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!!

Boys don’t cry… Hamlet (1921), Wilton’s Music Hall with Robin Harris

Another year another celebrity Prince of Denmark and as London reels from the Cumberbatch-lash (To be or not to be… was moved in previews to the start of the play in the Barbican’s new version - imagine!?) this screening at wonderful Wilton’s provided the perfect opportunity to reflect on just how malleable this play can be.

This wasn’t the first time that a woman had played Hamlet but it was almost certainly the first time that the Prince had actually been a Princess – one forced to conceal her sex in order to maintain the Danish throne and who’s dithering route to revenge is now explained by her femininity. Well, that’s how Dr. Edward P. Vining's book The Mystery of Hamlet had it in 1881 but here, with Asta Nielsen as the Prince, it’s a little different…

One of the tinted sequences - Hamlet rides with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Die Asta was calling all of the shots and with this being her self-titled company’s first production, she appointed the directors Svend Gade and Heinz Schall and – one presumes – had plenty of say in the direction of her character: a Hamlet whose function is not just smothered by surmise (as distant cousin Macbeth once remarked) but through force of circumstance. She is a woman in a brutal man’s world, whose position is purely dependent on her being perceived as a man.

Asta Nielsen and Lilly Jacobson

Some of those down from Hoxton for the evening may have found the premise a little too funny but Asta knew full well what she was about and there are some wonderful digs at Hamlet in the opening titles: “ an ass” said Goethe, “an affected fop” said Herder and a "taseless mix of whim and nonesense" said Voltaire (ooh, get you!). Vining’s theory could explain it all and is all the more gender-bent because of the fact that in Tudor times a young man would have had to play the woman playing the man…

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman...

This was also post-War Germany, after a conflict that had seen women stepping into so many of men’s roles – Asta was already the money and the talent: here was another way for her to promote equality of opportunity…

My father was killed by a Danish sword...but let us put their hatred behind us!

I’d seen the film before – the splendid Edition Filmmuseum DVD and this was the version used for tonight’s screening but I wasn’t just here for the movie and the newly re-furbished Wilton wonderland: I was here for the music. We were treated to an exceptional live score composed by multi-instrumentalist Robin Harris who played piano, flute and percussion whilst regular collaborator Laura Anstee played Cello and a lot more besides. They also had Aaron May on electronics, who sampledg the other players’ and creating enriched soundscapes layered over the acoustic instruments: a fusion of modern composition for silent film with modern sound collage.

Hamlet instructs the players

They provided a multi-textural accompaniment to Nielsen’s meta-textual film and you got the feeling that Asta would have smiled that knowing smile, winked and said “well done”! I especially liked the deployment of the Swanee Whistle but there were many instruments played to great effect throughout highlighting the comedy as well as the usual tragedy – I think this Hamlet was meant to be played with a swagger and to be fun. Mission accomplished Robin, Laura and Aaron!

Hamlet teases Polonius

Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance, to give its full title, is a tour-de-force from Nielsen who, whilst she wouldn’t actually pass for a man does pass as a woman playing at being a man. Mr. From-Hoxton, the jokes are intentional and the country that was busy inventing and perfecting the art of twentieth century cultural transgression was more than capable of holding all of the contradictions of Asta’s Hamlet in its cinematic consciousness all at the same time.

How lovely Provence must be...

Hamlet goes to university and casting an appraising glance up and down Horatio (Heinz Stieda), who is from Provence, remarks how lovely the place must be; she occasionally has to pull her shirt closed to conceal herself and you can imagine the double-think of the Ophelia situation. All is explained by her attempt to keep Horatio away from Polonius’ daughter but there’s a lot of love that might well dare not speak its name otherwise.

Hamlet’s situation starts with her father, also called Hamlet (Paul Conradi), almost dying in battle. Her mother Queen Gertrude (Mathilde Brandt), delivers a baby girl but decides the only way to secure the throne is to tell the world it is a son. King Hamlet recovers but agrees to go along with the deception.

The Danish Royal Family: complicated...

By the time the girl has grown almost into a man, Gertrude has grown tired of her father that she’s carrying on with his brother Claudius (Eduard von Winterstein). A power struggle’s afoot and you wonder how Gertrude is going to break the news to her new lover that her son is nothing like he seems…

The King is removed by snakebite and his funeral wake quickly morphs into a wedding party as his brother and murderer hastily arranges a wedding. Hamlet enters the great hall, dressed in black with her cape flowing impressively behind as she storms towards the throne: she has her suspicions and when she discovers Claudius’ knife next to the snake pit from which he took the viper that did the deed… she knows her enemy.

Hamlet flies in to challenge the new King

How to revenge herself given her precarious position and the new King’s superior strength? Hamlet makes the decision to not only pretend to be mad but to carry on pretending to be a man.

Kindly old Polonius (Hans Junkermann) – who is quite splendidly made up like an out-take from an Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Japanese fairy tale – tries to help the seeming unfortunate who then persuades his daughter Ophelia (Lilly Jacobson) to fall for him and not Horatio… That’s just not going to work out and, by the same token, nor can the Norwegian King Fortinbras (Fritz Achterberg) expect his relationship with the young Price of Denmark to ever be more than… fraternal.

The fair Ophelia gets closer to the water...

Hamlet is always amongst my favourite Shakespeare with an uncertain hero given plenty of great soliloquies en route to the neat bloodbath at the end… Here the tragedy is stripped down and given new dimension as Horatio realises his buddy is really his love: an extra twist – love as well as life wasted.

Asta Nielsen

It goes without saying that Die Asta is quite magnificent – amidst the pantomime the big screen revealed even more of her ability to present the appearance of nuanced reality on film. It’s her casual glances and smaller gestures that succeed the most; underpinning her ability to rise to the more obvious dramatic crescendos.

The Edition Filmmuseum DVD is available direct and can find it on Amazon.de, .com and ,co.uk too.

More details of Robin Harris can be found on his website which also features musical samples from his score for Der Golem! Lovely stuff.