The princess and the violinist

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Movie
Original title The Blackguard,
The Princess and the Violinist
Country of production Great Britain , Germany
original language English , German
Publishing year 1925
Rod
Director Graham Cutts
script Alfred Hitchcock ,
Adrian Brunel
production Michael Balcon ( Gainsborough Pictures ), Erich Pommer ( Ufa )
camera Theodor Sparkuhl
occupation

The Princess and the Violinist , also known as The Blackguard , is a German-English feature film by Graham Cutts from 1925 . It is based on the novel The Blackguard written by Raymond Paton . The film is of film historical importance primarily because of Alfred Hitchcock's collaboration in various functions prior to his own career as a director. Hitchcock also shot several scenes for the film itself.

action

The Princess and the Violinist tells the story of the violinist Michael Caviol, who made a career, rose to the aristocratic circles of Tsarist Russia and fell in love with a married princess. He gets caught up in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution , where his past and the consequences of his amorous entanglements catch up with him.

background

  • Since there are hardly any usable memories or documents about the films of this time, there is little and sometimes contradicting information about the circumstances of the production of The Princess and the Violinist : For example, it is not entirely clear whether The Princess and the Violinist is the fourth or was the fifth film in a row that director Graham Cutts worked with Alfred Hitchcock . After Hitchcock's own memories and the portrayal in the Hitchcock biography by John Russell Taylor, The Princess and the Violinist was followed by His second wife in 1925 . In contrast, IMDb dated his second wife to 1924 and classified him as the third of the five collaborations between Cutts and Hitchcock; likewise Donald Spoto in his Hitchcock biography. Accordingly, The Princess and the Violinist would be the fifth and last of these joint films. The former is supported by the fact that Hitchcock - asked by Taylor in a conversation with Hitchcock about the contradicting information - insisted on the former order and remembered related details of the production of the two films. The fact that His Second Wife , like the first two Cutts and Hitchcock films - Women to Woman and The Wide Shadow - was produced by Balcon-Saville-Freedman speaks for the other representation . 1924 but apparently the cooperation between the three producers had Michael Balcon , Victor Saville and John Freedman ended and Balcon had the company Gainsborough established, the 1924 and 1925 films marriage in danger (A Passionate Adventure) and The Princess and the violinist / The Black Guard produced .
  • Due to financial problems, producer Michael Balcon had to look for a co-producer for his film. He found it in the German producer Erich Pommer . For this reason, the shooting for The Princess and the Violinist or The Blackguard , as the film was titled in the English-language version, took place in the Ufa studios in Babelsberg .
  • According to the circumstances of the co-production, the cast consisted of English and well-known German actors, some of whom had worked in films by well-known directors such as Fritz Lang or Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau . The star of the film was the American actress Jane Novak .
  • Alfred Hitchcock was simultaneously a screenwriter , assistant director , and set designer for the production of The Princess and the Violinist . At the same time, he oversaw the filming and was, above all, a kind of girl for everything to the director Graham Cutts , who was considered unreliable. His fiancée Alma Reville also traveled to Germany.
  • Director Graham Cutts was busy with the affair with an Estonian dancer while filming . Alfred Hitchcock was drawn in part into managing and dealing with the affair, according to his recollections by Cutts. When the latter increasingly neglected his tasks and in the end disappeared head over heels, Hitchcock no longer only had to shoot secondary shots himself, but increasingly took over the staging of more central scenes and finally shot the film to the end.
  • For Hitchcock, his stay in Germany, which lasted several months, was of central importance for his further career: he learned a fair amount of German, attended theater performances and learned from them; Above all, however, he spent his time during the filming as often as possible watching the filming, as German film was a world leader in the silent film era. The emphasis on the visual in expressionist German silent films particularly impressed Hitchcock and influenced his later filmmaking. Above all, he observed the shooting of the silent film The Last Man and got to know its director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau . The last man in a silent film that managed to get by with a single subtitle was a prime example of the visual thinking that was to become so central to Hitchcock himself: Murnau used special effects to illustrate dreams, and the decoration based entirely on the film image, used in this film, for example, the so-called unchained camera , which brought the film image in motion, the possibilities of spatial development extended (and the film revolutionized), and so taught Hitchcock cinematic thinking.
  • In the course of the last of their five films together, the relationship between Hitchcock and Graham Cutts deteriorated. Cutts and other collaborators felt that Hitchcock was too prominent, Hitchcock the impression that there was intrigue against him behind his back. So Cutts finally refused to work with Hitchcock any further, and The Princess and the Violinist (probably) marks the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of Hitchcock's career as a director. He had increasingly taken on central roles in Cutts' films and so the producer Michael Balcon entrusted him with directing his own film after his release. This film was The Pleasure Garden (The Pleasure Garden) .
  • How often did Hitchcock work with actors who also appeared in other of his films: Jane Novak played fifteen years after The Princess and the Violinist in The Foreign Correspondent , Bernhard Goetzke in Hitchcock's second feature film Der Bergadler , Fritz Alberti in Mary , the German version of Mord - Sir John intervenes! .
  • The English word blackguard means roughly rascal or common person in German .


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