Sangue gitano

As was the case with many other nations, especially after the war, the German movie industry struggled against the flood of American films into German cinemas. Ernst Lubitsch, like other prominent filmmakers, was surely acutely aware of this disadvantage. Beginning in 1918, he went from being mostly a comedic director to a supposedly more serious one of pseudo-historical tragedies, with bigger budgets and starring Pola Negri. This new direction, aside "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and the other stylized art pictures, did prove to be successful in paving the way for the exportation of German films (and its filmmakers).

Additionally, many of them, unlike the more or less distinctly German pictures such as "Caligari", were made intentionally to look more like American and other foreign pictures. This one, "Carmen", came after two American versions--both released in 1915--one by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Geraldine Farrar and the other by Raoul Walsh and starring Theda Bara. Compared to DeMille's film, Lubitsch's "Carmen" appears unpolished, but I don't think that's bad. Because of their glitter, DeMille's scenes often seem staged and stagy. Although Lubitsch's direction isn't recommended, either, aside from some occasional dolly shots and the addition of framing the story as a told story.

Additionally, Farrar was annoying as Carmen. Negri is much better in comparison, but still rather unremarkable, I think. Edna Purviance, in Chaplin's burlesque, is still my favorite Carmen. The Walsh-Bara version doesn't exist anymore, as doesn't many early Fox films that burned in their vaults, so there's very little one can say about it. One thing to mention, however, is that Theda Bara's character was a vamp prototype, and Fox advertised it creatively, which is similar to Negri's persona and Ufa's publicity of her. Both Negri and Lubitsch emigrated to work in Hollywood. Negri wasn't very successful, but it's no wonder that Lubitsch was an even better American filmmaker than a German one.

I saw the American version of this film, re-titled "Gypsy Blood", which was kind of the original intention, anyhow.

Adapted from the later parts of the novella of the same name by Prosper Merimee, Carmen is Ernst Lubitsch's third surviving feature, and he was still firmly in the part of his career where his voice was muffled by studio needs. There was room for him to operate a bit within the bounds of this story of a Spanish army officer who allows himself to fall to his lowest through the wiles of a gypsy woman, but mostly this feels like Lubitsch continuing his early education in how to make films work overall. It's his most accomplished film up to this point, for sure, but it also suffers from the silent film medium's propensity for thin characterization due to the lack of dialogue.

Told in a wraparound narrative by a man around a campfire (something that doesn't really pay off, to be honest), we watch Don Jose Navarro (Harry Liedtke) arrive to a new military post where he is due to fulfil the promise that his mother as well as his betrothed, Dolores (Grete Diercks). He reaches the small town of his new post and quickly falls under the power of the gypsy woman Carmen (Pola Negri). The mysterious alure of this gypsy woman is what drives Jose downward. He first succumbs to simply giving her some time, but when he's supposed to arrest her for a crime, he ends up letting her go. This event causes his superior officer to strip him of his rank while, coincidentally becoming enraptured with Carmen himself. This comes to a head when Jose kills the officer in an impassioned moment, leading to Jose needing to leave the military life behind, all for the love of a woman who doesn't seem to care for him all that much.

The portrait of the two main characters is interesting in contrasts. Jose is written as a hopeless Romantic, and Liedtke performs him with all of the grand, sweeping gestures of over the top silent acting. He's completely in love with the wrong woman, mostly because he's exotic (some depth in the writing and dialogue would have helped deepen this a bit), but the woman is pretty much the exact opposite. Negri plays Carmen much less extravagantly. Where Jose is a grand romantic, Carmen is a cynic with no real attachments to anything, and Negri performs her reactions to Jose with reserved disdain. It's easy to see how she would simply abandon him as he descended in life. It was his uniform that attracted her to him, what little she was actually attracted to him to begin with, and as he became less important, she met him with just increasing dismissal.

Jose becomes just another bandit and smuggler while Carmen abandons things to go to Gibraltar where she organizes bandit raids on unsuspecting army officers and also falls in love with the famous matador Escamillo (Magnus Stifter). Everything has to come together tragically, and it does. It works well enough for the whole to feel as a single work (what was really missing from The Eyes of the Mummy), but those early scenes establishing our characters feel too thin for what's asked of them later. It's an issue in a lot of silent dramas where characters just don't quite have the immediacy and depth required to make late dramatic twists and turns feel impactful.

There's skill on display from Lubitsch this early in his career. There are more than one large scale, though all to brief, sequence from large crowd shots in the town to a gun battle towards the end. It's clearly filmed and edited in a way that was probably influenced by how Griffith was filming things in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Lubitsch was showing promise early, though the limits of the film's length and the medium's own constraints prevented him from going too far with it all this early.

However, after the dull disappointment that was The Eyes of the Mummy, it's nice to see Lubitsch recovering with something handsome and well made. That it doesn't connect fully is unfortunate, but he's not done yet.

It seems funny now, but back in the silent days, musicals and operas were often made into movies. But, without the beautiful music, you wonder what the point must have been. Well, Bizet's opera, "Carmen" was apparently very popular fodder during the silents, as I've seen two versions (plus Chaplin's "Burlesque of Carmen") and according to the excellent review already posted on IMDb, there is yet another version but it does not appear to exist any longer (starred Theda Bara). To me, not having the music is a fatal problem--so no matter how good the story is, too much of the play is missing for it to be all that great. Seeing "Carmen" without music is like going on a honeymoon and being told not to touch!! It loses a lot in the deal.

This German version has the distinction of being directed by a very young and inexperienced Ernst Lubitsch and starring the vampish Pola Negri (who was famous for her supposed adoration of Valentino...after he died). While it's pretty good and has relatively restrained acting and decent sets, the overall effect is just okay. It's not really bad...just what you'd expect from a butchered opera made into a silent film.

So is it worth seeing? Well, it all depends. If you are a total nut-job like me who adores silents, then by all means--though the ending seems all but missing. If you are a novice to silents, there are many, many, many silents out there that are simply more entertaining and interesting. Worth a look, but hardly a must-see.

By the way, I saw the version that was shortened slightly and renamed "Gypsy Blood". It came in at 64 minutes and I have no idea if the original and slightly longer version exists. Perhaps this shortening of the film could explain why it seemed to end so abruptly.

Carmen is the story of a soldier (Harry Liedtke) who is on track to have a good life. He is engaged to a nice girl, and he just got a promotion, so he will be able to provide for his new wife. However, on duty he stumbles upon a woman of ill repute (Negri) and is so completely enchanted that he leaves the military, abandons his fiancée, and resorts to a life of crime to support himself and his gypsy lover. She quickly tires of him and moves onto the next best thing.

This is the fourth Pola Negri film I've seen, and I do not understand her appeal. She isn't terribly attractive, which is essential for this role so we can understand why the soldier destroys his life for her. Although Negri was a trained dancer, she clumps around devoid of a shred of grace and her "seductive" dancing is laughable. Because the film lacks a charming leading lady, there is very little to rave about. Even though Ernst Lubitsch directs, there is very little sex appeal. The setting is dirty and destitute, and although the film is short it doesn't feel like it.

This is a classic story, so if you want to familiarize yourself to feel more cultured, go ahead and watch but keep your expectations low.

Based on everything you know about him and have seen by him, you would think Ernst Lubitsch to the perfect director to give a modern spin to the classic siren-story of "Carmen". Even in his early years, Lubitsch was a filmmaker known for his progressive sarcasm and frivolous flirting, but this film does not have either. Instead, it's one of his dullest films. The narrative being so familiar from operas, films and plays, it would require a thorough remodeling to be interesting. Lubitsch's "Carmen" feels rushed and avoid of imagination. Then again it was made in Germany right before the end of World War I, so perhaps the time wasn't the best for well-thought-out, carefully executed masterpieces.

The film tells the story of a Spanish soldier (Harry Liedke) who gets promoted and leaves his family to travel to another town. There he meets Carmen (Pola Negri) a gypsy-sinner-woman, who lures him away from the righteous path. There is no return, but never fear, it is the woman whom the society blames for the man's sexual appetite. Strangely, the whole thing is framed as a campfire story in the version that was distributed in the US.

Though Lubitsch was by 1918 well-rehearsed to direct character driven films, this one looks like an American historical spectacle from the same era, albeit smaller. There are not that many close-ups of the actors, which really hurts the film's chances to develop an erotic feel to it. This is not romantic, not emotional, not anything. Lubitsch would later make his historical films work by giving them an individualistic spin (like Anna Boleyn, 1920), but in "Carmen" the characters get lost in the epoch. The actors can't make anything of the material, and whenever there is a close-up of Pola Negri, you kinda feel that she has been too overtly made up to resemble the ethnicity of the part. It's a bit cringy.