Selige Drei Wochen

...on a tiger skin. Or would you prefer to err with her on another fur.

This is a very silly film but is as far as I know the only film version readily available of Elinor Glyn steamy 1907 novel Three Weeks. There had been a US version in 1914 and would be another in 1924 (which supposedly is extant but which I have not seen). In between Márton Garas (also director of a 1918 version of Anna Karenina) produced this Hungarian version (also issued in German under the title Selige Drei Wochen).

Glyn, later celebrated as the inventor of "IT" and the person who taught the US all it wanted to know about sex and din't dare to ask, was a specialist in romances targeted at shop-girls. This is a perfect bit of female fantasy (more like a nightmare for a man) about a Russian princess married to a brutal husband whom she doesn't love who, with the aid of the servants (they are the best thing in the film), takes advantage of her husband's absence on a diplomatic mission, to flee the house, set herself up incognita in a hotel and seduce a soppy young Count by the name of Ivan. And, yes, one gets to see the famous tiger skin (although not frankly much in the way of sinning).

The story (it is its saving grace) does not pretend to be about anything except casual sex (and a bit of equally casual food and drink). The couple only have three weeks together before the return of the brute and sinning, even if we don't see it, evidently does take place during this brief idyll because three years later, the princess, now back with brute, has a golden-haired three-year old son.

Unfortunately the pair cannot leave well alone and she sends him a letter and the servant who takes it is persuaded to bring him back to the Russian princedom for a secret rendez-vous and.....I won't spoil your enjoyment of what comes next.

Complete tosh but quite fun in a perverse sort of way. One even gets treated to a semi-pornographic dream (just stockings, a bathing suit..and a parasol) when Ivan falls ill after managing to overturn the boat on his way home from his three-week love-in (presumably suffering from exhaustion). So an experience obviously not to be missed....

In this Hungarian version of Elinor Glyn's story about wild times when the husband's away, most of what I noticed was lush sets and overacting. My acquaintance with Hungarian films in this period is very limited: one film by Michael Curtiz covers it. Yet there was a Hungarian film industry, with at least three studios, and Márton Garas has respected in the industry at the time. He is credited with turning Anna Karenina into a film. Perhaps it is the overt sexuality that appealed to him and the national audience. Even though nothing is too outrageous, the woman does lounge on a tiger skin, and her lover does try to crawl beneath the hem of her floor-length dress at one stage.

Mrs. Glyn, having failed with sentimental shopgirl novels, succeeded with this one. Her credits stop abruptly in 1930, although she lived until 1943. Perhaps the overt sexuality of the pre-code era overwhelmed this sort of piffle. Or perhaps she woke up, realized she had enough money without being a 66-year-old purveyor of vamps and decided to pack it in.