Knives Out… Sensation im Wintergarten (1929), Bonn Silent Film Festival 2025 streaming, with Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius

We have only the crème de la crème…(at the Wintergarden)

 

As a child during our regular family trips up the Lancashire coast I would be terrified as we watched the daring young men and women on the flying trapeze in the Blackpool Tower Circus as they swung high above our heads with no safety net, only flesh, bone and sinew away from a fall to their death. I knew they probably wouldn’t fall but my heart was always in my mouth as I watched them take their chances and it was always a relief once they had finished.

 

Now none of these acrobats enlivened the jeopardy by fixing long swords to the floor and then to a hoop through which they would fly at the end of their routine but in Their Son aka Sensation im Wintergarten, this is exactly what the great “Frattani” does and it is not just his sweetheart who hopes he will keep on swinging rather than being sliced and diced in his shiny silk costume… it’s also exactly the kind of device an ill-wisher might use to finish the man off. It’s the most gruesome variant of Chekhov's gun principle, if you see it in Act IV it will, probably, “go off” by Act VII… Chekhov's water torture more like.

 

Looks easy doesn't it?

After the trapeze artists my relief was always short-lived for then we had the always sinister clowns, led by the legendary but scary Charlie Cairoli. Laugh? I could have cried. It’s safe to say that there was no danger of my running off to join the circus but this is exactly what young Count Paul Mensdorf does in this picture, escaping from his disciplinarian stepfather Baron von Mallock (Gaston Jacquet looking just as shifty as he would with Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté (1930), weasel eyes and untrusting moustache…). Mallock has somehow worked his way into the affections of Paul’s mother Gräfin (Erna Morena) and, having secured his meal-ticket treats her son with cruel disdain.

 

Paul (Alphons Schünemann at this point), runs away and comes across a circus and, watching through a break in the tarpaulin is captivated by what he sees. He’s spotted by a friendly clown Barry (a very good Vladimir Sokoloff, a Russian emigree who would soon depart for Hollywood) and pulled into the new family of acrobats and jugglers. He meets one of the young stars, the horse-rider Madeleine (Alexandra Nalder) and the two form an instant friendship.

 

Vladimir Sokoloff and Claire Rommer "enjoy" the show...

The film actually starts with Paul (Paul Richter) now a world-famous trapeze artist under the name of Frattani as he travels across to Europe on an ocean liner from New York. He’s spotted by a group of young women as he trains and we see a newspaper revealing that this “King of the Air” is coming to perform in Europe for the first time. There’s some good business with cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum’s camera following Paul as he swings back and forth finally puling the curtains on his admirers before focusing on the muscular form (had Herr Richter not fought dragons in Die Nibelungen?) and a thoughtful fade back to his childhood and the split from his mother who now believes him long dead.

 

In Berlin there are wonderful street scenes as the camera follows traffic through the Brandenburg Gates and along Friedrichstraße to the Wintergarden wherein are promised “Internationales Varieté”. The stage sequences were filmed in the Wintergarden and its huge auditorium allows director Gennaro Righelli to pull the camera too and from the performance area and across the audience adding so much atmosphere to the proceedings especially when using a multitude of local talent, dancers, high-wire artists, acrobats and chorus girls. The venue was destroyed during the war but rose again in Potsdamer Straße*.

I wish I knew who the Dodge Twins were?

Back in 1929, Paul is reunited with Madeleine (now grown up as Claire Rommer) who is queuing with dozens of other hopefuls at an audition for a chorus girl. She has fallen on hard times and yet not even Paul's status is enough to persuade the hard-nosed Varietédirektor (Adolphe Engers) to give her a chance. But the King of the Air is nothing if not determined and he manages to wangle her a shot as “Mademoiselle Madeleine, the famous dancer from the Folies Bergère” and, after instructing the orchestra to play the Eccentric Charleston knowing she can and does ace it, whetting the whistle not only of the salacious director but also of Baron von Mallock who has already made his entrance and sexually harassed half the usherettes before even making it to his seat.

 

The Baron has only gotten worse over the intervening years and is fleecing Paul’s mother as he spends his time gambling and cavorting with other women and he immediately sets his sights on Madeleine and her long legs. The sequence is so well handled with the camera pulling away over the audience as Madeleine dances across the stage giving a real impression of the space and also the atmosphere as the sub-plots line up with cuts to the Baron, the manager, Paul and Barry cheering on the jazz.

Gaston Jacquet and Erna Morena

Then we get the build up to Paul’s turn as Clown Barry sets up the deadly basis for his act, only a clown could show how sharp the swords are and only a laughable figure could reinforce the morbid possibilities of this shiny steel… the slightest slip and the acrobat is guaranteed a bloody end. Richter appears to be doing some of the work himself including balancing on his head on his trapeze but the trickier work must have been a stunt man? It’s edited well though and you can almost feel the audience as uneasy as I was as a child in Blackpool.

 

Paul is on top of his game but having found his love with Madeleine he starts to worry about his ability to perform, he now has something to live for and danger loses it’s thrill. Meanwhile the Baron won’t play fair with anyone and once he realises who Frattani is, there can only be one or two outcomes, especially when Paul’s mother also finds out. I can guarantee a stressful denouement.

 

Talking of magnificent men performing the seemingly impossible, I give you Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius whose accompaniment was recorded live at the Bonn screening and reproduced for this streaming. The two are so familiar with each other they always play in sympathy with the action on film and the circus atmosphere would not be the same without Herr Bockius triplets and paradiddles whilst I still do not know how Herr Buchwald manages to seemingly play both violin and piano at the same time. Epic work gentlemen and next year, I promise, I will be in Bonn to see how this all works in person!

 

This was the premier of a new digital restoration from 2024-25 which built on earlier filmic materials combining a vintage positive print from the Swedish Film Institute with the DFF’s nitrate materials to create a version missing only a few sections which are covered by new title cards. It’s pretty complete, minus the third act, and whilst not exceptional is a very entertaining snapshot of German theatrical culture as well as film culture at this time.

 

This is as close as we’ll ever get to a night out at the Wintergardens!

Man on a wire... the documentary element gives the film more grounding

* The Wintergardens were – probably – the first theatre to screen films using the Bioscop projector in 1895 when its inventors the Skladanowsky brothers put on a show. This was, of course, a year after the Blackpool Tower Circus began its uninterrupted 130 years run. It all connects!

 

There is more about the venue and it’s destruction by Allied bombs in the Second World War here: https://www.berlinluftterror.com/blog/wintergarten-kabarett

 

Last word to Lotte Eisner writing at the time and quoted on the Bonn website…

 

Claire Rommer is allowed to show two sides of her talent, to be a charmingly quiet creature and suddenly transform into a spirited, eccentric dancer. This truly gives her the element of surprise that the film's narrative envisions. Her beautiful body wrapped in a glittering leotard, she dances a baker's dance, lithe and full of verve.

Lotte H. Eisner, Film-Kurier, No. 212, September 6, 1929

 

 

 

Marie Prevost is… Up in Mabel’s Room (1926), Günter A. Buchwald & Zerorchestra, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming, Postscript...

Gary dearest, I thought you were so naughty but I’ve found you are so nice… 

Sounds just like a movie.

 

Oh, this was so much fun and with accompaniment recorded right at the start of this year’s festival at the screening in Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, it had that live energy some of the streaming films don’t always get, although, to be fair this was an ensemble, with the local group Zerorchestra improvising alongside Günter A. Buchwald’s piano and violin. I had planned to be there for the festival but a last-minute Covid infection put paid to all that leaving me to relish the Giornate’s online offering and imagine everything I was missing… the films, the gelato, the relaxed late night’s discussing the films and much more. This film was the perfect finale for the streaming version though, setting us up for a physical return in 1923, sorry, 2023!

 

Directed by E. Mason Hopper, this perfectly executed farce was based on the play by Wilson Collison and Otto Harbach from 1919, and like every successful comedy of this type it relies on perfectly executed performances and timing, whether from the performers and director or in the editing suite. There’s also some exceptionally pithy title cards courtesy of F. McGrew Willis’ script and Walter Graham’s text… and if a picture paints a thousand words, the expressions on Marie Prevost’s face are a British Library’s worth of inuendo!

 

Harrison Ford and Marie Prevost

Marie plays Mabel Ainsworth returning from Europe on a cruise-liner, who has just divorced her husband, architect Garry (The Original Harrison Ford) after finding him in a lingerie department buying what she presumed was a present for another woman. Big mistake Mabs, as young Garry was buying you a silky see-through with both your names on it… too late she decides that he’s a keeper not a creeper and she knows she must do right by him, whether he likes it or not. Remember that embroidered nightware though, it will be important later. Also important will be her meeting on board with man-about-town Carl Gerard (Arthur Walkers) and his rather less outgoing spinster sister, Henrietta (Maud Truax).

 

Among new friends Gary Ainsworth was posing as a bachelor. He figured his secret marriage in Paris was like a vaccination… it hadn’t taken.

 

To Garry’s office where we meet his neighbours, Insurance Broker Jimmy Larchmont (Harry Myers) and his fearsome wife, “his top-go signal”, Alicia (Sylvia Breamer) who announce a party to celebrate their six-month anniversary, as so many don’t make it to their first, cue wince from Garry. Next to them is Leonard Mason (Paul Nicholson), a gay bachelor who is in love with vivacious Sylvia Wells (Phyllis Haver) who rather takes a shine to Garry, even as the latter advises his pal Paul on how best to broach the subject of asking her on a date. 

Harrison and Phyllis Haver

These characters all have elements of a classic farce set-up, which is completed when Mabel arrives just in time to hear that Garry has clearly told them all he’s a bachelor… Information is power and we all know the young draughtsman hasn’t a chance, but at this point the poor sap doesn’t though and rebuffs his ex-wife’s advances when she pops into his office on the grounds that they’re no longer wed and kissing would just not be proper. All the same she catches him unaware winking at his office assistant Simpson (Arthur Hoyt) causing Garry to worry that he’ll gain a reputation as “a swivel-chair sheik…”

 

The El Rey Night club was one of those places where twenty dollars wouldn’t buy enough food to widen a worm’s waistline.

 

One celebration leads to another after Garry is shocked to see his secret ex arrive at the Larchmont's party at the El Rey club with the Gerards. Mabel has so successfully rubbished the good name of her previous husband that the men promise to exact revenge if they see the swine. Garry panics and proposes to Sylvia, using the engagement ring which his lovelorn pal his pal Leonard had given to him for safekeeping. As usual, Mabel is the quicker thinker and extracts the maximum torture from the “bachelor boy” as she talks of her unknown previous husband and the special gift he had given her; perhaps Sylvia would like it as a wedding gift? 

Arthur Walkers, Maud Truax, Sylvia Breamer, Phyllis, Paul Nicholson and Harry Myers 

From this comes an invite to the Mason’s for a weekend away, to celebrate the new couple's engagement and which will involve combinations of most couples in ways that I’d need a spreadsheet to fully transcribe. The misunderstandings fly thick and fast as Garry, aided by his valet, Hawkins (William Orlamond) set out to recover the incriminating lingerie – the “doo-dad” – from Mabel’s room before she uses it to blow his cover and his fresh and instantly regrettable, engagement.

 

You’ve been hanging on her door all day, you’re a regular doorknob!

 

Cue grown men hiding under beds, dancing as if wearing ladies’ lingerie (I know) and being assaulted by three women in search of imagined burglars… it’s a richly comedic closing segment that would have been hilarious to watch with an audience instead if on a laptop with my family checking I was OK after every few minutes of snorting. Sooner or later, everyone ends up in Mabel’s room…

Listen baby, I can explain everything so that even you can understand it!

  

It’s a classic farce and fascinating to see the Anglo-American tradition expressed so well in silent film. Hopper directs with precision and great timing which, as we all know, is the essence of good humour. He has a cast of great reactors; shock, stunned, outraged, surprised and even frightened all freely expressed and played as perfectly as the instruments in Günter and the Zerorchestra accompaniment.

 

Talking of which, the boys in the band were perfect and spirited and the fact they were improvising in front of an audience adds extra frisson and humour. The music is perfect in tone for this delightful comedy and also great for dancing… who wouldn’t want to cut a rug with Marie and Harrison.

 

A band not unlike Günter A. Buchwald & Zerorchestra

Prevost is, as every time I watch her, pitch perfect, full of sass and perky emotion, she’s not only the best winker in Hollywood but one of the most endearing comedians of her age. She’s the queen of emoting on clue, that perfect timing again, but also thoroughly likeable and believable. She should have gone on to be huge in the wise-cracking pre-codes and throughout the thirties but it wasn’t to be.

 

Still, with films as strong as this to display her wit, beauty and talent she won’t be forgotten and when she’s recalled it will be in the knowledge that, despite her early passing aged 40, she was capable of creating so much cinematic happiness.

 

Il trono di spade … On the Steps of the Throne (1912), with Günter A. Buchwald, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming Day One

Before the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia, there was the equally daft Ruritania, a mythical substitute for all things Balkan, semi-feudal states still run by kings and queens, nestling somewhere in the vanishing borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but still locked in time, a home for heroes and their distressed damsels. In Italy this land was Silistria or Silistrie, described by one critic as “the promised land of cinematic heroes… It is a kind of barracks in which resides a king, a crown prince, great generals, captains, officers, a few soldiers, many spies and a few diplomats… “

That quote of from Festival Director Jay Weissberg’s notes on this film and, given that Ruritania is one of this year’s themes, it’s fitting that we kicked off the virtual Giornate with what was one of the earliest and most influential of Italian Silistrie films, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle’s Sui gradini del trono (1912); all the finery, gallantry and nobility you could possibly wish for, accompanied by suitably grand gestures on the piano from Günter A. Buchwald.

As with much Italian cinema of this year, the action is mostly fixed camera shots of tableau with some gorgeous, layered mise en scene and lavish exterior shots that Del Colle intermingles with reaction shots – players inside looking out as a parade assembles. As always, it’s so interesting to see the film makers working within the constraints of their craft and pushing the limits. There are so many shots in this film, it’s a rich visual treat with characters moving across the spaces drawing the eye and creating a dynamism potentially lacking in studio-based productions.

Dynamic tableaux

Any resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda is purely coincidental but the plot did make me worry that, given current circumstances, somebody might bump into a criminal who looks exactly like Charles Windsor and install the doppelgänger on the British throne in order to fulfil a dastardly power grab… stranger things are clearly happening anyway.

110 years ago, though, all seems much more normal, with the young Prince Wladimir (Alberto A. Capozzi) all set to be King once he comes of age, even though he’s a very mature-looking teen. Until then he has to do as he’s told by the wicked Regent Backine (Giovanni Enrico Vidali). Backine has his eyes on marrying his daughter to the Prince but our hero only loves Princess Olga (Maria Gandini) and even the promise of undying loyalty from his sneaky mentor isn’t enough to convince him.

You accompany the Prince to Paris and try and make him forget all about his kingdom and more particularly Princess Olga…

Backine works up a plan and sends Wladimir to Paris accompanied by his henchman, Sobieski (the wonderfully featured Giovanni Ciusa, who’d give Daisy Doodad a run for her money in the gurning stakes…). The plan is to distract the Prince and he needs little help, soon falling for a dancer called Camilla, sorry, Thaïs, who gives a very impressive performance in a hall of mirrors at a nightclub, a superb invention from Del Colle and one of the most satisfying scenes in the film.

Thaïs dances with the mirrors

Worse is to come for our royal rotter though – poor Olga! – as Sobieski spots a young man, Chichito, who is the absolute spitting image of Wladimir give or take a criminal swagger and some low-rent facial hair. Backine is summoned to France and soon gets Chichito involved in a plot to replace the Prince. Chichito shows Thaïs his double’s love letters to Olga and, her heart broken, she agrees to entrap Wladimir by luring him to a country mansion he just happens to have spare, and a trap door to a basement prison.

