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

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

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

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

 

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

Enrique Riveros and Brita Appelgren: combined age 36

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

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

 

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

 

Karin Swanström and Julius Falkenstein

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

 

Long hair – A woman’s most beautiful asset!

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

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

 

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

Brita Appelgren

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

 

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

 

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

   

Hans Junkermann and Karin Swanström

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

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

 

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

Asta talks! Impossible Love (1932), BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Three women: Ery Bos, Asta Nielsen and Ellen Schwanneke

It looks good from far away, just like me…

 

It’s no coincidence that the very first thing we see Asta Nielsen do in her first and only talkie is to put her finger to her lips to shush the chatter as her daughter gives a music recital. Only Die Asta could be so knowing and post-modern. She was fifty when she made this film and she looks great, lovely big smiles and gorgeous fashions, nothing like the rags of Joyless Street and, as with that film and so many others, she unrolls as stunning closing section… watching all of these films that’s one thing that stands out, the actress always left plenty in the tank for a sprint finish of audacious expression.

 

So many lines ring beyond the film, not least the one above and other’s relating to her age that she may well have improvised given their added poignance. The male characters in the film are mostly boorish and one constantly complains that a woman of her age with two grown daughters should simply resign which I took to be a mistranslation of retire but which the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey suggested was meant literally, Asta’s character being viewed by a conservative German man as wrong to still have personal ambition given her womanly responsibilities.

 

Maybe it was Asta’s age and her feeling that the parts were just drying up as younger actors swarmed. She made silent five films released in 1927 and headed off to the theatre before being lured back for Unmögliche Liebe (1932) and clearly decided that artistically that was enough and the stage would be where she would carry on before the changes in Germany forced her back to Copenhagen in 1936.

Asta Nielsen, Julius Falkenstein and Hilde Hildebrand

Directed by Erich Waschneck, Impossible Love is a little deliberate but also a very interesting film that is firmly centred on three women, sculptor and studio manager Vera Holgk (Asta), her eldest daughter Nora (Ery Bos) and youngest Toni (Ellen Schwanneke, who’d featured in the previous year’s Mädchen in Uniform). These three are the centre of the action and are largely surrounded by odd men.

 

Nora is, for some reason, in a relationship with the moneyed but foolish Leopold von Möllendorf (Anton Pointner) who, once engaged to his much younger partner, calls Vera Mutter like the man child he is, whilst also attempting to get Nora to give up the cello on the grounds that it is a most unfeminine instrument to play. He also thinks Vera should “resign” and surrender her selfish ambitions, declaring his family as “conservative” but not backward… Toni meanwhile has a relationship with a young man nearer her age, Erwin (Carl Balhaus) who works with her in a photographic studio and how is less intelligent and less realistic than she. Toni may be the youngest but she has insight and some of the film’s best lines.

 

Daftest of all is the Professor’s man servant Zimmermann (Julius Falkenstein, who, as Michelle reminded me, was so good in The Oyster Princess with Ossi Oswalda) but he’s meant to provide comedic relief and does so with practiced ease, some physical comedy, inappropriate napping and lots of outspoken lines that still cause a titter.

 

Asta still works hard on the casual details of real character

Tell me you still believe I can create great work? 

The exception to all this appears to be Professor Steinkampp (Hans Rehmann), a sculptor of repute and, even though younger, a suitor for Vera’s affections. Steinkampp pursues her with some style and then invites her to his studio to work on her own sculpture for a competition. At first, Vera, who has been running a commercial art studio, is doubtful she can still compete but with the Professor’s encouragement she is soon back in the groove, as it were. It’s a joy to watch Asta, fag in mouth and singing to herself as her character works… that’s how to use talkies for narrative continuity, her old tricks of seemingly casual distractions are accompanied by sound in this new environment. You can also see/hear the stage experience at play.

 

Vera has doubts and guilt about her growing feelings for Steinkampp and starts withholding some information from her daughters, the beginnings of a distance between them as she, for the first time in a long time, starts to put herself first. She wins the art competition and has to confess some of her new relationship but then things take a dramatic turn for the worst as Steinkampp’s old girlfriend, Martini (Hilde Hildebrand) sells her salacious story to the newspapers and all Himmel breaks loose…

 

Amidst the moral outrage, that Vera was seeing and staying with Steinkampp is the assertion that he helped her win the sculpture prize. Stuck up Möllendorf insists she responds publicly but Vera has nothing to say to the stuffed shirt and will deal with this in her manner. Nora is conflicted and leaves to stay with her man whilst Toni takes matters into her own hands to visit the newspaper and ask them to retract… she learns far more than she wants to hear.

