The Love of Jeanne Ney

The Love of Jeanne Ney

Director: G.W. Pabst

Starring: Edith Jehanne, Brigitte Helm

The Love of Jeanne Ney is another film from the German Silent era, by G.W. Pabst.

Jeanne Ney is a French woman who returns to France after her father is killed while being a political observer in Crimea (Russia), post-World War I. While in France she works for her uncle, is excited when the Bolshevik she loves comes to France and seeks her out, and her blind cousin gets involved with a scoundrel.

The sad part about this movie, is what I just wrote makes much more sense than the movie.

The script is all over the place, with many things happening at uneven pacing. There is no clear plot, theme, story or subplot. This is not an experimental or esoteric film, it is presented as a linear narrative, just not a good one.

What is going on in this film is never quite clear. What is also muddled is if Jeanne knows the man she loves killed her father. I say yes, which makes things more confusing.

The filming and style of the movie is solid. The acting is passable, with only Brigitte Helm delivering any real quality.

G.W. Pabst fails to make a compelling film with Jeanne Ney, instead allowing the film to fall into the darkness of the noir he tried to invoke.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Thoughts hurt here.

RATING: 4.5

Diary of a Lost Girl

Directed by G.W. Pabst
Screenplay by Rudolf Leonhardt
From the Novel by Margarethe Bohme
Starring Louise Brooks

Dairy of a Lost Girl is an odd film. A silent film out of the great German silent era, it is supposed to be a drama about Thymain Henning, a young women struggling to make her way in life after being disowned by her Pharmacist father. However, there are elements in the film that take away from the drama and drag the film down.

The strong point of this film is the characters, at least they are defined and strong.


Overall though the script and story are thin, barely enough to carry a film of 113 minutes in length. After the character of Thymain (Louise Brooks) has a child out of wedlock and is disowned by her father, she is sent to a reformatory.

It is this thirty minute chunk at the reformatory that the film isn’t just lost, but destroyed. The acting is overwrought and terrible, everything is robotic and monotonous and it slows down the pacing and plot of an otherwise already slow drama.

I get what Pabst was going for – to show reformatories as stifling in nature – but it could have been done a lot better.

Dairy of a Lost Girl never recovers from this point on, in fact it seems to try too hard to get to the end.

Pabst employs a number of different techniques to this film, but none seem to work. Indeed there are moments that seem like they were intended to be comedic, but fall flat and are out of place.

Dairy of a Lost Girl has a lot in common with its main character: Lost, unsure of itself and at best hoping to be a good film.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This is supposed to be a classic of the German Silent era (my favorite era in film), but isn’t. It doesn’t rank against the best of that era, and by itself it is barely average at best.

RATING: 5