L'Atlantide

This is beautiful and strange but comes to us from so far back it doesn't register for what it really is. The novel it was based on is apparently a piece of exoticist fluff, popular then - a time of archaeology and excavations in faraway places promising original truth.

We get fantastical story of Saharan intrigue and adventure at first sight. There are hooded Tuareg figures, a pet leopard, a binge- drinking impresario, lots of feverish wandering about in rooms, a prophecy of death, and a memory inside memory that flashes back to Paris and the Folies Bergeres. All this is worthy of Sternberg and Dietrich in their their own escapades into sensual , opiate dreaming.

But it's all what an unreliable narrator presents to us of his supposed discovery of the lost city of Atlantis, elusive sand-particles of a story.

Your first clue is that there is a woman in the early stages of the lost expedition who writes an account - a script - of the narrative. The film is from that French tradition of layered fiction most notably expressed later in Rivette and Ruiz, but predates them all with the exception of Epstein, that mage of fluid dreaming.

It is not immensely effective. Sternberg made similar things work because he was madly in love with Dietrich with the kind of love that bends reality. Pabst lacks his own muse this time, Louise Brooks, so there are no strong currents around his woman. His brilliance is that he doesn't film big and gaudy, it's a piece of erotic fantasy after all, in an exotic place. And it's a story being recalled, a piece of sunbaked imagination.

The magic is not in the sets and costumes the way Lang did for Metropolis, though some of them impress the overall feel is earthy and makeshift, like something the narrator and listener may have walked through in their patrols and have the images for.

No, Pabst sustains the fantasy in the uncanny drafts of desert wind between something resembling reality and feverish dream, with fragile (for the time) borders between memory and fiction, the mind captive in its own world of stories. The pursuit of myth is only the opportunity to travel out in search of fictions spun from such fabrics of the imaginative mind.

What Pabst does here finds its continuation in Celine and Julie Go Boating (not Indiana Jones).

Eventually it is all swallowed up by the sands and time, every answer we had hoped for. There was a woman desired, possibly a cabaret dancer and that's all we can glean - consider the subplot in Rivette's film about a vaudeville tour in the middle east. The rest is gauzy and half-glimpsed.

And the prospect that Pabst has modeled the Queen after Leni Riefenstahl is tantalizing; cold beauty, a dancer, surrounded with mystical pageantry, plus the actress looks like her.

Atlantis in the Sahara? This English-language version of L'ATLANTIDE follows two French Foreign Legionnaires lost in the Algerian desert who stumble into the subterranean kingdom of Antinea, the enigmatic ruler of the title. Fantasy buffs may find this production is all elaborate build-up with little dramatic payoff, while the politically inclined may see this as a late spasm of colonial chic that exploits real people for their exoticism. However, for fans of director Pabst's erotic indirection [as in PANDORA'S BOX], this makes a heady lesson in how to build a sensuous, suggestive atmosphere.

Pabst sets his cameras gliding across the sands and into real locations in the Hoggar mountains. Towering, black-shrouded tribesmen appear, then sleek native women beckon with mysterious gestures of invitation. When they descend into the maze of tunnels that is Antinea's kingdom, they find a tipsy, excitable Quentin Crisp-y character, a longtime resident who holds some key to its history. As Antinea, the great German star Brigitte Helm has a mesmerizing presence as she lolls on a divan, with a menacing leopard at her side. Equally imposing is a monumental stone head of her visage that figures in several memorable compositions. When the protagonist [who is not a traditional hero] is first summoned to Antinea, what unfathomable depravity will take place? They play chess, of course. The story comes from a popular French novel, but it is Pabst's fluid style that makes this masterly kitsch.

This is the 3rd, and most recent, in the three films I've seen by controversial director G.W. Pabst, after his extraordinary silent classics, 'Pandora's Box' and 'Diary of a Lost Girl', both starring legendary screen goddess Louise Brooks. It's the English-language version of 'L'Atlantide', itself a sound-remake of the '21 silent film by Jacques Feyder, and, by being mostly shot on location in the Sahara Desert, went against the grain at the time of shooting movies exclusively in studio.

