Salomé

Salomé is set in the palace of Herod, actually in a feasting hall and a courtyard only, so it's a very hermetic movie. The idea is that Salomé is annoyed about John the Baptist rejecting her advances and so asks for his head on a silver platter, this is after she performs a highly charged dance for her father, for which he agrees to grant her any wish.

The art design is meant to be based very much on the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. I saw a large version of Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist at an exhibition once, it's a quite monstrously beautiful thing, and you get a feeling of a Salomé who wants to play with John's blood. If you also read Beardsley's "The Story of Venus and Tannhauser", which is a fine read, written by the great man whilst dying slowly in the casinos of Deauville, you will find naked erotic content that has nothing in common with this movie. The movie is perverse but in a quite different way, it has a beauty that is not nearly as profane as Beardsley's, but as good in its own way, it's Thespian and ripe with impotency and death. However that doesn't go anywhere near far enough in explaining the luminous and unnerving images created by Nazimova and M. Bryant.

So I think the scene is set very well, of an almost pre-moral world which is metaphorically benighted. Herod presides, a fish-faced man with a droopy wreath, and dirty darkened teeth which are surrounded by a rouged mouth and a heavily whitened face. He's got the appearance of a senile erotomaniac.

Salomé is a milk-and-honey-eyed nymph who peers out tentatively from kohl rings beneath a baubeled coiffure. She is ignorantly innocent as well as tempestuous, and is played by Nazimova, director Charles Bryant's wife. Beardsley's Salomé in contrast has been inducted into depraved rites.

John the Baptist is a gaunt imprisoned man with a fanatic's stare who is portrayed rather irreligiously as a kind of Christian sadist, wishing all sorts of nasties on the women of the court. Shots of him in his cell are brilliant and are positively Sternberg-ian in their luminosity and blasphemous nature (think of the way Russian orthodoxy is portrayed in The Scarlet Empress).

The genius of the film really I think is that it has a slow miasmic tempo, which is achieved by always having slowly wafting fans towering over the court to cool the night down.

Another satisfying thing about the film is that the intertitles, presumably poached from Wilde, are extraordinarily well written. The main detractor from L'Herbier's L'Argent for me is very substandard and naive intertitles. Intertitles can generally only detract from a movie, in Salomé we have a totally unusual example of the opposite.

It's a haunting movie, which more than once made me mutter astounded compliments under my breath. Examples including the "leap", the veil dance, and the peacock montage. I would like to have been there to see what they did with the veil dance to make it so diaphanous, I have an idea they could have done it with strong lighting, the effect was pretty amazing to me.

Oscar Wilde's 1892 retelling of the Bible story of Salome, who danced before Herod to win the death of John the Baptist, was considered so depraved that the High Lord Chamberlain of England refused to grant it a license for public performance--and in the wake of Wilde's scandalous exposure as a homosexual and his subsequent imprisonment, all of Wilde's plays were swept from the stage. Wilde, who died in 1900, never saw his play publicly performed.

The worth of Wilde's plays were reestablished by the 1920s, but even so SALOME, with its convoluted and exotic language and hothouse sense of depravity, remained something of a theatrical untouchable--and certainly so where the screen was concerned. No one dared consider it until Russian-born Alla Nazimova, who is generally credited with bringing Stanislaski technique to the New York stage, decided to film it in 1923.

It proved a disaster. Theatergoers in large cities might be prepared to accept Wilde's lighter plays, but Main Street America was an entirely different matter--especially where the notorious SALOME was concerned, particularly when the film was dogged hints of Nazimova's lesbianism and by the rumor that it had been done with an "all Gay cast" in honor of Wilde himself. Critics, censors, and the public damned the film right and left. It received only limited distribution and faded quickly from view. Even so, the legend of both the film and its exotic star grew over time.

Given that much of the original play's power is in Wilde's language, SALOME suffers from translation to silent film--the title cards are often awkwardly long, and in general fail to convey the tone of Wilde's voice; moreover, the convolutions of the original have been necessarily simplified for the silent form. Even so, it is a remarkable thing in a purely visual sense. Directed in a deliberately flat style by Charles Bryant and designed by Natacha Rambova (wife of Valentino, she would also design Nazimova's silent CAMILLE), the look of the film seeks to reproduce the playscript's equally infamous illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley--and succeeds to a remarkable degree.

And then there is Nazimova herself. Well into her forties at the time she played the teenage Salome, Nazimova is an electric presence: while she often shows her years in close up, she is remarkably effective in capturing the willful, petulant, and ultimately depraved Salome in facial expression and body posture, balancing an over-the-top style with moments of quiet realism to most remarkable effect. The supporting cast is also quite memorable, with Mitchell Lewis (Herod) and Rose Dione (Herodias) particularly notable.

I would hesitate to recommend this film anyone other than someone already well versed in silent movies--and even then I would give the warning that it is unlikely to be what you thought it would. Still, this is a classic of its kind, and fans of silent cinema are urged to see it.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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!).

By the early 1920s, Alla Nazimova had lost her standing as one of the premiere actresses of her time. She had an appeal some compare to Greta Garbo, with much-acclaimed performances in films such as "War Brides" (1916), "Revelation" (1918), and "Out of the Fog" (1919). Unfortunately, these films are presently unavailable. Today, Nazimova's most widely seen silent film appears to be her ludicrously impressionistic version of "Camille" (1921), which was precisely the sort of film which made audiences and exhibitors conclude Nazimova's star had set. By the time "Salome" was released, her appeal was low.

This is unfortunate because "Salome" was the best of Nazimova's art-house period, and could have been a hit comparable to some of the foreign imports of the day. It follows the plot of Oscar Wilde's play, but works more as a visual feast of images. Nazimova's opening hair style alone is among best in all of filmdom. A heavily "homosexual look" (many said) to the film has been said to stem from Nazimova's use of an exclusively gay cast and crew, including most notable stylistic contributions from Natacha Rambova (aka Mrs. Rudolph Valentino). Like a lot of hyperbolized Hollywood, the whole is more of a bisexual affair.

********* Salome (10/22) Charles Bryant ~ Nazimova, Nigel de Brulier, Mitchell Lewis, Rose Dione

This film is brilliant. Go back and re-read the play, then re-read the biography of Oscar Wilde. Forget about the opera and other dramatic presentations. The film beautifully represents the slow pacing and strangeness of the play, and the personality of Wilde. Admittedly, for the first few milliseconds of watching the film I felt like bursting into laughter. Then the penny dropped, and I realized what was happening.This is not a blockbuster, it is an unusually thoughtful interpretation of a classic.