Inglourious Basterds, Part XII

12. Sumurun (1920), aka One Arabian Night, is a prime selection from the resume of Hollywood's first exotic import, Pola Negri (a Pole!), co-starring and helmed by her best director, Ernst Lubitsch — the Cadillac of directors. What a thrill to spot the name of Pola Negri in La Louisiane, little remembered as she is today. In conveying something of this creature's legend I can hardly do better than to quote a paragraph from the book "Silent Stars" by film scholar Jeanine Basinger:

When Negri finally arrived in Hollywood, she knocked 'em dead. She bought herself a white Rolls-Royce upholstered in white velvet and equipped with ivory door handles and dashboard. When she went for a ride, she placed an enormous white fur rug across her lap, and took along her two white Russian wolfhounds, one sitting on each side of her. Her chauffeur was dressed in an all-white uniform — unless it was raining, and then he wore black. She wrapped herself in ermine and chinchilla and mink and sat up straight in the back, staring stonily ahead, drawing all eyes. (She also kept a pet tiger on a leash, and frequently paraded down Sunset Boulevard with him.) She had her dressing room decorated exclusively with Chinese furnishings, and insisted the floor be strewn daily with fresh orchid petals. Her wardrobe was dramatic, either black silk, black velvet, or sable, or the opposite — white silk, white chiffon, and ermine. She started the fad for toenails painted fire-engine red. Furthermore, she had the guts to chase a man, and once she caught him, she knew how to conduct a torrid love affair twenties-style, worthy of the plots of her movies. Both Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino became her lovers. Chaplin couldn't take the heat and begged out as soon as he could, but Valentino could match her style, having had considerable training with other women who knew how to get attention. (For years, everyone assumed that the famous "woman in black" who showed up annually at Valentino's grave was Pola Negri. Who else, they figured, would think up a dramatic scenario like that, and who else would have the nerve to pull it off, year after year? However, it wasn't really her.) Among Negri's other lovers was rumored to be Adolf Hitler, but this idea was put to rest by Negri's wardrobe mistress, who scoffed, "Miss Negri is herself a dictator. She would never take orders from Hitler." (It made sense.) And when it came to marriage she was no slouch, either. She married and divorced three times — two counts and one prince. Pola Negri never went second-class.

To that I simply add that Negri's public feud with Gloria Swanson may have been all hype, but we still want to believe it.

Before moving on, a word on Negri's other Sumurun co-star, German actor/director Paul Wegener. I had thought Wegener a fine fellow, having enjoyed the surviving part of his Golem trilogy (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920), an early Expressionist work about the folkloric clay-formed brute, animated by rabbinical magic to defend the Jews of Prague against Imperial pogrom. Imagine then my surprise to discover Wegener's name on a list of Goebbels' honored Artists of the State, alongside Emil Jannings. What's more, I learned that Wegener had starred in Kolberg (1945), Goebbels' presumed masterpiece — the Nazi "Gone With the Wind". A reappraisal of his career opened my eyes to the fact that his Golem movies are not in celebration of Jewish heritage but rather a warning about wild and dangerous Semitic occultism. (I know, it seems obvious in retrospect.) There is a direct line of Judeophobia that runs from Der Golem through Wegener's mid-20s Aleister Crowley obsession to his fervent support of the Third Reich and active participation in Nazi propaganda. What a dick.