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Svengali the maestro, the "Polish scavenger" and the lewd visionary, Svengali the John Barrymore Show. The scraggly, gangling Bohemian is seen from the back through a swirl of Chopin, he turns in profile with elongated beak and pointy beard and there you have the model for Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. (Citizen Kane's low ceilings and opera lesson are also visible.) Paris in the 1890s is an enclave of painters, singers and sculptors, mesmerism is no less an art form, used by Svengali to lure the delectable Trilby (Marian Marsh) away from her beau, "the head of the purity brigade" (Bramwell Fletcher). George du Maurier's novel becomes a racy pre-code melodrama with dashes of horror and slapstick, shot by Archie Mayo under a Germanic shadow: The best sequence (the camera circles around the eponymous villain, then zooms out from his blank peepers and glides over Anton Grot's Gothic rooftops until it reaches the slumbering heroine) is like Murnau filming a Mabuse trance. Barrymore pours his Richard III and his Jekyll and Hyde into this greasy reprobate, at his most affecting when crumbling in self-disgust before Trilby's hypnotized romantic declarations. "You are beautiful, my manufactured love. But it is only Svengali talking to himself again." The peculiarly poignant ode to the tragic lecher builds to an appropriately perverse onstage miracle, l'amour at last materializing between puppeteer and marionette as the light goes out of their eyes. Hawks in Twentieth Century has the definite, irrepressible riposte. With Donald Crisp, Luis Alberni, Lumsden Hare, Carmel Myers, and Paul Porcasi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |