The spectacle of Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun attests to silent German cinema’s propensity toward ornate orientalism—a fascination evident in fellow UFA neophyte Fritz Lang’s early works and of apparent special interest to Lubitsch during his formative years. In addition to this harem melodrama, there were also two curious flings with Egyptiania, Eyes of the Mummy and The Loves of Pharaoh.
An adaptation of the Friedrich Freska play (originally produced by Max Reinhardt), the film unexpectedly anticipates many of the components of Lubitsch’s ill-defined but unmistakable “touch,” in particular the romantic triangulation later moved into the deco drawing rooms of Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Indeed, Lubitsch’s narrative features triangles of love and betrayal that eventually overlap, with the eponymous rebellious harem girl (Jenny Hasselqvist) gravitating from the stern Sheik (played by The Golem’s Paul Wegener) to a young cloth merchant (Harry Liedtke), while a fiery dancer (Pola Negri) ignores the affections of a hunchback jester (Lubitsch) in favor of the Prince (Carl Clewing).
In contrast to the serious, weighty epics that were catching the eye of Hollywood producers at the time, the film jumps recklessly (and, often, exhilaratingly) from coarse comedy to cutting drama. The tragic arc of the plot is open enough to include some slapstick humor involving the royal eunuchs, a particularly scabrous bit of dark comedy involving Lubitsch as an uncooperative would-be corpse, and an ineffable instant of pantomimed eroticism when Sumurun’s forbidden lover kisses her exposed foot before raising her lips to his.
Too messy to sustain its moods, the film is at its most intriguing when letting unhinged performances disrupt the carefully arranged frames, most notably with Lubitsch himself hogging the spotlight with a grotesque gusto that foresees not just Emil Jannings’s tragic figure in The Blue Angel, but also other filmmakers’ penchant for plunking themselves in front of their own cameras—a long line from Hitchcock to Welles to, shudder, M. Night Shyamalan.
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