The Cossacks (MGM, 1928)

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

Last night’s Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” was The Cossacks, a 1928 MGM production starring John Gilbert as Lukashka, effeminate son of Cossack ataman (head of the band in a particular Cossack village) Ivan (Ernest Torrence), who would rather pick flowers and look for turtles with his sort-of girlfriend Maryana (played by Renée Adorée, one of the great phony names in film history) than do the butch Cossack thing and ride into war against the Turks. From that synopsis I was expecting a Four Feathers-like story in which coward Gilbert would be rejected from his community, would ride into war secretly, become a hero and be welcomed back into the clan – but all that happens in the first half-hour of this 100-minute movie. What occupies the rest of it is a typical silent-film romantic triangle between Lukashka, Maryana and Prince Olenin Stieshneff (Nils Asther), who’s been sent by the Tsar in Moscow (so this is happening before Peter the Great built St. Petersburg and moved the Russian capital there) to marry a Cossack bride in order to strengthen the royal family’s bloodline with some real fighting blood. He’s also there to announce that Russia has concluded a peace treaty with Turkey, which – at least according to this story, written by Frances Marion and ostensibly based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy (if he had anything to do with this, it must have been a quickie he cranked out for the rubles) – would deprive the Cossacks of their whole raison d’étre.

So Ivan gets the idea of writing the Sultan of Turkey an insulting letter that will get him to break off the peace treaty and resume the war with Russia, thereby giving the Cossacks a reason to start fighting again. Ivan has also told his son that he’s only “half a Cossack” because even though he’s racked up 10 Turks he’s killed in battle, he hasn’t yet suffered a wound – which made me joke that John Gilbert would reply, “You mean I have to lose a leg like I did in The Big Parade?” Instead he gets a slash across his forehead leading to the upper part of his nose – a scar that comes and goes for the rest of the movie – and when he returns from one of the Cossacks’ battles he decides to have a hot sexual encounter with one of the gypsy girls who show up to service the Cossacks (so all of a sudden this movie at least briefly turns into Carmen!), only Maryana catches him and decides to dump her warrior slut and marry the Prince. But as they ride off in a box-shaped carriage their party is waylaid by the Turks, one of whom stabs the Prince in the back with a dagger (thereby eliminating the inconvenient second male lead). The battle goes ill for the Cossacks and both Ivan and Lukashka are captured, tortured, branded and threatened with having their eyes put out by those nasty Turks until the other Cossacks rescue them; Ivan expires from the treatment he received at the Turks’ hands but Lukashka survives, assumes leadership of the Cossack band, and with the competition conveniently eliminated he and Maryana get together at the end.

Whatever its merits as a novel might have been, as a movie. The Cossacks is a triumph of style over lack of substance. The script by Frances Marion – who apparently protested the assignment on the ground that Tolstoy’s novel wasn’t really that good as the basis for a film – basically is a dumping ground for macho-movie clichés, though the most obnoxious sexism in the film comes more from John Colton’s titles than Marion’s work. (According to James Whale biography James Curtis, Marion’s strength as a writer was story and scenario construction, which made her a star writer in the silent era; her weakness was dialogue, which left her somewhat at sea in the sound era – especially when Irving Thalberg died and Marion left MGM rather than work with the new management. Curtis blames her for the silliness of Whale’s next-to-last feature, Green Hell, pointing to one ridiculous line in which one of the characters, reassuring another about the injury to a third, says, “It’s only a coma.” A lot of people protested that line at the time, especially after preview audiences laughed at it, but it stayed in the movie.) All those lines about Cossack women working themselves to the bone, losing their beauty and getting old get really tiresome after a while!

The Cossacks was directed by George W. Hill, who’d done the big battle scenes for The Big Parade (though King Vidor received sole directorial credit) and brought the same level of skill to the big battle scenes here; his work is genuinely creative and exciting. At times The Cossacks looks like a war movie from 15 to 20 years later despite the relative primitiveness of the weaponry; Hill, who’d actually seen combat in World War I, clearly knew what a battle should look like on screen. MGM really shot the works budget-wise on The Cossacks, building an entire Cossack village in Laurel Canyon and trooping out the company to shoot the final two reels in the spectacular canyons of Arizona – which makes it suddenly look like a John Ford Western; Charles joked it was a bad geographical decision to travel from Cossack country to Moscow via Arizona. It was the most expensive silent film MGM produced – though there’s no clue in Jacqueline Stewart’s commentary about how well it did at the box office or what sort of soundtrack it might have had originally. By late 1928 all films were expected to have some sort of recorded soundtrack, even if it were only music and sound effects, and there are a lot of reports in the trade press of the time about movies that had suddenly been withdrawn from planned releases to have at least one or two talking sequences hurriedly inserted.

I’m presuming The Cossacks went out originally with at least some sort of music-and-effects accompaniment, but the version we were watching (from a remarkably well-preserved print) had a musical score dubbed in by Robert Israel, who made the mistake of inserting a lot of vocal choruses as the film showed the Cossacks riding to or from their battles or praying, which they did quite a lot of because according to Cossack lore, “above all is God.” The music sounded vaguely familiar – Charles thought one theme sounded like Jerome Kern’s song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and I recognized Tchaikovsky’s “Miniature Overture” from The Nutcracker as the theme for Prince Stieshneff, who I got the impression was played by Nils Asther because MGM needed someone even less butch than John Gilbert. Gilbert had a few more silents ahead of him after The Cossacks and before his ignominious talkie debut in something called His Glorious Night, and it’s almost painful to watch the sheer amount of drinking he does in this film with the foreknowledge that within eight years he would basically drink himself to death. Alexander Walker wrote that unlike Rudolph Valentino, who seemed to have something he was keeping in reserve, “Gilbert gave all of himself” – which ironically makes Valentino seem the more modern performer – and judging from the sound films of Gilbert’s I’ve seen his problem in the sound era wasn’t his voice per se but that he never learned to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to express emotions. Gilbert’s overall career is a sad one despite his huge success – mostly from the back-to-back masterpieces he shot in 1925 with great directors, King Vidor in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim in The Merry Widow – he seems off-screen to have been the same kind of devil-may-care character he played on-screen, and as dated as his acting looks there seems to have been a glimmer of potential he could have developed if he’d been more responsible about his career.