by Larry Kardish
We don’t yet know what film will reopen the restored Crandell in October but we do know what was the first to play in our beloved theater when it opened on December 25, 1926: Michael Strogoff, a mission-impossible, action-packed epic that at two-and-a-half hours is virtually as long as Tom Cruise’s latest adventure.
Strogoff, a young soldier and the tsar’s “courier,” travels incognito across Russia and into far Siberia with a secret message to prevent an alliance between invading Mongol hordes and a traitorous provincial governor. Along the way he is mauled by a bear, fights many battles, is twice captured, tortured, perhaps blinded, and finds love. Based on Jules Verne’s immensely popular 1876 novel of the same name, it has been made into at least seven movies and two television series.
But the version that inaugurated the Crandell is the most spectacular, cinematic and resonant of them all. Made in France by White Russians having fled Bolshevism and still loyal to the Romanovs, Michael Strogoff is as visually fluid and dramatically edited as any silent film made. It also carries with it the imprimatur of Old Russia. The director, Victor Tourjansky, who studied acting in Moscow with Konstantin Stanislavski, made his first film in 1915 and continued to work steadily after self-exile in France, Germany and Italy, completing sixty films through the 1950s.
Another White Russian, Ivan Mosjoukine – tall, handsome and brooding – played the hero. He was France’s major silent film actor. Hollywood hoped Mosjoukine would replace Rudolph Valentino, who had just died in August 1926, as the world’s heartthrob. Unfortunately, Mosjoukine’s only American film, Surrender (1927), opened in New York the same October week as another film about a Jewish family, The Jazz Singer – the film that effectively ended the silent era.
I do find it of interest and exciting that the Crandell’s first attraction was an international film whose original French intertitles were replaced by sensationalized English ones and was, according to the reviews of the time, a terrific hit.
If readers are interested in seeing a restored digitized version of Michael Strogoff with original French intertitles, new English subtitles and a lush musical score, here’s the free YouTube link. Enjoy!
Larry Kardish, senior curator emeritus for film and media at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, teaches in the masters of directing program at School of Visual Arts in New York. He is Co-Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director of FilmColumbia, and yearly brings the world’s latest films to Chatham.