Souls Enchained (1923) Review: Cinematic Fever Dream of Fatal Love & Flight

A Sky Aflame: The Plot Reimagined

Picture an era when propellers sliced clouds like serrated knives and newsreels still stank of potassium flash. Into this grainy cosmos strides Alba, a woman who treats gravity as optional and monogamy as a mild suggestion. The film’s first reel is essentially a meteor shower in human form: long linen scarves, helmet goggles denting her cheekbones, and a smile that promises altitudes no man has mapped. When Romero—ink still wet on his marriage certificate—interviews her, the soundtrack (a live orchestra in most palaces) swells with Wagnerian foreboding. From that point forward, every parachute is a wedding veil, every landing strip a parting glance.

Director Leone Carovini—best remembered for the lost epic The Black Envelope—shoots courtship like an aerial dogfight: jump-cuts between fuselage and flesh, intertitles scrawled as if on the inside of a cockpit glass. The result is intoxicating, disorienting, and oddly modern; you half expect Alban Berg to rise from the orchestra pit.

Performances: Alchemy in Celluloid

Silvana Mancuso, discovered in a Milan cabaret, plays Alba with the feral poise of a hawk asked to apologize for soaring. Watch her pupils in the Venice ballroom sequence: they contract the instant she spots Romero across the dancefloor, as though someone has dimmed every chandelier with one theatrical pull-chain. It’s silent-film acting at its most electrically subtle; you can hear silk ripping even though the screen remains mute.

Opposite her, Giulio Trentini’s Romero is all scribbler’s stoop and guilty jawline. His shoulders seem perpetually damp from the mist of conscience. In the hospital deathwatch montage—achieved with nothing more than a slowiris, a bedside crucifix, and a single tear that takes an eternity to fall—Trentini earns the right to stand beside Veidt and Brooks in the pantheon of tragic lovers.

Visual Grammar: Chiaroscuro at 10,000 Feet

Carovini’s cinematographer, the unsung Ugo Silvani, bathes the cloud sequences in selenium reds that look like hemorrhaged dawn. Interiors, by contrast, are Caravaggio caverns: walnut panels drinking up kerosene lamplight, a single shaft picking out the gold braid on Baron D’Oro’s uniform until he resembles a gilt-edged invitation to catastrophe. The palette is so deliberate that when Alba finally pawns her aviator’s chronograph, the close-up reveals oxidized numerals the exact color of Romero’s sickroom phlegm—an image you will never unsee.

Sound & Silence: The Phantom Score

No original score survives; archivists stitched a new one from 1923 Milanese orchestral parts discovered in a sealed trunk beneath La Scala. The reconstructed soundtrack pairs tremolo strings with rotax-engine field recordings—an anachronistic coup that feels oddly authentic. During Alba’s danse-macabre in the waterfront tavern, a tarantella accelerates into a mechanical howl, as if the phonograph itself has begun to stall mid-air.

Comparative Lens: Fatal Attractions Across Eras

Where Forbandelsen uses Nordic frost to cauterize its sin, Souls Enchained opts for Mediterranean combustion. Both films share the trope of a woman whose desire is punished by cosmic decree, yet Alba engineers her own doom with such brio that the film edges closer to the defiant eroticism of Infatuation than to the moral rigidity of The Mill on the Floss.

Gender & Power: A Tailspin into Modernity

Make no mistake: the narrative scaffold is 190-proof melodrama, but beneath the lacquer lurks a surprisingly contemporary interrogation of autonomy. Alba’s aircraft is both chariot and chastity belt; her flight records mock the Baron’s terrestrial wealth. When she finally sells her medals—not to the Baron but to a pawnbroker whose sign reads “We Buy Futures”—the film flirts with proto-feminist critique, only to crash-land into the swamp of sacrificial love. Yet even that final tableau, with the photograph welded to her rigored grip, reclaims agency: she chooses the icon she will take into oblivion.

Restoration & Availability

The 2022 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna salvaged two nitrate reels thought lost in the 1943 bombings. The new print premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato, drawing a standing ovation that lasted until the projectionist raised the house lights. Streaming rights are fragmented, but a Blu-ray from Kino Lorber includes an essay by Pamela Hutchinson and an audio commentary where composer Lucia Ronchetti debates the ethics of retrofitting sound to a film conceived for live orchestra. Region-free players can currently access it via this dedicated page; digital rental is expected by winter.

Final Approach: Why You Should Watch

Because the film understands that the most perilous altitude is not 30,000 feet but the vertigo of looking into another human and recognizing your own combustion. Because its palette of iodine skies and cadaverous lamplight has seeped into the DNA of every subsequent tragic romance from Out of the Past to Atonement. Because Silvana Mancuso’s eyes—two black radars sweeping for impossible landing strips—will follow you long after the credits, asking whether you too would pawn your wings for one more hour of love.

Watch it on a stormy night when the rafters creak like stressed spars. Watch it with someone whose hand you are not sure you have the right to hold. Watch it because Souls Enchained is not a relic but a live round, and a hundred years have done nothing to dull its impact.