a fiddler in his
bedroom
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Czinner (screenwriter and director) Der Geiger von Florenz (The
Fiddler of Florence) aka Impetuous Youth / 1926
Born in Budapest, then part of the
Austria-Hungary Empire, Paul Czinner was educated the University of Vienna
where he studied Philosophy and Literature before turning to film.
Czinner was first married to actor Gilda Langer, who died of the Spanish
influenza in 1920.
His
first film was the silent feature Homo Immanis (1919). By 1922, however,
he was working in Germany on Victim of Passion, and soon after begin
filming with actor Elisabeth Bergner on his first successful film, Husbands
or Lover (1924); in that film she plays the bored wife of the then
well-known actor Emil Jannings.
His next film, fashioned as a vehicle for Bergner, was Der Geiger von
Florenz (The Fiddler of Florence) of 1926, the film I review in this
essay.
Although Czinner was homosexual, he developed a close working
relationship with Bergner, and the couple were eventually married. He made
several films after in Germany, but by 1929, after the Schnitzler-based novella
Frãulein Else, the couple who were both Jewish, faced with the rise of
Hitler, left for England in 1933 where they remained for several years before
emigrating to the US in 1940, where he worked for a while on Broadway. After
World War II, they returned to England where he continued to make films.
Given Czinner’s sexual orientation, it is not surprising that The
Fiddler of Florence and his 1928 film Dona Juana both feature
Bergner playing gender-bending characters, wherein the actor is asked to
perform as young boys.
In fact, Bergner, if you use your imagination, allowing a long,
curly-headed hairdo to be that of a long-haired Italian boy, is fairly
convincing, despite a costume that doesn’t entirely hide her breasts, one commentator
suggesting that it was purposeful so as not to allow the film to become too
homoerotic. Yet the young violinist the painter (Walter Rilla) discovers in an
Italian bordertown road and impetuously takes home with him, does indeed send
him into a spin and before long begins to confuse him severely as he
increasingly feels attracted to the boy he has successfully captured on canvas.
In general, this film is a very Freudian work in which in the first few
scenes Renée (Bergner) is jealous of the attention
her loving father, Conrad Veidt, pays to her new stepmother (Nora Gregory). In
these early scenes, Renée is somewhat of a brat as she continual attempts to
take the attention away from her father’s new love, bringing to the table her
own flowers and replacing them for those her stepmother has chosen, and during
the meal gradually moving the vase over so that it stands between her father
and his new wife, blocking out their views.
Soon after, she feeds her pet dog scraps from her plate, while the
stepmother’s better-behaved pooch is allowed to sit beside her owner’s feet,
while Renée’s father orders his daughter’s dog removed. The dogs eventually
begin to fight, causing a huge row in which Veidt’s character, in attempting to
separate the two fighting dogs, gets bitten.
Angry with her behavior, her father retreats to a streetside bench to
think matters over, his new wife soon joining him, again convincing the girl
that her father no longer loves her.
In a third instance, while seemingly trying to be agreeable, Renée
tastes her stepmother’s new punch, suggesting further ingredients which seem to
please both of them. And while they continue tasting the brew they both become
slightly inebriated and begin to dance giddily together. But the father/husband
enters the room, both women run up to him offering him a glass of punch. When
he takes the glass his wife proffers over his daughter’s she angrily throws the
punch at her stepmother.
It has become clear that there is no choice but to send Renée away to a
Swiss boarding school. And from there, after she gets into further troubles,
she finally escapes to Italy.
In her new home with the painter, the boy-child delights in the
attention she is given, quickly falling in love with her new mentor. But just
as with her own behavior previously, so does his sister Grete become jealous of
the intruder, behaving in several instances similarly to the way Renée has
previously treated her stepmother, at one time also throwing a glass of punch
upon what she perceives as her rival for her siblings’ love.
In this case, however, the sister obviously is not only jealous of the
boy but confused and worried since she perceives that her brother gradually
appears to be falling in love with the child. Rilla plays the character rather
exaggeratedly to begin with, performing some scenes with slightly effected
gestures that suggest gay behavior. We too become fascinated by his attraction
to Bergner’s boy. Of course, Barbra Streisand in the 1983 film musical based on
a story by Isaac B. Singer, Yentl will take up a similar situation, but
in 1926 there had been very few films to engage its audiences with a developing
relationship as the result of cross-dressing.
