Michael (1924)

This German-made silent by the great Danish director Carl-Theodor Dreyer has been available for a while now, but I only caught up with the most recent restoration via a German television broadcast.  I probably should have held out for the English-subtitled version since the film was not all that cinematic and had very "talky" intertitles (my German is hardly fluent).  Still I was able to get the gist of the story and a fairly unusual one for the time it was, insofar as it strongly suggested a homosexual relationship between a famous artist and his aspiring-artist protege and model.  The former was strongly played by Benjamin Christensen, himself the leading Danish director pre-Dreyer, and the latter by Walter Slezak, an Austrian actor whom I previously only knew from his Hollywood parts in the 40s and 50s; as a pretty, thin young man he was virtually unrecognizable from the mustachioed heavy he became.  Between the two comes a desirable Russian princess who is having her portrait done, but the elder artist (who previously only painted men) can not capture her essence; it takes the skill of the younger one (who apparently swings both ways) to portray her eyes.  He falls for her and with the selfishness of youth forsakes his mentor, even whilst the latter is on his death bed; the last shot of the young man is of his being comforted by his lover, wrapped up in an elaborate Chinese blanket (to my eye he looked here like an over-upholstered armchair, which is perhaps not the best message to take away from what is meant to be a classic film).  I will give it another go in due course, but doubt that I will find it any more wonderful.