventure as technology.

Brian Taves, Ph.D., University of Southern California

 

John Ernest Williamson was born in Liverpool in 1881 making him yet another Silent Scouser although he was not related to the Mr Williamson who laid out Williamson Square in 1745. No, his father was Captain Charles Williamson, a seafarer from Norfolk, Virginia who patented his "Apparatus for Submarine Work” in December 1903. This was a three-foot diameter tube, made of a series of interlocking iron rings covered with a mix of canvas and rubber and provided a waterproof connection between the surface and the sea below.

 

Originally designed for underwater repair work, salvage and so on, John adapted this to incorporate a six-by-ten feet diving bell with a large, reinforced, window which enabled him to film in actual underwater locations. This “Photosphere” enabled him to not only be the first man to take a picture underwater from a submarine but also to create a series of stunning films starting in 1914 when he took his device onboard his ship, the Jules Verne, to the Bahamas, where sunlight shines deep into the sea.

 

An observation chamber made entirely of metal, weighing three tons and equipped with a crystal window four centimetres  thick…

 

Moving Picture World proclaimed that “Jules Verne is vindicated at last… the panorama is as entrancing as it is new.” Whilst The Evening Standard (23 July 1914) suggested that the photosphere “has amazed the scientists and diplomats…” although I’m not quite sure why the latter were notable? His most famous film is probably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which aligned his technique with a purely fictional subject and included a mechanical octopus to match his imagined giant creature. He was clearly as inspired as any schoolboy by undersea adventure and creatures of the depths.

 

This sparkling new restoration from the Austrian Film Museum, combines archive fragments found across Europe and Australia to recreate this extraordinary documentary/adventure from 1922 but it’s not without modern day quibbles.

 

It may not have been widely known at the time but Octopuses, whether in their garden or not, are rarely dangerous to humans normally avoiding their pathetically four limbed fellow creatures rather than engaging in arm-wrestling or injecting them with poison (although some are venomous). Mr Williamson preferred to suggest that they were “formidable monsters” and at one point we even see a supposed victim of a savage cephalopod execution with a bit of skeleton next to a divers’ helmet… pull the other one John lad.

JE Williamson, Dick, Lulu and "painter" in the underwater studio

 

Similarly, whilst Conger Eels can look after themselves alright, the one we see proposed as such a danger to the divers - so much so that they ask for a spear to be lowered – just wants to be left alone rather than prodded by the intrepid explorers. The eels can grow over two metres and will attack if left with no other escape but this one’s a juvenile and unfairly pulled into the action. I’ve seen more frightening scenarios in a Georges Méliès’. Also, the barracuda is not “the most ferocious of all sharks” and it’s not even a shark.

 

Consider yourself told John Ernest, at least from the point of view of 2026. But this was all part of the “blended reality” of his films and this stretches back to his earliest films one of which featured him attacking a shark lured by a horse carcass into the sea. To most of the audiences of the time this would have been an exciting part of this window into an unknown world… and was very much inline with a whole raft of ethnographic documentaries then and in the decades to follow.

 

The premise involves a collection of colourful characters off to explore the seas around the Bahamas specifically “Treasure Island” whose reefs have claimed so many ships carrying riches… and around which we find the monsters. Sir Williamson is accompanied by master diver, Jack Gardner, ship’s Captain Ross and his mischievous son Dick who provides comic relief during the journey out to the island. Also included is “a talented painter” and his “niece” Lulu McGrath… It’s all very Jules Verne and in the spirit of his great adventurers.

 

Lulu is there for a number of reasons but mostly to look very good in a swimming costume. She was runner-up in the first Miss America beauty pageant but equally importantly she can swim well and smile at the same time bringing glamour to the proceedings and diving to a depth of 12 metres with the aid of a 8 kg led weight which gave her more time to swim around in front of the submerged “studio” and she dives so well that Williamson repeats the shots in slow motion. A proper diving belle… although some will also be impressed with the muscular “local” who dives to retrieve the weight and swim it strongly to the surface.

 

Is this not a dreamlike spectacle, the vision of a new world?

 

The shots from the sea floor are indeed wondrous and it would be interesting to compare the coral and aquatic life now with then. We are so used to underwater photography that it’s difficult to imagine how mind-blowing this footage would have seemed at the time. A landscape as alien as Mars and about which we are still learning more with every year.

 

Lulu makes a bigger splash!

