Gypsy Blood (American release version of Carmen), starring Pola Negri, Harry Liedtke, Leopold von Ledebur, and Magnus Stifter.  Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  Originally released by UFA in 1918; American release by First National in 1921.  Silent film, 73 minutes. DVD release by Sunrise Silents, October 2005.

Sunrise Silents are one of the fastest-growing public domain distributors of silent movies on home video and are offering many rarities and otherwise hard to find classics in beautifully-packaged DVD’s with covers that resemble the fan magazines of the period.  As of this writing, they have released two of Pola Negri’s pictures, Gypsy Blood (1918) and One Arabian Night (1920), on DVD.  Both include commentary by Sunrise Silents proprietor Rich Olivieri, and the latter includes a number of extra features arranged to simulate an old-time movie matinee.  In this article we will discuss their April 2005 Gyspy Blood release and the commentary in both the Gypsy Blood and One Arabian Night releases; click here for more information on the contents of their One Arabian Night release.

Gypsy Blood is the American release version of Pola’s German film Carmen, which was originally released by First National in 1921.  The film was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, produced by Paul Davidson, and originally released by Ufa in 1918 after the success of Lubitsch’s costume film Die Augen Der Mumie Ma, which was a large risk but also a large success for UFA. 

UFA, elated with their returns from the former film, decided to have Lubitsch and Davidson strike while the iron was hot and do another costume film.  This time they would use an even bigger budget and use a classic of literature as its basis, a classic that has gone on to be one of the most filmed classic stories in the history of movies (121 filmed versions as of 1996).  That story is Prosper Merimée’s novella Carmen, which has since been overshadowed by its treatment in the Georges Bizet opera just as vaudeville singer Helen Kane has been overshadowed by her treatment in the Betty Boop cartoon character.  Pola even mentioned in her autobiography that she wondered how Carmen would work on film without the music.  Ufa worked around this by basing their version heavily on the Merimée novella and pretty much ignoring the opera, which reportedly few of the other filmed versions do.

  The story is a simple and classic one about a bad woman who brings a good man down and enjoys doing it, making it one of Pola’s few legitimate “vamp” roles and of course the one people think of when they call her a “silent screen vamp” since it is one her best-known screen appearances.  Don José, soldier in the Spanish army, comes home on leave to visit his fiancée and mother, while there, he receives news that he has been promote to sergeant and is to report to duty in Seville.  His fiancée is concerned for him because she has heard about how seductive the ladies are there, and Don José is immediately tested in this very arena when La Carmencita, gypsy and cigarette factory worker, is arrested for pulling a knife on one of her co-workers and Don José has to break up the disturbance.  La Carmencita (Carmen) then begins to work on Don José, and as Don José opens the door of his heart to her, he thus begins a downward spiral that leaves him in rags and disgrace.  In the film he starts as a sergeant, then goes to jail, then is demoted to a soldier, then kills a lieutenant in charge of him over Carmen’s love, then becomes an outlaw, then lives with the Gypsies.  When Carmen meets a bullfighter whom she falls in love with for real, Don José cannot stand to lose her so he kills her and himself.

This picture’s success as good entertainment relies heavily on the magnetic personality of Pola Negri.  When I first saw this I was very surprised at how sexy this movie was within its period.  Pola’s alluring personality burns into the screen, even in prints such as this one that are copies of copies of copies and dissected along the way.  Pola’s character is an anti-heroine, meaning that you look at her as a villain but love her at the same time.  Often you completely forget how evil she is and are just enchanted with her, and then the movie has to remind you that this is a bad girl that is in the process of destroying an honorable man.  Pola’s character stands out so sharply amongst the other characters that you realize that it would hardly limp out the door without her.

As for the quality of this version of the film, it is VERY poor, as are all the available prints of this movie right now.  The best way to describe watching this version of the film is that it is like watching a movie underwater.  However, it is the only version of this film available on DVD right now, and none of the existing VHS copies look much better.  This is one movie that is in dire need of a good restoration, and with the arrival of a restored Sumurun we can always hope that a restored Carmen will also come to us soon.  In the meantime, this is what is available, and at least Sunrise Silents is making it available.  
 

Notes on Cuts From This Edition

European prints were almost always sliced and diced before they are shown here in America in the silent era; sometimes the cuts were censorship cuts, and sometimes they were cuts on the action to keep it moving for American audiences.  In the case of the print used in this DVD, there are even further cuts on this as compared to other existing American prints, probably to keep the old ladies on the censorship boards in this or that state happy. 

The first missing part is where Pola brings the bread with the file in it for Don José.  Here’s what you miss out on: after Pola leaves her house and draws the cross on her door, the uncut version has Pola approaching the prison and knocking on the door to be greeted by an old, perturbed-looking jailer.  Pola says that she has brought a loaf of bread for her cousin José Navarro and would like to take it to him. The jailer shakes his wattles in an emphatic “Oh, no, no”, and when he does this, Pola mocks his headshake, sticking her tongue out and bulging her eyes as she does it—it’s really cute.  As he raises his hand in anger, she starts smiling and flirting with him.  Of course, the jailer’s heart softens immediately, and he agrees to make an exception for her.  He takes her in and offers her a seat, but she flirtatiously refuses, pushes him down into the seat and jumps into his lap.  She then leaves him with the bread and says, “I will return—to see how he liked it!”  She then holds his face in place while she kisses him on the mouth, and then goes on her merry way.  The jailer is stunned from the unexpected kiss and immediately takes the bread to Don José; after he gives José the bread, the jailer says, “Devilishly pretty girl, your cousin!”, and walks out, locking the door behind him.  José then breaks open the bread to find the file and a note from La Carmencita inside, which is where this edition of the DVD picks up on the story. 

The second missing part happens after Carmen hatches a plan with the Gypsies to help them get through the Little Gate. The print used for the DVD only hints at what happens with an intertitle that says, “Midnight: The third folly!”  The missing part shows what happened.  The smugglers reach the Little Gate at night, with Pola leading the way.  Telling the smugglers, “I signal with the castanets,” Carmen approaches Don José alone while he is guarding the gate.  She lures him away from his post and starts making passionate love to him (or “making out with him” in modern-day terms).  While she has him on his knees, in front of her, she signals with the castanets, and the smugglers go through the gate.  When José sees them going through, she forces him back and makes love to him even more violently.  His heart sinks in despair and he says, “Lower and lower!  I am no longer a soldier to be trusted!”  Carmen then says to him, “Grieve not—tomorrow will bring sweet reward!” She then braces him and starts making love to him again, after which we see them buying food and wine at the market the next day.  Too hot for the old ladies who gave us Prohibition, I take it, but hey, now you know what you’re missing.

(A couple of other explanations: to “marry a widow with wooden legs”—the original titles let us know that this refers to the gallows.  Also, when Pola is on “the business of Egypt”, she means the business of the Gypsys.)
 

About the Commentary in Gypsy Blood and One Arabian Night

The only extra material on the Gypsy Blood DVD is a short commentary by Sunrise Silents proprietor Rich Olivieri, which follows the movie.  (Olivieri adds another commentary about Pola to Sunrise Silents' One Arabian Night release, which we will also discuss here.)  In the Gypsy Blood commentary, Olivieri does his part to build the suspense and mystery around Pola that helps to drive the movie’s point home even further with the viewer.   Fascinatingly, the bulk of Rich’s convincingly foreboding commentary about Gypsy Blood is actually a direct rebuttal to The Pola Negri Appreciation Site’s assertion that “Pola is not a vamp, she just looks like one”.   Rich is very much aware that, in large part because of our work here at the Pola Negri Appreciation Site, Pola Negri is now becoming less recognized as a silent film vamp.  Rich counters this by citing that Pola lived on as a vampire to the public, namely in the American fan magazines.  Our rebuttal to this and to the commentary in One Arabian Night is that Olivieri has been reading too many fan magazines.  This is especially noticeable in the One Arabian Night commentary, where Olivieri reports the Pola Negri Apocrypha as told by the fan magazines as if it were fact, including the supposed duel between Gloria Swanson and Pola that we know to be a complete fabrication.  

