Die Frau mit den Millionen is the second of four multi-part “Reise- und Abenteuerfilme” (travel-and-adventure films) that Ellen Richter produced and starred in between 1921 and 1925. Shot largely on location during extended round-the-world expeditions, the films’ genre-bending blend of popular fiction and non-fiction genres (action-adventure and travelogue) proved a winning formula at domestic and international box offices at the time, and became synonymous with Richter’s name even after her film career had ended.
Here Richter plays an Armenian princess whose father is being held prisoner by a despotic and corrupt pasha. A confrontation at the New Year’s Eve Ball at the Paris Opera leads to the princess being wrongly suspected of attempted assassination against the pasha. With the help of an English diplomat, she manages to flee Paris, but the pasha and his henchmen are hot on her heels. This marks the start of an extended, action-driven cat-and-mouse game that stretches to the outer regions of the Bosporus – and back again.
The film gives Richter ample opportunity to display her talents, among them a cross-dressing stint posing as the former crown prince of Dagestan, the titular character of the second part. Solid support is provided by a number of familiar faces from Richter’s films, including regular villain Eduard von Winterstein as the pasha. Georg Alexander, a frequent co-star of Richter’s throughout the 1920s, starting with the previous year’s Lola Montez, die Tänzerin des Königs, appears here as the pasha’s double-crossing French aide. Roly-poly Hungarian actor Karoly/Karl Huszár-Puffy, who for a time enjoyed some success in the U.S., was a mainstay of Richter’s travel-and-adventure films of the 1920s, supplying the comic relief. Richter and Wolff would call on Puffy’s talents again when they dusted off their winning formula and briefly revived the genre for Richter’s “talkie” debut, Die Abenteurerin von Tunis (The Adventuress from Tunis, 1931), a thinly disguised remake of her first foray into the genre, Die Abenteurerin von Monte Carlo (The Adventuress from Monte Carlo, 1921).
Although no explicit references are made in the film, the events and characters depicted in Die Frau mit den Millionen are clearly set against the backdrop of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and its aftermath. The events were still fresh in spectators’ minds when the film was first released in March 1923, not least due to the assassination of Mehmed Talaat, the “architect” of the Genocide, in Berlin in 1921. The perpetrator, an Armenian revolutionary who had lost his family in the Genocide, was ultimately acquitted in the ensuing highly publicized trial. In her films, Ellen Richter frequently portrays underdogs or pariahs who triumph over authority figures or social injustices (or a combination of both). From this perspective, Die Frau mit den Millionen is consistent with her other films, though the underlying political dimension is somewhat unique.
Following complaints from members of the Turkish community in Berlin, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior petitioned to have Die Frau mit den Millionen removed from circulation mere months after its premiere. Its allegedly biased depiction of the Turkish-Armenian conflict, as well as its unflattering portrayal of certain members of Turkish royalty, were cited as examples of how the film posed a potential threat to Germany’s diplomatic relations with Turkey and Greece. While the Senior Film Censor’s Office (Film-Oberprüfstelle) didn’t ban the film outright, it ordered that all references to those countries be removed from the intertitles. Thus, for example, the supplementary title of the third film, “Konstantinopel – Paris”, was changed to “Dagestan – Paris”. Also, the name of Karl Huszár-Puffy’s character, Leonides Kleptomanides, a not-so-subtle allusion to the character’s greedy and unscrupulous nature, was changed to Manides. Gosfilmofond’s print of the Russian release version (the only one known to survive) retains the original spelling.
Unfortunately, the Russian source element had clearly seen better days by the time the archive came to duplicate it. The muddy, damage-ridden images do little justice to Arpad Viragh’s photography, and Willi Wolff and Paul Merzbach’s complex storyline is hampered by the occasional loss of footage in the surviving print. Nonetheless, the set pieces – including an escape from a speeding train that holds up alongside anything by Richter’s male contemporaries such as Douglas Fairbanks, Luciano Albertini, or Harry Piel – still manage to instil excitement, and the locations fascinate behind the dirt and scratches. – Oliver Hanley