The Bohemian Girl

The first twenty minutes of this silent adaptation of the operetta are missing. What is gone is basically the set-up, which explains how Austrian Count Henry Vibart's daughter winds up with a bunch of gypsies, and how Polish Count Ivor Novello winds up being adopted by them, following the Partition of Poland. By the time the little girl has grown up to become Gladys Cooper, she and Novello are in love. This makes Gypsy Queen Constance Collier jealous.

Making a silent adaptation of an operetta would seem to be thankless task, especially to a modern viewer with no sympathy for the theatrical form. Songs which define the show are reduced to phrases in the titles, and the stage spectacle of a number lost entirely. What is left are some very interesting credentials, including roles for Ellen Terry (as the nurse), C. Aubrey Smith as a gypsy, source novel by Cervantes and Joseph von Sternberg with his third movie credit as an assistant director. Some writers claim that some of the visual dazzle of the movie are his vision. I find that suspect. At this distance, it's impossible to tell if some of the staging is his idea, and he would repeat that sort of ornate mise-en-scene later, or if he noted what worked in this production and thought it worthy of redoing.

In any case, what survives is an interesting work, if only for the talent associated with it, and an example of what the British film industry was producing right at the peak of post-World-War-One movie making, before the industry turned down.

The other reviewer on this page has sufficiently given the thread of the romantic narrative, so I won't repeat it here. Novello in his fourth film has little to do but stand around and look melancholy, which he does rather well. He was only 29 when this film was released and he is still a bit boyishly beautiful. Indeed Gladys Cooper was famed as a great beauty of the time, but in the one close-up they share, she seems rather plain and no match for his perfection.

The film is typical of its day. The camera moves but once during the film, it dollies in to the dream pair during the Marble Halls sequence, otherwise it is static. The shots are primarily long and medium shots with very few two shots and even fewer close-ups. Acting is alternately melodramatic and restrained. One has the feeling one is watching tableaux.

Ellen Terry has little to do as the nurse and no close-ups. Her appearance in the film is a notable one, however.

All in all, a curio, worth seeing only for fans of Novello and Cooper.