Sodom und Gomorrha

The film Queen of Sin and the Spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrah can be perceived in many ways. As a great inflationary film, as a European film of the future Michael Curtiz, as a parallel to all other European inflationary films, as a moral, as a biblical mirror... And as the unfulfilled peak of the Viennese career of Anny Ondra and Karel Lamač. Yet there is also the perspective of a trio of friends who came from Hungarian cinema - Manó Kertész Kaminer, Svetislav Petrovic and Ilonka Kovács. They became Mihály Kertész, Ivan Petrovich, and Lucy Doraine with the help of a move to the German language region. Ivan soon went his own way and we can know him as Ondra, Novotná or Ita Rina’s partner. But Doraine and Kertész were married by 1923, and her career up to that time was linked exclusively to his work. After the divorce, she went to live with Emelko in Munich, and although they both went to Hollywood, they never worked together again. That is why this spectacle can be perceived as the swan song of a career spent together. There is something symbolic in the failure of Doraine in the sound film and her transformation into Lot's wife - if only out of sheer fear at the thought of failure. Yet Queen of Sin and the Spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrah is certainly not a passive film, as instead, it revels in all the attractions that were inherent in Dr. Mabuse's generation, and that is something magnificent. The costumes, the decadence, and of course the sex woven into every single frame. The iconic Doraine costume with its rich spatial mosaic with beads goes into something as if from insect life, but it is all the more wonderful for it. All the more so because before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah she wore a very similar costume of intricate feathered construction, thus linking the two characters. (27.03.2013)