6 out of 10
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When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
Having just watched it last night in a revival house (the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, CA, I feel compelled to award it an 8.5--possibly even a 9. This print even had the final scene, in which the Prince Regent creates Nathan a baron, in beautifully preserved/restored Technicolor.
Considering when this movie was released, I think 20th Century (not yet merged with Fox) showed a lot of courage to bring it out then--the year after Hitler came to power.
When I pointed out to my 17-year-old son that the villain Ledrantz was acted by Boris Karloff, famous for playing Frankenstein's Monster, he whispered to me, "He's a monster in this movie too."
The Stanford paired The House of Rothschild with another Arliss film, the delightful comedy The Working Man.
Considering when this movie was released, I think 20th Century (not yet merged with Fox) showed a lot of courage to bring it out then--the year after Hitler came to power.
I'm grateful to David Packard for bringing us this film in the 21st Century. :)
I, too, was fortunate enough to see this last week. It wasn't a film that I was familiar with before, but I liked it a great deal. I saw it on Thursday, and toyed with the idea of seeing it again on Friday, but, alas, I just couldn't make it over there.
Of course, seeing a movie like this even once on the Silver Screen is more than most film buffs have any right to expect. The Technicolor sequence you mentioned is quite eye-popping, even though it's also very brief (~four minutes total). I don't doubt that it wowed the audiences of 1934, though, because I still found it remarkable three-quarters of a century later: Karloff never looked sexier! share