Finding Sumurun (1920-also reviewed) to be an enchanting tale,I decided to create a double bill of Ernst Lubitsch's Silent works,by discovering how wild this wildcat could be.
View on the film:
Detailed in the booklet from Masters of Cinema excellent box set that the movie flopped in Germany, (it was screened in no other countries)and that the film maker looked back on it later and said "I found the German audience in no mood for a picture which satirised militarism and war." Co-writer/(with regular collaborator of this era Hanns Kraly) marches in with a creation which binds together the separate themes and motifs that had been weaved in his earlier works.
Inspired by his experience of working on Berlin stages under theatre director Max Reinhardt, Lubitsch ambitiously alters the matting of each shot into highly stylised unusual cardboard cut out frames,with the real Bavarian Alps being made to look like it is contained inside a snow globe.
Along with continuing his surreal fantasy stylisation, Lubitsch crosses it over in the continuation of hid farce staging,with a hallucinatory atmosphere washing over the panning shots of the military fort,where comically macho troops go to battle against mustache twirling bandits.
Rolling onto the screen like a tornado, Pola Negri gives a magnetic performance as Rischka, whose fiery, seductive swaying from Negri grooves perfectly with the heightened atmosphere, and Negri untamed expressiveness clawing all the men off the screen,as the wild cat is unleashed.
View on the film:
Detailed in the booklet from Masters of Cinema excellent box set that the movie flopped in Germany, (it was screened in no other countries)and that the film maker looked back on it later and said "I found the German audience in no mood for a picture which satirised militarism and war." Co-writer/(with regular collaborator of this era Hanns Kraly) marches in with a creation which binds together the separate themes and motifs that had been weaved in his earlier works.
Inspired by his experience of working on Berlin stages under theatre director Max Reinhardt, Lubitsch ambitiously alters the matting of each shot into highly stylised unusual cardboard cut out frames,with the real Bavarian Alps being made to look like it is contained inside a snow globe.
Along with continuing his surreal fantasy stylisation, Lubitsch crosses it over in the continuation of hid farce staging,with a hallucinatory atmosphere washing over the panning shots of the military fort,where comically macho troops go to battle against mustache twirling bandits.
Rolling onto the screen like a tornado, Pola Negri gives a magnetic performance as Rischka, whose fiery, seductive swaying from Negri grooves perfectly with the heightened atmosphere, and Negri untamed expressiveness clawing all the men off the screen,as the wild cat is unleashed.