Svengali!

"Svengali" is a word I've known all my life I suppose -- the name for a ruthless man who holds sway over a young woman for his benefit alone. I had never had occasion to explore its origins nor see any of the several films featuring the word as title. Now at long last I have fixed that oversight and to exceedingly good effect. The Svengali I am looking at is the 1931 movie from the Warner Brothers group which casts John Barrymore as the notorious hypnotic musician and Marian Marsh as his beautiful victim "Trilby". Trilby is in fact the title of the novel by George Du Maurier from the which the essence of this story is taken. 

In the movie we first meet Svengali and his today assistant Gecko when a naive woman by the name of Madame Honori comes to confess her love for Svengali who rejects her despite her having thrown over her  husband. Apparently her refusal of a money settlement gives us the insight into the rapacious nature of Svengali who has clearly had relations with Honori and now utterly rejects the desperate woman. We have established our villain and Barrymore is one of the most pure cads I've seen on screen. The story shifts to a gaggle of painters including Taffy and Laird and the young Billee. They are friends of a sort with Svengali but his cleverness is always evident. Enter a beautiful model named Trilby and both Billee and Svengali are at once taken with her. She loves Billee and they are a couple until he finds her modeling nude for a group of painters and in a fit of puritanical jealousy rejects her. (At this point I lost all sympathy for Billee who shows himself to be a self-absorbed prat.) She falls under the hypnotic sway of Svengali who from that time is in control of her body and soul. The story shifts forward in time and we find that Svengali has made Trilby into a successful singing star. But because he is hounded by the relentless Billee Svengali throws over that career and the two fall into less successful venues. It seems the hold Svengali has on Trilby is damaging to them both and the denoument is surprisingly dour for a movie of the period. 

The thing that attracted me instantly to the film was the way Barrymore plays Svengali. He's magnificent in the role, giving the villain an evil charm. And when he exerts his hypnotic will on Trilby from across the city it is one of the scariest and most compelling sequences I've seen in a classic horror flick. I kept thinking that the compelling connection between Svengali and his slave Trilby is exactly what Tod Browning's Dracula should have been. In point of fact Barrymore as Svengali looks more like Stoker's Dracula than the urbane Bela Lugosi, though that's a quibble. I've seen Barrymore in his silent horror outing as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it's remarkable, but he's won me over completely with this outstanding performance. 

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