The Devil's Manor

The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya Dama) 1916

2012-02-26T19:58:00.002Z

"And then he told her a secret . . . for which each of us would pay dearly . . ."

Za Vas! Join me in a toast to the dear old Countess Fedotovna, long gone but not forgotten, at least not by your friends at the Devil's Manor... This supernatural tale by Aleksandr Pushkin becomes one of the most celebrated Russian films of the silent era. The secret of winning a fortune at cards is revealed to an obsessive army officer by the ghost of the woman he killed...

Director: Iakov Protazanov

Credits:

Ivan Mozzhukhin (German), Vera Orlova (Liza Ivanova), Yelisaveta Shebneva (Countess Anna Fedotovna as old woman), Tamara Durvan (Countess as a young woman), Polikarp Pavlov (Countess' husband), Nikolai Panov (Count Saint-Germain).

Producer: Josev Ermolieff, Scenario: Iakov Protazanov and Fyodor Otsep, based on the short story by Alexandr Pushkin, Camera: Eugenii Slavinskii, Art Directors: Vladimir Balliuzek, S. Lilienberg and W. Przybytniewski, Asst. Director: Georg Asayaroff.

Ermolieff Films, Russia

Running Time 63 mins.

Synopsis:
German, an officer in the Horse Guards, is at the house of his friend Narumov where his fellow officers are playing cards. German watches them intently, yet never gambles himself. He professes to be unwilling to 'sacrifice the necessary in the hope of gaining the superfuous'.

His interest is aroused by a story that Narumov relates about his grandmother, the Countess Fedolovna. Sixty years before, the young Countess had been the toast of Paris. A losing streak at the faro tables left her penniless, and when her incensed husband refused to pay off her debt, she sought the counsel of the alchemist and mystic Count Saint-Germain. "You don't actually need any money", the Count advised. "Listen to me...", and revealed the secret that allowed her to regain her wealth, a secret she has kept to herself for the past six decades.

German (Ivan Mozzhukhin) evokes the ghost
of the Countess (Yelisaveta Shebneva)

German is fascinated by Narumov's story. Chance brings him to the Countess' home in St Petersburg, and over time persuades her ward Liza to allow him inside. Begging the Countess for her sixty-year-old secret gets him nowhere. A desperate threat makes his pistol a murder weapon, although it is not loaded; the old lady dies of a heart attack. That night, her ghost appears to German. Compelled by some supernatural law, she tells him simply that he must play the three, the seven and the ace in succession. Then she is gone.

German visits a gambling club in Moscow, staking his entire fortune of 47,000 roubles on the turn of a single card; he plays the three, and wins. He returns the next night to play the seven, and is successful once again., and it's heritage On the third night, a crowd gathers to watch as he plays his final card. The dealer cries "The ace wins!", but the outcome is not what German expects...

Notes:

The Queen of Spades is widely regarded by those who know about such things as one of the finest examples of Tsarist Russian cinema. This brief but fruitful period lasted for just under a decade; Svetna Lanzy, Russia's first home-grown narrative film, appeared in 1908 while Iakov Protazanov's Father Sergius was the last to be completed before the October Revolution in 1917.

Although basically a tale of revenge from beyond the grave, TQOS is not usually considered as part of the horror genre. This is perhaps not all that surprising if you bear in mind that it was based on an acknowledged literary classic; 'serious' critics are usually reluctant to tarnish their pet subjects with such disreputable associations, which is why you'll rarely find the many screen versions of Shakespeare's The Tempest or Dickens' A Christmas Carol in genre surveys, despite their authentically supernatural themes.

In addition, The Queen of Spades features an intriguing guest appearance from the mysterious Count Saint-Germaine, a real-life historical figure who claimed, amongst other things, to be over three hundred years old, to possess the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, and to be able to liquefy diamonds. A darling of the court of Louis XV, later commentators have variously depicted him as a vampire, a charlatan, a mystical High Adept and the legendary Wandering Jew.

But despite all the paranormal trappings, it doesn't seem as though The Queen Of Spades was ever intended to frighten. Its author Pushkin enjoyed a reputation as Russia's greatest, and so his work was approached by the indigenous film industry with a suitable amount of reverence. The Russians were quick to embrace the movie camera as an instrument for genuine artistic expression, and had set their sights high from the beginning. There's a fitting quote credited to film expert Yuri Tsivian; "in constructing the edifice of their own cinema, the Russians, as usual, had begun with the roof."

German (Ivan Mozzhukhin) trapped in
a web of deceit

Any chills that the film might provide come from director Protazanov's aim to reveal his characters' psychological states in purely visual terms - states that just happen to be thrown dramatically off-balance as the film progresses. Protazanov's imaginative but carefully contrived images take a turn for the strange in the film's final reel; German becoming tangled in an outsize spider's web, or clutching wildly at imaginary playing cards that tauntingly drift past. It should come as no surprise that things end badly for the hopelessly obsessed officer.

There was an earlier version of The Queen of Spades, made in 1910 by director Piotr Chardynin and based on the libretto of Thaikovsky's 1890 opera rather than Pushkin's 1834 short story. While Protazanov returned to the original text for this version, the musical analogy is still appropriate. New theories of acting were being discussed at the time in Russia that attempted to codify an actor's movements and expressions in a manner similar to musical notation, something which later developed through the montage experiments of director Lev Kuleshov with the aid of his 'model actor' Ivan Mozzhukhin.

As German, the elegant Mozzhukhin is a model of restraint. He was admired as much by the public as by intellectuals like Kuleshov, and was later compared to Valentino for his intense gaze and sombre good looks. Describing his controlled, economical performance as 'choreographed' seems fair when not a glance or gesture is wasted. He and Protazanov made several films together (including Satan Triumphant in 1917) and we can assume that Protazanov was also musically inclined from his occasional habit of directing the action with a conductor's baton.

