L'Atlantide

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.

Note that the DVD copy from Alpha Video is a bit rough--scratchy and a bit blurry. So, you really must want to see this film if you bother buying this one! I was quite surprised by "The Lost Atlantis", as I expected quite a bit from it since it was directed by the famous G.W. Pabst--the same guy who directed Louise Brooks' famous films ("Diary of a Lost Girl" and "Pandora's Box") as well as the brilliant German dramas "Kameradschaft" and "Westfront 1918". Instead, I found the film to be quite dull and lacking momentum. In other words, it has an unusual but interesting idea but is so poorly paced that I found myself losing interest as the film progressed. My assumption is that this will happen to you, too, if you decide to watch.

The premise of this film is that Atlantis was not lost in sea but covered in the Sahara Desert. And, unknown to outsiders, this bizarre land still exists--and is ruled by a goofy lady named Antinea (Brigitte Helm). For the most part, folks just sit around in this land doing nothing while Antinea spends her time jerking men around because you assume she has nothing better to do. If she says to kill, they do--and it's all VERY slow and mysterious--with LOTS of staring from Antinea. In fact, she rarely talks (possibly due to her strong German accent) but lounges about and makes men dance because she is, supposedly, so exotic and enticing. Yeah,...whatever.

All in all, this is a pretty bad film. The plot is WAY too slow, the acting way too poor and you wonder how Pabst could have made such a film. I was hoping for a strange escapist sort of film (like "She", 1935) but instead it was just boredom from start to finish.

FYI--Helm was famous as the lady who was the evil robot woman from "Metropolis". However, in "Metropolis" her performance was much more human and emotive!

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.

Two French Legionnaires discover the lost city of Atlantis in the middle of the Sahara Desert located in magnificent halls below the surface of the Earth.

This German-French co-production was a remake of a silent epic and was unusually shot in English, German and French in three different versions. This being an early solution to the language barrier problem the early talkies found themselves up against. It has more than a little in common with the film adaptions of 'She', in which an evil queen resides in a mysterious opulent place in the desert. The title character here was played by Brigitte Helm who has over the years achieved eternal iconic fame due to her earlier double role in Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927), her appearance as the android Ava being especially timeless. Needless to say, The Mistress of Atlantis is considerably less famous or good but it is quite an interesting production nevertheless. It benefits quite a bit from having elaborate sets and costuming, as well as on location photography. It also has some memorable individual scenes such as the chess game where one of our heroes plays against the queen while escalating Arabic music plays and dancers cavort in the background intensifying the drama; while it also benefits from the appearance of the eccentric mustachioed elderly English fop who bizarrely resides in this strange place. Overall, though, it is an interesting film which is middling on the whole. The reason for this is chiefly down to its slow pacing and uninteresting/interchangeable two central male characters, whose plight it is hard to care about very much. But it is nevertheless a film with some ambition and interest.