Fall 2026—Tuesday, October 20, 7:30 p.m.
The Wildcat
Die Bergkatze
Germany, 1921, 79 minutes
Directed by: Ernst Lubitsch
Written by: Ernst Lubitsch and Hanns Kräly
Starring: Pola Negri, Paul Heidemann, Viktor Janson, Wilhelm Diegelmann, and Edith Meller
Introduction and live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli.
Description
We open the festival with Pola Negri, born Apolonia Chałupiec in Lipno, Poland, who became one of the first great international stars of the silent screen in Berlin and Hollywood. In this broad farce about the military and marriage, made years before Lubitsch’s famous “touch” took shape, Negri plays Rischka, the fiery daughter of a robber chief high in the snowy mountains, who runs her father’s gang with no mercy. When the dashing Lieutenant Alexis is transferred to the nearby fort, Rischka ambushes him and steals his clothes. The commander’s daughter soon sets her sights on him, but Alexis cannot stop thinking about the wildcat.
Lubitsch fills the film with style, from an extravagant ball to masks that change the shape of the image on the screen to shift its mood. The film was restored in 2000 from the original negative; its lost intertitles were reconstructed from surviving censorship records. This is the first time The Wildcat has been shown at the Dryden.