by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on TCM and watched
the “Silent Sunday” showcase film, The Loves of Pharoah, a 1922 historical epic from Germany directed by
Ernst Lubitsch — yes, you read that right; the master of romantic and sexual
comedy tried his hand at DeMille’s territory in the early days (though this was
made before DeMille’s own first excursion into ancient Egypt, the 1923 silent
version of The Ten Commandments, and the hugeness of the production and especially the sets were
probably inspired by the Babylon sequences of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance). Why the English-language version is called The
Loves of Pharoah is a mystery, since he’s
only shown in love with one woman in the plot and the German title, Das Weib des Pharao, literally translates to “The Pharoah’s Wife,” a
more sensible name for the film in terms of its actual content. The cast list
is virtually a who’s-who of German cinema in the early 1920’s; the (fictional)
Pharoah Amenes is played by Emil Jannings (eight years before he made The
Blue Angel, which made for an
interesting contrast given that we’d just re-watched that classic); his rival,
Ethiopian King Samlak, is Paul Wegener (in one of the worst blackface jobs ever
done on screen; how were UFA’s makeup artists able to do such a great job
making him look like an animate clay statue in The Golem and such a lousy one making him look Black?); and
Sothis, the designer of the Royal Treasury, is Albert Bassermann, an actor who
later fled Germany and settled in the U.S., where he got parts in major films
even though he never bothered to learn English. Bassermann learned all his
lines in U.S. talkies phonetically and was O.K. when he had either a German
director or a director like Alfred Hitchcock who had learned German (Hitchcock’s first two films were
English-German co-productions and he learned German so he could talk to his
crews), but when he didn’t he needed an interpreter; when he made A Woman’s
Face for George Cukor, fellow
cast member Conrad Veidt interpreted Cukor’s directions for him.
A major
director, a huge budget, a stellar cast: where could The Loves of Pharoah go wrong? With the script! The story by Norbert
Falk and Hans Kräly (a frequent Lubitsch collaborator until Kräly seduced
Lubitsch’s wife and, rather than behaving in the emotionally detached way of
the characters in his later films, Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and
banished Kräly from all of his future projects) is one of the most idiotic
things ever put on screen: Pharoah Amenes receives a state visit from King
Samlak, who promises the Pharoah his daughter Makeda (Lyda Salmonova) to seal
the deal for peace between the two countries. Only once Amenes gets a gander of
Makeda’s Greek slave Theonis (Dagny Servaes), he couldn’t care less about the
Ethiopian princess — and Samlak responds to the Pharoah’s rejection of his
daughter for her slave by making war on Egypt. As if that weren’t enough plot
to stir the melodramatic stew, there’s been a mutual love-at-first-sight
attraction between Theonis and Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), son of Sothis, and in
case you’ve already forgotten who Sothis is, he’s the designer of the royal
treasury, which Amenes has decreed that no one — not even he — will be allowed to enter. Charles
and I both found this plot hole outrageously silly; if no one is allowed to enter the treasury, how can Amenes
have money put into it, or taken out again when he needs to spend it?
Amenes
orders Ramphis executed by being crushed under a giant boulder being lowered
into place as part of the treasury construction project — earlier Amenes had
told his advisor Menon (Paul Biensfeldt) to be careful not to rush the project so much as to jeopardize the workers’ health and
safety (I joked, “Caring about your workers’ health and safety — that’s so 5th century B.C.!”), but the workers
got restive anyway and called a protest march through the streets of the
Egyptian capital (Charles almost inevitably joked, “It’s Occupy Memphis!”), a
plot thread that quickly gets dumped and never picked up again — only at the
last minute Theonis agrees to marry the Pharoah if he’ll spare Ramphis’ life,
and Pharoah does so but assigns Ramphis lifetime slavery in the construction
gang. Just then the war between Ethiopia and Egypt breaks out, the Egyptians
get their asses kicked, the slaves building the treasury seize the opportunity
to escape, and King Samlak shows up at the capital with the crown of Amenes,
indicating that the Pharoah died in battle. Queen Theonis is now the ruler of
Egypt, and she selects Ramphis — who’s shown up just in time — to be her
consort and rally the Egyptian troops to defend the capital and reverse the
course of the war. So you’d think Ramphis and Theonis would beat the enemy
invaders and live happily ever after, wouldn’t you? Well, that is how the version originally released in the U.S.
ended — a number of U.S. productions also had different endings for their
American and European versions (including Love, the Garbo/Gilbert silent of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, which ended with the two
lovebirds happy together in the U.S. version and with Anna’s suicide as per
Tolstoy’s original in Europe) — but in the one we were watching, pieced
together Frankenstein-style from partial prints from Germany, Italy, Russia and
the U.S. (encompassing four-fifths of the original footage and with descriptive
titles and production stills to fill in the gaps), Amenes suddenly shows up,
not dead after all, and demands to be reinstated as Pharoah even though Ramphis
has just been crowned. (He’s been shown with his head shaved during the scenes
in which he reigned, but when he shows up again he has a full head of hair even
though he doesn’t seem to have been gone more than a day or two.)
The Loves
of Pharoah is a thoroughly risible
movie, impressive as spectacle but loony-tunes both in the basic outlines of
its plot and the incredible overacting of the principals; as I said when I
wrote about the 1912 Italian silent Cabiria, “This is the kind of relentlessly overwrought, scenery-chewing acting that
people who have never sat through an entire silent feature in their lives
nonetheless are convinced all silent films were acted like.” The characters grimace, pull their faces
nearly to shreds, faint like a building collapsing in an earthquake, move their
arms around like off-kilter windmills and otherwise ham it up unmercifully;
later Lubitsch would gain a reputation for getting his actors to deliver
subtle, delicate performances in his romantic romps, but either he wasn’t a
good enough director yet to tell his stellar actors not to overact or he
thought an historical spectacle needed a bigger, more obvious style of acting
than a romantic comedy. The Loves of Pharoah is a perfect example of a genuinely talented
filmmaker totally out of his depth, making a
story he was utterly ill-suited to and whose discomfort showed in the ham party
he allowed his set to become — and though I’m glad for the sheer amount of
effort that went into patching it back together again as much as the materials
allowed it to be, I can’t really say that we rediscovered a great film the way
we did in such other restorations of long-lost silents as the Gloria
Swanson/Raoul Walsh Sadie Thompson, Rex Ingram’s The Magician, John Ford’s Three Bad Men and the like.
