The Last Performance

The Last Performance or The Twelve Swords is a movie directed by Paul Fejos in 1929.  The picture was lavishly produced as silent film and, then, remade in a sound version.  Both the silent and sound versions as shown in the United States are lost.  Indeed, the film was considered entirely lost until a negative turned up in a private collection in Denmark.  The Danish print is entitled De Tolv Klinger.  With subtitles translating Danish intertitles into English, the film has been released on the Criterion CD featuring Fejos' Lonesome.(and his 1929 picture experimenting with Technicolor, Broadway).  Fejos is an interesting director and The Last Performance, although rather faded and murky, is quite legible.  The movie contains some fascinating sequences, although it's clearly a minor production -- the film as released in the Danish version is an hour long.  (It seems clear that, perhaps, a reel of film is missing although I couldn't tell precisely, or, even, imprecisely, what has been left out..)  The movie is mostly notable for performances of Conrad Veidt as a sinister magician (Erik) and Mary Philbin (Julie) as his lovely stage-assistant.

The movie was made by Universal under the supervision of Carl Laemmle and it is clearly beholding to that studio's earlier, and wildly, successful horror film, The Phantom of the Opera (1925).  In fact, the villainous, if pathetic and lovelorn protagonist of The Phantom of the Opera was named Erik as well and he memorably menaced Mary Philbin, the romantic interest in this film.  Accordingly, Laemmle and Universal come close to plagiarizing themselves with The Last Performance.  The plot is inconsequential.  A famous stage musician is in love with his assistant Julie.  A young man breaks into his apartment and, apparently, starving starts ravenously eating at the buffet in the room.  The young man is somehow associated with Julie, although this is the part of the film that seems to be missing.  Julie and the young man, Mark Royce, fall in love.  Mark clashes with Erik's rather fey and eccentric assistant, Buffo.  (There seems a suggestion that Buffo is homosexual and a rival with Julie for Erik's love.)  Erik invents an illusion involving a chest being pierced with 12 swords while an assistant is locked inside that casket.  When Buffo contrives to humiliate Erik publicly by exposing Julie's love for Mark, it's pretty clear that things are going to go badly wrong with the dangerous stunt involving the 12 swords.  Buffo gets locked in the trick-chest.  Mark slides the twelve swords into the casket.  When the casket is opened, Buffo is dead, fatally stabbed  (There's a bravura tracking shot showing the hysteria in the audience when the corpse is unveiled, the camera moving to the left to climb onto stage with some cops charging in that direction from the auditorium from which the crowd is fleeing.).  Mark is framed for the crime, a bit implausibly because the illusion is the invention of Erik who has supervised the gory stunt on stage.  A trial is convened for Mark and it doesn't go well.  (You know that a trial is headed in the wrong direction when the courtroom artists start doodling gallows and electric chairs.)  Erik demonstrates the trick for the Judge and confesses that he killed Buffo with a dagger concealed in his sleeve in order to frame Mark so that he could enjoy Julie.  (It wasn't clear to me why Erik confesses in open court -- seemingly, it has something to do with his suddenly selfless love for Julie.)  With the confession, the film abruptly ends.

The movie illustrates a feature of American silent films late in the period during which they were produced:  a sort of hypertropy or giganticism afflicts these movies.  They are way too large and expensively produced for their rather slender plots.  The Last Performance has the sort of narrative that we might associate with B-movie, something like the kinds of films Tod Browning directed with Lon Chaney.  But the sets are enormous and the numbers of extras vastly superfluous to the requirements of the story.  Erik performs in elaborate opera houses with hundreds of over-dressed people in the audience.  He lives in a house with marble steps that are a hundred feet high and ceilings that can never been seen --like the opera house, Erik's apartment has no top; the walls just soar out of sight in the frame.  (A corridor in Erik's apartment seems wide enough to accommodate truck traffic coming and going.)  In the courtroom sequence, another hundred spectators are crammed into a vast amphitheater, again with topless rooms and the judge sitting on a bench that seems the size of a freight car.  The film is overproduced on all levels.  There's a startling banquet scene in which the camera dollies along a table groaning with spectacular-looking food for about sixty feet.  In one scene, Buffo theatrically parts a curtain to show the lovers Julie and Mark embracing in another room that has no visible ceiling; when Erik is ushered forward to see the lovers (he has invited guests to the banquet to announce his betrothal to Julie), he casts a colossal shadow, bigger than a house that falls across the embarrassed couple.  The film is far more impressive visually than it needs to be.   

Anything starring Conrad Veidt is worth seeing.  Here he is tall and white as a ghost, cadaverous with flaring bony cheeks.  His eyes are enormous and sunk in pools of supernal darkness.  Mary Philbin is about half his height.  She comes up to the level of his naval.  She's very pretty and delicate with a pointed chin and, in some scenes, she's looks exactly like a very young and undernourished Laura Dern. Both Veidt and Philbin are capable of all sorts wildly histrionic acting.  In one amazing scene, Veidt acts with the veins in the side of his head -- this was the sort of thing silent movie stars could do.  As he receives bad news, he stoically gnaws on his lip while the veins on the side of his head throb and bulge to make his distress painfully visible.