Next up are the divers who descend in search of treasure after they have bothered a few innocent fish. It’s still an awesome sight and they are operating two different breathing systems: one fed by a line from the surface and the other using carbon blocks to recycle the air. Both braver than me and a proxy for the audience’s adventure into this unknown.

 

We are also treated to a rare glimpse of the famous land mammal, inventor Alexander Graham Bell who descends in the photosphere just as you’d expect even for a pioneer in his 75^th year.

 

Talking of pioneers, this submersive treat was made all the more immersive by the singular talents of Frank Bockius on percussion and Stephen Horne on piano and everything else. They really pushed the boat out in combining to create new moods to connect with the old feelings and elevated the adventure in the most visceral of fashions. We need to see them play it under-water next in the spirit of The Williamson Technique and his approach to health and safety! Totally inside their depth and well played!

 

Bonn delivering yet another fascinating restoration.

 

 

 

 

 

Show people… Die große Sehnsucht (1930), Bonn Silent Film Festival 26

Camilla Horn

Quiet! Sound recording in process!

 

I love films about film and the silent era had some excellent examples from Eleanor Boardman’s Souls for Sale, Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly* (1917), the lost Merton of the Movies (covered here on this blog) to the British Shooting Stars, and the German Die Filmprimadonna (1926). They give us a tantalising glimpse behind the screen, showing films in production, sometimes actual ones with Erich von Stroheim on Greed and Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in Souls. By showing the process though they let the audience in on the secret and in doing so enhance the end product… yes, even the slapstick chaos of Show People!

 

This is the German version and it features mehr sterne als im Himmel, or something like that, to coin a phrase. Yet, whilst the guests keep on coming, the film retains a compelling central story that is something along the lines of the later What Price Hollywood? (1932) and no doubt many more before, in which a young star breaks through potentially leaving friends and lovers behind.

 

The couple in question are Eva von Loe, played by an more earthly Camilla Horn than I’m used to  and Paul Wessel, a hope-less Harry Frank who seems like a nice chap until events start to move. They are part of a reserve army of extras who as much a part of the filming as the audience. Most of the details pass them by but they are just happy to be in the frame.  

 

The set up

Shot “on location” at the EFA Studios in Berlin, the script was co-written by one Emeric Pressburger along with Hans H. Zerlett and the director István Székel – later Steve Sekely. It is based around the filming of a feature of the same name, Die große Sehnsucht (The Great Longing aka Camera! Action!) which has the double longings for love and career… everyone wants to be in pictures but at what cost? But, neither the question nor the film is that serious and to cap it all there is the most outrageous of endings signalled by letters attacked to the bloomers of the dancers in the final dance sequence.

 

We start with a call for silence as the sound department sets the levels and a lovely tracking in shot moves us from on high under the gantry and onto the sound stage – reminiscent of shots in Shooting Stars but also that rare “making of” footage shot of L’Hebier’s L’Argent by Jean Dréville. It’s a very silent shot for a talkie where microphones needed to be close to the action but opens up the visual world of the film in swooping fashion. The accompaniment also provides a lovely diegetic moment as Mykyta Sierov’s flute is foregrounded as the camera finally settles on a man in Regency costume playing the same instrument. But, there’s an additional touch from Sekely, as the camera shifts from the man seemingly playing the flute to the musician at the side of the stage actually playing it – extra delicious as we know it’s really Mykyta.

 

It’s break time and we switch to the canteen with extras in costume ask for boiled sausages with salad whilst, in the actors’ area, Luis Trenker is having lunch with Hans Schlettow who prods the fourth wall by saying that they’re due to feature in a scene in which they meet Elga Brink in the canteen. She duly arrives and Luis is introduced as having just come down from his “Holy Mountain” in case the audience was in any doubt.

Luis Trenker, Elga Brink and Hans Schlettow

Poor chap! He’s been in films for twenty years now… always as an extra.

 

Luis then hands over the baton by saying hello to Cornelius (Ferdinand Bonn) who is a perpetual “background actor” and who is sitting next to Paul as Eva comes rushing across the canteen with an urgent need to speak to him. Just one kiss though before rushing back to take her place at the tables in a staged night club in which Carla Marventa (Berthe Ostyn) is singing to this captive audience but seriously not impressing director Hall (Theodor Loos) who, after numerous takes, can’t take anymore of her vocals and fires her. He tells cast and crew to take the afternoon off but is distracted by the pretty blonde girl sat among the extra “audience” but is too enraged to take notes.

 

How do you do, I’m Conrad Veidt!

