Die Bergkatze (1921) - film review

In the mountain town of Piffkaneiro, hundreds of desolate women gather to bid a sad farewell to Lieutenant Alexis, the popular military man who has touched all their hearts and left each one of them with a permanent reminder of their liaison, in the form of a child.  Alexis may be a first-class lover but he is a lousy soldier, so to punish him for neglecting his duties he is sent to a fortress in the icy wasteland outside Piffkaneiro.  On the way to his new posting, Alexis is attacked by a band of notorious mountain bandits.  These include Rischka, a beautiful but wild young woman who forces the lieutenant to strip to his underwear when he tries his seductive charms on her.  Alexis lives to tell the tale, but once he has arrived at the fortress he is confronted with another potential female conquest, the daughter of his new commandant.  The latter informs Alexis that he must show exemplary behaviour if he is to marry his daughter, an outcome that his wife has already resolved to happen.  To prove himself, Alexis leads an attack on the bandits, where once more he is humiliated by Rischka, who turns out to be more skilled in the art of war than he is.  The fortress commandant mistakes Alexis’s resounding defeat for a great victory and organises a grand party to celebrate his success.  During the festivities, Rischka and her robber friends break into the fortress and end up being mistaken for party guests.  Alexis’s third encounter with Rischka proves to be a revelation, for by now the amorous lieutenant realises he has found his one true love...

Die Bergkatze (a.k.a. The Wildcat) is Ernst Lubitsch’s supreme comic triumph, a film that surpasses the director’s previous and subsequent comedy marvels not only in its unbridled hilarity but also in its artistic brilliance.  The film may lack the sophistication of Lubitsch’s later Hollywood offerings, but for sheer entertainment value it is an unparalleled achievement, certainly for this era of German cinema.

By 1921, Ernst Lubitsch had established himself as Germany’s leading filmmaker, internationally renowned for his grand historical epics Madame Du Barry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920).  Die Bergkatze marks a return to an earlier phase of his career, the period marked by his frenetic sex comedies such as Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918) and Die Puppe (1919).  Of course, by this stage, Lubitsch’s  confidence and technical ability had progressed enormously. The skills he acquired on his more ambitious films are put to good use here, making Die Bergkatze the most inventive, extravagant and slickest of his German comedies.  

Revealingly, Lubitsch is not content with mocking contemporary society; he also feels impelled to make fun of the process of filmmaking.  In an attempt to forge their own identity and explore the boundaries of the new cinematic art, many of Lubitsch’s contemporaries were resorting to increasingly elaborate visual gimmicks.  Some, like D.W. Griffith, had begun experimenting with frame matting to emphasise the dramatic impact of a scene.  Others were using sets and lighting in an expressionistic manner to exteriorise the inner world of the protagonists.  These were techniques which Lubitsch himself employed widely in his films, but Die Bergkatze gave him an opportunity to go overboard and use these to comic rather than dramatic effect. 

This is certainly one of the most visually expressive of Lubitsch’s films.  Every other shot is frame-matted, with the same childlike abandon of someone who has just discovered a new graphics design package.  The sets (designed by Ernst Steiner, a frequent collbaorator of the great theatre director Max Reinhardt) are ludicrously comical and render the characters that inhabit them even more absurd.  Even the exteriors, set in the Bavarian alps, have a warped expressionistic quality, although nothing compares with the mind-bogglingly weird dream sequence featuring a gang of musical snowmen.  With an almost adolescent glee, Lubitsch is cocking a snoot at his more serious rivals and showing the world that he is not only a filmmaking genius but also a comedy anarchist, the Monty Python of his day.

Unfortunately, neither the public nor the critics quite saw the joke.  Even with a star of the calibre of Pola Negri in the lead role, giving immense value in a rare comedic part, Die Bergkatze proved to be an immense flop in Germany and failed to get an international distribution.  The main reason for the film’s failure was its humorous portrayal of the military as self-deluded incompetents, not a popular point-of-view for a country that had recently suffered a crushing defeat in the First World War.  

In spite of the frosty reception it met with, this film was always fondly regarded by Lubitsch, who considered it to be the best thing he made in Germany.  It presages much of his later work, both in its subject (power struggles in male-female relationships) and  in its effortless use of comedy.  The pathos and absurdity of the human mating ritual would feature heavily in the director’s later films, but seldom with as much unrestrained hilarity and artistry as in Die Bergkatze, Lubitsch’s supreme comic masterpiece.

© James Travers 2010

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