Das alte Gesetz (1923) Online

E.A. Dupont is one of the UFA crowd who, in a long career, turned out numerous works in many genres. Only one is remembered: VARIETY -- and, as an aside, what is it with German directors and the circus? On the basis of this single movie Dupont is acclaimed a great director. Not a single one of his other movies is remembered, except by the diligent -- not even the sprightly work he did in Hollywood in the 1930s. I look out for them, and this is only the seventh I have been able to find. I have enjoyed them all, and this one in particular.

This is the movie that THE JAZZ SINGER was based on: a young man wants to be an actor in Vienna, but his father the rabbi.... well, you know the story. It's very well told, with some nicely broad acting, and a wonderful turn by Hermann Valentin as the theater manager Heinrich Laube. This movie is based in large part on Laube's memoirs. There is also a typically fine performance by Henny Porten as an aging archduchess who yearns for a handsome young lover.

It is not, however, the performances, excellent though they are, that make this movie work. It is the sense of separate worlds that interact to their mutual confusion and grief: the poor shtetl that the man grows up in, dominated by his father and the richly adorned shul; the tawdry traveling show that he initially joins; the Habsburg court; the Royal theater.... each is a little kingdom with its own laws and each interacts poorly with the others... only Robert Garrison as the wandering cantor is uneasily welcome in more than one realm.

For me, this is summed up in one brief shot, when the rabbi, desperate to know what has drawn his son away, opens up a copy of HAMLET to read.... and opens it the wrong way, as if it were a book in Yiddish or Hebrew, from right to left, instead of the other way around. Suddenly the rules of his world no longer work.

All these factors add up for me and make it better than its American remake, THE JAZZ SINGER is. Even though no one in it sings as well as Jolson.

I saw 'This Ancient Law' (subtitled 'Baruch') in October 2007 at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy; they screened a print from the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. The print had a running time of 107 minutes; I could have cut out 15 minutes without losing any of the plot.

IMDb's detailed synopsis of this film is accurate. However, for some reason IMDb's cast list identifies two different actors (Fritz Richard and the great Werner Krauss) as playing Nathan, the professor. Herr Richard does indeed portray that role in this film; Werner Krauss is not listed in the film print's credits, and I did not spot him anywhere in this movie.

This film is apparently based on the memoirs of Heinrich Laube, who was director of Vienna's Burgtheater in the 1870s. I haven't read those memoirs, but it's not uncommon for a showman to 'improve' his autobiography. Several events in this film seemed rather contrived to me, and the assertion that they were ostensibly based on a true story only annoyed me further.

A major problem with 'This Ancient Law', at least for modern viewers, is that the movie's basic conflict is very similar to the one in a movie made four years later, and now much better known than this one: 'The Jazz Singer'. Baruch Mayr is a rabbi's son with greasepaint in his blood: will he forsake the ancient Jewish ways for the glamour of showbiz, or will he find some way to exist in both worlds?

I was intrigued by the depictions of 19th-century German circus life, which I assume are accurate. Character actor Julius Brandt gives a poignant performance as an elderly performer who is aware that his big break will never come; his only option is to carry on performing in small-time venues until he dies. The photography by the great Theodor Sparkuhl is up to his high standard.

Henny Porten is very pretty in a role which I found contrived and implausible. At this point in her career, Porten often produced her own films. That may explain why some sequences in this movie seem to be placing Porten's character at the centre of the plot when it's clear that Baruch Mayr is really the focal character. Mayr is played by the bland Ernst Deutsch; I wonder if Porten intentionally chose such a bland actor so that her own performance would not be upstaged.

Since I'm not Jewish and I wasn't raised in a Jewish environment, I don't have an instinctive feel for the Judaic traditions and duties which are so crucial to this story. I tried to empathise with the young Jewish hero of this film, and I was able to do so intellectually but unable to do so emotionally. Perhaps if I had never seen 'The Jazz Singer', I might have been more impressed by this movie. As it is, my rating for this one is barely 5 out of 10. It could have used Werner Krauss.

Four years before 'The Jazz Singer', the same conflict between a young man yearning for the stage and his stern rabbi father was played out in its natural shtetl environment in this German super-production set in the 1860s.

At first resembling one of Edgar Ulmer's late 30's Yiddish films, the action relocates to Viennese high society with Henny Porten wandering in and out of the action as the Empress Elisabeth. This middle section drags terribly as it keeps pausing to shows off the sumptuouness of its décor and photography (the work of Alfred Junge and Theodor Sparkuhl who later fled to Britain and Hollywood respectively as part of Hitler's gift to the English-speaking cinema), before finally remembering the Rabbi still simmering back at home and reuniting him with his prodigal son for a conclusion that comes very abruptly after a build-up of over two hours.