"The Crucified" is a relatively poor film on which to conclude "A Season of Classic Films," a series of Czech silent films unearthed from the archives for streaming. Like the prior film shown, "Gypsies" (Cikáni) (1922), it's based on a novel, and neither story is especially good. This is one of those that track characters over many war-swept years, to the point that they're more figures in some grandiose picture of a past era (in this case, circa the 1848 revolutions) than they are characters to care for or be interested in. A less long-winded Victor Hugo, perhaps--I don't know. Apparently, it covers (not investigate or comment on in any interesting manner, though, mind you) issues of anti-Semitism, which is rather oddly done by showing perhaps the most crucifixes I've ever seen on film--and I've ranked 60 Dracula movies. This is compounded by the boy-turned-man of the narrative being terrorized by the image of his Jewish mother being crucified by a mob. Eventually, he falls in love with his mother's double, as played by the same actress, I believe, and who is also his cousin--which is still not as incestuous as the first-cousin romance in another Czech silent film, "An Old Gangster's Molls" (Milenky starého kriminálníka) (1927).
Whereas "Gypsies" was so well plotted in a novelistic manner that the story seemed secondary, however, "The Crucified" is doomed by a relative incompetence in storytelling. It begins promisingly (if commonly) enough with the framing device of the book being read (although it also includes the ghost of the author narrating the book to the reader, but whatever), and there is occasionally some nicely done low-key lighting or tinting effects. But, this is also a picture that includes title cards telling us such plot points as that a boy has awakened and run into the woods--you know, instead of showing us that. It's a plot that jumps months to years between scenes and largely explaining textually how she did this or that happened to him. Quite dull. It doesn't help that the acting is uniformly bad, either (or that as with every other modern score for these films, with the exception of that for "Gypsies," the musical accompaniment is awful; after some repetitive beeps early on, I muted this one).
I didn't know anything about the author behind the novel that this film is based on, but it seems we were unlucky with this adaptation. For the writer, Jakub Arbes, reportedly also wrote a novella involving the transplanting of Isaac Newton's brain and precedes H. G. Wells with time travel. Now that's the film adaptation I wish I'd seen.
