Teresa Reviews “Die Abenteurer G.m.b.H.” (Adventures Ltd.) (1929): Sadly Silent

Fidelity to text: 2 guns.
I think. It was hard to tell since at least two reels were missing, one near the climax plus the ending. This film was a silent movie, made in Germany, and the filmstock was so deteriorated so I couldn’t always figure out what was happening. The musical score was also missing.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 guns.
I think. No score, chunks missing, degraded filmstock, and the silent-movie format make the movie difficult to enjoy.

The basic story arc of The Secret Adversary (published in 1922) is here. You get the missing damsel, secret papers, Tommy and Tuppence looking to support themselves, a wicked adventuress, spies, and a hidden villain. After that, things change and shift.

Let’s start with the physical film. The version we saw (thanks to YouTube) was in bad shape. If it weren’t for the internet, Die Abenteurer G.m.b.H. wouldn’t be available at all, other than via some film institute’s silent movie festival so we should be grateful we’ve got this version. It’s better than nothing. The other silent adaptation, The Passing of Mr. Quinn (1928), is considered lost, leaving behind a few photographs and written records.

By the time Die Abenteurer was made (the German title translates to Adventures Inc.), the art of making silent movies was at its height. The industry knew what it was doing in terms of acting, staging, direction, camera tricks, stunts, title cards, and the all-important musical accompaniment, played by the theater’s organist. Despite the contrary evidence in front of you when viewing this film, moviemakers knew how to tell a cohesive story. They were good at it, good enough to get customers to pay to watch.
This movie is so damaged that if you are a first-time viewer of a silent movie, you would not believe that filmmakers of the time were competent. The filmstock is terrible, blurry and full of scratches and skips. There’s also the problem of the missing soundtrack. A silent movie wasn’t silent. They were designed with a piano or organ score to be played by the theater’s house organist. The musical score, like a film score of today, supplied the mood, revved up when the action revved up, slowing down in quiet moments. Some scores even came with special effects like a sudden sharp blare to highlight explosions or gunshots.

There’s also the acting. Silent movies depend on dramatic overacting, because there is no dialog. Emotion and speech have to be conveyed via charades. The style of acting looks stagey and weird today. The Die Abenteurer was also a contemporary for 1929. The makeup and clothing look wrong. The men’s hairstyles in particular look odd, all spit curls and Brylcreem.

Silent movies do come with title cards, conveying dialog or other narration, but you don’t want a lot of them because it breaks the spell. Silent movies can be easily translated into foreign languages because gestures and facial expressions are so exaggerated that any audience should be able to understand. Swap out the few title cards and an English audience can easily enjoy and understand a German silent movie.

Part of the film is missing. Scenes stop and then restart somewhere else and it’s clear portions are missing. This is especially notable in two sections. Our hero (we’ll call him Tommy) is suddenly and abruptly walking a tightrope between buildings while carrying a ladder! We don’t know how he found the tightrope or where he got the ladder.

The entire ending reel is missing. We get the climax when the villain is unmasked and then the film stops without even a “The End” title card. A murder is left unexplained and the missing damsel (we’ll call her Jane Finn) still doesn’t know who this mysterious man is who claims to be a relative.

So that’s the chopped-up film that survived the vicissitudes of time.

What did the scriptwriter (Jane Bess, born in 1894 and a prolific writer of German silent movies up until 1933) do with Agatha’s plot? She did what scriptwriters everywhere do: she hacked and slashed, using what she wanted of Agatha’s storyline and discarding what she didn’t. Jane Bess set the pattern: rewrite as you please, whether the source material needed it or not.

For starters, even though the movie is clearly The Secret Adversary, she Frenchified all the names: Tommy becomes Pierre, Tuppence becomes Lucienne, Jane Finn becomes Jeanette Finné and so on. The doomed ocean liner becomes the Herculania but that’s more reasonable: a German production isn’t going to start with the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-boats. We’ll stick with Agatha’s names, however, since that’s what you’ll do when you’re watching the film. Nobody’s talking.

We spend plenty of time onboard the doomed ship with Jane Finn and her brother (!) and discover they’re both secret agents! This is how Jane meets Rita, wicked adventuress. Jane’s brother drowns but, weirdly, the script has a cousin showing up (like in the novel) but the cousin shares virtually the same name: Jane’s brother is George while her mysterious cousin is named Georges. Because of the names’ similarity, I was sure that Jane’s brother would reappear, but no.
Even more weirdly, we watch a hunky stoker on what seems to be the same ship, amusing the child passengers after the sinking. The hunky stoker is none other than our Tommy, er, Pierre. Yet he doesn’t recognize Jane Finn, despite being in the same refugee rescue boat. He’s also so clean, despite shoveling coal into a fiery furnace day in and day out, that he positively glows onscreen.

Then Jane gets kidnapped. Tommy meets Tuppence and somehow, it was decidedly unclear, Tuppence meets the villain and gets a wad of cash to buy her silence about Jane Finn.
Except I couldn’t tell how Tuppence knew about Jane Finn. Other people know about Jane Finn, including the spymaster and the minister and the villains. Tommy didn’t know Jane Finn from his days on the same ship but as stoker, he wouldn’t interact with passengers. Except they seemed to be in the same refugee camp when they could have met. I’m not sure if footage was missing.

The setting is often unclear. Tommy and Tuppence got French names but it didn’t seem like any of the action took place in France. Or Germany, for that matter. The hotel remains the Savoy, which is in London but nothing onscreen looked English.

There are fight scenes on staircases, Tommy inching his way up what looks like an airshaft, sprinting across a tightrope with a ladder for no discernible reason, and other primitively staged stunts. As you watch them, realize that it’s all real. No CGI here, just clever camera work, stuntmen risking life and limb, and off-screen mattresses.
I don’t know how Rita gets murdered because the last reel was missing. I’m not sure of the relationship between Jane Finn and Georges, her mystery cousin. That explanation must have been in last reel, along with Tommy and Tuppence’s declaration of love and adventure.

All in all, Die Abenteurer was a weird experience. You could say, looking at how scriptwriter Jane Bess attacked Agatha’s prose that this film set the stage for all the other Hollywood adaptations. Things got changed that didn’t need changing at all (names), scenes were added that made no sense (Tommy as a ship’s stoker entertaining kids), scenes were dropped (like comprehensive explanations), and characters who had reasonable motivations in the novel suddenly behave as if they were lobotomized because the new plot demanded they be stupid.

Should you watch Die Abenteurer? Maybe, if you want to ogle what is probably the most muscular Tommy ever (Carlo Aldini, a serious athlete as well as actor). Otherwise, probably not. The story’s difficult to follow, partly due to damage and partly because of the format itself. It’s not that good. If you decide yes for reasons of completeness and curiosity, keep in mind you’ll lose 76 minutes of your life you’ll never get back.

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