We belong to each other, I would never let anyone else
have you…
Brigitte Helm stands to the right of the screen, a dark
shadow receding behind her on the wall as gradually she lowers her right arm
with a fisted hand slowly unclenched as she realisation saps the energy from
her body. The game is up, devasted and all alone, she’s out of focus and for
the first time, off balance… is this it, is there no way back? Don’t bet on it.
Ivan Mosjoukine’s eye’s well up, the most well-honed tear
ducts in all silent film, febrile emotion twitching across his mouth and brow, as
truth dawns and resolution nears. How do these people lay emotion so bare that
we still feel it after almost a century of artifice and the endless replaying
of trope and technique? This story was old even when it was first told but I’m
still in bits.
This is Fantasy Silent Film, a game in which the combination
of two of the best strikers in cinema muto both score hattrick after
hattrick combining in ways that seemed impossible especially to this viewer who
had no idea they had ever played together. Manolescu… Ivan “The Cat” Mosjoukine
versus Brigitte “The Panther” Helm in a battle for our eyeballs, our attention…
our love. Honestly, you could have taken the script for Carry on Cabby
and given it to these two and we’d all be collapsed in a pool of utter distraction.
You want engagement well here he and she are…
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| Brigitte Helm |
Director Viktor Tourjansky, had previously worked with
fellow emigree Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin/ Mosjoukine on Michel Strogoff (1926)
and also assisted Abel Gance for Napoléon (1927) and boy does it show. This
film shows every late silent period trick in the book, from audacious single
take shots of Brigitte and Ivan getting out of a car, walking across through
hotel revolving doors and through reception, to mixing positive and negative
during a dream sequence and following every movement and expression of the
performers with a camera so mobile you could pin a tail on it and call it
Rover!
It’s a feast for the eyes and mine are welling up because I
wasn’t able to see it on the big screen BUT at least we have the Giornate’s
Silent Stream and I’ve no doubt this will get a screening in GB soon enough. In
addition to the performers we also get exteriors including the Alps, Paris and
Monte Carlo… all beautifully captured by cinematographer Carl Hoffmann, who had
some form, including Fritz Lang’s epic Die Nibelungen and Murnau’s Faust.
The story was adapted by Robert Liebmann and inspired by the
true story of the Romanian fraudster George Manolescu, a notorious fixture of the
Berlin press at the turn of the century and source for three other films. In
this version, Manolescu is inspired to raise his criminal game after fleeing
his debtors in Paris and meeting a femme most fatale in the form of feline Cleo
(Brigitte Helm) on route to Monte Carlo. Cleo is being kept in the manner to
which she is accustomed by the plump gangster Jack (Heinrich George). The two
meet on a train and share a night’s intimacy after Cleo sneaks into George’s
compartment to avoid the police who are on Jack’s trail.
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| Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin/ Mosjoukine |
Needless to say the combination of George/Ivan and
Cleo/Brigitte is absolutely electric with the elder actor’s inherent delicacies
balanced by the uncanny flexibility of Helm’s physicality. He touches her and
she bends her back, forcing that unbelievable profile at an awkward angle
against the cabin seat as she tries to avoid him. You sense that he respected
his co-stars, just a hunch, because there seems absolute trust on show. How
else to explain their ease in creating sexual tension? Fire and ice but (coolest)
cat on (cooler) cat!
Cleo always follows the money and dumps George at the
station in Monte Carlo before he spots her in the street and finds his way to
her hotel room. Jack’s arrival forces him to action especially when the thug
pulls a gun and Cleo’s cries alert the police who finally get their man. Jack
out of the way, George has only one way to keep his new girl and that’s to steal
jewels from the old lady next door in order to provide a viable economic and
amorous alternative for Cleo and the two quickly become partners in love and
crime. There’s a lovely sequence later on when George’s disguises for his
crime-spree to come are lined up like a deck of cards… it’s the romance of
Riviera robbery; everybody loves a con in the sun.
The two move on to Paris where Cleo’s an irresistible object to many a moveable man, flaunting her powers in front of George; the two are alike but so different and whilst he can manipulate and emotionally defraud, she cannot help herself or perhaps she is less controlled. She’s not a soulless vamp though as we shall see; these two are, of course, a tragedy waiting to happen.
Sure enough Jack, out of prison, tracks them down and in a
face off with George, fractures his skull with a heavy ornament, leaving Cleo shouting murder.
The film changes course… George wakes up in hospital being
cared for by nice Nurse Jeanette (Dita Parlo); it’s the calm after the storm
and, almost too calm if I’m honest but, and Parlo can hold her own in this company
and is the catalyst for a change in the relationship between the two leads. Can
these two leopards change their spots?
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| I am only fulfilling my duty as a nurse… (yeah, right sister) |
This is a truly exceptional film with a sparkling digital restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung which took over four years to combine as many original materials, in order to reconstruct the film according to the 1929 censorship certificate. All elements were scanned in 4K at L’Immagine Ritrovata as detailed in Luciano Palumbo’s notes on the Giornate site. What a job they did.
John Sweeney’s accompaniment wrapped itself around this film
like the most luxurious of musical blankets, never strained but not just easy
on the ear, as dynamic and quicksilver as the performers and the camerawork, duetting
with Helm and Mosjoukine tonally, emotionally and stylistically. Oh to have
been in the same room… Maybe not tomorrow but soon.
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| Jack of all trades, master too. |
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