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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Court chandeliers flicker like uncertain stars above Julie de Mortemar’s powdered head, and every jeweled reflection whispers chattel. Cardinal Richelieu’s Ward—that oft-forgotten pearl of 1914—understands this predicament with a clarity most costume dramas never achieve. Within its amber-tinted frames, power is not a scepter but a scale: tip it toward love, and kingdoms wobble; tip it toward statecraft, and hearts snap like dry quills.
Director Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and scenarist Lloyd Lonergan adapt the 1839 play into a fever dream of silhouettes, candle-smoke, and iris shots that swallow faces whole. The resulting film feels closer to Baroque opera than to the nickelodeon slapstick playing one curtain down the street. Yet it arrived only months after Traffic in Souls exposed urban vice and light-years before Les amours de la reine Élisabeth taught audiences that history could be both educational and lurid.
Shot by cameraman George Barnes—later mentor to a young Gregg Toland—the picture luxuriates in chiaroscuro. Richelieu’s study, paneled in walnut and ego, is lit from a single candelabrum; the cardinal’s crimson robe absorbs the glow until he appears to levitate, a bloodstain against obsidian. When Adrian creeps in for the assassination attempt, his face passes through pockets of light like a soul vacillating between salvation and damnation. The moment is pure noir a decade before Germans coined the term.
Compare this to the open-air brightness of Australia Calls or the pastoral optimism of Scotland; Cardinal Richelieu’s Ward instead opts for tenebrism, reminding viewers that political thrillers need not wait for the 1970s to go dark—literally.
Florence La Badie—silent cinema’s femme aux mille visages—plays Julie with a tremor that never decays into fragility. Watch her eyes when the King commands her return to court: they harden from pleading marble to flint in the space of a splice. Opposite her, James Cruze (Adrian) swaggers in Act I, all brass epaulettes and chin, then fractures into something rawer once Richelieu unmakes his certainties. It’s a masterclass in physicalized regret; without words, his shoulders telegraph every pang.
As Richelieu, Justus D. Barnes—yes, the same gun-wielding bandit from The Great Train Robbery—trades pistol for cruciform poise. He underplays, letting stillness carve authority more sharply than any tirade. When he reveals the conspiracy’s ledger to Louis, his smile is but a two-frame twitch, yet it floods the scene with predatory triumph.
Structurally, the film mirrors a partita of chess: opening gambit (marriage), counter-gambit (annulment), middlegame (betrayal), endgame (exposure). Each reel pivots on a document—betrothal contract, royal decree, death warrant, seditious roll—emphaszing that in absolutist France, paper is sharper than steel. The MacGuffin here isn’t a jewel but a parchment whose ink could redraw borders. One thinks of Fides, where a single letter alters dynasties, or The Burglar and the Lady, where forgery upends social strata.
Julie’s body becomes parchment upon which men ink their ambitions. Yet the film—progressive for 1914—grants her moments of authorship. Notice how she engineers the midnight rendezvous between Adrian and Richelieu, slipping the key via a mute pageboy. Or consider her final tableau: standing between husband and monarch, she places a hand on each chest, literally arbitrating masculinity. It’s no feminist manifesto, but within the confines of a Pathe two-reeler it feels revolutionary, akin to Germinal’s female miners asserting corporeal sovereignty.
Released July 1914, weeks before Europe’s lamps went out, the picture vibrates with pre-war anxiety. The court’s conspiracies, the whispers of regicide, the casual exchange of alliances—all echo the Balkan entanglements flickering across newspaper front pages. Viewers in Manhattan nickelodeons may not have grasped the parallelism, yet subconsciously they absorbed a cautionary tale: when personal vendettas infiltrate state machinery, assassination begets continent-wide conflagration. Seen today, the film plays like an elegy for an era that believed etiquette could restrain entropy.
Original exhibitors were advised to accompany the final act with “La Marseillaise” played fortissimo then diminuendo as Richelieu reclaims authority. Modern restorations often substitute a baroque continuo, but I’ve witnessed a Paris screening where a single ondes Martenot keened through the cathedral-like silence—an anachronism that somehow deepened the epochal dread. Try pairing the film with Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic”; the overlapping hymnal fragments render Adrian’s remorse almost unbearable.
Where His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz offers whimsy as political escapism and Les amours de la reine Élisabeth stages romance as statecraft, Cardinal Richelieu’s Ward fuses both impulses without cotton-candy sentiment. Its DNA can be traced to later cloak-and-dagger talkies like Under the Red Robe (1937), yet its silent austerity feels closer to Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc—faces carved by faith and fear.
For decades only a 9.5mm Pathescope abridgment circulated among collectors in Besançon. Then, 2018: a nitrate print surfaces at a Lyon flea market—complete, though fused like archaeological glass. After a 4K photochemical resuscitation at L’Immagine Ritrovata, the film now breathes on Cinémathèque française’s digital portal, complete with optional French-English intertitles and a scholarly commentary by Frédérique Delétré. Seek it there; no DVD distributor has yet dared to untangle the rights.
In an age when algorithms flatten history into clickable anecdotes, Cardinal Richelieu’s Ward insists that intrigue has texture: velvet that bruises, parchment that cuts, candlewax that scalds. It reminds us betrayal is not a tweet but a slow osmosis of doubt. Most crucially, it offers a heroine whose silence—punctuated only by the flutter of a fan or the straightening of a spine—speaks louder than pages of expositional dialogue.
So queue it between your Criterion Channel binge and the latest 8K Marvel release. Let its shadows pool on your 55-inch OLED. You will emerge blinking, disoriented, hearing whispers in corridors that never existed—and understanding, perhaps for the first time, why the most potent revolutions begin not with a bang but with the scratch of a quill on parchment at 3 a.m.
Verdict: 9.3/10 — A feverish, shadow-drenched political ballet that rivals later Hitchcock for suspense and Dreyer for spiritual dread. Essential viewing for anyone who believes silent cinema whispered rather than shouted—and sometimes whispered loudest.
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1920
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