Director: Josef von Sternberg
Cast: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Jack Raymond
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: I want to reflexively like every black and white movie I see, to say nothing about silent movies. I may be the last guy on the planet who isn’t entirely convinced that color and synchronized sound were an unassailably good decision.
And this film has some things to recommend it. It has some things to say about the movies that are equally profound today as they would have been nearly a century ago. When the film is about these observations in its early scenes, it is quite good. Although you may be getting the sense that I’m not 100% behind this, the film is also beloved enough to have gotten quality treatment over the years leading up to and including its release via the Criteron Collection. Not every silent movie gets treated so well, up to and including no longer existing.
And yet I couldn’t help but find the whole exercise a little bewildering. Spending much of the story focusing on an extended flashback thoroughly fleshing out why Alexander (Jannings) is so sad and bewildered in the years after Czarist domination. Even when flashback and main narrative inevitably intertwine, what was so trenchant and engaging about the earlier scenes gets absolutely vaporized in the chase for melodrama.
While I can’t completely dismiss the film, the story ultimately doesn’t play to its strengths. But my problems with the film run a little deeper. The scope isn’t epic enough to make it memorable with the great dramas, nor is it clever or energetic enough to put it with and of the truly great comedies. It is imminently average, and it may be unfair to look too harshly at an average film of the silent era, but I was told only the great ones would survive to the present.