Knight Without Armour (1937) - film review

1913.  Fothergill, a British journalist facing expulsion from Russia, accepts the offer of a friend to work as a spy.  Under the name Peter Ouranoff, he infiltrates a group of revolutionaries, but is arrested after an attempt to blow up the government minister Vladinoff.  He ends up in a prison in Siberia, just as war breaks out in Europe.  In 1917, Fothergill is freed by the triumphant revolutionaries, but is soon caught up in a bloody conflict between the Red and White armies.  Meanwhile, Vladinoff’s daughter, Alexandra, has been arrested and faces execution...

Knight Without Armour is the only film which the renowned Belgian film director Jacques Feyder made in Great Britain.  He had previously worked on a few Hollywood productions – notably The Kiss (1929) - although the majority of his films were made in France.  Knight Without Armour brings together two iconic actors of the 1930s, Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat.  The film was based on a novel by James Hilton, re-written to given Dietrich a much more significant part in the story.

Compared with Feyder’s better known French language films – Visages d’enfants (1925) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935), Knight Without Armour now looks painfully dated, marred by its over-ambitious action sequences, tacky sentimentality and some ludicrously stilted dialogue.  Feyder’s direction is competent, but hardly inspired, and the absence of any chemistry between the film’s lead actors robs the film of any real emotional impact.   The film feels like an awkward melange of Hollywood melodrama and British adventure thriller.  There are one or two impressive sequences (the skilfully shot darker scenes which convey the insane bloodiness of the Russian revolution), but overall the film lacks the impact and charm of Feyder’s other films of this era.

© James Travers 2007

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