Pola Negri

Heaving Breaths

During her Hollywood heyday and beyond, a be-turbaned Pola Negri sometimes referred to herself in the third person as just “Negri,” and she took her artistry very seriously while also playing up any publicity angle: walking a pet tiger on a leash, dating Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, and engaging in a supposed rivalry with fellow Paramount diva Gloria Swanson that was nearly entirely cooked up by journalists. It is difficult to account for her stardom today because so many of her American silent films are lost, a fate she shares with Swanson. Fourteen or so Negri pictures are missing for now, and so her legacy lies further back with the films she made in Germany with Ernst Lubitsch.

Negri started out as a dancer in her native Poland, but she switched to acting and worked for Max Reinhardt on stage before beginning to star in films. In The Polish Dancer (1917), the 20-year-old Negri has a kind of gross exuberance and a very uninhibited sexuality that would become her early trademark. She had big eyes and an imp-like quality and she was mad for fame; when she wrote a screenplay for herself it was titled Slave to her Senses. Negri has the most important thing an actor can have: concentration, and with her it is so intense that she often seems to go into a trance or a fugue state on screen during emotional scenes.

Negri had worked with Lubitsch on stage and she requested him as her director when she signed with the German studio UFA. In their primitive first collaboration, The Eyes of the Mummy Ma (1918), Negri became so overcome by the final scene with fellow ham Emil Jannings that she hurled herself backwards down a small staircase, a shot that stayed in the film. Their version of Carmen (1918) is still fairly primitive (some extras stare straight into the camera), but Negri is at her most volatile and inventive; she can go from depression to joy in a split second, so that her transitions are so lightning fast that they almost aren’t transitions at all. Negri really knows how to make a gesture land here, whether she is slapping a face or dropping a flower or opening the latch on a very heavy gate with only her teeth, and she makes another striking death fall, backwards and face up for maximum visual impact.

Though Carmen remained Negri’s favorite role, it was Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919) that made her an international star when it was released worldwide as Passion. Her DuBarry is full of life and fun when she is first glimpsed in a hat shop, and there is a nicely blasphemous moment when she raises her arms in lustful joy in front of a crucifix over her bed. Negri’s Carmen is one long flow of behavior, pure impulse, while her DuBarry is more ordinary and calculating, a woman whose face sometimes goes totally blank.

Lubitsch’s later American style, his famous “touch,” is subtle, dry, oblique, but Negri throws everything at you in the two Lubitsch films that made her a star. In spite of her posturing in interviews, she was not a soulful or mysterious figure but thrived on screen as a temperamental and unpredictable woman who holds nothing back from us, including an outsized libido. The early Negri grabs hold of men with such lust that it feels like someone opening windows and letting air in against the concept of ladylike gentility, and Lubitsch observes this with his own much slyer keyhole voyeurism. Negri said that Lubitsch was so funny that she would laugh even when the joke was on her, and she was not noted for having a sense of humor about herself.

In Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920), which was based on a Max Reinhardt production, Negri is again a lower-class vagabond and spends most of her time offering her bared torso to male admirers with a heavily proud look on her face. In The Wildcat (1921), Lubitsch experiments with jigsaw framing and lets Negri run rampant as a mountain girl who rules with whip and gun. The tone here is all over the place but finally settles on farce as Negri’s hoyden finds a table loaded with perfume bottles and douses herself with all of them, a signal of her too muchness and its vulgarity, which Lubitsch observes with some pleasure, though he was starting to feel that she was treating him as a subordinate by this point. A Negri-Lubitsch collaboration called The Flame (1923) is lost aside from a brief scene that shows them working in a very different dramatic and solemn style.

Negri was courted by Chaplin and made a great fuss over when she signed with Paramount, but she wasn’t happy with her first Hollywood vehicles and insisted on Lubitsch as her director for Forbidden Paradise (1924), a sophisticated comedy about Catherine the Great in which Lubitsch controls his elemental star with his precise pacing and editing, which often boils down to a subtle glance from an actor, a cut, and then a subtle glance from another actor, and so forth. This is an ideal role for Negri, for she is a very believable queen and of course her raging libido suits the character of this Russian ruler, and her own real-life attraction to her leading man Rod La Rocque makes itself felt on screen. This was her seventh and last movie with Lubitsch, and it is the pinnacle of their collaboration where his mature urge for indirection touches her, whereas in Carmen and Madame DuBarry it can be argued that Negri is so overwhelming that she is often the one steering the ship of the film. 

Very few of Negri’s silent American films of the 1920s survive, but Marion Davies does a hilarious impersonation of her style in The Patsy (1928): bleary eyes raised upward in funky, self-conscious despair, a face all too suited to sulking. There was often a self-enchantment about Negri that felt unearned, and she alienated fans with her dramatic performance of grief at two funerals for Valentino, the too muchness that made her a star unseemly when not seen on a screen in close-up. (Orson Welles enjoyed calling close-ups “big head of Pola” because that is how Negri referred to her own close-ups.) She sang in her first talkie A Woman Commands (1932), where her accent is fairly heavy and her performance somewhat laborious, and Negri drifted until she found a sure-fire part back in Germany in Mazurka (1935), an all-out mother love melodrama that stranded her in that country under Nazi rule for several unhappy years.

Negri made an unlikely American comeback as a Wagnerian soprano in Adrian clothes for the delightful comedy Hi Diddle Diddle (1943), but she turned down the part of Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls and resisted a move to such character parts. By the mid-1940s she found herself at very loose ends in New York but was rescued by an oil heiress from Texas named Margaret West.

West and Negri lived together in Hollywood for a time and then in West’s hometown of San Antonio, from which Negri emerged a final time to take a role in the Walt Disney film The Moon-Spinners (1964) with Hayley Mills. In her sixties in that movie, Negri seemed fairly unchanged: dramatic, abrupt, given to flashing eyes and high dudgeon, and keeping a cheetah on a leash. She published a book titled Memoirs of a Star in 1970, and mainly kept to herself in San Antonio after West’s death. Approaching death herself in the late 1980s at age 90, she stared at a handsome young doctor who read her chart but did not recognize her name. “You don’t know who I am?” Negri asked, her voice weakened by illness but with a dramatic throb underneath.