Not all heroes wear capes. But when they do, few perfect the ensemble with a jester’s hat trimmed in jingle bells. Still, Peter Carstairs, the debonair savior of distressed damsels played here by Henry Edwards in a pan-European production from 1928, dresses up as a court fool to carouse in Riviera nightclubs. And he wears it well. But why? “Because nobody can beat The Joker—and Peter Carstairs wins every play!”
The Joker, a production of the Danish Nordisk company, with a German director and two notable British leading men, was likewise conceived as a can’t-lose proposition. With German and Danish money, a decadent French milieu, an attractive intercontinental cast, and a successful British play as source material, this film was played as Nordisk’s trump card.
The story, taken from Noel Scott’s West End hit of the same name, has Carstairs, a.k.a. The Joker, intervening when a pair of innocent aristocratic sisters fall victim to a blackmail racket, perpetrated by a villainous lawyer.
The setting has been transferred from well-heeled London to the upper-class ballrooms and casinos of Nice at Carnival time. Director Georg Jacoby crosscuts judiciously between footage of the elaborate parades or the glittering seafront, shot on location at the very last minute before the film’s premiere in March 1928, and his fast-paced narrative action. The nightclub scenes do not stint, filling the screen with glamorous gaiety and a splash of champagne-addled debauchery. While most of the interiors were shot at Nordisk in Copenhagen, the vast Savoy ballroom was recreated in a Berlin studio. A team of chorus girls in sequined top hats dance-kick their legs high while partygoers raise their glasses and allow the inevitable tangle of paper streamers to tie them closer to that night’s partner in passion.
Across town, the revelers in a more sordid tavern witness a shocking accident through bleary eyes, there are street brawls in the afternoon sun, and late-night confrontations involving handguns and poisoned champagne in lavishly furnished villas. It’s all such a self-consciously cinematic spectacle that it is only fitting in the end that the shyster is exposed on the nightclub dancefloor by a comedian playing a film director who dazzles him into submission with a Klieg light. The Joker offers such an abundance of pictorial pleasures it can legitimately claim offspring in bankable modern-
day franchises such as Mission: Impossible and especially, James Bond.
The Bond comparison is apt. Nordisk executives were probably targeting the UK market in particular with The Joker, in the hopes of finding a British buyer for the ailing business. And UK film fans should have been easily persuaded. Edwards, playing the gentleman gambler who truly is a gentleman, had been one of Britain’s most popular screen stars and directors since the First World War. Audiences loved his charm, his good looks —in particular, his eyebrows—as well as his energetic style. Having acted on stage in London and New York, his first screen work was undertaken at the successful Hepworth studios and for Turner Films, the British company founded by former Vitagraph Girl Florence Turner.
A decade or more of Edwards’s on-screen heroics and romantic storylines was bolstered in the public imagination by the real-life love story of his 1924 marriage to Chrissie White, another Hepworth alumnus, and frequent costar. Such was their combined allure, they could genuinely claim to be Britain’s answer to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks—but their marriage lasted, until Edwards’s death in 1952. Despite their acclaim, much of their work is now lost: the couple had diligently stored copies of their films in the attic of their house, an attractive property with a traditional straw-thatched roof. Alerted to the dangers of this arrangement during the Second World War, amid fears of German bombardment, the couple just as diligently cremated their life’s work in a garden bonfire. Edwards plays Carstairs as a wholesome kind of party animal: chirpy, chivalrous, confident, and always ready to buy a round of drinks for the room.
Miles Mander, however, provoked an altogether different response. Dissolute villainy was his stock-in-trade, and audiences thrilled to see him stoop to yet lower acts of wickedness. He was, in a very literal sense, to the manor born, yet instead of converting his expensive education into the expected career as a businessman or member of Parliament (the route taken by his older brother), Mander deviated from tradition. First, he tried out aviation, which led him to serve in the RAF during WWI, and then he dabbled in sheep farming with his uncle in far-off New Zealand.
It was the early 1920s when he entered the film business, but not until the middle of the decade that he found his footing, playing increasingly dastardly, often drunken, characters. His role as the degenerate husband in Alfred Hitchcock’s debut 1925 The Pleasure Garden set the tone. By 1928, the trade press could barely contain their excitement at the prospect of Mander playing “once again a blackmailing rake” (The Bioscope), reassuring readers that “he has not entirely lost his screen reputation” (Kinematograph Weekly). Here he is introduced sleeping off the excesses of the night before in an advanced state of dishevelment, before being humiliated when his lover Lulu abandons him for a richer man. He is shadowed on his escapades by manservant Jonny, a gruff goon who stoops to do a filthy beast’s dirtiest business; it is the final silent film performance of a prolific Danish actor, Aage Hertel, most familiar to modern audiences as the Witch Judge in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922).
This combination had a precedent. Mander and Edwards had recently collaborated, along with Jacoby, on The Fake (1927), a film made in London that likewise pit the two stars’ contrasting personas against each other. Edwards’s sincere brow versus Mander’s rakish moustache. Both films shared a leading lady, German actress Elga Brink. In The Joker she plays the more intrepid of the two sisters who, warily at first, falls for the irresistible charms of Edwards then proves to be fairly resourceful with a champagne cork, if not a revolver, in a crisis. Her presence is not so much of a surprise; she was married at the time to Jacoby and appeared in many of his silents. Other prominent roles were taken by French actors to broaden the film’s potential appeal across the continent. Jacoby, who directed more than 150 crowd-pleasing genre films in his career, spanning the silent and sound years, makes a memorable appearance as a private detective called Pippolet, who dresses up as a woman for an undercover assignment before abruptly unmasking himself as “the blackmailers’ horror!”
It’s that lightness of step, the wink of good humor, that makes The Joker such an enduring pleasure. The more melodramatic aspects of the plot fail to weigh down a film that channels the joie de vivre of its titular hero. And yet, in the film business, just as at the casino tables, there is no such thing as a sure-fire certainty. The Joker was well, if not excitedly, received in Britain—but there were no takers for Nordisk, which fell into bankruptcy just a few months after the film’s release, before reemerging in a new form as a producer of sound films. The Joker became a casualty of this transition and has proved frustratingly elusive until this 2021 restoration by the Danish Film Institute.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius