The 
POLA NEGRI
Appreciation Site

     
Home

POLA NEGRI FILMOGRAPHY
Last Entry | Main Page | Next Entry

The Paramount Period (1923-1928)

Pola masquerades as a blonde in Three Sinners (1928).   (Photo courtesy Paul Meienberg)


BELLA DONNA

(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1923)
Director: George Fitzmaurice
Other actors: Conway Tearle, Conrad Nagel, Adolphe Menjou, Claude King, Lois Wilson, Macey Harlem, Robert Schable
Scenario: Ouida Bergére, based on the novel Bella Donna (1909) by Robert Smythe Hichens
Photography: Arthur Miller
Technical Director: Dudley Stuart Corlett
Notes: Pola’s only bonefide American “vamp” role, unless you also want to count The Cheat. It is a remake of Paramount’s 1915 version which stared Pauline Frederick.
Preservation Status: Print exists in the Gosfilmofond in Russia and the Cinémathčque Royale de Belgique in Belgium.

THE CHEAT
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1923)
Director: George Fitzmaurice
Other actors: Jack Holt, Charles de Roche, Dorothy Cumming, Robert Schable
Scenario: Ouida Bergére, based on the popular silent film screenplay The Cheat (1915) by Hector Turnbull and Jeanie Macpherson.
Photography: Arthur Miller
Preservation Status: Lost.

HOLLYWOOD
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1923)
Alternate Titles: Joligud, Hollywood and the Only Child (working title)
Director: James Cruze
Scenario: Thomas J. Geraghty, from a story by Frank Condon.
The cameos (in addition to Pola’s):
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Gertrude Astor, Mary Astor, Agnes Ayres, Baby Peggy, T. Roy Barnes, Noah Beery, William Boyd, Clarence Burton, Robert Cain, Charlie Chaplin, Edythe Chapman, Betty Compson, Ricardo Cortez, Viola Dana, Bebe Daniels, Daisy Dean, Cecil B. DeMille, William C. DeMille, Helen Dunbar, Snitz Edwards, Douglas Fairbanks, George Fawcett, Julia Faye, James Finlayson, Alec B. Francis, Jack Gardner, Sid Grauman, Alfred E. Green, Alan Hale, Lloyd Hamilton, Hope Hampton, William S. Hart, Gale Henry, Walter Hiers, Stuart Holmes, Sigrid Holmquist, Jack Holt, Leatrice Joy, Mayme Kelso, J. Warren Kerrigan, Theodore Kosloff, Lila Lee, Lillian Leighton, Jacqueline Logan, Jeanie Macpherson, Hank Mann, May McAvoy, Robert McKim, Thomas Meighan, Bull Montana, Owen Moore, Nita Naldi, Anna Q. Nilsson, Charles Ogle, Guy Oliver, Kalla Pasha, Eileen Percy, Carmen Phillips, Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford, Zasu Pitts, Charles Reisner, Fritzi Ridgeway, Dean Riesner, Charles de Roche, Will Rogers, Ford Sterling, Anita Stewart, George Stewart, Gloria Swanson, Estelle Taylor, Ben Turpin, Bryant Washburn, Maude Wayne, Claire West, Laurence “Larry” Wheat, and Lois Wilson! Whew!
Other actors: Hope Drown, Luke Cosgrave, George K. Arthur, Ruby Lafayette, Harris Gordon, Bess Flowers, Eleanor Lawson, King Zany
Photography: Karl Brown
Assistant director: Vernon Keays
Notes: This picture cost the studio $202,000, and was filmed at the Universal and Paramount lots.
Preservation status: Lost.

