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Audrey Kupferberg: The Ancient Law

In the mid 1980s, an archivist at the Deutsche Kinemathek worked on the restoration of a 1923 silent film by the esteemed director E.A. Dupont.  The film is titled DAS ALTE GESETZ which is translated as THE ANCIENT LAW.  It tells the dramatic story of Baruch, a young shtetl Jew, the son of a Rabbi, who leaves his family and community, seeking a secular career as a stage actor. 

The restoration of the film was complex.  First, the censorship certificate with the original text of the title cards was located, and then 35mm nitrate prints from the same negative source were located in a handful of European archives.  All these years later, with the support from the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts, THE ANCIENT LAW is just now made available in a crisp digital restoration from Flicker Alley.

E.A. Dupont was a renowned columnist in Germany when he entered the motion picture industry in 1917 as a screenwriter.  Later, as a director, he was one of the outstanding proponents of the German expressionist style and one of the forces behind the development of the sound film.  At one point, the American trade journal Film Daily listed him as a nominee for one of the ten best film directors.  He had an up and down career.  His most known films are classics today:   VARIETY (1925), MOULIN ROUGE (1928), and PICCADILLY (1929). 

As so many other film artists from Germany, Dupont, a Jew, was forced to abandon his homeland in 1933 with the rise of Hitler.  After a stint in Great Britain, he made films in Hollywood.  Most agree that his peak period was the silent and early sound era.

The star of THE ANCIENT LAW, Ernst Deutsch, also a Jew, abandoned his Austrian roots in 1933.  He, too, made films and appeared in stage productions in many countries.  His most recognizable role by modern audiences is in the Carol Reed masterpiece, THE THIRD MAN, where he plays opposite Orson Welles as the mousy Baron Kurtz.

A misconception already is arising about the plot of THE ANCIENT LAW, and corrections must be made!  Viewers and critics are comparing the plot to that of THE JAZZ SINGER.  One viewer on imdb.com even wrote that this film is the basis for THE JAZZ SINGER.  Absolutely not!  THE JAZZ SINGER film of 1927 has its roots in the short story “The Day of Atonement” which was published in Everybody’s Magazine in January 1922, well-before THE ANCIENT LAW.  It was written by Samson Raphaelson (who also wrote the 1925 play).  Raphaelson was my mentor, almost a grandfather to me till his death in the early 1980s.  He would be foaming at the mouth to read that his work was based on THE ANCIENT LAW.  He was so caring about his literary art that he once exclaimed he would horse-whip an editor for placing a comma where it did not belong on a piece he was having published.

So, enjoy this moving drama of a young man’s journey from the shtetl to Viennese high society, his romance with acting and his conflicted loyalty to his religion and community.  In one memorable scene, he takes a scissors to his sidelocks—his payos—to cross a symbolic bridge into the secular world.  THE ANCIENT WORLD has many such emotional scenes.  It is a significant addition to our available silent film repertoire.  It is a work of art by Dupont and a band of incredibly talented film artists during Germany’s short-lived, free-wheeling Weimar Republic.

Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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