|
"The applause is deafening," growls the slumming maestro to his nonexistent audience, a note picked up by Osborne for The Entertainer. Marionettes on a miniature stage, replaced by a young runaway for the club-footed artiste (John Barrymore) who molds a dancer in his own image. (The Golem and Frankenstein's Monster are mentioned as models, and there's a glimpse of Boris Karloff as the boy's brutal father.) The protégée (Donald Cook) has a brilliant career and a sweetheart in the ballet company (Marian Marsh), the patron strenuously objects to the romance, "a very jealous god," cf. The Red Shoes. Mitteleuropa, Berlin, Paris, opera houses and cabarets. The fearful impresario recounts a dream of flight cut short when not manipulating those around him, "mud" is his favorite metaphor. "Sometimes I think I almost admire him for the very power that should make me despise him." The genius in the provinces and "the artistic temperament" that engulfs, all grist for the mill of Michael Curtiz's Germanic mise en scène. Hunched under a top hat yet with his eyes perpetually burning, Barrymore brings imperious gravity to the protagonist's gnarled obsession, charging Anton Grot's sets with silent-era intensity. (Stroheim achieves a similar alchemy in Cruze's forgotten The Great Gabbo.) Control and movement mark the essence of the métier, strings are there to be pulled and tripped over. The climax unfolds behind the curtain as the delirious shadow play of a brush with an ax-wielding hophead, the corpse rests atop a plaster Moloch. "I make my own blood run cold, my friend." The poignant coda finds the comical blankness of the sidekick (Charles Butterworth) now standing for unutterable sadness. With Luis Alberni, Carmel Myers, André Luguet, and Frankie Darro. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |