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Hotel
Imperial
(1927), starring Pola Negri, James Hall, George Siegmann, Max Davidson,
and Nicholas Soussanin. Directed
by Mauritz Stiller and produced by Erich Pommer for Paramount Pictures.
Silent, 77 minutes. DVD
released by Grapevine video, May 2006. (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!)
So
far, the best of the public domain DVD releases of Pola Negri movies (next
to The Woman He Scorned) has been Grapevine Video’s reissue of Hotel
Imperial. Hotel
Imperial has suffered a tarnished reputation over the years because of
the noticeable three-way tug of war in visual aesthetics that resulted in
a hodgepodge of Swedish, German, and American visuals that keep the movie
from having a strong visual cohesiveness.
However, thanks to an improved transfer from a better-quality
print, we can now watch the film in a little better light and see what
made the New York Times film critics begin their Best of 1926 film
list with a mention of Hotel Imperial (even though they couldn’t
include it in the list because of its January 3, 1927 release date).
Hotel
Imperial
was a film that did well with the critics, but performed poorly at the box
office in America because it happened to be released after a strong public
backlash against her in America, due in part to Pola’s famed antics at
Rudolph Valentino’s funeral (easily the worst acting of her career,
although sadly she wasn’t acting!).
In retrospect we can see that this incident was the straw that
broke the camel’s back in a pattern of poor choices in Paramount’s (mis)management
of Pola’s career that ended up alienating her somewhat from American
audiences (although she continued to do well with overseas audiences this
entire period). Earlier
on in her American career, Paramount cast Pola in a succession of “good
bad girl” roles while simultaneously making a Gloria Swanson-style
clotheshorse of her. This
uneasy mixture was a compromise amongst what women wanted to see (pretty
clothes), what men wanted to see (a hot babe seducing them from the
screen), and the complaints from women who didn’t want their husbands
and sons being seduced by lecherous women in the theaters, as filtered
through an American film industry losing ground to their German
competitors and yet not understanding the inner workings what made their
competitors’ films the threat that they were.
The result of so many compromises was that nobody was happy, and
Pola’s career began suffering, which meant that Paramount had to rethink
Pola’s career. It has been
suggested that the Valentino funeral incident was what forced Paramount to
reinvent Pola in Hotel Imperial, however Hotel Imperial was
already in production when this occurred (and was delayed because of it),
which tells us that Paramount had made the decision to reinvent Pola even
before this happened. The
decision was made to cast Pola in more down-to-earth roles, only in her
native Europe. She would now be the girl next door in a European fantasy
world. The critics loved the
results, but for American audiences the damage was already done and her
reputation in America would be in recession for about a year while
Paramount finally got around to making great Pola films.
And
this is where we find Pola in Hotel Imperial.
In this film Pola plays the chambermaid at a small hotel in an
Austrian town under Russian occupation during World War I. An Austrian army lieutenant fighting for his life behind
enemy lines breaks into the hotel Pola works in to evade capture, and
having had no rest for several days he falls into a deep sleep. Pola and her co-workers move him into one of the rooms, only
to have a Russian general and his troops make their hotel their
headquarters. The hotel’s
staff members do not want to betray one of their own countrymen, so they
disguise the lieutenant as their waiter.
The Russian general immediately takes a liking to Pola, but she
resists him until they nearly take the “waiter” away for not having
identification. She then
appeals to the general and turns on the charm to save the
lieutenant/waiter’s life. The
plot thickens when the Russian camp is visited by one of Russia’s best
military spies. The spy has
found the locations where the Austrians have stockpiled their reserves and
has one more trip to make across enemy lines to gain enough information
for the Russians to hit the Austrians with a fatal blow that may end the
war in their favor. The
lieutenant, still disguised as a waiter, overhears this, and when the spy
returns he kills the spy in his bath.
Pola and the lieutenant destroy the information the spy brought
with him and try to disguise the murder as a suicide, but the general does
not believe it and begins to hold court, having everyone in the hotel
questioned. The Russians
suspect the lieutenant, and then Pola does something to rescue him again
and later receive honors from the Austrian government as their “bravest
and most beautiful solider”—but you’ll have to watch the picture to
find out what she did… The
three-way tug of war in visual aesthetics results from the film being made
by an American film company under the supervision of German producer Erich
Pommer (who worked before and after this for UFA), with Swedish import
Mauritz Stiller (who was brought over to America along with his actress
protégé and girlfriend Greta Garbo because of industry interest in his
film Gosta Berling’s Saga) directing the film.
The American film company had a set style for the films they
produced and expected the film to be made within these confines, while the
German producer pushed for the artistic motifs that had become prevalent
in his home country. Paramount let him do this, knowing that they needed to rely
on the German producer somewhat in order for their film to stand up
against their German competitors. Therefore,
we have a German producer working within the structures of the American
film factory, obsessing over staircases and shadows, carefully organizing
shots in a geometric fashion, and dizzying us with moving cameras.
Pommer ingested what he learned while working for Paramount, and
took the resulting German-Hollywood filmmaking hybrid back to Germany with
him, producing a series of German films that have a similar hybrid look.
In fact, one of the German films he produced later on, Hungarian
Rhapsody (1928), contains a dance sequence with moving cameras that is
very similar to the dance sequence in Hotel Imperial. Swedish
director Mauritz Stiller, on the other hand, found himself less a creative
force than a timekeeper for the studio, which was a very depressing
situation to him and led to his dismissal from Paramount.
He and fellow Swedish director Victor Sjöström (or Seastrom, as
he was later credited) created a world of stark, unflinching bleakness
that rang strong with the audiences in their home country and caused them
to become the most famous directors in Sweden during that time.
Although their films were not as artistically stylized and
geometric as the Germans’ films, Stiller and Sjöström took the
darkness found in German silents to much more brutal extremes.
The hanging lamps and streetlights of German fame get prominence in
Scandinavian pictures as well, but the claustrophobic blackness and somber
subject material, no doubt influenced by the long, unflinching winters in
their native habitat, get “cranked up to eleven” in their pictures.
These Swedish directors were also more prone to use natural
settings than the Germans, probably due to budget constraints as well as
to their collective love of nature.
Stiller’s
influence is squashed somewhat in Hotel Imperial, but shows up
powerfully in the military sequences at the very beginning and end of the
film, as well as in the two war montages ten and sixty-eight minutes into
the film. We also see his
influence in certain shots inside the hotel, where loosely organized
extras congregate underneath suffocating overhead lighting with
pitch-black darkness outside. Although
not as crisp-looking as many mainline DVD releases, the visual improvement
is noticeable and makes for a much more enjoyable watching experience.
We still have a picture that is a little too dark around the edges
and find numerous scratches on the film itself, but at least we can see
the shadows and nightmarish montages with some clarity now.
The compiled orchestra score also brings out the best in the film
for the most part, even following scene changes and subtleties of mood in
the film itself. How’d they
do that? There are a couple
parts that don’t work so well (namely the a cappella chorus toward the
end of the film), but overall the score goes out of its way to enhance the
film, which is really amazing considering that it is a complied score and
not actually written for the film. |
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Pola
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