The Dumb Girl of Portici (Universal, 1916)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s Lifetime movie I changed channels and watched most of a quite interesting 1916 silent film, The Dumb Girl of Portici – though the alternative title The Mute Girl of Portici would probably work better for modern audiences now that “dumb” is usually used in its colloquial sense (lacking intelligence) rather than the literal one meant here (lacking speech). Just five years after founding Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle green-lighted this as a prestige product, hiring world-famous ballet dancer Anna Pavlova (in what turned out to be her only film role) to star in the film and using her own ballet company to play many of the supporting roles. The film was based on the opera La Muette de Portici by Daniel Auber with libretto by Germain Delavigne and Eugène Scribe, which was premiered in Paris in 1828 and whose story of revolution and violence inspired an audience in Belgium in 1830 to riot and stage a revolution of their own for real. The opera had in turn been based on a real-life rebellion in Naples in 1647, at a time when this Italian city was occupied by Spain and ruled by a corrupt and greedy viceroy in which a fisherman named Masaniello organized and carried out a revolt. Masaniello carried over as a character in both the opera and the film, while the librettists drew on Sir Walter Scott’s novel Peveril of the Peak, only they made her a woman and made her Masaniello’s sister Fenella. Auber and his librettists departed from operatic convention big-time and made Fenella literally unable to speak, casting her as a dancer with singers all around her in the other roles. Though most of Auber’s works (including the first version of Manon Lescaut and Fra Diavolo) are considered operettas, this one is regarded as the first French grand opera, containing such hallmarks of the form as a five-act structure, lots of interludes for dancing and spectacular stage effects.

The Dumb Girl of Portici was freely adapted from its operatic source by Lois Weber, who is credited with the script and also co-directed the film with her then-husband Phillips Smalley. Weber is one of the earliest major women filmmakers (Alice Guy-Blaché was her most significant predecessor but she made shorts almost exclusively, while Weber directed many features) and her 1916 drama Where Are My Children? still packs a wallop even though its open propagandizing against abortion would be a problem for modern critics, especially feminist ones. She was considered a highly prestigious name in 1916 and it’s not surprising that Universal hired her to steer this quite impressive movie. Technically, Weber wasn’t at D. W. Griffith’s level in terms of camera movement, intense editing or close-ups, but she stages this movie effectively and gets quite a good performance out of Pavlova even though the script gives her precious few opportunities to dance. It’s also interesting that the film contains a very long introduction – the part of the story presented in the opera doesn’t begin until halfway through the film, with the marriage of Prince Alfonso (Douglas Gerrard), son of the corrupt and licentious viceroy, to Princess Elvira (Edna Maison) even though he really loves the fisher girl Fenella (Anna Pavlova), sister of rebel activist Masaniello (Rupert Julian, who later became a director; his most famous directorial credit was the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, though comedy specialist Edward Sedgwick was brought in to reshoot the final chase scene and star Lon Chaney reportedly directed the scenes he was in).

The prologue explains how Alfonso met Fenella in the first place by ripping off another then-popular but now largely forgotten 19th century opera, Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, by having Alfonso and his friend Condé (future Western star Jack Holt, essentially the John Wayne of the silent era) disguise themselves as peasants and crash the fishing village of Portici just off the Neapolitan coast. While there Alfonso realizes how desperately poor the peasants have become because of all the taxes his dad the viceroy has imposed on them, including a tax on flour that makes it virtually impossible for the peasants of Portici to feed themselves. Alfonso is determined to stay in Portici as long as he can to cruise Fenella, even though she’s too “good” a girl to accept his advances. Fenella is arrested when her attempt to smuggle flour to his family is undone by a leak in the bag which leaves a trail of flour behind her. She’s imprisoned by the viceroy’s security people and held in a cell full of rats (“What is this — Room 101?”, joked my husband Charles), though she survives both physically and psychologically by learning to tame them and feed herself on them. It’s about this time that the viceroy decrees that Alfonso, newly returned to court, must marry Elvira even though he’s still carrying a torch for Fenella (but has no idea where she is). There’s a surprising overhead shot for a 1916 film as Fenella looks out the window of her cell (which is just a hole in the wall, with neither bars nor glass) and straight down at the two security guards standing watch over her cell. The viceroy decrees a festival for the wedding of Alfonso and Elvira, and the two guards can’t resist getting involved in the celebration so they can get drunk on the viceroy’s wine; they desert their posts and thus give Fenella a chance to escape.

The guards chase her through the town but just then Masaniello starts his revolution after the fed-up peasants lose their whole supply of fruit, about the only food they have left, because it’s been requisitioned for the wedding celebration. Masaniello and his forces overrun Naples and take over the imperial palace, but in a plot twist Weber added (the original librettists had Masaniello killed in a counter-revolution and Fenella commit suicide out of grief shortly afterwards) Masaniello’s friend-turned-enemy Pietro (William Wolbert), who wanted Fenella for himself and resented that Masaniello prevented them from getting together, slips Masaniello a drug that turns him permanently insane. This leads him to hold even more disgusting and depraved orgies at the former royal palace and set up a regime just as oppressive as the one his people joined him to rebel against. In the final scene, as Alfonso leads a counter-revolution less to regain power than simply to protect his wife and their families from the revenge-minded revolutionaries, Masaniello accidentally kills Fenella and then, horrified at what he’s done, takes his own life by stabbing himself with a dagger, Othello-style – though his costume is so thickly padded I suspect he didn’t need a rubber dagger or one with a collapsible blade (the usual movie expedients at the time), but could stab himself with a real dagger confident that the heavy-duty padding would never let it get near his skin.

