Moviecut—Jacques Feyder's Knight Without Armor

source: Jacques Feyder's Knight Without Armor

Although the plot may seem thin I consider it a very absorbing film - lots of drama and action. It is a movie of its time so modern expectations are out of place. Marlene Dietrich shines in this one of course but I view it because Robert Donat is there also. It's my opinion that their screen kiss is one of the finest on record, very touching and tender. All in all, well worth the popcorn!

In "Knight Without Armour" (***) Robert Donat plays a British journalist in 1914 revolutionary Russia who is persuaded by his government to go undercover as a "red." The catch is that if he's caught the British home office will disavow any knowledge of him. He is caught and spends two years in Siberia before the death of Czar Nicholas and the fall of the Russian nobility free him. He then becomes the right hand man for an influential revolutionary commissar. Needless to say, his heart isn't really in it and when he gets an opportunity to escort a rich and pampered Russian countess back to headquarters in Petrograd for questioning he decides to help them both escape from the country. They are then tossed about like footballs from one side to the other. The plot is really rather ingenious, although you get the impression that the filmaker's hearts are more on the side of the corrupt "white" establishment if for no other reason that it never misses an occasion for glamorous star close-ups of Marlene D. in extravagantly opulent costumes. Even a young red official is so smitten with her he sacrifices himself in order to save her and Donat from one nasty predicament. I suppose the film wanted to avoid appearing to be too pro-communist, but in the process it comes down a little too much on the side of "noblesse oblige." The film ends a bit abruptly with Donat and Dietrich seemingly a long way from being out of the woods yet, but all-in-all it's beautifully produced and holds the interest pretty much all the way through. Good scene: Dietrich awakening one morning alone in her palace to discover that her entire household of servants has fled. If you can find a good print of this unusual oldie, it's worth seeing.

Some of my favorite films of the 1930s and 40s were based on James Hilton novels, so when I saw that "Knight Without Armor" was based on one of his books, I was thrilled. After all, he was responsible for such wonderful films as "Lost Horizon", "Goodbye Mr. Chips" and "Random Harvest" (though this last one IS quite a bit different from his book). Then, when I saw the wonderful actor Robert Donat starred in it, I knew I had to see it! The movie begins with Donat agreeing to spy for the British on the Revolutionary rumbles within Russia just before the World War I began. However, soon his cover is blown and he is arrested and sent to Siberia! Several years pass in a prison camp until he ultimately is liberated by the Communists---during the height of the Revolution in 1917. Eventually Donat meets up with the Countess (Marlene Dietrich) who is determined to make her way to safety out of the new Soviet Union. Much of the film is spent with the two of them sneaking across this huge country towards freedom and it comes off a bit like "It Happened One Night"--just without all the comedy (comedy was, understandably, not something the Revolution was known for, by the way). And, like Gable and Colbert, romance soon blossoms. But the way out is treacherous and you'll just have to tune in yourself to see how it all unfolds. As usual, Donat is very good--believable and not especially 'flashy'. As for Dietrich, I am not a huge fan of her films, but she's very good here as she ditches her usual glamorous image and it suits her. Now if only she had non-penciled in eyebrows, she's have been terrific! They just looked odd AND hiding among the peasantry wasn't very believable with the fashionable but creepy plucked brows. The direction was very nice--with a soft touch and lots of excellent touches. It was a very nice looking film from start to finish--with a rather brutal scene near the end involving a firing squad. By the way, I think tonight was the first time Turner Classic Movies showed this rare film. However, I noticed that the film seemed to play at a slightly slower speed than it should. The sound seemed okay, but the actors moved at a noticeably slower than normal pace. I am not sure how this happened, as all sound films run at 24 frames per second and don't vary like a silent film (which runs anywhere from 16-22 fps). Isn't there some way this can be corrected?!

