Svengali (1931)

So much average

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This will forever be identified as john Barrymore's greatest screen achievement, a slow but interesting psychological horror drama. Looking much like his brother Lionel would look the following year playing Rasputin, the great profile comes off as charming, if eccentric and weird to some, yet possibly even more than that. He has allegedly driven one singer to suicide, and when he meets the beautiful Trilby (Marian Marsh), he will either have his greatest success or his next victim. With eyes burning and the pupils gone, he gets rid of her headaches, but appears to put her into a trance. She disappears, presumably to suicide as well, but reappears as his greatest protégé, much to the shock of the man (Bramwell Fletcher) who loved her sincerely, yet obviously under his control.Lavish looking yet often filled with those aggravating long pauses between lines, this was obviously greatly praised in its time, but the past 85 years have not been completely kind to it. How no man could see the possibility of sinister motives in his obsession with Marsh is beyond comprehension. But one thing that remains fresh is Barrymore's mesmerizing performance which did not garner him an Oscar nomination that he truly deserved. Marsh's pageboy hairstyle does seem a little odd, but fortunately, she does not play Trilby as a flowery little silent heroine. Oscar winner Donald Crisp isn't recognizable as one of the trio of artists, but his voice is most recognizable.

Through hypnotism and telepathic mind control, a sinister music maestro (John Barrymore) controls the singing voice, but not the heart, of Trilby O'Farrell, (Marian Marsh) the woman he loves.Amazingly, this film was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Art Direction by Polish-born Anton Grot, and one for Best Cinematography by Barney "Chick" McGill (who worked at Warner Brothers from 1927 to 1933 before dying prematurely at age 51). That is pretty impressive for what is basically a horror film. And while it has been remade many times, it seems the original has more or less been forgotten -- it deserves a deluxe release! Director Archie Mayo was quite prolific from the 1920s through the 1940s, and this has to be one of his better films, though "A Night in Casablanca" (1946) with the Marx Brothers is worth singling out.Barrymore is incredible, his Svengali being a very Rasputinesque figure that uses hypnotism for mind control... but he mixes obsession and love with a dangerous twist. I can see how this man has become a legend and his family has stayed at the top of Hollywood for generations.

There never was an historical figure named Svengali, nor a hypnotized Trilby on whom he worked his will. The novel was written in the late 1800s. The book was a big smash in those days, when people still read, so the name and the relationship became icons of vernacular culture.Barrymore is Svengali, a pianist and teacher of music, who lives in a decrepit boarding house in Paris with a couple of other half-starved artists. (The novel devoted a lot of time to a description of la vie Boheme on the Left Bank.) A young artist's model, Marian Marsh, falls in love with Billie (Fletcher) but falls under the hypnotic spell of the older Svengali. Well, it's more than hypnosis really. He can enter her head from across the city.Under his spell, Trilby becomes a famous soprano. Svengali fakes her death and whisks her off elsewhere. Svengali marries her. She becomes the toast of Europe with her soprano. The only thing that Svengali can't get past is her love for Billie. He has to hypnotize her to get her to cooperate in the boudoir and by the end, he's disgusted with himself for making love to a marionette. He longs for her love and gets it in the end, though it costs him dearly.There are a couple of good reasons for watching this old flick if the opportunity arises. For one thing, the direction, performances, and sets are pretty good for their time. In particular, a traveling shot across a miniature Paris is right out of German expressionism. And rooms are filled with dark, angular shadows.Then there's the way the story is shot. This was before the imposition of the infamous code, so there are scenes that wouldn't have made it past the censors a few years later. There's a semi-nude scene, for instance, which suggests that Trilby looks good all over.And then there's the dialog. Svengali has been described by his neighbors as "a Polish scavenger." Indeed, he's unkempt and clomps slowly about. I think he once played Rasputin, the Mad Monk. If he didn't, he should have. But, what with his hypnotic eyeballs, he has this power over women. When a rich woman enters his studio for her music lesson at the beginning, he asks, "What did we do last?" The woman replies, "Don't you remember?" And he says, "Ahh, yes, but I meant the music." The wealthy woman then tells him, "I worship you, Svengali. I have left my husband for good." And Svengali squints thoughtfully and says, "Yes, but how much did he leave YOU?" When he discovers that she came to him without a penny, he throws her out and she commits suicide. "Her body was found in the river!" Svengali: "Ah, that is impossible -- in this weather." Later, fighting Trilby's love for Billie, he dismisses Billie as "that stiff-necked Englander, the head of the Purity Brigade." Barrymore plays all this with a comic relish, like Richard III. He revels in his exercise of evil.Marian Marsh, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful young woman to appear in the screen in the early 30s. She doesn't have Garbo's knowing languour, although she's equally attractive, but rather the winsome eagerness of a child. She's like a porcelain doll with perfect features and a smile that has the same effect on a viewer as Svengali's glowing eyeballs.I wonder how many of today's kids would recognize the name of Svengali. (Never mind Trilby.) He may be disappearing along with much of the rest of our shared data base in vernacular culture. I once asked my college class if they had heard of Sinbad the Sailor. Forget it.

Having read the original book, I watched this one and adored it. One of the things that first struck me was the incredible detail put into it. The set and costume design are matched perfectly with the original illustrations. Svengali, at the start, even plays Chopin's impromptu. Even though the story itself is a trifle different from the book, it is still mesmerizing to watch. In contrast to the book, Svengali is deprived of his malice, and left only with a frightful hypnotizing power. Other than Svengali himself, the other characters are exactly as in the book, and was wonderful. It was very moving, to have the first half hour or so be comical, and light-hearted, then the last half be absolute tragedy. It was such a great film.