Film review: Midnight Lace (1960)

There are some films (most famously Charade) that seem Hitchcockian enough to be genuine Hitchcocks.  This one falls short (although it's probably better than a couple of his weaker efforts), although one wonders what the master would've made of this material, and this star-studded cast.

The plot: we are in London, and Doris Day is Kit Preston, new (just 3 months) bride of Banker Tony Preston (Rex Harrison at his suave best - unusually un-ascerbic), who starts getting mysterious phone calls 

threatening to kill her.  However, nobody ever hears them (not even us, for most of them, although we do hear the initial threat that comes in the fog as she walks across Grosvenor Square from the American Embassy to their swanky flat) and Tony, initially solicitous and supportive gradually loses confidence in the reality of the threat.  

Meanwhile, at Tony's bank they are about to withdraw funding from a man's Gold Mine because somebody is somehow trying to undermine it (I didn't understand that part, because it involved money) and then an employee works out that some other employee has gradually been syphoning money from the bank to the (current) tune of a million pounds.

Side characters include Melvyn Douglas as Tony's colleague who is shown to be a serial loser at the horses (to the extent that he is refused credit at his regular bookie's), Roddy McDowell 

as the ne'er-do-well son of Kit and Tony's maid, Nora, who doesn't like that Kit "is trying to come between them" (she watches him leech money off his doting mother and then makes sure to make up for it herself.  He is a suspect for the voice because it is high and sing-song.  Then there's the mysterious (and ludicrously unlikely) foreman of the construction team building right outside their apartment building, who is supposed to be English but is played by too-good-looking-by-half Rock Hudson knock-off John Gavin, 

who is American (and went on to be Reagan's ambassador to Mexico!).  Oh and Kit and Tony's neighbor Peggy, whose husband is off at sea with the Navy.  And part way into the film Myrna Loy shows up as Kit's feisty Aunt Bea.  

And John Williams (not the composer, but an instantly recognizable very English character actor) is the skeptical police inspector who plants the seed in Tony's mind that the threatening voice is a creation of Kit's unconscious.  Oh, and finally there's a mysterious scar-faced man 

who hangs round all the time and even breaks into Kit's bedroom, although of course has vanished by the time the help she screams for has arrived.

Multiple misdirects make it genuinely impossible to tell who's messing with Kit (although there's never really any serious implication that she's imagining it all).  Things come to a head as first Tony postpones a promised trip to Venice (because of the whole bank business) and then reverses course and is ready to go off with Kit after one last bank meeting.  Then the phone rings...

Definitely a bit slow to start, and, although there's nothing wrong with Day's performance, her character is made into a bit of a victim and she's a bit too girl-next-door to buy as somebody having a genuine psychotic break.  Also, I can't help but feel that some of the cast is underused, especially Loy and McDowell, as well as the wonderful Hermione Baddeley (best known as Ellen the Maid in Mary Poppins) who only gets a couple of scenes as a publican.

However, the last twenty minutes or so is genuinely gripping and you can't help but feel sorry for Kit at the end...  Oh, and if you're wondering, the title comes from the name of a garment that Kit buys for herself to get Tony excited, that she is wearing at the film's climax, that manages to be a curious combination of lacy and matronly on Day.

Dog days

So, the Summer Vacation is drawing to a close - teaching starts on Tuesday for Jami and Wednesday for me, but after a brief taste of autumn (one night the temps were down below 50, and the days were low 70s) it's suddenly roasting again.  So time for some late summer swimming!

When we got back to the car after swimming today (Hogbacks), the temperature reading inside the car was 99!

Stepping Stone Falls

 Still plenty of giant catfish...

Bad news about the basement

 Specifically root-related.  Apparently the roots that cracked the foundation are from all the nice trees that make the front of the house look nice, shield us from the road and hide our horribly collapsing front porch.  But the real root cause (no pun intended) was the groundhog hole right by the living room wall that formed an attractive nuisance (a) for the roots, which all grew into it, and (b) skunks, who like to steal groundhog holes, apparently.  We have been smelling a lot of skunk, although it's hard to tell the difference between natural skunk musk and the smell of skunky weed wafting over from next door.  So these will have to go (and we're still waiting for the estimate for the repairs, sphincters tightened).

De-molding my brain

Owing to excessive levels of mold-related neurotoxins in my system, my doctor recommended that I buy a de-tox protocol called, I shit you not, "Dr. Jill's Miracle Mold Detox Box".  He did acknowledge that the name was ridiculous (especially for the almost FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS it costs) but swore blind that it was the bees knees.  So...  It requires several disgusting fluids twice a day, each followed a half hour later by a teaspoon of soluble charcoal.  Apparently this will flush all those toxins away and potentially make my brain as sharp as it was when I was able to remember a damn thing.  We shall see.

De-molding the basement, day one

 

So, good news and bad news.  Good news is that in the washer/dryer room we only need to lose the bottom shelf.  Bad news is that a tree root has grown up through the shower drain and cracked the foundation, and there's been significant leakage, so we're going to need (a) a drain rooter and (b) a foundation fixer.  This just keeps getting more expensive...

Cleaning out the basement

We are having a mold (and lead) treatment on our basement, which requires cleaning EVERYTHING out of it.

Where is all the stuff going?  Answer: the sun room and the garage:

Film review: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue/Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

A lesser-known early post-Romero zombie classic, this one is set on location in mostly rural parts of Northern England (not Manchester, though, despite the name) although almost all of the actors are actually Italian, and the director is Spanish.  There are a couple of direct ripoffs of Night of the Living Dead - the first zombie attack is of a single woman in/near her car, the nihilistic ending - but other than that, if I'm honest, apart from a few short scenes of gnarly disembowelment (and one truly gratuitous streaking scene in the opening minutes), this could almost have been a Doctor Who episode of this era (early Tom Baker).  It very much had the feel of something like Horror of Fang Rock, complete with the regional theater level acting and copious use of dry ice.  Also, the explanation for the zombification is very Doctor Who-esque, complete with that era's environmentalism (think The Green Death). Bear in mind I'm saying this as someone who loves 70's Doctor Who, mind.

We open on our protagonist, George, who is closing up his antique shop supposedly in London (although this scene actually was shot in Manchester) and gets on his Norton and sets off out of town.  He's made it oop North when he stops off at a petrol station.  He asks the attendant, who is currently dealing with a pretty redhead in a car to fill up the bike and goes over to buy something to drink.  As he's doing that he hears a crash, and sees that the redhead has backed her car over his bike and crumpled the wheel.  The mechanic says they'll have to send away to Glasgow, and they can't do it before Monday.  Long story short he bullies (basically, George is a bit of a dick for most of the beginning of the movie) the young woman, Edna (makes you think the Spaniard came up with the name from reading Victorian English novels) into letting him drive to where he was going.  He also shows serious road rage in getting round a large truck that says Manchester Morgue on it.  (Yes, we do see it again, 

and I thoroughly expected the title to be explained at the end where the corpses it takes from the small local hospital where a lot of the film's action happens, and where the climactic zombie outbreak occurs, arrive in Manchester and spread the plague in a large city, a bit like the scene at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where we see trucks carrying the pods to a big city... but it doesn't.  It opts for a much stupider last twist.

Anyway, where was I?  Turns out Edna is in a hurry to meet up with her sister and persuades George to take her to where she's going (Windermere) first and then he can have her Mini and she'll get someone to pick it up.  However, she doesn't know exactly where her sister lives, so they have to stop off (in an absurdly picturesque dale) 

at a farm to ask for directions.  Here George encounters the farmer working with scientists from the government who are trying out a new pesticide-free way of killing bugs - specifically a kind of radiation.  

