Unsolvable... The Mysterious Lady (1928) with Carl Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall

In the stalls at the Festival Hall there was no option but to just sit back and surrender to Carl Davis’ sound and Greta Garbo’s fury; both were overwhelming in their own way and the result was a unity of music and expression that you won’t find in Cineworld.

Crossing Hungerford Bridge after the show, I heard a complaint that the score had been “too loud” and “ill-matched” to the action but this is an opera without words and Garbo is radiating the same intensity as a stage full of singers with Puccini on full volume. If you want your Swede’s subtle and “silent” then maybe try some Ingmar Bergman instead?

The tempo is set early on when Austrian solder Captain Karl von Raden (Conrad Nagel) gets a last-minute ticket for the opera and finds Tania Fedorova (Greta Garbo) elegantly draping herself over the edge of their box as she watches Tosca. Karl is mesmerised and can hardly focus on the events on stage and Mr Davis’ score cleverly captures this by accompanying the interplay between the two leads as well as the performance on stage, quoting from the opera itself. Allegedly it’s an uncredited Betty Blythe playing the opera singer, but Conrad only has eyes for Tania… just as she planned (the minx!).

He doesn't even need to see her face...

Tania was due to meet her cousin, but he fails to turn up and, what do you know, she’s left her purse at home… like any gentleman faced with such a situation, Captain Karl races to the rescue and escorts her home in a handsome cab. He almost leaves only to find he has Tania’s carefully forgotten silk, returning it to her he accepts her offer of a “coffee” and enters her apartment not only abandoning all hope of an early night but also leaving his cab driver to soak in the pouring rain. Director Fred Niblo plays this for laughs and thankfully keeps the drama mellow just as Garbo herself injects the odd twinkle among the smouldering.

It’s been a while since I watched Greta in Hollywood and you can fully understand the impact she had on the American public with a forthright sexuality that slinked and scolded and yet was self-determined and not fully revealed. As author Zadie Smith recently put it, Garbo exhibited an “inviable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by other people.” Here as elsewhere, Garbo’s character has a secret and yet another secret beyond that too… In the first instance she is a Russian spy and she has deliberately targeted the young Captain in order to take advantage but it’s a role she takes far more intensely than necessary.

Conrad Nagel and Greta Garbo

We are in Vienna in 1910 and Europe is bracing itself for conflict as the Russians and Germans eye the Balkans and each other. After their night after the Opera and a “perfect day” in the sun, the Captain is informed of Tania’s day job and is suitably vexed. Karl has a vital package to take to Berlin and his career and many lives depend on it, but he’s followed by Tania who “comes to him as his lover and leaves as his enemy…” such a difficult woman this mysterious lady.

She has the secrets and Karl has a court martial, ritually humiliated in front of his regiment who turn their backs as he is stripped of insignias and medals before being thrown in jail for treason. He’s given a shot at redemption when released by his uncle Colonel Eric von Raden (Edward Connelly) who sets him up with a trip to Warsaw under the guise of a Serbian pianist.

Karl naturally finds Tania at a cocktail party and plays Vissi d’arte, their aria… she turns in shock to find him playing these dangerous chords and luckily decides to follow her heart. But Tania is under the wing of General Boris Alexandroff (Gustav von Seyffertitz) and whilst he won’t wait forever for her to surrender to his very limited charms, he is also very suspicious of the pretty pianist. And why does he keep on playing Pucccini?!

The Mysterious Lady is a symphony of Garbo in shimmering silk and magnificently shaded close ups - devised and shot by William H Daniels, who specialised in setting up that face for the most devastating effect.  It works optically of course but all the more so because of the specific mysteries of the actress’ expression; she is constantly wrong-footing the watcher’s expectations with distracted agitation and we look that bit harder almost seeking her reassurance. She rides the edge of defined emotional response in a way that haunts us still. Worn down by pretty much everything at this point in America, film critic Alexander Walker describes how Garbo managed to make her exhaustion look like "romantic agony..." and that "...no film so clearly shows that, for Garbo, passion was a form of tragic depression."

For his part Conrad Nagel was ill-served by the example of Lars Hanson in the surviving nine minutes of The Divine Woman shown before the main feature. Large Handsome can go toe-to-toe with his compatriot and even deluged in dozens of Garbo kisses and with the actress – shockingly and perhaps to him, surprisingly – grabbing him by the hair, he keeps on responding no doubt urged on by guttural Swedish encouragement from director Victor Sjostrom. Conrad’s no dummy but he is outshone by the divine energy of his co-star as were so many others.

Lars and Greta amidst the rough and tumble

Such a shame that only one reel of The Divine Woman survives but what an explosive section it is as Lars and Greta play forcefully for each other’s affections as the clock ticks away his last moments before he must depart with his regiment: they have only right now and, as it happens, so do we.

Carl Davis conducted his own scores and he had the full might of the Philharmonia crammed on stage with him – an 87-piece ensemble of intricate power augmented by piano, harp and possibly even the sink from Carl’s kitchen. The score referenced far beyond my limited experience of contemporary classical music but was as expertly constructed around image and acting as you would expect: you don’t need to understand the method just feel the results. As with actress so with composer.

The natural volume of such an orchestra is quite different from the amplified power of, say, Mogwai who I have also seen in the Royal Festival Hall (front row, right by the bass speaker…) but the results are the same minus the ringing ears. This is music with which you have a tangible connection and which, interwoven with the action on screen leaves you stirred and smiling as those silent film endorphins race around for a few hours still. 

Both these films are available on the Garbo Silents collection from TCM, but you haven’t really lived them until you’ve watched them in cinema with Carl’s band.

It’s in the air… Love (1927) Aphrodite Raickopoulou, Vadim Repin and Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall

Well it was certainly love for Mordaunt Hall, with the New York Times critic almost lost for words in describing Greta Garbo as "a blonde Mona Lisa" who "outshines any other performance she has given to the screen".

I doubt he could have contained himself had he been here to hear Aphrodite Raickopoulou's stonking new score written for and played by Vadim Repin ably accompanied by the might of the Philharmonia Orchestra… “Paramedic for Mr Hall!”

Is often been said that the camera loved Garbo – watching Sky Arts Movie documentaries it seems that the camera also loved Ava Gardner, Lana Turner et al and so on: that Camera was pretty fickle. I think that the director, cinematographer and, subsequently the audience loved Greta and Mordaunt Hall of course…

Mordaunt loves Greta

She must have brought something powerfully new to the screens and perhaps her European ethereality topped off an earthy sexuality that the West had rarely seen. Theda and Pola were too deliberate whilst Lillian, Mary and even Clara were girls in comparison with this woman who operated on unknowable levels. She has more in common with Asta Nielsen and the great Italian Divas, especially Bertini: realism with just a silent touch of a short-fuse.

A Lyda Borelli reveal borrowed from Malombra?

Her only vulnerability was love itself and even she could be charmed by the wholesome wit of John Gilbert. Gilbert was the proof of accessibility and possibility and, pause for sigh, proved that ultimately neither of things actually applied in Greta Gustafsson’s case.

But all that was to come and tonight, as in 1927, the audience believed in their love and, in the love of a mother and son as well as the love of a soldier for his comrades in arms: there was a lot of love going round.

But first to feel it was off-screen, as Vadim Repin – described as the leading soloist of his generation – took to the stage to rapturous applause alongside conductor Frank Strobel wading through the eighty-strong Philharmonia. Aphrodite Raickopoulou has spent much of the intervening period between her splendid score for Faust – performed in the same venue in 2012 – on this new piece and it was worth every note.

Repin took flight almost from the first few bars of the overture before the film began and Raickopoulou’s themes began to reveal themselves against the well-travelled narrative of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It is an interesting choice to follow up the more tonally extreme Murnau film but the score succeeded in adding flavour especially to Garbo’s almost mystical expressiveness. I probably said it before but she over-matches Mr Gilbert whose natural charm and earnestness simply washes over the swede’s hidden depths.

John Gilbert: at first sight

Don’t get me wrong, I do love John Gilbert and I would also agree with the rather leftfield suggestion from Hugo Vickers who in his introduction suggested that were he alive today, Gilbert would easily beat Donald Trump to the Whitehouse: well yes, him, Felix the Cat and Ben Turpin too!

Meanwhile, back in Tsarist Russia… as adaptations go, this one is remarkably economical with Director Edmund Goulding moving Frances Marion’s precis swiftly along and focusing on the aspects of love that bind the characters to their diverging paths: there is no easy way for any of them to follow their hearts. Such clever work Miss Marion!

John Gilbert also part directed, perhaps been given his head with his almost soul-mate – not for nothing did the publicists promote the film as “Garbo and Gilbert in… Love” although the original title was simple Heat which I’m less convinced about.

OK... it is a little warm in here...

Their first encounter is tantalizing as horse-drawn carriages career through frozen countryside. We only see Garbo’s face through a veil which delays the moment of her rescuer, Alexis Vronsky (Gilbert) seeing her face. After her carriage loses a horse he takes her to an n inn and after installing her in a double room wrongly assumed to be theirs, is transfixed when the big reveal happens: love at first sight!

But… it’s complicated: Anna is already married to the influential, rich and late middle-aged Senator Alexei Karenin (Brandon Hurst) and, worse still, they have a son, Serezha Karenin (Philippe De Lacy) who Anna adores more than life itself. The bond between the 10-year old boy and the 22-year old actress is a strong one but I’m pretty sure it’s meant to show the immensity of the maternal bond. True Vronsky is jealous in the selfish days of his passion but he comes to accept the boy’s position in her life.

George Fawcett does his Windsor Davies

But Vronsky is similarly compromised by his family connection to his regiment, led by the Grand Duke Michel (George Fawcett who is about as Cossack as Windsor Davies!). He faces being drummed out after generations of Vronsky family service if he doesn’t save face by giving up Anna.

Eventually the Senator intervenes, telling the lovers that they will destroy themselves. He is playing a long game and counting on the pressures of societal norms to keep them apart.

Ultimately Anna cannot leave her boy any more than Vronsky can walk away from his comrades and his familial history. Regretfully they give up their love and prepare for the misery of separation.

Anna gives her emotions away as she watches Vronsky's race

Famously two endings were filmed one based on Tolstoy’s and another crafted for local taste… you’ll have to watch it yourself to find out which one won.

Love is a very good film above and beyond G&G. There is some lovely cinematography from William H. Daniels who employs a good range of “European” camera mobility, following the characters through immense rooms and tracking John Gilbert during the soldier’s horse race – Anna’s heart is in her mouth and we respond in kind to the under-cranked danger of the equine dual.

It’s available from Warner Archives in a decent print but it would be good to see it released with this enormous, radiantly good-natured new score.

The concert launched the 2016 UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature and featured my pal Sarah’s live debut at a silent film – thanks for taking the chance SEG!

Blockbuster! The General (1926) and One Week (1920) with Carl Davis and Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall

“He seems like a modern visitor to the world of the silent clowns.” Roger Ebert

A big night for Buster as the film buffs and concert crowd gathered together to watch Carl Davis conduct the mighty Philharmonia Orchestra in playing his own scores for two of stone face’s finest. We may have clashed sartorially – and I did have visions of a potential Mods vs Rockers conflagration, though thankfully things didn’t “kick off” – but, ultimately we all grooved to Mr Davis and the band and we all laughed together, out loud and a lot.

Silent films were often shown in large auditoriums and with full orchestral backing so this grand occasion was not unbefitting especially given the scale of Keaton’s comic adventure. I hadn’t watched The General for a long time and here, presented in the recent upgrade, it was indeed re-masterful.

"If you loose the war, don't blame me..."

Having watched or rather, been assaulted by, the new Avengers film earlier in the day with my son, I thought I’d been all punched out but Keaton can still compete with the modern thriller with all of its technological advantages. In the language of that film he’s “augmented”: someone who has super-human qualities that are a special effect all of their own. Allied to this is his creative energy which ensures that not only is there always something happening it’s also funny. Other directors of the time cut very quickly and whilst he and co-director Clyde Bruckman do just that Keaton also has an action-reaction-action loop switched to fast forward.

Amidst all of this chaos, there remains that face: impassive, at peace… absorbing every blow whilst immediately figuring out a way to respond. As David Gill once said to Carl Davis, Keaton is a problem-solver and his stories are a triumph of resolute improvisations against all odds: the comedy of hope.

Buster sets off in lone pursuit

Carl Davis understands this on an orchestral scale and his compositions, which could easily overwhelm the 90 year-old subject matter, are subtle and leverage the power inherent in the film as much as any hyper-produced Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri score. If anything the modern sonics are over-loud cheats to get a cheap animal response whereas Buster and Carl are so much smarter than that. Together they project in emphatic unison and you are drawn into rather than enveloped.

So it was that The General’s true nature was revealed as an action adventure as much as a comedy. It is a great story based on William Pittenger’s book about actual events in the Civil War and it is superbly filmed. Cinematographers Bert Haines and Devereaux Jennings shot on a parallel line and the narrative is steam-powered by the constant motion of machine, men and horses.

Buster misses the Northern advance and the Southern retreat

At one point Buster is so busy trying to stoke the loco’s fires that he completely missed the mass retreat of the Confederate forces and the thousands of Unionist soldiers in pursuit – a large scale replica of Buster’s persona: calm amongst the chaos.

Then as Buster and his true love Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) try to steam their way to safety, they start rowing as she gets over picky about which bits of wood to use and then starts sweeping the cab. Only Buster would place a domestic quibble in the middle of a war.

Marion Mack

Keaton is an equal-opportunities comedian and he always ensures that his leading ladies carry a fair share of the pratfalls and his southern belle is as daft and brave as he. Meanwhile the generals of the North are sillier still as it takes them ages to work out how to fix the tracks and their engineer a few seconds. Maybe Buster wasn’t so impressed with Generals in general?

By the mid-twenties, Buster could do pretty much what he liked, resulting in this film… one of the most expensive ever made and, at the time, a relative flop that was to curtail his creative freedom. Those guys at the top, they didn’t really have a clue.

Home sweet home...

On the under-card tonight was One Week (1920) Buster’s first solo effort after years of duetting with Roscoe Arbuckle.

Directed and written by Keaton along with Edward F. Cline the film was a smash and began his establishment as a major star in his own right and you can see why as it hurtles along with the same wit and rapid improvisations as the longer, later film.

Sybil and Buster on the swing

The film was a parody of the Ford Motor Company documentary, Home Made (1919), an educational short about prefabricated housing: it all looked far too easy for Buster who set out to show how things could all wrong so very easily…

Again he puts his female lead through her paces, this time a young Sybil Seely, who flies up in the air as their pre-fab wall spins Buster down and gets thrown in the dirt as the storm spins them round. She also gets featured in a bathroom scene so daring the cameraman eventually puts his hand over the lens.

Sybil's impressed with the man at work...

But it’s Buster who takes the big risks as he battles to erect their flat-packed house only to be flattened by the arrival of their piano, dropped from a great height and, famously, almost obliterated by an on-rushing locomotive. There was something about Buster and trains…

Before the green screen, a real train and a big smash!

By the end of the evening the taste of those digitized Avengers was washed away as the real super heroes were revealed: Buster and Carl took flight.

The General is now available complete with Mr Davis’ score on Kino Blu-ray direct or from Amazon whilst One Week is also on a Kino Blu-ray  through Amazon.   

So it goes… Waltz with Bashir (2008) Max Richter, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall

In the Q&A session after the film’s screening, writer, director… subject matter extraordinaire Ari Folman explained the intimate connection between the music and the film: it has to be “love at first sight” otherwise no amount of effort can create the right blend.

For Folman Max Richter’s soulful compositions first provided him the back drop as he wrote this memoire/documentary in a hut not far from Galilee – a mixture of Richter’s haunting first two albums The Blue Notebooks and Memoryhouse. He contacted the composer by email once the script was completed and the two met up to discuss the film early in its production.

Normally, Folman says, the music is something you come too late in the film-making process and when you’re low on funds, but here it was different – there was no budget anyway – but he wanted the music to be an integral part of the production process as well as the narrative. After Richer had composed the score in two weeks, Folman’s animators worked with it as a backdrop and the film’s sentiment was infused through both.

This was a special screening of Waltz with Bashir with a mix of soundtrack and the score played live by the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of James Lavell’s Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre. It was only the second time this has been done and the first time Folman had seen the film this way.

As always the mix was a potent one with Richter explaining the extra dimension as coming from our instinctive response to human communication – when you are face to face with a performer any connection is always deeper. The result made my first viewing of the film all the more affecting.

Walt with Bashir may lay claim to being the first animated documentary but as Folman says, he could think of no other way of telling such a story.  The animation serves to bring the viewer closer to the voices of the performers – in all but two cases, the actual participants in events – in much the same way as a radio play but it also adds to the sentimental tone: the distancing of events by protective memory ultimately peeled away in an horrific explosion of reality at the very end.

Folman is the main character, trying to piece together the events of his service in the Israeli army from a distance of over twenty years: mid-2000s looking back to 1982 when he was just 19.