 

Wladimir securely out of the way, can anything stop the rotten Regent replacing the rightful ruler?!

The story was written by Renzo Chiosso, who, as Jay Weissberg notes, specialized in Silistrian stories contributing to some of the 65 or more films made in Italy set in mythical Balkan kingdoms. The fascination with this area may have been sparked by the marriage of the Montenegrin princess Queen Elena, to the Italian crown prince, Vittorio Emanuele, in 1896, who became queen of Italy from 1900 to 1946. In Britain, there was a similar fascination with Royal cousins and when Queen Elisabeth of Romania stayed in the Welsh resort of Llandudno for five weeks in 1890, the town renamed streets in her honour, there’s a Roumania Drive, a Princess Drive as well as a Carmen Sylva Road, a nod to her pen name used in novels and poems.

At the same time these figures were being romanticized they were also under political threat; change was coming and perhaps that added to the mythical appeal. There’s further visits to Silistria/Ruritania in Pordenone and we shall find out more, much more...

Characterful baddies...

Interior view of exterior scene

Rich design

Plotting

And this is the real me.

Gimme shelter... Zuflucht (Refuge) (1928), with Günter A. Buchwald, Bonn Silent Film Festival

So many vanished back then, never to be seen again…

 

This restoration was one of the highlights of the recent Bonn Festival and whilst it’s a relatively simple tale told very well it’s a reflection of its time in terms of polished late silent technique and the central premise of class loyalties disrupted during the Weimar years ten years after the uproar of war and revolution.

 

Whereas so many German films of this period we shot in studio, Refuge features a host of location shots of Berlin as director Carl Froelich exhibits the realist, "New Objectivity" style, a reaction against the expressionism practiced on the silent stage. It also features perhaps the most popular film star of this period, Henny Porten – star of The Ancient Law, Merchant of Venice (1923), and Lubitsch’s Anna Boleyn (1920) - providing an opportunity to see just why she commanded the affections of so many. This was also a co-production of the actress with Froelich; she chose the role and it shows.

 

This was the World premier of the new digitization from Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and it looked fantastic even on our screens hundreds of miles away from the festival with the experience being enlivened by accompaniment on piano and violin from the maestro Günter A. Buchwald!

Francis Lederer, he lived long and prospered

We start with passengers unloading from a train repatriating German combatants from the German Revolution of 1918-19 which saw many communist sympathisers flee into exile. These include Martin Falkhagen played by Francis Lederer who was later to feature in Pandora’s Box and live a long life in film and education, stopping work just before he died aged 100! Born in 1899 Lederer lived through until the 21^st Century and also saw action in the Great War for the Austrian-Hungarian Imperial Army. There’s a collection of photographs at his mother’s desk and one includes him in his uniform as she muses over all those lost in the war; a time when the losses were still so keenly felt across Europe.

 

Refuge is all about the War, it’s about loss and injustice and poor people trying to make ends meet in a society with huge inequality. It doesn’t beat the drum in the manner of say Kuhle Wampe but it is presenting a shared experience to an audience fully ware of the circumstances… Martin wants to make ends meet with people he loves and, as we learn, he turns his back on easier options, a man of principle in a country that, sadly, couldn’t always afford them.

 

People didn’t go to the cinema for politics, they went to see actors like Lederer and, especially, Henny Porten, living life as they did and here the film is as political as it needs to be. Germany was broken, what was to be done? Henny and Martin just want to get on with their lives and their love.

Henny Porten's character goes to work

Now, that’s jumping the gun… but yes, Henny meets an exhausted Martin after he has tramped his way to Berlin form the eastern border and slept rough at the allotment. She invites him back to the apartment she shares in a run-down tenement with the Schurich family, father (Max Maximilian), mother (Margarete Kupfer) and flighty daughter Guste (Alice Hechy). Their living space is cluttered and humble, with a bunk also being rented out to a loud-mouthed butcher, Kölling (Carl de Vogt).