Olivieri discusses Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson as possible influences on Pola’s acting style in the One Arabian Night commentary, and here again I would say that this is a conclusion one could easily make from reading too many American fan magazines.  The first thing you have to remember is that Pola Negri was in Germany when she became a star, and that Germany and America were not on friendly terms when she was working her way up as a star in Germany, so the likelihood of her seeing Theda Bara in the movies was not too high in Germany, and it was even less likely in poverty-striken Poland, which was ruled by the Russians at that time.  Also, keep in mind that she was not an avid movie fan at first.  Pola got into movies as a sideline when her main focus was the theatre, so she would have been interested in theatre stars moreso than movie stars at the beginning, hence the copy of the photograph of theatre actress Sarah Bernhardt that she kept in a scrapbook that is now in the holdings of St. Mary’s University. We also know that, like practically everyone else from the period, she did a lot of reading to entertain herself, hence her idolization of the Italian poetess Ada Negri, which led to her taking on the poetess’ surname as her own.  In Germany, Asta Nielsen and Henny Porten were the reigning lady movie stars when Pola was moving up, so it would be safer to say that Asta Nielsen was an influence than it would to say that Theda Bara or Gloria Swanson was, although that’s a pretty dubious assertion too since Pola was not really an avid movie watcher.  

As for the "vamp" assertion that returns to haunt us in both of these commentaries, again this is a conclusion you could draw solely from reading American fan magazines, but that is only one aspect of the way the world saw Pola.  If you see The Yellow Ticket or Hotel Imperial, for example, you will have a hard time calling her a vamp after watching these pictures.  Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner never refer to Pola as vamp even once in their holy books on early German movies (From Caligari to Hitler and The Haunted Screen, respectively).  The New York Times critics never referred to Pola as a vamp.  The closest thing we get to “vamp” commentary from the Times critics is this rebuttal: “And to dismiss Pola Negri as a ‘vampire’ is simply absurd.  One might as well say that Sarah Bernhardt was a vampire, and let it go at that.”  (New York Times, Jan. 22, 1922 [Sunday], Section VI, p. 3)  Especially in Europe, where the populace was more open-minded to broader personality sketches (which led to Pola’s Sappho being banned here in the States), you will find no trace of Pola being typecast as a vamp.  If we typecast Pola as a vamp, then we should also typecast Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and Asta Nielsen as vamps, because they all played similar characters in their movies and in about the same ratio as Pola did.

But if you want to say that Pola was a femme fatale, that is a different story.  There is a difference between a camp (or vampire) and a femme fatale, and this is the difference: a vampire destroys men and enjoys doing it, whereas a femme fatale destroys men and it just happens.   The vamp does it on purpose, while the femme fatale does it on accident.  Pola’s Carmen is a vamp and viciously destroys Don José without flinching or caring. But her Madame DuBarry is a femme fatale.  Jeanne Marie, who later becomes the infamous DuBarry, dumps her first love Armand in favor of a succession of aristocrats, but she continues to love Armand and uses her position to save his life and promote him in the ranks of the French military.  Early in the movie, she genuinely feels bad about her dumping Armand and then invites him to the Bal de l’Opera, only to have a sword duel break out over her, which results in Armand killing the Spanish aristocrat she is seeing.  This is an accident and she is terrified and sad about it, whereas her Carmen actually gave Don José the sword to kill his superior with, and showed heartless cruelty and indifference to Don José after he did the deed.  That is the difference.  Did Pola play vampire roles?  Yes, about four of them.  Did she do enough to be typecast as a vamp? No, unless you want to typecast Greta Garbo as a vamp while you’re at it.  But if you wanted to typecast her as a tragedienne, that is a much more fair to her because Pola did enough of these roles to support that conclusion if you want to make it.

But this is where I like to take up the banner of the Europeans and just say that Pola Negri was a great actress.  Why bother to typecast Pola Negri, Asta Nielsen, Miriam Hopkins, Marilyn Monroe, or whomever, when they all play such a variety of roles and convince you that they really are those characters when they play them?  This is what had the New York Times critics all a-flutter about Pola originally, and that is what we see when we watch her pictures today.  And this is very reason you will continue to see the emphasis on Pola the actress and Pola the personality here in the Pola Negri Appreciation Site.