With a composer and a painter for parents, and the acclaimed writer Colette for a best friend, Jeanne Roques seemed destined for the arts. Having established herself as a successful stage performer under the sobriquet Musidora, she would receive a notice in 1914 that would change the trajectory of her career: “The cinema is an art, come and act in films.” The sender was Louis Feuillade, then Artistic Director at the Gaumont Film Company, who later directed Musidora in a staggering 31 films, including the role that would make her an immortal star: Irma Vep, the iconic villainess of Les Vampires. After just three years, Musidora would leave Gaumont to establish her own production company, Les Films Musidora, where she would serve as both lead performer and director on every film. The war thriller Pour Don Carlos was the second of only three features that Les Films Musidora produced, and the one in which Musidora’s chops behind and in front of the camera shine the brightest. Musidora stars as Allégria Detchart, a guerilla commando in 19th-century Spain who first kidnaps, and then recruits, a young duke in her fight against the Spanish and French Royalist armies during the Carlist Wars. While the two sides square off in battle, Allégria engages in some advanced spycraft behind enemy lines, posing as a peasant waif to enact a highwire assassination plot. Inspired by her mentor Feuillade, Musidora keeps Pour Don Carlos rollicking and brisk, rarely pausing between plot twists and set pieces (lest the audience start to wonder why Allégria is suddenly holed up in a heretofore unmentioned city populated entirely by pirates), and delivers a performance that further cements her status as one of the greatest screen presences in film history.

35mm from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival