Film Review
Of the numerous screen adaptations of the works of Jules Verne few are
as visually spectacular and memorable as Victor Tourjansky's silent
epic
Michel Strogoff.
The novel had previously been adapted by Verne himself into a
phenomenally successful stage play and two silent film versions were
made in 1910 and 1914. Running to almost three hours in length,
Tourjansky's film was a bold testament to the ambition and confidence
of French cinema at the height of its Golden Age in the 1920s, a lavish
production that has all the drama, excitement and page-turning
compulsion of Verne's classic novel.
Victor Tourjansky was a highly competent film director but he was never
a great cineaste (of the standing of, say, Eisenstein or
Pudovkin). Whilst some of his films have stood the test of
time, the vast majority have been forgotten, even ones that were
extremely popular in their time. Ukrainian by birth, Tourjansky
left Russia on the eve of the revolution and continued his promising
filmmaking career in France, concentrating mostly on big budget period
productions.
It was Tourjansky's Slavonic background that led him
to be commissioned to work on
Michel
Strogoff, along with several of his countrymen, including some
skilled technicians and Ivan Mozzhukhin, a star of pre-revolutionary
Russian cinema. The producers wanted a film with an authentic
Russian feel and this is what Tourjansky delivered. He was unable
to shoot the exteriors on Russian soil, but the wide open spaces of
Latvia were a more than adequate stand-in for the Siberian
steppes. The snow scenes were filmed in Norway.
In common with Verne's novel, the film suffers from a dearth of
narrative logic and character depth but makes up for this with a
seemingly relentless succession of action-oriented escapades that test
the resilience of the titular hero and his playmate Nadia. Most
impressive are the magnificently staged battle scenes, which employed
around four thousand soldiers in the Latvian army and are in a league
of their own for a film of this era. Some demonically inspired
choreography, camera motion and editing work together to create a
dizzying spectacle that is eerily reminiscent of Kurosawa's great
Samurai
films of the 1950s.
The frenzied Tartar attack on Irkutsk at the film's climax is so
fiercely alive and realistic that you almost expect the warrior-laden
horses to burst from the screen. Another highlight is Emir Feofar
Khan's grand festival (which is hand-painted in colour on some prints),
a spectacle of debauched gaiety that serves as a sickening counterpoint
to Strogoff's personal torment as he is humiliated by his
enemies. One of the cinematographers who worked on the film was
the legendary Léonce-Henri Burel, who also lent his talents to
Gance's
Napoléon (1927), a film
on which Tourjansky was employed as an assistant.
At the time, there was probably no other actor on Earth better suited
to play the doggedly heroic Michel Strogoff than Ivan Mozzhukhin (also
credited as Mosjoukine). One of the most prominent Russian actors
in the pre-WWI, Tsarist era, Mozzhukhin went on to find great success
in France in the 1920s. He starred in several high profile films,
including Marcel L'Herbier's
Feu Mathias Pascal (1926),
Alexandre Volkoff's
Kean
(1924) and Volkoff's Casanova (1927). Mozzhukhin certainly had
the physical presence that a part like Strogoff demands but he also had
a formidable talent as an actor, expressing his character's inner
feelings with immense force and poignancy. Acho Chakatouny is
just as attention-grabbing as the main villain of the piece, Ivan
Ogareff, with Nathalie Kovanko (Tourjansky's wife) no less perfect for
the role of Strogoff's love interest, Nadia. Tourjansky was
blessed with an impeccable cast and he more than got his money's worth
on the acting front. Watch Mozzhukhin's climactic fight to the
death with Chakatouny and you'll see what acting commitment really
looks like.
Predictably, the film has strong political overtones and almost reads
as a piece of anti-Soviet propaganda, so intent is it on glorifying
Imperial Russia. Throughout, the Tsar is portrayed as a benign
patrician, loved, even venerated, by his subjects, and it is easy to
regard the treacherous Ogareff and his Tartar allies as Bolshevik
rebels, intent only on destroying the unity of a great nation. At
the end of his career, Tourjansky directed a sequel,
Le Triomphe de Michel Strogoff
(1961), starring Curt Jurgens, which has a similar tendency to exalt
the age of the Tsars.
After being a hit in Europe,
Michel
Strogoff was released in America, in a cut down form with one
hour lobbed off its runtime. For many years, the film was thought
to have been lost, existing only in a three reel home video
version. In 1988, it was restored to its former glory by the
Cinémathèque Français. After this film,
there have been many further adaptations of Verne's novel, the best
known being another French version by Jacques de Baroncelli,
Michel Strogoff (1936), which was
re-cut for an American audience as
The Soldier and the Lady
(1937), with a dashing Anton Walbrook in the lead role. Needless
to say, none of these can hold a candle to Tourjansky's epic
masterpiece, one of the most superb action films to come out of France
in its glorious silent era.
© James Travers 2014
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