Barbed Wire

Pola Negri as a French farm girl who falls in love with a German prisoner working her fields. Rowland V. Lee directed for Paramount, 1927, from Hall Caine's novel The Woman of Knockerscroft; Clive Brook is the prisoner. The war is offscreen. The wire is not. Negri, already a star in Germany and a curiosity in Hollywood, plays the romance without the usual Allied sermon — the German is a man, the farm is a workplace, the neighbors are the chorus that will punish her. Released as the last of the big silent war pictures were turning into talkies about the next one.