The Sunday Intertitle: Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend
Illa Meery in Richard Oswald’s CAGLIOSTRO – LIEBE UND LEBEN EINS GROSSEN ABENTEURERS.
Known in English as THE ADVENTURES OF CAGLIOSTRO, it charts roughly the same narrative course as the Orson Welles BLACK MAGIC, despite being based upon a different novel. The conflicted attitude to the protagonist causes different but comparable problems in both films — Welles’ movie (partially directed by the Great Man himself) sets Cag up as a heroic revolutionary with a legitimate grudge, before transforming him into an out and out villain. Oswald’s portrays him as something of a scamp, but his slimy scheme to start the French Revolution a year early, motivated only by personal pique, renders him utterly unsympathetic, especially as he escapes the consequences and leaves Meery, his confederate, to take the rap –
Since my copy is a truncated English translation, I can’t tell if this is a shorthand version of a deleted scene, or just a lonely intertitler’s perverted fantasy.
Cagliostro is played by the unnaturally handsome Hans Stuwe, and expensive and imaginative production design (Lazare Meerson!) and striking expressionist photography result in a sumptuous visual spectacle, still dimly apparent in this shortened and fuzzy print. Oswald’s oeuvre, which includes the bold, sympathetic gay rights film DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS, and the epic LUCREZIA BORGIA, could do with restoration and reappraisal. He’s nothing if not resourceful, visually, taking particular pleasure in Cagliostro’s magic tricks.
German cinema’s first disco ball. It would not be the last.
A Wellesian flavour — see the title sequence of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, soon to be re-released.
Cagliostro’s magic is a lot of balls…
…crystal balls, that is.
July 17, 2011 at 2:52 pm
No doubt Welles saw this. He came for the magic and stayed for the mise en scene.
July 17, 2011 at 4:31 pm
He’d have been pretty young — 14 or so. But he was nothing if not precocious. It’s a lovely thought, though, a movie feeding his love of magic, which led him back to — movies.
July 17, 2011 at 5:35 pm
Wow, terrific stills.
I recently got hold of “Lady Hamilton (1921),” another Richard Oswald historical film, considered lost until recently. I don’t think the print is complete — the end is very abrupt, and I’ve seen stills of elaborate battle scenes that don’t appear here. Also: intertitles in Russian, which is a shame, because you may need the titles to get that the film is really a mock-epic, a picaresque satire. Conrad Veidt as Nelson shows up about halfway through, and of course is more wonderfully wrecked with every subsequent appearance. There’s also Reinhold Schuenzel as a degenerate (of course) Hapsburg or other. No less a source than Wikipedia suggests that the portrayal of this king as an infantile moron mainly preoccupied with fishing is historically accurate. Ilke Gruening, the “What watch?” lady from Casablanca, has a small role.
Anyway. It really upped my estimatation of Oswald as a filmmaker, as opposed to a courageous chutzpahteer.
Oh, and set design by Paul Leni.
July 17, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Excellent! Hope that one turns up, and with fan subtitles, sometime. I haven’t yet seen a film I’d call great by RO, but he certainly could trump up some impressive stylistics if the need arose, and each film I see deepens my appreciation.
Different from the Others certainly sounds impressively progressive, but I haven’t seen it to see how it bears up as cinema.
July 17, 2011 at 11:53 pm
It was put out on video a few years ago in a boxed set of early German gay cinema that included William Dieterle amazing gay prison drama Sex in Chains in which Dieterle himself starred.
Different From the Others is highly melodramatic, but who can resist a melodrama starring Connie Veidt as a man blackmailed for being. . . Connie Veidt. Best of all the blackmailer is played by Reinhold Schünzel who went on to direct Viktor und Victoria (famously remade by Blake Edwards) AND Ice Follies of 1939 starring Joan Crawford, Jmaes Stewart and Lew Ayres.
July 18, 2011 at 12:51 am
Wow… I do have to see it. The Victim of its day.
July 18, 2011 at 3:38 am
The existing print is only about half of the original film, and may represent the truncated reedit Magnus Hirschfeld did a few years later in an attempt to beat the censor. The original seems to have been a melodrama wrapped around a (literal) lecture delivered by Hirschfeld.
Reinhold Schuenzel was very much a part of Oswald’s stock company — and HEY, he also directed the lost 1921 film “Der Graf von Cagliostro, in which he played the title role and Veidt plays, um, somebody else.
A few years ago I sat through the end credits of “There Will Be Blood” and noticed the assistant director’s name: Richard Oswald. Sure enough, The Concise Cinegraph confirms that he’s the grandson of Weimar’s Richard Oswald (and the son of another director, Gerd Oswald).
July 18, 2011 at 11:19 am
Oh, Gerd! That connection never occurred to me.
RO also has his supernatural side, with Tales of Hoffman, Uncanny Tales, and the second version of Alraune. None of which are available with subtitles (and UT is missing its last six minutes in all prints).
Sad news about Different from the Others, a movie which could only have been made in the atmosphere of Weimar Germany, or else forty years later.
July 18, 2011 at 12:28 pm
What a pity that Conrad Veidt doesn’t play Cagliostro! Who better to be sinister and hypnotic?
Showed DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS in a class with some Italian ‘suffering diva’ movies, and Veidt fitted in perfectly!
July 18, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Yes, Veidt as Cagliostro would have been splendid, a nice role reversal from Caligari: hypnotised to hypnotist. But I’m sure you’ll find Stuwe agreeable (I’m presuming you’ll want to see this!)
December 5, 2011 at 12:10 pm
For those interested, “Cagliostro” by Richard Oswald is being released on DVD on Tuesday 6th December by French DVD publisher Potemkine (http://www.potemkine.fr/Potemkine-fiche-film/Cagliostro-cagliostro-/pa11m5pr9671.html).
The DVD includes two unreleased scores: classic piano version by Mathieu Regnault and exclusive cine-mix by DJ Cam. It also provides English subtitles (the DVD is region free).
December 5, 2011 at 2:35 pm
That’s wonderful news! A beautiful movie that deserves a far better version than the bootleg I reviewed.
December 5, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Let’s hope the two scores will please silent movie fans.