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.

From the moment I saw the close-up of Nazimova (who plays the title character) with her crown of gently bobbing light-globes, I was entranced by this bizarre, magical, lovely film. That's why I was shocked to see its relatively low ratings on this website and the unflattering description by Mr. Warner. This is one of the strangest, most beautiful films I've ever seen, and certainly one of the more engaging silent films I've watched. Yes, it's highly stylized and the acting is way over the top, but realism gets awfully dull sometimes, especially in the silent format. Salome is a true original and a thing of great beauty. From the creative use of drawn set pieces to the spectacularly inventive costumes to Nazimova's perfectly controlled, dancer-like movements, the experience (and it really is that) has a mystical, otherworldly glow to it. A must-see for anyone interested in silent film, dance, costuming, or art nouveau.

Having read the reviews of this on the Silents Majority website and in Time Out film guide I was curious. It looked good from stills and the play is one of my favourites ... the film is extremely odd. Nazimova, who looks like Gloria Swanson only more over the top, is a seductive and teasing Salome, dancing the seven veils with style, driving Herod mad, taunting the Baptist (a gaunt stick of a man who is quite disturbing to look at). The guards are all extremely camp and OTT and the whole film has that feeling of the extremes of twenties decadence. One feels Wilde would have approved. Not a patch on the opera but a decent stab at a play which is full of excess. It just wouldn't work with sound. It has to be images, and this is full of them.

This is extremely faithful to the spirit and letter of Oscar Wilde's play (at least, judging by Ken Russell's 1988 interpretation of it in SALOME'S LAST DANCE). While I rated it higher than the latter, this is mainly because it is visually redolent of the Biblical spectacles of the Silent era (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS {1923}, BEN-HUR: A TALE OF THE Christ {1925} and THE KING OF KINGS {1927}, to name the more obvious examples), being a straight adaptation as opposed to a 'performance' – even so, while it may have readily jumped on the spectacle bandwagon, the result is unsurprisingly verbose for a non-Talkie and, in any case, its real raison d'etre was apparently as a paen to Wilde's transgressive lifestyle since it has been stated that the entire cast was homosexually-inclined (with several prancing courtiers and even minor female roles being filled by men)!

The star is Alla Nazimova (billed only by her surname) who, at 42, appears in the title role – a character who was supposedly all of 14 years old! Though her real age is undeniably betrayed in close-ups, for the most part, her lanky figure supplies the requisite illusion of youth; to get back to its proximity to Wilde's text (and, by extension, Russell's rendition), Salome is made out to be something of a nymphomaniac, if not quite as gleefully wicked as Imogen Millais-Scott in the later version. For the record, of the remaining cast members, only Nigel De Brulier's name – in the part of a rather scantily-clad John The Baptist and actually referred to as Jokanaan(!) – was familiar to me, from a number of swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks vehicles and even THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1939; as it happens, directed by the gay James Whale), with the woman playing Herodias being noted, if anything, for her disheveled hair-do (though, when the scene shifts to the terrace, it then appears inexplicably combed!).

Again, the narrative of the two films are very similar: from The Baptist's wardens pleading with Salome (by the way, an accent is inconsistently placed throughout over the 'e') to leave the prophet alone, with the soldier (whom the girl blinds with false promises of affection) eventually committing suicide because, as he says, he "cannot endure it". Likewise, the latter's servant being jealous of his attentions for the Princess and, ditto, Herodias berating her husband for his incestuous leering over the girl (having already assassinated his own brother and usurped the throne in order to win the Queen's favors!). Perhaps the film's mainstay are the incongruously outlandish costumes (created by Natacha Rambova, noted wife of the even more famous Rudolph Valentino – the silver-screen's Latin Lover prototype whom Ken Russell would himself deal with in a 1977 biopic!), from Nazimova's bejeweled hair to the over-sized outfits of her ladies-in-waiting, which conveniently obscure Salome while she is changing into her dancing attire (though the film-makers seem to have forgotten all about the Seven Veils in this case)! For the record, Rambova (who is said to have been Nazimova's lover before she was Valentino's) also designed the sets and did the screen adaptation herself, the latter under the assumed name of Peter M. Winters!

The climax is somewhat confused, though: first, we have a Nubian giant (who had stood guard by the castle walls all through the picture) being asked to behead The Baptist but, when he goes down to the pit where the prophet is incarcerated, the latter's Holy words apparently convert him. Yet, all of a sudden, we cut to Salome already with the proverbial silver platter (or "charger", as it is called here) in hand, albeit covered-up – however, it was only after she has put in on the floor and bowed down beside it, all the while pining for Jokanaan's red lips, that I realized the deed had already been done! Finally, after Herod gives out the order for Salome to be slain (and his spear-sporting minions dutifully oblige), the film simply ends on a long-shot of her corpse and Herodias looking upon it in horror (at least, Russell's theatrical framework lent the whole a better sense of closure and, if anything, given the propensity of the foreword here, one would have expected at least a matching coda!).

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.