A film with a similar plot to this one appeared
in 1914, Robert G. Vignola’s The Barefoot Boy, the director of that film
also being a gay man. In that work, the central character was also a painter,
who mistook a young girl to be a boy, with similar feelings of sexual
attraction. Otherwise, only in the brief male-on-male cross-dressing kisses in
Sigmund Lubin’s Meet Me at the Fountain (1904), the budding romance
between the detective’s sister and the disguised female villain in Mario
Roncoroni’s Filibus (1915), Buster Keaton’s confused attraction to Fatty
Arbuckle’s nurse in Good Night, Nurse! (1918), the entire leadership of
World War I’s attraction to Bothwell Browne’s drag character in F. Richard
Jones Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919), there were no real sexual
interactions between those in drag and the others in the heteronormative world
before this film.
Rilla’s character is quite serious about his growing love and truly
doesn’t know what to make of his feelings. In a crucial scene near the end, he
discusses the issue in somewhat coded ways with the young boy he has taken into
his household. “You bring me luck, our pictures has already been purchased,” he
reports, a few minutes adding, “Du bist scheu wie en Mädchen,” “You’re as shy
as a girl.” A short while later he goes even further suggesting, “Manchmal
glaube ich das Du ein Mädchen bist.” “Sometimes I actually think you are a
girl.” “...oft wünsche ich mir Du wärest en Mädchen!”; “...often I wish you were
a girl!”
And with that inferred statement of his love, Renée runs off in mad
rapture, confusing him even further.
Meanwhile the father has spotted the painting “Der Geiger von Florenz”
reproduced in the newspaper, and believes it may be his daughter, a likeness
his butler confirms. He quickly tracks down the address of the wealthy
painter’s Italian villa and pays him a visit, explaining the situation.
The painter’s sister concurrently visits the boy in his room, taking the
opportunity to confirm her suspicions by suddenly grabbing the “boy’s” breast
and discovering in the process that he is definitely female. In a very
odd reversal of the entire controlled expressions of the previous days, the
sister Grete suddenly grows almost giddy, holding the young female close to
her, promising not the reveal the truth to her brother, and, just as the boy is
called into the other room by the painter, suddenly kissing her full on the
lips. Apparently an absolutely lesbian-like scene is permissible, but a kiss on
the lips of a girl representing herself as a boy is verboten.
So too, when the painter discovers the boy’s true sex, does he quickly
grow extraordinarily physically familiar with her father, hugging him close
while he begs for the girl’s hand in marriage. Indeed, if there seemed
something a bit effeminate or simply exaggerated in terms of his gestures about
the artist previously, he now nearly kisses Renée’s father, physically
resisting the man’s attempts to search out his daughter. He sits at Veidt’s
feel almost like an acolyte as they wait for the girl to enter.
Only when Renée sees her father and runs to him, the two of them
engaging in a series of deep hugs and kisses that might almost make one wonder
about an incestuous relationship, does he back off watching the scene as a
voyeur. Finally, the two having ending their reunion, the father hands his
daughter over to the painter, as the two begin fighting over the lies that have
been told and the secrets that have both held within. It finally takes the
father to encourage them to kiss, ending the film on a joyful note.
During all of this, moreover, we are quite aware, in hindsight, how
Freudian this film is in relation to the director and his major actor. It must
have truly delighted the gay man to be able to turn his future wife temporarily
into a boy and imagine the joys in might feel making love to the young wild
Italian fiddler.
Czinner’s
and Bergner’s marriage lasted the rest of their lives. And there is little
gossip that I could find about Czinner’s gay life as he moved to England and
the US. He did direct the bisexual actor Laurence Olivier in As You Like It,
and obviously, the film and theater is filled with opportunities for continued
gay experimentation. But like Cole Porter with his wife Linda, there was
apparently deep love between them along with their differences in sexual
behavior.
Los Angeles, May 7, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May
2022).
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