It takes place in Russia, but otherwise this film is a long way from "The Scarlet Empress." Marlene Dietrich, playing an aristocrat who is targeted by the Bolsheviks, does not display her usual tough persona. She's warm, human, almost innocent, not to mention gorgeous. No wonder so many of the male characters take great risks and even betray their beliefs to help her. Robert Donat's character, the man who wins her heart, is a British agent operating under deep cover, originally assigned to infiltrate radical groups in Czarist Russia. Caught up in World War I and the Russian Revolution, he is cut off from contact with his spy bosses for years. Alone and then with his lady love, he has a remarkable series of adventures. The story is sweeping, fast-paced and intelligent, making "Knight Without Armour" one of the best movies in English about this turbulent period in Russian history. As some other commentators have noted, it is not propagandistic. Czarist Russia is shown as an often unjust and corrupt place, but also tormented by mindless radical terrorism. The Bolsheviks who later seize power are a mix of idealists, thugs and fanatics, with the fanatics on their way to gaining the upper hand. You don't have to care about Russia to enjoy this movie. If you like intelligent thrills, you ought to see it.

This was one of the most extreme examples of the durability of eye makeup in 30s cinema. Whether waking up from deep sleep, held prisoner without toilette facilities, covered with dead leaves on a forest floor, traveling across the muddy steppe, the leading lady's penciled brows, shadowed lids and false eyelashes neither budge nor smudge. Even the lipstick stays perfect until near the end when a bout of illness suddenly erases it. But seriously, this is a thoughtful and multifaceted look at the Russian Revolution from a James Hilton novel. But too often the plot wanders off periodically into atmospheric details until one forgets it entirely until it picks up again, reminding us that, oh yes, there is a plot. Marlene Dietrich plays a beautiful countess who emerges from her silken sheets one morning to face a silent mob of armed revolutionary peasants marching directly towards her. She is taken prisoner but rescued by Robert Donat, a British agent posing as a Russian revolutionary. Together they flee their Red pursuers through the wreckage and chaos of post-Revolutionary Russia. As in Doctor Zhivago many years later, we enter the Russian civil war from the perspective of the Reds and then the Whites. This film lacks Zhivago's sweep and scope but presents a convincing and compelling, if somewhat sketchy, picture of its time and place with masterful camera work, authentic looking costumes and surroundings (including actual condensed breath when called for), stirring Russian music, a sigh-inducingly romantic portrayal by Dietrich, the last of her wide-eyed, breathy ingénues, and one of imperturbable gallantry and nobility by Donat.

One truly cares about the characters in "Knight Without Armour" (1937) (which at present is only available on Region 4 DVD---officially, that is). John Clements almost steals the film with a role that is little more than a cameo, but superbly acted. One can see how this part led to his being cast as the lead in "The Four Feathers" (1939), the very best motion picture produced by Alexander Korda and released by London Films, and one of the best movies of all time. Other character actors such as Miles Malleson also do memorable bits. This atypical role for Marlene Dietrich---a truly vulnerable, feminine character, though noble and glamorous---is superbly realised by the German actress, here playing a Russian countess. Robert Donat, excellent as always, is the lead, an Englishman travelling incognito in Russia before, during, and after the Revolution. There is one scene early in the film which is an interesting reversal of a portion of "Battleship Potemkin"'s Odessa Steps sequence: in "Potemkin" the "White" Cossacks, a faceless, cruelly efficient horde simultaneously gun down a "Red" woman who tries to appeal to them for mercy for her dying child. In "Knight Without Armour" a horde of Reds trudge en masse across the palatial estate of "White" Countess Alexandra, played by Marlene Dietrich. The scene in which she encounters the unsympathetic, destructive mob on her great lawn, and the momentary lull before they act, is unmistakably a comment upon "Potemkin" and its pro-Red propaganda. American audiences may find the various, regional British accents of the Russian characters a bit jarring. Filmed during the height of the Depression, this is a great lovers-on-the-run film with a world-falling-apart backdrop, irresistible entertainment in any era. Find this one! Used VHS copies are easily had. Miklos Rozsa's score, one of his first for film, has the same warmth and pathos that embodies most of his splendid catalog of work.

