plaidpotato

This is very different from Pabst's later and more famous films, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. It's more in line with the other German Expressionist stuff of the period: gothic, shadowy, sort of ponderous, and with a simple moral message. But there's also some humor, so it's not as totally downbeat as some of the other German silents. The acting's stylized, mildly hysterical, but in a good sort of way--plenty of maniacal laughter and such. I saw it without English intertitles (and with very limited, maybe 20-30%, comprehension of German), and it was still quite understandable and quite watchable.

8/10.

This isn't really a Jean Renoir-originated film. It was commissioned by a historical society to commemorate 500 years of history in whichever French city it was that this was made. Portions of the film are apparently lost, and what I saw was a three-reel reconstruction made much later, probably by the BBC. It runs about 30 minutes. It kind of tells a complete story.

It's a fairly large-budget, swashbuckling costume drama set in the 16th century in the court of Catherine de Medici. She, at the time, was trying to reconcile Catholic and Protestant factions in France. She promises to marry one of her ladies-in-waiting to a prominent Protestant nobleman (who's portrayed as the bad guy in the piece), in exchange for his promoting peace. But the lady has already promised herself to a Catholic nobleman, whom she loves, and who is a good buddy of her brother's. The Protestant taunts the brother about how he's going to have his sister; they fight a secret, illegal duel, and the brother gets killed. Finally, there's a big tournament between the rival lovers, the Catholic and the Protestant, with jousting and swordplay and whatnot. The Protestant is winning. But while this is going on, the he is betrayed by a former lover, and revealed as the murderer of the brother. Catherine de Medici orders a group of her men-at-arms to arrest him, but he refuses to be taken alive. He fights to the death. As he lays dying, he asks his mother--the so-called 'Queen of the Protestants'--to forgive. But she has a vengeful look on her face... The Catholic nobleman and the lady are back together, smiling. Some dust blows in the wind. The end.

I'd be curious to know how long this film originally ran, and whether there were additional sub-plots that are now missing. What remains feels kind of skeletal in the way of those very early silent dramas of the 1900s and early 1910s--it just hits the main points of the plot and leaves the rest up to your imagination. It's not terribly engaging drama, as in scenes aren't really developed or built up to; they just sort of happen. But I guess that's to be expected if really significant portions of the film are missing. The costumes and the sets seem nice, as is some of Renoir's camera work, but the print I saw was incredibly shoddy and non-restored, barely watchable.

It's hard to judge something like this fairly, but I give it a 6/10. It's probably only of interest to Renoir completists, and maybe some history buffs.

Shot in three days on a practically zero budget, using film stock left over from Nana, Jean Renoir made this strange curio just for fun. He never edited it. It was never released. He later gave the footage to the Cinémathèque Française, who pieced the film together.

The story: it's the year 2028. An explorer from Central Africa (Johnny Huggins, a jazz dancer of the 1920s, who appears here in minstrel makeup; he actually was black) arrives in a post-apocalyptic Paris in a flying sphere. He encounters a scantily-clad wild girl and her monkey friend. The girl dances the Charleston to try to seduce him. He thinks she's threatening him and he runs away. She chases after him, dancing ever more aggressively and seductively. The explorer begins to watch, hesitantly, but curiously. The girl draws a telephone on the wall, which turns into a real telephone, and she calls some kind of disembodied human head with wings. Some other winged disembodied heads appear. The girl hands the phone to the explorer, and one of the heads speaks to him--apparently letting him know that the girl's OK. Then the explorer and the girl dance the Charleston together. The girl leaves with the explorer in his flying sphere, her tearful monkey friend waving goodbye.