Carmen

Carmen is the story of a soldier (Harry Liedtke) who is on track to have a good life. He is engaged to a nice girl, and he just got a promotion, so he will be able to provide for his new wife. However, on duty he stumbles upon a woman of ill repute (Negri) and is so completely enchanted that he leaves the military, abandons his fiancée, and resorts to a life of crime to support himself and his gypsy lover. She quickly tires of him and moves onto the next best thing.

This is the fourth Pola Negri film I've seen, and I do not understand her appeal. She isn't terribly attractive, which is essential for this role so we can understand why the soldier destroys his life for her. Although Negri was a trained dancer, she clumps around devoid of a shred of grace and her "seductive" dancing is laughable. Because the film lacks a charming leading lady, there is very little to rave about. Even though Ernst Lubitsch directs, there is very little sex appeal. The setting is dirty and destitute, and although the film is short it doesn't feel like it.

This is a classic story, so if you want to familiarize yourself to feel more cultured, go ahead and watch but keep your expectations low.

Adapted from the later parts of the novella of the same name by Prosper Merimee, Carmen is Ernst Lubitsch's third surviving feature, and he was still firmly in the part of his career where his voice was muffled by studio needs. There was room for him to operate a bit within the bounds of this story of a Spanish army officer who allows himself to fall to his lowest through the wiles of a gypsy woman, but mostly this feels like Lubitsch continuing his early education in how to make films work overall. It's his most accomplished film up to this point, for sure, but it also suffers from the silent film medium's propensity for thin characterization due to the lack of dialogue.

Told in a wraparound narrative by a man around a campfire (something that doesn't really pay off, to be honest), we watch Don Jose Navarro (Harry Liedtke) arrive to a new military post where he is due to fulfil the promise that his mother as well as his betrothed, Dolores (Grete Diercks). He reaches the small town of his new post and quickly falls under the power of the gypsy woman Carmen (Pola Negri). The mysterious alure of this gypsy woman is what drives Jose downward. He first succumbs to simply giving her some time, but when he's supposed to arrest her for a crime, he ends up letting her go. This event causes his superior officer to strip him of his rank while, coincidentally becoming enraptured with Carmen himself. This comes to a head when Jose kills the officer in an impassioned moment, leading to Jose needing to leave the military life behind, all for the love of a woman who doesn't seem to care for him all that much.

The portrait of the two main characters is interesting in contrasts. Jose is written as a hopeless Romantic, and Liedtke performs him with all of the grand, sweeping gestures of over the top silent acting. He's completely in love with the wrong woman, mostly because he's exotic (some depth in the writing and dialogue would have helped deepen this a bit), but the woman is pretty much the exact opposite. Negri plays Carmen much less extravagantly. Where Jose is a grand romantic, Carmen is a cynic with no real attachments to anything, and Negri performs her reactions to Jose with reserved disdain. It's easy to see how she would simply abandon him as he descended in life. It was his uniform that attracted her to him, what little she was actually attracted to him to begin with, and as he became less important, she met him with just increasing dismissal.

Jose becomes just another bandit and smuggler while Carmen abandons things to go to Gibraltar where she organizes bandit raids on unsuspecting army officers and also falls in love with the famous matador Escamillo (Magnus Stifter). Everything has to come together tragically, and it does. It works well enough for the whole to feel as a single work (what was really missing from The Eyes of the Mummy), but those early scenes establishing our characters feel too thin for what's asked of them later. It's an issue in a lot of silent dramas where characters just don't quite have the immediacy and depth required to make late dramatic twists and turns feel impactful.

There's skill on display from Lubitsch this early in his career. There are more than one large scale, though all to brief, sequence from large crowd shots in the town to a gun battle towards the end. It's clearly filmed and edited in a way that was probably influenced by how Griffith was filming things in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Lubitsch was showing promise early, though the limits of the film's length and the medium's own constraints prevented him from going too far with it all this early.

However, after the dull disappointment that was The Eyes of the Mummy, it's nice to see Lubitsch recovering with something handsome and well made. That it doesn't connect fully is unfortunate, but he's not done yet.

It seems funny now, but back in the silent days, musicals and operas were often made into movies. But, without the beautiful music, you wonder what the point must have been. Well, Bizet's opera, "Carmen" was apparently very popular fodder during the silents, as I've seen two versions (plus Chaplin's "Burlesque of Carmen") and according to the excellent review already posted on IMDb, there is yet another version but it does not appear to exist any longer (starred Theda Bara). To me, not having the music is a fatal problem--so no matter how good the story is, too much of the play is missing for it to be all that great. Seeing "Carmen" without music is like going on a honeymoon and being told not to touch!! It loses a lot in the deal.

This German version has the distinction of being directed by a very young and inexperienced Ernst Lubitsch and starring the vampish Pola Negri (who was famous for her supposed adoration of Valentino...after he died). While it's pretty good and has relatively restrained acting and decent sets, the overall effect is just okay. It's not really bad...just what you'd expect from a butchered opera made into a silent film.

So is it worth seeing? Well, it all depends. If you are a total nut-job like me who adores silents, then by all means--though the ending seems all but missing. If you are a novice to silents, there are many, many, many silents out there that are simply more entertaining and interesting. Worth a look, but hardly a must-see.

By the way, I saw the version that was shortened slightly and renamed "Gypsy Blood". It came in at 64 minutes and I have no idea if the original and slightly longer version exists. Perhaps this shortening of the film could explain why it seemed to end so abruptly.

Considering the great talents of Ernst Lubitsch and Hanns Kräly this film is a bitter disappointment; were it not for these men and Pola Negri's Carmen, this film would be hardly worth mentioning; it could have been made by any competent, but uninspired director. During the credits Lubitsch is shown behind his desk smoking a cigarette and not a cigar!!; as if the viewer is already warned that this film is not "Lubitsch".

Problems start with the casting of Don José. Pola Negri is sensual, lively and very good (though very Teutonic, but I can accept that), Harry Liedtke on the other hand is stiff as a board; probably his military uniform was too tight to give him room for natural movement and expression. Therefore not one Negri/Liedtke scene works; when ever the viewer expects eroticism and longing, Spike Jones' parody of Bizet's Carmen enters the mind.

The adaptation is too straight-forward, and - more importantly - spiritless. Besides, on several moments the story telling is that clumsy, that it is hard to follow the story, were it not that the subject is widely known. But there may be a reason for this: Herman G. Weinberg (in his book "The Lubitsch Touch") claims that originally the story was told in flashback within a frame story (these parts being coloured-in by hand)and as such more or less following the set-up of Merimée's novel. I could not find confirmation of this and the copy I saw today only had the "Carmen story". Nonetheless the problem still remains that - with the exception of a few scenes like the one in which Carmen throws a flower at Don Jose- the film is pasted together with scenes that do not even try to capture the spirit of the novel: it never really visualizes the nuances of the relationship of Carmen and Don José; was that aspect of the novel too subtle for the German public? Were they only interested in an exotic environment and Carmen just happened to be in it?

Quite some other weak points could be mentioned; a 1000 words would not do. To mention but a few: 1) Don José's fiancée is introduced at the beginning of the film, only to disappear totally as the film progresses. She returns only once in the prison scene (Don José in agony over to escape or not), but in a double exposure trick as old as cinematography and too corny for Lubitsch. 2) We spend long minutes at the coast when every (and I mean every) gang member tries to cross the water; I was waiting to see at least one member fall into the water to give the scene some tension and meaning. 3) Lubitsch was known for his direction of masses; but I could for instance make neither nor tail of the marching in of the soldiers. 4) How could Lubitsch be contented with a bull-fighting scene without a bull? (To get a real Spanish bull into Germany that short after the war was over, indeed might have been a problem) But why was not a better (filmic) solution found? As it is now it is just, well, bull ....

It was a huge success in Germany with audiences and press, but I think we should not be mislead by that. This success says more about the psyche of a defeated country after 4 years of war than about the film. Curiously enough in 1947 Lubitsch said that Carmen was one of his best dramas claiming that he made a drama not influenced by Italian dramas. Did he ever see it again? I wonder.

An early screen adaptation of Carmen which, contrary to popular belief, was a novella before it was an opera. Lubitsch presumably wanted a nondescript character to play the tragic military officer Don Jose Navarro so that his complete capitulation to the wiles of Pola Negri's peasant girl would be believable, but he probably got more (or less, depending on how you look at it) than he bargained for with Harry Liedtke, who is so bland that it's difficult to pick him out from the scenery. Navarro's downfall is clumsily handled and unconvincing.