 

Conny duly arrives to find the set empty and greets long-suffering assistant director, Mopp (Paul Kemp) who tells him of the need for a new star. Meanwhile Eva has read too much into her director’s distraction and seeks him out in the hope that she can take over. Herr Veidt arrives just in time to jump to the wrong conclusion thinking she has been cast and when Hall corrects him remarks on her looks: “but can she act?” is the reply.

 

Camilla Horn, Conrad Veidt and Theodor Loos

… the Ondra Bar is now open!

 

Meanwhile, it’s Anny Ondra’s birthday and she celebrates with Charles Puffy (Károly Huszár) and a host of other faces I couldn’t quite place – she’s definitely A Party and when asked by Puffy how old she is, promptly pouts her thumb in her mouth. Anny gets more time than most for some leggy shots of exhuberance and the sign of a star at the peak of their powers. She had a productive 1930s, even though her accent excluded her from more British films with Herr Hitchcock 

 

What shall we do? Garbo’s in America. Bergner** isn’t available.

 

The pressure’s on an as Hall gets desperate enough to give the unknown blonde a go, he calls on Mopp to tell him who she was. Unfortunately the AD is drunk as a streifenskunk and has to be sobered up under a shower. Back in the land of the straight he remembers her name and full address and so we can proceed with the ending we’re all expecting. She gets handed the script and works all night on it with Paul but will she be able to den erwartungen entsprechen?

 

The answer is uncertain especially when Paul starts to feel excluded… and there’s still time to meet Fritz Rasp – being unexpectedly charming (Brooksie always said so…), not to mention Betty Amann, Lil Dagover, Jenny Jugo, Gustav Diessl (still not forgiven by me for Pandora’s Box…), Fritz Kortner (ditto), Harry Liedtke, Jack Trevor and many more…

Anny and Puffy

 

The balance between the drama and the star-spotting is well kept and everything comes together for that cheeky big finale. Fun for lost of reasons and including a lovely self-awareness and wiliness to make fun of the industry in ways that still surprise. Well done!

 

A very funny scene is at… (a) … party when a couple of stars do an imitation of Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel. It’s comic, and at least gets those two (about the only German stars missing) by names into the picture. 

Variety, 13 October 1931

 

This silent version that was screened was sent out to the many theatres that still didn’t have sound systems and works very well, it even adds to the meta feeling as we see throughout: the idea of a silent film about a talkie and a talkie about the birth of anew stars featuring a host of older stars not all of whom would make the transition to the extra dimension. Sadly, that wasn’t going to be entirely their choice.

 

For this stream, there was fine accompaniment from Richard Siedhoff on piano and Mykyta Sierov on oboe/flute which follows the dynamic shifts between the stage and behind the screen along with the romance. Personally I’m not so sure about the kazoo used to imitate the singing voices – the jokes already there in the mime – but otherwise they do a really pleasing job. I wonder what Camilla Horn’s singing voice was like, hopefully the sound version is still around for us to compare someday?

 

Camilla Horn and Harry Frank

 

*Screening at the Kennington Bioscope on 30^th September as part of a fund-raiser for The Cinema Museum – details here!

  

**Elisabeth Bergner, star of Fräulein Else (1929) and a hugely successful actress who moved to the UK in the mid-30s and provided the origin for the story used in All About Eve!

Camill and Fritz Kortner

"They're making a film based in Vienna for a change..." 

Paul Kemp Mopps up...

Crime & Punishment… Schatten der Weltstadt (1925), Horne & Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2026

 

When night sets on the big city

And lights and make-up and laughter mingle

Then, from streams and deceptive pomp emerge

The shadows of the metropolis, the shadows of the night…

 

Have to say that the “F” in FOMO reached a peak this year for the Bonn Silent Film Festival as I not only “MO” on a two-part screening of the magnificent SFI restoration of Gösta Berling Saga (1924) but also a rare screening of L’Inferno (1911) as well as many goodies including this stylish Weimar thriller with accompaniment from the many hands of Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry… if only I’d been there. I say it every year and there will be no stopping me in 2027!

 

A man dies in the agony of a heart attack, grabbing the dark-stylish hair of a would-be younger conquest, falling down with frozen grip as her silent scream is given startling verbal reality by our harpist (probably not pianist…). It is but one moment in a two-hour tour-de-force accompaniment from Elizabeth and Stephen which sees them intertwining phrases and melding tonality of strings plucked or hammered with hand or keys. I can’t imagine how it feels standing on the precipice of even a practiced and prepared for cinematic trio: piano, flute and accordion interplaying with harp, percussion and voice, all relating to the action on screen.

 

But Stephen and Elizabeth Jane are pitch-perfect musical adventurers, sure of each other’s contribution just as they are of their ability to match the momentary moods and themes of the film unfolding in front of them. A fourth element is always the audience and, whilst I played my part in our living room, it’s the immediate ambience that provides a call and response as compelling as the narrative. In the live stream from the festival, you can feel this almost tangible atmosphere. You are, very quickly caught up in the mix and the focus on film which is the ultimate magic of live cinema… contrapuntally rubbing circles on our stomachs and patting ourselves on the head, two things are true at the same time even moving in different time, space and direction.

 

Ellen Richter

It's all about the hair though. Ellen Richter was a one-woman industry by this time in Germany with her own production company, Ellen Richter-Filmgesellschaft, managed with her husband Willi Wolff, who directs her in this film as most of her others. Ellen was once described as a forgotten star but is now resurgent with recent screenings at key festivals including Moral (1928) and others at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 40^th Edition. She’s a German diva with sharp features, eye-drawing presence and jet-black hair that is often pulled back to allow the focus on eyes as deep as the Danube of her native Vienna and which beguile as they inform. And clothes, she wears these with the grace of a Borelli or Bertini exuding a Germanic athleticism which saw her feature in many action adventures.

 

Her physicality is on display here as she goes in search of her husband’s killer into the dark underbelly of Paris but first she must play her part in the demimonde of the wealthy as Olly, the wife of a just-promoted prefect, Henry Bernard (Alfred Gerasch). The film’s opening already gives us a hint of the degradations to come as a well-dressed man is propositioned in the street after the theatre and a young woman, presumably poisoned by the skin game throws herself in the Seine in the establishing shots bookended by portentous poetry.

 

No wonder! Making a career with a wife like that…

 

Horrid Henry: Alfred Gerasch

We then join the couple at the lavish party they’re giving to celebrate Henry’s elevation and it soon becomes apparent that a price is being paid for his career and by Olly. The inference is clear, she has been abused for her sex as much as the desperate women of the streets and, as leering men of influence pass inappropriate comments we see her being approached by her husband’s benefactor, the government minister (Philipp Manning). One man, a journalist Felix Granier (Walter Janssen) complains about the language and assumption that an attractive wife is a professional asset… and we soon learn that he is Olly’s lover, her refuge from her brutal husband and the deals he makes using her body as collateral.

 

But enough is enough and when the minister makes his way to Olly’s boudoir to collect his reward she cannot go through with it and, as the shadows of the musicians and the dancers at the party play against the curtained windows the old man has a heart attack and promptly dies. Henry tries to cover up the location of the death and sends the dead man away in a cab pretending he’s dead drunk… It’s not a particularly clever ploy and the police soon come knocking only to find the new prefect dead with a pair of scissors deep in his back. Olly enters the room and seems shocked but these guys know a good actress when they see one.

 

The story moves on in swiftly in detailed ways and the trial of Olly follows in a magnificent studio set - designed by the art directors Otto Erdmann and Hans Sohnle – which emphasises the pomp and process with Olly isolated on the stand, distant from her judges and jury with a circle of lights illuminating the search for the truth among the murky testimonies below. By this stage Olly is almost defeated and reluctant to tell a story that no one will believe over and again but gradually her situation is revealed and she shows the scars of her husband’s beatings. She is acquitted due to lack of anything other than circumstantial evidence but this is not enough to stop the media portraying her as a murderer who got away with it.

 

The most hurtful of this group is Felix who hasn’t the stomach to see through the whole trial and still won’t see her as she begs his mother (Frida Richard) to understand that she is innocent. In the face of this intransigence and the police’s indifference, she resolves to find the murder herself. She gets her first clues on returning home to find that a rough looking gentleman of the streets, Emil, aka Egghead (Robert Garrison) had wanted to see her urgently. We encounter Emil at her court case where he was so worked up by Olly’s evidence that he shouted out support and a caricature is printed in the paper below the acquitted.

 

Emil knows something but has been forcefully removed by a man who we later discover is Boxer Karl, but Olly’s maid gives her enough detail for her to head off to spend long weeks searching for the man who can save her reputation and identify the true killer of her tormenter.

 

The third act involves her perilous journey through darkened streets at risk from criminal and cop alike until she finally finds out Emil’s name and likely location at the Black Stork. This is the deepest dive-bar you can imagine; two women waltz with a cat as a violin and accordion play on and Boxer Karl’s gang look on… there’s Egghead, Elegant Hugo and Cocaine Max (who later went into advertising I believe). And it has to be said that Harald Paulsen performs a mini masterpiece as the relentlessly cruel boxer, never giving an inch and driving the narrative uncertainty with convincing menace, flashing fists and a sharp blade.

 

Olly in the Underworld

Will Olly manage to outwit both the forces of the legal and criminal enterprise… it’s another job for Richter the adventurer and allows Richter the clothes horse, plenty of scope as she pulls the audience with her to the end.

If crime dramas primarily pursue the purpose of keeping the viewer in exciting suspense and astounding him with a witty and unexpected ending, the film corresponds to this intention throughout. 

The Grazer Tagblatt

 

The film was another successful one for Richter and Woolf with the latter showing plenty of Weimar style and featuring some expressionist scenes (even though there’s nary a mention in Lotte Eisner’s Haunted Screen) with oppressive staircases, guilty apparitions in court and her bedroom curtains and a demimonde of the darkest hue. I like the use of eggagerated flashback to show how the prosecution frame the murder and the different takes – a technique we’d take for granted now, especially after Columbo and Murder She Wrote!

 

Richter’s success continued into sound but being Jewish, she was banned from acting after the election of the Nazi government in 1933. She and Woolf moved to Vienna and then ended up in New York after the annexation of Austria in March 1938. They returned to Germany after the war and although she started another production company although her husband died in 1947 (according to Wikipedia) there’s no evidence I can find that she resumed her career either side of the camera, living mostly in Dusseldorf until her death in 1969, aged 78. Still, we have this film and other precious examples of her glittering career and can understand how and why she was so successful during the good times.

 

Which is where I came in and Stephen and Elizabeth-Jane, helping to reanimate her star power in front of our very eyes.

 

Harald Paulsen is Boxer Karl

No animals were harmed in the making of this film

Cocaine Max

Hair death grip 

Feathers!

Here we gather... Nuts in May (1976), BFI Blu-ray Out Now

 

In my office, packed floor to ceiling with home media – digital, analogue, paper, plastic and vinyl – it’s easy to forget the time when we assigned value to film and television based on a single viewing and memory alone. I was a teenager when Nuts in May was broadcast in 1976 and it not only stayed in my mind but it became a shared memory with my partner, similarly, raised on a diet of Play for Today although not so much of the ITV in her case.

In the 2021 BFI Q&A in the extras the cast recall the in-joke created by Roger Sloman’s character, Keith asking “our larder isn't sticking in you is it?” when a rain-sodden Ray clambers into the back of his Morris Minor. It’s such a daft line – for many reasons – but to this day is repeated by cast and crew whenever they meet. In the same way, I am Keith to my wife’s Candice-Marie, on holiday or on walks when I’m stating the obvious or being boringly precise about unimportant subjects.

Mike Leigh’s film was made on a rain-soaked shoestring in 1975 but it has remained in our minds and collective consciousness ever since: perhaps because of the freshness of performances and the enduring relevance of this most “suburban” of rural dramas – one of the extras is Basil Wright’s documentary The Country Comes to Town (1933) and Nuts is certainly the Town come to the Country and a small camping site that represents the clash between class and culture, freedom and licence and McCartney’s Wings versus homegrown folk songs about going to the zoo.

Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman

It’s interesting to hear Leigh talk about the characters as being something created by the actors and not so much his scripting and it’s clear that his actors prepared thoroughly for their roles by thinking themselves into these characters and then reacting to the situations the loose script put them in. Husband and wife team Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill who played biker couple as Honky and Finger, travelled down to the filming location in Dorset on a motorbike completely in character although I’m not sure if she was wearing the platform boots seen in the film.

Alison Steadman, who ties with Nigel Hawthorne on nine Plays for Today and is still ubiquitous on our telly’s, and Roger Sloman (surprisingly only three PfTs) create a couple of well-intentioned monsters in Candice-Marie and Keith – both as memorable as Say Beverley in Leigh’s Annabel’s Party (1977) in terms of their being within a gnat’s whisker of believability. The couple are socially conscious, vegetarians and adherents to The Country Code and yet they are not tolerant of people who either do not share their values or are just not aware. In this space is Ray, played with diffident precision by Anthony O'Donnell – another class act with a long career – who just wants to be left alone but who is pulled into the disapproving gravitational whirl of the couple’s dissatisfactions (with each other as well as everyone else).

Ray is a student PE Teacher who is also studying geology and who likes processed milk and “Diddy” David Hamilton’s Radio One show (on which we hear Wing’s Magneto and Titanium Man, a mid-period dip…). Spurred on by Candice-Marie, Keith asks him to turn the transistor down only to have to move their tent when their noisy neighbour ignores him. It’s a foretaste of what’s to come when Honky and Finger arrive but in the meantime the couple form an uneasy truce with Ray, Candice-Marie especially being interested in reaching out much to Keith’s jealous disapproval.

Wings' Titanium Man or The Zoo Song? Your choice...

There’s enough between Candice-Marie and Keith to fill out a marriage counsellor’s big notebook and they are a couple held together by the strangest of power dynamics as well as their self-impose rules. After jealously attempting to intimidate Ray for his choice of syllabus (I know!), Keith has to back down after Candice-Marie says she doesn’t want to go on any further trips with him – it’s the unsubtle blackmail of children and both are undoubtedly immature but hey, let he who is without sin cast the first stick on the bonfire…

Keith takes his wife on a coastal walk – five miles he estimates, before revealing it was 14 after they return. His organised in a disorganised way wanting to take three sets of footwear for a walk involving a clamber, seaside pebbles and Corfe Castle, C-M resists and is glad of it after the rain soaks his plimsoles… their relationship is full of micro-aggressions and petty sniping but they can, at least come together for the formal duties of singing together, he on banjo, she on guitar. The songs featured were written by the actors in character.

The delicate balance is disturbed by the arrival of the very urban Honky and Finger on their motorbike - a couple who just don’t know the “code” that Keith has in his head nor the rules of the campsite. They’re loud but not unreasonable but when Finger wants to start a fire on the campsite, Keith cracks and a confrontation is unavoidable. It is a visceral moment and sympathies are balanced as we can recognise the pressures on both couples of an ungoverned situation that throws them together in ways for which they are not prepared: the reality of the class divide.

And they say culture war is new and that “Woke” – that word really meaning to other – is a “mind virus” of modern design. Imagine Nigel and Kemi pitching their tents next to yours in a wet and sodden west country camping site… shudder.

Stephen Bill, Anothony O'Donnell and Sheila Kelly

There’s a must-have limited edition which includes an illustrated booklet with essays on the film by Mike Leigh, John Wyver and Dr Adam Scovell and writing on the archive films by Ellen Cheshire and Vic Pratt. It may help you decide on whether you’re Team Keith or Team Candice Marie but, as with all things as magically real as Leigh’s work, these rich characters are not all bad and they’re not all good. As he always says, there is no “they” in his work, only us…

 

Special town and country features:

Newly restored by the BBC in 4K and presented in High Definition

Archive commentary by Mike Leigh (2009)

Mike Leigh Remembers… Nuts in May (2026, 14 mins): the director looks back on one of his most influential television plays

Director and Cast Q&A (2021, audio, 43 mins): Mike Leigh, Alison Steadman, Roger Sloman, Anthony O’Donnell, Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill are reunited on stage at BFI Southbank

BFI London Film Festival 2024 Screen Talk: Mike Leigh (2024, 48 mins): celebrating the 2024 release of his film Hard Truths, Leigh discusses his career with writer and journalist Amy Raphael

The Country Comes to Town (1933, 21 mins): a documentary made to help modernise the image of farming and the British countryside

Spring Comes to England (1934, 16 mins): documentary on the journey produce makes from field to market – including Candice Marie’s favourite, mushrooms

Winter on the Farm (1941, 15 mins): a public information film on Upton Manor Farm in Dorset

The Chiffy Kids: Pot Luck (1976, 19 mins): the Children’s Film Foundation favourites take a holiday under canvas

Play Safe: Camping and Fishing (1978, 2 mins): a safety awareness film showing the dangers lurking in the countryside

You can/must order Nuts in May direct from the BFI from 17^th August and come rain or shine it’s perfect viewing for all of us who wonder why the neighbours are so noisy and the World doesn’t do as it’s told.

There’s a fabulous moment in the BFI Q&A when Alison and Roger click right back into character as if the half-century between had been a lunchbreak, and then lead the audience in a sing-along of the Zoo song. Ultimately this work binds us together with its vitality and memory of a shared entertainment. That’s priceless.

Alison Steadman and Anthony O'Donnel say "Big cheese!"