Improbable lessons for today from a propagandist film of a century ago

What can we possibly learn from a propagandist film made in 1919, after World War I, by a white American Southerner? The kind who had a Confederate flag jammed in the barrel of a rifle at his doorstep? For years after it released, Irvin Willat’s silent Behind the Door had the reputation of being a film that shocked because of the brutal fashion in which an enemy officer was depicted meeting his end. “A climax of terrific power which is so horrible that it may sicken,” one review said. 

In its recent second run, following a laborious restoration in 2017, the film’s post-war patriotic edges have worn away and instead it holds a mirror to our troubled historical moment. The tale of its tragic hero Captain Krug (Hobart Bosworth), taken from a short story by Gouverneur Morris, becomes cautionary rather than one worthy of emulation. We find him old and forlorn in the opening as he returns to a ramshackle home in rural Maine where the sight of a dirty handkerchief — “her handkerchief” — turns him into a tearful heap. 

Flashbacks show Krug in happier times as a retired soldier running a taxidermy shop, stuffing and stitching things back together. He is deeply in love with Alice (Jane Novak) but her father Matthew Morse, a wealthy banker, disapproves. So when news arrives of America joining the war, the banker uses it to fuel suspicions over Krug’s German ancestry. Spontaneous nationalism, intolerance and moral panic lead to a gory confrontation, which is more unsettling as a sequence than that much-touted climax.

Townsmen who didn’t think twice about sending weepy toddlers with damaged toys to Krug so he could fix them now stood outside his shop with balled-up fists. Suddenly he is a German “Hun”. He appeals to them that he, and his father before him, had served the nation. The mob does not care. But didn’t his mother come from Germany, they spit. This stirs Krug’s own patriotism and he announces he will fight anyone who challenges his Americanness before enlisting to fight the Germans. It is only after Krug overpowers the mob with raging-bull force that the townsmen admit defeat and accept him. 

Who belongs and who doesn’t, and who gets to decide on matters of inclusion? In such arbitrary othering, the burden always falls on the “foreigner” to prove one’s allegiance to the state or wear gratitude to the nation on one’s sleeve. Krug, sadly, gives in to this and continues the cycle of violence. He marries Alice and sails away for the war. He and Alice, who joins the ship’s nursing unit, survive an attack by a German submarine but she is taken prisoner and he is left in the waters. The two never meet again.

Krug is back to leading a ship months later and, as circumstances will comfortably have it, his crew overpowers the same enemy submarine and takes its commander Brandt (a leering Wallace Beery) prisoner. Tellingly, the cloud of suspicion never really leaves Krug. When he decides to question Brandt behind closed doors (thus the film’s title), his crew still wonders whether the ancestry he shares with the German will test his loyalty to America. 

After coaxing out in great detail (gratuitous detail even on the part of the filmmaker) the truth about Alice’s final days on the submarine, Krug is maddened into performing a gruesome revenge. The good German (the “American” German) eliminates the evil one. Ultimately, though, as he cries out helplessly, “it doesn’t bring her back.” Nothing is fair in love and war. In a tolerant world, he might have continued to spruce up toys and Alice might have run a chain of successful dispensaries.

Willat, a cinematographer-turned-director, shows his flair with the camera in intertitles that are superimposed on sweeping hills and high waters. The film was screened recently in Hyderabad during an annual workshop by the Film Heritage Foundation. Its restorers, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, put Willat’s original tints of red, yellow and green back in the frames. They also used shots from a Russian copy of the film wherever American reels were lost. The restoration itself is a reminder of the magic of colours and countries coming together.

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in