Bestia

Pola Negri is a small-town girl with great ambition and few morals. She steals money from her lover to go to the city, where she hopes to become a star dancer. But there are predators in the big city far more dangerous than she.

I suppose one could call this "boldly" acted, but really, it seems histrionic, to choose a ten-dollar word to ease the sting. Miss Negri is lovely, and the dance numbers are well performed, but the acting is overdone. Perhaps this is because this is a Polish film. I suspect those were largely produced for the local market, where this sort of performance was preferred. Likely the shortage of films in the war period, as well as Miss Negri's youthful vivacity made it a hit.

Hertz' compositions suggest to me that he was strongly influenced by the pre-Academician Russian cinema. That is hardly surprising.

Poland's Pola Negri, a silent movie star in the 1920's who was one of the few actresses to make the successful transition to sound in the 1930's has only one surviving film from her native country produced in her early days of cinema, January 1917's "The Polish Dancer," aka "Bestia." Only 20 years old at the time of production, Negri already displayed an unusual wealth of talent and spunk in her fourth feature film. Negri three years earlier had a role in Poland's first ever feature film, 1914's "Niewolnica zmystow," but because of World War One, most of Poland's early features are lost. "The Polish Dancer" is credited as being one of the earliest viewable Polish feature films today.

It's only natural Negri was cast in "Bestia" as a dancer. As a poor young girl who lost her father when he was arrested and sent to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities, Pola was accepted to Warsaw's Imperial Ballet Academy for her exceptional coordination. She eventually received a role in a 1912 play at 15-years-old, and in the following year was in her first movie. Both the stage play and the film were dancing roles for her.

"The Polish Dancer" displays Negri's adroit dancing skills during one sequence in particular. Her role as Pola Basznikow appears to be written just for the young actress. In the film, Pola runs away from home, decides to take a "loan" from her drunken boyfriend, and then audition, and win, a position for a cabaret dancer. A married man takes to the winsome Pola, setting the ball rolling for a series of tragedies.

A print of "The Polish Dancer" was able to survive the destruction of WW1 in Central Europe when a United States distributor was able to purchase the rights of the movie and import it. Thankfully for those Pola Negri fans who admire her body of work, the film gives a rare insight on the beginnings of one of cinema's first international movie stars.

And if that's not enough to recommend it, the immortal Pola Negri gives a well-rounded performance and her star appeal is abundantly clear even at this early stage of her career.

The film itself doesn't have much to recommend it beyond Miss Negri, but the remastered print I viewed on YouTube was quite good and -with a nice piano score - is a pleasant enough way to see the embryonic Pola absolutely poised to take the world by storm.

Although often described as a "vamp" by film writers, it certainly does a disservice to this legendary star to limit her appeal to this clichéd stereotype for Pola is so much more in every performance.

Although the "vamp" outline is contained in the film - young woman steals money from a beau, and runs away from her family to the big city were she became a famous dancer and steals a married man from his wife & daughter - Pola's character retains the audience's sympathy and does the right thing in the end.

It's easy to see why Pola would shortly take Europe and America by storm and let's hope more of her filmography continues to be rediscovered and saved.