Casting Marlene Dietrich (a coup achieved only after Donat's own two preferred actresses proved unavailable -- he was supposed to have the right of veto on the leading lady) may have been a publicity coup for Alexander Korda, but to be honest I'm not sure it did the film any favours. With Dietrich on board and then Donat so ill the start of the film had to be shot around him, the part of the Russian Countess was massively pumped-up, causing the running time to go seriously over-length. Supposedly about two hours of material then had to be cut out, a process which is most evident towards the beginning of the film where passing time is skated over very unevenly. Secondly, scenes featuring Dietrich have a tendency to feature long, loving close-ups of her face at the expense of pacing, plausibility (her make-up never falters) and acting -- Donat's own close-ups are reaction shots in which we see a shadow of significant emotion or realisation, but Dietrich's might as well be promotional stills for all the expression she gets to demonstrate. (Ironically she also comes across as too worldly and sophisticated for the part, certainly in the opening scenes: I had her pegged as an unmarried daughter/companion in her twenties from her racetrack appearance, and was jolted to subsequently find that the character was supposed to be a teenage débutante!) Dietrich was far better in her earlier Russian role of "The Scarlet Empress", Catherine the Great: here she is little more than a doll to be pushed around and emerge in an improbable china glow. It is perhaps because of this that I can't see any real chemistry between the two characters: Donat shows chivalry and protectiveness throughout, but his subsequent protestations of love (and her requisite responses) felt to me very arbitrary and artificial. A sudden excess of calling one another 'darling' and kissing are not the same thing as demonstrating any actual feeling between the characters, unfortunately, and the script feels forced in this respect. Where the film does shine -- or at least engross - is in its depiction of the scrambling post-revolutionary war of brutality and counter-brutality, and the hordes of hapless refugees caught up between the two. There are a lot of executions in this film; then just when the audience is keyed up for another, the hero makes his escape (courtesy of an unexpectedly schoolboy knockdown blow) and the others scheduled for execution take advantage of the confusion to attempt to turn the tables. Subconsciously I suppose we expect a morally uplifting outcome, which makes the brutal bayoneting that follows all the more shocking. As others have said, the scene where the Countess wakes up to find her entire house deserted -- save for one peasant woman at the riverside who flees at the sight of her -- is a powerful one, as is the moment when she faces down the mob... unsuccessfully. I did find the big reveal of the line of soldiers suddenly coming over the brow all around the horizon to be a little too cinematic for its own good, though: shades of Westerns throughout the ages, in a scene that's more "Tale of Two Cities". (My other problem with this scene is that, again, Dietrich displays almost no emotion of any kind and just stands there in soft-focus looking blankly beautiful.) Sections of this film are very good, but they are mostly not the sections featuring the character of the Countess; and certainly not those using her as a glamour object, which tend to be rather banal. I can't help suspecting that what I'm seeing is the bones of the original novel showing through the star overlay.

As usual, seeing this film via TCM or Turner Classic Movies was a most enjoyable experience. The subtext of "Knight ..." is that every known revolution is an entirely messy affair. Entirely. The story is told in a rather straight-forward fashion and for most fans it will only augment their affection for, or resentment against, the female lead -- Marlene Dietrich. Like certain other stars of the cinema in the 1930s, she is always really just Marlene, take it or leave it alone. It works well in this mad adventure of a Russian Countess who awakes one morning to discover her world has crumbled. The scene where she is confronted by a mob of revolutionaries, on her own beautifully manicured lawn, and without so much as one member of her staff there to speak up for her, is amazingly effective. It works and it works well in a fairly understated and yet unambiguous way. Robert Donat, always one of my personal favorites, does yeoman's work. He's the British secret agent who speaks Russian like a native and is clever enough to adapt to almost any situation. He is brilliant in this role ( and it is understood after the fact that Dietrich insisted that he not be replaced when he suffered a bad asthma attack as the production was just getting under way ). All these decades later, those of us who are not so conversant with the historical basis of the Russian Revolution will probably be shocked by the casual slaughters that both the Reds, and the Whites indulged in. There's much to recommend in this fine film and the Russian music that gets salted in here and there is tremendously emotional and workable. Flat out, I really liked this rickety old movie and I could have used another fifteen minutes of Dietrich and Donat, no problem !! Eight of ten stars for the intrigue and this beguiling romance.