Works featuring "displaced persons" (21)
Featured image for Raja Harishchandra

Raja Harishchandra

Fragment of a poor print, so of no great entertainment value - but hey, any story where a king and his royal family get bumrushed to the boonies can't be all bad.

Featured image for Carmen [1913]

Carmen [1913]

A fragment of a 1913 Italian-Spanish production of the story of Carmen, minus the ending, and partly in poor condition, thus probably only of interest to Carmen enthusiasts.

Although an opening title declares the film to be: “The famous work of PROSPER MÉRIMÉE faithfully brought to the screen from the book”, like Carmen herself the film's faithfulness is questionable. It actually closely follows the opera's adaptation, even quoting lyrics of the musical numbers. There is one important exception: the opera portrayed José as an upright soldier dragged to disgrace and dishonor by the charms of Carmen. This film retains the backstory of José given in the book: he joined the military as a lamster from a bloody quarrel (possibly deadly - victim's fate is not revealed). So José used a military uniform to cover a roguish past, and his acts of violent rage began long before he met Carmen. That alone might make this film fragment notable to Carmen enthusiasts.

Sources: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carmen_(1913).webm, “Carmen on Screen: An Annotated Filmography and Bibliography” https://books.google.com/books?id=Yl3cwxX2s_oC&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Featured image for The Black Circle (Il circolo nero)

The Black Circle (Il circolo nero)

Peculiar piece of work this one... Starts like a Fantômas-style gentleman-thief/mysterious criminal ring flick. When Our Deadbeat Hero stiffs The Villain with a gambling debt, Deadbeat is given a choice: join The Black Circle or die. Just when he is initiated, the scene immediately switches from Italy to a Chicago wool business - for 16 seconds - then to sheep Out West - for 12.5 seconds - then back to Deadbeat and the Black Circle. Deadbeat is assigned a theft and accepts. But then he sees a picture of his Mom and punks out.

So, after only 17.5 minutes of zero action, less than halfway, The Black Circle crime story ends, and Deadbeat loses his cherished greasy hairstyle (just a bit) to go Out West, where men are men, to join the cow-boys doing whatever it is that cow-boys do with sheep, in a new spaghetti Western romance story: A Fistful of Sheep.

Clearly, footage is missing. Nonetheless, it's hard to conceive of any footage that could credibly link these two stories. Peculiar piece of work this one...