Pola Negri and Ernst Lubitsch knew each other from the Berlin stage before they ever made a film together. And, if one is to believe Norman Zierold, Lubitsch got the chance to direct something other than comedies for Ufa due to Pola Negri’s meddling. The two even emigrated around the same time to America to make films in Hollywood. So it seems safe to say that Die Bergkatze (1921) was tailor made by Lubitsch as a vehicle for Negri.
Pola Negri followed Ossi Oswalda as the second quintessential Lubitsch heroine. Lubitsch’s heroines are firebrands whose independence and disregard for popular gender politics subverts the genres genres that these heroines inhabit. Rishka (Pola Negri) in Die Bergkatze is just one in a long line of female iconoclasts who appear in the films of Lubitsch; establishing many of the motifs that will define the “Lubitsch touch” during the most popular period of his career from the thirties to the mid-forties.
Lubitsch’s “dandy Lieutenant” character type really finds its footing in Die Bergkatze in the form of Lt. Alexis (Paul Heidemann). Alexis, and this character type in general, is a send up of aristocratic manners. Alexis is the total antithesis of. Negri’s Rishka and it is their juxtaposition that forms the basis for most of the comedy in Die Bergkatze. This arrangement of the feminine male and the masculine woman falling in love will find its way into Lubitsch’s subsequent films in varying iterations though never with quite the same bravado as in Die Bergkatze.
One of the thrills of digging into Lubitsch’s films made at Ufa is that you get to see the director really lean into his slapstick impulses. Die Bergkatze is classic Lubitsch, a parade of visual gags, pratfalls, and minute moments of intimacy and sentiment. One of the great set pieces in the film is the chase through the fort up and down parallel stair cases. There’s absolutely no logic to this design except to orchestrate this particular sequence of gags. It’s Lubitsch’s gift for production design and his instinct for setting his narratives as modern fairytales that makes the stair case feel perfectly acceptable within the world of the film. Similarly, at the start of Act 4 of Die Bergkatze, Lubitsch serves up one of the great spectacles in his entire career with the “Rishka’s Dream” sequence. This is a scene born out of a children’s book, a fantasia of sorts, where Rishka and Alexis waltz through an icy cave of mirrors to music played by snowmen.
The fairytale aspect to the design and structure of Lubitsch’s German films has to do with the director’s life long interest and admiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s work. So often in Lubitsch’s career are films set in imaginary kingdoms (each resembling Hoffmann’s Prussia) during the early to mid 19th century. Die Puppe (1919) is a literal adaptation by Lubistch of Hoffmann’s work yet one can see echoes of these images and designs in Die Austernprinzessin (1919) and Die Bergkatze. Both Lubitsch and Hoffmann had an understanding with regards to the inability for different social classes to ever really intertwine within autocratic cultures. Kings, Queens, Princes, Princesses and their ilk are all fodder for the social satires these two artists veiled in their good humor and spectacular stories.
Die Bergkatze is essential to charting the aesthetic growth and development of Lubitsch just as much as it was responsible for defining Pola Negri’s brand as a Hollywood starlet. Die Bergkatze is, in many respects, a touchstone for silent film culture. It’s a shame that the original intertitles have been lost, nonetheless, the restored print from 2000 still looks incredible today.