...And the last words, of course, go to Mozzhukhin's German, a decidedly non-musical refrain he was probably still chanting on his death bed: "...Three, seven, ace... Three, seven, queen... Three, seven, ace..."

Availability:
Early Russian Cinema Vol. 8: Iakov Protazanov (Milestone Films)

The Golem (Der Golem, Wie Er In Die Welt Kam) 1920

2012-02-06T20:15:00.006Z

"The word, the terrible life-giving word, I have snatched it from the Dark Powers. Now I shall call the Golem to life..."

From the mouth of the demon Astaroth comes the word written in fire that will turn the giant of clay into an instrument of vengeance... Paul Wegener creates a work of cinema alchemy from the raw clay of an ancient Jewish legend . . .

Directors: Paul Wegener (with Karl Boese)

Credits:

Paul Wegener ('A strange creature, named The Golem'), Albert Steinruck (Rabbi Loew), Lyda Salmonova (Miriam, the Rabbi's daughter), Ernst Deutsch (Famulus), Hanss Sturm (Rabbi Jehuda), Lothar Muthel (Florian, a knight), Otto Gebuhr (The Emperor), Max Kronert (The Temple Beadle), Dore Paetzoid (the Emperor's Mistress), Greta Schroeder (Maiden with Rose), Loni Nest (Little Girl).

Screenplay: Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen, Camera: Karl Freund, Camera Assistant Robert Baberske, Art Direction: Hans Richter, Sets: Hans Poelzig, Costumes: Rochus Gleise, Music Score: Hans Landsberger, Producer: Paul Davidson.

Union-Film, Germany

Running time 85 mins.

Synopsis:

Paul Wegener as the Golem

16th-century Prague: the astrologer and mystic Rabbi Loew, "the heart and mouth of the Jews", sees in the stars an omen of disaster for his people. The prophecy is proven to be true when the knight Florian brings a decree from the Emperor ordering the Jews to evacuate the ghetto by the next full moon. Loew persuades Florian to grant him an audience with the Emperor, though Florian is more concerned with the charms of Loew's daughter Miriam.

Loew consults his ancient volumes of necromancy in order to create a Golem, a clay giant that will serve as a protector of his people. With the aid of his assistant Famulus, Loew summons the demon Astaroth, who reveals the secret word - AEMAET (truth) - that will breathe life into the creature. The written word is placed within an amulet on the Golem's chest, and his eyes spring open... the Golem obeys Loew's commands until the amulet is removed, and he again becomes an inanimate statue.

Loew sets the Golem to work, chopping firewood and collecting provisions as bystanders look on in astonishment. Shortly, Florian returns to invite Loew to the Emperor's 'Festival of the Roses'. Loew brings the Golem with him, and the Emperor's court is soon charmed by the imposing but benign clay man. Loew attempts to appease the Emperor by manifesting a vision of the biblical patriarchs, but his sorcery is laughed off by the court as a mere conjuring trick. Their mirth angers the gods: the walls tremble and the palace begins to crumble around them. The Golem holds the ceiling aloft, sparing the lives of those present, and in return the Emperor agrees to allow the Jews to remain in the city.

Wegener's Golem drags Miriam (Lyda
Salmonova) through the burning ghetto

When Loew returns to the Jewish quarter, he finds that the Golem refuses to obey him; the stars are re-aligning, and the giant is falling under Astaroth's evil influence. He removes the Golem's life-giving amulet, and leaves for the temple to bring his good news to the people.

Meanwhile, Famulus calls on Miriam to bring her to temple, and discovers her in bed with Florian. He unwittingly restores the Golem to life to drive Florian away, but the enraged creature chases the knight to the top of Loew's observatory tower, and throws him to his death. As Famulus escapes, the Golem sets Loew's home ablaze and drags Miriam off into the streets. Famulus rushes to the temple, crying to Loew, "Your house is in flames. The Golem is on the rampage!"...

Notes:
It was during location filming for The Student of Prague in 1913 that Wegener's fascination with myth and folklore first drew him to the story of the Golem. According to legend, The Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created the clay being to protect his people from persecution by the Emperor Rudolf II. Statues of both Loew and his creation still stand in Prague today, and rumours persisted well into the twentieth century that the remains of the original Golem were stored in the attic of the city's ancient synagogue.

The Golem of Prague

Wegener's first version of The Golem was released in January 1915. Never a man troubled by self-doubt, he produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in the film himself, alongside his colleagues from Student of Prague, co-writer 'Heinrich' Galeen and co-star Lyda Salmonova, by that time his third (and later his sixth) wife. The story was updated to the present day, when an antique dealer (Rudolf Bluemner) resurrects the Golem only to have it fall in love with his daughter Jessica (Salmonova). Spurned by Jessica, the monster goes on a rampage but is destroyed when the life-giving amulet is torn from its chest and it falls from a high tower. How it compares to the 1920 version we can only guess, as there are barely four minutes of the earlier film in existence today.

The Golem was a great success in Germany, and was released America under the title The Monster of Fate, though we can assume that Fate wasn't on the Monster's side as the USA declared war on Germany the same week and the film sank into oblivion. Wegener meanwhile continued to make a speciality of fantasy films, including The Yogi (1916), and a series of subjects drawn from German folklore ('marchenfilme'), most notably Rubezahl's Wedding (1916) and The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918). He also found time to resurrect the Golem once more with The Golem and the Dancer in 1917, in which Wegener plays himself, attending a screening of the original Golem and donning the monster's costume in order to seduce a dancing girl. It is often cited as the first ever horror film sequel.

The Golem (1915): Wegener attacks Heinrich
Galeen, as Lyda Salmonova looks on.

