The Informer. 1929. UK. Directed by Arthur Robison. Screenplay by Benn W. Levy, from the novel by Liam O’Flaherty. With Lya De Putti, Lars Hanson, Ellen Pollock. Digital restoration courtesy British Film Institute. New York restoration premiere. 83 min.
John Ford’s 1935 adaptation of the Liam O’Flaherty story is a justly celebrated classic, but this earlier, silent adaptation from 1929—a British-German co-production directed in high Weimar style by Arthur Robison (Warning Shadows)—deserves its own place in film history. The Swedish star Lars Hanson plays O’Flaherty’s tortured protagonist, an IRA partisan who has betrayed his best friend to the authorities, as a man stalked by fate, dodging through a labyrinth of night exteriors constructed on a soundstage at Elstree that might as well have been UFA’s Babelsberg studios in Berlin. It’s a remarkable example of the international culture that silent movies created—Hanson’s costar is the Hungarian Lya De Putti—in the years just before the form disappeared.