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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Memory, that fickle seamstress, unpicks herself in Rubes and Romance—a film so drunk on its own nitrate ghosts it feels illicit to watch in daylight.
Richard Smith saunters into frame as if he has already been erased, his coat pockets sagging with unmailed valentines. Opposite him, Alice Howell’s kohl-smudged eyes operate like broken kaleidoscopes: every glance sprays shards of thwarted vaudeville dreams across the screen. Together they compose a duet of collapse, their silhouettes flickering between Keystone slapstick and Grand Guignol lament.
Director-writer [Name Missing] refuses establishing shots the way a miser refuses coin. Instead, we dive through a skylight into cavernous darkness where dust motes swirl like displaced galaxies. The camera—operated, legend claims, by a former cartographer who charted trenches—glides over warped floorboards that remember every footfall since 1893. Notice how the frame rate hiccups whenever Smith touches a prop: the world stalls to accommodate his ache, then lurches forward, leaving ghost frames that resemble double-exposed funerals.
Compare this claustrophobia to The Bells, where snowy exteriors served as moral refrigeration. Here, interiors metastasize; walls inch closer between cuts, as though the opera house itself is inhaling the protagonists. The result is a pressure-cooker cosmos where romance cannot breathe without turning rube—naïve, bruised, bled dry.
Technically monochromatic, yet the tinting strategy brandishes hues your retinas will swear are hallucinations. Night sequences swim in selenium cyanide blue, evoking arsenic postcards mailed from the afterlife. Flame-woman moments erupt with hand-painted tangerine neons that feel scraped off Expressionist woodblocks. Mid-film, a single shot of a glass doorknob receives a topaz glaze—a breadcrumb leading nowhere, yet you’ll chase it through endless dissolves.
This chromatic rebelliousness outpaces even The Flames of Johannis, famous for its crimson floodlights. Whereas Johannis announced its palette like trumpet fanfare, Rubes and Romance sneaks color through the servants’ entrance, letting it poison the punch bowl when no one’s looking.
Smith’s body language quotes Buster Keaton’s stone-face, but the quotation marks rot off in real time. Watch the micro-twitch under his left eye when the celluloid woman unfurls her dress—an entire silent confession squeezed into 1/24th of a second. Howell, meanwhile, pirouettes between Nell Gwynne earthiness and Daughter of Two Worlds ambivalence. She mouths words the intertitles refuse to print, creating a secret subtitle track only your subconscious can decrypt.
These layered deliveries feel closer to Czechoslovakian camera-tests than to Hollywood histrionics—think Genie tegen geweld stripped of its didacticism. The effect is a vertiginous empathy: you occupy two performances simultaneously, the one you see and the one you fear.
No score survives. Archivists claim the original accompaniment mandated a single violin strung with human hair, bowed behind the screen so notes emerged from the actors’ mouths. Today’s restorations pair the film with a spectral track: distant typewriters, the slow wheeze of a calliope found at the bottom of a lake, and—during the final reel—what might be a child reciting the alphabet backward. The absence of melody weaponizes silence; each splice becomes a guillotine drop you hear with your bones.
This sonic void rivals The Silent Voice, yet where that film used silence as moral absolution, here it functions as capital punishment for nostalgia.
Seventeen shots, eleven frames each, depict the pickpocket aging from boy to man to corpse without ever leaving a doorway. The cuts accelerate into stroboscopic hysteria, prefiguring Dangerous Days by half a decade. But unlike the urban montages that would later glorify conveyor-belt modernity, this sequence mourns velocity itself—each frame a funeral for the moment you just finished living.
The celluloid woman owns the only gaze that pierces the fourth wall. When she stares down the barrel of the lens, male spectators report an involuntary urge to apologize to ex-lovers. Female viewers describe the inverse: a sudden taste of iodine on the tongue, as though the film has lanced an abscess of historical shame. This gendered rupture feels more radical than Cheating Herself or even Hearts and Let Us, because the narrative refuses to punish her transgression. She simply burns out, leaving a hole in the shape of a woman who never needed rescuing.
Watch for the recurring shot of a ticket booth shuttered by cobwebs. Its window glass reflects not the audience but an amusement pier that exists outside the plot—an oneiric Coney Island where profits evaporate faster than saltwater taffy. The motif indicts entertainment economies older than nickelodeons and younger than NFTs. Every time Smith’s character fondles that brass coin, you hear the clank of speculative bubbles bursting from 1929 to 2023.
Currently streaming in 4K on SpectralVault+, though the platform annoyingly inserts five compulsory ad breaks—each commercial louder than the last, as if to vandalize the deliberate hush. Physical media devotees should hunt the Midnight Chimera Blu-ray: limited to 666 numbered copies, each disc laced with a scratch-n-sniff patch that smells of mildewed velvet during chapter 8. Refuse any YouTube bootleg; the compression chews the tinting into moldy cheddar.
Great films leave footprints on your hypothalamus; Rubes and Romance leaves hoofprints. Long after credits, you’ll catch yourself counting spare change as though coins could purchase back the minutes the film quietly pickpocketed from your life. It is both rube trap and romance, confidence game and love letter, a mirror smeared with mercury so you can’t tell if the crack is in the glass or in your reflection. Enter only if you can stomach the vertigo of discovering that the hand you’ve been holding through the dark is your own—gloved in glass, still warm from the last stranger who trusted the flicker.
IMDb —
1917
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