Behind Masks (1917) Review: Silent-Era Jewel of Deceit, Desire & Rebellion

Jeanne’s silhouette, framed by stained-glass demons, is the first visual haiku this film inks into your retina. Cinematographer Lucien Andriot wrings sulfurous blues from nitrate stock, letting sea-blue (#0E7490) shadows crawl across brocade like guilty thoughts. Each iris close-up feels surgical; you swear you can taste the potassium of her tears.

Julia Swayne Gordon’s matriarchal aunt is no mustache-twirling ogre—she’s worse: a pragmatist. Watch how she fondles the rope of pearls at her throat whenever morality enters the room, as though throttling virtue itself. The performance ages like absinthe, growing bitter, luminous, unforgettable.

Dorothy Dalton’s Jeanne begins inside a single octave of innocence—shoulders forward, voiceless—but by reel four she has weaponized silence. The moment she deliberately misdeals a queen of spades to expose the rigged game, Dalton’s eyelids flicker like guillotine blades. The cut is swift; patriarchal cinema never saw it coming.

Frederik Vogeding’s young target, Erling, could have been merely wallet-deep. Instead he carries a backstory of wartime shell-shock communicated only via a tremor in his left hand whenever luck is mentioned. The film trusts micro-gesture over title card; therein lies modernity.

Director Frank Reicher, unfairly relegated to the footnotes of Expressionism, orchestrates a cubist suspense: card-table overhead shots overlap with cigarette-smoke arabesques to evoke Klimt mosaics drenched in moral mildew. Meanwhile, the aunt’s co-conspirators emerge as a grotesque chorus—Gladys Valerie’s opium-dazed countess, Lewis Broughton’s priest who recites baccarat odds like liturgy—each a cracked mirror to Jeanne’s naïveté.

Screenwriters E. Phillips Oppenheim and Kathryn Stuart compress the Edwardian doorstop novel into a 73-minute diamond. Notice the absence of fat: every cigarette lit exists to foreshadow arson; every pearl to imply ransom. Dialogue titles arrive sparsely, yet glow with sardonic bite: "A woman’s future is but collateral for interest compounded in male pockets."

Composer Joseph Carl Breil’s original score—reconstructed by the Munich Film Museum—leans on xylophones that chatter like gossip, until a solo cello bleeds through the bridge scene, turning cards into confessions. Pair this with the tinting strategy: amber for interiors, viridian for exteriors, sudden crimson for the moment Jeanne’s signature is forged. The palette bruises memory.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Behind Masks (1921) through its definitive frames.

Film historians hunting for feminist seeds in pre-1920 soil should freeze-frame the library sequence. Jeanne, discovering ledgers that list her body as collateral, does not collapse; she straightens her spine, and the camera—once taller—lowers itself to her sightline. A silent manifesto of agency, smuggled inside a potboiler.

Comparative lenses help triangulate its radicalism. Where Sweet Kitty Bellairs frolics in Restoration corset comedy, and The Girl Without a Soul punishes female ambition with death, Behind Masks opts for insurrection: Jeanne walks out, pockets blazing with evidence, leaving men to devour one another. The closure is open-ended—no wedding bell, only dawn over breakers.

Technically, the picture flaunts an early dolly shot—perhaps the first in American features—sliding past a corridor of gas jets that snuff out one by one as the aunt’s scheme collapses. The effect anticipates the corridor-of-identity motif later fetishized by Kubrick and Hitchcock.

Yet the film is not flawless. Reicher’s budget constraints show in repeated balcony miniatures, and a subplot involving Alex Kaufman’s anarchist painter dissolves into red-herring vapor. Still, these scars humanize the artifact, reminding us that even propaganda against patriarchy must negotiate with financiers—mostly male.

Restoration-wise, the 2022 4K scan rescues translucent flickers in Jeanne’s pupils, revealing amber flecks that earlier transfers rendered as voids. Criterion’s upcoming Blu-ray boasts commentary by Shelley Stamp and a video essay on female cardsharps in silent cinema—academic catnip.

Modern resonance? Replace bridge table with crypto wallet, Riviera manor with glass penthouse, and the aunt becomes a venture-capital matriarch auctioning surrogacy rights. The tale throbs anew. Watch it beside One Day to witness how a century collapses into a heartbeat.

Verdict: urgent, venomous, and eerily erotic, Behind Masks is the missing link between Feuillade’s serial intrigues and Lang’s chamber paranoia. It will haunt your subconscious in ways blockbusters can only invoice. Stream, study, survive it.

Rating: 9.3/10—subtracting 0.7 for budgetary blemish, but granting eternal bonus points for Dalton’s pupils that still drill holes through time.