26 | Sight&Sound | May 2020
WIDE ANGLE- Romeo and Juliet in the Snow
Ernst Lubitsch, Germany
Ernst Lubitsch’s famous lightness of touch
turns Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy to
timeless comedy in Romeo and Juliet in the
Snow, a rural German version with sausage
gags to match. Here, in the apothecary scene,
the despairing teens ask for “Poison for two,
please,” in silent film’s best-ever intertitle. - One Week
Eddie Cline/Buster Keaton, US
Buster Keaton branched out on his own in - One Week was a stunning debut, with
its finely honed physical gags and adorable
young married couple building their first
home from a kit (one week being the time
the job is supposed to take). A flat-pack
house? What could possibly go wrong? - The Life of the Party
Joseph Henabery, US
The sight of Roscoe Arbuckle, one of the great
silent comedians, hanging by his fingernails
in a film called The Life of the Party, is horribly
ironic given the terrible scandal that beset him
only a year after this spritely comedy was made.
You may recognise the building he is falling
off from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923). - Hamlet
Svend Gade/Heinz Schall, Denmark
We might think of women playing the
great male Shakespearean roles a a recent
phenomenon, but in 1920 the Danish
actress Asta Nielsen played Hamlet as a girl
disguised as a boy by her mother – it makes the
Ophelia/Hamlet relationship interesting!
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