★★★I was a little underwhelmed here though you can see Lubitsch trying as many audience appeals as he can. More than anything, I found that this story didn’t engage me at all. It’s long, it has interesting turns, and it’s romantic, but I never plugged into it the way I did in, say, I Don’t Want to Be a Man. The story seemed very conventional to me, though I suspect a contemporary audience might have responded more strongly, knowing the film from the play it’s based on.
That said, two aspects of the film were very worthwhile. For one, I enjoyed the visuals a lot. The film is chock full of beautiful sets draped with orientalist fabric in the bold patterns of early 20s cinema. The sets are immense, too – huge, exotic exteriors of palaces and streetscapes; interior courtyards; plazas teeming with extras. And everyone dressed in orientalist fantasy costume that blends Northern India, Syria, Ancient Egypt and Morocco. Whenever my interest in the various love triangles in the film flagged, I could always find something worth my attention in the scene in front of me.
I also liked the comedy in the film. I kept thinking of Shakespeare while I was watching the life-and-death-and-love drama of the upper-class leads regularly being undercut by the comedy of their servants. The cloth merchant desperately seeks time with Sumurun, but she is the favorite of the very mean and possessive Sheik. Meanwhile, the cloth merchant’s two servants, dressed in stripped tights, cavort and roll around the shop poking at each other and satirizing their master; Sumurun’s supporter in the harem jokes around while manipulating and fooling the eunuchs and directing the other women in the harem to help the couple unite; and the Sheik’s guards first toss out the slave trader and then run rapidly after him making goofy faces. There’s an awful lot of lightness about the humor here, and it’s one of the film’s most endearing aspects.
Otherwise, the two love triangles are simply too diverse to engage much sympathy. The Sheik is certainly scary, and Yannaia is an original gold-digger. But neither Sumurun nor her cloth merchant love are particularly engaging because you simply don’t see enough of them to care about them, and while we feel some sympathy for the hapless hunchback Yaggar early in the film, he spends much of the last part of the film asleep in a bag. With the focus so spread out in Sumurun, it’s hard to be very engaged with the film’s characters.
Sumurun is certainly worthwhile for its great visuals, and I got several smiles from comic touches here, too. And this is my introduction to Pola Negri, a silent star whose name I was very familiar with but whose work I’d never seen. I can tell she has a real presence on film and will look forward to seeing her more. Overall, though, I’m not sure I’d recommend this film for the silent movie initiate because of how hard it is to engage.
