Thu 6 Aug 2009
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: DANTE’S INFERNO (1924).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews , Silent films[4] Comments
DANTE’S INFERNO. Fox Film Corporation Production, 1924. Lawson Butt, Howard Gaye, Ralph Lewis, Pauline Starke, Josef Swickard, Gloria Grey. Written by Edmund Goulding and Cyrus Wood; cinematography by Joseph August. Director: Henry Otto. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.
This is one of those moral dramas that were so popular in the silent film era, which seemed to take special delight in appealing to audiences’ interest in the artistically tasteful depiction of sexual excess, this time portrayed in a tour through Dante’s Inferno with the poet guided by his Roman predecessor, Virgil.
The really interesting part of the film, the guided tour that shows the horrified Dante the sufferings of the damned (with a great deal of what appears to be actual or very well simulated nudity), is embedded in a modern morality play, whose simple treatment of good and evil needn’t detain us here.
As for the programmers at Cinevent, I suspect they scheduled the film rather less for its artistic merit than as a lead-in to Josef van Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, a modern take on the eternal question of good and evil that may be less classically graphic but is a much more powerful treatment of the subject.
Editorial Comments: Be watching for Walter’s review of The Shanghai Gesture. It’ll show up here soon.
And while it isn’t certain that the photo below is from the 1924 silent version of Dante’s Inferno, there is a long sequence in the 1935 film with Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor which used stock footage from the earlier one. Since that may be where this rather horrific scene came from, I’ll include it on a provisional basis, and delete it later if it shouldn’t be here at all:
August 6th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Walter, I have gone over the “inferno” scenes many times, repeatedly, in slow motion, and I still can’t tell if the nudity is real or simulated.
But I’m willing to keep trying, for the sake of Art.
August 6th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Although the scenes of Hell were still startling in the 1933 Tracy film what I recall mostly from it were the dance numbers by a young dancer before she turned red head and called herself Rita Hayworth.
Henry B. Walthall, the silent star icon from Birth of a Nation is also in it.
August 6th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Re the nudity, while I can’t vouch for this one there is a good deal of actual nudity in many silent films both from American and European directors. In the 1912 version of She the star is clothed in transparent clothing in many scenes and there are topless girls in at least one of the silent Biblical epics from de Mille.
My guess would be the nudity is real though pasties and some sort of cache sex may have been employed along with the obvious long hair and camera angles.
August 7th, 2009 at 7:16 am
I’ve never seen this 1924 version, or the 1935 film.
There is an interesting 1911 version made in Italy, L’INFERNO, directed by Giuseppe de Liguoro, Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan. It is one of the earliest of all feature-length films. It took three directors to put this spectacle together!
The film might require adjustments for modern audiences: the story telling techniques are far from advanced or modern. It still looks great however. It was shown on the big screen at the Detroit Institute of Arts a year ago.