Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Two by Jacques Feyder

Jacques Feyder

Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder established his career in France during the silent era, and went to work for MGM in Hollywood in 1929 to direct Greta Garbo in her last silent movie, The Kiss. But Hollywood was more interested in having him direct foreign-language versions of movies after talkies came in: Before dubbing became a common practice, films were often made in two versions, one in English for the American and British markets, others in various languages for overseas audiences. So Feyder was tasked with making a German-language version of Garbo's first talkie, Anna Christie (1931), though he also made two movies starring Ramon Novarro, Daybreak (1931) and Son of India (1931). Disillusionment with Hollywood sent him back to France, where he made his most famous film, Carnival in Flanders, in 1935. The rise of the Nazis, who banned that film after they invaded France in 1940, caused Feyder and his wife, Françoise Rosay, who starred in many of his movies, to move to Switzerland, where his career stalled and he died, only 62, in 1948. After the New Wave filmmakers began to dominate French film, Feyder's reputation began to wane: François Truffaut said of Carnival in Flanders that it represented a tendency to make everything "pleasant and perfect," As a result, David Thomson has said, "Feyder may be unfairly neglected today just as once he was injudiciously acclaimed."

Gribiche (Jacques Feyder, 1926)

The young actor Jean Forest had been discovered by Feyder and his wife, Françoise Rosay, and he starred in three films for the director, of which this was the last. It's a peculiar fable about charity. Forest plays Antoine Belot, nicknamed "Gribiche," who sees a rich woman, Edith Maranet (Rosay), drop her purse in a department store and returns it to her, spurning a reward. Edith is a do-gooder full of theories about "social hygiene." Impressed by the boy's honesty, Edith goes to his home, a small flat above some shops, where he lives with his widowed mother, Anna (Cécile Guyon), and proposes that she adopt Gribiche and educate him. Anna is reluctant to give up the boy, but Gribiche, knowing that Anna is being courted by Phillippe Gavary (Rolla Norman), and believing that he stands in the way of their marriage, agrees to the deal. When her rich friends ask about how she found Gribiche, Edith tells increasingly sentimental and self-serving stories -- dramatized by Feyder -- about the poverty in which she found him and his mother. But the boy is unhappy with the cold, sterile environment of Edith's mansion and the regimented approach to his education, and on Bastille Day, when the common folk of Paris are celebrating in what Edith regards as "unhygienic" ways, he finds his way back to his mother's home. Edith is furious, but eventually is persuaded to see reality and agrees to let him live with Anna and Phillippe, who have married, while she pays for his education. The whole thing is implausible, but the performances of Forest and Rosay, and especially the production design by Lazare Meerson, make it watchable and occasionally quite charming.

Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935)

Feyder's best-known film is something of a feminist fable, a kind of inversion of Lysistrata, in which the women of Boom, a village in 17th century Flanders that is occupied by the Spanish save the town from the pillage and plunder that the men of the village expect. Françoise Rosay plays the wife of the burgomaster (André Alerme), who holes up in his house, pretending to have died. The other officials of the town likewise sequester themselves. But the merry wives of Boom decide to wine, dine, and otherwise entertain the occupying Spaniards. It's all quite saucily entertaining, though undercut by a tiresome subplot (suspiciously reminiscent of that in Shakespeare's own play about merry wives) involving the burgomaster's daughter (Micheline Chierel) and her love for the young painter Julien Brueghel (Bernard Lancret), of whom the burgomaster disapproves. Again, Rosay's performance is a standout, as is Lazare Meerson's design: The village, with its evocation of the paintings of the Flemish masters, was created in a Paris suburb, with meticulous attention to detail, including the men's unflattering period costumes, designed by Georges K. Benda. The cinematography is by the American Harry Stradling Sr., who built his reputation in Europe before returning to Hollywood.