Samson und Delila

Austrian screens first tremble under the weight of myth in this 1922 colossus: Nazirite muscle ripples through expressionist shadows while a Philistine vamp in silk and kohl stalks the parapets of Gaza like a panther bred on decadence. Samson, all sun-bronzed shoulders and covenantal fire, topples temples with the hubris of a nation drunk on its own origin story; Delilah, veiled in cigarette smoke and proto-flapper ennui, unpicks his strength strand by strand until the desert itself seems to exhale a sigh of complicity. Between them Korda stitches a Vienna-haunted modernity—jazz-age eyelashes flutter against biblical thunder, gilt opera-house décor collides with crumbling pagan masonry, and the Danube glows sulfur-orange beneath an eclipse that feels suspiciously like post-war dread. The result is a fever dream where martyrdom and celebrity, sacred oath and tabloid betrayal, share the same intoxicated waltz.