User Reviews

As a fan of both Conrad Veidt and Showtime's TV series The Borgias, I was intrigued to see that he had starred in a film about the Borgias. In this silent film, liberties are taken with history (as any fictional work on the Borgias seemingly does). Here, Cesare and Juan Borgia are not Pope Alexander's sons, but his nephews. Lucrezia Borgia is not Cesare and Juan's sister, but instead their cousin. Perhaps this change was to make Cesare's love for Lucrezia less scandalous for audiences of the day.

Unlike the Showtime series, this film does not depict Cesare and Lucrezia as having a close, loving, platonic relationship. Instead, Cesare is cast as a total villain, lusting after Lucrezia and determined to have her to himself despite her loathing for him. To this end, he plans to keep her from marrying her betrothed, Alphonso of Aragon, by any means necessary.

There is also a subplot involving Cesare's rivalry with his brother Juan over a woman named Naomi. So that makes two love triangles in the film already, and then Lucrezia's first husband Giovanni Sforza is thrown into the mix, and he is portrayed in a much nicer and more heroic light than he plays in Showtime's series. (In fact, you could say that his and Cesare's roles are reversed in this film, Giovanni playing a hero, Cesare a villain.) This is a rather dense movie, particularly for a silent film, running over 2 hours, and without a traditional three-act structure. A fair amount of time is spent on Lucrezia and Alphonso falling in love. Cesare's henchmen Micheletto, Sebastiano, and Lodowico get their share of screen time as they carry out Cesare's schemes. And an entire act is devoted to Cesare's army marching on Sforza's castle in Pesaro, in a battle scene that reminded me of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I found the epic scale of the battle impressive for its time.

Conrad Veidt is at his diabolically debonair best, playing Cesare as totally captivating and powerful: A ladies' man and villain whom anyone would be afraid to cross. (Cesare is the complete opposite of Veidt's character in The Man Who Laughs, Gwynplaine, a wholly sympathetic, timid, innocent man on the bottom of the social structure, which is a testament to Veidt's range as an actor, and his particular strength as a silent film actor to create and inhabit fully formed characters with his striking, devastatingly controlled body language and facial expressions.) And yet, Cesare is not without a sympathetic moment or two, thanks to Veidt's compelling performance. He does have chemistry with Liane Haid as Lucrezia, who, repulsed by Cesare's actions and murderous intent, launches a determined strike against his plans. There are some truly tense scenes between these two actors that work fantastically.

For a movie released in 1922, I think the filmmaking holds up remarkably well today. Highly recommended for fans of the Borgias, silent films, or Conrad Veidt.

Heinrich George has a good if way-down-the-cast-list role in Lucrezia Borgia (1922) in which the title part is played to perfection by the wondrously beautiful Liane Haid.

A super-expensive, highly exotic production, the film also stars Conrad Veidt in one of his most impressive roles as Cesare Borgia, while Albert Bassermann is almost equally brilliant as Pope Alexander.

All in all, the gripping, fast-moving story, coupled with charismatic acting and incredibly lavish sets held me absolutely spellbound for 128 minutes.

Grapevine Video market UFA's superb full-length, tinted print.

I saw this film in a version that was a bit over 80 minutes long, with English intertitles (evidently from several sources as the font--and typo ratio--varied, the best being one with long extensions on the b, d, h, k, l so that titles like "Kill him!" and "Murdered!" looked very elegant) and no score. It was evident that at least one subplot, and possibly two, were missing: the character of the Countess Orsini was introduced in one scene, evidently as Cesare Borgia's mistress, but there was no real explanation and she did not reappear; and we see Cesare leer very briefly, in passing on a street, at Naomi (a woman of the people who turns out to be his brother's fiancée), but there was no development of his interest in her despite the fact that it evidently motivates his killing both Naomi and his brother. If these subplots had been developed with another scene or two, we would have a picture of Cesare as man who takes his pleasure with women high and low and considers any woman he has lusted after his personal property. Moreover, we'd see a Cesare who will not kill his brother for political reasons or as revenge for tattling on him to their father (the Pope), but will kill him out of a very casual sexual jealousy over a woman he has hardly met.

There also seemed to be a gap between a moment where Lucrezia tells Juan that Cesare is "at the Circus" and the next scene, in which all three of them are now in the Circus audience.

The production was splendid, with a wonderful Sistine Chapel set (at least that's what it looked like, minus of course the ceiling which would have been painted by Michaelangelo at a later date) for Papal audiences and a spectacular final sequence involving the siege of a castle in which Lucrezia has taken refuge after Cesare murders her husband. There were many extras, many scenes of Cesare's men galloping towards and away from the castle, scaling the walls, etc. There were good, coherent smaller sets too, for Naomi's adventures (a 3-story blacksmith shop in particular). There was also "the Circus", which seemed to be the Colisseum but was not as coherent, and a vast nunnery which I also found confusing as Lucrezia tries to escape from it at midnight or dawn and finds nuns with candles processing in all directions.

Lucrezia, Liane Haid, was quite good. She had to spend a lot of time basically just resisting Cesare's advances, but her character was dynamic–from relatively passive and dependent on her father (the philoprogenitive Pope) to active, riding her horse around the countryside and escaping from the convent, and finally vindictive in her desire to see Cesare dead. Albert Basserman was also wonderful as the Pope, combining affection for his children, a pious dependence on God, and a political ruthlessness in a way that made sense. The nice men in the story (Cesare's brother Juan and Lucrezia's two suitor-husbands) were well differentiated from each other and from Cesare's three assassins.

Veidt is marvelous as Cesare. His Cesare is of course wicked as can be, but intelligent enough to enjoy duping a prisoner into revealing secret information by making him *imagine* he has been poisoned. He then uses the information to distract his father the Pope from brother Juan's accusations about his general tendency to kill people whom he considers to be in his way. These are his first scenes, and they establishes a Machiavellian Cesare who has more than a little of Shakespeare's Richard III in him– one almost expects him to be able to convince Lucrezia to take him as her lover over her husband's dead body, as Richard does with Lady Anne. Although he carries himself like a live Renaissance portrait, strong, straight, and elegant, Veidt conveys the quality of a moral hunchback, born twisted and ready to do what it takes to live with that. His final battle scenes, in which he steps in to lead the troops personally when they are discouraged after several failed assaults, and is slain in a duel but turns out to be hard to kill, also recall that aspect of Richard III.