The events in question have scarred him and all of his contemporaries. They dream about what happened in an abstract way and cannot bear to look directly at their recollections. There’s a confusion of sadness, shame and denial after the almost unimaginable events of their war, some of the interviewees seem almost matter of fact. How else to cope?

Folman starts a journey – tracking down as many as he can from his old platoon to get their help in jogging his memory – there are tales of the war in Lebanon, an adventure as they started out still in their teens but which became serious enough all too soon.

One recollection has them pinned down by sniper fire until one of the patrol grabs a machine gun, breaks cover and waltzes around (to Chopin's Waltz in C-sharp minor) firing in all directions, miraculously avoiding being hit. The backdrop shows numerous posters of Bashir Gemayel, the President of Lebanon, who was assassinated shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

As the pieces come together for Folman the full horror of what he experienced in the Sabra and Shatila massacre is revealed. As he says, if only two people leave the theatre and Google the details of that event, it will have been worth it. Over 800 people died in the incident after Israeli command allowed a force of Christian Phalangists to enter a refugee camp after the assassination. Folman was one of a number of Israeli soldiers who encircled the camp, firing flares into the night to illuminate the ground…

As a psychiatrist friend of Folman suggests, one of the reasons he has suppressed the memory of the atrocity is because of the experiences of his parents in Auschwitz… how can genocide have been repeated?

But Waltz with Bashir isn’t judgemental per se it just shows things as they were remembered and lets those thoughts speak for themselves or cry out as in the harrowing closing montage…

It’s an extraordinary film and you genuinely couldn’t see it working better without the animation. Memory is selective and subject to the imagination as Folman’s friend outlines but we all have a responsibility to establish and maintain certain truths. And in this, the music and the images delivered powerfully well.

Waltz with Bashir is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from  Movie Mail.

More details of Max Richter's compositions are available on his official site. I'd particularly recommend The Blue Notebooks - an inventive mix of modern composition with electronica and Tilda Swinton.

Details of the Sabra and Shatila massacre can be found at Wikipedia, which has plenty of links to other sources.  The Independent's Robert Fisk was one of the first journalists on the scene and his 2012 article commemorating the massacre's 30th anniversary is here.

The morning after my newspaper carries images of field executions by insurgents in Iraq… as Kurt Vonnegut kept repeating after every death in Slaughterhouse Five: “so it goes, so it goes…”

Max Richter (left) and Ari Folman (right)

The Philharmonia await their cue...

Immersed… Napoléon (1927) with Carl Davis, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall

“Maintain radioactivity during the creation of Napoléon. Only write in moments like these...” Abel Gance

Oh where to start? It’s the morning after the day before and my head is still full of the Abel Gance’s images and Carl Davis’ music.

This was the biggest silent cineaste party of the year: one huge film in four parts, a sixty piece orchestra and those three stunning screens… Napoléon is a rich artistic achievement that still over-reaches itself 85 years after it was created.

Even when you know what to expect, this was the most visceral of cinematic experiences and one that almost defies rationalisation: you respond in the most subjective, emotional ways and you are constantly surprised… you can’t quite keep up.

Locked in the Royal Festival Hall from lunchtime to closing time, you are sucked into the heart of Gance’s story by his relentless energy and invention. From the beginning you are placed right in the visual heart as the camera roams freely through the snowball fight that is the foretaste of every battle to come. But it’s not just the mobility of the image, it’s the way Gance captures his actor’s emotion, cuts rapidly between his shots and overlays images that show their interior responses to the action.

Vladimir Roudenko and Albert Dieudonné play Napoléon young and old and are marvellously expressive, but only Gance can show you what they are actually thinking of: conquest, Josephine, a pet eagle… sometimes all at the same time in multiple exposures on three screens.

Simon Pegg recently described modern cinema as being like fireworks but Gance was making the explosions first, using every technical advance he could to disorientate the viewer and make them submit to the story. Forget 3D he had polyvision, cameras on bikes and horses (steam powered to counter the motion) as well as hand-held and suspended on a giant pendulum. And, whilst he originally had music from Arthur Honegger, today he had Carl Davis and the mighty Philharmonia channelling Beethoven, Mozart and Hayden – so, come and have a go Hans Zimmer if you really think you’re hard enough!

