Das Herz der Königin (1940)

Zarah Leander IS Mary Queen of Scots.

There are plenty of English-language films about foreign history - 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971), for instance, about the death of the Tsar of Russia, or almost any film about Jesus, so I've long been curious about foreign films about English history.  Are there Indian films about Cromwell, or Russian biopics of Queen Victoria?

'Das Herz der Königin' is exactly what I'd been looking for - a film made in Nazi Germany about Mary Queen of Scots' imprisonment and (spoiler) execution by Queen Elizabeth of England.  It's a bit of history I don't really know, as it wasn't on the syllabus in my youth.  I read the first half of Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary last year, so have a vague understanding of the queen and her times, but since I didn't ever finish the (good and thorough) book, the end of Mary's life is something I first learned about from this film.

I think this may be Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who I've much enjoyed in Fritz Lang's
'Metropolis' (1927), 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), and the Dr Mabuse films (1922, 1933)

The history is something like this: England and 'Schottland' were completely separate nations back then, and their queens, Elizabeth and Mary, were cousins who always wanted to meet.  Catholic Scotland believed Mary was the real heir to England's throne, as, refusing to recognise Henry VIII's divorce, they considered Elizabeth illegitimate and thus an ineligible heir.  Mary went to France for a bit (which in those days was next-door to Scotland) to marry a prince, who died.  When she came back to Scotland it was no longer as Catholic as she was (for, having had Catherine de Medici as a mother-in-law, she was Catholic indeed).  Everything went pretty badly for her until she was locked up by the English for some reason (in the middle of Sheffield, though you wouldn't recognise it in those pre-tram days), and was beheaded for something like treason.  She and Elizabeth never met, except perhaps a little bit in this movie.  The fruit of her loins became king of both England and Scotland, uniting the island of Great Britain, so that's a sort-of happy ending for you.

Zarah Leander, Nazi Germany's great diva, plays Mary, and gets a number of sad-sounding songs, though their contents could be intensely jolly for all I know, as I was watching the film in German without subtitles, so had no idea what anybody was saying.  Nonetheless, Leander gives a pleasant performance, though some count it as her worst.  I've long been curious to see her in action as Maria and Pauline Simon in my beloved 'Heimat' (1984) go to see her in the 1938 film of the same name, and admire her greatly.

Sorry, German language, I've no idea what you're trying to tell me.

The whole film looks very fine, giving us a splendid, very clean picture of history.  Big Tudor costumes: doublets, kilts, ball-gowns and jerkins.  Plenty to envy, and want to wear.  We can tell it's set in England and Scotland, as there's Norman architecture and lots of capotains, a hat I very much enjoy.

I think I would have found the movie more enjoyable, not to mention more intelligible, had some subtitles been available to me.  It would probably make the film's anti-British bias more evident, which in pictures is only apparent in the chilly horridness of Königin Elizabeth's performance.  Who knows what allegations lie within the dialogue?

P.S. Because I only realised a year ago, I shall clarify: Mary Queen of Scots isn't the same person as 'Bloody' Mary, Queen of England, they merely shared a forename, a century and a lineage.  This all happened about 450 fears ago, shortly before Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Guy Fawkes, the revolution and the interregnum (in that order).

P.P.S. While watching the film, my chair broke and I fell over backwards.  It was hilarious.

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Look, it's not out on video, but you can find the film on Youtube.  Or better, why not read Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary?  It's really good.  I only didn't finish it because I'm lazy.

Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Alexander Nevsky had terrible hair, but a nice tunic.  He lived a nine-hundred-ish years ago, and was a prince and a saint and a general all at once.  He was the Christian Mohammed, the Orthodox Jeanne d'Arc, and he kept a peace with the Mongols, that the Russians of Rus might war against the Teutons, who were all a load of jerks.

This, then, is an anti-German film made in thirties Russia.  It was intensely popular, then banned when the government realised how nice the Germans were, then unbanned and intensely popular again when the Germans became the enemies once more - all this inside three years.  It was an exciting time.

Parp!

The film is directed by Sergei Eisenstein, who made that other handsomely-edited propaganda piece 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925).  Like that film, 'Alexander Nevsky' is much easier to appreciate than to enjoy, though it surely has its merits.  One such merit is the famous musical score by Prokofiev - at least, I've often heard it's famous.  I wasn't sure I recognised it, but it had a great power to make me exclaim 'uh oh' and (more crudely) 'oh crap' at my television whenever it indicated the stirrings of impending catastrophe.  The Teutons, you see, are very horrid enemies, and whenever the film cuts to them in their vast and amazing helmets the dialogue disappears and the music takes over.  Though 'Алекса́ндр Не́вский' is a talkie, it's a silent film at heart, meaning the Catholic foe are presented for the most part as mute, unutterably malign, communicating only through helmet-size and loud instruments.

The other thing for which the movie is famed is the battle on the ice, which takes up the latter third of the duration.  It's a tremendous spectacle, and it left me thinking that Eisenstein could have made a really watchable 'Birth of a Nation' (1915).  At the time it was the greatest battle in all of cinema, and it's hard to know when it was surpassed.  The battle is immensely long, showing the overall flow of the fight, and great amounts of detail, from seething crowds to small moments of character or comedy.  It's easy to see how we got from this to The Battle of Helm's Deep, and though I'm sure Tolkein had some experience of real-life battles I wouldn't be surprised if he had seen and enjoyed this film.

Alexander Nevsky says 'Fish'.

I thought I would like Alexander more than I did.  He turned out to be rather a dull sort of fellow with little to humanise him.  He did his job, winning the war, well and functionally, and showed little reason to be posthumously canonised.  A fair résumé for a hero in the age of Stalin, but not great for a movie protagonist.

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Don't buy the DVD - the print is soft and shaky - not to an offensive degree, but it could look much better.  Get yourself the soundtrack instead, which comes with Prokofiev's music to 'Lieutenant Kijé' (1934) too.
 

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

This is one of three very different Russian Revolution films I'd like to cover during this 100-films experiment - and the only one in Russian.  The trio are 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) which I like very much indeed, 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) which I don't like at all, though I concede that it has great artistic merit; and this, 'Броненосец «Потёмкин»', which I admire as a piece of work, but can't claim to have a great preference on either way.  We don't watch propaganda films because they make us happy, but because they're well-wrought, interesting and historically significant.  One doesn't watch 'Triumph of the Will' (1934) through a joy at seeing Hitler's little face.  By no means!  It's a major piece of history in itself, and has brass bands and rich oratory (however objectionable) to keep the attention.

So it is with 'Battleship Potemkin'.  The propaganda films that last long enough to be counted as classics tend to be worth watching for their artistry and innovative techniques.  Most striking here are the montages, the tensest moments juxtaposing images - the mutinous sailors quailing beneath a tarpaulin, a firing squad of their fellows tensing to fire, the fire-and-brimstone priest thumping his hand with a golden cross, all cut together to produce the most emotive reaction in the spectator.  To make us angry at the unfairness, to see the suffering of fellow workers and the cruelty of oppressive officers.

It makes a compelling case.  I admire these sailors and pity the people of Odessa, gunned down by the Tsarist troopers for supporting the mutinous cause.  It's a revolution easy to support, but history has left it seeming bitter.  I don't know much about Soviet Russia, but I know I wouldn't want to live there.  The revolution, as in the microcosm of the Battleship, got rid of the most visible villains, but in the long-term life got no better.  If I didn't know this, such a film might have incited me to action.

It's constructed with an amazing clarity of vision based on political conviction.  Such fervour in the hands of an artist can produce incredible works, and the whole thing is about as striking and sure of itself as one could hope for in a ninety-year-old movie.

One of the delights of silent films is the choice of musical scores that tend to accrue.  I've watched several recently which gave me a selection of different musical styles to choose from, and director Sergei Eisenstein was well aware that this was how the future would be.  He said that 'Battleship Potemkin' would always be relevant so long as a new soundtrack was created for it every 20 years.  On this occasion, I watched it with the 2004 score by the Pet Shop Boys - a combination currently available only on Youtube, though film and music are both purchasable separately.  The new(ish) soundtrack is something one could dance to, or at least gyrate rhythmically to, and certainly gives the film a boost and an immediacy, but has the effect of making the flickering pictures seem ancient, as well as timeless.  Perhaps Youtube's diabolical picture quality played a part here - I know twenties films are capable of scrubbing up rather better than this, and I'm sure the film is available in a more beautiful state on shiny disc.  So yes, as I like the Pet Shop Boys' style, so I shall watch out for any future release marrying this soundtrack to a cleaned up print on blu-ray.  It's got to happen eventually.