Yet Wegener still felt he hadn't done the story justice. Drawing on the experience gained from his marchenfilme, he moored his third Golem film in the murky waters of the middle ages, allowing his imagination free rein in creating a self-contained fantasy world. Contrast Wegener's concept with Gustav Meyrink's 1916 novel 'The Golem', a contemporary tale in which the monster was portrated as a kind of personification of the ghetto itself, a spirit of the Jewish community; Wegener's Jews on the other hand were Kabbalists in cloaks and wizard's hats, trafficking in alchemy and sorcery. In his defense, Wegener at least portrayed his Jews in a sympathetic light, a perspective that would have been difficult to imagine in the German cinema of a decade later.

The fairytale mood of the film was enhanced by the work of UFA studio's artists and technicians, not least the eye-catching sets designed by Hans Poelzig. His jewish ghetto was a sprawling termite mound of crooked peaks and furrows, like Caligari's painted landscapes come to three-dimensional life. "It is not Prague that my friend, the architect Poelzig, has built", Wegener told the 'Film Kurier' in 1920, "Not Prague and not any other city. Rather it is a city-poem, a dream, an architectural paraphrase on the theme 'Golem'."

Poelzig was a mysterious figure with many esoteric theories about his profession, including the idea that every building had its own 'music', which could only be heard by the initiated. He made a strong impression on one of his assistants, a young Austrian named Edgar Ulmer; when Ulmer eventually got to direct a film of his own, The Black Cat (1934), he named his architect protagonist, played by Boris Karloff, after his old mentor.

Hans Poelzig's ghetto set

The critics were impressed, too. Wegener was already a respected figure in Europe, and thanks to the enthusiastic welcome given to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari a few months earlier, the Americans were primed for arty European fantasy in a similar vein. A review in the New York Times was typical; "The photoplay gives the impression of some fabulous old tale of strange people in a strange world, fascinating, exciting to the imagination, and yet so unfamiliar in all its aspects that it always seems remote, elusive even, when one would like to get closer to its meaning."

Like Lugosi's Dracula or Karloff's Frankenstein Monster, the Golem is a role that Wegener, a perfect fit with his bulky frame and Mount Rushmore face, can claim as his own. Presumably satisfied with his work this time around, he at last laid his man of clay to rest and moved on to another marchenfilme, The Lost Shadow (1921), a tale of Hoffman reprising Student of Prague's deal with the devil. The monster itself was revived a year later for Sascha-Film in Austria for The Golem's Last Adventure, which of course it wasn't. French director Julien Duvivier remade the story again in 1936, and then 20th-century revival It menaced Roddy McDowell in 1967.

More important than these later efforts is the lasting effect that The Golem would have on the next generation of film directors. It's been well documented that Wegener's performance was an inspiration for James Whale's Frankenstein. Whale, EdgarUlmer, Karl Freund (The Golem's cinematographer), whose classic monsters came to life through learning the lessons of Wegener and his expressionist contemporaries, all owe this film a great debt.

"Golem, your task is done. Become lifeless clay once again, lest the Dark Power seek vengeance..."

Availability:
The Golem (Kino Video)

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (John Barrymore) 1920

2012-01-30T23:49:00.086Z

"For some time, Jekyll renounced the dark indulgences of Hyde -- until in an hour of weakness, the demon, long caged, burst forth more malignant than before."

Call in at number 9 Barnsbury Road, Soho for an adventure in sin and degradation from the evil Edward Hyde!... "The Great Profile" John Barrymore brings Jekyll and his second self to life in this prestige production distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Director: John S. Robertson

Credits:
John Barrymore (Dr Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde), Brandon Hurst (Sir George Carew), Martha Mansfield (Millicent Carew), Charles Lane (Dr Richard Lanyon), Nita Naldi (Gina), J. Malcolm Dunn (John Utterson), Cecil Clovelly (Edward Enfield), George Stevens (Poole), Louis Wolheim (Music Hall Owner), Julia Hurley (Hyde's Landlady).
Producer: Adolph Zukor, Scenario: Clara S. Beranger, Art Direction: Robert M. Haas (architecture) and Charles O. Seessel (decorations), Cinematography: Roy Overbaugh, Assistant Director: Shaw Lovett. Based on the novel 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by RL Stevenson, and the play adapted by Thomas Sullivan.
Famous Players-Lasky, USA
Running Time 79 mins

Synopsis:

Dr Jekyll,"idealist and philanthropist", pursues his researches in medicine when not treating London's poor in the free clinic he runs entirely at his own expense. One night there is a social engagement at the home of Sir George Carew, father of Jekyll's fiancée Millicent. Sir George is sceptical of Jekyll's saintly reputation, and gently mocks his principles; "Your really strong man fears nothing. It is the weak one who is afraid of -- experience".

Later that night, Carew takes the men to a music hall where Jekyll catches the eye of an exotic dancer named Gina. Carew arranges an introduction, but the dashing young doctor makes his excuses and leaves. Even so, Carew's taunts have left their mark on Jekyll: he becomes fascinated by the idea that man's evil nature could be wholly separated from the good. "Think what it would mean!" he tells his friend Lanyon, "To yield to every evil impulse - yet leave the soul untouched!" Jekyll withdraws to his laboratory: a potion is concocted, and soon his experiments bear fruit in the form of his hideous alter-ego, Edward Hyde.

Hyde and the music hall proprietor (Louis Wolheim)

Hyde finds lodgings in a seedy Soho backstreet, and returns to the music hall to claim Gina for himself. But his appetite for debauchery is too strong and he soon tires of her. He throws her out on the streets, trolling the gin mills and opium dens in search of new diversions and other women. The next time he comes across Gina she is a haggard ruin; he responds to her sorry state with cruel mockery.

Meanwhile, Jekyll's friends are growing concerned about his long unexplained absences, and about Hyde's influence over his affairs. Millicent confesses to her father that she hasn't heard anything from her fiancée for days, and Sir George resolves to hold Jekyll to account for his actions. He and Lanyon later cross paths with Hyde, preventing him from violently attacking a small boy who got in his way. Their suspicions grow deeper when Hyde produces a cheque in recompense that bears Jekyll's signature.

Sir George finally confronts Jekyll in his laboratory, demanding an explanation. Jekyll refuses, saying; "What right have you to question me - you, who first tempted me?" As Sir George looks on in horror, Jekyll transforms into Hyde before his eyes. He tries to escape, but is overpowered by Hyde and bludgeoned to death.

Hyde, over Sir George's dead body

Lanyon discovers the body: Jekyll's colleagues pursue Hyde back to his lodgings in Barnsbury Road, but he evades capture by returning to Jekyll's house and consuming the transforming potion. Jekyll is reunited with Millicent, but his promises of devotion ring hollow; he knows that it is only a matter of time before Hyde once again gains control...

Notes:

The transformation scene had been the centrepiece of any actor's portrayal of Jekyll and Hyde ever since Richard Mansfield first astonished theatregoers with his before-your-very-eyes metamorphosis in T.R. Sullivan's 1887 play. Some found Mansfield's homicidal Hyde a bit too astonishing; in a perverse tribute to his skill, he was for a time suspected of the Jack the Ripper murders by audience members who refused to believe that any sane man could fake psychosis so convincingly.

John Barrymore's big scene comes half an hour into the 1920 film version. Alone in his laboratory, Barrymore's handsome Dr Jekyll raises a glass vial to his lips and hesitantly swallows its contents. Immediately he stiffens, clawing at his throat with an expression of mingled pain and fear. His hair falls over his face as he convulses violently, doubled up in agony; when he raises his head, the Great Profile is twisted into Hyde's leering countenance. Only then does the camera start to work it's own magic. It cuts away to show Hyde's elongating fingers, then returns to a face rendered more hideous by the attentions of the make-up man.

By 1920 there had already been five screen versions of the Jekyll and Hyde story, but Barrymore's efforts surpassed them all. He was at the time the most prominent member of America's foremost acting dynasty, one that continues to the present day with his granddaughter Drew. Respected equally on stage and screen, he performed on both concurrently. Jekyll and Hyde was shot during the day while Barrymore appeared as Richard III by night, an exhausting schedule that reportedly brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Players-Lasky's adaptation was put together in their Long Island studios with a scenario expanded to six reels and production values increased to match. The good-girl / bad-girl female leads invented by Sullivan for his stage play (named Millicent and Gina this time around) were allowed more screen time than before, offering insight into Jekyll's motivations and adding a lecherous tone to Hyde's formerly one-dimensional villainy. This sexual subtext is underlined by frequent borrowings from Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Several of Wilde's epigrams appear as intertitles, and the rakish Sir George Carew comes across as a thinly-disguised clone of Dorian's Lord Henry Wotton.

Nita Naldi

Worthy of note here is the bad-girl half of the pair, ex-Zeigfeld Girl Nita Naldi in her first major role, two years before she set the screen on fire alongside Valentino in Blood and Sand. Naldi's earthy sex appeal as the "fimous h'Italian dancer" Gina far outshines the pretty but bland Millicent (Martha Mansfield), and her scenes alongside the lecherous Hyde are some of the film's best.

Barrymore's Hyde mostly avoids the histrionics of his cinematic predecessors (see the1913 King Baggott version for details). He's not the simian brute of earlier (and later) films, but a stealthy arachnid, menacingly motionless until stimulated into sudden outbursts of violence. And if the scuttling walk and spindly fingers were not enough of a clue to Hyde's true nature, viewers are referred to the dream sequence late in the film, when a gigantic spider with Hyde's face crawls onto the sleeping Jekyll's bed.

On its release at New York's Rivoli Theatre in March 1920, the critics lavished the film and its leading man with praise. The New York Times called Barrymore's performance "one of pure motion picture pantomime on as high a level as has ever been attained by anyone". Variety called it "a fine, dignified production", despite labelling the story "ridiculous, by modern standards".

Another reviewer enthused, "one leaves the theatre with the belief that motion pictures are on the verge of a new era", and perhaps he had a point.

Availability:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Kino Video)

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Das Kabinett Des Dr Caligari) 1920

2012-01-08T22:46:00.704Z

"You Will Become Caligari!"

When darkness falls on the town of Holstenwall and the frantic motion of the Carnival grows still, the sleeper walks, bringing death's cold touch at the bidding of his master Caligari...

Director: Robert Wiene

Credits:
Werner Krauss (Dr Caligari), Conrad Veidt (Cesare), Freidrich Feher (Francis), Lil Dagover (Jane Olsen), Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Alan), Rudolf Lettinger (Dr Olsen), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (A Criminal), Hans Lanser-Rudolf (Old Man), Henri Peters-Arnolds (Young Doctor), Ludwig Rex (Murderer), Elsa Wagner (Landlady).

Screenplay: Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, Producer: Erich Pommer, Rudolf Meinert, Cinematography: Willy Hameister, Production design: Walter Riemann (Costumes), Hermann Warm and Walter Rohrig (Set Design), Assistant Director: Rochus Gleise
Decla-Film, Berlin
Running Time 72 mins.

Synopsis:
The town fair comes to Holstenwall. The hypnotist Dr Caligari visits the town clerk, seeking a permit to allow him to exhibit his attraction: Cesare, a somnambulist with oracular abilities. The clerk offends Caligari with his brusque manner. Next morning, he is found stabbed to death in his room...

The following evening, two students, Francis and Alan, visit the fair. Both are in love with a girl named Jane, though they agree to remain friends whichever one of them she ultimately chooses. They join the crowd in Caligari's tent, where Alan asks Cesare to predict how long he will live. Cesare's answer is chillingly brief; "Until dawn." That night, Alan is murdered in his bed by an unknown assailant. A possible culprit is arrested, though Francis suspects Caligari, and enlists Jane's father to help investigate.

Cesare (Conrad Veidt) attacks Jane
(Lil Dagover)

Later, while Francis is spying on Caligari's quarters, Cesare breaks into Jane's bedroom. They struggle, and she collapses in a faint. Unable or unwilling to kill her, he instead carries her off across the jagged rooftops. Chased by a mob, he is forced to abandon her, and escapes to the fields outside the town where he dies of exhaustion. Francis now knows that Caligari - who had spent all night watching over a decoy dummy of Cesare - is the true culprit. Caligari escapes, but Francis tracks him to a nearby insane asylum and is horrified to discover that he is not an inmate but the asylum's head.

The doctor's obsession with the legend of an 18th-century mystic named Caligari and his murderous sleepwalker led him to assume the man's identity, swearing, "I will become Caligari!" The luckless Cesare, a catatonic patient, is forced to kill at his bidding. When Cesare's body is discovered, Francis has him brought to the asylum. The sight of his lifeless servant drives Caligari is into a violent rage: clearly insane, he is wrestled into a strait-jacket and locked away in one of his own cells.

Notes:

Part 1: "Spirits surround us on every side..."

Caligari brought a new kind of nightmare to the cinema screen. Its co-author, Hans Janowitz, described his part in its creation as "the father who planted the seed", and that of his partner Carl Mayer as "the mother who conceived and ripened it". It was a nightmare grown to maturity through a terrible war which had seen millions of young men subjected to terrible atrocities, and which had been conceived by a vile sex crime committed in the dark shadows of a carnival.

Caligari (Werner Krauss) enlists his protege

1913: Janowitz, a young Prague-born poet, had been wandering through a fair on Hamburg's Reeperbahn in search of a pretty girl who had caught his eye. Following the sound of laughter to a nearby park, he saw a respectable-looking middle-aged bourgeois disappearing into the undergrowth ... and the next day, read of a young girl raped and murdered on that very spot. He attended the girl's funeral a few days later and again caught a glimpse of the mysterious middle-aged man. Janowitz was convinced he had seen the killer and was haunted by thoughts of countless murderers roaming the city streets undetected...

Janowitz's subsequent wartime experiences did little to improve his opinion of humanity. He left the infantry a committed pacifist with a fierce hatred of authority. He settled in Berlin and befriended an eccentric Austrian Jew named Carl Mayer. Mayer's father had committed suicide when Carl was only sixteen, and since then he had been scraping a living as an artist and theatrical bit player. During the war, Mayer had suffered humiliating mental examinations by a high-ranking military psychiatrist and, like Janowitz, returned to civilian life an embittered man, deeply distrustful of those in power.

The two men shared a love of cinema, particularly the fantastic films of Paul Wegener, and in it recognised a way to express their revolutionary ideas. Janowitz wrote that film "might lend itself to powerful poetic revelations", but those revelations failed to find expression until Mayer took them back to the carnival. On the Kantstrasse they saw a sideshow called "Man Or Machine" featuring a strongman who acted as if in a kind of hypnotic trance. As Janowitz later recalled, “he accompanied his feats with utterances which affected the spellbound spectators as pregnant forebodings”.

This was all the two men needed. Their story was concocted that very night, and a manuscript was completed in six weeks. A volume of Stendahl's letters provided the final missing piece: a Milanese army officer who gave their protagonist a name. Caligari.

Part 2:"Now I shall unravel the psychiatric secrets of this Caligari!"
Mayer and Janowitz couldn't believe their luck when noted producer Erich Pommer agreed to purchase their debut screenplay for Decla-Bioscop. According to film historian Carlos Clarens, the proud parents handed over their baby for the equivalent of only $200. Pommer saw artistic potential - and therefore, overseas sales - in the "unusual, if not subversive" script, but its authors were outraged at the eventual treatment is was to receive.

Pommer's first choice for director, Fritz Lang, was busy with his crime serial The Spiders at the time, but he recommended Robert Wiene as a replacement. A cast was assembled: Werner Krauss, under contract to Decla, was Caligari, and his old colleague from the Deusches Theatre Conrad Veidt wore the black leotard of his sleepwalking servant. Mayer's girlfriend Gilda Langer was suggested for the role which ultimately went to Lil Dagover, again at Lang's suggestion. Frederich Feher took the lead as Francis; after Robert Wiene's death, he also attempted to take the credit for most of the film's direction.

The authors' initial suggestion of Czech painter Alfred Kubin as designer was overruled by Pommer, who opted for three men from the art group Der Sturm. Hermann Warm and Walter Rohrig created the crazily distorted sets and Walter Riemann the costumes, an arrangement that appealed to Pommer for economic as well as aesthetic reasons. Painted light and shadow would save a lot of electricity, after all.

During filming, a change in the script suggested by either Wiene or Lang (depending who you believe) completely undermined the subversive, anti-authoritarian tone of the story summarised above. A prologue and epilogue were added which revealed the entire narrative as the paranoid delusion of Francis, who is in reality a patient of Werner Krauss' kindly asylum director. As critic Siegfried Kracauer commented, "A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one - following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum."

Mayer and Janowitz were outraged. Four years of wartime madness had informed their cautionary tale of unrestrained authority, which now had been gelded with an ending that timidly restored the status quo. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, the authors are at least partly vindicated. We can see that the reassuring explanation isn't all that reassuring; 'Normality' is represented by the ravings of the insane, played out before the same distorted backdrops as the madman's tale we have just watched.

Of the many individuals who contributed to the making of Caligari, posterity has come to recognise Mayer and Janowitz as the ones who made it such a unique experience. The interest generated by their creation in the years following it's release have ensured that their voices have at last been heard, and their message has been kept alive for each successive generation that experiences their twisted carnival nightmare.

Part 3: "In the grip of an obsession"

Pre-release publicity poster

Caligari's notoriety grew gradually following its Berlin opening in February 1920. The critics were impressed, and the film became an immediate hit, thanks to a clever ad campaign (left) by Pommer which insisted "You will become Caligari!" Unfortunately, the film's artistic intentions and antiwar sentiments were mostly lost on a public which assumed that the distorted visuals represented the world seen through a madman's eyes.

The campaign picked up steam. The French lifted the wartime ban on German films to allow Caligari to be screened, and gushing critics coined the word 'Caligarisme' to describe the film's singular style when it opened in Paris. British distributors described a story told "in somewhat the same manner in which an artist transfers his own emotions upon the canvas - in vivid and unusual strokes", adding: "...you will immediately feel terror in the movements of that floating grotesque".

But it was when Caligari reached New York in April 1921 that its reputation was cemented. US critics weary of insipid home-grown efforts enthused that "the artist has slipped into this crude phantasmagoria [the cinema] and begun to create". Critic Kenneth MacGowan called it "the most extraordinary production yet seen". Many commentators mistakenly labelled the film as 'cubist', and the film was not universally praised. Variety sniffed: "It may well catch the popular fancy, but it is morbid. Continental creations usually are." Either way, it made a strong impression on the public.

The Los Angeles premiere in May was disrupted by rioting protesters, mostly war veterans incensed that US dollars were being fed into the pockets of German film producers. Some sections of the audience hooted derisively at screenings, unimpressed by Caligari's "modern art" trappings and no doubt fired up by an anti-German smear campaign generated by William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. It appeared in countless magazine articles, and even works of fiction. According to Carlos Clarens, "it remained the most talked-about film of the twenties until the advent of Battleship Potemkin".

Original German one-sheet poster

Rightly revered nowadays as a classic, its expected influence on the course of film making never materialised. There were a few imitations, including Weine's follow-up Genuine, but Caligari was pretty much an artistic dead end. Its more immediate effect was to make a successful break away from realism, in the process opening the doors for the German expressionist movement.

The Schauerfilme (shudder film) genre explored by Paul Wegener and others in the last decade would flourish after Caligari; Wegener himself would be inspired to return to The Golem, Hans Janowitz wrote FW Murnau's Jekyll and Hyde adaptation Der Januskopf (1920), and studios across Europe began to see the viability of films whose main purpose was to run a shudder down an audience's spine. But as nightmares go, Caligari remains unique even after all these years.

Background information taken from 'From Caligari To Hitler - A Psychological History of the German Film' by Siegfried Kracauer and 'The Monster Show' by David J Skal.

Availability:
Recommended is the Image Entertainment edition with soundtrack by Timothy Brock.

The Devil's Church (Die Teufelskirche) 1919

2011-12-30T23:21:00.005Z

"The lord has forced the Evil One to build Him the temple! Come - follow me - let us cleanse the temple!"

Congregation, please be seated, and pray silence for today's sermon! Pastor Lucifer has a few choice words to say about all your old favourites; greed, hypocrisy, deceit ... and of course, lust. "A Thunderstorm Dream in a Prologue and Four Acts" describes Satan's plan to bring three peasant villages to ruin with the help of a peasant farmer's wife...

Director: Hans Mierendorff

Credits:
Hans Mierendorff (Pastor), Otto Werther (Asmus), Agnes Straub (Ane), Paul Rehkopf (The Devil).
Written by Adolf Paul, Assistant Director Freidrich Degener.
Lucifer-Film, Berlin
Running time 55 mins

Synopsis:
Asmus, a poor farmer, dreams that the Devil comes to his village in the guise of a tinker. The village church, shared by three parishes, has burnt down. As the parish council leaders debate where the new church will stand, the 'tinker' intervenes, offering a special fireproof stone to help with the construction. The council leaders see this as a sign from God, and it is eventually decreed that Asmus' farm, which occupies the central spot between the three parishes, will be the site of the new church.

Asmus refuses to hand over his land. While he is out at work, the Devil seduces his wife Ane. "Listen!", he tells her, "Your kettle is singing -- it is humming the old song of domestic bliss ... let it boil over a little - but silently and secretly, like a secret love no-one else knows about." Ane begs the 'tinker' for the child her husband cannot give her, and he whisks her away to the forest. Meanwhile, the kettle does indeed boil over, and the farmhouse catches fire. Asmus returns home to see the blaze as Ane tells him this is the "wrath of God" and dances joyfully in the light of the flames.

Paul Rehkopf tells Agnes Straub how a
watched pot never boils

A shaken Asmus gives his land away to the parish for free, but the leaders squabble over the land rights, ultimately refusing to build the church. The despairing Pastor is visited by the Devil, who offers to build the church himself, but tells him that should the Pastor deny God before the altar, he and the church "...are mine, with everything that lives and breathes in it!"

The pastor accepts the challenge. The new church miraculously appears overnight, and the pastor leads his congregation to drive out the Evil One. But the Devil will not be ousted so easily. Ane confronts the pastor with a few accusations of her own, and a bearded stranger bearing a shepherd's crook brings about a final reckoning for the souls that hang in the balance...

Notes:
Die Teufelskirche, produced by the splendidly-named independent company Lucifer Film, has a lot in common with Satan Triumphant, the 1917 Russian opus discussed on these pages a while ago. In both films, the church is at the centre of my infernal employer's diabolical schemes, and through it he undermines the community it serves. Sadly, this film is also incomplete, missing all of the prologue and the first act. But at least we get to see how it ends.

As in the earlier film, sex looms large - mostly in the person of Ane, an evident weak link who makes the leap from faithful farmer's wife to cocky village strumpet in no time at all. Agnes Straub as Ane gives a full-blooded performance here. The seduction scenes still carry a charge, though sensitive viewers may take exception to the way female sexuality is seen as a destructive force - q.v. the blatantly sexual metaphor of the boiling kettle which causes the farmer's house to burn down. Those same sensitive viewers may also worry about the way Ane constantly seems to be on the verge of falling out of her dress. Devilish!

Sex is just a means to an end, though. More mileage is derived from the theological traps set throughout the film, where Satan's most heinous schemes are justified as acts of God by the credulous villagers. There's the burning farmhouse, which Ane proclaims is God's punishment to her husband for refusing to offer his land to the community. There's the pastor's sinful desire for Ane, which he excuses by entering a plea of "only human", adding that Christ died to redeem them all - therefore, "There is no sin!" In fact, there's a lot here that still seems very pertinent today in an age of greedy televangelists and wayward Catholic priests...

The Pastor's confession: (L-R) Paul Rehkopf,
Hans Mierendorff, Agnes Straub and Otto Werther

Things come to a head in the final act, set entirely inside the eponymous church. It's a theological showdown in which God himself makes a surprising guest appearance and the assembled cast fling insults and accusations at each other with aplomb. It's a rousing finale, and one can even excuse the tired old cop-out 'why,-it-was-all-just-a-dream' conclusion, as we the audience had been aware of it as a set-up from the beginning.

This is a shame, as Satan (who, in the person of Paul Rehkopf, looks a lot like TV horror host Zacherle) had for once successfully damned the souls of the entire cast, thanks to the credulity of Pastor Hans Mierendorff (late of Hilde Warren and Death, in his sole feature as director) and the bountiful bosom of Agnes Straub. Sadly, it seems one cannot always depend on even the most sincere of directors to provide a happy ending.

Availability:
Not available commercially. Sinners are advised to view online or to seek out Ebay dealers.

Uncanny Tales (Unheimliche Geschichten) 1919

2011-09-12T22:35:00.012+01:00

“If it is totally silent we can summon the spirits . . . Are you afraid?”

Conrad Veidt stars in a rarely-seen, tongue-in-cheek anthology of five macabre tales. Death, the Devil and the Harlot come to life in an empty bookshop, to read of mysterious disappearances, fiendish traps and murder most foul...

Director: Richard Oswald

Credits:

Conrad Veidt (Death / The Stranger / The Assassin / The Traveller / Club President / The Baron), Anita Berber (The Harlot / Woman / Girlfriend / The Drunkard’s Wife / The President’s Sister / Baron’s Wife), Reinhold Schünzel (The Devil / Former Husband / Murderer / Drunk / Artur Silas / Travelling Baron), Hugo Döblin, Paul Morgan, Georg John.

Screenplay: Richard Oswald, based on the stories ‘The Apparition’ (Anselma Heine), ‘The Hand’ (Robert Leibmann), ‘The Black Cat’ (Edgar Allen Poe), ‘The Suicide Club’ (Robert Louis Stevenson), & ‘The Spook’ (Richard Oswald), Cinematography: Karl Hoffmann, Set Design: Julius Hahle, Producer: Richard Oswald.

(Alternate titles; 'Eerie Tales', ‘Tales of Horror’, ‘Five Sinister Stories’, ‘Weird Tales’)

Richard Oswald Produktion 1919

Running time 97 mins

Synopsis:

An antiquarian bookseller closes his shop for the night. On the walls hang portraits of Death, the Devil and a Harlot, which come to life and roam around the empty shop, amusing themselves by reading macabre tales from the bookseller’s dusty shelves…
The Apparition

A Stranger rescues a young woman when her former husband attacks her. She explains that he is insane and refuses to leave her alone even though they are divorced. The Stranger escorts her to a hotel, where they stay in separate rooms. After a night out with his friends, he pays the woman a visit, only to find her room, number 117, empty and in disarray. He later questions the desk staff, who deny the room was ever occupied…

The Hand

Two men are rivals for one woman’s affections, and they decide who shall win her by a throw of dice. The enraged loser strangles his rival to death, but the dead man’s hand tightens its grip on him... Years pass before the Murderer next meets the woman; she invites him to see her debut performance as a dancer. As the Murderer watches, a ghostly hand clutches at the stage curtain…but worse is to come when the woman invites him to join a séance…

The Black Cat

A Traveller makes the acquaintance of a Drunkard and his pretty but long-suffering wife. He is invited to their home, but is caught flirting with the Drunkard’s wife and made to leave. When the jealous Drunkard then threatens to harm his wife’s beloved cat, a struggle ensues and the wife is accidentally killed. He attempts to hide his crime by walling up her corpse in the cellar, but the suspicious Traveller soon returns…

The Suicide Club

A curious stranger searching a supposedly deserted property discovers the inner sanctum of the ‘Suicide Club’, where any member unfortunate enough to draw the ace of spades from a deck of cards is bound by the club’s rules to take his own life. Despite pleas from the sister of the sinister club President, the newcomer joins the club, drinking a toast to a recently departed member…and drawing the ace of spades on his very first night…

The Spook

In the 18th century, the bored wife of a caring but inattentive Baron takes in a travelling nobleman who has been injured nearby in a coach accident. Noting the developing attraction between his wife and the stranger, the Baron finds an excuse to leave his castle. Alone with the Baron's wife, the nobleman finds his mettle tested by a series of disturbances apparently supernatural in origin...

Notes:

Even in the early days, Germany took its horror films seriously. The Germans were always secure enough to serve their chills straight without the need for a get-out clause (“…it was all just a dream!”) to explain away their supernatural happenings. Which is why we need to put a film like Tales of the Uncanny in its proper context. Viewed among of sophisticated chillers about doppelgängers and Golems, audiences would have a different appreciation of a film whose sole purpose is to sneak up behind us and say “Boo!”

