Salomé

Having read the reviews of this on the Silents Majority website and in Time Out film guide I was curious. It looked good from stills and the play is one of my favourites ... the film is extremely odd. Nazimova, who looks like Gloria Swanson only more over the top, is a seductive and teasing Salome, dancing the seven veils with style, driving Herod mad, taunting the Baptist (a gaunt stick of a man who is quite disturbing to look at). The guards are all extremely camp and OTT and the whole film has that feeling of the extremes of twenties decadence. One feels Wilde would have approved. Not a patch on the opera but a decent stab at a play which is full of excess. It just wouldn't work with sound. It has to be images, and this is full of them.

This film is brilliant. Go back and re-read the play, then re-read the biography of Oscar Wilde. Forget about the opera and other dramatic presentations. The film beautifully represents the slow pacing and strangeness of the play, and the personality of Wilde. Admittedly, for the first few milliseconds of watching the film I felt like bursting into laughter. Then the penny dropped, and I realized what was happening.This is not a blockbuster, it is an unusually thoughtful interpretation of a classic.

By the early 1920s, Alla Nazimova had lost her standing as one of the premiere actresses of her time. She had an appeal some compare to Greta Garbo, with much-acclaimed performances in films such as "War Brides" (1916), "Revelation" (1918), and "Out of the Fog" (1919). Unfortunately, these films are presently unavailable. Today, Nazimova's most widely seen silent film appears to be her ludicrously impressionistic version of "Camille" (1921), which was precisely the sort of film which made audiences and exhibitors conclude Nazimova's star had set. By the time "Salome" was released, her appeal was low.

This is unfortunate because "Salome" was the best of Nazimova's art-house period, and could have been a hit comparable to some of the foreign imports of the day. It follows the plot of Oscar Wilde's play, but works more as a visual feast of images. Nazimova's opening hair style alone is among best in all of filmdom. A heavily "homosexual look" (many said) to the film has been said to stem from Nazimova's use of an exclusively gay cast and crew, including most notable stylistic contributions from Natacha Rambova (aka Mrs. Rudolph Valentino). Like a lot of hyperbolized Hollywood, the whole is more of a bisexual affair.

********* Salome (10/22) Charles Bryant ~ Nazimova, Nigel de Brulier, Mitchell Lewis, Rose Dione

Alla Nazimova in the silent "Salome" at the Bird's Eye View Festival, National Film Theatre:

The film and accompaniment were much more enjoyable than I'd been expecting -- both from what I'd heard of it and, alas, from last year's precedent of female performers... I can see why it has been described as too long: the whole thing is more operatic than filmic, and I do remember marvelling even at the time over the way that a single line in the Bible story -- "Bring me the head of John the Baptist!" -- is strung out over half-a-dozen shots before the detail of what Salome wants is even disclosed. Never mind the fact that it's repeated five or six times at great length before she actually gets Herod to agree...

But the key to "Salome" is Aubrey Beardsley; apparently Nazimova deliberately set out to create a work of art based on the Beardsley illustrations to Oscar Wilde's play "Salome". As the lady who did the introduction told us: sometimes it's a bit too obvious that the director is more interested in reproducing the original illustrated poses than in any kind of dramatic plausibility!

Now, I don't *know* the drawings for Wilde's "Salome", and even so I could recognise the inimitable Beardsley style. If her main concern was trying to animate the drawings, it's a brilliant job... But I found it quite compelling as an experience as well.

Really it isn't a true silent film at all: it starts off with about six screens of pure text, for heaven's sake! It's a series of tableaux illustrating each utterance as it's given -- more like a ballet than a piece of cinema, only easier to follow the plot of... It's pure spectacle, with a cast of grotesques (the only one I didn't take to was the implausibly hairy Herodias -- I can guess at the sort of illustration that was supposed to echo, but that sort of hair just looks messy in photographs, as opposed to being delineated in wave after wave of close-drawn lines).

But it didn't strike me as too long at all, and that was on account of the music. It was the sort of thing I'd never encounter normally, let alone choose to listen to -- just as I'd never normally subject myself to a heavily stylised, 'arty' film whose acting is about as artificial as it gets. ("Salome" is about as naturalistic as "Beyond the Rocks"... but it's so far over the top that it gets away with it, whereas the Swanson/Valentino picture just sags.) The performer was a young Indian-looking woman credited only as "Bishi", with an impressively long list of achievements and venues which meant nothing at all to me -- evidently we move in quite separate worlds. Her costume resembled that of Herodias, while her golden hairpiece would not have appeared amiss within the film itself.

The music was a 'fusion' of sitar, electronica, live percussion, quarter-tone-sounding vocals and simple Western-style melodic lines to the song; quite indescribable and very alien and exotic to my ears. But for this queer off-beat decadent style it worked amazingly well: unsettling and beautiful in equal measure. Even snatches of English lyric over the action -- let alone over the intertitles! -- worked: the words she was singing were no part of the words on screen, and yet they formed an extra dimension describing the characters, and returned and fitted later, linking back. It was uncanny. During those long, long shots you were sitting there absorbed in the music, and the music and the images fed on one another...

Casting was good. Herod was a loose-lipped tyrant weakling reminiscent of Charles Laughton's later Henry VIII; Nazimova is a tiny slip of a thing who can pass as a child (she must have been pushing forty when she made this, surely?); Jokanaan is an incredible beaky emaciated charismatic, wild and ugly and yet believable as an object of lust. Herodias I didn't care for (and the music didn't work so well where moments of comedy were intended).

Costumes and make-up are... so far over the top as to be an art in themselves. Again, the reference is clearly Beardsley. We don't get to see the severed head, which is a bit surprising -- it's usually the pièce de résistance of the special effects department -- but probably a wise decision, as the idea of kissing one of those smeared drained mutton-like objects is always deeply unalluring! The image of blood seeping over the moon, on the other hand, is uncanny.

Apparently the American press were deeply suspicious of the film on its release, while the English press said it was Great Art... "Salome" is far too static and wordy to be a feature film in the terms of 1923: it's verging on being experimental art (Nazimova supposedly thought of it in terms of a Russian ballet). But in combination with the music of Bishi it's a mesmerising experience unlike any normal cinematic entertainment. I found it still a little stilted at times ("thou rejectedst me"!?) but in its own terms very largely successful.

If I'd known what I was getting into, I shouldn't have gone. But I'm certainly glad that I did!

Oscar Wilde's 1892 retelling of the Bible story of Salome, who danced before Herod to win the death of John the Baptist, was considered so depraved that the High Lord Chamberlain of England refused to grant it a license for public performance--and in the wake of Wilde's scandalous exposure as a homosexual and his subsequent imprisonment, all of Wilde's plays were swept from the stage. Wilde, who died in 1900, never saw his play publicly performed.

The worth of Wilde's plays were reestablished by the 1920s, but even so SALOME, with its convoluted and exotic language and hothouse sense of depravity, remained something of a theatrical untouchable--and certainly so where the screen was concerned. No one dared consider it until Russian-born Alla Nazimova, who is generally credited with bringing Stanislaski technique to the New York stage, decided to film it in 1923.

It proved a disaster. Theatergoers in large cities might be prepared to accept Wilde's lighter plays, but Main Street America was an entirely different matter--especially where the notorious SALOME was concerned, particularly when the film was dogged hints of Nazimova's lesbianism and by the rumor that it had been done with an "all Gay cast" in honor of Wilde himself. Critics, censors, and the public damned the film right and left. It received only limited distribution and faded quickly from view. Even so, the legend of both the film and its exotic star grew over time.

Given that much of the original play's power is in Wilde's language, SALOME suffers from translation to silent film--the title cards are often awkwardly long, and in general fail to convey the tone of Wilde's voice; moreover, the convolutions of the original have been necessarily simplified for the silent form. Even so, it is a remarkable thing in a purely visual sense. Directed in a deliberately flat style by Charles Bryant and designed by Natacha Rambova (wife of Valentino, she would also design Nazimova's silent CAMILLE), the look of the film seeks to reproduce the playscript's equally infamous illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley--and succeeds to a remarkable degree.

And then there is Nazimova herself. Well into her forties at the time she played the teenage Salome, Nazimova is an electric presence: while she often shows her years in close up, she is remarkably effective in capturing the willful, petulant, and ultimately depraved Salome in facial expression and body posture, balancing an over-the-top style with moments of quiet realism to most remarkable effect. The supporting cast is also quite memorable, with Mitchell Lewis (Herod) and Rose Dione (Herodias) particularly notable.

I would hesitate to recommend this film anyone other than someone already well versed in silent movies--and even then I would give the warning that it is unlikely to be what you thought it would. Still, this is a classic of its kind, and fans of silent cinema are urged to see it.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer