The Winter Sports Week, organised in conjunction with the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, was held in Chamonix at the foot of Mont Blanc between 25 January and 5 February 1924. Designed to honour sports that couldn’t be held in summer, the event was a huge success, with over 10,000 paying spectators, ensuring that it would be repeated quadrennially as the Winter Olympic Games.
The buzz around the games inspired the making of this film, produced by the Zürich-based Gotthard-Film company founded the previous year by writer and former art dealer Stefan Markus (who was, allegedly, forced to sell an original van Gogh in his possession to raise the necessary capital).
Shot almost entirely on location, Der Rächer von Davos combines documentary-like footage of the various sports featured in the games, such as bobsleighing, figure-skating, skiing, and ice hockey, with a fictional plot revolving around the guests of an Alpine vacation resort. Here a con artist of supposedly noble lineage preys on one woman after another. Having seduced the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, he gets his comeuppance at the hand of the vengeful brother of his previous victim.
Both the mountain setting and storyline are somewhat reminiscent of Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), but the film stands out thanks to the spectacular scenery as well as German director Heinrich Brandt’s dynamic staging and brisk pacing of the action scenes. The makers assembled an international cast including Swedish actor Eric Barclay as the eponymous avenger, French actress Marquisette Bosky as his wronged sister, Italian actors Angelo Ferrari and Elena Lunda as the con man and his accomplice, and Czechoslovakian actress Suzanne Marwille as the industrialist’s daughter. The latter, “considered to be the first Czechoslovakian female film star” (Martin Šrajer), was also active behind the camera, serving as scriptwriter on several of her Czechoslovakian productions.
Davos was at one point in the running to host the next Winter Olympic Games in 1928, but lost out to St. Moritz.

Oliver Hanley