 

A woman with agency, managing her life and business

Spoiler zone: Steinkampp is revealed to be married but his wife Katharina (Elisabeth Wendt) has lost her mind and is permanently residing in an asylum. Fair dos to the Professor, he makes sure that she is looked after and he wants a divorce but he hasn’t told Vera any of this and she is naturally devastated and, as he talks calmly with Toni about his plans to divorce and marry Vera, she is visiting Katharina… Wendt is made up like a supernatural Miss Haversham, golden hair floating around her head, a child’s mind but with enough left to know that her husband’s love is all the world to her.

 

Nieslen finally let’s rip in these circumstances and they are very powerful moments, it’s an over-egged scenario but she makes it work through all the years of skilled control and tears flow between the two. Even if Steinkampp had been completely open with Vera, how can he be forgiven this abandonment… Later, we see Asta sitting on a bench for a moment, she stands and walks into the darkness of the forest… out of life perhaps, but certainly out of film.

It's a perfect ending to her cinematic career and not dissimilar to that she confected at the end of the documentary she would direct about herself in 1968.

 

In this film, the family’s friends suggest she should just marry Steinkampp, “after all you can get married at 90 these days…” and, almost forty years later, that’s what Asta did, marrying a 70-year-old art dealer aged 88*. She didn’t let age deny her, just like Vera perhaps.

 

So, the end of a stunning season of films covering 22 years when Die Asta was the biggest movie star most people hadn’t heard of… not anymore! Thank you, BFI, programmer Pamela Hutchinson, the accompanists, archivists and all who made this happen. There’s still enough films left for a part two… just saying.

 

Julius Falkenstein and Ossi Oswalda in The Oyster Princes

*Julie K Allen of Brigham Young University, quotes the 18-year age gap in a review of Lotte Thrane's book, Maske og menneske: Asta Nielsen og hendes tid. (Copenhagen: Gads forlag 2019) in Scandinavian Studies, Volume 93, Issue 1.

She also quotes Thrane on her examination of Asta's the public and private persona: "...her mask and her private self. . . . From time to time the mask can even triumph over the physical face upon which the mask is based, so that it alone is visible - and is therefore mistaken for the person..."

Looking froward to an english translation of this book... 

Lust for life… The Oyster Princess (1919)/I Don't Want to be a Man (1918), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

"A Foxtrot Epidemic Suddenly Breaks Out During the Wedding…"

Ain’t no party like a Weimar party and the party that you really need at that party is Ossi Oswalda. Before Pola’s energy Ernst Lubitsch had Ossi’s optimism; a free-spirited comedian who carried ferocious commitment to the comedy cause as well as an easy conviction that this all made perfect sense: marrying the wrong man, being bathed by dozens of servants, picking up handsome drunks and taking them home, that’s Ossi. Dressing up in drag to go dancing with your male pal – who thinks you’re a guy - getting blotto and kissing him all the way home, that’s Ossi too… at a dark time for her country, this woman knew how to enjoy the moment and she had such gleeful command on screen. Ossi must have helped so many laugh their way around the misery outside.

Ernst Lubitsch was the man directing of course but Ossi is the lead singer on his songs and everything stand or falls on her ability to make us laugh and she is one of those characters with whom it is so easy to connect even a century down the line. She knows and she knows we know too.

Harry Liedtke and Ossi Oswalda share a moment

Both films are so audacious, so modern and still challenging. This is the German sense of humour and it is certainly not Hollywood’s… not even Hellzapoppin’ of the Marx Brothers or the gentile serial killing of Kind Hearts… it’s playful and knowingly surreal in a manner that is distinctly more artful.

For The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin) we see Mister Quaker, the American Oyster King (Victor Janson) smoking an unfeasibly large cigar with the help of half-a-dozen black servants – racial comment duly noted – he is so rich that everything he does is over-done for him by a moving mass of servants. His daughter Ossi (Ossi!) is spoilt rotten and her main means of expression during ongoing bouts of boredom is to simply wreck things; there are always other “things” to replace them…

“Why are you throwing those newspapers?”

“Because all of the vases are broken.”

