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End of the affair and beginning of the revolution, right before Sternberg's The Last Command and almost as dazzling. Incisive strokes are G.W. Pabst's specialty—the black-market rotter (Fritz Rasp) is introduced with his feet up in a messy room, he trades a cigarette holder for a bottle of champagne but holds on to a racy card. (An orgy swirls outside, it's Crimea at the end of the Russian Civil War.) "From bad to worse" is the report on the situation from the French political observer (Eugen Jensen), whose daughter (Édith Jéhanne) luxuriates in the memory of a romance with the Bolshevik leader (Uno Henning). The lovers' gauzy meadow turns into rainy rubble, back home the girl's seamy uncle (Adolf E. Licho) receives her at a little private detective agency remembered by Truffaut in Stolen Kisses. ("Why should a misfortune cost so much?" cries the cuckold served with the bill.) An Austrian eye on the Franco-Russian dalliance: The word "Paris" is scrawled on a foggy window pane and seen backwards, it dissolves to onion domes and Red Army demonstrations. The sightless maiden (Brigitte Helm) is courted by Rasp's dandified rodent, at their engagement party he holds her with one hand while groping the heroine with the other. (Even the shady barmaid warns about him: "He's a villain!") Mobile subjective inserts, rarefied sets and documentary open-air streets, all part of the formal bariolage. Stroheim is present in the uncle's frenzy of imaginary fortunes and subsequent murder (a candle is held under his face for the jack-o'-lantern effect), the glimpse of the teary bride across the street is a signature Pabst modulation. The Zhivago adumbration is inescapable, though there's a closer relation to Resnais' La Guerre est finie. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Lach. With Hertha von Walther, Hans Jaray, Sig Arno, and Vladimir Sokoloff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |