Únos bankére Fuxe

Just when I though my summer of Czechoslovakian silent films was over, as streamed by the the Czech archives, here's another one, "The Kidnapping of Fux the Banker," but streamed as part of the Bonn silent film festival. It's the second picture of director Karel Anton that I've seen now. The other being "Gypsy" (a.k.a. "Cikáni," 1922), a tortuous melodrama that I nevertheless rated highly for its novelistic weaving of various subplots. In this subsequent release, we likewise get various narrative threads, but it's largely a mess and an inane comedy that seemed to recycle a lot from other movies.

The most interesting to me of these is the Sherlock Holmes parody. Instead of deducing some murderer's convoluted scheme, this Holmes incompetently bungles his case so thoroughly it would require Arthur Conan Doyle's actual Holmes to unsort if we hadn't ourselves seen it unfold on screen. A simple matter of finding a girl becomes an opportunity for this Holmes to be dragged through the streets by his clothes accidently getting caught on an automobile for which he was in the process of writing down the license plate, subsequently ending up in the looney bin and escaping, then disguising himself to play out an old-dark-house farce (à la "Haunted Spooks" (1920), "One Exciting Night" (1922), "The Bat" (1926), "The Cat and the Canary" (1927), and so on) whereupon, as promised in the title, he accidently kidnaps the banker instead of his daughter, the girl he was hired to find. And, there's more: he repeatedly switches outfits with his client for them to elude the bumbling bobbies, ends up getting a Duke arrested in their place, and, then, he inadvertently frees an actual criminal instead of the Duke from jail. Eventually, the entire mess drives the police chief mad.

All of that sounds more amusing to me now that I write it down, but it pales in comparison to some other such parodies, especially Douglas Fairbanks's 1916 "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish." Alice Guy-Blaché's "Burstup Homes' Murder Case" (1913) also comes to mind. It's far better than "Holmes & Watson" (2018), but so is most everything else ever filmed.

The rest of the film is less appealing--a romantic comedy for a couple who hardly know each other. Grossly, the banker's daughter is first portrayed by adult actress pretending a little girl talking to her teddy bear like a second-rate Mary Pickford. She reads a book, the title for which we're never told, and she suddenly craves womanhood--that is, sex. It's a book she stole from her father, which only adds to the quasi-incestuous nature of her father unwittingly being one of her suitors, along with the Duke and her father's debtor--the guy who hires Holmes. The father, meanwhile, is introduced in a scene surrounded by servants that's reminiscent of "The Oyster Princess" (1919), except in this case we never see the servants again. There's also another woman, a friend of the daughter, for whom she schemes to marry her father. A multiple-exposure dream of those suitors, lots of slapstick and mistaken identities ensue.

One final note: yet again, a Czech silent film was streamed with an awful modern score. It was the same case with almost all of the postings from the Prague archives. I ended up muting this one, too. I mean, if you think speaking during a score to a silent film, such as repeating a character's name, Daisy, over and over again, is a good idea--and to do so with tonal obliviousness by making it a creepy whisper to what is obviously a comedy, then you should seriously reevaluate your decision-making process. Something bad is going down in scoring Czech silent films these days.