The Oyster King and some staff

Ossi is perturbed because The Shoe Cream King’s daughter has married a count and she has decided it is time for her to get one up and marry a prince. Mister Quaker agrees to “buy” her one and employs Seligson, the matchmaker (Max Kronert) to source an appropriate model.

Impoverished Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke) is the man required but things do not run smoothly as his pal Josef (Julius Falkenstein) goes to negotiate with the House of Oyster, only to end up marrying Osi in Nucki’s name… but there’s madness in his method.

There’s a whole truck load of daft surrounding this, Ossi goes for her extended bath-time, aided by dozens of hand-towel maids, hundreds wait on the wedding banquet and Ossi is clearly not bothered about who she marries until she spots a charming drunk, Nucki, and smuggles him home…

Prince Nucki's tired and he wants to go to bed, he had a little drink...

Over and over Mister Quaker says “I’m not Impressed…” the rich – Americans – are bored but finally, even he is charmed by true love no matter how convoluted its arrival. Lubitsch balances everything so well and there’s never a moment when the silly transcends the story – remarkable discipline for a mad-cap caper and proof that Ernst was a filmmaker first and a comedy storyteller second.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man) (1918)

Of course, we see this too in tonight’s other film, made the previous year and clearly under the influence of the new winds that were already blowing strongly into Berlin.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man and sometimes, I Wouldn’t Want to be a Man: these are not personal statements you understand just different versions of the film title…) Ossi Oswalda is energetically an uncontrollable tomboy who finds the saving graces of her gender through cross-dressing. Now, I barely grasp the nuances of the modern debate on sex and gender but I do know that Lubitsch goes further than many would have expected with still-shocking subtleties.

Ossi isn’t asking for equality she’s taking it, gambling, drinking and grasping masculine and adult entitlements from which her uncle (Kurt Götz) and governess (Margarete Kupfer) forbid her if only to allow themselves more time to indulge. Lubitsch highlights the comic hypocrisy of both as governess carries on smoking Ossi’s cigarette and uncle grabs a bigger glass to increase the rate of alcoholic intake.

Ossi’s like Iggy with a Lust for Life… worth at least “a million in prizes”, eating cherries and gobbling candies in her window whilst a crowd of young men pleads to be fed like so many hungry penguins. She obliges only for Uncle to chase them away... what the girl surely needs is some discipline or maybe an adventure! Uncle is called away for important work and before he goes, he recruits a stern governor to make sure his ward is properly looked after: Herr Counsellor Brockmüller (Ferry Sikla).

Brockmüller almost immediately brings Ossi to heel with his startling natural authority – he’s also a bit of a looker girls, and, indeed boys! But Ossi is not so easily curtailed and she vows to resist whilst he promises to cut her down to size. The game is afoot!

Ossi decides to play men at their own game and goes off to the gentlemen’s outfitters to order a dinner suit. The assistants fight over measuring her up and decide on splitting the work limb by limb. Men lust after Ossi in groups and make horribly obvious play of their intentions: are you watching Sydney James? But Ossi’s now complicit Babs Windsor or Liz Fraser, she’s not going to take it.

Kitted up in starched collar, bow tie, top hat and tails, Ossi sets off to have fun at the dance hall, catching the eye of several young women as she takes her pretty-boy swagger to the dance. Then she chances across someone familiar: Herr Brockmüller. Jealously, she tries to attract away Brockmüller’s favoured escort and as he rushes to confront the impudent challenge of this young man, turns to find his target already lost to another man. Women eh? Butterfly minds and unreliable… He takes solace in his new acquaintance who, it transpires, is an excellent drinking buddy.

Boys who like boys who are girls etc

It’s a long night and by the time the two fall out onto the pavement, it’s the morning and they’re struggling to think or walk straight, putting on each other's overcoats which happen to include their address cards. Confused by the cards, their driver takes them to each other’s houses but not before some curious drunken smooching. Cheekily subversive. the kissing has the audience running through the permutations: Ossi knows what she’s doing but Herr Brockmüller is clearly a man of broad tastes… she knows but he doesn’t.

Lubitsch clearly delight in this transgressive confusion and the iconoclastic Ossi who was far more that a fashionably strong woman trying to find a new level in a society robbed of so many men. In Germany as elsewhere, the War left an opportunity for gender equality and Ossi was here to grab that chance with both hands either in a suit or in a dress… for the continuation of the film’s title is clearly: I want to be a woman!

