1921 ‘Die Bergkatze’ Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
A charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained. A wonderfully anarchic and playfully subversive satire of military life from one of the great comedy filmmakers.
The Mountain Cat, El gato montés, Горная кошка, La chatte des montagne, Bergkatten, Az elvarázsolt fellegvár, Bjergkatten, Lo scoiattolo, Górska kotka, Beijos que se Vendem
Cinematic Time Capsule
1921 Marathon - Film #15
"The wench has spirit!"
Lubitsch’s 1921 silent mixes military satire with a romantic farce and tops it off with a heaping helping of manic silliness!
Starring Pola Negri as the feral mountain-woman wildcat who gleefully leads her father’s elfin band of bandits on several drunken escapades and acts of highfalutin bedroom looting.
But despite all the savagery, this wild-eyed Helena Bonham Carter, is still tender-hearted enough to build a shrine to the man she loves... out of a pair of his recently confiscated pants.
It’s looney, it’s goofy and wildly imaginative, with such Lubitsch touches as a literal river of tears, an eat-your-heart-out fever dream, and massive crowds of well-wishing women and…
A seriously unhinged movie. The majority of shots are framed in decorative cut-outs. Everyone looks slightly (or much more than slightly) insane. Pola Negri gives an endlessly GIF-able performance, and I want to go back in time and hang out with her and be her friend. This is usually described as a satire on militarization, but, honestly, it's way too off-the-rails to be constrained by any one meaning. Bandits. Skulls. Wild mustaches. Sex. Proto-psychedelic sets. (The sets are actually like cartoonized versions of German Expressionist sets.) A dream sequence featuring a band of slightly horrifying marshmallow men. (They're actually supposed to be snowmen, but whatever.)
I imagine this movie would come as a shock to anyone who only knows through…
Every now and again you come across a film where everyone is clearly having so much fun it is infectious rather than self indulgent. Lubitsch and co seem to have some sort of anti-military theme in mind, presumably resonant in 1921 Germany with all the extras looking particularly motley and unkempt but presumably mainly all combat veterans. As most of the reviews point out they all come across as more than a little unhinged, a feel that is helped by the amazing costumes, alpine location shooting, fairy tale sets and Lubitsch framing the image with a succession of cardboard cut out frames to focus your attention.
It's the story of two irresistible people, womanising Lieutenant Alexis, followed by crowds of…
Why did you let him go? And the lovely underclothes - I could have used a pair.
Rectangular frames are for squares, this picture comes in all shapes and sizes.
FANTASTIC expressionist set designs, costumes, editing, and modern score. Some truly amazing visual effects. The cut-outs technique to dynamically frame every single scene was genius and incredibly impactful. But uh…. well it's really silly. I'm sure it would have been hysterical at the time but the comedy just kinda rolled over me. The story is really wild and I didn't find it particularly interesting. That being said, I can't overstate enough how extremely well made this is. Fun time.
My first Pola Negri movie and she was utterly delightful! I definitely want to check out more of her movies!
Lubitsch evolves his fare into satire, but a Langian scouring of Weimar Germany this ain't; it's all setup for what Lubitsch does best, telling a romance with more razor-sharp wit, bawdy suggestiveness and convincing tenderness than people can made decades after his death. Would that he had lived forever.
Anteriormente a Wildcat, Lubitsch já havia dirigido pelo menos 3 das sua obras primas (A Princesa das Ostras, A Boneca do Amor e Não Quero ser um Homem) e feito tantos outros com a Pola Negri no elenco, tudo isso antes de chegar aos 30 anos. A grande vantagem do cinema mudo é que se rodavam filmes aos borbotões, tantos que era impossível não acabar saindo pelo menos uma grande obra no meio do entulho, isso em Hollywood, então imagine Lubistch na Alemanha durante a primeira guerra. É fato que o período que durou a 1ª Grande Guerra foi usado por Lubitsch para fazer um “intensivão” sobre cinema, foi nesse período que ele aprendeu no braço a fazer cinema e…
Comedy as it had never seen before; passionate and irrational romance as it had never been satirized before. Brilliant episodic hyperactivity addressed with a wonderful scenery and allegorical scenes, some of them intentional, some of them perhaps not. Lubitsch is an unrecognized master of the genre, and he was one of the first filmmakers (if not the first) to understand that one of the most effective sources of comedy is to mock our own flaws and senseless features.
99/100
Ernst Lubitsch presents an absolute unfazed satire on unorthodoxity in a disjointed narrative of blissful chaos; a chaos yielding the purest form of comic relief, when put up on a panoramic beauty.
95/100
Lubitsch’s favourite of his German films is a lot of fun – especially after struggling through two of his more stolid melodramas, Sumurun and Anna Boleyn.
For the most part, it’s delirious comic mayhem, a sort of live-action cartoon set in a mythical kingdom and featuring an effete, amorous lieutenant, a completely incompetent guardsman with a massive moustache, and Pola Negri as a mountain-dwelling robber baron engaging in S&M with her hordes. The film kicks off with a soldier leaping out of bed to shut the window on a bugler so he can go back to bed, and goes on cheerily from there.
The pace does slacken at times, but there’s always something funny or unexpected around the corner. Highlights…
Beijos que se Vendem estreava há exatamente 100 anos na República de Weimar.
Eu deveria realmente assistir algum filme do Lubitsch ou do Preston Sturges toda a semana, quem fala mal de comédia romântica é porque não os conhecem.
No Youtube ( youtu.be/VPd_8TdgRkM )
