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Not Stroheim's Alpine summit (Blind Husbands) but Ernst Lubitsch's, where love and death are sorted out or combined. A Swiss village during the Napoleonic Wars, the disarmament demanded by the occupiers is heeded by all but the mountain man (John Barrymore), so rugged that he enters with a freshly slain goat slung over his shoulder. "My gun is my life. Who dares to take it from me?" The pastor's niece (Camilla Horn) does by simply asking, he can't deny his beloved a symbolic rifle. The local feast celebrates the burg's liberation as well as the couple's romance, "nothing can ever threaten our happiness again," cut to the amorous peasant (Mona Rico) behind a witchy mask. A night's indiscretion sends the lovers to church with unwanted partners, he weds the spitfire and she weds the stolid suitor (Victor Varconi). "This isn't a very happy marriage," observe the bell-ringers. Something of a tragic reworking of The Wild Cat, an expressive melodrama with a mise en scène to match. Murnau and Fanck are visible influences, a mobile camera for figures silhouetted against vast, gelid expanses. The emotional torment of matrimonial chimes is answered by a shot in the void, sounds in a silent visualized by Lubitsch through superimpositions and visages, as befits a filmmaker on the verge of shaping the Hollywood musical. Barrymore's riotous ardor and Horn's dolorous delicacy, passions burning through a blizzard. "Don't separate us again" is the plea to the heavens promptly answered, the fatal and the sublime collapsing on a screen blanched with snow, cf. Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife. With Hobart Bosworth, Evelyn Selbie, and Bodil Rosing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |