Show people… Die große Sehnsucht (1930), Bonn Silent Film Festival 26

Camilla Horn

Quiet! Sound recording in process!

 

I love films about film and the silent era had some excellent examples from Eleanor Boardman’s Souls for Sale, Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly* (1917), the lost Merton of the Movies (covered here on this blog) to the British Shooting Stars, and the German Die Filmprimadonna (1926). They give us a tantalising glimpse behind the screen, showing films in production, sometimes actual ones with Erich von Stroheim on Greed and Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in Souls. By showing the process though they let the audience in on the secret and in doing so enhance the end product… yes, even the slapstick chaos of Show People!

 

This is the German version and it features mehr sterne als im Himmel, or something like that, to coin a phrase. Yet, whilst the guests keep on coming, the film retains a compelling central story that is something along the lines of the later What Price Hollywood? (1932) and no doubt many more before, in which a young star breaks through potentially leaving friends and lovers behind.

 

The couple in question are Eva von Loe, played by an more earthly Camilla Horn than I’m used to  and Paul Wessel, a hope-less Harry Frank who seems like a nice chap until events start to move. They are part of a reserve army of extras who as much a part of the filming as the audience. Most of the details pass them by but they are just happy to be in the frame.  

 

The set up

Shot “on location” at the EFA Studios in Berlin, the script was co-written by one Emeric Pressburger along with Hans H. Zerlett and the director István Székel – later Steve Sekely. It is based around the filming of a feature of the same name, Die große Sehnsucht (The Great Longing aka Camera! Action!) which has the double longings for love and career… everyone wants to be in pictures but at what cost? But, neither the question nor the film is that serious and to cap it all there is the most outrageous of endings signalled by letters attacked to the bloomers of the dancers in the final dance sequence.

 

We start with a call for silence as the sound department sets the levels and a lovely tracking in shot moves us from on high under the gantry and onto the sound stage – reminiscent of shots in Shooting Stars but also that rare “making of” footage shot of L’Hebier’s L’Argent by Jean Dréville. It’s a very silent shot for a talkie where microphones needed to be close to the action but opens up the visual world of the film in swooping fashion. The accompaniment also provides a lovely diegetic moment as Mykyta Sierov’s flute is foregrounded as the camera finally settles on a man in Regency costume playing the same instrument. But, there’s an additional touch from Sekely, as the camera shifts from the man seemingly playing the flute to the musician at the side of the stage actually playing it – extra delicious as we know it’s really Mykyta.

 

It’s break time and we switch to the canteen with extras in costume ask for boiled sausages with salad whilst, in the actors’ area, Luis Trenker is having lunch with Hans Schlettow who prods the fourth wall by saying that they’re due to feature in a scene in which they meet Elga Brink in the canteen. She duly arrives and Luis is introduced as having just come down from his “Holy Mountain” in case the audience was in any doubt.

Luis Trenker, Elga Brink and Hans Schlettow

Poor chap! He’s been in films for twenty years now… always as an extra.

 

Luis then hands over the baton by saying hello to Cornelius (Ferdinand Bonn) who is a perpetual “background actor” and who is sitting next to Paul as Eva comes rushing across the canteen with an urgent need to speak to him. Just one kiss though before rushing back to take her place at the tables in a staged night club in which Carla Marventa (Berthe Ostyn) is singing to this captive audience but seriously not impressing director Hall (Theodor Loos) who, after numerous takes, can’t take anymore of her vocals and fires her. He tells cast and crew to take the afternoon off but is distracted by the pretty blonde girl sat among the extra “audience” but is too enraged to take notes.

 

How do you do, I’m Conrad Veidt!

 

Conny duly arrives to find the set empty and greets long-suffering assistant director, Mopp (Paul Kemp) who tells him of the need for a new star. Meanwhile Eva has read too much into her director’s distraction and seeks him out in the hope that she can take over. Herr Veidt arrives just in time to jump to the wrong conclusion thinking she has been cast and when Hall corrects him remarks on her looks: “but can she act?” is the reply.

 

Camilla Horn, Conrad Veidt and Theodor Loos

… the Ondra Bar is now open!

 

Meanwhile, it’s Anny Ondra’s birthday and she celebrates with Charles Puffy (Károly Huszár) and a host of other faces I couldn’t quite place – she’s definitely A Party and when asked by Puffy how old she is, promptly pouts her thumb in her mouth. Anny gets more time than most for some leggy shots of exhuberance and the sign of a star at the peak of their powers. She had a productive 1930s, even though her accent excluded her from more British films with Herr Hitchcock 

 

What shall we do? Garbo’s in America. Bergner** isn’t available.

 

The pressure’s on an as Hall gets desperate enough to give the unknown blonde a go, he calls on Mopp to tell him who she was. Unfortunately the AD is drunk as a streifenskunk and has to be sobered up under a shower. Back in the land of the straight he remembers her name and full address and so we can proceed with the ending we’re all expecting. She gets handed the script and works all night on it with Paul but will she be able to den erwartungen entsprechen?

 

The answer is uncertain especially when Paul starts to feel excluded… and there’s still time to meet Fritz Rasp – being unexpectedly charming (Brooksie always said so…), not to mention Betty Amann, Lil Dagover, Jenny Jugo, Gustav Diessl (still not forgiven by me for Pandora’s Box…), Fritz Kortner (ditto), Harry Liedtke, Jack Trevor and many more…

Anny and Puffy

 

The balance between the drama and the star-spotting is well kept and everything comes together for that cheeky big finale. Fun for lost of reasons and including a lovely self-awareness and wiliness to make fun of the industry in ways that still surprise. Well done!

 

A very funny scene is at… (a) … party when a couple of stars do an imitation of Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel. It’s comic, and at least gets those two (about the only German stars missing) by names into the picture. 

Variety, 13 October 1931

 

This silent version that was screened was sent out to the many theatres that still didn’t have sound systems and works very well, it even adds to the meta feeling as we see throughout: the idea of a silent film about a talkie and a talkie about the birth of anew stars featuring a host of older stars not all of whom would make the transition to the extra dimension. Sadly, that wasn’t going to be entirely their choice.

 

For this stream, there was fine accompaniment from Richard Siedhoff on piano and Mykyta Sierov on oboe/flute which follows the dynamic shifts between the stage and behind the screen along with the romance. Personally I’m not so sure about the kazoo used to imitate the singing voices – the jokes already there in the mime – but otherwise they do a really pleasing job. I wonder what Camilla Horn’s singing voice was like, hopefully the sound version is still around for us to compare someday?

 

Camilla Horn and Harry Frank

 

*Screening at the Kennington Bioscope on 30^th September as part of a fund-raiser for The Cinema Museum – details here!

  

**Elisabeth Bergner, star of Fräulein Else (1929) and a hugely successful actress who moved to the UK in the mid-30s and provided the origin for the story used in All About Eve!

Camill and Fritz Kortner

"They're making a film based in Vienna for a change..." 

Paul Kemp Mopps up...

Game of thrones… Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), with Costas Fotopoulos, Kennington Bioscope

 

First Bioscope of the year and it’s an epic evening for one of the cornerstones of Weimar Cinema, one in fact that I’ve been saving up for just such an occasion and, judging from a non-too scientific sampling of the audience, I’m not the only one with the DVD/Blu-ray at home on the shelf, waiting to be watched after a proper screening and the Bioscope made sure that this was indeed a special screening.

 

A 16mm print was shown tonight, slightly shorter the restoration on which our home media is  based but still very impressive, astonishing even given the scale and verve of the film making. Regular KB, MC, Michelle Facey gave her usual high-content introduction, providing the background on director and cinematic visionary Fritz Land and his script-writing partner Thea von Harbou, as well as explaining the film’s link to early 13^th Century Saxon epic poetry, Der Nibelungenlied, written in High Middle German and by unknown hands in Passau in what is now southern Bavaria.  This tale was itself based on oral traditions dating back centuries and mentioning historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries.

 

There are similar stories across German speaking Europe and up to Scandinavia and, there are some similarities with later Middle English stories such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Le Mort d’Arthur, they are all epics in which it is how the characters live as much as if they die: chivalric romances with logic and outcomes based on magical and religious certainties. The link as a noted medievalist pointed out, may well be the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, who, writing in the late 12^th  Century, told tales of Arthurian legend; setting up a style and subject matter that led to the Extended Chivalric Universe, spreading across borders and language.

Paul Richter provides some scale

Der Nibelungenlied is altogether fuller of dungeons and dragons than usually found in Arthur, it is peculiarly Germanic and this appealed especially to Lang and von Harbou who were looking to take their countrymen out of themselves by presenting a folk-fantasy many would recognise on a grand scale, something even the Americans would struggle to better. There’s no getting over the links between the story and German identity though with elements not only quoted after German reunification in the 1870s, but forming the basis for Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a celebration of the loyalties rather than the more courtly aspects. After the First World War – and Lang’s film – it’s even possible to see Siegfried as literally representing the betrayal of German interests, “the stab in the back”, seen by many at home after surrender in 1918. Politics and culture pick and choose each other in odd ways, for more on this see von Harbou’s output in Germany after 1933…

 

No doubt the primary purpose in 1924 was to deliver rousing entertainment every bit as stirring as Arthurian legends, swords and sorcery. This is something of a superhero epic with a hero who, having bathed in dragon blood, is almost invulnerable. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine two young friends, sons of recently migrated European Jews, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, both ten on this film’s release, perhaps seeing it in the USA and getting a few ideas. The Italians had their own strong man, Maciste, the German Übermensch went back a bit further.

 

The film is huge in scale and features many tropes that are now staples of the explosion in fantasy films, although Lang’s vision is decades before Tolkien or CS Lewis set their templates, let alone Game of Thrones, House of Dragons and all the rest. Like modern blockbusters, Lang’s film was also in two parts and tonight’s screening was only of the first part, still some two hours even on 16mm and well over half an hour longer on the reconstruction found on the Eureka Blu-ray.

 

Siegfried holds aloft his sword

It tells the tale of Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of King Siegmund of Xanten, who becomes an expert swordsmith, fashioning the perfect blade which the artful blacksmith, Mime (Georg John) tests by dropping a feather onto the edge and slicing it in two. Siegfried is a genetically lucky blonde, yes, an Aryan, who attains success through bravery, guile and killing the right dragon. After the sword is struck he leaves on his white charger (possibly called Tonto or Comet the Superhorse) after hearing about the kings of Burgundy who reign at a mighty castle at Worms on the Rhine, where the beauteous Princess Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) awaits just such a knight as he.

 

I shall set out for that place so that I may win Kriemhild!

 

Mime tells our hero how to find Worm but he sends him to almost certain doom as there is a dragon blocking his way. Siegfried is of course fearless and wily and outthinks the, actual fire-breathing creature, who looks a little sad as he’s blinded and then fatally stabbed by the knight’s blade. This blood has magical qualities and a little bird, literally, tells him that if he bathes in it, he will become impervious harm which leads to some  long-distance nudity as Siegfried takes the bath of invulnerability. One last twitch of the dragon’s tail though and a leaf lands on his shoulder meaning that he has one area of weak human flesh… every superhero needs their kryptonite or Achille’s Heel.

 

He also gains additional super powers and wealth after being attacked by Alberich, King of the Dwarves (Georg John, again) who wears a net of invisibility but is soon overwhelmed and forced to promise Siegfried his fortune, the treasure of the Nibelungs, if he will spare him. Naturally Alberich double-crosses but fails and as he dies curses all in his subterranean kingdom to be turned to stone. Siegfried heads off and goes from strength to strength soon conquering 12 kingdoms and presenting a suitably heroic prospect to the Burgundians. 

Margarete Schön

In her introduction, Michelle referred us to Lotte H Eisner’s Haunted Screen¹ for an analysis of the film’s incredible design and mix of the usual expressionist/UFA studio work with stunning location shots; all perfectly controlled by Lang and his team led by art director Otto Hunte. Eisner quotes early film critic Béla Balázs in saying that “the soul of a landscape or milieu did not always present itself in the same way” and so it was up to the director to “seek the eyes of the landscape…” Nature had to be “stylised” for film to become a work of art (Rudolph Kurtz²) and plain nature was not enough in itself to “make man’s destiny understood” and Stimmungsbilder, “mood pictures” had to be used.

 

Lang certainly took control of his landscape and it is very much a major character in this film, reflecting and setting the moods of the characters and the narrative. The studio constructs are huge dynamic depictions of nature; rocky outcrops, dense pine woods and treacherous pathways whilst the building of Worm are massive in scale both for the interiors and exteriors, with huge stairways dwarfing the players, who move across them, black or white, like pieces on a chess board.

 

Talking of which, Lang also micromanages the way his human resource was aligned and where exactly they where in the frame. There are so many examples of this that I was tempted just to leave 150 screen shots in place of all these words. The opening sequence is almost balletic, as Siegfried hammers out his sward and Mint recoils in horror as he sees how powerful he has become and then, when we first see the imposing King’s Castle, the guard are spaced out symmetrically as the nobles walk past, as if the audience, commoners all, are held at a distance. We quickly switch to the interiors and the almost sterile atmosphere.

 

Order in the castle

All this will change when Siegfried strikes a deal with King Gunther of Burgund (Theodor Loos) to help him gain the hand of the fearsome Queen Brunhild of Isenland (Hanna Ralph who is great value!) in exchange for allowing his new friend to give him his sister Kriemhild’s hand in marriage. They head off to Brunhild’s realm and Siegfried uses his net of invisibility to make sure that the puny King Gunther wins the three trials of strength he needs against the woman he wants to marry. Brunhild is down but not quite out and, whilst she has to accede, she suspects something is wrong.

 

All is now set for some court intrigue in Burgundy and, as with other characters who break the code of chivalry, there is always a price to pay and an uneasy peace will not last for long at the King’s castle.

 

It’s hard to think of many films with this kind of scale in 1924, and the direction as well as cinematography are first rate with cameraman Carl Hoffmann, Günther Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann as good if not better than almost anyone in Hollywood. Paul Gerd Guderian’s costumes also match the set designs and there’s a striking mix of strong modern design with traditional folk stylings. Everything is larger than life from the hairy hobbits working in the smithery to the dwarfs and the brown back coiffeurs of Siegfried and Brunhild. There’s also a moody turn from the King of Burgundy’s general, Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), eye patch over one eye and huge black wings attached to his armoured helmet.

Hanna Ralph is not to be messed with

It's operatic, and fantastic with an emotional sweep designed to sweep the audience away. To this end, Costas Fotopoulos’ tirelessly inventive accompaniment also played its part, never flagging during the epic mood and melded to Lang’s vision as everything else. It contributed mightily to the unfolding ultra-drama with lines and themes as intriguingly structured as the architecture and design on screen.

 

Die Nibelungen was premiered in the at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where it played for 40 performances between 29 April and 20 June 1924. A hit and an influence on film for all eternity. It was certainly a hit tonight and here’s to the second part when it can be arranged… no spoilers but it’s called: Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild's Revenge).

1.       The Haunted Screen, Lotte H Eisner, first published in 1952 and updated with translation and new material for Thames and Hudson in 1969.

2.       Rudolf Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film, published in 1926, was one of the first, if not the first, art historical treatises to examine film as an equal of the other arts.

 

Crimes and misdemeanours… In the Eyes of the Law (1919) with Stephen Horne, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Any suffering is easier to bear if the goal is great…

 

More Asta magic that turns what could be a melodramatic take on Crime and Punishment into something altogether worth watching. The secret of her success and lasting impact certainly wasn’t the scripts she was given or the directors she worked with but the ways she was able to create character and to self-direct… can you imagine her working with Griffith or DeMille? She did work with Lubitsch but that film sadly no longer exists and it would be especially interesting to view now as she was very much the established star… It’s also such a shame that her Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler are no longer with us, but so it goes.

 

Here she delivers yet another distinct performance, from metropolitan newspaper reporter flirting easily with her co-worker, and fiancé, so naturistic you feel like you’re intruding… to a committed newshound on a case, exposing inequality and ruinous criminal practice to an avenging angel who effects change but at a moral and personal cost.

 

The statement at the top is something her character says near the end and isn’t that far away from Friedrich Nietzsche's words, He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How… a very apposite and necessary sentiment given the time after so many had died for Kaiser and country, a film made in the early days of the Weimar Republic when Germany was in recovery. Bruised and unbowed depending on your point of view.

