The triumphant premiere of Miracle of the Wolves at the Paris Opera in November 1924 was a watershed in French commercial cinema. It led to a second wind in large-scale historical films, giving the lie to claims that French filmmakers lacked a true epic spirit that could meet the challenge of Hollywood and German hegemony. The apotheosis of this new wave, of course, was Gance’s Napoléon and its premiere at the same Paris Opera in April 1927.
Miracle of the Wolves marked a sea change in the career of its 34-year-old director Raymond  Bernard, who until then had been making stylish, modest-budgeted films based on the melodramas and comedies of his playwright father Tristan Bernard. Suddenly, Raymond Bernard became the “D. W. Griffith of France,” and looked to more ambitious subjects.
His first project after Wolves was to be a screen version of Victor Hugo’s grotesque historical romance, The Man Who Laughs, which he would write, produce, and direct for a new firm, La Société Générale de Films. But the film was imperiled when SGF was approached to salvage and finance the completion of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, which had been shut down following the bankruptcy of its principal German backer. Bernard, in a rare display of professional solidarity and sacrifice, chose to graciously bow out of The Man Who Laughs so that Gance could finish his troubled masterpiece.
Instead, Bernard fell back on the collaborators he had under contract for the Hugo adaptation, notably actor Charles Dullin, cameraman Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, and production designer Jean Perrier, and agreed to undertake a fascinating new project from Henri Dupuy-Mazuel, novelist and founder of the Société des Films Historiques, who had produced Miracle of the Wolves as part of a grandiose cultural and artistic project, to popularize the history of France in a series of 18 films. Miracle of the Wolves had been announced as the template.
Ironically, The Chess Player had nothing to do with French history. It was a historical fantasy set in 18th-century Poland during the uprising against the Russian occupation of Catherine the Great. Dupuy-Mazuel, an amateur historian with a flair for unearthing the bizarre historical anecdote, became fascinated with the enigmatic figure of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Viennese court engineer whose hobby was designing life-size automata in his formidable laboratory. His masterpiece was the chess-playing automaton called “The Turk,” which he toured throughout the courts of Europe as a chess sensation, pitting it against all human contenders (who included several European monarchs). One of the legends attached to Kempelen was that he had concealed a wounded Polish patriot inside the Turk to spirit him out of the country. In Dupuy-Mazuel’s imaginative plotting the wounded Pole also happens to be a master chess player, who is brought to St. Petersburg inside the Turk to play against the Russian empress. When the automaton exposes Catherine as a cheat, she orders it to be executed for lèse majesté…
In The Chess Player, Bernard wasn’t restricted by fidelity to French history or the pictorial conventions of the “Film d’Art,” which had given studio scenes in Miracle of the Wolves a certain tableaux theatricality. Here, from first scene to last, it crackled with movement and mystery. Even compared to other period extravaganzas, it was unusual in its bravura mixture of historical intrigue, fantasy, and realism.
One of the most lavish spectaculars of the decade, The Chess Player was shot at the Reservoir studios in Joinville, where Bernard’s designer Jean Perrier constructed some 35 major sets, most impressively the façade and courtyard of the Winter Palace, which covered 5,000 square metres of land adjoining the studio. (Only the first story of the palace was actually built – the rest was the work of glass-shot wizard W. Percy Day.)
Location shooting was fraught with accidents. The most spectacular involved the filming of a thrilling cavalry charge on the sandy plains of Lomza, Poland, for which Polish military authorities lent Bernard 1500 uhlans. The first regiment of horsemen raised so much dust that the following columns failed to see the cameramen stationed at various points along the plain. Bernard’s three cameramen, along with his assistant director Jean Hémard, were knocked over, with their equipment. Early Polish news releases reported that they had all been trampled to death. Years later, Mundwiller would regale his students at the IDHEC film school in Paris with anecdotes about the day he was run over by the Polish cavalry!
The Chess Player contributed to creating the new escapist sub-genre of Slavic ambiance films, which were now to be the rage in French films, along with the rival spectacular,  Tourjansky’s Michel Strogoff with Ivan Mosjoukine, which opened in Paris just weeks before The Chess Player. But despite a sensational premiere (electrified by Henri Rabaud’s original score) and first-run release, it did not live up to commercial expectations. Perhaps the film’s unusual mix of the heroic and the bizarre disconcerted audiences. Ten years later, Jean Dréville attempted a remake, which, despite Conrad Veidt’s presence, proved too tame and studio-bound.

Lenny Borger