This is a pretty good looking silent film. The sets and the crowd scenes are fine, the acting's adequate, the elaborate back-lighting's all there. There aren't really that many titles, but the story IS all told in the titles. After a while, one realizes that one hardly has to look at the pictures, just keep alert for the titles... so the pictures recede dramatically in importance. In the end, it's a journeyman job, with a lack of respect for the viewer's intelligence. For example, when a character tells other character about events we've already seen, the titles carefully spell it all out, or the scene is shown again, just in case the audience forgot. It's the tale of a poor violinist taken under the wing of a painter and tutored by a has-been violinist. When his granny cracks him on the bean, he actually travels up those ethereal stairs to the pearly gates where St. Peter tells him that he'll only be a great artist if he doesn't mess around with women. But does he listen? One can't blame him for breaking training with Russian princess June Novak, who's hot stuff in soft-focus close-ups. When he and the princess find themselves in the middle of the Russian revolution, he has a sword fight with a revolution leader--his old violin instructor!--and is clearly killed dead on screen while thousands of revolutionaries look on. Nevertheless, he manages to end the film in a clinch with his sweetie. It's all entertaining enough, but lacking the visually sophisticated storytelling techniques that Hitchcock (screenwriter and art director on this film) would employ when he became director, even in his first films.
Review of Die Prinzessin und der Geiger
