by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
The film Charles and I watched last night was The Last Performance, a 1929 Universal production directed by Paul Fejos and appearing in his filmography right after the big-budget musical Broadway. It was the third film of his on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray disc that also included the marvelous Lonesome (1928), a bittersweet love story that made this Hungarian director’s American reputation and got him the assignment to make Broadway. The Last Performance was Universal’s attempt to reunite Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin, the co-stars of Paul Leni’s late silent The Man Who Laughs (1928) in a story that, like The Man Who Laughs, would have been a more suitable vehicle for Lon Chaney, Sr. The Last Performance was originally released in the U.S. as a part-talkie but the only version known to exist is an all-silent print that survived in Denmark in relatively poor image quality and with Danish credits and intertitles that were retained in this release – with English subtitles under the Danish titles.
The Danish version was also retitled The Twelve Swords, after the famous stage magicians’ trick reproduced in the film: the magician locks his assistant in a trunk and drives 12 swords through it, then withdraws them again, then opens the box and the assistant emerges safe and sound. The film shows how the illusion is done – the sort of thing that makes real stage magicians angry because they don’t like audiences to see how they work their “magic” – the trunk contains a trap door on the side the assistant can open, roll out of the trunk and then get back in again after the swords are inserted and then pulled out. The trick is performed by Erik the Great (Conrad Veidt), a world-famous magician who’s in love with his assistant, Julie Fergeron (Mary Philbin) and is engaged to marry her after his current tour. Only a young man named Mark Royce (Fred MacKaye) breaks into Erik’s hotel room to steal some of his food so he can eat. Erik takes pity on him and hires him as the assistant to Erik’s assistant Buffo Black (Leslie Fenton). The film starts out in Copenhagen, then moves to Paris and finally ends up in New York, where Erik has got his long-awaited bid to perform in the U.S.
Erik hosts a giant party to celebrate the announcement of his upcoming wedding to Julie, only he raises a curtain behind which Julie and Mark were making out and realizes he’s lost her to the other, younger and considerably less strange guy. (Since “Erik” was also the name of Lon Chaney’s character in The Phantom of the Opera, in which Philbin was the female lead, I joked that Mary Philbin was used to being cruised by weirdos named Erik.) Erik pretends to be O.K. with his fiancée leaving him for another guy, but he secretly hatches a revenge plot: he will put Mark onstage and have him do the twelve-swords trick, only when the swords are pulled out there is blood on one of them and when the trunk is opened Beppo is found stabbed to death. Mark is arrested and put on trial for Beppo’s murder, but at the end of the proceedings Erik has a change of heart and demands to be heard. He explains that he killed Beppo before the performance, then hid his body in the trunk so it would look like Mark had killed him. His object was that Mark would be convicted of murder, presumably executed and then Julie would come back to him – only after his confession Erik pulls out a small dagger and, after taking far longer to do it than any self-respecting actor playing Othello, uses the dagger to commit suicide.
The Last Performance, written by James Ashmore Creelman (a journalist and travel writer who wrote an absurdly fawning profile of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diáz before becoming a screenwriter; he worked on the early drafts of King Kong until producer-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack rejected his work as too elaborate to be filmed), with titles by Walter Anthony and Tom Reed. It is the sort of movie that works as O.K. entertainment but is too predictable to be truly great – all too often, as Dwight Macdonald said about formulaic movies, we feel like we’re a reel or so ahead of the filmmakers instead of behind them, where we should be. Part of the problem is Conrad Veidt; when Charles and I watched The Man Who Laughs I regretted that the original actor they’d planned to star in it, Lon Chaney, was contractually unavailable (he’d signed with the Goldwyn Company, later part of MGM, in 1922 while he still owed Universal two films under his previous contract; Universal used those commitments to make The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, but after Phantom MGM had Chaney locked up for the rest of his career), and missed the pathos Chaney could have brought to the film. I found myself missing the pathos Chaney could have brought to The Last Performance, too: Veidt was a powerful screen presence but there’s a reason why his two best-known parts – as the sinister somnambulist Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the beginning of his career and the Nazi villian Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca at its end – cast him as stylized figures of menace.
Through most of The Last Performance Veidt just glowers at the camera and gives it burning stares that establish that this is a man not to be trifled with – but one misses the extra dimension of sadness Chaney could have brought to the role (and did in the quite similarly plotted Laugh, Clown, Laugh, a year earlier in 1928). There are a few of Fejos’s visual fireworks, notably several superimposition scenes (instead of standard intercutting, Fejos seems to have favored double exposure as his means of indicating that two actions were occurring in different places at the same time) and two long tracking shots down a banquet table (though director Clarence Brown had already done that in the 1925 film The Eagle, Rudolph Valentino’s next-to-last movie, with a breakaway table that split apart to accommodate the camera dolly and then came back together again – this must have discomfited some of the actors!) – but there’s not much he could do to liven up an all-too-predictable story. With my penchant for imagining quite darker endings to classic-era films that twisted story logic to send the audience out comforted and in a good mood, I found myself wishing Erik would have outright murdered Julie and Mark along the lines of similarly plotted operas like Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Puccini’s Il Tabarro – and, quite frankly, Conrad Veidt could have played total, unrestrained homicidal madness quite a bit than he could remorseful suicide!
