“Fear the unrelenting wrath of the Buddha!”

The lovely O-Take-San (Lil Dagover, dressed up, as with all of the German actors playing Japanese characters, in full facial make-up and flowery regalia) escapes the desires of the evil Buddhist Monk (Georg John, there’s an Asian name for you) to make her the priestess of his temple (including by insidiously setting up for her disapproving high lord father to be shamed and forced to commit hara-kiri, while continuously raising fear in the heart of O-Take-San if she doesn’t do what he wants with righteous proclamations like the one above) by working as a geisha for visiting Western officers. As the tendrils of the Monk’s plans close tighter around her, she desperately pines for the return of the European officer (Niels Prien) who she had fallen in love with, had married her to save her from the monk and who she bore a child with from their relationship…

I’ve never seen any adaptions, opera or film, or read the original short story of “Madame Butterfly”, so I have no way of knowing how loyal Lang’s silent film is (apparently the second film translation, the first one made in America in 1915) to the source material. On top of that, while the Oriental sets, production and costume design are fairly impressive in their period piece design (it feels like another tent-pole studio production, which it appears the lucky Lang dropped directly in the middle of right from the beginnings of his career – though perhaps not always quite as fortuitous for the beaten cast and crew who had to constantly face his sadistic wrath), the fact that they were made by Germans without a Japanese cinema from which to draw their impressions from at the time likely makes it fairly suspect on the level of verisimilitude (though I can’t seem to locate any irate Japanese reviewers on the internet screaming bloody racist murder – guess it helps for a film to be a hundred years old for slipping under the radar), while still mightily ambitious.

With much of the narrative suspense derived from poor O-Take-San being forced to marry for exactly 999 days before she can be free, then requiring her well-to-do European husband (who has a wife back at home and is only tangentially concerned about the plight of the Oriental wife he left behind) to return after a certain number of years before she can fall back under control of the Buddhists (and the evil-eyed monk), it’s understandable why Lang was drawn to directing the tale (assuming that was what the original was all about), with the theme of an individual struggling against what appear nearly insurmountable forces both societal and bureaucratical (and law-based) already taking root in his work (fully blossoming with the arrival of his major collaborator, co-writer and wife, Thea Von Harbou within a year).

While I always approve of the idea of drawing up religious figures as duplicitous and self-servingly calculating, you do have to wonder about a bunch of Westerners writing a film about a culture they knew little about (and from mostly a distance in 1919) that has as it’s main villain an evil monk. Saying that, Lang (and perhaps the original story itself) at least tries to balance it a bit by having the European officer a fairly spineless wimp who, while willing to indulge in a fantasy of love with a geisha while on travel, isn’t much up for shaking up the comfort of his existence at home by taking responsibility for her (and his child’s) terrible circumstances. Ultimately, it takes his wife to stand up and demand it.

No matter how celebrated the story is, in all its adapted glories, if it concludes as this version does, with the Westerner imperialists showing up to save the day and our geisha removing herself ‘heroically’ as a burden via the titular means, it’s at best iffy in its overall perspective… and not a particularly shining example of a cross-cultural handshake.

Full film available (as of now) on youtube: https://youtu.be/EMaBzb243t8

Buck A Review   adaptation   fritz lang   german cinema   madame butterfly