Shortly before his emigration to the United States, director Ernst Lubitsch created a silent film in which he himself participated as an actor for the last time. Set in Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age, Sumurun tells of the unrequited love of a hunchback (played by Lubitsch) for a traveling dancer (Pola Negri) and the illicit love between the enslaved harem girl Sumurun (Jenny Hasselquist) and a cloth merchant (played by Harry Liedtke) — thwarted by a brutal sheikh (Paul Wegener).

Writer Thomas Mann saw the film in Munich in 1920 and later incorporated the film experience into his novel The Magic Mountain:

They watched as a rousing tale of love and murder in the court of an Oriental potentate unrolled silently before them; scene after opulent scene sped past, full of naked bodies, despotic lust, full of cruelty, prurience, and fatal desire — and then suddenly the film slowed to linger revealingly on the muscular arm of an executioner. In short, it had been produced with a sympathetic understanding of its international audience and catered to that civilization’s secret wishes. (The Magic Mountain)

While Sumurun has been often criticized for stereotypes and historical distortion, the film’s orientalism is also a European projection that tells us much about the social order after the end of the German monarchy and the early Weimar Republic.

The LAYKA Lens film series is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.