1 out of 5
Directed by: Graham Cutts
Notable for being part of UK Studio Gainsborough Studio’s coproduction with the German UFA, as well as an early writing credit for Alfred Hitchcock, nothing much about The Blackguard itself, beyond some isolated visuals, really works. As a modern day viewer watching this in the 2020s – albeit one who has seen a small handful of silents – I found the story both overly complex and too simple, requiring after-the-fact summaries to confirm I hadn’t missed anything, and then flummoxed by the fact that only about ten minutes of the actual film were really consequential. Which can be fine if more can be told by the visuals than the story itself, but that’s part of the issue here: the visuals feel so out of line with the context that each new scene grinds the film to a halt, like you’ve got to start over and reassess what’s going on. While that makes it sounds like a surrealist picture, that’s hardly the reality; moreso – in my surface level read – that you have a still fairly fresh director who’s now being told to work with / learn from the German teams his studio has hooked up with (The Blackguard was shot in Berlin, with German DP Theodor Sparkuhl), with two other younger studio blokes, Hitch and Adrian Brunel, tasked with adapting a novel, leading to one third of the movie focusing on relatively lavish, artistic setups and another third speedrunning through the plot, with the remaining third filling up the screentime, mostly with actors who are not being directed for silent films, and rather just casually talking to one another, with nary a title card in sight to ground us in the subject matter. Or much more shortly: the movie is a confused slog.
Michael (Walter Rilla) grows up in an abusive household, his only joy found when listening to the playing of a famous violinist, Levinksi (Bernhard Goetzke). A rich painter (Fritz Alberti) notes Michael’s passion, in a none-too homoerotic scene, and agrees to front the cash for Michael’s violin lessons, as long as the boy will pose nude for him, which is always the kind of deals one makes with younger children. A vision then confirms Michael’s destiny: he should dedicate himself to the instrument, solely.
The vision is confirmed as we flash forward and Michael is now the famous violinist, though his dedication is threatened when he meets Marie (Jane Novak), and their instant love indicates there’s more to life than violins. Oh, but is there, Michael? she doth protest, and runs back home to Russia, for reasons that build up to a rescue of sorts, as Michael travels thereabouts to fetch his lovely love.
There are some interesting wrinkles in the way characters intersect that’s also not really well explained; Michael actually initially meets Marie as a child, and just like the interactions between Michael and his patron, it feels like there’s supposed to be a lot more going on than is “said” in these scenes, but whether or not that’s the case, the film makes nothing of it. Otherwise, the movie is sorely lacking in title cards, and only a few characters act “for the camera;” Rilla and Novak mostly just calmly chatter back and forth, with only small physical gestures to read for the tone of the scene(minimal title cards), though as the plot suffers from this dense but simple conundrum – the story is very straightforward, but the way it’s told keeps suggesting there’s more to it – you’re sitting there trying to decipher those physical gestures until finally realizing that they just don’t matter. Which is exhausting: scenes will have some amazing blocking and lighting and conceptually intriguing staging – Cutts, somewhat ironically, seemed to prefer not to cut, leading to longer takes which feels unusual for the time – but as characters cross stage and get into the aforementioned static conversational scenes, it suggests a discrepancy between the visuals and story, with Cutts mostly focused on getting a good shot, then waiting out the clock until the next setup.
Plenty of silents move slow by today’s standards, and I accept that visual film language was still being crafted. I just have rarely seen a movie so distanced from itself that it became a struggle to watch it. The confluence of cross-cultural studios and makework style productions relegates The Blackguard into that category, making its notoriety – the Hitchcock participation; the early Gainsborough / UFA teamup – the only things really worth knowing or seeing.
