Michael

Michael is a 1924 German silent drama directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. It centres on Claude Zoret, a celebrated painter who takes a young man, Michael, into his household as his protégé and favourite model, and whose feelings for him run deeper than he admits. The arrangement is unsettled when a Russian princess, Lucia Zamikoff, sits for a portrait and she and Michael fall in love. Zoret's sense of betrayal is bound up with Michael's own wavering, and the film follows the painter as the two younger people draw together and drift away from him. The screenplay was written by Dreyer with Thea von Harbou, and Erich Pommer produced for UFA, following the director's earlier Danish films and marking his second production in Germany. The cast includes Benjamin Christensen as Zoret, Walter Slezak as Michael, Nora Gregor as the princess, and Robert Garrison as the journalist Charles Switt. Among Dreyer's features it comes before The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from around 2,200 votes, while on TMDB its rating is 6.4 from a much smaller number of votes, so the two audience measures are not directly comparable in weight.