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Why not watch a far better quality copy than I did? Or listen to the music - it's quite something.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

This entry may sum up with the greatest purity one aspect of this project: I've watched this film so you don't have to.  I've dreaded 'The Birth of a Nation' fro some while, having tried it in 2004 and given up bored after half an hour.  Here's a film that's way racist, way long at 190 minutes, and not especially engaging or rewarding to a modern eye.  I considered other options for this year, 'Der Golem', for instance, but 1915 simply is 'The Birth of a Nation' and to skip it out would be simply absurd.

The first half of this sentimental and differently-exciting melodrama shows two American families, one Northern, one Southern, divided by the Civil War.  We see the war, in all its glory and tragedy (the South were the heroes, by the way), and the ensuing reconstruction under the Neanderthal-faced Abe Lincoln, whose assassination is lavishly reconstructed at the film's mid-point.

John Wilkes Booth, after assassinating the president

The more notorious second half tells the tale of the liberated 'negroes' (as the film insists on calling them) and ruthless carpetbaggers (who are a cross between carpet slippers and teabaggers) oppressing the 'helpless White minority'.  The Ku Klux Klan is formed, apparently to seek something like good and equality through 'fair trials' and diabolical fancy-dress, and to quash these (obviously blacked-up) rascals who are, we are told, degrading America.

'The organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule'.  It's a very ugly piece of propaganda, but it seems to have worked.  The release and popularity of this film was almost wholly responsible for the re-emergence of the KKK in 20th Century America, a vigilante mob still exercising its brute force well into the 1950s.  The heroic young colonel of the film's first half is the instigator of this gang of terrorists, and the film would very much like us to admire him for it.  At the end, the spectral form of Jesus Christ puts in a cameo to lend it a little credibility.

The household servants are presented as benign (in short, they're submissive),

presumably as the one example with which to say 'this film can't be racist'.

All this is set to a rich orchestral score, which may be a more modern addition.  It's rather odd to see such American scenes of alarm overplayed with Grieg's characteristically Norwegian Peer Gynt music, or 'O Christmas Tree' (though it may have been the equally irrelevant 'The Red Flag').  Colonel Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant was apparently made to the strains of the British national anthem, a tune which may have a different meaning in the U.S., but I felt compelled to stand up in salute to her majesty in any case.

One of the most striking discoveries in the 100 films experiment is how competent, stylish, ambitious and advanced films were a century ago, a time we think of as their infancy - and how the advances from then until now have been slow, gradual and constant.  The adventure from 1913 cinema until 2013 isn't marked by milestones and watersheds (except perhaps the arrival of talkies, which so far seem to have emerged over-night fully formed), but by seemingly seamless development.  The more films I view, the more I can see how cinema got from the 1910s to the 1920s, from there to the 1930s, and so on.  Technically there's little between this and 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) bar a honing of special effects.  Decades famed for their distinct flavours - the 60s and 70s, for instance, flow smoothly from one to the other.

The North marvel at the South's bravery in war

To bring this back to 'The Birth of a Nation', here are superimposed images placing models ablaze in the same short as fleeing crowds; a camera clearly fixed to a moving vehicle to keep pace with actors on horseback; shots are juxtaposed with the understanding that viewers will know how to read the links between images; intertitles introduce scenes (as they did a decade earlier) but also provide excerpts of dialogue or context within the scenes.  In 1915, the movie and the movie audience are both highly advanced.  This is a flm wholly confident of its ability to use all cinema's techniques to tell any scale or complexity of story.  Of course, it looks crude and ancient now, but who was to know back then how far cinema might develop.  If director D.W. Griffith didn't anticipate the coming of sound and colour, then the epic scale of this achievement, with its cast of hundreds, its historical re-enactments and battlefields filled with smoke, horses and explosions, must have looked like the greatest film it was possible for humanity to produce, the eventual pinacle of the medium.  I wonder what film holds that title now.