Giovanni Pastrone’s ground-breaking epic Cabiria has been one of the best films I’ve watched so far as a part of this podcast, so I was looking forward to seeing another film that he directed. I had no idea what to expect from this film, as even its title, The Fire, is vague. A film with that title could be about nearly anything. As it turns out, this one is about an incendiary relationship between a poet and a painter.
The original Italian title of the film is Il Fuoco (la Favilla - la Vampa - la Cenere), which translates to The Fire (the Spark, the Blaze, the Ash). That’s a solid title, as the film depicts a relationshp that grows from a spark of mutual interest into a blazing inferno of passion, and ultimately ends up in ashen ruins. In other words, the fire is a metaphor, which makes sense for a film about a poet.
I neither loved nor hated this film. I may have felt somewhat letdown due to my own expectations, as I thought this would be another epic-scale action drama along the lines of Cabiria, but that’s my own fault for pigeonholing Pastrone as a director who only made epics. No director makes only epics. Even D.W. Griffith made small-scale dramas.
The story is fairly simple. The main character, a painter of humble background, heads out to a lake to paint, where he encounters a woman writing poetry. They hit it off, and start spending time together. She’s wealthy and married, but living a wild life, and he abandons his mother to move into her mansion. They have a passionate affair, until one morning he wakes up after a bender to find the mansion abandoned. She’s moved out. He’s inconsolable, and eventually tracks her down at a high society party, only to find her with her husband. She pretends not to know him, and he has a nervous breakdown. The film ends with him in a nuthouse folding paper animals, while she continues to enjoy her wealthy lifestyle.
The Fire would pair well on a double feature with a A Fool There Was, as both deal with the then-popular topic of the female vampire, who seduces and discards men, leaving them broken-down shells of who they once were. I enjoyed A Fool There Was more, partly because Theda Bara made for a far more intriguing lead than Pina Menichelli, who plays the vampire in this one. I did enjoy the fire metaphor and imagery in this film, which made for clever, and at times almost surreal, visual effects.
This film was a little bit tricky to track down. I couldn’t find it on any sort of physical media, and it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube. The only place I was able to find it online is at the Internet Archive, where you can watch it, too.
Next I’m watching: Sold for Marriage [1916], directed by Christy Cabanne.
The Fire (Apr. 7, 1916)