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Not long after the war, a full infantry of Germanic cutups. Aristocracy and banditry are mirrored regions, the henpecked commander (Victor Janson) is stationed with an unmarried daughter (Edith Meller) in the military fortress. Their counterparts live in the snowy mountains, the brigand leader (Wilhelm Diegelmann) whose cohorts welcome the lashes from the turbulent tomboy (Pola Negri). Between them passes "The Seducer" (Paul Heidemann), who leaves behind a crowd of weeping maidens so massive it must be dispersed with white mice released under their feet. "You have served us well." "I did what I could." The brush with the robber's daughter has him smitten and pantsless, still passion can only bridge the opposite sides so far. Knockabout baroque, merrily shifting angles and proportions. The raid on the hideout becomes a snowball fight emulated by De Sica in Miracle in Milan, the mission to infiltrate the compound is interrupted when both outlaws and sentries get caught up in the waltz emanating from within. "Ah, the season of love..." The spitfire is not immune to the contents of a vanity table, her dream reunites her with the amorous officer—they dance to an orchestra of snowmen, though not before she takes a bite out of the heart he offers her. A screen full of fireworks, furniture out the window ahead of L'Age d'Or. Throughout, Lubitsch masks the frame with an unending array of shapes (slashing rectangles and squeezed ovals and zigzagging outlines, veritable cutouts in a storybook) and dotes on wavy architecture that suggests Gaudí in the Alps. The Smiling Lieutenant is born here, so is Renoir's enlisted poet (Tire au flanc). With Marga Köhler, Hermann Thimig, Paul Biensfeldt, Paul Graetz, and Max Kronert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |