Le Lion des Mogols (1924)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

After his experience with the company Cinéromans, for whom he directed La Goutte de sang (1924), Jean Epstein could well have been forgiven for turning his back on commercial cinema altogether.  Fortunately, shortly afterwards he found in Alexandre Kamenka a producer who not only allowed his directors artistic freedom but positively encouraged it.  Kamenka had just taken over the management of Films de Albatros, a Paris-based film studio staffed mostly by Russian émigrés which was committed to making prestige films to rival Hollywood's superproductions.  Epstein made just four films for Albatros -  Le Lion des Mogols, (1924), L'Affiche (1924), Le Double Amour (1925) and Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925) - but the freedom he enjoyed gave him ample scope to refine and extend his filmmaking technique in preparation for his subsequent auteur masterpieces.

Le Lion des Mogols is the most fanciful and most blatantly commercial of Epstein's films.  Part melodrama, part social satire, it begins with what looks like a spoof of a Cecil B. DeMille epic and ends as a caustic satire on the film industry of the period (doubtless informed by Epstein's run-ins with his bosses at Pathé and Cinéromans).  Abel Gance described the plot as somewhat idiotic, although the plot was supplied not by Epstein but by the film's lead actor Ivan Mosjoukine, who was not only Albatros's biggest star but also the most famous actor in French cinema of the 1920s.  With his hypnotic stare and powerful physique, Mosjoukine had an electrifying screen presence that drew massive audiences to all of his films, many of which are now classics of the silent era - Alexandre Volkoff's Kean (1924), Marcel L'Herbier's Feu Mathias Pascal (1926) and Viktor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff (1926).  As Mosjoukine was himself an émigré, it's easy to make the connection between him and the solitary exile he portrays so vividly in Le Lion des Mogols.

The film's enormous success made Ivan Mosjoukine a worldwide star and provided a massive boost to Albatros's prestige.  As for Epstein, there's a welcome return to the exuberant impressionistic style of his early films, but this comes only in the film's second part.  After a tantalising prologue which anticipates the events to come, the film begins in classic Hollywood epic mode, with an exotic first course set in a lavishly reconstructed Tibetan holy city.  There's not much room for directorial innovation here so Epstein suppresses his auteur instincts and instead gets as much value as he can from Albatros's genius set and costume designers.  This duty out of the way, he can then let his creativity run riot in the film's second half (which craftily replays the narrative of the first half).

Once the location has shifted to modern day (circa mid-1920s) Paris, Le Lion des Mogols ceases to be a mundane piece of exotica and becomes an astute social satire, which is made both humorous and poignant by Epstein's uninhibited impressionistic flourishes.  Superimposition is used repeatedly to emphasise Mosjoukine's feelings of isolation in the throbbing metropolis, most movingly in a scene set in a Parisian nightclub that reminds us of the justly praised merry-go-round sequence in Coeur fidèle (1923).  By placing Mosjoukine at the hub of a swirling mass of activity Epstein stresses his tragic detachment from the world he seeks desperately to be a part of.

In the very next sequence, Epstein uses motion even more dramatically to depict a stark change of mood in the protagonist - from self-pitying solitariness to fierce nonchalance.  Accompanied by a girl he met in the nightclub and a tramp he just happens to come across, Mosjoukine stands defiantly in a taxi as it is driven at breakneck speed down the Champs-Élysées, looking like a latter-day Ben Hur.  For Epstein, speed was the perfect embodiment of freedom and, being a lover of fast cars himself, it is no accident that this became one of the defining motifs of his work.  Life in motion was what Epstein sought to capture on film, and in at least two sequences in Le Lion des Mogols, he does that brilliantly.

Film Synopsis

For the past fifteen years, a holy city in Tibet has lived under the tyrannous rule of the Great Khan.  A palace guard, Roundgito-Singh, is told by a fortune teller that he will become the city's beloved ruler, providing he is not diverted from his destiny by an untrue woman.  Roundgito-Singh's attempt to rescue a virgin from the wicked Khan ends in failure and the prince is forced to flee his country.  After crossing many forests and deserts he ends up on an ocean liner, where he falls under the spell of a film actress, Lady Anna, whose past is a mystery to all.  Taken with the enigmatic foreigner, Lady Anna persuades her producer, Monsieur Morel, to engage him as an actor on her next film.  Seeing Roundgito-Singh as a dangerous rival, Morel fools him into signing a dud cheque.  If the prince dares to take Anna from him, the ruthless financier will betray him to the police...