From Lipno, Poland to HOLLYWOODLAND
What are the things that make Pola great?
Her resilience and tenacity for one, her incredible seven film collaboration with the great German film director Ernst Lubitsch, and the fact that she was the first European film star to sign a contract at a major Hollywood film studio, namely Paramount Pictures.
Pola stars in "The Wild Cat/Die Bergkatze, a 1921 German silent film directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
Pola Negri in “Hotel Imperial” (1927,) a silent film directed by pioneer filmmaker Mauritz Stiller. The film was made at the Famous Players-Lasky studio and distributed by Paramount Pictures.
During WWI, an aristocratic woman (Pola Negri) poses as a chambermaid to seek out her sister’s killer.
“Hotel Imperial” was produced by Erich Pommer, known for creating several of the greatest German Expressionist silents, such as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), “Metropolis'“ (1927), as well as “Blue Angel” (1930).
Who wouldn’t want to marry you Pola?
Feisty, unpredictable and extremely ambitious, Pola “was a startlingly beautiful woman, with skin as delicately white as fine porcelain, jet black hair and flashing dark-green eyes.
Her off-screen life was more tempestuous than any role she ever played, and although she often insisted that she wishes only to be left alone, she could shrewdly maneuver her love affairs and feuds into avalanches of personal publicity.” - Albin Krebs, The New York Times.
Der gelbe Schein/The Yellow Ticket/The Devil’s Pawn (Germany, 1918) directed by Victor Janson, Eugen Illés and Paul Ludwig Stein.
Photo Source: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library
Following its release, less than two weeks after Armistice Day, the film played to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Its success propelled Pola Negri’s career into becoming one of the greatest actresses of the silent era.
“This print of a lost film was discovered by the late Jan Zaalberg in a private collection in Holland. Had the Nazis found its hiding place under the floorboards, they would have seized it for its Jewish subject matter. As it was, they almost destroyed it when they flooded Holland at the end of the war. Although badly water-damaged, enough survives to tell the story." - Kevin Brownlow.
The restoration of the film in 2013 was supervised by Brownlow, who in 2010 received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, alongside Francis Ford Coppola and Jean-Luc Godard.