Salomé

Just saw this film on tubi. My jaw stayed open. Where to start? The costumes, makeup, dancing, plot. Not much of the Salome of the Bible or Hollywood era fer sure! Herod looked like a circus clown. Herodotus like the grandma in the Addams family. Salome like she ran out of the beauty parlor with perm rods still on her hair. The guy with the little pasties on his nipples and a big pearl necklace. The little boys with huge headpieces. I have to admit, it did astound me. You have to have an open mind to watch it. In today's world, everything in this film would be banned in certain states. Since I'm not of that mindset, I watched, looking instead as entertainment. I love silent movies; my husband and I watch quite a lot of them. This one will go down in our viewing history of the weirdest, and that says a lot.

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

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.

Salomé is set in the palace of Herod, actually in a feasting hall and a courtyard only, so it's a very hermetic movie. The idea is that Salomé is annoyed about John the Baptist rejecting her advances and so asks for his head on a silver platter, this is after she performs a highly charged dance for her father, for which he agrees to grant her any wish.

The art design is meant to be based very much on the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. I saw a large version of Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist at an exhibition once, it's a quite monstrously beautiful thing, and you get a feeling of a Salomé who wants to play with John's blood. If you also read Beardsley's "The Story of Venus and Tannhauser", which is a fine read, written by the great man whilst dying slowly in the casinos of Deauville, you will find naked erotic content that has nothing in common with this movie. The movie is perverse but in a quite different way, it has a beauty that is not nearly as profane as Beardsley's, but as good in its own way, it's Thespian and ripe with impotency and death. However that doesn't go anywhere near far enough in explaining the luminous and unnerving images created by Nazimova and M. Bryant.

So I think the scene is set very well, of an almost pre-moral world which is metaphorically benighted. Herod presides, a fish-faced man with a droopy wreath, and dirty darkened teeth which are surrounded by a rouged mouth and a heavily whitened face. He's got the appearance of a senile erotomaniac.

Salomé is a milk-and-honey-eyed nymph who peers out tentatively from kohl rings beneath a baubeled coiffure. She is ignorantly innocent as well as tempestuous, and is played by Nazimova, director Charles Bryant's wife. Beardsley's Salomé in contrast has been inducted into depraved rites.

John the Baptist is a gaunt imprisoned man with a fanatic's stare who is portrayed rather irreligiously as a kind of Christian sadist, wishing all sorts of nasties on the women of the court. Shots of him in his cell are brilliant and are positively Sternberg-ian in their luminosity and blasphemous nature (think of the way Russian orthodoxy is portrayed in The Scarlet Empress).

The genius of the film really I think is that it has a slow miasmic tempo, which is achieved by always having slowly wafting fans towering over the court to cool the night down.

Another satisfying thing about the film is that the intertitles, presumably poached from Wilde, are extraordinarily well written. The main detractor from L'Herbier's L'Argent for me is very substandard and naive intertitles. Intertitles can generally only detract from a movie, in Salomé we have a totally unusual example of the opposite.

It's a haunting movie, which more than once made me mutter astounded compliments under my breath. Examples including the "leap", the veil dance, and the peacock montage. I would like to have been there to see what they did with the veil dance to make it so diaphanous, I have an idea they could have done it with strong lighting, the effect was pretty amazing to me.

Initially I was skeptical when I heard that Alla Nazimova, 42 when this movie was made, was playing the 14 year old dancer Salome, but except for the extreme close-ups she actually manages to pull it off. Her Salome is a pouty but utterly monstrous Lolita, who would no doubt casually order the death of any underling who didn't satisfy her most fleeting, girlish whim. Evil yes, but like Herod you can't stop looking at her in her marvelous glam headgear and wigs, looking for all the world like a party girl headed out to a nineties' rave (on the other hand her fleshy mother and leering, lipsticked stepfather suggest the grotesques of Fellini's Satyricon, making me wonder if Fellini was influenced by this movie). Still, as compelling as Nazimova's performance is, much of this film's impact arises from Natacha Rambova's eye catching costumes and set designs. Based on the Beardsley drawings that accompany some editions of Oscar Wilde's play, they often resemble insect parts—-beautiful but rather unsettling, like Herod's court itself. As far as the dramatic action goes, they are almost too eye catching –they grab your attention and hold it nearly at the expense of all else. However I'm not sure that this effect wasn't intentional on the part of both Nazimova and Rambova (the guardsmen, for example, wear clay wigs that perhaps are deliberately meant to suggest statues). As I recall the original play was rather static—it's been a while since I read it, but what I remember mainly is the exquisite, poetic dialogue rather than the plot. At any rate, the movie is probably best viewed as a series of fantastic tableaux.

An odd but completely absorbing little film that deserves to be better known.