The Dumb Girl of Portici is advanced for its time in some areas and strictly of its time in others: the film (mostly) moves swiftly and keeps one’s interest, and occasionally it’s even emotionally moving, but there are few close-ups, almost no moving camera shots and the actors generally register in the worst, hammiest style. Moving their arms like semaphore signals and heaving their bodies around to register rage or disgust, the actors in this movie perform in the sort of heavily stylized, flamboyant unrealistic acting style a lot of people who’ve never seen a silent movie start to finish assume they were all acted like – a sort of acting some silent movie fans defend by saying you had to be that hammy to register emotions without access to dialogue. That’s nonsense; there are plenty of silent films acted naturalistically and with restraint, and plenty of silent sequences within sound films that show that sometimes the greatest movie effects can be created by actors without dialogue. Of all the cast members in The Dumb Girl of Portici Anna Pavlova stands out, not only because she’s the star and she was a superstar ballerina (and no doubt her dance-pantomime in the big 19th century “story ballets” like Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty helped Pavlova act in a silent film) but because she’s a woman and therefore doesn’t have to wear any of the God-awful ugly, fake facial hair with which the male characters are cursed. Though she was 35 when she made this movie (usually an age at which actresses are beginning to lose their careers) and her face clearly had seen better days (as well as better make-up jobs), Pavlova is nonetheless an electrifying screen presence. She projects charisma and dominates the scene whenever she appears, and it seems amazing that she never got to make another film. It’s also ironic that she’s playing a mute girl in a silent film, in which everyone is mute; there’s a grimly ironic scene in which Fenella is captured and the captain of the guards gives his minions the order to torture her “until she speaks.”

Pavlova was born, raised and trained in St. Petersburg in pre-Revolutionary Russia, though she’d already relocated to London in 1915 and therefore didn’t have the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go dilemma of whether to remain in Russia after the two revolutions of 1917 (the March one in which the Czar fell and was replaced by an attempt to create a constitutional republic, and the November revolution in which the Bolsheviks took over), but the plot of The Dumb Girl of Portici as Lois Weber rewrote it for the screen – peasants unite to overthrow an old regime that’s been oppressing them and end up stuck with a new regime that’s at least as oppressive, if not more so – eerily anticipates what happened to Pavlova’s native country in the next few years: a long-established regime with a history of oppression and confiscatory taxation was overthrown, only the new regime that emerged afterwards was just as dictatorial and oppressive. As Pete Townshend wrote in the Who song “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Though the plot is radically changed from the original opera, the film still features quite a lot of dancing – I suspect part of the terms of Pavlova’s contract was that they would have to pay her dancers and keep them occupied at Universal’s expense during the making of the film, so the company pressed them into service as the dancers first the viceroy and then Masaniello employ for their orgiastic revels (though the revels don’t look all that orgiastic to me; the intertitles hint that quite a lot more physical corruption exists than what we actually see) – and apparently when Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley turned in their cut the “suits” at Universal were upset that there weren’t more solo sequences of Pavlova dancing.

So the filmmakers added a prologue showing Pavlova dancing in front of a black backdrop and a spectacular ending sequence in which the dead Fenella rises to heaven and Pavlova does ballet steps in front of a backdrop representing the clouds in the sky she’s brushing past as she ascends (a quite difficult special effect to pull off in 1916, and one I suspect was achieved much the way a similar effect would be done today: she danced in front of a black screen, thus creating a negative image of her against a clear backdrop, and this was double-printed with a matte painting of sky the technical people either rolled on wheels or had Weber’s camera pan up). For years The Dumb Girl of Portici was thought lost – the only part of it I’d seen was the clip in the 1990’s documentary That’s Dancing!, in which Pavlova is shown clumping around the beach (presumably at Malibu) in a rather clumsy and ungainly dance (the makers of That’s Dancing! suggested in their narration that this scene appeared towards the end of the film and represented Fenella celebrating the victory of Masaniello’s revolution; in fact it appears midway through during a point in the story just before the revolution happens, in which the people are getting more and more restive as they lose confidence in their ability to survive the government’s treatment of them); it wasn’t until 2015 that a major restoration of this film was made, using a 35 mm print from the British Film Institute and a 16 mm print from the New York Public Library. Wisely, the people who added the musical score for the restored version reached to Auber’s opera for inspiration and drew the themes for their score from it – so we didn’t have the sometimes dreadfully anachronistic modern scores (often including electronic instruments) that have been slapped onto some silent films. One wonders how the theatre accompanists of 1916 coped with a film that featured this much dancing!