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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Paris at dawn, 1921: a city still picking shrapnel out of its haunches, discovers a new wound—Joan Coolidge—who pirouettes through the fog like a stiletto searching for a heart.
The film opens not with title cards but with a close-up of a wedding veil caught on a nail; the tear is louder than any organ chord. Director Lucien Hubbard weaponises that rip: it foretells the entire narrative, a silk flag surrendering to the gale of self-sovereignty. Joan, incarnated by the unfairly forgotten Elinor Hancock, possesses the startled grace of a deer who has read the script of her own hunting. Every glance is a referendum on agency; every shrug of her epauletted husband Freeman Wood is a master-class in casual sadism. Their drawing-room, all burgundy and bruised wainscot, feels like a mausoleum with the thermostat set to "patriarchy."
The escape sequence—shot in two-toned tints of cobalt and arsenic green—unfolds inside a train compartment that contracts like a throat. Hancock does not act the scene; she inhalates it, her pupils dilating from society ingénue to refugee of the gilded cage.
Cut to Montparnasse, where cinematographer William Marshall trades chiaroscuro for champagne-flare. Joan’s metamorphosis into the toast of bohemia is rendered through a delirious montage: charcoal sketches smear across the screen, a flapper’s cigarette traces the arc of a leap, and suddenly her likeness is crowned on the wall between Modigliani and a Picasso that refuses to stay cubist. The portrait—an aching tableau of aquiline despair—becomes the film’s MacGuffin, a silent scream that travels faster than cables or conscience.
Enter Jack Perrin as the engineer-hero fresh from mapping the Euphrates. His cheekbones carry the sun’s autograph; his eyes, the sandstorm’s apology. The reunion inside the Galerie de la Boétie is staged in a single, unbroken dolly shot that pirouettes 360 degrees, past monocled dilettantes and a jazz trio whose trumpet literally steams. No intertitles interrupt; we read lips that form the word "tomorrow," and it sounds like a pistol click.
But tomorrow is a desert. The narrative hops continents with the insouciance of a bored magician. Arabia, rendered on a backlot in Santa Monica, glows under magnesium sunflares that bleach the celluloid to parchment. Joan’s tulle tutu flutters against djellabas; cultural collision becomes choreographic poetry. The sandstorm climax arrives as a negative-image blizzard—white grains, black sky—while native drums syncopate with the film’s orchestral score until the husband’s silhouette is swallowed whole.
Death by mirage: it is here that Hubbard achieves the sublime. The cuckold’s demise is not triumph but existential erasure; the camera tilts skyward as if embarrassed, and when it tilts back the dunes have already forgotten him. The final embrace between Joan and her engineer is shot against a matte painting of star-drunk infinity, their shadows fusing into a single Chinese-dragon silhouette—an alchemical marriage no priest could sanctify.
Hancock’s acting vocabulary is microscopic: the twitch of a nostril heralds revolutions; the slackening of a shoulder exorcises years. Compare her to Miss DuPont in The Darkening Trail—all operatic mascara—and you realise restraint can detonate louder than hysteria. Perrin, meanwhile, channels the laconic eroticism of a man who has already witnessed civilisations sink into dust; when he whispers "I built you a bridge in the desert," the line feels both geological and holy.
Even the bit players mesmerise: Leo White as a monocled hanger-on delivers a dissolving close-up—his smile collapses like soufflé the instant Joan rejects his absinthe invitation—an eight-second master-class in social self-cremation.
Art director William Cameron Menzies (uncredited but stylistically obvious) drapes Paris in suicidal lilacs and the Sahara in cadaverous ochres, creating a chromatic conversation between decadence and doom. The transition from ballroom to dune is achieved via a match-cut on a spinning coin: the coin morphs into a full moon, then into a brass compass rose. Silent-era audiences, accustomed to tableau, would have felt the seats tilt beneath them.
The costuming deserves its own Louvre wing. Joan’s runaway frock—initially a straitjacket of pearls—unpicks itself scene by scene: sleeves vanish, hemlines rise, until in the final reel she strides across the sand in jodhpurs that annihilate gender binaries. Note how the husband’s three-piece suit remains immaculate even in the desert, a moral armour that ultimately fails against a blade designed for goat throats.
Contemporary screenings often retrofit 1920s films with generic ragtime, but The Rage of Paris begs for something fiercer. Imagine Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies shredded through a distortion pedal, or Josephine Baker’s La Petite Tonkinoise slowed to narcotic crawl. The existing restoration (Kino Lorber, 2019) opts for a hypnotic oud-and-theremin score that transforms the sandstorm into a cosmic exorcism.
Beware pigeonholing this as mere melodrama. Joan’s flight is not from marriage but from proprietary gaze; her choice of the desert over the drawing room predicts Simone de Beauvoir’s axiom that woman is made, not born. When she finally speaks the intertitle, "I was property signed and sealed, now I am geography unbounded," the words detonate like feminist artillery a full half-century before second-wave theory.
Contrast this with A Woman of Impulse, where the heroine’s rebellion is punished by syphilitic ruin. Hubbard refuses moral retribution; the Sahara does not purify Joan, it recognises her pre-existing purity—an oasis of self-defined identity.
Stacked against The Turn of the Wheel—all fatalism and carnivalesque coincidence—The Rage of Paris feels modernist: cause and effect are suggestions, geography is psychology. Where The Floor Below traps its heroine in subterranean class anxiety, here the ceiling is literally sky, infinitely escapable.
Meanwhile, Count Your Change treats romance as arithmetic; Hubbard treats it as cartography—every kiss redraws borders, every betrayal redraws continents.
Watch Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and notice how the desert’s circular glyphs echo the spinning coin match-cut in Rage. Or consider Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire: both films understand that when a woman’s image is captured, she reclaims the brush. The gallery scene where Joan’s portrait ‘eyes’ Perrin across a crowded salon predates Laura’s investigative gaze by twenty-three years.
Imperial myopia mars the periphery: Arab characters oscillate between noble savage and hysterical assassin without psychological scaffold. The murderous guide, credited merely as "The Moor," lacks even the dignity of a name—a colonial scar the film wears like an unmentioned scarlet letter.
Additionally, the narrative’s velocity from divorce papers to sandstorm is break-neck; one reel’s time-code hops continents faster than a 2024 budget airline, risking whiplash. Yet such warp-speed dislocation also mirrors the protagonist’s emotional tachycardia—so perhaps flaw and virtue are Siamese twins.
The 2019 4K restoration mines the original camera negative held at Cinémathèque Française, revealing textures previously mummified: the glint of Joan’s earring now stabs like a comet; grains of sand become constellations. Stream it via Criterion Channel or snag the out-of-print Blu-ray whose booklet essay by Miriam Rosen unpacks the feminist cartography better than any thesis.
Collectors note: the alternate ending—housed at MoMA—features a coda where Joan returns to Paris alone, having outgrown both suitors. Test audiences in 1921 jeered; the reel was burned, surviving only as a smoky legend among archivists.
The Rage of Paris is a silent supernova seldom mentioned outside cine-club catacombs, yet its afterglow irradiates everything from Out of Africa to Mad Max: Fury Road. It is both time-capsule and time-machine: flappers, deserts, brutes, and emancipation whirl into a cocktail that tastes of gunpowder and starlight. Approach expecting antiquated melodrama and you’ll exit with sand in your shoes, salt on your lips, and the intoxicating suspicion that freedom is not a gift but a continent you must be willing to cross barefoot.
Seek it, devour it, argue with it, dream of it—because films this ferociously alive refuse to stay silent, even when the last piano chord fades to black.
IMDb 6.7
1919
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