Le golem

Right from the first few minutes, "Le Golem" reminded me, weirdly enough, of Alfred Hitchcock's "Jamaica Inn": a stuffy, unengaging period piece with a gifted director struggling with material that seems alien to his sensibilities. Even the eccentric emperor plays quite similarly to Charles Laughton's "putting on a show" style. The climactic Golem rampage is fun (the title creature, just a beefy man really, looks like a proto-Terminator), but it's a long, tedious wait getting there. The choppy, poorly preserved print does not help matters. *1/2 out of 4.

Duvivier's Golem is a rough sequel to the far-more-famous 1920 German production with Paul Wegener. It is a European court drama first and a horror/fantasy second, but for viewers who don't mind that sort of balance it is a fascinating experience. At times it resembles The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) or Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.

All characters are sympathetic, including the paranoid and desperate emperor and his ruthless but loyal chamberlain. A suave Frenchman appears first to be a self-serving seducer but shows later that he can be exceedingly generous. The Jews are perhaps drawn with a bit too much seriousness, but their faith and idealism is hard not to admire. The actual golem awakens only for the final action scenes, but the wait is worth it. Unlike Wegener's golem which resembled a child's toy, this golem appears as a tall imposing man, stiff but realistic. A brisk, intelligent film.

Certain precisions:

The Paul Wegener film of 1920 Der Golem : Wie er in die Welt kam/The Golem: How He Came into the World was not exactly "the originaL". It was the third film to be made on the subject. The original, Der Golem, directed by Wegener and Henrik Galeen in 1915, alas survives only as a fragment. Inspired by the success of the novel Der Golem by Austrian writer Gustav Meyrinck (serialised 1913-14), it was not really an adaptation but an original script, although, like the Meyrinck novel, it was set in modern times with an antiques dealer rediscovering the golem. The second film , also lost, Der Golem und die Tanzerin/The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) was a comic sequel, again obviously set in modern times.

Wegener and Galeen were responsible for one very important element in the story, the idea that the golem was susceptible to the charms of the fair sex, a theme that would be enormously influential in all subsequent "monster" films including Whale's Frankenstein and King Kong. This element was retained in the film of 1920 which is a kind of "prequel" going back to the supposed sixteenth century origins of the golem in Prague and its creation by one of the great heroes of European Jewish culture, the Rabbi Loew (Judah Loew ben Bezalel) to protect the Jewish community against the depredations of the Emperor Rudolf II.

So this film is certainly not a remake of the German films but it is a sequel of sorts to the 1920 film in the sense that it follows it more or less immediately in chronological terms, being set just after the death of Rabbi Loew and still during the reign of Emperor Rudolf (played by Harry Baur). It is however based on a new work - a 1931 play by two well known Czech actors Jiri Voskovec and Jan Werich.

The "golem" legend has a long history. It may have influenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) but this is uncertain. It is true that a very young Jakob Grimm (one of the brothers later famous for their fairy tales) had published a Polish "golem" story in 1808 (in the collection Journal for Hermits) which inspired other stories on the theme and might possibly have been known to Byron, the Shelleys and their circle. It is however absolutely certain that the German "golem" films influenced upon the later film-versions of Frankenstein.

The specific story of the golem of Prague was seemingly of German rather than Czech origin and was largely a nineteenth-century invention.It only subsequently seems to have become a popular story in Bohemia/Czechoslovakia.

The French actor Harry Baur was not Jewish nor he was exactly killed by the Nazis. He did frequently play Jewish characters and had a Germanic name, two factors which led to his being falsely accused during the forties of being Jewish. He was arrested by the Gestapo in occupied France in 1942, ironically just after returning from Germany, where he made his last film, Symphonie eines Lebans (actually part of an extended visit by French actors and actresses organised by the German propaganda ministry). He was held in La Santé prison in Paris for four months and eventually released without charge but never fully recovered from the ill-treatment he received and died in April,1943.

Several accounts say he was arrested with his wife or that he was arrested on account of his wife, who was Jewish. The first is correct but the second not. Baur's second wife, actress Rika Radifé, was born in Turkey and, although she may well in practice have had Jewish origins (her real first name was Rebecca), she was actually a Muslim (and neutral Muslim Turkey was friendly to Germany until it opportunistically sided with the Allies in 1945) and she was released just two weeks after the arrest. She was never subsequently troubled and later in fact converted to Catholicism.

Baur's involvement with this film probably did him no good in the eyes of the Germans. Duvivier himself moved to the US in 1938. Although other countries, including the US and Britain, were outrageously silent on the subject of the persecution of Jews in Germany (and remained so even during the war), there had been a certain discrete propaganda effort by some producers during the thirties as more and more Jews fled or attempted to flee from Germany. So the British film The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) clearly draws a parallel with the flight of French aristocrats from the Revolution (both producer Alex Korda and star Leslie Howard were of East European Jewish origin)and another British film of the same year, The Jew Suss, had a pro-Jewish theme that would later be answered by the anti-semitic German version of the same story in 1940. The British film starred expatriate German Conrad Veidt, not a Jew but a fierce and strongly committed anti-Nazi (he even devoted part of his income to the cause).

In the US, another dissident German, Wilhelm Dieterle, whose wife was Jewish, made The Life of Émile Zola in 1936 (concentrating on the Dreyfus affair) and later drew a clear parallel in his depiction of the persecution of gypsies in his 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The House of Rothschild (1934) would also paint a sympathetic picture of Jews which particularly infuriated the Germans and resulted in another anti-semitic riposte (Die Rothschilds Aktien auf Waterloo) in 1940).

The only film to openly expose and attack German treatment of the Jews, Professor Mamlok, was made in Russia in 1938. Although praised by anti-Nazi campaigner Edward G. Robinson (from a Polish Jewish family), who said he wished he could act in such a film, it was widely dismissed in the US as communist propaganda (which it also is) and was actually banned in Britain for fear of offending Mr. Hitler.

I'm sincerely sorry not to join the chorus of praises of the other users.I've seen most of Duvivier's talkies and I have always been his fan.But "le golem" is definitely not my cup of tea.Eclecticism was Duvivier's trademark (his precedent movie was "Golgotha" an underrated version of the Passion.)But his metier was film noir ;check his filmography: all his best works belong to the genre.

The main problem with this Golem -which may or may not have inspired Mary Shelley- is that the director does not choose between comedy and drama.Harry Baur's talent is unquestionable,but you'd better see him in "David golder" where he plays a Jew;In the Golem,it seems that the Jewish culture eludes Duvivier (it eludes me too of course),and it is not his use of (beautiful) hymns which will make me change my mind.The ten-minute appearance of Golem is not even impressive ,and when he returns to ashes,well...

Outside "David Golder" ,people interested in Duvivier's work should see "Poil de Carotte" "La Belle Equipe" "Pepe le Moko" "Carnet de Bal" and "La Fin du Jour" all French classics of the thirties.

This version of the golem story has some advantages over the 1920 Paul Wegener film. While the original must remain the best simply out of respect, this film has introduced sound, a much more fluid camera, and odd angles that would make a German Expressionist blush -- and this is France with director Julian Duvivier at the helm!

The golem itself is a different sort of creature, less clay or stone and more of a robotic, steel beast. Not as heavy-set, and with decidedly more human movement through use of his arms and legs, removing the lumbering gait of the older version. I do not see this as an improvement or a step back, but an entirely new scenario.

The political message seems to be different, too. While the Wegener film has a Frankenstein-like message about creating something you cannot control, the story is a bit twisted here. The film says, explicitly, "Revolt is the right of the slave." People could draw a variety of messages from that line alone... I will not offer examples, as they are obvious enough.