Starring Pierre Blanchar, Lien Deyers and Charles Boyer
There are a lot of things that make a movie great. Great characters. Towering performances. A premise that captivates you and themes that leave you itching to talk about it with friends.
Captain Fracasse has none of these things.
A movie can still be good despite the lack of these elements. One great performance by an actor or a couple of great set pieces can keep you coming back for more.
Sadly, Captain Fracasse lacks these elements as well.
A film can be mediocre. If a director can get across a basic story in a comprehensible way and keep the actors in focus and in frame....
I think you know where I'm going.
Captain Fracasse is an astoundingly awful silent. This plot (a poor nobleman joins a troop of traveling actors, falls in love and must fight to save his girl) has potential as a comedy or an action film or even a mystery.
The film makes feeble grabs at each of these. But you cannot be a comedy with characters this dour and humorless. And you can't be an actioner when you only stage a couple of sword fights, and those consist entirely of the same three moves repeated over and over again. And you are certainly not a mystery if at the first opportunity, your disguised hero walks up to the villain and proclaims he can't wait to reveal himself later.
All of the above would be enough to make this an okay, but boring affair. However, when you couple it with inept direction and dialogue, the film moves to new kinds of terrible. It is as though the makers of Captain Fracasse have never actually seen a film before.
Shots are out of focus and subjects are out of frame. Not in artistic ways that may demonstrate uncertainty or man's divided nature. It's sheer ineptitude. And it's frustrating.
The final nail in the coffin of this dead-on-arrival effort is its dialogue. Silents are at their best when the intertitles are sparse and the action conveys most of what we need to know.
Here, the intertitles fill the screen with flowery language that adds little to the story. At one point, in the middle of a sword fight (!?), one of the combatants starts talking. And it goes on for three screens.
Captain Fracasse is a film that wears its ineptitude and plodding plot like boxing gloves and pummels its audience for the full 15 rounds. In the end, one of the bad guys is killed quickly as an act of mercy. If only the film offered its audience the same.
* out of *****
Photo from Dreamland Cafe
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