This print of a lost film was discovered by the late Jan Zaalberg in a private collection in Holland. Had the Nazis found its hiding place under the floorboards, they would have seized it for its Jewish subject matter. As it was, they almost destroyed it when they flooded Holland at the end of the war. Although badly water-damaged, enough survives to tell the story.
Set in Tsarist times, the film was intended as anti-Russian propaganda before Russia was taken out of the war by the Bolshevik revolution. It features Pola Negri as Lea, a Jewish girl who blames her foster-father’s death on her lack of medical knowledge. Determined to study medicine, she leaves for St. Petersburg. But since she is Jewish, the police insist she apply for “The Yellow Ticket” – the “badge of shame” inflicted on prostitutes. She accepts, and a friendly prostitute finds her lodgings. (The melodrama was not entirely fictitious; the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg took the Yellow Ticket. The Bolsheviks rescinded the law.)
SPOILER ALERT. Lea is reluctantly drawn into St. Petersburg’s nightlife, while studying at medical school by day. At graduation, she is hailed as the university’s brightest pupil – but is recognized by a man in the audience, who reveals her nocturnal activities to her Russian suitor, Dmitri. When he confronts her, she tries to kill herself. She is rescued by an operation performed by her professor – who, in true melodramatic style, turns out to be her long-lost father.
While it is not as accomplished as one would expect from associates of Lubitsch, it is of exceptional historical value. It was filmed on location in Warsaw in 1918 while the German army was still in occupation. Some scenes were filmed in Nalewki Street, in what would become part of the Warsaw Ghetto – created by a later German army that would then blow it up, along with the rest of the city, in 1943.
Warsaw stands in both for a town in the Pale of Settlement and for St. Petersburg. (Although for a high angle of St. Petersburg, with its famous waterways, the filmmakers resorted to a stock shot of Florence.) Note that while the English titles translated from the Dutch print give Lea’s year of birth as 1899, they refer to “St. Petersburg”, though by the time Lea would have been of university age, the town had been renamed Petrograd.
In her autobiography, Negri talks at length about the story, her part in it, and the vivid impression filming in the Jewish quarter made on her. But what she refers to is another film entirely, supposedly of the same subject, supposedly made by Polish producer Aleksander Hertz and his company, Sfinks, in the mid-1910s, and traditionally referred to as Czarna książeczka (The Black Book), or even as Żółty paszport (The Yellow Passport), Ufa’s Polish distribution title.
This film is a figment of her imagination. But since Negri puts Hertz’s connection to this story so firmly at the centre of her recollections, was Hertz, who had been her early mentor and director (and had reportedly kept on the good side of the German authorities), possibly PAGU’s local facilitator in 1918?
In any case, the story was unusually popular with filmmakers. Under various guises, it was filmed four times in the silent era alone, and there were at least three sound versions. Tsarist Russia produced Gde Pravda? (What Is the Truth?, 1913), probably shot in Riga, which survives in Gosfilmofond (and on YouTube).
Then there were two American films: Edwin August directed Clara Kimball Young in The Yellow Passport (1916), from a 1911 Yiddish stage melodrama, Afn Yam un “Ellis Island” (At Sea and Ellis Island), by Abraham S. Schomer, and William Parke directed The Yellow Ticket (1918) starring Fannie Ward, from the 1914 Broadway play by Michael Morton. (Some Polish historians hold that August’s The Yellow Passport was so well received in the Polish territories that Ufa simply remade it locally.)
(Note: Fyodor Otsep’s film Earth in Chains (Zemlya v plenu, 1928), starring Anna Sten, shown at the Giornate in 2012, carried the international title The Yellow Ticket, but had a different story.)
A few days after the Armistice, Der gelbe Schein had its premiere in Germany. Pola Negri stayed on there to become one of Europe’s leading stars, acclaimed for films like Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry and Carmen. In 1935, with Negri back in Germany after years in Hollywood, Hermann Goering told her that her portrayal of the Jewish student had so moved him he had never forgotten it. In her autobiography Negri makes this the phantom film by Hertz – referring to it disparagingly as “this Polish 2-reeler”, rather than the feature by Janson and Illés, neither of whom is mentioned.
Variety, reviewing Der gelbe Schein in 1922 under its U.S. title, The Devil’s Pawn, considered it “an exceedingly poor picture from all angles… Pola Negri makes you think of Theda Bara playing Juliet”. Photoplay said, “Foreign … not good enough to be dangerous to home product.” Could this be because Pola Negri, signed by Famous Players-Lasky, had recently arrived in Hollywood?
Anxious not to antagonize Gentile audiences, the scriptwriters give Der gelbe Schein an ending where Lea turns out not to be Jewish at all. Ironic coda: at Hitler’s orders, rumours that Negri herself was Jewish were “investigated” in 1935, and dispelled – “She is Polish and thus Aryan.” Victor Janson, despite the sympathy his film expresses for the Jews, didn’t balk at signing up to the Reichsfilmkammer in 1933, and voluntarily became a National Socialist party member as early as April that year.
Der gelbe Schein was last shown in Pordenone in 1990.

Kevin Brownlow, Caroline M. Buc

 

The music  In writing my score for Der gelbe Schein I tried to bridge the gap between the film’s time and ours – a gap that might deprive us of the emotional response the original audience would surely have had. The mores depicted are a little mysterious now; the pressures driving the characters not as self-evident as they would have been then. The narrative conventions of film, now a second language to us, were only just forming. I felt my task was to clarify the story’s structure through the music, and arouse in the viewer the profound feelings depicted onscreen.
The score is influenced by klezmer and Slavic folk forms, Béla Bartók and Ernest Bloch, café music, cantorial singing, and my particular fiddling style. I chose improvising pianist Marilyn Lerner as my partner, knowing both her ability to take a melody and twist it into surprising shapes, and her deep connection to klezmer.

Alicia Svigals