Tag: Ivan Mosjoukine

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews, Silent Cinema

Silents Please!: ‘The House of Mystery’ from Flicker Alley

Written by Sean Axmaker April 25, 2015

The House of Mystery (La Maison du Mystère) (Flicker Alley, DVD) – Serials—the adventure cliffhangers what would play out in theaters before the main feature at a chapter a week—are commonly dismissed as kid stuff, glorified B-movies cranked out with little thought for story or character. France, however, produced some serials with high production values for adult audiences. Louis Feuillaude was a master at making surreal pulp thrillers like Fantomas and Les Vampires but Judex moved him toward epic storytelling with more mature themes (his later serials, which are even more adult if less exciting, are sadly unavailable in the U.S.).

Albatross, a French studio founded by Russian immigrants who fled the communist revolution, produced some of the most sophisticated films on the twenties, including the serial The House of Mystery (1923), an epic story of love, jealousy, murder, blackmail, and injustice. The opening credits tease the audience by presenting our hero in multiple disguises before revealing the face of Ivan Mosjoukine, suggesting he is something of a Judex or Fantomas. In fact he’s Julien Villandrit, the scion of a manufacturing family who marries his sweetheart Régine (Hélène Darly) and takes over the family textile mill. All seems well as we jump to “Seven Years Later” and find his longtime associate Henri (Charles Vanel) going all Iago, planting the seeds of doubt in Julien’s mind over the attentions of an elderly banker (Sylvia Gray) toward his wife. What seems unseemly has a rather touching explanation but it takes a dramatic turn when Julien is framed for murder and sent to prison while Henri remains free to pursue Régine. Nicolas Koline plays the woodsman Rudeberg, a photographer whose hobby gives him the leverage to blackmail his way into a steady job. It’s not quite as mercenary as it seems—it’s all to give his troubled son a shot at an education and a better life than him—but it means hiding the evidence proving Julien’s innocence and incriminating the true killer.

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews, Silent Cinema

Videodrone: ‘French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1928’

Written by Sean Axmaker May 18, 2013

French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1928 (Flicker Alley) presents of the stateside DVD debut of five silent classics from Film Albatros, a French studio founded by Russian artists: The Burning Crucible, Kean, The Late Mathias Pascal, Gribiche, and The New Gentlemen.

Three of the films star Ivan Mosjoukine, the great Russian actor who fled the revolution and landed in Paris, and the other two are directed by Jacques Feyder. All of them are examples of the sophisticated filmmaking coming out of France in the twenties.

Which is not to say that they are all masterpieces — The Burning Crucible (1923), which not only stars Mosjoukine but is written and directed by the actor, is inventive and full of lively images and playful techniques but is all over the place and jumps willy-nilly through styles and episodes — but they are all tremendously entertaining and full of filmmaking energy. Mosjoukine plays eleven roles in The Burning Crucible, including the leading role of Detective Z, a man of many disguises, and Mosjoukine the director rolls Russian formalism, German expressionism, and French surrealism together in a simplistic but richly imaginative story that at times borders on craziness of Louis Feuillade’s serials of the previous decade.

Mosjoukine also stars in Kean (1924) as the great 19th century stage actor Edmund Kean and in The Late Mathias Pascal (1926), the fantasy epic directed by Marcel L’Herbier that Flicker Alley released on Blu-ray earlier this year. I reviewed it for Videodrone here.

The final pair of films in the set are from Jacques Feyder.

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Film Reviews, Silent Cinema

Blu-ray: ‘The Late Mathias Pascal’

Written by Sean Axmaker March 10, 2013

Even the most famous of silent movies are a specialized interest when it comes to home video. Apart from the comedies of Chaplin and Keaton or a few acknowledged landmarks of silent cinema (think Sunrise or Metropolis or Nosferatu), many movie fans view silent films as primitive or dull. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At its best, silent cinema is a pure kind of moviemaking that tells stories in images and metaphor. It’s a different kind of storytelling, but it is no less complex or evocative than the best of sound cinema.

The Late Mathias Pascal, Marcel L’Herbier’s fabulist epic from 1926 France, is a marvelous example of silent cinema at its most ambitious from one of the most inventive and most influential French directors of the era. Based on a novel by Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mathias Pascal (originally titled Feu Mathias Pascal) stars Ivan Mosjoukine, a Russian émigré who became a leading star in French silent cinema, as a dreamer whose life takes a fantastic turn. The film opens with Mathias as the spoiled son of a wealthy widow who loses the family fortune because he, the aspiring artist and would-be genius at work, is too self-involved to be bothered with the family affairs. He’s hardly a classic hero – when asked by his best friend Jerome (Michel Simon), a shy and bumbling but good-hearted working class schlub, to approach the town beauty Romilde (Marcelle Pradot) on his behalf, Mathias ends up falling in love with her himself and ultimately marrying her – but he’s also resilient, plucky, and driven to succeed after his sudden turn of fortune.

Mathias and Romilde move in to a dreary old apartment with Romilde’s sour mother and Mathias takes a job in a horror of a municipal library, yet he approaches both with optimism and ingenuity. When he first enters the former church turned neglected book warehouse, a place that could have spring from the imagination of Kafka in a whimsical mood, he finds rats nibbling the haphazard stacks of books and responds by bringing in a pair of cats. He watches them clear the place with the joy of a kid. But while L’Herbier makes a point of creating a vivid portrait of the social culture of working class life in this small town, realism is the last thing on the director’s mind. The plot takes wildly abrupt turns and shifts in tone–the storybook romance of this marriage is poisoned by his never-satisfied mother-in-law, his optimism is swamped by a double-shot of tragedy, and when his misery sends him on a trip to Rome, fate turns around and suddenly pours on the good fortune. The provincial dreamer who loses it all becomes an innocent in the high society of Rome where he wins it all back, but his new life comes with a wicked price.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies