The Woman He Scorned captures Pola in what is quite possibly her most sterling performance in a silent film. The story follows a young lighthouse custodian (played by German actor Hans Rehmann) from the English town of Cornwall, who sails across the English Channel on business to a French port on business. While stopping at a bar in the city\'s red light district (shot on location in Marseille\'s Street of Abandoned Children, hence one of the films alternate titles), he meets Pola, one of the bars dancing girls. Although he doesnt like the girl, he stands up for her when her pimp/boyfriend Max (played by English character actor Warwick Ward) mistreats her. Pola is enamored with the first man who has ever treated her kindly and runs after him, begging him to take her with him. After he nearly drowns from his boat capsizing in a storm on the Channel, Hans agrees to have compassion on Pola and marries her. Pola goes to work changing her ways to adapt to her new role as housewife, having her share of mishaps along the way. Just as she is staring to settle in and forget her past, the old boyfriend, who is wanted for murder and running from the law, shows up in her house and forces her to give him shelter. She lies to the police about him and runs to her husband at the lighthouse, who is furious with her and makes her swear that she will never see him again. The boyfriend hounds her again, and this time the husband catches Pola in the act of aiding him and disowns her. Pola gets into the boat her husband gave her as an anniversary present, and rows into the middle of the Channel to meet her fate as a storm approaches.The film is directed by German director Paul Czinner. Czinner was one of the progenitors of the German Kammerspielfilm, the film genre that gave silent film some of its greatest artistic accomplishments. The Kammerspielfilm, or instinct film, simplified its storyline down to an almost instinctuallevel (hence the name), allowing the visuals to tell the entire story through the actions and expressions of the actors, focus on detail, and the use of moving cameras and/or unusual camera angles. Intertitles were rare if not completely absent from these pictures. In addition to The Woman He Scorned, The Last Laugh (1924), Sunrise (1927), Lonesome (1928), and the Hedy Lamarr sound film Ecstasy (1933) are all shot in the Kammerspielfilm style. Eisner mentioned in the above-mentioned The Haunted Screen that Czinners career went downhill after the advent of talking pictures and that his truly great work was in his silent films (most of which were Kammerspielfilmen). But until now, none of Czinners silents (some of which starred Conrad Veidt, Emil Jannings, and Czinners wife Elizabeth Bergner) have been available for evaluation, which is yet another reason to see The Woman He Scorned.\n\nThefilms synchronized soundtrack is one of the most unusual and certainly one of the most modern sounding of any surviving original silent film soundtrack. The soundtrack was written by Fred Elizalde, who led one of the most successful British jazz dance bands of the 1920s and who went on to become a successful modern classical composer in the 1930s. (Thanks to John A. B. Wright and colleagues in the UK for this information.) This soundtrack catches Elizalde in the transition between the two genres, and the music, whether popular or classical in nature, electrifies the already emotional film. There is an unusual amount of atonality in the soundtrack, which makes it sound especially modern and ahead of its time. There are no spoken lines (its not a part-talkie as was once believed), however the film makes frequent use of sound effects. In some instances, such as in the lengthy bar sequence where Pola meets her husband-to-be (which, by the way, is the sexiest sequence the author has seen in any Pola Negri movie), there was not a strong attempt to synchronize the sounds perfectly with the visuals, which gives the film a slightly abstract and, once again, modern feel. czinner, film, negri, paul, pola, silent, ward, warwick