Synopsis: Satan has been condemned by God to tempt humankind on Earth and thus prolong his own damnation even as he longs to reconcile with the Almighty. In four different historical epochs--the time of Christ, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, and finally contemporary Finland in the shadow of the Russian Revolution--Satan disguises himself as a mortal in order to push four individuals toward acts of betrayal.

Leaves from Satan's Book (1919), the second feature by the great Danish director Carl Dreyer, is a mixed affair. On the one hand, it contains many beautifully composed shots and the director already displays his eye for peculiar physiognomies. One close-up of a member of the Army of the Revolution in the French episode has the craggy intensity of a judge from The Passion of Joan of Arc. On the other hand, the film is badly dated as a political tract; for example, in the last episode Satan disguises himself as a Russian Orthodox monk supporting the Reds during the Civil War in Finland--in case we have any doubts about where our sympathies are supposed to lie. Marie Antoinette is portrayed as a noble martyr in the French episode. The most successful episode is the last, since at least the contemporary setting inspires more natural performances from the actors and a somewhat less heavy-handed approach from the director himself. Still, the film doesn't ultimately achieve either the warm, generous spirit of his greatest early films such as The Parson's Widow (1920) and Master of the House (1925) or the uncompromising rigor of his work from Joan of Arc (1927) onwards.

While the credits state that the film was adapted from Marie Corelli's Victorian bestseller The Sorrows of Satan (1895), apart from the central conceit of Satan posing as a man it jettisons the plot of Corelli's novel entirely. The latter is set in present-day Victorian England and focuses on Geoffrey Tempest, an impoverished writer who is moved to reject the ways of God. He falls under the influence of Prince Lucio Rimanez, who is in fact Satan in disguise. When he inherits a fortune, Geoffrey marries Lady Sibyl Elton, a spiritually bankrupt noblewoman. In what must surely be the most drawn-out suicide note in the history of literature, Lady Sibyl blames the corrupting influence of Swinburne's blasphemous verse(!). A more faithful adaptation is the 1926 film by D. W. Griffith, that most Victorian of film directors. (Adolphe Menjou, appropriately enough, played the role of Prince Lucio Rimanez/Satan.) One could argue that in terms of pulpy stylistics, dubious theology and revivalist fervor, Corelli's phenomenally popular novel set the template for a century's worth of religious potboilers, most recently the Left Behind novels. If Dreyer's film never descends to the level of Corelli's bathos, it also fails to soar as high above it as one might like.

The more obvious influence on Leaves from Satan's Book is Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which also contained four stories set in different historical eras. Griffith, however, cannily interwove the stories so that they climaxed at the same time, giving his film a more complex structure and a more satisfying dramatic arc. The basic problem with Dreyer's film is that the similar--and predictable--outcome of all four stories soon grows tedious. Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) presents three successive stories like Dreyer's film, but at least they are unified by a strong frame narrative and are more engaging to watch thanks to Lang's unparalleled visual imagination.

Incidentally, the credits on the English-language print used for the DVD assign the date "1918-1921" while the DVD itself states 1920. In fact, the film was finished in 1919 and was released abroad first in a cut version against Dreyer's wishes; it didn't premiere in Denmark until 1921, after Dreyer had finished his third feature, The Parson's Widow.

While the print can be overly contrasty, it is workable on the whole and the transfer itself is as sharp as the print will allow. Fans of silent cinema will know what to expect. The Philip Carli piano score is expressive and has enough musical variety to sustain interest throughout the film's two-hour running time. Leaves from Satan's Book will be of interest mainly to die-hard Dreyer fans or film historians, though one is thankful for a good quality edition on the market.

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by James Steffen