 

In the Eyes of the Law (Nach dem Gesetz) is directed with fluid precision by Willy Grunwald, who worked with Nielsen on a number of films during this period and was obviously trusted to let the Danish diva get on with the real magic. There are, nevertheless, some well-constructed sequences and he really does show her to best effect as the film reaches its climactic sequence.

 

The film is presaged, as a number of Nielsen’s were, by some glamour shots of the actress smiling direct to camera and smelling a large bunch of roses, this is, as usual, a very knowing moment that seems to suggest that audience complicity is already guaranteed…

 

Asta’s Sonja Waler is dressed in some style as she breezes into the newspaper offices to briefly flirt with Arthur (Fritz Hartwig) before typing up her copy. The opening of the film feels like a rom com with some superb street shots of bustling Berlin – the locations are a glimpse on a lost world with cinematographer Max Lutze capturing the city in motion and one particularly delicious shot of Sonja and Arthur enjoying a champagne lunch high up in a café overlooking one of the main streets.

 

Lutze also captures the couple eating their sandwiches on the roof of the newspaper, Asta opening the bread to see what’s inside, an everyday action that almost no one else would think of. From a distance they spot her brother Eric (Otz Tollen) and doctor, with his colleague, Albert Holm (Theodor Loos). They invite them up and learn about Holm’s latest breakthrough which could greatly help the large numbers who are dying from lupus (remembering again that this was also the time of the Spanish flu pandemic).

 

Sonja wants to help raise the funds Holm desperately needs but her editor is less keen until she finds a way of popularising it. Never short of ides she decides to visit a wealthy industrialist whom she finds mid-argument with his son (Henri Peters-Arnolds). Her curiosity peaked by the elder man’s refusal to provide any further financial support, she follows the young man to a dingy part of town and a meeting he has with a money lender, Heere (Guido Herzfeld) who is bleeding his client dry.

 

Soon afterwards she hears that the youngster has shot himself, the latest casualty of the loan shark’s greed. Meanwhile, she visits her brother’s clinic and sees for herself the sad deaths of his patience, all of which could be preventable if funding could be made available.

 

Then Sonja’s aunt is ill and she is to travel to see her with her mother (Georgine Sobjeska) – she has not got long to live. It is then that Sonja, spurred on by the extremes of injustice, decides on an almost perfect plan to help the needy and punish the guilty… and it’s pretty ingenious at a time when not all such things were as well thought out – so props to writer Louis Levy!

 

The New Cinema Review said at the time that Nielsen’s “internalized play… makes one forget the shortcomings of logic ...” and you can say that about so many of these films although, this caper seems secure if only Sonja’s conscience allows it to be. There must be a reckoning of course and there’s a dogged policeman played by Bernhard Goetzke … so, once again we are treated to the actor’s emotional pyrotechnics; she never disappoints and, again, this is Sonja’s agony… unlike any other character I’ve seen.

 

Stephen Horne accompanied with Asta-assurance on piano, flute and accordion, and again one felt that different mix in his call and response with the action on screen. It’s been a full on three days of Nielsen films and we’re all deeply invested at this stage.

 

You still have time to experience the Asta impact as the films run until 15^th March. Booking and details on the BFI site.

#TheyAlso… Claire (1924), Kennington Bioscope with John Sweeney

Lya De Putti

Good programming from the Bioscope tonight with two films variously entitled Passions of Men and The Woman Always Pays… even in the early years there were important social questions being raised especially in Europe, in this case Germany and Denmark.

What a year it’s been for Weimar Cinema and out of the blue comes a rarity to Kennington extracted by Bioscope stalwart Tony Fletcher from the BFI archives – not lost but certainly a film that hasn’t been seen for some time.

Directed by Robert Dinesen, Claire (aka Passions of Men), stars the incredibly watchable Lya de Putti, the sharpest profile in Berlin with pencil-thin eyebrows capping sublime arches over eyes flickering the deepest darkest black… There’s something about Lya and that’s exactly what this film is about as the plot is essentially a story of her efforts to evade unwanted male attention; that might be a proto-feminist theme and it’s certainly not the only film of this period dealing in man’s inhumanity to woman.

Frida Richard playing another mum in The Path of Grete Lessen (1919)

Claire lives with a rich older man (Eduard von Winterstein, Claudius in Asta’s Hamlet) who has taken her in along with her mother (Frida Richard, who played the manically possessive mother in Lupu Pick’s New Year’s Eve aka Sylvester (1924)) with the aim of marrying her – he’s over fifty and she’s just twenty which means she was about sixteen when he made an offer that couldn’t be refused. The film repeatedly has Claire “facing the World” – a woman with little power and reliant on the kindness of male strangers.

Claire is, however, made of stern stuff and refuses the old man’s take it or leave it offer, leading the old buzzard to turf both her and her mother out immediately. He soon relents and chases after them on horseback in terrific shots along a snowy lane lined as far as the eye can see by winter trees. He loses the women and falls off his horse, losing the use of his legs in the process.

Eduard von Winterstein - a face made for drama

Claire gets a job as a poorly paid administrator whilst her mother grows increasingly frail in their one-room apartment. They can’t afford to eat properly and the old woman collapses and is almost gassed for want of a decent meal. A kindly Doctor (Theodor Loos) helps and even waves his fee after Claire tells him they can’t afford him again. Claire attendance at work is affected by her mother’s plight and she is dismissed by her boss unless that is, she would like to make up for her tardiness in kind.

On her way home she catches the eye of a con artist (Erich Kaiser-Titz) who spies the chance to romance only to have his plans interrupted by the police. He makes a break for it and hides thousands of Marks worth of forged notes in Claire’s bag. Claire gets arrested trying to buy her mother a chicken for supper… but has a lucky break when the police commander believes her story even when she opens her purse to reveal the rotten notes.

By the time she gets home her mother has passed away and, alone in the world as the Doctor says, accepts his kind offer of work as his assistant. The two go close and she frets over the visits of a woman who turns out o be his sister. The film could end with their embrace and the Doctor’s highly prominent hair fetish – he just can’t stroke it enough – where it not for the surprisingly early release of the forger.

Theodor Loos in kindly Doctor mode

This is where the plot gets a little convoluted when he works out where Claire lives and – successfully - tries to drive a wedge between her and the Doctor. Claire’s options begin to narrow but, as she has done all along, she refuses to sacrifice her independence and morality and, after a chance encounter, meets her former master’s son (Eberhard Leithoff) who pleads with her to return and look after him as his mental and physical health declines.

Trouble is, the old fellow is still infatuated with Claire and he has the gun in his pocket to prove it! Will Claire’s luck finally run out – I know it doesn’t sound like she’s had much – or is there one more twist to prevent the woman from paying?

Claire is convoluted fun and John Sweeney enlightened the narrative with romantic flourishes and dramatic interventions that ensured we were firmly focused on the extraordinary expressiveness of Lya. Michell Facey introduced and told of the Hungarian actress’ success in Germany – including Variety and her off-screen/in-trailer relationship with Emil Jannings – before she tried her luck in Hollywood. She couldn’t sustain success there and died tragically young after surgery to remove a chicken bone led to infection. By coincidence tonight was the anniversary of her death in 1931.

Asta on the tram

Claire was a rather calming experience after the Bioscope audience was left shaken and rather stirred by young Asta Nielsen’s outrageously sexual dancing in Afgrunden (1910). Colin Sell ventured that the actress might have had control of her costume design because the fabric used could hardly have been more revealing as she writhed her way around circus cowboy (Poul Reumert) in a deliberate, distended demonstration of dominance over her bound “captive”. Syncopated BDSM with a beat and a swing... as it were.

The alternate title for this film is The Woman Always Pays and even as early as 1910, Asta was questioning why this should be with a character who is dependent on male patronage and who cannot be free of the “male passions” that plague Lya too. They were making sophisticated films for women as well as men and you can only wonder what Die Asta – the first true European film star along with Max Linder – did for her sisters over this time?

She is famously one of the inventors of screen acting and her ability to express cinematically – nuanced and naturalistic – is something to behold. On the big screen she’s stunning, using fine-motor physical control that, as Angela Dalle Vacche has said, seemed to anticipate the close-up's subliminal impact.

Colin Sell accompanied with remarkably steady hands despite the on-screen excitement and combined so well with this remarkably advanced film which, blemishes aside, stands as one of the pinnacles of early European cinema.

"And she can dance..."