The Chess Player (no 39)

by Allan Fish

(France 1927 141m) DVD1

Aka. Le Joueur d’Echecs

The board is set, the pieces are moving…

p  Raymond Bernard, Henry Dupuy-Mazuel, Jean-José Frappa  d  Raymond Bernard  w  Raymond Bernard, Jean-José Frappa  novel  Henry Dupuy-Mazuel  ph  Joseph-Louis Mundviller, Marc Bujard, Willy Faktorivitch  ed  Raymond Bernard  m  Henri Rabaud  md  Carl Davis  art  Jean Perrier  cos  Eugène Lourie  spc  W.Percy Day

Pierre Blanchar (Boleslas Vorowski), Charles Dullin (Baron von Kempelen), Edith Jehanne (Sophie Novinska), Camille Bert (Maj.Nicolaieff), Pierre Batcheff (Prince Serge Oblomoff), Marcelle Charles-Dullin (Catherine the Great), Jacky Monnier, Armand Bernard, Alexiane, Pierre Hot, James Devesa, Fridette Fatton,

So spoke I McKellen as Gandalf in The Return of the King, but it’s also a wonderful summation for this wonderful, long feared lost silent masterpiece.  For far too long discussions of French silent cinema have tended to centre around Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the epics of Abel Gance.  Bernard is a name unjustly lost in time, but this was a man responsible for three supreme masterworks of the cinematic storyteller’s art; WWO classic Les Croix de Bois, his epic five hour Les Misérables and this wonderful historical romance.  Many of the cinematic touches seen here may have first been seen on Napoleon, but Bernard (and Russian director Alexandre Volkoff) worked as assistants to Gance on that film out of respect for Gance and must have had some input into the innovations used therein.  The Chess Player is the other great masterpiece of French silent cinema, and one which is impossible not to compare to the same year’s Metropolis. 

            The story begins in 1776, when Poland is under the control of Russian invaders and the nationalist Poles are aching for a revolt.  Sophie and Boleslas are the adopted children of eccentric inventor Baron Von Kempelen, who has made his name throughout Europe with his life-size automatons.  However, when an attempted revolt fails and Boleslas is on the run, he takes refuge inside his adopted father’s latest pride and joy, a chess playing automaton (Boleslas himself is a master player).  Sophie meanwhile is torn between brotherly devotion to Boleslas and her passion for a kindly Russian officer, Oblomoff. 

            Though essentially pure historical tosh, Bernard’s handling of the story is masterful and the look of the film, achieved in tandem with his technicians, is awe-inspiring (with particular credit to the cinematographers and costumier Lourie).  The set pieces are handled with incredible skill.  Some may now see the battle scenes as rather artificial, but they are deliberately so, inspired by a bizarre, almost surreal sense of fervent patriotism, personified in the almost crazed stares of Sophie as she plays her nation’s music at her beloved piano.  Indeed, it is one such scene which really puts the film up into the immortals of the silent cinema; Sophie is at home and can hear the cannon fire and battle not too far away and is praying for a victory for her nation.  Yet we have seen that the Polish uprising is failing, that they are on course for a heavy defeat.  Sophie, in shock as the windows are blown out and a portrait is knocked off its perch, hastens to the piano to play and calm her spirits and ends up imagining in her head a rather different result, one in which the Polish cavalry run through the Russians like a knife through butter and ne’er a man is lost.  Not only is this perhaps an accurate depiction of nearly all well-bred women’s view of war at the time – romantic and heroic – but a quite exhilarating piece of cinematic bravado, one which would not have been possible but for the truly amazing score of Henri Rabaud, who drew on Polish music as his source.  It’s simply the greatest silent score ever written and it’s a miraculous mercy that it has survived.  But then again, it’s a miraculous mercy that the film has survived at all, so that we can relish the look of a true cinematic visionary and the excellent performances, particularly that of the great Charles Dullin (a Raymond Bernard favourite) and the lovely Edith Jehanne, sadly now so forgotten we know not even her dates of birth or death.