The Unexpected #2

Anton Walbrook fights a bear.

From THE SOLDIER AND THE LADY, a movie that perhaps exists to explain solely why Walbrook never became a Hollywood star, and to provide an excuse for this post. Number Two in an occasional series of things you never particularly hoped to see.

MICHAEL STROGOFF was a French epic directed by Richard Eichberg and Jacques de Baroncelli. RKO liked it so much they hired its star, Walbrook, specifically so they could cannibalise the film, using all the expensive visual bits and shooting new dialogue in English. (The resulting melange ends up credited to George Nichols Jnr, who shot only the bad bits. Don’t know much about him except he apparently died on the job, in 1940, shooting THE MARINES FLY HIGH.)

Unfortunately, the studio’s “de-imagining” included inserting two “comedy relief” characters, played by the normally-welcome Eric Blore and Edward Brophy, who disrupt the story’s sweep and (potential) dignity at every turn. It’s like thrusting Wheeler and Woolsey into a version of LES MISERABLES.

Anton’s ursine encounter is put together with the fast editing associated with the French silent cinema of ten years before, a flurry of quick cuts attempting to convince us that Walbrook, his stunt double, the bear, and the man in the bear costume, are all part of the same dramatic continuum. It almost works. Walbrook doesn’t look like any kind of Grizzly Adams, but he enters into the fray with the dignity and conviction that comes from knowing that he, alone, is Anton fucking Walbrook. Damn straight.

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