Visionary Picks Drawn from the Same DNA as Arènes joyeuses: Cult Guide

Dir: Karl Anton

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Une petite femme dans le train perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Sophisticated romantic comedy of suspicious husbands, straying wives, handsome lovers, with various misunderstandings thrown in for good measure. (Including a gender-reversal of the old Pirandello plot twist from "The Late Mathias Pascal" of the protagonist changing identities after supposedly perishing in a train wreck.)

Dir: Karl Anton

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Un fil à la patte perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Monsieur Albert is a very elegant and much appreciated butler. One day he falls in love with a client, Sylvia Robertson, and follows her to a winter sports resort. Sylvia does not recognize him and imagines that he is related to a king who goes incognito.

Dir: Karl Anton

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Monsieur Albert perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

This Czech sophisticated romantic comedy, filmed by director Anton also in a parallel French version ("Une petite femme dans le train"), casts beautiful Czech star Baarova in the role that Meg Lemonnier played in the Gallic version. Both versions seem to owe something to the sophisticated "continental" comedies of Lubitsch and, later, Korda, although Anton was not exactly in their league. It may be coincidence that the original Czech title of this film ("Jsem devce...") can be translated as "I'm a Girl with a Devil in the Flesh." Both Raymond Radiguet's French novel "Le diable au corps" and Garbo's famous MGM film, "Flesh and the Devil" (based on Radiguet's book), would have been well known in Czechoslovakia as well as France, before "Jsem devce..." was filmed. But the Radiguet & Garbo creations were very serious, while the Anton-Lemonnier-Baarova films were light and amusing. Pehaps no connection. (A Czech language web-site today displays a nice poster from the 1933 Czech film: "http://www.csfd.cz/film.php?186".) Lida Baarova (who plays the naughty wife in the Czech film) in her later career experienced less amusing and more serious ups and downs, particularly as a consequence of her brief stardom in Nazi Germany in the last half of the 1930s and in Fascist Italy in the early 1940s. After WW2 Baarova was jailed nearly 2 years in her native Czechoslovakia, and may have come close to the death penalty, accused of "collaborating" with the Fascist film industries.

Dir: Karl Anton

A prostitute in an act of pity is keeping chaste company with a condemned man through the night before he is to be hung.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Der Fall des Generalstabs-Oberst Redl perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

In 1917 during the First World War, a French deserter entered the service of German counter-espionage, but F. Villard (registration number 33) was a real French spy. Discovered, he is saved by a German spy who betrays her country for love.

Dir: Karl Anton

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A lyrical tale of the pure, vernal romance between a diffident, somewhat naive girl from a rural backwater and a fairly dissolute, but kind-hearted law student from Prague.