THE SPANISH DANCER
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1923)
Director: Herbert Brenon
Other actors: Antonio Moreno, Wallace Beery, Kathlyn Williams, Gareth Hughes, Adolphe Menjou, Edward Kipling, Dawn O’Day, Charles A. Stevenson, Robert Agnew
Scenario adapted by June Mathis and Beulah Marie Dix from the French stage play Don Cesar de Bazan by Aholpe Philippe D’Ennery and P. S. P. Dunamoir, based on the book Don Cesar de Bazan (1844) by Victor Hugo.
Photography: James Howe
Notes: This was an epic costume film, the only one of its kind that Pola made for Paramount. It was originally written for Rudolph Valentino, but Rudy and Paramount had a row that led to Rudy’s severance of his contract with Paramount, so it was rewritten for Pola. This makes it the closest brush Rudy and Pola had in any picture, even though they didn’t know each other personally at the time. Also it is a different interpretation of the same story that Ernst Lubitsch was shooting with Mary Pickford at the time, which was released as Rosita (1923) earlier in the year. It is fun to compare these two interpretations of the story side by side (the critics favored Rosita, and quite rightly so). It is also fun to contrast this story of Maritana, the good gypsy, against that of Carmen, where Pola plays Carmen, the bad gypsy.
Preservation status: The original film was nine reels long. There are numerous cut-down, five-reel Kodascope reissue copies dating from the 1930’s surviving in archives all over the world. Grapevine Video had a combined print that runs 56 minutes, which adds 5-6 minutes of footage, making it the longest available on video to date; this version is now out of print. Now as for the nine-reel original, apparently it survives at the Nederlands Filmmuseum. David Shepard says this about it: “This was run at Pordenone [aka Un Giornate del Cinema Muto, the perstigious Italian silent film festival] in the Herbert Brenon season a few years ago. Although it was the complete version (with titles in Dutch or some other language I can only half make out) it was quite unsatisfactory because it was put together from second-best takes which didn’t quite fit together, and which certainly didn’t sparkle.” Hey, at least it survives.

SHADOWS OF PARIS
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1924)
Director: Herbert Brenon
Other actors: Charles de Roche, Huntley Gordon, Adolphe Menjou, Gareth Hughes, Vera Reynolds, George O’Brien
Scenario: Even Unsell, adapted by Fred Jackon from the French play Mon Homme: piece en 3 actes (1921) by Andre Picard and Francis Carco
Photography: Bert Baldridge
Preservation status: A few brief scenes survive in the Paramount compilation picture Fashions in Love (1936); otherwise the film is lost.

MEN
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1924)
Director: Dimitri Buchowetski
Other actors: Robert Frazer, Robert Edeson, Joseph Swickard, Monte Collins, Gino Corrado, Edgar Norton
Story by Dimitri Buchowestki, adapted by Paul Bern
Photography: Alvin Wyckoff
Preservation Status: Lost.

LILY OF THE DUST
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1924)
Alternate titles: The Song of Songs (Australian release title)
Director: Dimitri Buchowetski
Other Actors: Ben Lyon, Noah Beery, Raymond Griffith, Jeanette Daudet, William J. Kelly
Scenario: Paul Bern, from the book Das Höhe Lied (1908) by Hermann Sudermann
Photography: Alvin Wyckoff
Preservation Status: Lost.

FORBIDDEN PARADISE
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1924)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Other actors: Rod la Roque, Adolphe Menjou, Pauline Starke, Fred Alatesta, Nick de Ruiz, Madame Daumery, Clark Gable.
Screenplay by Agnes Christine Johnston and Hans Kräly, from the Hungarian play A Carno szinmu: harom felvonasban by Lajos Biró and Menyhert Lengyel.
Photography: Charles J. Van Enger
Set Design: Hans Dreier
Notes: This is Pola’s and Lubitsch’s only American collaboration, as well as their last collaboration ever. Pola was frustrated with being mishandled by Paramount, so she fought hard to have this film made and released, insisting that Lubitsch direct. It was a big success in its day, and the critics were elated that the exotic, sexy Continental Pola was back; even today it is considered her best American silent. The picture was remade in 1945 as A Royal Scandal starring Tallulah Bankhead, and was again directed by Lubitsch. It is also the first of three partial comedies that Pola made for Paramount.
Preservation status: Exists at MoMA, George Eastman House (incomplete), and the American Film Institute (AFI holds a copy formerly held by the Nederlands Filmmuseum).

EAST OF SUEZ
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1925)
Director: Raoul Walsh
Other actors: Edmund Lowe, Rockliffe Fellowes, Noah Beery, Kamiyama Sojin, Mrs. Wong Wing, Florence Regnart, Charles Requa, E. H. Calvert
Scenario: Sada Cowan, from the British play East of Suez: A Play in Seven Scenes (1922) by William Somerset Maugham
Photography: Victor Milner
Notes: The only Pola film directed by Raoul Walsh! Pola was made up to look as though she were half Chinese in this one. Also she appeared in a turban in the film and in the accompanying publicity photographs, which helped to make turbans a ladies’ fashion craze.
Preservation Status: Lost.

