Struck in the face in the middle of a violent fight with the convict Jack (Heinrich George), his rival in love, George Manolescu (Ivan Mosjoukine) falls to the ground unconscious and sinks into a dark coma that quickly evolves into a nightmare. In a dream sequence, Manolescu stands minuscule before a threatening judge and jury. Photographic effects show the protagonist as the only image in positive, immersed in an inverted negative space. A vertiginous whirlwind of presses then prints out his accusations in giant letters: “swindler”, “thief”, “forger”. Mugshots reveal his talent for disguise. George utters a few words, defining the turning point from one half of the film to the other, from the past to the future: “Cleo… all because of her.”
Although always attracted to a life beyond his means, it is only when he meets Cleo (Brigitte Helm) that Manolescu refines his techniques in deception to the point of no return, becoming a professional impostor. Redemption will oblige him to leave her for the frugality of life in the mountains and a relationship on sincere, intimate terms with Jeanette (Dita Parlo) – the polar opposite, respectively, of luxurious, cosmopolitan vice and the ambiguity and polygamy of the vamp Cleo.
Inspired by the true story of the Romanian fraudster Manolescu, a famed figure in the Berlin press in the years around 1900, Victor Tourjansky’s Manolescu was the second of four film adaptations of the short story by Hans Székely made in Germany between 1920 and 1972 (Manolescus Memoiren, Richard Oswald, 1920; Manolescu, der Fürst der Diebe, Willi Wolff, 1932-1933; Manolescu, Hans Quest, 1972). It was the first truly major production by the Ukrainian director in Germany, where he arrived after being Abel Gance’s assistant director on Napoléon (1927), preceded by experience in Paris with Les Films Albatros, during which he established a working relationship with Ivan Mosjoukine.
Ufa supported the project despite the enormous difficulties it had faced for almost a decade, providing a solid financial base and agreeing to the requests of Tourjansky and producer Gregor Rabinowitsch for a first-rate cast, which included Helm, Parlo, and George, and the renowned and highly respected cinematographer Carl Hoffmann, who had worked on some of the company’s most successful productions (Die Nibelungen, Fritz Lang, 1922-1924; Faust, F.W. Murnau, 1926). The screenplay is by Robert Liebmann, already appreciated for his contribution to high-grossing comedies like Ihr dunkler Punkt (Johannes Guter, 1928), and the currently untraced score was composed by Willy Schmidt-Gentner.

The print  The resources of the period allowed the production to create three different nitrate negatives. Only two of these survive today, both conceived for foreign distribution. There exist about 30 further fragments, each only a few metres long, mostly production or post-production material, with the exception of some sequences cut from a distribution copy. All these elements represent the only surviving material contemporary with the film’s release, and the only ones extant in Germany, which were housed for decades in the former state archives of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and are now in the Bundesarchiv.
Both of the surviving negatives show signs of handling and include frames inserted from duplicates taken from later copies. One of the two has German intertitles in the form of flash titles, but these were quite likely added after the initial production of the film. The flash titles of the other negative are mostly in English.
The digital restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung begun in 2018 was based on the most complete negative, further completed in combination with the other materials, in order to reconstruct the film according to the 1929 censorship certificate. All elements were scanned in 4K at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Later-generation shots physically included in the original negative were digitally replaced from their source material, while the intertitles were reproduced based on the existing flash titles. The censorship certificate was also used as a point of reference for the digital reconstruction of three missing intertitles, here seen in a font similar to the original, and marked with the initials “FWMS”.
This complex process, which also created an alternative version corresponding to the other surviving negative, was carried out with the support of the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien and the collegial participation of the Freunde und Förderer des deutschen Filmerbes e.V.

Luciano Palumbo