Paul Czinner | Doña Juana / 1927 [Difficult to obtain or Lost film]

a man without whiskers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Balázs (screenplay, based on Don Gil of the Green Breeches by Tirso de Molina), Paul Czinner (director) Doña Juana / 1927 [Difficult to obtain or Lost film]

 

Soon after making The Fiddler of Florence Paul Czinner and Elisabeth Bergner paired up again to film Doña Juana for the German company UFA, with a script by Béla Balázs based on the Baroque playwright Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil of the Green Breeches. 

 

     Since this film is unavailable, we have no idea how faithful Balázs’ version is to the original Spanish play or know how much of the screenwriter’s work actually made it into the final film by Czinner since Balázs later sued the director and producers for not remaining true to his screenplay, asking that his name be removed from the credits.

      In the original Don Gil de las calzas verdes, Juana follows a man with whom she had a relationship, Martín, from her home in Valladolid to Madrid, where he intends to marry a rich woman named Inés. He appears in Madrid under a false name, don Gil, so as to hide his engagement as Martín to Juana. Meanwhile Inés has promised to marry another man, Juan.

     Dressing in male clothes, Juana herself meets with Inés pretending she is Gil. Both Inés and her cousin Clara fall in love with the young delicate stranger. And when Martín, also pretending to be Gil, shows up, he is confused to hear that Inés has already met a different Gil, a “little Gil without whiskers.”

      By act II, both Inés and Clara have fallen in love with the female Gil, which causes yet further confusion and almost ends with Juana and Inés’s unlawful marriage. At one point even Clara dresses up as Gil. By Act III, however, after Juana has revealed herself, all three end up with their right partners, Juana with Gil (Martín), Clara marrying Antonio, and Inés returning to her beloved Juan.

      The character of Gil (Martín) is apparently renamed Don Ramon is Czinner’s film, performed by Walter Rilla. Hertha von Walther is Doña Ines and Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel plays her cousin Clara. Further, in the Czinner version it appears that Doña Juana (Bergner) was raised by her father as a boy, helping to explain her various drag manifestations or perhaps being simply the manifestation of her own gender confusion.

      In any event, it is clear that gender transformation and confusion is very much at the center of Czinner’s film, just as it was in The Fiddler of Florence and will again be in his and Bergner’s 1936 production of As You Like It.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).