A very pleasing development in recent months is the increasing availability of a wide range of Spanish films of the silent era. Spain, and especially Catalonia had an extremely active cinema industry and, even if the overall quality is unremarkable, its industry reflected two important developments in European film, the emergence of a "naturalistic" cinema (Sangre y arena before Hollywood got it hands on it, El beso de la muerte, El golfo) on the one hand and, as here, the fashion for the "polar", the detective thriller, still at this point of time predominantly a European genre, only really imported by the US, along with refugee European film-makers, in the 1930s. In practice this films is something of a cross between the two - a naturalistic thriller.
It is efficiently filmed and directed and very well acted example of the genre.Margarita Xirgu, who plays Emilia, was friend of the dramatist Lorca, prominent anti-Fascist and a very major star of Spanish and. later in exile, of Latin American theatre. The heroine Emilia's brother, Augusto, is convicted of a murder of a prostitute, strictly a "courtesan" (which we witness on screen in the prologue) which he claims that he has not committed. She is absolutely convinced of his innocence despite the unsympathetic attitude of her husband, who fears that the family name will be besmirched as a result of any association with the crime. None of his attempts to divert her (reading, visit to the forest, the zoo, the park) can prevent her increasing depression over the fate of her sibling.
A mysterious character with a beard breaks into the house and reveals himself to be Augusto, escaped from custody. To fool the husband, she pretends there has been an attempted burglary. With his Faithful friend Dr. Morales (a former beau of Emilia's before her marriage), Augusto plans to leave the country. He meets his sister for a last farewell but the couple are seen (at a distance, through binoculars) by the husband. In a rather interesting use of the (at this period typical) "binocular matte", he is unable to identify the man he sees (he rather improbably does not seem to know of his brother-in-law' escape) and assumes adultery (presumably with Morales). He challenges about it but does not believe her denials; she cannot of course reveal the identity of the man.
Now estranged from her husband (although they remain under the same roof), all Emilia's happiness and well-being depends on the truth coming to light....
There is, at least until the very end, no very sensational drama here (as one finds typically in the German, British or Dutch thrillers of the period, trains, chases and corpses in German films, people hanging from windmills in Dutch films and people talking to each other without being properly introduced in British films. The psychological drama too remains subdued (Xirgu is no Italian diva) but the suspense is well maintained until very nearly the end. Dr. Morales learn the truth about the killing well before the end of the film but it is carefully not revealed to the viewer or to Emilia until later (the film's restorers assume, I think wrongly, that there are significant missing ntertitles).
As for the scene of murder the audience has witnessed at the beginning, that is one of the simplest tricks imaginable but not so common in films as one might suppose (it relies on certain things that one might say were peculiar to that epoch) and is very effective. But judge fro yourself....
The European silent thriller has generally received far too little attention. There has always been a critical preference for confining European cinema to an "art film" ghetto (reflecting the US industry's protective strategy towards European from a very early stage), more readily associated with "expressionism", "surrealism" and so forth. Consequently the more obviously "popular" aspects of European cinema have been neglected and the films themselves, until very recently, buried.
In this process, foolishly flattered by the "art film" tag, European have themselves often been their own worst enemies. When questioned back in the sixties by a naif young François Truffaut about his influences from the silent period, Alfred Hitchcock mentioned only Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod, one of the relatively few European silents of which people were still aware at that period and one which the wily Hitchcock knew perfectly well to have an "art film" cachet. In fact, today, we can again see any number of very Hitchcockian German "popular" films of the twenties which reveal, without "a shadow of a doubt", the huge influence such "popular" films had on the young Britisher.
There is nothing very Hitchcockian about this Spanish film (but see Pabst's The Love of Jeanne Ney or Joe May's Asphalt) but it is a typical product of a thoroughly "popular" genre ("sensationsfilme" in German) that was widespread, particularly in fact in northern Europe (Dutch and British films as well as German). A better knowledge of such films gives a more rounded picture of European film and allows us to extract it from the "art film" ghetto to which the US establishment from cynical design (art films there had by definition a more limited distribution) and the individual European film-makers from foolish vanity ("je suis auteur"), found it convenient to allow it to be confined. Not of course only in the silent era but, although it didn't matter to Hitchcock, for decades thereafter.
It is also a rare chance to see one of the great European actresses of the period (she is also in El beso de la muerte) even if film was not perhaps her ideal medium.
It is efficiently filmed and directed and very well acted example of the genre.Margarita Xirgu, who plays Emilia, was friend of the dramatist Lorca, prominent anti-Fascist and a very major star of Spanish and. later in exile, of Latin American theatre. The heroine Emilia's brother, Augusto, is convicted of a murder of a prostitute, strictly a "courtesan" (which we witness on screen in the prologue) which he claims that he has not committed. She is absolutely convinced of his innocence despite the unsympathetic attitude of her husband, who fears that the family name will be besmirched as a result of any association with the crime. None of his attempts to divert her (reading, visit to the forest, the zoo, the park) can prevent her increasing depression over the fate of her sibling.
A mysterious character with a beard breaks into the house and reveals himself to be Augusto, escaped from custody. To fool the husband, she pretends there has been an attempted burglary. With his Faithful friend Dr. Morales (a former beau of Emilia's before her marriage), Augusto plans to leave the country. He meets his sister for a last farewell but the couple are seen (at a distance, through binoculars) by the husband. In a rather interesting use of the (at this period typical) "binocular matte", he is unable to identify the man he sees (he rather improbably does not seem to know of his brother-in-law' escape) and assumes adultery (presumably with Morales). He challenges about it but does not believe her denials; she cannot of course reveal the identity of the man.
Now estranged from her husband (although they remain under the same roof), all Emilia's happiness and well-being depends on the truth coming to light....
There is, at least until the very end, no very sensational drama here (as one finds typically in the German, British or Dutch thrillers of the period, trains, chases and corpses in German films, people hanging from windmills in Dutch films and people talking to each other without being properly introduced in British films. The psychological drama too remains subdued (Xirgu is no Italian diva) but the suspense is well maintained until very nearly the end. Dr. Morales learn the truth about the killing well before the end of the film but it is carefully not revealed to the viewer or to Emilia until later (the film's restorers assume, I think wrongly, that there are significant missing ntertitles).
As for the scene of murder the audience has witnessed at the beginning, that is one of the simplest tricks imaginable but not so common in films as one might suppose (it relies on certain things that one might say were peculiar to that epoch) and is very effective. But judge fro yourself....
The European silent thriller has generally received far too little attention. There has always been a critical preference for confining European cinema to an "art film" ghetto (reflecting the US industry's protective strategy towards European from a very early stage), more readily associated with "expressionism", "surrealism" and so forth. Consequently the more obviously "popular" aspects of European cinema have been neglected and the films themselves, until very recently, buried.
In this process, foolishly flattered by the "art film" tag, European have themselves often been their own worst enemies. When questioned back in the sixties by a naif young François Truffaut about his influences from the silent period, Alfred Hitchcock mentioned only Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod, one of the relatively few European silents of which people were still aware at that period and one which the wily Hitchcock knew perfectly well to have an "art film" cachet. In fact, today, we can again see any number of very Hitchcockian German "popular" films of the twenties which reveal, without "a shadow of a doubt", the huge influence such "popular" films had on the young Britisher.
There is nothing very Hitchcockian about this Spanish film (but see Pabst's The Love of Jeanne Ney or Joe May's Asphalt) but it is a typical product of a thoroughly "popular" genre ("sensationsfilme" in German) that was widespread, particularly in fact in northern Europe (Dutch and British films as well as German). A better knowledge of such films gives a more rounded picture of European film and allows us to extract it from the "art film" ghetto to which the US establishment from cynical design (art films there had by definition a more limited distribution) and the individual European film-makers from foolish vanity ("je suis auteur"), found it convenient to allow it to be confined. Not of course only in the silent era but, although it didn't matter to Hitchcock, for decades thereafter.
It is also a rare chance to see one of the great European actresses of the period (she is also in El beso de la muerte) even if film was not perhaps her ideal medium.
