His experiences in the Red War led Cayde to leave his duties in The Last City frequently to return to field missions, leading to his demise in the Prison of Elders at the hands of Uldren Sov and the Scorn Barons.īiography Life as a human During the Taken War he assisted The Guardian in infiltrating the Dreadnaught to defeat Oryx, the Taken King and later fought beside them on the frontlines of the Red War. Despite this, he became a close friend of both his fellow Vanguards, Commander Zavala and Ikora Rey. After Andal was murdered by Taniks, the Scarred, whom Cayde was believed to have previously killed, Cayde took up his friend's post in the Tower despite his hatred of being stuck doing paperwork and unable to go on missions.Īs the Hunter Vanguard, Cayde often looked the other way or facilitated Guardians who operated outside of normal operating procedures. A famous explorer and adventurer in his younger days, Cayde ran with a pack of Hunters that included Shiro-4 and Andal Brask, his predecessor as Hunter Vanguard. This is mine." - Cayde-6Ĭayde-6 was an Exo Guardian and the Vanguard for the Hunter class who was partnered with the Ghost Sundance. Killed in cold blood by Uldren Sov with his own gun the Ace of Spades, brother to Mara Sov, Queen of the Awoken An exhilarating classic.Created the plan to infiltrate the Dreadnaught and kill Oryx When the crazed Suvorin finally comes face to face with the cantankerous old lady, it is a scene of pure fear: as Nietzsche might have said, Suvorin is staring into the abyss and the abyss stares back. This is in fact the one way in which the lowborn Suvorin has the advantage over the aristocrat – and the film allows us to see his self-destructive madness in not appreciating an opportunity for happiness.
She is also being courted by Andrei, whose decent and diffident good nature is no match for Suvorin’s brash desperation and fanaticism, which poor innocent Lizaveta mistakes for ardent passion. Interestingly, the nobleman who is supposed to have brokered the encounter with the Prince of Darkness is a real-life figure: the Count of St Germain, a philosopher and adventurer who appeared as if he might be French, with the same dark glamour of Napoleon, although in fact it appears he was from central Europe.Ĭunning Suvorin plans to gain access to Countess Ranevskaya’s house by seducing the old lady’s gentle, impressionable companion, Lizaveta Ivanova (a sympathetic performance from Yvonne Mitchell), and they have a murmuringly passionate encounter in the opera foyer. Suvorin becomes electrified by the rumour (though a flashback implies it is considerably more than a rumour) that ancient, haughty Countess Ranevskaya, thrillingly played by Edith Evans, once sold her soul to the devil to learn the secret of winning at faro this was to recover her husband’s money, which she had lost to a secret lover. What fills Suvorin with greedy, envious fascination are the fortunes won and lost there every night at cards: an addictively simple game called faro, in which everyone is superstitiously obsessed with the bad luck involved in playing the queen of spades. Suvorin regularly attends a dissolute military club at the invitation of his friend, the kindly, well-born brother officer Prince Andrei (Ronald Howard), who sympathises with Suvorin as a lonely, sensitive, prickly soul. But his Austrian accent makes a certain sort of sense: in Pushkin’s original story, his character was an ethnic German. Walbrook appears without the raffish moustache that he had for his famous performances in Powell/Pressburger movies such as The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and his face is somehow naked without it, exposed and desperate. A humble captain intensely aware of his lack of money, Suvorin is obsessed, like much of fashionable Russia of the time, with France’s low-born leader Bonaparte, who rose to the top with pure audacity and courage. Dickinson’s control of the screen is a joy, something to be compared to Max Ophüls: I wonder how he might have directed The Earrings of Madame De… or how he might have adapted Dostoevsky’s The Gambler or Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need?Īnton Walbrook gives a glorious, gamey performance as Suvorin, a Russian military officer in St Petersburg. This is surely one of the great gambling movies, and one that makes the theological connection explicit: Pascal recommended that you have nothing to lose by betting on God’s existence, but the worldly sinner gambles that the last judgement does not exist and that pleasure and gratification in this life are everything.
The density of visual detail and incident on screen is superb and the swirling, delirious onrush of storytelling is addictive.
Ambition, sin and horror are the keynotes of Thorold Dickinson’s brilliant 1949 melodrama based on the story by Pushkin.
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