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!!

Champagne Katya... The Girl in Tails (1926), Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane-Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival

I’m to be disgraced simply because I’m a girl. A meek and mild, simple and unassuming girl…

 

Warm glow… this is such an uplifting film, a delicate mixture of comedy and drama that fully lives up to its promise as A Light Summer Film Story especially with truly delicious accompaniment from Horne and Baldry, without whom no remote access Bonn would be complete. It is notable for addressing so many issues that might be considered more modern concerns and it tackles proto feminism in ways which are never black and white, flowing naturally with the story. It’s sophisticated about its subject and uses cross-dressing as a means of creating conflict as well as comedy and makes points about fairness that doesn’t bang the drum so much as rolls it around the ballroom between social conservatism and the heroine’s “fight against injustice”.

 

This restraint is ostensibly surprising as the film, Flickan I Frack in Swedish, is directed by Karin Swanström who also plays the terrifying matriarch, “the undisputed monarch” of the small-town society of Wadköping, Widow Hyltenius, but that’s acting for you. She was one of the few women directing film in Sweden in this period – or anywhere else by this stage – and is clearly responsible for the emotional intelligence that raises the film above broader comedy and simplistic melodrama.  The characters are fulsome and nuanced and there is a very satisfying pace to the story throughout; it’s coherent and never forgets to entertain.

 

Who knows what conversations it started in contemporary Sweden but the debate is still ongoing in certain aspects of equality…

Magda Holm

There are many good performers in the film but everything revolves around the outstanding verve of Magda Holm as Katja Kock. Holm featured in several Swedish films during the silent period and was also a top-class sailor, with the nickname” Bimbi”, which was also the name of one of her dogs. Both Bimbi’s feature in a nautical interlude in which the hound’s mistress falls into a lake, swimming to shore with all the assurance you’d expect. But, far more impressive in this context, is Maga’s acting ability and she performs as well as she freestyles.

 

The tonality of the film turns of Holm’s expressiveness and her ability to flick from the dramatic to the tongue in cheek without ever the giving the game away. She has so much of the camera’s attention and rises magnificently to the challenge every time – what a team with Swanström!

 

Holm plays Katja the eldest child of Karl Kock (Nils Aréhn) the town’s unsung genius not only down on his luck with unwelcomed inventions, but also being defrauded by his accountant Björner (Gösta Gustafson).

 

Einar Axelsson

Katja is the smart one in the family with brother Curry (Erik Zetterström) being “Wadköping’s only, or at least, most perfect, snob” and the favoured sibling, his father’s investment matched only by his sister’s endless patience and generosity. They both attend the town’s co-educational school where Magda’s pal Count Ludwig von Battwhyl (Einar Axelsson), is on course to fail all his exams. Magda decides that he can still be saved if he studies with her help for a solid month although the Counts get up and go has got up and gone and his main interest is in his new tutor…

Axelsson is also a delight in this film with a world-weary energy informing Count Ludwig with a cheerful listless charm; he’s a decent chap though just saddled with the burden of his position even though he will prove to be steadfast when the going gets reactionary.

 

How can the world see how pretty you are when you dress like a washerwoman?

 

Ludwig chides Katya for her dowdiness and she agrees so, when the Count arranges a ball to celebrate the end of term, she asks her father for funds to buy a dress to impress. Father is not unsympathetic but he’s broke and decides against this investment even though he has long splashed out on Curry’s living beyond their collective means. This, patently, is unfair… but Katya is determined and she will go to the ball!

 

Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen and pals

 

The Count is heir to the Larsbo estate, 20 kilometres south of Wadköping and where his cigar-chomping Aunt Lotten Brenner (Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen), university lecturer in comparative anatomy, leads The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies a group of bluer-than-blue stockings who do as they will. It’s a great group and I’d love to know more about this lot, a mix of future-thinkers and privileged political thought who, as with everything in the film, Swanström paints evenly with hints of intellectual snobbery mixed in with their liberalism.

 

Against this is not only Widow Hyltenius and her Council of Mothers but also the traditions of the school as embodied in Rector Starck (Georg Blomstedt) and yet the latter shows more understanding when the ball arrives and Katya makes her grand entrance in her brother tails. The ball sequence is so well developed, at first showing the town’s social structure in miniature with the Widow and her Mothers overlooking the dancers and then the absolute shock when Katya arrives in male clothing – the reaction shots are a hoot but the whole room visibly pulls away from this “unnatural” apparition leaving her confidence draining.

 

The belle of the ball.

Starck intervenes and turns everything on its head, seeing only a “damsel in distress” and turning the Mothers’ prudishness around by pointing out how sober Katya’s clothing is in comparison to distasteful modern décolletage – on awkward display in a number of the group. The tide turns and the young men queue to dance with Katya but disaster strikes when her drink is spiked by creepy Björner and she enjoys herself rather too much.

 

Ludwig sees only one route froward from now, they must leave to become missionaries in the Congo but with Katya now disowned and the town’s elders attacking her in the local newspaper with a series of articles on modern youth… she finds refuge with The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies at Larsbo…

 

And that’s barely the half of it; can young and old, father and daughter, vindictive and forgiving be brought together. The conclusion is as easy going and narratively uncompromised as the rest of the film, an absolute belter!

Karin Swanström and Georg Blomstedt

 All of this was of course enlivened by the piano, flute and accordion of Stephen Horne and the harp of Elizabeth-Jane Baldry. The two work so well together leaving each other space and supporting as they share the leading lines with the harp being used as percussion and bass as well as the heavenly flourishes you’d expect. There we some exceptionally lovely themes and the improvised was hard to separate from the pre-arranged which says it all. The ideal accompaniment for this uplifting film!

 

As if by magic, the date of the film’s climactic moment is Thursday 12^th August, the day before Friday 13^th August and… the Bonn organisers chose this film to be the first streamed last Thursday, 12^th August. 

 

The link to the full schedule, screenings and, most crucially, donations is right here. Please help to support this festival and, hopefully, see you there next year.