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Danish film master Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael is a mature and visually elegant period romance decades ahead of its time. Available for the first time on DVD, Michael takes its place alongside Dreyer's better known masterpieces as an unusually sensitive and decorous work of art and is one of the earliest and most compassionate overtly gay-themed films in movie history. Collaborating with famed German cinematographers Karl Freund (Metropolis, The Last Laugh) and Rudolph Maté (Passion of Joan of Arc, DOA) Michael offers the first fully realized example of Dreyer's emotionally precise, visually extravagant style.
Based upon Herman Bang's 1902 novel, Dreyer's Michael refashions the classical Greek myth of Jupiter and Ganymede into a love triangle between an aging artist, Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his protagonist Michael (Walter Slezak, later to play the Nazi villain in Hitchcock's Lifeboat) and Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor, Rules of the Game), an aristocratic femme fatale as entranced by Michael's youthful beauty as Zoret is. As Michael plunges from the dizzying heights of new love to the depths of theft and betrayal, Zoret experiences a spiritual rebirth from out of the ashes of rejection and despair.
A film of exquisite artistry, Michael is both elaborately theatrical and remarkably restrained. Dreyer elicits vivid and passionate performances from his adroit cast, including the screen's only acting appearance by cinematographer Freund. Co-written by Fritz Lang's wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou (M, Metropolis), this intimate and compelling film possesses a bold level of emotional detail and depicts the twilight of a male-male romance with unusual daring and subtlety.
Germany / 1924 / B&W / 86 min / Full-frame (1.33:1)
Silent with English intertitles
Directed by CARL THEODOR DREYER
Written by CARL THEODOR DREYER and THEA VON HARBOU
From the Novel by HERMAN BANG
Produced by ERICH POMMER
Cinematography by KARL FREUND and RUDOLPH MATE
Production Design by HUGO HARING
Original Music by NEAL KURZ
With WALTER SLEZAK, MAX AUZINGER, NORA GREGOR,
ROBERT GARRISON, BENJAMIN CHRISTENSEN, DIDER ASLAN,
ALEXANDER MURSKI, GRETE MOSHEM and KARL FREUND
©1924 UFA. Renewed by notice of intent to enforce a copyright 1996 under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Germany. Licensed from Transit Films GmBH on behalf of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung. |
