Behind harem walls

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Movie
German title Behind harem walls
Original title Facil
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1928
length 2 199 meters / 75 minutes
Rod
Director Howard Hawks
script Seton I. Miller
production Fox Film Corp.
music Samuel Lionel Rothafel , Ernö Rapée
camera L. William O'Connell
cut Ralph Dixon
occupation

Behind Harem Walls (English original title: Fazil ) is a silent film melodrama that the American director Howard Hawks realized in 1927 for Fox Film . In it, the topic of the clash of cultures is dealt with on a more private level.

Seton I. Miller's script was based on the play L'Insoumise by the French writer Pierre Frondaie , which premiered at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris on October 3, 1922 and which Philip Klein had edited for English. He gave him the title of Prince Fazil .

The main female role of Fabienne was played by the Norwegian dancer and actress Greta Nissen , who was born in Oslo .

Director Hawks is said to have not been very satisfied with his film later. It was not his material, he was only fulfilling a contractual obligation.

action

Prince Fazil, an Arab tribal prince, meets Fabienne, a beautiful, carefree Parisian, from friends in France. During a vacation in Venice, the two fall in love and get married. But no sooner did Fabienne feel the severity of the foreign culture than she revolted and a dispute broke out. Prince Fazil leaves them and returns to his desert home, where he maintains a harem. Fabienne, jealous, travels to him, breaks into his harem and chases the harem women apart, much to Fazil's displeasure. He then arrests them. When her friends from Paris set out on a rescue operation that resulted in a scuffle, Fazil was wounded by a revolver bullet. Using a poisoned ring, he kills Fabienne, dying, and both are united in death.

history

"Fazil" was delivered as one of the first films of the transition period between silent and sounding film with synchronous accompanying music recorded on optical soundtrack ( "Movietone" ), which Samuel Lionel Rothafel had put together and which was conducted by Ernö Rapée ; at the premiere on June 4, 1928, Bernard Hazeltine Bassett was the conductor in the cinema. The sound track also contains sound effects and the theme song by John Stepan Zamecnik with the text Oh nights of splendor by Harry D. Kerr , which is performed by the American tenor James Melton , while a Venetian gondolier can be seen singing in the picture.

In France, where the film was only released in theaters on November 23, 1928, it retained the title of the underlying play “L'insoumise”.

Fox produced a Spanish-language version in 1931 under the title "La ley del harem", directed by Louis Seiler with Josée Mojica and Carmen Larrabeiti in the leading roles.

In Germany, “Fazil” ran under the promising title “Behind Harem Walls” and was awarded by the Deutsche Vereins-Film AG Leipzig / Berlin. In Austria it was called “The Harem of Prince Fazil” or “Under the Stars of the Orient”.

reception

“Behind harem walls” was discussed in: “Illustrierter Film-Kurier” (Berlin), publisher: “Film-Kurier”, GmbH, Verlag Alfred Weiner, GmbH, No. 1022, 1928, p. 8.

A contemporary (2013) review of the film by "CH" at filmmuseum.at quotes the British-American film historian William K. Everson: A politically incorrect excursion into the exotic madhouse: "Like Victorian porn from which the porn scenes have been removed ..."

literature

  • Howard Hawks: Interviews. Conversations with filmmakers series. Edited by Scott Breivold. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006, ISBN 1-57806-833-9 , pp. XX, XV, 17, 78.
  • Pierre Frondaie: L'Insoumise. pièce en quatre actes. (= Petite illustration. Edition 80). L'Illustration publishing house, 1922.
  • Gero Gandert: 1929 - The film of the Weimar Republic. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 1993, ISBN 3-11-085261-6 .
  • Alan Gevinson (Ed.): Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911-1960. (= AFI Catalog Series. Volume 7.2). University of California Press, 1997, ISBN 0-520-20964-8 .
  • Todd McCarthy: Howard Hawks - The Gray Fox of Hollywood. New edition. Grove Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8021-3740-7 , pp. 86, 94, 670.
  • Ross Melnick: American Showman Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935. Columbia University Press, New York 2012.
  • Babett Stach, Helmut Morsbach: German film posters 1895–1945. (= Film, television, sound archive series. Volume 3). Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 1992, ISBN 3-11-140214-2 , p. 48.
  • Robin Wood: Howard Hawks - Contemporary approaches to film and television series. Wayne State University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8143-3837-2 , p. 184.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Summary at IMDB : "the tremendous differences in their backgrounds and the cultural differences between their two different societies put strains on their marriage that may well prove irreparable"
  2. ↑ real Albert René Fraudet (1884–1948), cf. french Wikipedia: Pierre Frondaie
  3. ↑ née Grete Rutz, 1905–1988, cf. Thomas Staedteli, cyranos.ch and imdb.com
  4. ↑ cf. Breivold p. 17.
  5. ↑ the first was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Sudermann film adaptation "Sunrise / Sunrise" from 1927, cf. engl. Wikipedia Movietone sound system  : " The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927) directed by FW Murnau. It was the first professionally produced feature film with an optical sound track. Sound in the film included only music, sound effects , and a very few unsynchronized words ".
  6. ↑ cf. almovie.com: It was issued with a fully synchronized music score (which is also intact), similar to what was done with the 1926 Don Juan starring John Barrymore, and the movie understandably places a strong emphasis on the music, arranged by SL Rothafel and directed by Erno Rapee, which gets credited after the cast and director.
  7. ↑ American composer and arranger (1871–1958) who worked primarily for film, cf. engl. Wikipedia Reginald Hazeltine Bassett
  8. ↑ 1872–1953, cf. montalto composer profile JS Zamecnik (1872-1953). ( Memento from October 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Note title shown at i.ebayimg.com
  10. ↑ cf. encyclocine.com
  11. ↑ also El hijo del desierto . see. imdb.com , Gevinson p. 1567.
  12. ↑ cf. Sources on film history up to 1945 kinematographie.de
  13. ↑ cf. releaseinfo imdb.com