Herr Lubitsch

Both films are available as part of the priceless Lubitsch in Berlin DVD box set from Masters of Cinema/Eureka but seeing them on screen is, of course, the best way to really meet Ossi!

The BFI’s Weimar Cinema season has another week to run so check out the remaining goodies: how to follow all this?!

Ernst incognito… Als Ich Tot War (1916)

This is not Ernst Lubitsch’s first film but it is his earliest-surviving long feature consisting of two reels and possibly a little more in the original version. It has something of the manic energy of his early comedies without perhaps the editorial control: as if he was in a rush and over-improvising. There’s no Pola Negri making like a cat or Ossi Oswalda not wanting to be a man but here we have Ernst himself not wanting to be alive… well, sort of.

Writer and Director introduces himself as a performer by stepping through the curtains in a nod to theatrical tradition. He grins at the camera and is a figure of impish vitality – it is good to see and whilst I’ve seen Ernst act in Sumurun here he is more himself in an attempt to be a dramatic comedy lead (not successfully as he later admitted).

Lanchen Voss and Louise Schenrich

He is followed on the cine-stage by Louise Schenrich who will play his wife and then the formidable form of Lanchen Voss who is his mother-in-law: Schwiegermutter in German which sounds far more of an insult.

Als Ich Tot War (When I Was Dead) was originally released as Wo Ist Mein Schatz? (Where's My Sweetie-Pie? or Treasure?) after the censors objected to the original title… there was a war on I suppose. It is a film about marital misunderstandings, chess obsessives and the transformative properties of the right kind of toupee.

But, more than anything, it is about the dangers of living with your mother-in-law… a timeless source of humorous friction: had Les Dawson been alive then or now, this is the kind of silent film had have made.

Happy families

Ernst lives with his lovely wife Louise and her over-bearing mutter, he has a passion for chess and after being invited to the local chess club for a match stays out far later than his Schwiegermutter would like. Ernst is frustrated by the slowest moving opponent you can imagine and chews hard on his cigar as he glances at the audience in frustration.

By the time his bland master opponent has moved enough to be defeated, his mother in law has locked him out of their apartment and, as he sleeps in the hall she evens steals his clothes for good measure – what a mean old Mam?!

Slow moving

An argument ensues the following morning and tensions run so high that his Louise has been persuaded to write him a note asking for a divorce: it seems that he may have won the match only to lose out in matrimony!

Ernst won’t take this lying down and writes a note back threatening to take his own life – when under pressure it’s always a good idea to sacrifice a pawn if it means you gain the Queen.

A mean ol' Mam

Mother-in-law wastes no time in going to a marriage bureau and asking what they have in stock. She is offered a middle aged man (Julius Falkenstein) who recoils at the possibility that she might be his match.

Meanwhile Ernst has been boring himself silly by enjoying life on the town… it’s not fulfilling and he wants his wife and life back. A job advert offers him a way, as Mother-in-Law advertises for an “intelligent younger man” to help around the house. With the aid of a cunning blonde wig, Ernst is becomes a different man and even his own wife doesn’t recognise him… see Mr Kent those glasses and Mr Wayne, that cowl… completely unnecessary!

Completely transformed!

The new houseman is a wow with the other servants and his employer begins to fall for his convincingly coiffured charms… but can Ernst prevent his wife being won away by the “new” man from the agency and thereby prevent his Schwiegermutter’s ultimate victory?!

It’s fluffy stuff but still funny and the three leads all play well with Ernst’s over-familiar nods and winks to us almost a statement of intent from the great director he was to become… “this is me messing about but just you wait a few years!” Deeply un-historical I know, but this man has the look of someone who really knows what he’s going to do!

The old and the young get ready...

The film was regarded as lost until the 1990s when an almost-complete copy was found in the Slovenska Kinoteka – it appears to be missing part of the first act and maybe even the ending although maybe Lubitsch trusted his audience enough to know how completely all would be resolved.

Three's a crowd

It is now available as part of the Masters of Cinema dual disc edition of Madame Du Barry (1919) – which is a vast upgrade on the version of that film I’ve previously watched. It is available direct or from Amazon – a must-have for those who appreciate the importance of being Ernst!

It comes with a zippy new score from Aljoscha Zimmermann played on clavier and violin and which suits you very well Herr Lubitsch!