Davis’ score is an amazing composition which matches the film’s energy and tone: heroic and soulful. Even with the three breaks it must push the players to the limits: I’m amazed at the endurance and the fact that Mr Davis appeared as spritely for his fourth bow on the podium as he did for the first. Needless to say, there was a suitably-sustained standing ovation at the end… and perhaps we were also clapping ourselves for experiencing this wonder: we did it – the whole day long: we saw Napoléon!

As the crowds floated away a huddle remained around Kevin Brownlow without whom the film would not exist in the form it does… something close to Gance’s original before it was so cruelly butchered.  Here was also our physical connection to the director whom he met on a number of occasions and who got to see his original restoration aged 90. When we got home we re-watched the Napoléon section in Brownlow’s The Music of Light which features an interview with Gance as well as cinematographer Jules Kruger.

Napoléon as seen by Abel Gance to give its full title, was the first of six planned movies on Napoleon but the first one was enough… as financial issues and a mixed reception clipped Gance’s wings. There were spectacular performances with both triptych sequences intact and a full orchestra but the general distribution was compromised by business meddling. In the end, the final part, Saint Helena was made from his script by Lupu Pick in 1929 and Gance made Austerlitz in 1959 with a multi-national cast including Orson Welles and Leslie Caron.

This first part takes us from Napoléon’s school days, through the Revolution, the Terror and to his first successful foray into Italy aged just 28 and two days after his marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais. Had Gance carried on in the same manner, it would have taken us till at least Thursday to get to Waterloo: either the battle or the station for the journey home…

School days

But what remains is a powerful exposition on the nature of the man and his motivations. Napoléon’s rise to power is amongst the most startling in history and whilst his elevation to Emperor and expansion across Europe mark him as a military dictator of the highest order – 17 years of conflict and as many as six million dead - he also brought reform as well as order.  He was a man of incredible drive and intellect and in a country that had to re-invent its concepts of authority and nation after the end of monarchy, understanding him and his relationship to the Revolution was an enduring concern when the Third Republic faced the Great War and France struggled in the aftermath.

Saint-Just, Robespierre, Danton and Marat

Gance wasn’t excusing the tyrant-to-be just trying to explain him… and, then as now, being even handed with despots is a minefield. The Revolutionary period is not straightforward and even “The Gods” - Danton, Marat and the notorious Robespierre - all fall from grace at some point: not for nothing is the latter seen reading a biography of Cromwell… All of their reputations reflect the political mores of the day but they were revolutionary.

Albert Dieudonné

Dieudonné is mesmerising as Napoléon and carries the weight of the film and history on his narrow but firmly-set shoulders… this was pretty much a suicide mission for any French actor and yet he is entirely convincing even in a wig that gives him a passing resemblance to Noel Fielding.

His Jospehine is Gina Manès (so amazing in Coeur Fidele) whose electric blue eyes are given full reign as she lures the young general in whilst politicking on his behalf with her paramour the Vicomte de Barras.

Gina Manès

 Alexandre Koubitzky makes for an operatically expressive Georges Danton, Antonin Artaud (known for the Theatre of Cruelty) is a twisted Marat whilst Edmond Van Daële (the baddie in Coeur Fidele) plays Robespierre, hiding his thoughts behind deeply tinted glasses.

Abel Gance himself plays Louis de Saint-Just encapsulating the movement’s conflicted delight in the removal of opposition via Madame La Guillotine whilst at the same time, passionately defending the continuing revolution in front of the baying mob in the Assembly.

"The Gods": Marat, Danton and Robespierre

There are two other roles that also mark Gance’s view of greater events with Tristan Fleuri (Nicolas Koline) as an “everyman” who pops up throughout the key moments of Napoléon’s career and his daughter Violine (Annabella who later married Tyrone Power!) who starts her own cult of Napoléon: worshiping him at an alter hidden in her room like a pop star, like a saint…

Both help to humanise the spectacle and to anchor the audience in the recognisably real – there are plenty of jokes too. But Napoléon was super-natural and Gance’s film is suitably extra-ordinary.

Albert Dieudonné, Annabella and Nicolas Koline 

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the character or the odd blips in pacing and tone, ultimately we’ll never forget the moments of Napoléon’s tiny ship riding the waves of the storm as the Assembly erupts in conflict. Nor will we ever see anything like the closing sequence when the curtains are pulled back and the film on view triples in size. As Davis’ score reached new heights the story soared like Napoléon’s eagle over any refusal to accept it.

Simply magnificent.

Abel Gance as Saint-Just