by Allan Fish
(Germany 1929 94m) DVD2 (Italy only)
I want to see you…
p Paul Czinner d Paul Czinner w Paul Czinner novel Arthur Schnitzler ph Karl Freund m Marlene Kuntz (reissue) art Erich Kettelhut
Elisabeth Bergner (Else Thalhof), Albert Bassermann (Dr Alfred Thalhof), Albert Steinrück (Von Dorsday), Grit Hegesa (Cissy Mohr), Else Heller (Frau Thalhof), Adele Sandrock (Tante Emma), Jack Trevor (Paul), Irmgard Bern, Ellen Plessow,
Elisabeth Bergner is one of those figures that can make one either weep with emotion or with laughter, an elfin Germanic waif with more than a faintly androgynous persona. I first saw her in Korda’s Catherine the Great, in which she played the infamous Catherine in as hilarious a piece of miscasting as you could ever witness; like having Brigitte Bardot play Joan of Arc. Our sympathies were well and truly with Doug Jnr’s mad Peter, hoping Fairbanks and Korda would screw history and have him throttle the little madam. Czinner was her wife by then, but he’d been her Svengali every bit as much as Von Sternberg had been Dietrich’s. Czinner wasn’t in Von Sternberg’s class as a director but he knew how to make a film and its plot orbit round a star, his star, his wife. Yet when she played Catherine she was 36 and would still go on to play in Escape Me Never and opposite Larry Olivier no less in As You Like It, in which she was described as the more masculine of the two. Yet Bergner was once a legend, a figure beloved on the European stage and, if she never really was on film what she was on stage, she remains fascinating. She’s generally dismissed by serious critics these days, all of which makes the restoration and rediscovery of Fraulein Else something to be shouted from the rooftops. Okay, so it’s no masterpiece but it is a revelatory film for any one of a number of reasons.
Bergner plays Else Thalhof, daughter of doctor and stock market dabbler Albert Thalhof, who goes to St Moritz for the 1928 Winter Olympics with friends and, while she’s away, a stock market crash hits her father hard, leaving him unable to meet the share demands which would prevent him from slipping into insolvency and the local prosecutor’s court. Her mother writes urgently to her to ask help of local bigwig Von Dorsday, who has always had a soft spot for Else. When Else asks him for help he agrees, but on a condition that she take her clothes off for him in private.
Like many stories of its author, it’s a film rich in sexual symbolism, something which seems all the more dangerous when associated with Bergner. Many critics will tell you that Ariane is her and Czinner’s greatest film, and it may well be, but Else pushes close. In both films, this is Bergner as you’ve never seen her before. Gone the blonde locks to be replaced by a short, dark, even more elfin crop which only accentuates her fairy quality, like a porcelain doll to be wrapped up for fear of breaking. It’s thus ironic and not without fascination to see her in the final sequence, resigned to her fate, knowing that unless she goes au naturel for Dorsday her father faces prison, but unable herself to live with the shame. So she goes from her room to the slimy Dorsday, dressed in the proverbial fur coat and no knickers, but in white furs – naturally – and removing it in a crowded bar to shame Dorsday and go out in as dramatic a fashion as possible. It may seem somewhat ridiculous to imagine any girl seeing it as a reason for suicide, but as that ol’ Bob Dylan song told us, the times they have a-changed. It’s nonsense, and yet it works because she believes in it, and her performance remains one of great delicacy, matched by a more stagy but still memorable turn from Basserman, not a day under 60, but over 10 years before becoming the cuddly old men of various Hollywood classics. Throw in some stunning snow-capes from the great Karl Freund and firm direction from Czinner, before he turned from director to aspic preserver (note the scene where Steinruck asks Bergner to strip, he doesn’t say the word ‘naked’, he rather points to a nude statue), and you have a definitive example of a forgotten diamond in the snow. The DVD is superb, but do yourself a favour, the only score worth anything of the three on the DVD is the second.
Interesting! Bergner of course has captivated me with AS YOU LIKE IT. This one is surely worth a look see!
As You Like It was mediocre. This and Ariane are the films to see.