Knight Without Armour Film Review

I was surprised to find out that this sprawling epic film that takes place in Russia before and after the 1917 Revolution was not written by Pasternak. It has mild echoes of Dr. Zhivago about it though written twenty-years before that book. It is in fact written by James Hilton, the author of Goodbye, Mr. Chips starring Robert Donat, who appears in this one as well. Mr. Chips was two years after this film and 39 Steps was two years before for Donat. His career was hindered by illness throughout limiting the number of films he made. In this one they had to stop production for a month for him to get better. Only his co-star Marlene Dietrich saved him from being fired. She was a top star at the time with a series of classic films usually under the direction of Josef von Sternberg. Which makes it surprising that I had never heard of this film before coming across it recently. Both Donat and Dietrich were huge at the time (though this film flopped at the box office and for a while Dietrich was tagged as box office poison). They make an interesting pair here with romance flowing from every pore of Dietrich's body and those lustrous eyes while Donat never overplayed a scene in his life. Cool, English and impeccably polite. Dietrich is pure glamor in this film even when she is supposed to be disguised as a peasant. I kept telling her, throw some dirt on your face, take off the make-up. But did she listen? People don't come to see Dietrich with a dirty face.

The film produced by Alexander Korda has a political perspective that is fairly neutral - Czarist Russia, the Bolsheviks and the White Russians are all villains in this. Probably the best way to play it. They are nearly all merciless brutes putting prisoners out to be machine gunned down with no concern about guilt or innocence. Donat (Fothergill) is an expert on Russia and speaks the language fluently. He travels to Russia in 1913 to translate books into Russian. The British Secret Service asks him to work for them - take on the identity of a Russian and infiltrate the revolutionaries to report how it is going. Dietrich (Princess Alexandria) returns to Russia again (she was Catherine the Great three years before in the magnificent Scarlett Empress). She isn't the Czarina but is among the nobility and her father is a General who is in constant fear that the Revolutionaries will assassinate him. They try and the bomb thrower ends up dying in Donat's apartment and Donat is arrested and sent to Siberia.

He is there till the Revolution sets him free and his co-prisoner is made a Commissar and makes Donat his Adjutant. The Bolsheviks have begun their killing of the bourgeoise. There is a terrific scene when Dietrich wakes up in her large comfy bed in her Dacha out in the country. She rings for her servants. Rings again. They have all left. It is no longer safe being a servant to Royalty. She walks to her lake and when she turns around a crowd of peasants have come to kill her. "Come and get me" she taunts them. Donat gets her away and they are on the run - back and forth between the Reds and Whites - getting caught - escaping and making their way across Russia to freedom. A good adventure story with a large cast. If it had been shot in color, it would have been much better, I expect. The director is Belgium born Jacques Feyder, who primarily directed in France but made the occasional foray to Hollywood. He had directed Greta Garbo in Anna Christie and in MGM's last silent film, The Kiss.