Svengali Reviews

By most accounts, this is a psychological drama with numerous horror film trappings but Svengali never finds a comfortable setting. Loosely based on George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, this film adaptation sees John Barrymore take on the titular role of an obsessive hypnotist with his sights set on a nude model, Trilby. Barrymore is deliciously hammy in the role, and the film has a few moments of divine inspiration, but it’s mostly just amateur-hour.

To have been truly effective, Svengali needed a strong actress in the role of Trilby to sell the overarching drama. Marian Marsh is not that actress. Almost cringe inducing and precocious in the first few moments, she finally settles into a more endurable mode once the darkness creeps into the plot. But Barrymore blows her off the screen, and Marsh’s presence never provides a visible or logical reason for so many different men to be obsessed with her.

While clearly in debt to German Expressionist cinema, Svengali is mostly all look and no emotional excavation. Unlike, say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which utilized its topsy-turvy sets to describe the main character’s tenuous emotional state, Svengali gives its characters a pleasing set and no thoughts or emotions to play out. Only on a few occasions towards the end does the film manage to scrap together some interesting ideas. A late-night psychic call-out from Svengali to Trilby sticks in the mind. Svengali is across town, but calls out to her, and the camera pans out from his apartment clear across the rooftops before resting on the sleeping Trilby. This sequence lingers in the mind for its imagination and for displaying the obsessive nature at the heart of the story. But that is Svengali in summary: brilliant tiny moments surrounded by wooden and indifferent film-making.