Die Herrin von Atlantis

This is the 3rd, and most recent, in the three films I've seen by controversial director G.W. Pabst, after his extraordinary silent classics, 'Pandora's Box' and 'Diary of a Lost Girl', both starring legendary screen goddess Louise Brooks. It's the English-language version of 'L'Atlantide', itself a sound-remake of the '21 silent film by Jacques Feyder, and, by being mostly shot on location in the Sahara Desert, went against the grain at the time of shooting movies exclusively in studio.

In Brigitte Helm, mainly known for her starring role of Fritz Lang's sci-fi magnum opus, 'Metropolis', he had a stunning villainous female, who would have made a great femme fatale, had she continued on the following decade in film noir. The script is nondescript and a tad melodramatic, and the other actors are decidedly pedestrian, but Pabst's visual elan and directorial genius shines through and lifts an otherwise drab picture. Worth your time if you're a fan of adventure films of the era, however.

Two French Legionnaires discover the lost city of Atlantis in the middle of the Sahara Desert located in magnificent halls below the surface of the Earth.

This German-French co-production was a remake of a silent epic and was unusually shot in English, German and French in three different versions. This being an early solution to the language barrier problem the early talkies found themselves up against. It has more than a little in common with the film adaptions of 'She', in which an evil queen resides in a mysterious opulent place in the desert. The title character here was played by Brigitte Helm who has over the years achieved eternal iconic fame due to her earlier double role in Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927), her appearance as the android Ava being especially timeless. Needless to say, The Mistress of Atlantis is considerably less famous or good but it is quite an interesting production nevertheless. It benefits quite a bit from having elaborate sets and costuming, as well as on location photography. It also has some memorable individual scenes such as the chess game where one of our heroes plays against the queen while escalating Arabic music plays and dancers cavort in the background intensifying the drama; while it also benefits from the appearance of the eccentric mustachioed elderly English fop who bizarrely resides in this strange place. Overall, though, it is an interesting film which is middling on the whole. The reason for this is chiefly down to its slow pacing and uninteresting/interchangeable two central male characters, whose plight it is hard to care about very much. But it is nevertheless a film with some ambition and interest.

I watched the French version of this film and the casting varies slightly to the German and UK versions. This film plays on the idea that Atlantis hasn't disappeared into the sea but lies buried under the sands of the Sahara. Why not? I have no doubt that those sands are burying secrets that could help us determine our origins and rewrite our history. For this film, the mystery of Atlantis is interwoven into the culture of the native Tauregs. From a garrison stationed in the Sahara, Captain Pierre Blanchar (Saint-Avit) recounts his story to Lieutenant Georges Tourreil (Ferrieres) of how he ended up in this mythical place where he met the evil Queen - Brigitte Helm (Antinea). Is his tale one of truth or is he bonkers?

The film has an interesting subject matter and a great location to keep you watching. It's full of mystery and you never quite know what is going on as characters that we meet don't say much. Well, apart from Vladimir Sokoloff who plays the mysterious European resident who is slightly camp and totally insane. However, the film sort of meanders along and the audience has no real sense of purpose as to what the aim of it all is. There are memorable scenes that are thrown in but they may all be red herrings. Is this just one man's lunatic ravings as he has been affected by the sun? Or has this stuff really happened?

I think the thing to do is smoke some "kuff" and find out. It's easily available in Atlantis - 40% hashish and 60% opium. Everyone - let's go explore the Sahara!

This is beautiful and strange but comes to us from so far back it doesn't register for what it really is. The novel it was based on is apparently a piece of exoticist fluff, popular then - a time of archaeology and excavations in faraway places promising original truth.

We get fantastical story of Saharan intrigue and adventure at first sight. There are hooded Tuareg figures, a pet leopard, a binge- drinking impresario, lots of feverish wandering about in rooms, a prophecy of death, and a memory inside memory that flashes back to Paris and the Folies Bergeres. All this is worthy of Sternberg and Dietrich in their their own escapades into sensual , opiate dreaming.

But it's all what an unreliable narrator presents to us of his supposed discovery of the lost city of Atlantis, elusive sand-particles of a story.

Your first clue is that there is a woman in the early stages of the lost expedition who writes an account - a script - of the narrative. The film is from that French tradition of layered fiction most notably expressed later in Rivette and Ruiz, but predates them all with the exception of Epstein, that mage of fluid dreaming.

It is not immensely effective. Sternberg made similar things work because he was madly in love with Dietrich with the kind of love that bends reality. Pabst lacks his own muse this time, Louise Brooks, so there are no strong currents around his woman. His brilliance is that he doesn't film big and gaudy, it's a piece of erotic fantasy after all, in an exotic place. And it's a story being recalled, a piece of sunbaked imagination.

The magic is not in the sets and costumes the way Lang did for Metropolis, though some of them impress the overall feel is earthy and makeshift, like something the narrator and listener may have walked through in their patrols and have the images for.

No, Pabst sustains the fantasy in the uncanny drafts of desert wind between something resembling reality and feverish dream, with fragile (for the time) borders between memory and fiction, the mind captive in its own world of stories. The pursuit of myth is only the opportunity to travel out in search of fictions spun from such fabrics of the imaginative mind.

What Pabst does here finds its continuation in Celine and Julie Go Boating (not Indiana Jones).

Eventually it is all swallowed up by the sands and time, every answer we had hoped for. There was a woman desired, possibly a cabaret dancer and that's all we can glean - consider the subplot in Rivette's film about a vaudeville tour in the middle east. The rest is gauzy and half-glimpsed.

And the prospect that Pabst has modeled the Queen after Leni Riefenstahl is tantalizing; cold beauty, a dancer, surrounded with mystical pageantry, plus the actress looks like her.

COMRADESHIP (1931) can be said to have marked the relative end of the most fruitful period in the career of renowned German film-maker G. W. Pabst that had seen him create a handful of classics of World Cinema; in fact, his next venture was a very ambitious undertaking – an adaptation (in distinct German, French and English-language versions) of Pierre Benoit's epic adventure novel L'ATLANTIDE – but one that, in hindsight, would prove only partially successful. Another distinguished film-maker, Frenchman Jacques Feyder, had already made a celebrated stab at the material as a 3-hour Silent epic in 1921 and, over the years, other established film-makers – John Brahm, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer, Vittorio Cottafavi, George Pal, Ruggero Deodato, Bob Swaim and even "Walt Disney" – would find themselves attracted to the subject of the mythical lost empire. Admittedly, I have never read Benoit's original source and this 1932 English-language version is the first cinematic adaptation of it that I am watching but, is not Atlantis supposed to be an undersea kingdom? In fact, a recent study even went so far as to imply that the island of Malta (from where I hail) might well have formed part of Atlantis centuries ago! How come, therefore, that here (and, reportedly, likewise the other adaptations) it is situated in sandy desert dunes? A criticism leveled at the Feyder film had been that his choice of leading lady (the entrancing Queen of Atlantis) was all wrong but Pabst certainly got that bit down perfectly when he cast Brigitte Helm – best-known for playing the two Marias in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927) as Antinea. The plot has a little of H. Rider Haggard's SHE about it as two legionnaires stumble onto Atlantis in the Sahara desert and lose themselves within its labyrinthine dungeons replete with Antinea's past male conquests that have either gone mad or been mummified! The two male leads seemed slightly overage to me but, in any case, whatever acting capabilities they might possess would essentially have been dwarfed by the awesome sets and imaginative camera-work. As a matter of fact, this is where the film's main fault lies: the protagonists' plight never moves us as it should, even when one kills the other over Antinea or when, after her terrible secret is revealed to him, the survivor decides to go back to Atlantis anyway. The fleeting appearances of an eccentric 'prisoner' of Antinea (who speaks with a distinctly upper-class British accent and sports a Daliesque moustache) adds to the fun quotient but, overall, the stilted rendition of the dialogue (even Helm utters her own scarce lines in English) is on a par with other films from the early Talkie era. For the record, although every listing I have checked of this film gives its running time as 87 minutes, the version I watched ran for just 78! Incidentally, a movie I should be catching up with presently – DESERT LEGION (1953) with Alan Ladd, Richard Conte and Arlene Dahl – is said to have been partially inspired by Benoit's L'ATLANTIDE itself!