Was Pola a good actress?
Yes! Over and over again, Pola’s acting is praised to the hilt in the contemporary reviews of her films regardless of the quality of the picture she was acting in, and there is a reason why! To quote myself, Pola would, as film historian Lotte Eisner noted in the German film textbook The Haunted Screen, convincingly become about any role she was given, be it vamp, socialite, courtesan, mother, bride, dancer, singer, feisty teenage girl, or even comedienne, often in the course of the same picture. She would play princess and street prostitute with the same believable intensity. You almost have to see this in action to really believe it. In my case, it didnt hit me that Pola was running circles around me until a good way into my study of her films. Now at the same time I will admit that, early on, Pola did tend to overact. But this type of dramatization was very typical of the German theatre where she came of age as an actress underneath Max Reinhardt. Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt, oth
