The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927)
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Film Review

The theme of women coping with vice, corruption and general all-round nastiness in a male-oriented world is the one that is foremost in the early films of the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst. In Pabst's films, those members of the fair sex that resist this world's corrupting influences are shown to be beacons of virtue; those that do not are fallen women who deserve all they get.  Pabst's style of mise-en-scène, with its Brechtian objectivity, sets him apart from the expressionists and prevents his films from being overtly moralistic.  Pabst's women are less individuals and more symbolic of their sex - the eternal victims of male egotism, greed, lust and stupidity.  In The Love of Jeanne Ney (a.k.a. Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney) there are two such protagonists  - one, the most recognisably Pabstian, a fighter who is able to resist and does so with remarkable fortitude; the other a blind girl who is completely at the mercy of any caddish lowlife that comes knocking on her door.

Made at Germany's leading film studio, UFA, midway between two of Pabst's best-known films of this era - Joyless Street (1925) and Pandora's Box (1929), The Love of Jeanne Ney is somewhat less well regarded, primarily because it panders too obviously to popular tastes.  At a time when German cinema was beginning to buckle under the force of Hollywood, the screenwriters at UFA were pressurised into including more sensational elements in their plots.  As a result, a fairly serious novel by the distinguished Soviet writer Ilja Ehrenburg ended up as a tasty mix of melodrama and crime-thriller - one that has an uncannily Hitchcockian feel to it (particularly in its second half).  It's the most shamelessly commercial of Pabst's films, but that doesn't mean it's all bad.

It is amid the furore and turmoil of the Russian Revolution that the drama begins. Alfred Ney is a French political observer who is based in Russia to witness the civil war that is tearing the country apart.  Fearing for their safety, he and his daughter Jeanne are about to head back to France when the Red Russian army storms the city.  For refusing to hand over a list of the names of Bolshevik agents which he bought from an unscrupulous profiteer named Khalibiev, Ney is shot dead by Andreas Labov, who happens to be Jeanne's former lover.  With Andreas's help, Jeanne manages to flee the town just as it falls to the Red army.  Back in Paris, Jeanne has no one to turn to but her Uncle Raymond, the owner of a private detective agency.  Reluctantly, he provides her with work as his secretary.  Khalibiev then shows up and begins taking an interest in Raymond's blind daughter, Gabrielle.

Any suspicion that Khalibiev may have a better side is firmly laid to rest when he boasts to a girl he meets in a bar that he plans to kill Gabrielle and abscond with her dowry as soon as he has married her.  Andreas is now in France, to run an errand for the French communist party.  As he does so, he resumes his former affair with Jeanne.  Raymond also has amorous designs on Jeanne, but presently he is more concerned with recovering a missing diamond so that he can claim a huge reward.  Once the jewel is found, Raymond waits expectantly for the reward money to be handed over to him, but it is Khalibiev who shows up and steals the diamond before killing him.  As Khalibiev makes his escape, he arranges things so that Andreas is made to appear the likely suspect for his crimes.  After Andreas is arrested by the police, Jeanne sets out to find the man whom she believes will give him a watertight alibi for the murder - Khalibiev. She has no idea of the danger she is in as she puts herself at the mercy of her deadliest enemy.

The chief failing with the film is that there is just too much going on - it's as if its writers were trying to crowbar in just about every dramatic device under the sun. An inevitable consequence of trying to squeeze an over-abundance of plot into a film of moderate length is that the characterisation suffers.  The Love of Jeanne Ney is almost completely plot, with next to no characterisation.  The titular heroine has practically no depth to her at all, and neither does the handsome Russian beau she falls for.  She is an archetypal orphan of the storm, he is a stereotypical Russian revolutionary with a nice face. Together, they drift through the film like ghosts, almost as if they have no connection with it.  It is the secondary characters that offer far greater interest - they may be just as clichéd, but they have much more in the way of substance. Foremost of these are the two villains of the piece - Jeanne's rapacious guardian, Uncle Raymond, and the mercenary war profiteer Khalibiev (Fritz Rasp, revelling in the kind of role he specialised in). Photographed in close-up from skewed angles, these two come to look more like fairytale trolls than human beings.  Then there is the vulnerable blind girl (Brigitte Helm, best known as Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis) who can do nothing but meekly accept what Fate offers her, which is a bit unfortunate as Fate turns out to be something of a heartless bastard in this instance.

Not even Pabst's subsequent French spy thriller Mademoiselle Docteur (1937) is so self-consciously drenched in cliché - and yet we forgive this because of the sheer artistry that the director and his talented cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner bring to the film.  The Love of Jeanne Ney starts out as a bog standard Russian Revolution melodrama, it gives this up and then becomes a Parisian melodrama with fragments of  'city symphony', social realism and criminal intrigue bolted on, before finally ending up as a Perils of Pauline thriller.  Put like this, the film can hardly help resembling a potpourri potboiler dreamed up by a profit-hungry studio executive.  And this is how it would doubtless have ended up if a lesser director than Pabst had been involved - empty fodder for an undiscerning mass audience.  Fortunately, Pabst was too good a visual storyteller to let the film end up as second rate garbage.

There are two cinematic devices that Pabst uses particularly well in this film, and these are what give it its narrative power and a badly needed dose of modernity.  First, there is the moving camera, which, when it works well, creates feelings of tension, conflict and aggression that make the characters and their predicament suddenly come alive.  A good example of this is the tracking shot that follows the flapper girl as she retreats from Khalibiev after he has disclosed his plans to murder his bride.  Khalibiev's power is emphasised by a visual cue which implies the girl cannot ever break free of him.  This has the effect of making the evil Russian appear an even greater threat to the other two female protagonists, each of whom he manages to ensnare with his deadly cunning.

It is not Fritz Rasp's eye-rolling performance that makes his character so terrifying - it is the way that Pabst films it, particularly with his close-ups that have the effect of totally dehumanising the villainous Khalibiev. Unlike his contemporary Carl Dreyer, who employed the close-up to draw us into his character's souls (see, for example, Master of the House), Pabst uses close-up to further distance us from his characters.  The Love of Jeanne Ney is peppered with massive close-ups which greatly distort the individuals we are looking at, making them seem more monstrous, more frightening than we had imagined.  The main villains, Khalibiev and Uncle Raymond, are transformed into ghouls that are every bit as repulsive as Peter Lorre's serial killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931) or Max Schreck's Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922).  In one memorable shot, the camera zooms in on the face of an old woman to underscore her horror on witnessing the strangulation of a bird.  The image stays in our head as a grim overture for the greater shock that follows, when a man is murdered in pretty much the same way.

It is the scene leading up to Uncle Raymond's violent killing that is the film's most inspired touch.  As he waits for his reward money to be delivered, the vile miser is transported to a state of rapture, and he is even seen counting the banknotes he has not yet received, savouring the pleasure that is yet to come.  Of course, what he doesn't yet know (but which we can too easily anticipate) is that what is heading his way is not wealth but the grim spectre of death, in the form of his merciless executioner.  Raymond's strangulation is as stark and dramatic as the famous shower slasher scene in Psycho (1960), and just as masterfully shot and edited.  You'd never have thought Pabst capable of conceiving, let alone constructing, such a visually shocking sequence.  There is nothing in Nosferatu that is half as frightening.

The Hitchcockian similarities become even more evident as the film builds to its nerve-racking climax, which has the hapless Jeanne sitting, in a train compartment, alongside a man who is more likely to rape and kill her than help her.  At this stage, Jeanne has no reason to mistrust the smiling Khalibiev - she thinks he is a good sort who will help to clear her lover, who has been wrongly charged with murder.  We know differently, of course, having seen him kill one man, been instrumental in the death of another, and threatened to murder and rob a blind girl.  (Just about the only thing in Khalibiev's favour is that he was not the one who strangled the pet parrot.)   Pabst plays on the separation between what the heroine knows and what we know to thrilling effect and reveals what a great thriller director he could have been if he had so wanted.  The Love of Jeanne Ney has many of the elements of Hitchcock's best films, and you can't help wondering to what extent it influenced the young British director who, incidentally, was working at UFA around the time this film was made.  One master may learn from another...