Black ice (12/23/02)
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Die Augen der Mumie Ma. [
Eyes of the Mummy. Ernst Lubitsch, 1918. “Drama in 4 Akten von Hanns Kräly und Emil Rameau.”]
Excerpts from the juvenalia of Ernst Lubitsch:
A young German painter [Harry Liedtke] on sabbatical in Egypt goes out for a stroll in the desert and, with the unfailing luck of the cinema, immediately stumbles across the exotic and alluring Polish bombshell Pola Negri, drawing water at an oasis. Bewitched by this vision of loveliness, he accosts her, but she responds poorly to his pickup lines and somehow contrives to disappear in broad daylight among the featureless sands.
Meanwhile, back at the luxury hotel where all the intrepid European adventurers vacation, a specimen of VIP royalty [Max Laurence] is enquiring about that famous local attraction the tomb of Queen Ma. The proprietor assures him that this tomb carries a Curse, and points out a picturesquely shattered previous visitor [drooling into a bucket and babbling “Die Augen leben!”] posed here conveniently on the terrace to attract the tourist trade.
Naturally this piques the interest of our hero Herr Liedtke, and he goes down to the square in Cairo to try to drum up an expedition or at least to gather intelligence among the native color, who are hanging around in rags turning somersaults and charming snakes and doing ropetricks and all that other shit you expect in the Mysterious [Middle] East.
Obtaining directions, he mounts up on horseback and sets off across the desert for the mausoleum; which, we discover, is a rather rudimentary monument tended by native guide and Very Untrustworthy-Looking Person Emil Jannings [warming up for his later turn as Murnau’s Mephistopheles], dusked down to Egyptian in a sort of smudgeface and clad in some kind of Biblical coat of many colors.
Warming to the arrival of the mark, Jannings leads Liedtke into an underground chamber — where, after trying to lull him into dropping his guard by showing off the hieroglyphics and erotic etchings which decorate the walls, he springs the Big Surprise: a pair of peepholes in a sort of wallmounted mask which are inhabited by living [albeit rather disoriented] eyes.
Though Jannings clearly expects that this revelation will paralyze our hero with terror, the ploy doesn’t work; indeed why it ever did work is less than obvious, since the effect, such as it is, is that of somebody [e.g., a fan of the Colorado Buffaloes] standing in the corner with a bag over his [or, as it turns out, her] head. [Fortunately for the scary-Mummy-movie industry, many technological advances lay ahead.]
Muttering something like “Curses, foiled again,” Jannings tries to jump his prey and bludgeon him into submission, but only ends up getting shot for his pains; one must suppose this tourist trap has brought him better days.
Our hero then busts into an inner chamber and discovers the girl behind the curtain to be the captive Ms. Negri, who explains in flashback that she was carried off by the evil Jannings while bathing [though in deference to the delicate sensibilities of the contemporary audience we see that this was one of those primitive Movie Baths, in which a girl stood in a pond with her dress on — as Nun to God, thus Actress to Camera] and brought back here to be his love slave, or bait, or something; and that she has been a captive ever since, sleeping on a stone bench here in this dank tomb with Mister Charisma drooling all over her.
“Folge mich, Mädchen, ich werde Dich befreien,” our hero proclaims, [German for “Let me take you away from all this”], and they ride off on his trusty steed, leaving the not-quite-mortally-wounded Jannings gnashing his teeth and vowing revenge.
Herr Liedtke takes Negri back to Germany, where, her Gypsy wild-child difficulties in donning the trappings of civilization notwithstanding, she becomes a sensation as a hootchie-cootchie dancer.
Prince Max meanwhile finds Jannings stretched out in the desert negotiating with the vultures, rescues him, and, figuring no doubt that you can never tell when a retainer versed in the occult who can strike down your enemies with the Evil Eye might come in handy, tenders him a job offer; swearing by Osiris that he’ll find the bitch who laid him low, Jannings accepts.
One must expect all this will end badly; though not before der junge Lubitsch manages to thoroughly bore us with many very static studies of upper-class drawing rooms.
The surviving print is not good; and even in pristine condition could not have been terribly impressive because it obviously antedates the systematic use of lighting; moreover the camera work is rudimentary [stand it over here and let everybody walk in front of it], and the editing, primitive. [Griffith’s innovations in these areas were only absorbed by European filmmakers after the war.] Thus technically it is roughly on a par with Feulliade’s
Les Vampires [1915]; though hardly so entertaining.
Ms. Negri [later linked romantically to both Chaplin and Valentino] though admittedly striking and certainly athletic, is athletic in the traditional sense — i.e., it looks as though she could line up at defensive end; meaning that, by the standards of the ballet then or now, she is little less than elephantine. — Still, she projects something exotic and uninhibited entirely alien to the Hollywood starlets of the era, and you have to wonder what she could have done with a pole: there is, e.g., a curious scene set to illustrate the difficulty of her European education in which Liedtke enters the room and presents a welcome distraction, and, overjoyed, she runs to meet him and leaps into his arms — quite as nimbly as Amanda Peet greeting Bruce Willis. One simply cannot imagine Lillian Gish behaving this way; even Mary Pickford was far too decorous.
It is disappointing that the author introduces an exotic locale and then abandons it so rapidly, choosing instead to return to Europe and hang around high society. One might compare Lang’s contemporary serial
The Spiders [1919] — another romance about intrepid European adventurers in jodhpurs and high leather boots — which does essentially the opposite and has much more action and more inventive camera work. — Moreover though Lubitsch later acquired a reputation for raciness [aka “European sophistication”], Von Stroheim would have made the Mummy’s tomb a front for a brothel, found an excuse for a midnight-at-the-oasis scene in which Liedtke stumbled across Ms. Negri and fifteen or twenty attendant nymphs bathing in the nude, and would have reserved the role of the decadent procurer for himself, smoking cigarettes through a holder with a monocle screwed into his eye and a lascivious smirk on his face:
Queen Kelly, with Egyptology and occult subplots. — Indeed it says altogether too much both about Lubitsch and about Hollywood, that this was a guy who was destined to better himself there, while Lang was trivialized and Von Stroheim destroyed.
____________Midafternoon of the living dead (12/20/02)
