Sumurun (1920) - film review

The Sheik of an Oriental province is incensed when he discovers that one of his wives, Sumurun, has been making overtures to a cloth merchant, Nur-Al-Din.  He is about to take a swift revenge when one of his eunuchs distracts him with the news that a party of travelling minstrels has arrived in town, with a beautiful dancing girl.  Eager to add another beauty to his already crowded harem, the Sheik heads off to check out the new dancer and, sure enough, she is a stunner.  Unfortunately, his son finds her just as attractive and intends to claim her for his own.  All this upsets the dancer’s most fervent admirer, a pitiful lute-playing hunchback, who has tried without success to woo the dancer.  With so many libidinous men chasing after one lascivious young woman, things cannot end well...

Here’s a case of a filmmaker trying to have his cake and eat it.  In the pre-Hollywood, German phase of his career, Ernst Lubitsch’s films broadly divide into two categories: outlandish farces and extravagant historical epics.  Sumurun is a film that straddles both of these genres, having both the anarchic fun of Lubitsch’s more manic sex comedies and the stunning production values of his grander period dramas.  It also stands apart as something quite different, a completely unhinged send-up of the Arabian Nights-style melodrama.  Sumurun is so frenetic, so off-the-wall, that it is hard to take any of it seriously, yet it is great fun and amply demonstrates  both Lubitsch’s flair for farce and his mastery of filmmaking technique.  As if that was not enough, Lubitsch even has a not insignificant acting role in the film, playing (somewhat appropriately) a hideously deformed sex-starved hunchback.

Sumurun originated as a stage play which Lubitsch had directed and acted in during his time with theatre director Max Reinhardt.  The star of the play was the famous Polish actress Pola Negri, who reprises her role of the nubile dancer in the film.  Negri had in fact starred in the original Polish version of the play, which had originally drawn her to the attention of Reinhardt.  Lubitsch was a great admirer of Negri and would employ her in his German films, most notably Madame Du Barry (1919), the film that brought international fame to both the director and the actress.

No one would describe Sumurun as Lubitsch’s most sophisticated or best-structured film.  In fact, you need almost superhuman powers of concentration to be able to follow every twist and turn of the über-convoluted plot.  Yet the film has a great deal of charm and is outrageously funny in places.  When one of the Sheik’s women tries to elicit support from a eunuch she taunts him with the remark, "Well, you want to be a man, don’t you?"  The eunuchs themselves are a spectacle to behold, a cross-between a heavyweight wrestler and a camp male hairdresser, swathed in what looks suspiciously like the living room curtains from a 1970s British sitcom.  

Lubitsch contributes his fair share of laughs as a lovelorn hunchback who is so ugly that he would have a job chatting up an acne-infested gargoyle.   If you ever wondered why Lubitsch never made it as a screen actor, you only have to watch his mock suicide scene in this film.  Not quite sure whether he is Shylock or Quasimodo, Lubitsch twists the pathos dial so far that it almost comes off in his hand, deluging the set with enough prime cuts of ham to open a chain of delicatessens.   And as if this show of histrionic excess was not enough, Paul Wegener wades in and does the expressionistic monster bit, just as effectively as he did in Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920), admittedly more for laughs than frights.

As wonderful as Lubitsch and Wegener are in this film, both are totally eclipsed by Pola Negri who, in the most uninhibited of her wild cat turns, ignites the screen with her lethal concoction of beauty, charisma and sex appeal.  No wonder all the male characters in the story (eunuchs excluded) are falling over themselves to possess her.  She perfectly embodies the notion of the untameable temptress that no man can resist and which no women can deny wanting to be.  In Sumurun, Negri is the original and definitive femme fatale - at least that is the impression you get judging by the number of corpses that litter the stage after she has had her fun.  That damn snake in the garden of Eden has a lot to answer for.

© James Travers 2010

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