Connoisseurs of first-rate filmmaking, silent or talking, should drop everything and find Raymond Bernard’s THE CHESS PLAYER. This French classic from 1927 has been newly released on video and DVD by Milestone, purveyor of some of the finest films ever made.
The time is 1776 during the Russian occupation of Poland. While that may seem a very long time ago, even from the perspective of the 1920s, in it one can see intimations of the Cold War that was to dominate most of the 20th century. In this post-World War I era, Russia had just emerged from a bloody revolution, was greedy for expansion, and the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family had taken place less than a decade previously. It can hardly have been far from the minds of audiences back then watching Cossacks beat old women in the streets during their nightly rides through the cities of Poland as depicted here.
The story is one of rebellion. The protagonists are an eccentric Polish noble, Baron von Kempelen, who builds lifelike automatons to recreate the happiest times of his life, a Polish officer, Vorowski, who leads the rebellion, and his foster sister, Sophie, prophesized by an old Gypsy woman to be the future rallying point for Polish independence. There is a romance, of course, between Sophie and a Russian officer, which leads to heartache. There is also a fiendishly clever plan by the Baron to save Vorowski from the Russians by passing him off as an automaton, the Chess Player of the title, complete with elaborate Turkish robes and a turban of prodigious proportions. Like all fiendishly clever plans, at least the cinematic variety, this one goes fiendishly awry, culminating in a spectacular denouement involving Catherine II (for some reason never referred to as Catherine the Great) and Carnival in St. Petersburg.
Writer and director Raymond Bernard blends the sweeping drama with wonderfully human touches, including a thwarted romance between the servants who tend to Sophie and the Russian officer she loves, thus do the affairs of state play havoc with the lives of the little people. As for the production, the sets are sumptuous, the costumes lavish, the locations multinational (France, Russia, Poland), and the story a wonder of invention and fantasy. Outstanding is Edith Jehane as Sophie, who is surprisingly subtle for the heroine of a melodrama, playing a half-smile plays on her lips as she falls in love with her handsome Russian, or making a tear linger in the corner of her eye as she’s forced to part from him. And while the swordplay and battle charges were no doubt choreographed for visual effect and, one hopes, the safety of the actors involved, there is an immediacy and fire that infuses them with a boundless kinetic energy. That the Polish cavalry supplied extras for this film adds to the authenticity. Yet, Bernard at times creates imagery of carnage that is poetic. Puffs of smoke from a battle rise above the forest where it takes place, growing like a grotesque bouquet of flowers slowly blooming.
There is little that feels dated in THE CHESS PLAYER, aside from the heroine’s hairstyle. The camerawork is sophisticated, with Bernard using perspective and shadowplay to evocative perfection. The humor, with which the melodrama is lightened from time to time, reaches across eighty years without a trace of quaintness. There is even something cutting edge to the traditional tinting that was used in silent cinema to convey mood.
The transfer from the original nitrate is very good, but not perfect. So few films of that era have escaped the ravages of time. The occasional blip fails to break the spell of the film’s magic. As for the extras packed onto the DVD, there is the usual chapter selection, an interesting gallery of the publicity materials that accompanied the film’s initial release, and a contemporary interview with writer Tom Standage, which will answer your questions about what 18th-century automatons, the chess-playing one in particular, were like. The most spectacular extra, worth its weight in metaphorical gold, is the text transcript of an interview done by film historian Kevin Brownlow with Bernard himself. For reasons I cannot fathom, it plays only on DVD players attached to computers, not to televisions.
Never mind. This restoration of THE CHESS PLAYER supervised by Brownlow, Patrick Stanbury, and David Gill, stands on its own. Watching it,you have to wonder why this treasure of world cinema is not spoken of in the same breath as INTOLERANCE or PANDORA’S BOX. Here’s hoping that Milestone’s release will change all that.
CHESS PLAYER, THE
Rating: 4
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