George, being the long hair that he is (the farmer remarks that it's obvious he's from London as the young folk hereabouts don't dress like him), disapproves.  But the farmer at least promises to show him how to get to Edna's sister's place.  Meanwhile, Edna, waiting by the car, is accosted by a strange man dressed all in black and soaking wet.  

She gets away and runs to meet George and the farmer, but by the time she does the man has vanished.  The only man who meets his description, however, is a local vagrant, Guthrie, whom it can't have been, because he drowned last week and was buried...

George isn't sure he believes Edna, but they set off for the sister's house.  Cut to the sister's house.  Except, at first we don't know that's what it is, because we're just seeing a man (a rather seedy looking man, to be honest) developing photos in what looks like an outbuilding and then setting off through the dark.  But he hears something and goes back to find a woman (Edna's sister) in the building he just left.  

She claims to be retrieving strawberries to make a pie for Edna, but he knows better.  Essentially he's kept her out here in the middle of nowhere trying to get her clean from her drug addiction, but for some unexplained reason there is heroin on the premises and she knows where it is.  They fight and he goes off and then she gets the heroin out and starts heating it up on the spoon when... the same man who attacked her sister appears.  She escapes through a window and flees calling for her husband, who is currently taking flash photos at a nearby waterfall.  The man and the husband tussle... and George and Edna arrive.  Edna's sister brings them over, but all they find is her husband's corpse.  Again George is asked to believe that there was a strange man responsible.  Anyway, cut to the next morning and our other major player (and the only other English-named actor besides George) the local (although, oddly, supposedly Irish (probably because American Arthur Kennedy couldn't do a good English accent)) police inspector, 

who (a) hates hippies, and (b) is convinced that George, Edna and her sister are in some way responsible.  So George and Edna are forbidden from leaving and have to stay in the hotel in town (The Old Owl).  George gets the idea of having the film in the husband's camera developed and has Edna distract a policeman (Craig, who will meet a grisly fate later) while he takes it.  

Alas the photos do not exonerate the sister and she has a breakdown and gets moved to the local hospital.  They visit and while Edna is with her sister, George has a weird encounter with a doctor who tells him that babies are being born with absurdly violent urges (yes, babies - we see bloodied maternity nurses!).  George theorizes that it is something to do with the bug-killing radiation and they go and visit the farm again.  They find out that the radiation works on the nervous systems of the insects, and George and the doctor postulate that the babies' simple nervous systems make them vulnerable.  Later, in the local shop, looking at the photos, George and Edna are caught by the inspector who is now even more convinced they're up to something and says he'll see them at the inquest.  Edna is still going on about Guthrie, so to settle matters, George takes her to the local grave yard to see if they can find Guthrie's grave.  What they find at the graveyard is a slaughtered verger and yes, Guthrie, 

who not only attacks them but daubs blood on the eyes of two other corpses awaiting burial, which seems to wake them up.  At this point Craig, who's been assigned to chase them, arrives, and the three hole up on the church.  

However, these zombies are much less brainless than usual and team up to use a grave stone to break down the door.  Poor old Craig bites it and we get the first gnarly scenes of cannibalism.  George is now convinced that the newly dead are similar enough to babies in their primitive nervous systems and now is determined to destroy the bug-killing device.  But first they manage to destroy the three zombies using, you guessed it, fire.  But tragically the inspector, on seeing Craig's hideously dismembered corpse and three other charred corpses only suspects satanism and is determined to stop George and Edna by hook or by crook.  

At first George thinks the zombie crisis is over, because last time he and the doctor saw the bug radiation device, they shared that it had only a mile radius, but when he goes to smash it they tell him that they've just expanded its range to five miles, and he realizes that this encompasses Edna's brother-in-law, at the house Edna is visiting.  And indeed, we see Edna almost got by him - he injures her arm, but she runs over him.  Weirdly she drives away about a half a mile then just stops, in the dark and the mist, and gets out of the car!  It looks like she's being attacked by him again, but it's just her imagining it (she's shellshocked) and it's really George.  He takes her to a nearby petrol station and tells them to call an ambulance, while he takes some kerosene to burn the corpse... but the cops have laid a trap and haul him in.  However, he gets away and heads for the hospital, where the husband's corpse has also been sent, and is making more zombies as we watch.  Cue several more gnarly body-munching scenes and our grisly climax.  

Then the epilogue where our inspector, still ignorant of all the zombies, thinks that he's responsible for ending a satanist murder-spree, retires to his hotel room for a well-deserved rest...

In general, this one's about on the level of importance in early zombie-lore as Hammer's The Plague of the Zombies, which is to say, a notch below Romero, but a notch above a lot of the cheesier Italian gore-fests of the era.  Check it out, if that's your cup of blood.

Film review: The Lost Moment (1947)

This is apparently an adaptation of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, for those (not including me) who are familiar with that work.  And very handsome it looks, too: excellent spooky atmosphere of a Venice that is clearly conjured up in Hollywood sets but no less moody for it.  There are parts of it that are a bit confusing, but I don't know if that was just me being confused or it being intentionally vague.

Anyway, the film begins with a sort of flash-forward to the present time, and a voice over of our protagonist, as we see from his point of view entering a study full of books and he tells us about legendary poet Jeffrey (!) Ashton, who vanished mysteriously in the mid 1800s in his early 40s.  He was known to have conducting an affair with a beautiful young woman called Juliana Bordereau and to have written her a series of scorching love letters that are sort of the Holy Grail of Ashton fans (of whom there are supposed to be legion, as he's presented as a sort of Shelley/Byron amalgam).  Then we get a flashback to the younger days of the narrator, who is revealed to be publisher Lewis Venable, waiting for a gondola in Venice to arrive and take him to the house where a now 105-year-old Juliana still lives.  

(So this must be somewhere around the early years of the 20th Century, although it's hard to tell from the costumes - and a strange plot feature that I'll come to shortly.)  Also on the Gondola is Charles Russell, who I thought was a friend, but Lewis is pretty short with him.  Russell seems to think there's a goldmine in tracking down the lost letters (which is Lewis's mission in Venice), but Lewis snaps that it's not about the money.  And certainly Lewis doesn't seem to be short of cash, as Juliana, when he finally meets her (Agnes Moorehead, best known for being the mother in Bewitched, then in her 40s but unrecognizable under amazingly good old-crone makeup).  

Anyway, he has called ahead and they are expecting him at the villa, which is palatial but mostly abandoned, with the only inhabitants seemingly Juliana, a naive young servant girl Amelia, her strict mother, 

and, most importantly, Juliana's "niece" (although, as is obvious to anyone, she's far too young to be the niece of a 105-year-old woman) 

Tina (!) Bordereau (it is just me or are "Tina" and "Jeffrey" rather anachronistic names?) played by the former model Susan Hayward.  At the time critics were not kind either to the actor playing Lewis (Robert Cummings, who was in a couple of Hitchcocks, most notably Dial M for Murder), whom they described as "unctuous," 

and Hayward, who was described as almost ludicrously stiff as Tina.  I can sort of see their point: she is chilly to the extreme, and in fact we were strongly reminded in a couple of places of Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein.  But it works pretty well for the film, which requires that one give oneself up to the atmosphere.  Which is very Rebecca-verging-on-Wuthering Heights.

The players: Amelia is terrified that ice queen Tina will find out about the stray cats that she allows in the house, genuinely afraid that she will kill them.  And Tina really does not seem to want Lewis in the house.  However, once she introduces Lewis to Juliana (at this meeting we just see the back of her chair and her claw-like hand, complete with giant jeweled ring, that we later discover was a gift from Jeffrey) Juliana makes it clear that whether or not Tina wants it, they have to do it, because they are out of money.  And to that end, where a price of 200 (I can't remember the unit of currency, but it wasn't lire, and it wasn't pounds, although later Julian does use "English pounds" as currency) a month rent had been agreed in advance, the price is now 1000, and the rooms are "unfurnished" (although, confusingly, they aren't).  That's right - Lewis is pretending to be a writer of a different name, who needs a place to finish his novel.  His rooms are isolated on one side of the house, with the evident hope that he will use his own entrance and not bother anyone else.  However, he goes a-snooping at night, and the owl-eared Juliana hears him creeping past her room and calls him in.  We get to see her face this time - think Davros, creator of the Daleks (same claw-like hand, too, and this time Lewis notices that the ring is missing).  She offers him a miniature of Jeffrey painted by her father for 1000 English pounds, but the money is to be given to the priest 

