The Wildcat

Today’s weather is threatening the occasional shower of rain, but the screening of The Wildcat will still be going ahead on Mount Drury tonight. It’s an 8:00pm start, Saturday 29 October. You are welcome to come early for a picnic dinner, and I highly recommend grabbing a takeaway curry from the Bombay Brassiere restaurant (at the last roundabout on Maunganui Road, right next door to Mt Drury). Be sure to bring warm clothes and a rug to sit on, plus a rain coat just in case a sneaky shower creeps up on us.

It’s free entry, however a $5 donation is suggested to cover the cost of the projection equipment.

Review of The Wildcat by Fernando F. Croce
Ernst Lubitsch started his career in broad slapstick, and a gleam of rowdy humor never fully left his work. The kind of wildness that often peeks through the tuxedoed elegance of his more well-known films, flows freely and steadily all through The Wildcat. Proudly proclaiming itself "a grotesque in four acts," the picture takes place in a snow-covered kingdom that could provide the setting for one of Erich von Stroheim's scabrous fairytales, had Lubitsch already not made the territory his own early on by having the departure of uniformed lothario Lieutenant Alexis leave behind a crowd of weeping women to miss his "services." On his way to marry the daughter of the commander of the local fortress, Alexis is held up by a gang of mountain thieves led by spirited tomboy Rischka (Pola Negri), who jumps into action and leaves Alexis in his underpants in the ice, promptly smitten.

A film of merrily shifting angles and proportions, The Wildcat delights in raucous mock-opera and lyrical phantasmagoria: The palace, decked with corkscrewing staircases and what look like oversized, art deco question marks, is practically a knowing parody of Caligari expressionism, and in the midst of a mission to infiltrate the fortress, both the outlaws and the guards take time off to get caught up in the rhythms of the waltz emanating from inside. Lubitsch blithely explores sets and frame sizes as if playing with toy soldiers, yet, characteristically, the film is more than an effervescent confection: Beneath the froth is a sharp view of social conventions, as Rischka and Alexis are enchantingly united in dream (spirits rise out of their sleeping bodies for a twirl scored to a full orchestra of snowmen) only to be separated by the reality of class divide.

It's a tribute to Lubitsch's comic genius that his frenetic gags here brim with as much sly subversion as his later visions of glittering worldliness. Marriage is skewered, hilariously and witheringly, with the couple outfitted in a pair of handcuffs before sitting down in the snow to chow on borscht.