THE CHARMER
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1925)
Director: Sidney Olcott
Other actors: Wallace MacDonald, Robert Frazer, Trixie Friganza, Cesare Gravina, Gertrude Astor, Edwards Davis, Mathilda Brundage
Scenario: Sada Cowan, from the British novel Mariposa (1924) by Henry Baerlein
Photography: James Howe
Film Editor: Patricia Rooney
Notes: The second of three part-comedies that Pola made for Paramount.
Preservation Status: Lost.

FLOWER OF THE NIGHT
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1925)
Director: Paul Bern
Other actors: Joseph Dowling, Youcca Troubetzkoy, Warner Oland, Gravina, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Helen Lee Worthing, Thais Valdemar, Manuel Acosta, Frankie Bailey
Screeenplay by Willis Goldbeck, from a story by Joseph Hergesheimer
Photography: Bert Glennon
Gambling advisor: Scott Turner
With cooperation from the Mexican government.
Preservation Status: Lost.

A WOMAN OF THE WORLD
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1925)
Director: Malcom St. Clair
Other actors: Charles Emmet Mack, Holmes Herbert, Blance Mehaffey, Chester Conklin, Lucille Ward, Guy Oliver, Dot Farley, May Foster, Dorothea Wolbert
Scenario: Piere Collings, from the book The Tattooed Countess: a Romantic Novel with a Happy Ending (1924) by Carl van Vechten.
Photography: Bert Glennon
Notes: The third of three part-comedies Pola made for Paramount.
Preservation status: Survives complete at the UCLA and in some private archives.
(Click to buy A Woman of the World from Grapevine Video.  Click "Add to Cart", and when the e-shopping cart pops up, type "PNAS" into the Customer Code box to receive $2 off this title!)

THE CROWN OF LIES
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1926)
Director: Dimitri Buchowetski
Other actors: Noah Beery, Robert Ames, Charles A. Post, Arthur Hoyt, Mikhael Vavitch, Cissy Fitzgerald, May Foster, Frankie Bailey, Edward Cecil, Erwin Connelly
Scenario by Hope Loring and Louis Duryea Lighton, from a story by Ernest Vadja
Photography: Bert Glennon
Preservation Status: Lost.

GOOD AND NAUGHTY
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1926)
Director: Malcolm St. Clair
Other actors: Tom Moore, Ford Sterling, Miss Du Pont, Stuart Holmes, Marie Mosquini, Warner Richmond.
Screenplay by Pierre Collins, from the play Naughty Cinderella, a Comedy in Three Acts (as adapted by Avery Hopwood) (1924)
Photography: Bert Glennon
Notes: The only full comedy Pola made for Paramount.
Preservation Status: Lost.

HOTEL IMPERIAL
(Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, 1927)
Director: Mauritz Stiller
Other actors: James Hall, George Siegmann, Max Davidson, Michael Vavitch, Otto Fries, Nicholas Soussanin, Golden Wadhams, Josef Swickard
Screenplay by Jules Furthman, from the Hungarian play Sznimu negy felvonasban (1917) by Lajos Biró.
Produced by Erich Pommer
Photography by Bert Glennon
Titles: Edwin Justus Mayer
Editor-in-Chief: E. Lloyd Sheldon
Notes: MGM had fired Swedish director Mauritz Stiller for reasons of incompatibility after having pulled him off the Greta Gerbo film The Temptress after he had completed a good portion of the film. Atop this, Stiller’s health was failing, and Garbo, who had been his mistress, had begun having an affair with John Gilbert, which naturally put a rift in Stiller's and Garbo's relationship. So a very sick, depressed and unhappy Mauritz Stiller ended up being hired by Paramount to direct Hotel Imperial for Pola Negri. Rudolph Valentino died midway through the making of this picture, so production got delayed a couple of months as star Pola worked through her grief. Pola and Mauritz Stiller had become good friends prior to the making of this picture, and this bond strengthened during this time, since both were going through so much trauma. Paramount kept Stiller for Hotel Imperial, Barbed Wire (which Stiller started but didn't finish), The Woman on Trial, and one Emil Jannings picture called Street of Sin (1928) before firing him for essentially the same reasons MGM fired him. Hotel Imperial is the last Stiller-directed film to survive complete, as Stiller died the following year in Sweden.
Preservation Status: Survives at MoMA, the Special Collections department at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, and in a private American archive.
(Click to buy Hotel Imperial from Grapevine Video.  Click "Add to Cart", and when the e-shopping cart pops up, type "PNAS" into the Customer Code box to receive $2 off this title!)

BARBED WIRE

(Paramount, 1927)
Directors: Rowland V. Lee, Mauritz Stiller
Other actors: Clive Brook, Einer Hanson, Claude Gillingwater, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Charles Lane, Clyde Cook, Ben Hendricks, Jr.
Screnplay by Jules Furthman, adapted by Rowland V. Lee from the novel The Woman of Knockaloe, a Parable by Hall Caine (1923)
Produced by Erich Pommer
Photography by Bert Glennon
Editor-in-Chief: E. Lloyd Sheldon
Notes: Mauritz Stiller began directing this film, but was pulled off and replaced by Rowland V. Lee.
Preservation Status: Survives at the George Eastman House and in a private American archive.

THE WOMAN ON TRIAL
(Paramount, 1927)
Director: Mauritz Stiller
Other actors: Einar Hanson, Arnold Kent, Andre Sarti, Baby Dorothy Brock, Valentina Zimina, Sidney Bracy, Bertram Marburgh, Gayne Whiteman
Screenplay: Elsie von Koczain, adapted by Hope Loring from the play Confession by Erno Vajda
Titles: Julian Johnson
Photography: Bert Glennon
Notes: This is not the same story as Pola’s German film Mazurka (remade in America as Confession). The actual events that Mazurka were based off of, although similar to the The Woman on Trial storyline in some ways, did not take place until three years later in 1930.
Preservation Status: One reel of outtakes exists at MoMA, otherwise the film is lost.

THE SECRET HOUR
(Paramount, 1928)
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Other actors: Jean Hersholt, Kenneth Thomson, Christian J. Frank, George Kuwa, George Periolat
Scenario by Rowland V. Lee, from the play They Knew What They Wanted: A Comedy in Three Acts (1925) by Sidney Howard
Photography: Harry Fischbeck
Titles: Julian Johnson
Film Editor: Robert Bassler
Preservation Status: Lost.

THREE SINNERS
(Paramount, 1928)
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Other actors: Warner Baxter, Paul Lukas, Anders Randolph, Tullito Carminati, Anton Vaverka, Ivy Harris, William von Hardenburg, Olga Baclanova
Scenerio adapted by Doris Anderson and Jean De Limur from an unpublished German play by Bernauer Osterreicher entitled Das Zweite Leben.
Photography: Victor Milner
Titles: Julian Johnston
Film Editor: Robert Brassler
Preservation Status: Lost.

LOVES OF AN ACTRESS
(Paramount, 1928)
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Other actors: Nils Asther, Mary McAllister, Rich Tucker, Phillip Strange, Paul Lukas, Nigel de Brulier, Robert Fischer, Helene Giere
Screenplay by Rowland V. Lee, from a story Ernest Vajda
Photography: Victor Milner
Titles: Julian Johnson
Film Editors: E. Lloyd Sheldon, Robert Bassler
Original music by J. Kiern Brennan and Karl Hajos (“Sunbeams Bring Dreams of You”)
Notes: Silent film with soundtrack.
Preservation status: Lost.

THE WOMAN FROM WOSCOW
(Paramount, 1928)
Director: Ludwig Berger
Other actors: Norman Kerry, Paul Lukas, Otto Matiesen, Lawrence Grant, Maude George, Bodil Rosing, Jack Luden, Martha Franklin, Mirra Rayo, Testu Komai
Screenplay by John Farrow, from the Franch Play Fedora, Comedie en Quatre Actes (1908) by Victorien Sardou
Photography: Victor Milner
Titles: John Farrow
Film Editors: Frances Marsh, E. Lloyd Sheldon
Notes: Silent film with soundtrack.
Preservation Status: Lost.

Pola Negri FAQ

Pola Filmography

Articles and Movie Reviews

Pola Documentary:
Life is a Dream in Cinema
Now on DVD!

Interview with Pola 1978

Old News

Music in Silent Films Section
(non-Pola related)

Harold Lloyd House Commemorative Page
(non-Pola related)

Links Page

About the Author/
Contact