Here's a surprise - a French silent made about five years into the period of maturity ushered in by The Birth if a Nation and said to be their first colour feature.
It's another piece in the Kismet, Hassan, Arabian Nights tradition with loads of sex & sadism mixed in with the juvenilia. This one is clearly a prototype of the Korda Thief of Baghdad - all seeing eye reveals the princess etc.
Basic plot has despot Sultan Vermoryal dispatch three agents to bring him back wonders. His lecherous dwarf entertainer Frankeur is suitably contemptuous, urging "the delicious death of strangulation," and the pair of twin sisters, rounded up to join the harem girls, face thirty lashes or beheading with the big sword if the couriers don't show up within three days. The benign neighbouring sultan cherishes his beautiful daughter Dhélia, who is accompanied by her childhood guardian Marcel Lévesque Meanwhile wandering Prince Sylvio De Pedrelli, at one stage found chewing a rose, spots Dhélia and the pair are smitten, with her mounting his gift emerald in the medallion she carries.
An imposing young Gaston Modot no less is the most enterprising of the couriers, climbing walls and diving off cliffs into the ocean. He gets into a punch up with De Pedrelli, who is mustering support among the bazar idlers and the prince is stabbed in the encounter. However his rescuing the dwarf creates an ally.
Back at the palace, while the headsman is preparing, the couriers return. The giant diamond offer by the first is dismissed - off with his head. The second has brought back an all-seeing glass (one foot telescope) and is excused but Gaston is on top of the game using the glass to show Princess Dhélia to Sultan Vermoryal, who sets about carrying her off, leaving her grief stricken dad to wander the land.
Her royal admirer however determines to rescue the glamorous prisoner, recruiting (a sizeable party of) market men, who disperse goat herds and pour over the walls and foliage in their way, while hapless Princess Dhéhlia is threatened with drowning in the palace pond because she won't come across. Rescued at the last moment, she joins the prince and embraces the dwarf in gratitude. He is immediately transformed into a handsome youth, the witch's curse on him dissolved by the required kiss of a virgin.
The nice people end happily. Fade out on the royal couple, with the father's inverted reflection on the lake behind them.
The piece is sophisticated technically, cutting closer for dramatic effect, even if they sometimes do get direction of travel wrong. They have a unit shoot striking silhouette scenes of the call to prayers or the rider at night. The effective device of inserting key scenes (with Dhélia) on a limbo background did not continue in productions.
The stencil colour got some stick from contemporary reviewers for spoiling the work of the cameramen and it does show a distracting fringing on scenes like swimming in the blue water, where they gave up on outlining the character and he looks like he's in a perpetual oil slick. Similarly fading in on material, where the tinted areas already show, looks ugly but impressively they can manage to get two shades of red in the one image. Black skin is particularly effective in the process.
Ciminez in the South of France is rung in for the Mysterious East with Turkish writer Naplas homing in on the Villa Lisberg and it's boorish Moorish decors, fountains and Lion Statues.
The harem girls in their see-through shirts are a notably non-shapely lot, as people observe about the Broadway chorus girls of the same time. Despite such shifts in taste and her hair-loose do, plump Dhélia does manage to project voluptuous. Outside Modot, the rest of the cast is non memorable. His comeuppance seems to have been sheared out of the copy.
While it's crude, by comparisons with the Fairbanks and Korda films in the same tradition soon to come, this one manages to hold attention on it's own merit and is a fascinating piece of film history.
The Cinémathèque Fraçaise Henri site is running a particularly excellent restoration.
It's another piece in the Kismet, Hassan, Arabian Nights tradition with loads of sex & sadism mixed in with the juvenilia. This one is clearly a prototype of the Korda Thief of Baghdad - all seeing eye reveals the princess etc.
Basic plot has despot Sultan Vermoryal dispatch three agents to bring him back wonders. His lecherous dwarf entertainer Frankeur is suitably contemptuous, urging "the delicious death of strangulation," and the pair of twin sisters, rounded up to join the harem girls, face thirty lashes or beheading with the big sword if the couriers don't show up within three days. The benign neighbouring sultan cherishes his beautiful daughter Dhélia, who is accompanied by her childhood guardian Marcel Lévesque Meanwhile wandering Prince Sylvio De Pedrelli, at one stage found chewing a rose, spots Dhélia and the pair are smitten, with her mounting his gift emerald in the medallion she carries.
An imposing young Gaston Modot no less is the most enterprising of the couriers, climbing walls and diving off cliffs into the ocean. He gets into a punch up with De Pedrelli, who is mustering support among the bazar idlers and the prince is stabbed in the encounter. However his rescuing the dwarf creates an ally.
Back at the palace, while the headsman is preparing, the couriers return. The giant diamond offer by the first is dismissed - off with his head. The second has brought back an all-seeing glass (one foot telescope) and is excused but Gaston is on top of the game using the glass to show Princess Dhélia to Sultan Vermoryal, who sets about carrying her off, leaving her grief stricken dad to wander the land.
Her royal admirer however determines to rescue the glamorous prisoner, recruiting (a sizeable party of) market men, who disperse goat herds and pour over the walls and foliage in their way, while hapless Princess Dhéhlia is threatened with drowning in the palace pond because she won't come across. Rescued at the last moment, she joins the prince and embraces the dwarf in gratitude. He is immediately transformed into a handsome youth, the witch's curse on him dissolved by the required kiss of a virgin.
The nice people end happily. Fade out on the royal couple, with the father's inverted reflection on the lake behind them.
The piece is sophisticated technically, cutting closer for dramatic effect, even if they sometimes do get direction of travel wrong. They have a unit shoot striking silhouette scenes of the call to prayers or the rider at night. The effective device of inserting key scenes (with Dhélia) on a limbo background did not continue in productions.
The stencil colour got some stick from contemporary reviewers for spoiling the work of the cameramen and it does show a distracting fringing on scenes like swimming in the blue water, where they gave up on outlining the character and he looks like he's in a perpetual oil slick. Similarly fading in on material, where the tinted areas already show, looks ugly but impressively they can manage to get two shades of red in the one image. Black skin is particularly effective in the process.
Ciminez in the South of France is rung in for the Mysterious East with Turkish writer Naplas homing in on the Villa Lisberg and it's boorish Moorish decors, fountains and Lion Statues.
The harem girls in their see-through shirts are a notably non-shapely lot, as people observe about the Broadway chorus girls of the same time. Despite such shifts in taste and her hair-loose do, plump Dhélia does manage to project voluptuous. Outside Modot, the rest of the cast is non memorable. His comeuppance seems to have been sheared out of the copy.
While it's crude, by comparisons with the Fairbanks and Korda films in the same tradition soon to come, this one manages to hold attention on it's own merit and is a fascinating piece of film history.
The Cinémathèque Fraçaise Henri site is running a particularly excellent restoration.