Titreenp
SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?
Pacionsbo
Absolutely Fantastic
Comwayon
A Disappointing Continuation
Robert J. Maxwell
It's a sprawling and exciting story of the Russian revolution and its aftermath. As I understand it -- the Tsar of Russia in the early 20th century was kind of inept and distant from the people. The peasants were illiterate and poor, while the aristocrats, including Countess Marlene Dietrich, were living it up -- eating cake, as it were. A few bombs get thrown and poor Robert Donat is mistaken for a revolutionary and winds up in Siberia for two years.While he's in the deep freeze, Russia enters World War I in 1914 which precipitates a full-scale revolution, the one we're most familiar with, led by Lenin and Trotsky and the rest. In the celebratory atmosphere of the revolution's success, the prisoners in Siberia are released.Donat has become friends with one of the imprisoned heroes of the revolution and is appointed commissar. It sounds better than it is. As happens with most ideological paradigm shifts, a civil war follows. You have the Red Russians fighting the White Russians, instead of sitting down and resolving their differences over Black Russians.The Reds and Whites aren't wines but they may be the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, respectively, but I don't swear to it because the film itself never truly makes all this clear, and my expertise in Russian studies is limited to a memory of a psychology professor once telling me that the only word he could remember in Russian was kapusta, which means cabbage, and he could only do that because mentally the phonological contours of the word "kapusta" conjured up visions of a head of cabbage. Vladimir Nabokov had left the faculty shortly before or I would have taken his course though it wouldn't have helped in understanding the Russians any better. Later I had many Russian students myself in New Jersey and I tried to learn some of the language but never got much past "pelmeni." In any case, Donat's Siberian friend is a hero of the White Russians. The opposing Reds are rougher customers, it seems. They execute hordes of suspect prisoners with machine guns. But we shortly find that the White Reds are equally tough on prisoners. It's a familiar pattern. Once the new dictatorship takes over they kill everyone associated with the old order. Sometimes the aftermath of the revolution is as bloody as the period preceding it. There was Robespierre and the Reign of Terror after the French revolution. Fidel Castro worked his execution list down to the mailmen who had delivered letters for the dictator Batista.I'll make this short. Donat meets Dietrich and they warm to one another. Dietrich, an aristo, is supposed to be executed but Donat spirits her away and after a long, arduous, painful journey by rail and through sphagnum-floored forests, the finally wind up aboard a hospital train to Bucharest and freedom.I noticed that the director, von Sternberg, does his usual job of turning Dietrich into a mysterious angel. But his lighting is dramatic for everyone involved, and his direction otherwise has its little felicities. At tense moments he tilts the camera delicately adding an unnerving quality to the scene.Marlene Dietrich is usually thought of as a no-nonsense down-to-earth sort of babe. Ernest Hemingway liked her a lot for that reason and affectionately referred to her as "the Kraut." Here she's soft and vulnerable, not sexy and vulgar as in "Der Blaue Engel" and not domineering and treacherous, as in "Witness For The Prosecution." Of course she never appears without precisely applied makeup. Donat comes across as a nice guy, innocent but smart and courageous. He was to die at fifty-three of status asthmaticus, a condition in which you can breathe in but not out, a crummy way to go.The film really was something of a surprise. It's very well crafted from the point of view of art direction. It's mostly studio bound, but the forest that Donat and Dietrich struggle through is far better done than any other studio forest I can remember seeing. And in its movement and conflict it reminds me of -- well, of "Dr. Zhivago," without the colorful spangles. It's well worth catching.
dbdumonteil
That was Jacques Feyder's only English movie.He had just done his major works " Le Grand Jeu" "Pension mimosas" and "La Kermesse Heroique" and "Knight without armour" in spite of obvious qualities cannot compare with them.This is a tormented love story between a commissar (Donat) and a Russian countess of the old Russian aristocracy (Dietrich)who try to get to the border .The plot sometimes recalls a "Doctor Zhivago" in miniature.Best scenes ,in my opinion,are to be found in the first part: Dietrich,walking across her desirable mansion,all dressed in white ,finding that her staff has left home and joined the revolution;the same,facing a sinister-looking pack of Reds in her park.The mad station master,ceaselessly repeating that a train is coming into the station (madness was also present in Feyder's former works :"Le Grand jeu "was a good example of folie à deux )
chrisart7
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.
afn01288
Knight without Armour is extremely melodramatic and somewhat tedious. Just when you think you've reached the end, the plot goes on and on and on. Dietrich shows how to have flawlessly overdone hair while on the run. Donat's Russian hat is reminiscent of Dietrich's in Scarlett Empress. In fact at times his costume looks like he's doing a drag act on Dietrich! Nevertheless, the film is entertaining and required viewing for Marlene Dietrich fans and collectors.This film was once very hard to find at all and is still limited in DVD availability. I searched for this film for ages before finally finding it as an Australian DVD (Reion 4--US viewers can strip region encoding and burn a disc playable on Region 1 players).
