Michael (1924)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/28/2018

Michael was a return to 1924 for us, our sixth film from that year. It stars Walter Slezak, Nora Gregor, and Benjamin Christensen, and is directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, who also directed 1928's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Interestingly it was co-written by Thea von Harbou, who is most famous for co-writing numerous films with her then-husband Fritz Lang, many of which we've seen earlier in this project.

This movie's plot concerns a love triangle between the three leads -- Christensen playing a much-older famous artist, who treats Slezak as his muse -- with Slezak eventually moving on to a Countess played by Gregor. This film is notable for being a very early example of a film centered on a gay relationship, though it is ambiguous on that point until well into the film. Slezak looks quite different than he did as a character actor in Hollywood decades later, and is well cast as the handsome but callow center of the love triangle. The triangle plays out rather straight-forwardly, with Christensen fully emotionally invested in Slezak, and Slezak doing as he pleases. There is another love triangle as well -- in a subplot that is extraneous to the main plot, but thematically linked. The film is a bit slow-moving, and Dreyer is clearly trying to capture a certain kind of intensity of emotion -- though in a less extreme manner than in Joan of Arc.

The movie is most closely aligned with Christensen, with Slezak receiving a much less in-depth characterization, and Gregor's part even more cursory. Christensen's forbearance is martyr-like to an almost comical Giving-Tree-like extreme. In the end I think the movie finds Christensen's behavior admirable, casting it as some kind of high-minded true love, which is in keeping with the romanticism for which the film is so evidently aiming. Still, I think there might have been room for a slightly larger tinge of cynicism even within that approach.

Next week we continue our revisiting of a few earlier films before moving on to 1929, watching 1925's Maciste in Hell, which stars one of the secondary characters from 1914's Cabiria. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT