André Deed - L'uomo Meccanico (The Mechanical Man) (1921)

L'uomo Meccanico (1921)

English title: The Mechanical Man

Italian, 80 mins. Released November 1921.

Directed by André Deed 

Starring Giulia Costa, André Deed and Valentina Frascaroli. 

L'uomo Meccanico is an Italian comedy-horror-sci-fi film made in Torino in 1921. The director was André Deed, a French acrobat and silent comic, while the female lead was his Italian wife and steady comic sidekick, Valentina Frascaroli, in the sinister role of Mado the Adventuress.

For many years this early science fiction film from Italy was regarded as lost, but then some reels of the Portuguese release version were discovered in Brazil. The discovered footage amounted to 740 meters and is believed to be approximately 40% of the complete film. Luckily, the discovered footage came from the latter part of the film and included most of the special effects and enough footage remains to establish that L’Uomo Meccanico is about the wonderfully compelling topic of riveted, steam-snorting, superhuman killer robots. Most of the lost footage consists of the beginning parts of the film, such as the scenes with the scientist and the cast credits, so some characters are unidentifiable.

The story begins with a scientist creating a device shaped like a man that can be remote-controlled by a machine, but thieves steal it then send it out to kill and destroy the city. The only way to stop the creature is by creating another mechanical man to destroy it. 

In a nice Alan Turing touch, the true human controller of the mechanical man is actually a woman, Mado the Adventuress. Mado, a career criminal, is the masked alter-ego of Margherita Donadieff, a scheming White Russian exiled countess, and obviously not a million miles away from the scheming Russian countess in a famous and successful Italian silent film from Torino, Royal Tigress, a hit flick in which Valentina Frascaroli played a supporting role.

André Deed had in mind a trilogy of films starring Mado the Adventuress, and L’Uomo Meccanico is the sequel to an earlier Mado thriller, Human Document, which accounts for Valentina and her machinations dominating so much screen-time. The third film in this Mado trilogy was never made because after the Great War, the Italian silent film industry was in shambles. Deed never recovered his pre-war prosperity, in which he had starred in hundreds of short slapstick films. This ambitious fantasy was not a success, and Deed died in Paris in 1940 as a forgotten man.