In Brigitte Helm, mainly known for her starring role of Fritz Lang's sci-fi magnum opus, 'Metropolis', he had a stunning villainous female, who would have made a great femme fatale, had she continued on the following decade in film noir. The script is nondescript and a tad melodramatic, and the other actors are decidedly pedestrian, but Pabst's visual elan and directorial genius shines through and lifts an otherwise drab picture. Worth your time if you're a fan of adventure films of the era, however.

As I watched this, I thought, what a nice print. The sound is good. The images are nice. It's certainly good at capturing the desert and the lost city in the title. Then I got to the key element. I just could not get involved in the story. Try as I might, I never had any empathy with any of the characters. They seem to be pulled around by non sequiters. It reminded me a little of the TV series "The Prisoner." There seem to be random forces at work that cannot be fathomed. Throw in the fact that there is something missing beside these aforementioned motivations, and it just doesn't work for me. There are lots of close-ups. This seems to be part of a legacy from the silent film, a transition piece if you will. Maybe, what it needs is those speech boxes, telling what the characters are thinking or presenting their reasoning. As a period piece it's interesting. Maybe someday a person will clean it up and restore a few things.

COMRADESHIP (1931) can be said to have marked the relative end of the most fruitful period in the career of renowned German film-maker G. W. Pabst that had seen him create a handful of classics of World Cinema; in fact, his next venture was a very ambitious undertaking – an adaptation (in distinct German, French and English-language versions) of Pierre Benoit's epic adventure novel L'ATLANTIDE – but one that, in hindsight, would prove only partially successful. Another distinguished film-maker, Frenchman Jacques Feyder, had already made a celebrated stab at the material as a 3-hour Silent epic in 1921 and, over the years, other established film-makers – John Brahm, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer, Vittorio Cottafavi, George Pal, Ruggero Deodato, Bob Swaim and even "Walt Disney" – would find themselves attracted to the subject of the mythical lost empire. Admittedly, I have never read Benoit's original source and this 1932 English-language version is the first cinematic adaptation of it that I am watching but, is not Atlantis supposed to be an undersea kingdom? In fact, a recent study even went so far as to imply that the island of Malta (from where I hail) might well have formed part of Atlantis centuries ago! How come, therefore, that here (and, reportedly, likewise the other adaptations) it is situated in sandy desert dunes? A criticism leveled at the Feyder film had been that his choice of leading lady (the entrancing Queen of Atlantis) was all wrong but Pabst certainly got that bit down perfectly when he cast Brigitte Helm – best-known for playing the two Marias in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927) as Antinea. The plot has a little of H. Rider Haggard's SHE about it as two legionnaires stumble onto Atlantis in the Sahara desert and lose themselves within its labyrinthine dungeons replete with Antinea's past male conquests that have either gone mad or been mummified! The two male leads seemed slightly overage to me but, in any case, whatever acting capabilities they might possess would essentially have been dwarfed by the awesome sets and imaginative camera-work. As a matter of fact, this is where the film's main fault lies: the protagonists' plight never moves us as it should, even when one kills the other over Antinea or when, after her terrible secret is revealed to him, the survivor decides to go back to Atlantis anyway. The fleeting appearances of an eccentric 'prisoner' of Antinea (who speaks with a distinctly upper-class British accent and sports a Daliesque moustache) adds to the fun quotient but, overall, the stilted rendition of the dialogue (even Helm utters her own scarce lines in English) is on a par with other films from the early Talkie era. For the record, although every listing I have checked of this film gives its running time as 87 minutes, the version I watched ran for just 78! Incidentally, a movie I should be catching up with presently – DESERT LEGION (1953) with Alan Ladd, Richard Conte and Arlene Dahl – is said to have been partially inspired by Benoit's L'ATLANTIDE itself!