 

Later that evening Kölling arrives back drunk gathering himself just enough to insult Martin and Hanne before the younger man falls deeply asleep. He’s still asleep the next day as Mrs Schurich and Hanne go to work in a vegetable stall at the market, the latter having to contend with the butcher’s “banter”… he doesn’t mince his words. Meanwhile Guste is fascinating by this sleeping prince… and flirts with him once he does awaken only for Hanne to rebuff her.

 

Hanne and Martin, well Hanne mostly, fall out with three out of four of the household – only her workmate supports her – and she goes off to another block to stay with her best friend Marie Jankowsky (Lotte Stein) who’s husband is away. Here they enjoy some freedom and begin to fall in love.

 

Mathilde Sussin

Meanwhile, across town, Martin’s background is revealed as his elder brother Otto Falkhagen (Bodo Bronsky) puts an advert in the paper calling for information about his missing brother. If nothing is forthcoming Otto will have him declared dead and therefore no longer able to benefit from the family’s fortune. Naturally mother Else (Mathilde Sussin) holds on to hope but Otto, having fallen out with Martin over the revolution, misses him rather less.

 

Martin gets a job as a manual labourer on the build for the Berlin subway and for a time the two are happy and plan to get married. But we know the lose ends will need to be tied and that a reckoning will need to be had.

 

What I like about this film is the balance of the characters, most of whom have shades of grey even the boorish butcher who shows concern and provides help when needed. The verbal scuffles are exactly as you’d expect from people living in such cramped conditions and, whilst the politics is under played, the crowds of genuine urchins who stare at the rich visitors and their car when Martin’s mother visits one tenement block. These buildings are all too real in comparison to the stage designs of say Murnau’s Last Laugh and the unpaid extras speak for themselves.

 

Simple pleasures for Hanne and Martin

Direct Carl Froelich keeps things at a believable pace whilst his cinematographer, Gustave Preiss works wonders, especially in catching the flight of expression across Porten’s face. She’s no Garbo but she is a great technician and so watchable.

 

The film was a success with Hanns Horkheimer of the Berliner Tageblatt raving: Henny Porten… has grown from a propaganda star to a human actress of such shocking urgency that, as a comparative standard, I would have to name the most sublime names even in spoken theatre…

 

For her alone the film is worth watching but this “small story” is still powerful for the concentrated and commonplace drama it presents. Günter A. Buchwald of course delivers the poignant and perfectly balanced support it needs and it still amazes me how he can do so playing violin and piano both at once!

 

Bravo Günter and danke Bonn again!!

Laugh in paradise… Siren of the Tropics (1927), Günter A. Buchwald and Frank Bockius, Slapstick Festival 2021

Over ten years into my silent film hobby and this is the first full-length feature film I've seen with the legendary Josephine Baker. Rather remiss you may say but she has been on my list and this, appropriately enough, was her first feature film and, indeed, one of the very first films to feature a black actor as one of the leads this side of Oscar Micheaux, Richard E. Norman, Frank Peregini and other black filmmakers in the US. Hollywood was certainly not ready to go as far as French directors Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant do in La sirène des tropiques and other ethnicities often paid the price for involvement in the Caucasian world.

 

Their film does not necessarily follow the cliqued tramlines of other multi-ethnic stories but Miss Baker is treated as more overtly sexual than most white actors at this time – she’s topless twice -  and is portrayed as both innocent and with a childlike wildness; she attracts (white) male lust as well as love and protectiveness, revels in powerfully expressive jazz dancing – seriously, that *core* and the way she co-ordinates massive extensions without any apparent strain -  and yet remains in awe of western spirituality. So many questions… but, so used are we to seeing black actors now, that it’s a shock to see someone as naturalistic as her placed, largely, at the centre of a story in which race is not really mentioned.

Jospehine Baker

Slapstick 2020 was the last film festival I was able to physically attend and this year it has leapt online with some alacrity with a week’s worth of films, presentations and panel discussions all with newly commissioned musical accompaniment. This film was introduced by Akulah Agbami, Director of Sheba Soul Ensemble and BLACK Artists on the Move who explained Baker’s popularity in Europe, the film ran for many months in Paris where she was already famous and was premiered in Stockholm were her “exotic” charm was regarded as very fashionable. The film is probably the first to feature a black actress in a leading role amongst a white cast.

 

Live musical accompaniment was provided by Guenter A. Buchwald on piano and Frank Bockius on percussion, who, in addition to deploying an almost telepathic musical synchronicity, smartly avoided the cliches of cultural referencing. This being one of the great jazz babies, they gave us a rip-roaring, hi-tempo jazzed score that not only kept pace but lifted the film to the vibrational level of its all-powered star. When Baker eventually struts her considerable stuff towards the end of the film you felt that this is the moment the players had been pacing themselves for.

 

This was the musical equivalent of announcing, Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Josephine Baker… and it was as spine tingling a combination of artists across 94 years as you’d find!

Pierre Batcheff and Regina Thomas

Now there was also a film narrative involved and what a curious thing it was too… All starts in Paris where the rich and ruthless Comte Severo (Georges Melchior) does not take kindly to his goddaughter Denise (Regina Thomas) falling in love with the lowly but pretty, André Berval (Pierre Batcheff). The Count has already told his wife, the long-suffering Marquise Severo (Régina Dalthy) that he wants a divorce for, and I hope you’re sitting down, he wants to marry his goddaughter!

 

Severo talks him round and he seems to accept the match by offering to set up André to manage one of his new mines in the West Indies; he demands a “brilliant situation” for Denise’s husband and tells him to go off and succeed”. How-ever… this is all a ploy to dispose of engineering André and he writes to his man in the Caribbean saying that it would “suit” him very well if Monsieur Berval never returned to France.

 

This absolute rotter’s right-hand rascal is régisseur Alvarez (Kiranine who is wonderfully menacing), who has the good looks of a crumbling cliff face and the charm of stale Roquefort. He will follow his orders to the letter just when he’s finished trying to sexually harass Papitou (Baker) the free spirit who dwells in the colony of Monte Puebla. Papitou climbs up a wardrobe to avoid his clutches and there’s a hand-held camera showing his and her views; the menace is real enough. She calls on her dog to help her jump to freedom and they cower behind a log as Alvarez shoots at them, surely premature assassination?

Georges Melchior and Kiranine - a right couple of wrong 'uns

André intervenes when he finds Alvarez trying to abuse Papitou and she is not only grateful but very much in love… so, when Alvarez tricks the young Frenchman into following him on a trip to the wilds, Papitou follows knowing it’s a trap. Sure enough André is knocked out and left for dead only for his new friend to come to his rescue. Bravely, he sets off after Alvarez and his men who plan to steal more gold and, again with Papitou’s help, stops them.

 

The film decides we’ve spent enough time in “Monte Puebla” as a disaffected Denise – appalled at her godfather’s intentions towards her, heads out to find her true love with Marquise Severo in tow. All are reunited and Papitou learns the disappointing truth that Andre’s eyes are only for his intended. Yet, the French set off back to Paris on a passenger ship, Papitou swims out to stow away and the film enters a more comedic phase in which Baker shows her gift for physical comedy and expression. She ends up in “white face” after being powdered with flour and in the nude, washing it all off in the bath and, again, whilst her race is not specifically part of the plot it is intrinsic to the viewer’s experience. We fill in the gaps, but Josephine just beams and carries on regardless.

 

Papitou learns Christian scripture...

Things will come to a head in Paris of course, but the abiding enjoyment of the film is in Baker’s incredible energy – something she had in common with the best silent stars – as well as her post-modern charm. She’s smiling at us and not just on behalf of her character and she’s making the most of her chances… and when she dances, the room is lit up once again.

 

The Slapstick Festival continues until Sunday 7^th March and you can still catch up on Miss Baker, Clara Bow – the glorious It and rarely screened Kid Boots – Max Linder’s hilarious The Three Must-Get-There’s and much more beside.

 

Full details on the Slapstick website HERE!!