All my colours… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Five

 

The effort put into making this film far exceeds anything attempted thus far in France. No bluffing, no pompous blarney, or gibberish preface. No political or social theory, no boring or muddled intertitles… Beauty, truth, art – there’s the secret of the success of La Sultane de l’amour.

La Cinématographie française (18^th October 1919)

Myriad lights, they said I'd be impressed

Arabian nights, at your primitive best...

Siouxsie and the Banshees, Arabian Nights

Some films are almost too impractically beautiful to exist, too unlikely to have been made given the exchange between huge effort and end results, no matter how charming, that make you sad the moment the action stops and they fade from view. Two films today met this criteria, The Blue Bird (1918) and La Sultane de l’amour (1919) – the first I’d seen but not “live” and the second I’d never heard of making it whack me even harder when the first image of the colourised Gaston Modot smiles on screen. Surely they’re not going to keep this up for the whole film? Yes indeed they do and it’s quite any colourised film I’ve seen before with gorgeous deep richness the result of an impeccable digital restoration in 2021 were carried out by the CNC laboratory using three tinted and stencil-coloured nitrate copies from the Cinémathèque française.

 

It's introduced as a missing story from the Arabian Nights... or it might as well be, with nasty Sultan Malik (Paul Vermoyal) bored, bored, bored and looking for some romance or at least aggressive male sexual behaviour. He despatches three knights to find him an appropriate female and yet when Kadjar (Monsieur Modot) discovers Princess Daoulah, the “Sultaness of Love” (France Dhélia – see above!) she informs him that she has other plans…

 

Problematic leader Sultan Malik (Paul Vermoyal) 

Not that it’s any of Kadjar or indeed the Sultan’s business, but Princess D’s plans are centred on the handsome man who recently rescued her from drowning, unknown to her but revealed to us as the hand-tinted rosy-cheeked Prince Mourad (Sylvio de Pedrelli) who, as it happens, is definitely thinking along the same lines. Sadly, Daoulah’s perfectly reasonable request to be left the heck alone, is ignored by the sexually malfunctioning Sultan who decides to kidnap her and use the tried and always successful techniques of abuse and torture to make her fall for his extremely well-hidden charms.

He's the poorest of leaders though alienating Nazir (Marcel Lévesque) his court jester/advisor by abusing him and making fun of his physical disabilities – see, there’s a pattern here – whilst his general administration is building up resistance from the population and other royals including Princess Zilah (Yvonne Sergyl) and Mourad. As tension mounts there’s plenty of dancing, vestals and cross-dressed eunuchs… this is not a film that holds back in presenting the excesses of Arabian socio-political structures. My main concern is that, lacking any kind of industrialised workforce, they’re going to have to wait a long time for the Sultan to be overthrown. Unless true love can win out…

 

Accompaniment was provided by Mauro Colombis on piano, Frank Bockius percussion and  Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp. The combination added mystery and flavour to this magical reality and we not only did the time warp again, reality folded around us in ways that will inform our dreams for weeks to come.

 

An absolute cracker!!!

The audience leaving the Teatro Verdi last night...

The Blue Bird (1918) with Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry 

M. Maeterlinck's poem has been transferred from a book to the screen, and it is a safe assertion to say that seldom, if ever, has the atmosphere and spirit of a written work been more faithfully reproduced in motion pictures.

New York Times, 1918

Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird was released just over a year after the director's collaboration with Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl and featured such regular collaborators as art director Ben Carré, cinematographer John van den Broke and Editor Clarence Brown. If that film was Revolver this was the full Sgt. Pepper - a flight of fantasy from start to finish: silent psychedelia in full bloom at a time when the World needed to believe in eternal truths and the truth of eternity.

 

When in the heart of their fantastic journey to find the Blue Bird, the two youngsters meet not only their dead grandparents but their dead brothers and sisters, there are at least ten of them... this was a time when infant mortality was high and life came with the flimsiest of "guarantees".

 

The film is a sumptuous collection of such moments and visual set pieces, a hyper-creative comfort blanket that smuggles through the simple message that there's not only no place like home but that kindness must spread out from there into the heart-broken World beyond. There are tightly-defined fantasy constructs - humanised versions of fire, water and light, dogs, cats and wonderful "moods" such as vibrant dancers embodying The Joys of Pure Thoughts and the slightly less impressive Sleeping-More-Than-Necessary (not going to happen here at Le Giornate…).

Tourneur draws pure and naturalistic performances from his cast of children, 12-year old Tula Belle as Mytyl and Robin Macdougall as Tyltyl who react and act with genuine thrill to every new wonder. It's a child's film with many adult concerns.

The accompaniment from Neil Brand on piano and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp brought the magic out across the auditorium and melted our stubborn hearts.

Song (1928) with Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius

 

I attended the talk and Q&A with Yiman Wang the author of To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong's Cross-Media World and one of the questions for this actress who struggled to sustain her successes, was when she really showed her qualities as an actor. Yiman pointed to Shanghai Express (1932) directed by Josef von Sternberg and co-staring Marlene Dietrich who, she contends, came of second best to Anna May. I would argue that Piccadilly and Song also allow her considerable expression, especially in comparison to her Hollywood work.

 

In this newly and magnificently restored version, Wong shows full command of her abilities moving effortlessly from drama to comedy and playing with the audience with her controlled expression. She was, as she said, never really a dancer but she could act dancing which is what she does here and in the British film. She ended up paying 200 guineas to learn in Britain in the thirties as people expected her to sing and dance given her oriental background.

 

Anna May Wong excels here because it’s a rare part that allowed her to just be and not just an exotic token or worse still, something sinister. She responds to the camera’s frequently intense gaze with naturalistic gestures and a positive focus on her character and rides out some of the more extraordinary plot elements and costumery with ease and good humour. She’s equally at home fighting off attackers, coming to the rescue during a train robbery and selflessly supporting a selfish man who can’t see further than his own infatuation.

 

The story is set in Istanbul and there are some lovely establishing shots of what would become the scene of Liverpool FC’s Champions League triumph almost 80 years later. Anna May plays Song, a poor woman eking out a living by catching lobsters on the beach. She is spotted by two men who proceed to assault her only to be fought off by a passer-by, Jack Houben (Heinrich George). It’s a pretty grim fight that’s only won when Song gets stuck into help her rescuer.

 

Jack takes Song back for shelter at his humble home and frightens her to death as he demonstrates his profession – a knife thrower. Jack decides she could be an asset to his act and before long she’s dancing in front of the regulars at the homely music hall where he works. Song and Jack’s life seems to have settled but the arrival of a famous ballet dancer is about to upset the precarious balance of their apple cart. There are posters for Gloria Lee (Mary Kid) all over town and Song decides to use one to make an improvised table in Jack’s house, without realising she’s an old flame and that flame is about to be rekindled…

 

Song is a melodrama with some sharp plot turns but Richard Eichberg directs it well enough helped by some excellent cinematography from Heinrich Gärtner and the designs of Willi Herrmann. Whilst Mary Kid makes for an unconvincing ballerina, Heinrich George makes for a believable thrower of knives and, of course, Anna May Wong's smile and ready tears steal the show.

 

Stephen Horne has previously said that, as a young accompanist, he had played along to Song sight unseen (the days before preview discs) and the film’s frequent narrative lurches had made for an engaging challenge. Today he and percussionist Frank Bockius, knew exactly what is coming and their improvisations enriched the film in ways that helped elevate it in the canon of Anglo-German silents and, indeed, in the career of the talented and beautifully-determined Anna May Wong!