MogwaiMovieReviews

A contender for the greatest of all silent films, made at the very peak of the artform, only a year before sound came in and cut it off in its prime. It's a story of changing fortunes: a once-young Russian revolutionary (William Powell), now a Hollywood director, finds the Imperial general who tormented him and stole his woman cross his path again, now a feeble old man seeking work as a film extra.

Emil Jannings, as the general, gives one of the greatest performances in all of cinema, completely inhabiting both the cruel, spoilt military man and the utterly broken later shell. We the audience feel a wide array of emotions for him: anger, hate, admiration, pity, empathy... The camera of Josef Von Sternberg roams around and captures it all perfectly in his best-ever film.

A brilliantly original, timeless fable and an excellent introduction to silent cinema for anyone unfamiliar with how great and powerful it can be.

Well-made Oscar-bait epic, overlong but well-acted, especially by the excellent Adrian Brody, who's used to this sort of thing from The Pianist, 20 years back.

The film tries hard to sell us the hideousness of brutalist architecture as youthful ingenuity and progress, as opposed to the barren, intentionally-ugly, soul-crushing concrete prison cells it actually delivered in the real world. It also briefly tries to do the same for free jazz, too, which is similarly abrasive on the senses in reality.

One gets the feeling there is political motivation behind the subject, being focused on a left-wing "art" movement (the Bauhaus school), the never-more-divisive topic of immigration, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish history - I presume to strengthen and promote the connection of the last two in the viewer's mind at a time when the deluge of people from certain cultures entering western societies has massively increased the rates of antisemitism in all left-wing political movements.

The other characters are competently acted but thinly-drawn and terribly shallow, and Guy Pearce seems more of a caricature of "wealth" than a real person. Though the details of the world and situations are painstakingly-reproduced, nothing in them seems all that believable.

There's a number of explicit sex scenes that don't seem to serve any purpose, and appear to be there just for flavour. The same goes for drug use. There's a brief moment in the last quarter that combines the two and some violence to boot, setting up the ending of the film, and is the most stupidly-heavy-handed part of the whole affair: completely out of character, out of the blue, and apparently all out of ideas.

The film it mostly reminds me of is P. T. Anderson's The Master, a similarly-meandering period drama similarly-saved by the performance of Joachim Phoenix. That film's not one of my favourites either, but it holds together quite a lot better than this.

All in all, an imposing and sturdily-constructed monument that doesn't seem to have any meaningful or important story to tell but succeeds in taking up a vast amount of time and space and money to do it. An awkwardly-shaped empty building made almost at random, with no clear purpose in mind.

A fun start, with witty dialogue and a bunch of nubile young actresses skinnydipping, but otherwise quite a glum and unglamorous entry in the Dietrich/Sternberg catalogue. Dietrich is uncomfortably cast against type as a dutiful wife and mother and Herbert Marshall often seems too dowdy and stiff to be someone she would fall for.

It's unusual in that it *begins* with boy-meets-girl-gets-married-has-child, and then the (mis)adventures of the tale begin as girl-goes-back-on-stage-to-make-money-to-help-boy-get-medical-treatment. I think maybe the problem is partly that Dietrich's character doesn't seem all that interesting until she steps on stage, and so it feels as though what is thrilling about her there is simply a performance by a much duller person, whose domestic affairs we are made to follow for the great majority of the film when we'd rather spend time with the creature in the spotlight.

The film is disjointed in tone with some sluggish stretches, and seldom plays to the strengths of any of its cast, which include Cary Grant and Sidney Toler (Charlie Chan), in small and ill-fitting roles. It *does* feature Marlene in the gorilla-suit singing about voodoo, which is timestoppingly iconic, but other than that and some occasionally nice photography, it's one of the most lead-footed and least magical of all its makers' collaborations.