Count Dahlborg’s Secret

FRAGMENT | These recordings were part of Valdemar Psilander’s live performance at the Royal Orfeum in Budapest, in February and March 1914. Psilander financed the show himself, and it was a mixture of film and theatre under the title Count Dahlborg’s Secret. The film footage, which unfortunately hasn’t been preserved in its entirety, opened the performance, after which Psilander himself rode onto the stage and continued the action.

It’s difficult to map a logical course of events based on the preserved fragment, which doesn’t contain any intertitles, but in an undated follow-up report in “Verden og Vi”, we find the following: “Psilander appears on the horse as a handsome jockey in tight-fitting breeches, and then as a fur-clad chauffeur carrying in his arms a fainted beauty – a certain baroness – whose favour he energetically strives to win, and for whose sake he, though a nobleman, disguises himself both as a stable-boy and a chauffeur.”