It’s peculiar how E.A. Dupont’s reputation always seems to hover on the edge of greatness, accorded high status for Varieté but then dropping a bit despite the excellence of films like Moulin Rouge and Piccadilly. Lotte Eisner, ever poetic, wrote that Dupont “succeeded in giving exquisite subtleties to his images… He makes the interiors vibrate with the atmosphere appropriate to each situation, marrying the velvet of the darks to the tender silk of the lights.” She was discussing Das alte Gesetz, a film that’s been well-studied following a 1984 restoration, largely for the way it sympathetically captures mid-19th century Jewish life via the story of an actor’s rise from his shtetl origins to the aristocratic world of Vienna. Yet our appreciation has significantly increased thanks to the new restoration by the Deutsche Kinemathek, which began with the discovery of the original title cards. Once these were found, a call was made for all surviving material, which turned up two additional prints to the four previously known. The resulting restoration, overseen by Daniel Meiller at the Deutsche Kinemathek, was an especially complex process which reproduces as much as possible the original German release, including the color palette shared by both the American and Swedish release prints.
Scholars of the film tend to fall into two camps: those like Eisner who practically ignore the storyline and focus on the aesthetics, celebrating the way Dupont and cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl emulate the light and shadow of a Rembrandt etching, and those who bypass the palpable beauty to analyze what the film says about assimilation and the divide between Jewish peasant life and that of their “Westernized” city-dwelling co-religionists (one also thinks of Der gelbe Schein, 1918, screened at the Giornate last year). It’s a shame so few scholars bring both perspectives together, since hiding from the film’s fascinating treatment of Jewish life misses a key reason why Das alte Gesetz is so special, while dealing only with the storyline not only sidelines its cinematic qualities but relegates the movie to that ghettoized subsection called “Jewish films.”
Screenwriter Paul Reno (born Pinkus Nothmann) was partly inspired by the 19th-century actor Bogumił Dawison, hired by Heinrich Laube at the Burgtheater in 1849. The real Laube held very firm notions about Jews in modern society: assimilation or expulsion, and he refused to give Dawison major roles in classic tragedies, claiming the actor over-sentimentalized them. It was a prevailing anti-Semitic put-down, associating outward displays of emotion with Jewish traits, and unsurprisingly Reno veered significantly from the historical record when inventing his characters. It’s interesting to note that Harry A. Potamkin, in his key discussion of Jewish characteristics in film (“Movie: New York Notes,” Close Up, February 1930), particularly praised Das alte Gesetz for its refusal to turn Jewishness into a schtick, favorably comparing Abraham Morewski, as Rabbi Mayer, to the over-sentimentality of practically everyone in The Jazz Singer. In addition, the film refreshingly presents the shtetl as a traditional rural village, not the impoverished and foul-looking place of misery so often associated with such communities.
For German audiences of the day, the enormous popularity of Henny Porten would have transcended most thematic hesitations, though unlike her real-life story (in 1921 she married the Jewish doctor Wilhelm von Kaufmann), the characters refuse to wed outside the faith. Does Porten’s Archduchess accept that a romance with Baruch (Ernst Deutsch) is impossible because he’s Jewish, or because he’s a commoner, and an actor to boot? The movie gives signs that origin and profession are the key, though perhaps that’s because the religious barrier is too obvious to need addressing directly. Precisely because the 1920s saw a solidification of the status of urban German and Austrian middle-class Jews, the backlash against integration and fears of assimilation continued to grow: just days after the film’s premiere in late October 1923, anti-Semitic riots broke out in Berlin, specifically directed at the kinds of East European Jews represented by Baruch’s family.
Dupont first worked with Porten in Die Geier-Wally (1921), exactly when his reputation began to rise and hers was undergoing a maturation process; she acted as producer on the first two of their three collaborations. Anna Schierse of the Landesarchiv in Berlin has discovered however that Comedia-Film, the short-lived production company for Das alte Gesetz, was owned by Ernst Deutsch and Hans Janowitz. Glowing critiques followed the worldwide distribution of Das alte Gesetz, with Iris Barry calling it a “beautiful, unsuccessful film” (she was especially taken by Deutsch, whom she compares to Charlie Chaplin). Like many in the cast and crew, Deutsch left Germany as anti-Semitism made life increasingly difficult. Morewski, one of the Yiddish theater’s giants, also survived by fleeing to the Soviet Central Asian Republics, making his way back to Latvia and ending his days as a star in Warsaw with Ida Kamińska’s State Jewish Theater. Others in the production weren’t so lucky: Paul Reno was murdered in Bergen-Belsen and Grete Berger, who played the Rabbi’s wife, died in Auschwitz. Contrary to a number of sources, Werner Krauss is not in the cast. I am indebted to Cynthia Walk, whose work on the film has been seminal to our understanding of its history and thematic importance.

Jay Weissberg