Georg Jacoby’s Jokeren is a light-hearted entertainment picture set during the carnival in Nice, a romantic comedy with a touch of melodrama. A young artist, fatally injured in a car accident, foolishly entrusts a batch of compromising love letters to Borwick, a crooked and unscrupulous lawyer, instructing him to destroy them. Instead, Borwick proceeds to blackmail the woman who sent the letters, Lady Cecilie Powder, married to the straight-arrow Sir Herbert Powder. Lady Cecilie gets help from her spunky younger sister Gill. In turn, she draws in Peter Carstairs, a debonair adventurer known to all as “the Joker” – the card that trumps all others. When the Joker repeatedly foils Borwick’s schemes, the crooked lawyer ups the ante, trying to incriminate his adversary Carstairs and expanding his demands to include marriage to Gill. But as the characters converge at yet another lavish carnival celebration party, it becomes clear that one card does indeed trump all the others: the Joker!
With its international cast and crew and swanky Côte d’Azur setting, Jokeren is in many ways a typical late-1920s “Film Europe” production. It was probably designed to appeal particularly to a British audience: not only was the British film market large and potentially lucrative, but at the time the management of Nordisk was trying to sell the famed Danish film company to English investors lock, stock, and barrel. Jokeren was based on a successful 1927 English stage play, The Joker, which had 155 performances in the West End. The action has been transferred from London to Nice, but the film’s characters are still nearly all English. Moreover, Jokeren’s top talent had already collaborated on a British film, The Fake (1927), directed by Jacoby with both Henry Edwards (who also produced) and Miles Mander. Jacoby’s then-wife Elga Brink also had a prominent role, as she did in most of his films from 1923 to 1930. Probably in the interest of making the film marketable in France, its remaining leads were French: Renée Héribel, star of L’Île enchantée (1925; shown at the Giornate in 2009), and Gabriel Gabrio, who was a superb Jean Valjean in Henri Fescourt’s unforgettable Les Misérables (1925). Danish character actors appear as domestics and sidekicks.
The performance style of Henry Edwards (1882‒1952) has been described by British film historian Christine Gledhill as marked by “an essentially romantic and extrovert theatricality that instills his characterizations with an infectious exuberance,” and these qualities are on full display in Jokeren. Edwards carries off with aplomb the difficult task of playing a hero who is effortlessly superior at everything he does without seeming smug, looking dapper even when wearing a jester’s cap. Elga Brink, considered “an American type” by German commentators, makes an appealing and spirited heroine, while Miles Mander is also quite delightful as the smarmy and despicable blackmailer. In the thankless roles of the indiscretion-haunted but virtuous Lady Cecilie and her stolid husband, the two French stars have less opportunity to shine.
In the course of a 47-year directorial career (1913‒1960), Georg Jacoby (1882‒1964) made nearly 150 films. A respected crafter of crowd-pleasing entertainments, he worked in a variety of popular genres, particularly comedies and musicals, but also crime films and melodramas. In 1919 he not only made the sensational drama Aberglaube [Superstition], screening at this year’s Giornate in the Ellen Richter series, but two more films with her, as well as four pictures with Pola Negri. He was brought on to co-direct (with Gabriellino D’Annunzio) the Italian-German super-spectacular Quo Vadis? (1924) starring Emil Jannings, but despite some impressively staged crowd scenes, it became a disastrously expensive flop. He continued to work internationally, claiming to be the first German director to work in Britain; he also directed the Danish comedy duo Pat and Patachon’s German talkie 1000 Worte deutsch (1930). During the Third Reich, he made nine films with the musical star Marika Rökk (whom he also married), including the gaudy Agfacolor confections Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (1941) and Die Frau meiner Träume (1944). A Nazi party member, he was banned from working for several years after the war, but came back to direct 19 films during the 1950s.
Jokeren’s interiors were mostly shot at Nordisk’s Copenhagen studios in December 1927; the production then moved to the Grunewald studio in Berlin for the spectacular Savoy carnival party scenes. The location footage of the Nice carnival was shot after the completion of principal photography, shortly before the film’s Copenhagen premiere. Jokeren was an expensive film, but no more costly than Nordisk’s previous big-budget productions aimed at the international market. However, the attempt to sell off the company failed, and beset as it was by cash-flow problems, Nordisk filed for bankruptcy three months after the premiere of Jokeren. After a year or more of legal wrangling, a new Nordisk company emerged, focused on making talkies. Jokeren was lost in the shuffle, and has remained unseen for 90 years. – Casper Tybjerg