who visits regularly, and Tina is not to know.  Juliana even seems a bit afraid of Tina.  Leaving her room, Jeffrey hears strange music playing (again the Frau Blücher echoes, only this time it's piano, not violin).  Following the sound to a part of the house that is otherwise deserted, he is preceded by one of the cats.  They both come upon a transformed Tina playing the piano, 

and where daytime Tina is all buttoned up and buttoned down, this one has let her hair down and is wild and happy (and likes cats).  And she thinks Lewis is Jeffrey!  And that she is Juliana!  And this is where the film gets confusing.  Has Jeffrey stepped back in time?  Well, it appears not.  Instead Tina (who is wearing the ring that went missing from Juliana's finger) has a split personality.  And as we discover later from Juliana, it's because Juliana read the famous love letters to her as a child (!) and eventually, when Juliana's eyes gave out, Tina read them to her, until Tina became too wrapped up in them, and took them away, and now every night becomes Juliana.  And scarily for Juliana, Tina becomes convinced that Juliana is a hated older servant, whom she despises to a possibly fatal extent.

But now Lewis knows where the letters are!  They're in the room with the piano.  He just needs the key and to find a moment when Tina isn't around.  But Charlie is back in the picture and threatens to expose him!  And the priest tells him that maybe if Tina could find somebody to love as Tina, she wouldn't need the Juliana personality.  But what did happen to Jeffrey back then?

It all canters to a suitably melodramatic ending.  Will Lewis ever get to see the letters?  Will he be tempted, if he gets his hands on them, just to do a runner (say, by means of the Orient Express)?  Who could blame him, wanting to get out of that mad house...

An odd, flawed, but very atmospheric film.  And the only film made by the director Martin Gabel (who acted in some films, including Marnie) - apparently he so infuriated Hayward by interrupting her line readings that she threw something at him.

Colonoscopy time!

Once one reaches a certain age, one starts getting referred for colonoscopies.  This happened a few years ago, and in fact I'm a couple of years overdue for my third, but they had a slot open up so I had mine today.  As usual, the prep requires that you spend the whole day before (i.e. yesterday) eating nothing but clear gelatine and drinking only clear liquids (although, apparently, both tea and coffee count, provided no milk).  This gets old very fast.  I made up three bowls of jello/jelly with three different kinds of the allowed clear juice, but the apple one was really not very palatable:

Then, when 6 PM rolls around, the real fun begins.  You get given a prescription of a large plastic jug with powder in it to which you add 4 litres of water.  Then you have to drink 8 oz (yes, they do mix metric and imperial in the instructions) every 15 minutes until you've finished about 3/4 of the jug.  After about 90 minutes, the waterworks begin.  At first it's the most disgusting thing you've ever seen (outside of maybe the motorway service toilets that Matt had a summer job cleaning in his late teens) but the color slowly lightens until eventually it's supposed to be, for lack of a better comparison, chicken broth color.  Eventually the torrents stop so that you can go to sleep, but you have to set your alarm for 5 AM when you have an hour to consume the remaining 1/4 of the liquid.  This means running to the toilet every 10 mins or so until about 7:30 (in my case) at which point I dropped off and then woke with a start at 9:22 realizing I had to leave at 9:45.  I picked up my volunteer driver (they won't allow you to have a colonoscopy unless you have someone with you who has to wait in the waiting room and drive you home - as it's not really feasible for this to be Jami, I prevailed on our favorite ex-student who lives two blocks away) and off we went!

They do knock you out entirely (which is a good thing, considering how undignified the whole procedure is) but you wake up surprisingly quickly (about 35 minutes later) and recover quickly, although you're not allowed to drive the rest of the day.  And the good news this time is that they found no polyps, unlike the last two times, so I won't need another one for seven whole years!

Film review: The Indian Tomb (1921)

Of all the films we've watched, I would be willing to bet that this is the least-seen by people actually alive now, because it's a nearly four hour German silent movie!  (And, according to Wikipedia, "upon its release, it was neither a critical nor commercial success".)  And it was actually pretty fun!  We did have to watch it in half-hour installments, but it really lent itself to that because it's very like the old adventure serials, or the Weissmuller Tarzan films.  I don't know what on Earth moved Jami to get it (probably the involvement of Conrad Veidt - probably best known for playing Jaffar in The Thief of Baghdad, or maybe the murderous somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but I also love him in the lesser-known Michael Powell film, The Spy in Black), who has yet to let us down), but get it she did, and now we've watched it.  It is notable in that it was co-written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, who at the time was a very well-known and prolific German author, and who fell in love while co-writing this (which is an adaptation of one of the latter's many novels) and left their respective spouses.  They were an item until the rise of Nazism prompted the Communist Lang to flee, but von Harbou to stay and even join the party (she had to go through "de-Nazification" after the war but Lang was irreconcilable with her).  It was directed by a Joe May, which partly explains why the female lead is played by the (somewhat dumpy by today's standards) Mia May, who was, you guessed it, his wife.  Lang had hoped to direct it himself, and never forgave May, but May, while the less-talented filmmaker, was established and even owned his own studio, and reasoned that he would not have got funding for an inexperienced director.  (The Mays also fled the rise of Nazism, but had less success when they finally arrived in the US, although May did direct the second Invisible Man film, of which I am quite fond.)  Lang eventually got his revenge when he remade this film (which is actually broken into two parts, as was his remake) in Hollywood in the 50s.

So why should you watch this?  Well, the number one reason would be the sets, which are stunning.  

They're huge and ornate, and you really believe that the film has to be on location somewhere exotic, because you can't believe that they actually made all of these giant edifices from scratch.  (But they did, not far from Berlin, and out of concrete, no less!)  And it also features just hundreds of extras, and a profusion of exotic beasts, from elephants, to tigers, to crocodiles.  It also features Conrad Veidt, 

of course, who is his usual amazing self, with eyes that pierce into your very soul.  He does a (not untypical for silent films) mixture of wildly over-the-top "big" acting, combined with a face that is incredibly expressive and can convey subtle emotions with ease.  In other words, he's like a great theatre actor, and is a magnetic presence as the despotic prince of the fictional country that is a stand-in for Bengal.  But going toe-to-toe with him in the magnetism department is Bernhard Goetzke as Rami the Yogi.  The film begins with the Prince bringing Rami back from the dead essentially to be his magic slave, and Goetzke is riveting as the granite-face mystic, who (through some very impressive-for-the-time special effects) manages to persuade "British" architect Herbert Rowland (the rather middle-aged looking putative protagonist) to come to the Prince's kingdom.  Why they can't just write to Herbert, I'm not sure, but Rami instead magics on some new clothes, teleports across the world and, when it looks like his fiancee Irene might spoil things, he magics a telephone cord out of a telephone, reaches through space to grab a letter left for her and makes a tire fall off her car 

as she pursues Herbert.  It is never explained what's so special about Herbert, as by his own admission he hasn't completed many projects (which is why he's so easily lured away - it's not like business is booming) but the Prince wants him to build a magnificent tomb for his bride.  The catch is, she's not dead yet!  The prince is incensed because she's been caught giving "British" adventurer Mac Allan (I love the German idea of a British name) a big fat ring that the prince had given her.  

This is the premise for the whole affair.  Herbert (understandably) has reservations about his part in the prince's revenge plot.  Meanwhile Irene follows her love to the kingdom, but is intercepted by the prince and told not to distract Herbert.  The prince sends his henchmen to capture Mac Allan, who has been lured out on a "tiger hunt" on false pretenses, 

but he puts up a hell of a fight, defending his hunting lodge with his gun until it is set on fire, then slipping the net and fleeing on horseback.  He is eventually captured, tied to a kind of sled and dragged back by horse.  Meanwhile, Irene wanders about the (incredibly impressive) palace grounds and is spotted by Herbert.  He pursues her and she runs (not wanting to break the promise to the prince) - straight through a cave full of penitents.  Herbert, on following, accidentally kicks one of them who is buried up to his head, and he curses him with leprosy.  Then Irene stumbles into the tiger den and has to be rescued by the astral projection of Rami.  Eventually both Herbert and Irene return to their respective parts of the palace without meeting, but it turns out that the curse is successful, and Herbert has leprosy!  So he has to be sent off to live in a cordoned-off courtyard full of lepers.  The prince confronts Irene with it 

and how it's her fault, and she begs him to save Herbert.  This requires her sacrificing herself.  After initially refusing, and following a night's thinking it over, she agrees, impressing him with her loyalty (unlike his  princess!).  Then there's a scene where she dresses up in ritual garb and he (the prince) appears to her dressed in an amazing headdress and miniskirt and apparently painted gold 

that I didn't quite understand.  Anyway, Rami cures Herbert and the prince lets Irene off un-sacrificed, for some reason.  (Meanwhile, Rami, knowing that the prince's deeds are only going to get worse, announces that his debt has been paid and vanishes, much to the prince's chagrin.) Irene and Herbert are reunited, and Mac Allan returns, and Irene and Herbert intercede to stop (or so they think) the prince executing both him and a faithful servant of the princess called Mirrjha, who has been interceding on behalf of Mac Allan, 

the princess and Irene.  The prince promises that "no man" will lay a hand on Mac Allan.  He is led away to a familiar doorway and told that all he has to do is cross this courtyard and exit that door on the other side and he is free.  Of course, this is the tigers' enclosure and both doors are quickly locked and... Mac Allan meets a grisly fate, which the prince forces the princess to watch.  That surprised me, I must say - I mean, we were at least a couple of hours in and Mac Allan was pretty much the dashing star up to that point.  Anyway, unaware of Mac Allan's fate, Herbert and Irene are having a posh soiree with the prince (who, educated at the best European schools, is dressed up in a dinner jacket, just complemented with his usual turban).  Then he says that Mirrjha "will soon be leaving us" but will dance for us once more.  Herbert and Irene sense something amiss but are powerless to help as, on the prince's signal, some snake charmers release a cobra that bites the dancing Mirrjha.  As she dies she entreats the European couple to flee, and take the princess.  That night they do, taking one boat and sabotaging others, which means that one of the prince's guards has to swim in crocodile-infested waters to get an adrift boat... and doesn't make it.  But soon the prince and his men are in pursuit, and we get a tense standoff around a rope bridge... that leads to the princess sacrificing herself, and the prince realizing he loved her more than life itself.  So Herbert does end up building the tomb (which is just as magnificent as all the other sets in this film), but the prince is a broken man in rags lying on its steps by the end.

Phew!  What makes this film so easily watchable, I think, is that while it is so long itself, it cuts back and forth between the different characters very frequently, so if you're not particularly invested in one story line, you won't have to wait long for a change of scene.  The camerawork is very basic - essentially the camera is fixed in each screen, the only movement being occasional zooms - but because the sets are so fantastic, it's enough just to capture the imagery.  It's films like this that make it worth anyone's while to watch a silent film once in a while - there's just nothing like them since.  I'm still wondering where they got all those elephants and tigers from in Germany...