Lilian Harvey Photo 1932 Screenland magazine January 1932 Gallery of Stars Καλλονές Θεάματα Κινηματογραφικά

 

Lilian Harvey

Photo 1932

Screenland magazine January 1932

Gallery of Stars

Καλλονές

Θεάματα

Κινηματογραφικά

 

 

 

 

Lilian Harvey – Photo 1932

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

Lilian Harvey

   She is called "incomparably the most exquisite of film stars— beside her Constance Bennett and Joan Crawford seem as if they were cut out of tin !"

What do you think?

 

By Rebecca West

 

   The beauty and gaiety of the new Erich Pommer film, "The Congress Dances," is a great success here in London, except among the highbrows. They grimly turn a shoulder on it and express preference for gangster films of the grim and ugly sort of which all other cinema-goers have long wearied. Thus we may see how an unbalanced literary diet may stunt the growth of a generation.

 

   Aldous Huxley, with that passion for self-analysis and self-censure which leads him to pounce on nearly every human characteristic as if it were a roach, and T. S. Eliot, who is so paralyzed by his anxiety to be distinguished that he is reduced to claiming paralysis as a distinction, have produced a generation which is afraid to make a move, in case it turns out to be derisible and undistinguished.

 

   Consequently they rarely commit themselves to the positive act of appreciation except for objects so unlikely to arouse this feeling that they can at first pretend to be relying on an esoteric discrimination and, if pressed, pretend that this appreciation was not genuine and they were merely gratifying an extremely subtle sense of humor.

 

   It is gloomy for those who have to do with them ; but in this case they are the losers. For this film is an extremely jolly thing, which marks the beginning of a phase in which the cinema complies with the ordinary literate person's demand for complexity. There has been practiced up till now in the film an unnatural and highly inartistic concentration.

 

   When one goes to see, say, Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored,"' one's attention is nailed down to the fair Marlene, her legs, her love affairs. But Marlene interests us only because she is part of an interesting world, and has endless derivations from it and relations with it.

 

   The emphasis laid on her, presupposes in the audience a greater power of being contented with a single personality than even an adolescent in love ascribes to himself.

 

   But in "The Congress Dances" there is an end to that pretense. The producers assume, and are certainly justified in so doing, that the audience will fall in love with Lilian Harvey, the girl who plays the little Viennese glove maker, who very nearly becomes the mistress of the Czar when he attends the Congress that was called to settle the fate of Napoleon when he was bottled up in Elba.

 

   But they also realize that the audience will have a lot of mind left over from that activity, which will be free to be amused by the pomp and ceremony of the Congress itself, and the superb character of Metternich. the cynical statesman who called the Allies together and tried to diddle them. So they use that material, and send the audience away with a satisfaction far wider than erotic.

 

   The film, in fact, has assumed the freedom the novel has always exercised,  to be large and roomy and full of all sorts of things only indirectly related to the main theme. But all the same it is at a difficult stage of its existence.

 

   What dangers threaten us now that the movies have become talkies I have been able to realize by; contrasting the first and second time I saw "The Congress Dances."

 

   The first time I saw the German version in Berlin ; and I am on such terms with the German language that the minute I relax my attention it ceases to be words, and is merely a gush of sound. I heard the Viennese songs and music that accompany most of the film, but when the characters spoke it was as if they spoke wordlessly like dogs. Then Lilian Harvey seemed an immortal effigy like Venus rising from the foam.

 

   She is incomparably the most exquisite of film stars now practising. Beside her Constance Bennett and Joan Crawford seem as if they were cut out of tin. She was originally a dancer, and she reminds one of that story of Pavlova, who, when asked to explain one of her dances, answered, "If I had been able to explain it, I would not have troubled to dance it."

 

   As she waved from her carriage when she is driving to the villa where she is to await the Czar, her slender arms and her flexible body revealed fine shades of the optimism of young love and the shamelessness of innocence that could not be put into words.

 

   One's mind enclosed her as in a timeless symbol.

 

   But in London, when she spoke English, she slipped back into time, back from imagination into reality. "I've no doubt about it," she said ; and one remembered having heard that she hailed from Muswell Hill, which is the equivalent of one of the less opulent districts of Brooklyn.

 

   One became conscious that she had a background, that she had a human personality, one agonized lest it was inferior to her person, one wanted to cover one's ears lest her accents should betray a lack of intelligence.

 

   She loses her place among the timeless symbols, she becomes a human being, and being human oneself one tends to judge her from the unfair standpoint of whether close and continued association with her would be an undiluted blessing.

 

   It is a pity; and the moral one draws is that the future of the cinema for the discerning, anyway, lies in the films (such as Rene Clair's "Le Million") where the sound effects are musical and avoid realistic dialogue, so that the actors can retreat into the silent significance of types.

 

 

 

The English, French, and German leading men of "Congress Dances," with Lilian Harvey, the star.

 

 

 

 

Screenland magazine, January 1932, pp. 16-17, 89.

 

 

 

 

 

“ Congress Dances ”

German comedy film 1972

English version

Directed by Erik Charell

Starring:

Lilian Harvey

Henry Garat

Conrad Veidt

Lil Dagover

Philipp Maning

Humberston Wright

Gibb McLaughlin

Reginald Purdell

Spencer Trevor

Helen Haye

  Στην αγγλική έκδοση του 1932 το επιτελείο των ηθοποιών είναι διεθνές και όχι γερμανικό όπως στην αρχική γερμανική έκδοση της ταινίας (1931).

 

 

 

   Στo πρωτότυπο φιλμ στα γερμανικά (1931) “Der Kongress tanzt” έπαιξε εκτός της Lilian Harvey, του Conrad Veidt και της Lil Dagover διαφορετικό επιτελείο ηθοποιών αποτελούμενο από γερμανούς.

 

 

 

Lilian Harvey – in “ Congress Dances ”

(photo από το IMDb)

 

 

 

Lilian Harvey (1906-1968)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[ ανάρτηση 18 Αυγούστου 2024 :  

Lilian Harvey

Photo 1932

Screenland magazine January 1932

Gallery of Stars

Καλλονές

Θεάματα

Κινηματογραφικά ]