俘虏 The Captive(1915)
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影评：
更全的一个原文：
于1915年4月22日上映的这部《俘虏》由塞西尔·B·戴米尔一手编剧、导演、编辑和制作。这也是一部在很长一段时间里面被认为遗失，最终被找回的影片。与《红妻白夫》一样，这部影片由塞西尔·B·戴米尔和杰西·L·拉斯基创建的公司制作，同样署名编剧的是之后也多次和塞西尔·B·戴米尔合作的珍妮·麦克弗森。塞西尔·B·戴米尔的妻子在生育时差点去世，为了防止再次怀孕致命，她准许塞西尔保持其他婚外恋关系。根据一个评论的介绍，珍妮·麦克弗森似乎是其中之一。
尽管塞西尔·B·戴米尔曾经否认她对自己影片的贡献，并称她只是想法的贡献者。但是也有人认为在Jeanie MacPherson于1946年去世之后，塞西尔·B·戴米尔的影片质量有着一定的下滑。
影片描述了黑山主人公索尼娅和她的土耳其俘虏哈桑在巴尔干战争时期的浪漫困境。这部影片与上次分享的《红妻白夫》在剧情上有一定相似度——被迫处于某地的男主人公与当地的女主人公坠入爱河。
本片的女主角布兰彻·斯薇特在为塞西尔·B·戴米尔拍片之前处境并不好。在当年最受欢迎的影片《一个国家的诞生》中，丽莲·吉许取代了她成为女主角。据说吉许在排练时被用作布兰彻的替身，而格里菲斯更喜欢她在抵御强奸时的样子(？）珍妮·麦克弗森把布兰彻推荐给拉斯基。她接受了他们的提议，并一直希望她的离去威胁能给格里菲斯敲响警钟，可惜并没有。（同样见原文链接）
然而就是这样一位女星与塞西尔·B·戴米尔的关系并不对付。她只出演了塞西尔·B·戴米尔的两部影片，并声称与他度过的时间相当糟糕。她更喜欢与塞西尔·B·戴米尔的哥哥威廉·C·戴米尔一起工作，并觉得他在许多方面都采取了更巧妙的处理方式。而塞西尔·B·戴米尔其实很害怕与这样一位有才华，并曾经与塞西尔尊重的格里菲斯一起合作的演员。最终，他们俩的合作也并没有很好的结果。《俘虏》的预算为12154美元，票房达到5.6万美元。这部影片并不属于塞西尔·B·戴米尔最受欢迎的那类电影，即使同在1915年，他的影片《卡门》等其他多部影片也取得了更好的票房成绩。
另一个关于这部影片的著名事件则是塞西尔·B·戴米尔对写实的痴迷导致的悲剧：一名演员在表演时因真枪实弹被杀。而对于这事的版本各方有不同的版本，有人认为塞西尔·B·戴米尔曾经让人将枪换成空弹，而布兰彻·斯薇特却没有这样描述。德米尔声称他心烦意乱，粗心大意，因此没有注意到有演员没有遵从他的指示。事实上电影原本仅仅因为这件事停工一天，第二天就紧急开工赶上进度。塞西尔·B·戴米尔甚至拒绝出席葬礼，是豪斯·皮特斯坚持出席让剧组无法拍摄才最终让其他人都参加了。不知是否因为这起事件，虽然塞西尔·B·戴米尔保有他拍过的每部影片，这部《俘虏》却不在其列。这也是这部影片在很长一段时间里被认为遗失的原因。
这部分基本是CB和Carmen主角法拉合作之前的部分，这还是个CB学手艺的阶段，在被拿来和D.W格里菲斯的时候还会被嘲笑不值一提。但他还是在持续在几乎每部电影里获得盈利。然后从《Carmen》到《The Cheat》你可以看到CB巨大的转折：他得以与更大的明星合作，在影片中凸显出独特的风格。
(1)
The Unafraid cost $14,226, and returned $63,944. It was the beginning of Cecil’s greatest period of accomplishment. In 1915, he directed thirteenof the Lasky company’s thirty pictures and wrote eighteen of them as well, including a couple of masterpieces.
(2)
Most people who knew DeMille believe that he would have been a very happy man if he could have gotten everything he needed from one woman. But Constance was steadfast in her decision to abstain from marital relations. Her only inadequacy was sex; other than that, she was a wife and partner in every possible way.
(3)
For Macpherson, DeMille could be misguided but never wrong. She was an adoring apologist, regarding his bursts of temperament as armor for “an extremely sensitive nature. Actors didn’t like him, and I have seen them tremble before his sarcasm and often cry with humiliation. But . . . he would forgive anyone anything if a person would only admit his error. But try to tell him that the other fellow was to blame, or insinuate another department was responsible for your blunder, and you were in serious trouble with him.”
DeMille loved Macpherson as a woman but didn’t particularly respect her as a professional. “She wrote like a plumber,” DeMille recalled. “I am sure I was frightfully insulting to her, but that kid took it and plugged along.” Another time, he bluntly said that “She was not a good writer. She would bring in wonderful ideas but she could not carry a story all the way through in writing. Her name is on many things because she wrote with me. I carried the story and she would bring me many, many ideas.”
(4)
For Blanche Sweet, newly signed as the company’s leading lady, DeMille suffered by comparison with her previous director. “Nothing could be as exciting as Griffith,” Sweet told film historian and author Kevin Brownlow. “Poor Cecil DeMille didn’t have any experience to go on. . . . He had come from the theater and so he had a background of that, but there was nothing exciting about Cecil DeMille and his work.”
(5)
Then and later, Jesse Lasky was distinguished by his capacity for appreciating and encouraging artistry. “He had this [talent] more than some of the other pioneers,” said director Rouben Mamoulian, “because he was an idealist, and when he saw something beautiful, he gave you a tremendous reaction to it. . . . He was always burning about something, always excited about something.”
To Jesse’s conceptual fire was added Cecil’s organizational genius and sense of drama. Around this time, Sam Goldfish asked Cecil to expound on why he had left the theater for the movies. Ignoring such mundane motivational factors as impending bankruptcy, Cecil came up with some very good reasons: “Because where one member of the paying public will see a play, there are two thousand who will see a picture; whereas one or perhaps two countries would see my play, practically all the countries in the world will see my pictures. Again, and as has been probably said before, the scope of the photoplay is so much wider than that of the legitimate drama. In the first place, we DO things instead of acting them. When a big effect is necessary, such as the burning of a ship, the blowing up of a mine, the wrecking of a train, we do not have to trick the effect with lights and scenery, we DO it.”
(6)
But the America of a hundred years ago was a very different place than it is now. Both Cecil and William embodied the typical prejudices of their Victorian childhoods. Agnes, William’s daughter, believed that both Cecil and William were anti-Semitic; she quoted her father referring to “your Broadway Jewmanager.” Yet Bill told his stepdaughter that he was “very proud of his Jewish heritage.” Agnes would also report that she heard Cecil say, “I don’t like the Jewish people out here.” And then he would smile and say, “Of course, I have to stop and remind myself, I’m one of them.”
Cecil’s own private feelings about Jews seem to have settled on an old saying he remembered from his childhood that sounds suspiciously like something from (the Jewish) David Belasco: “Every saladis helped by a little dash of garlic, and every man is helped by a little dash of Jew.”
In most cultural and religious respects, DeMille was egalitarian, promoting women into positions of power and influence very early in his career and displaying no noticeable prejudices about homosexuals. Once, when he was going to be introduced to someone on the set of one of his films, he was told, “They are colored.”
“I don’t care about the color of their skin,” he snapped. “I only care about the color of their soul.”
He once said, “I can understand being boredby a bore. I can understand being thrilled by a brilliant man. But you can never say, ‘This man can’t be brilliant because his skin is black.’ . . . I haven’t the smallest antagonism about race or color. I haven’t bad feelings about any man because he’s black, white, red, brown, green or blue.”
(7)
In 1915, Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse L. Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish were an unbeatable team. After making two dozen films, they had yet to have a flop. Lasky was visiting from New York more frequently, but DeMille was the director-general, running the studio and making a film a month. DeMille was fluent in both business jargon and film technique. He had
directed westerns, comedies, and melodramas. He could say what he wanted, and say it well. He needed something worth saying. While Lasky looked for stage stars to bring the company prestige, DeMille adapted a play by Charles Kenyon called Kindling.
Social realism was not a cinematic genre in early 1915. Moving pictures had left the nickelodeon too recently to aspire to anything beyond entertainment. Kindling was a grim look at slum life.
As might be expected, Kindling got harsh reviews. The post-Edwardian era did not countenance children eating garbage. “This scene is so strong as to cause one to become ill,” wrote a reviewer in Variety. There were favorable reviews. Moving Picture World compared DeMille’s street scene to “anything that ever came from the hands of Hogarth or Rembrandt.” DeMille had studied audiences from the stage for years. He felt they were ready for strong meat. He was right. Kindling cost $10,000 and grossed $66,000.
(8)
The Golden Chance was also a success. “There is a new force in this moving picture play,” wrote Bush. “I speak of the wonderful lighting effects which seem to lend an indescribable charm and lustre to numerous scenes.” Lighting effects would not be worthy of comment had they not told the story. In years to come, The Golden Chance would be acknowledged as a minor masterpiece. The Cheat would be recognized as a cinematic milestone.
(9)
Agnes deMille would have a difficult relationship with her Uncle Ce all their lives, but when she talked about him at work in those early days, her reservations melted away and she remembered only a force of nature, a man with a conquistador’s energy who subtly made her feel as if she “had to give an absolute reason for being a woman, for being alive, for being there, for occupying air space. . . .
“I saw him directing, and he had the most tremendous energy of anyone I’ve ever known, and for longer stretches. As you look at his pictures, the old pictures, I think they are miraculous. When they say he’s marvelous with crowd scenes, what does that mean? It means that everybody is doing something intelligent, something pertinent, and something different, and that there’s a great vivacity and liveliness and invention right through it, the way there is naturally with people.”
(10)
The Cheatis an authentic landmark movie, beginning with the frankness of its story: a silly socialite gambles away her money and accepts $10,000 from a Japanese admirer in return for a promise to sleep with him. When she reneges, he brands her like a piece of livestock and she shoots him. Prosecuted for attempted murder, she exposes her brand, the court riots, and she is acquitted.
(11)
The Cheat was a hit in America—a gross of $96,389 against a cost of $17,311; foreign would bring in another $40,975—and the critics were impressed as well. The Moving Picture World declared that “pictures like this put the whole industry under obligations to the Lasky company. . . . The feature is of such extraordinary merit as to call for the highest term of praise.”
(12)
The French were enthralled by the film’s production values, a sensuality that extended beyond the subject matter to the decor and costumes: lace, silk, furs. The Cheat synthesized all the strengths of the American movie, and of DeMille. Not analysis, but action; not tracking, but cutting: drama that is primarily theatrical conveyed through means that are purely cinematic—the best of both worlds. In France, DeMille would always be regarded as a major filmmaker, and several laudatory monographs were published about him over the years, in stark contrast to what would become his critical standing in his native country.