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A musician transforms a tone-deaf artist’s model into the most acclaimed contralto in Europe. There’s just one catch…
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An elderly Countess, mourning the past, is offered the chance to have her youth and beauty restored. There’s just one catch…
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
#1 by blake on September 22, 2014 - 12:09 pm
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Looking at Mephisto/Lucifer from the Rapsodia Satanica screenshots, I can’t help but notice that there’s something infinitely creepier and more unnerving about the make-up and/or acting styles of monstrous characters in silent films. Another example: Charles Loughton and Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo were deformed and pathetic, but Lon Chaney Sr. creeped me out big time.
#2 by lyzard on September 24, 2014 - 11:02 pm
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I think when film was much more heavily reliant on the purely visual, the creative process was significantly different from how things work now.
#3 by RogerBW on September 25, 2014 - 6:45 am
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Trilby seems to err in the direction of assuming that the only people we will care about are the rich young men, where in fact they’re essentially witnesses to the actual story. But as you point out, in the original story Trilby has to die for not following the rails, and Svengali has to die for being Jewish, I mean being the villain, and that doesn’t really leave anyone else of interest.
Rapsodia Satanica has a fine poster. One might complain about how the woman made young again is only interested in Lerve, but most versions of Faust pretty much only have him interested in sex and money (he’s already got the scholarship).
#4 by lyzard on September 25, 2014 - 5:54 pm
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It’s a tragedy that doesn’t have to be one; I guess most tragedies don’t, but this is more avoidable than most. It’s not so much that it expects us care more for Billee’s fate (he’s not rich; we can’t put that on it; just painfully middle-class), as that it takes it for granted that the reader will shake their head and say, “Pity – but of course it could not be!”, when there’s no real reason why the two of them couldn’t have gone off as planned and lived in a cottage in the country and been perfectly happy. Unless of course the book *wanted* us to despise its “external circumstances are much more important than intrinsic merit” philosophy.
To be fair, Alba’s argument with herself upon accepting the deal is, “Oh, well – you can still have a lot of fun without being in love!” – and for while there she gives it the old college try. The film’s probably a bit too short to do her efforts in that respect justice, but at the beginning of the triangle she’s just messing with both of them.
#5 by JASON FARRELL on September 26, 2014 - 11:30 am
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Svengali at least he knows what he wants and is able to push aside the reactionary morality in which the rest of the cast are bathing …if this were remade in the SIxties, when people assumed their minds and ethics were expanding on all that acid, he would be the hero … but (of course) the hangover would be that “girlfriends by mesmerism” would have evoked Charles Manson
#6 by El Santo on September 26, 2014 - 1:47 pm
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Trilby would be sort of a small-town Midwestern girl going to art school in California, and Svengali would turn her into a Janis Joplin figure by hypnotizing her while she was on LSD (because a Joplin doesn’t need to sing on key). Billie would be her square boyfriend from back home who followed her out to Berkeley (or wherever) to be close to her while she was studying, only to discover that he couldn’t open up his mind that wide once she fell in with the hippie crowd. Svengali turns out to be running a Mansonesque cult for which Joplin-Trilby is to serve as the number-one recruiting tool, and there’s a bummer ending touched off by Billie’s last-ditch effort to get Trilby away from the cultists before they go on whatever bloody rampage they’re planning. Damnit. I really want to see this non-existent movie now…
#7 by RogerBW on September 30, 2014 - 7:10 am
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If you got really lucky with scriptwriter and director, Trilby could be facing a genuine choice between mundane boring life and a life that while dangerous is at least exciting. (You’d have to tone down the cultiness a bit, of course, but a countercultural movement can look a lot like a cult from the outside.)
#8 by JASON FARRELL on September 30, 2014 - 1:58 pm
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Wow, now it sounds like an unholy blend of Romero’s SEASON OF THE WITCH, HELTER SKELTER, THE GRADUATE, and (saints preserve us) the Streisand STAR IS BORN!