Death, the Harlot and the Devil

Before the framing sequence in the bookshop begins, we are shown our director Richard Oswald and his two male stars (Anita Berber is conspicuously absent) in a chummy embrace, a kind of acknowledgement of the unreality of what follows. When we next see Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel, they are in character as a grimly boggle-eyed Death and a rotund, Lugosi-like Devil with a widow’s peak, cavorting with Berber the Harlot among the piles of musty books. But as the audience already knows that none of this is to be taken seriously, we can all sit back and enjoy the fun.

Horror, as represented by Uncanny Tales, was only one of many genres that director Richard Oswald dabbled in. He made his name during a brief period after the First World War when the new Weimar Republic forbade censorship of all kinds. This loophole offered him the freedom to produce a series of films dealing with previously taboo subjects like prostitution, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases.

His perhaps most notorious film was Anders Als die Andern (Different From the Others, 1919) a sympathetic study of homosexuality starring Veidt as a gay violinist threatened by a blackmailer. The film, possibly the first to deal with the subject, was a criticism of the ‘Paragraph 175’ law, which made homosexuality a criminal offence. The scandal provoked by Anders Als die Anderen contributed to the re-introduction of film censorship in the May 1920 ‘Cinema Act’. The film was banned and most copies destroyed.

'The Apparition': Conrad Veidt in room 117

In Uncanny Tales, the first story is by far the creepiest. There’s the scene where a nervy Veidt calls on his companion in the middle of the night, only to find her room unoccupied and in tatters; a giggling, manic Schünzel as the psychotic ex-husband; and a final, rational explanation that offers no comfort at all. Disparate elements that strike a queasily discordant note, one that the next three stories sadly can’t quite match up to.

Even so, the mood is maintained as well as you would expect. Squeezing five stories into less than a hundred minutes means that the pace never flags, and though the characters are sketchy at best, the three leads apply the sort of broad strokes that a film like this needs. The toweringly talented Conrad Veidt applies subtlety and overstatement as appropriate, coming over best as the dryly malevolent president of the Suicide Club. Round-faced Reinhold Schünzel makes a meal of his contributions, most often as a comically exaggerated foil to the more sober Veidt.

As the third-billed player, Anita Berber is somewhat under-used, her roles often amounting to little more than plot devices. Berber was a cabaret dancer and bisexual cocaine fiend who thrived on notoriety; she delighted in attending society functions with pet monkey and lesbian lover in tow, naked except for a fur coat. Her prim and proper on-screen Harlot pales beside the real-life exploits of a woman who produced a show in 1922 titled “Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy”, and who would die of tuberculosis aged only 29.

Berber is given the most screen time as the bored wife in Uncanny Tales’s final story, Richard Oswald's ‘The Spook’. This reassuringly non-supernatural finale restates the film's position as providing a few harmless shudders, before returning to the three figures in the bookshop (who, of course, have found all of the preceding tales hilarious). The comedic element of the film was played up by Oswald in his 1932 remake, starring Paul Wegener. In this version, the stories are combined into a single narrative which serves not only as a black comedy, but as a parody of the Expressionist horrors of the preceding decade. Critics testify to the film's quality, even if Oswald might insist he was only kidding.

Availability:

No commercial release. Contact the spirits through Ebay, or you might find a copy here.

The Ghost of Slumber Mountain 1918

2011-09-03T22:26:00.005+01:00

"His fevered breath was in my face! - - I could almost feel his fangs tearing my flesh!!"

A ghostly hermit's strange telescope opens a window into the prehistoric world in 'King Kong' animator Willis O'Brien's prototypical debut feature.

Director: Willis O'Brien

Credits:

Herbert Dawley (Uncle Jack Holmes), Willis O'Brien (Mad Dick).

Story and Visual Effects: Willis O'Brien, Technical Advisor: Barnum Brown, Producer: Herbert M. Dawley.

World Film Corporation, USA

Running time 19 mins

Synopsis:

Uncle Jack tells his two nephews the story of his trip with his friend Joe into Dream Valley, where they made camp on Slumber Mountain. They come across the haunted cabin of a hermit, Mad Dick. Joe tells Jack how he once followed Dick to the top of the mountain to find him peering into the distance through an odd-looking telescope.

That night, as Jack falls asleep by the fire, he hears a voice calling to him from Dick's cabin. Inside, he finds old bones, books on dinosaurs, and a box containing the odd instrument that Joe spoke of. Mad Dick's ghost appears and leads Jack to the summit of the mountain. Jack is instructed to use the telescope, and through it sees all manner of prehistoric creatures; a brontosaurus lumbers through the undergrowth, a Diatryma hunts a snake, and a Triceratops battles to the death with a ferocious Tyrannosaurus...

Notes:

Willis O'Brien broke into the movie business by bringing dinosaurs to life. Born in Oakland, California in 1886, he'd tried his luck in many jobs - boxer, bartender, brakeman, rancher, cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News - but it was while working as a wilderness guide for the palaeontologists digging for fossils in Crater Lake that his fascination with dinosaurs was born.

Later, while working as a stonecutter, he hit on the idea of making his sculptures move. Drawing on his developing interest in prehistory, he produced a minute-long animation using models of a dinosaur and a caveman. This led to local exhibitor Henry Wobber financing a comic short titled The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, which was picked up for distribution by Edison Studios early in 1917. They commissioned a series of similar subjects, released as 'Mannikin Films' under the Conquest Pictures banner. The titles that followed, Morpheus Mike, The Birth of a Flivver, RFD 10,000 B.C., Prehistoric Poultry, and so on, all featured Willis's tiny animated cavemen and a motley assortment of prehistoric animals.

Edison had dropped it's short subject program by the end of 1917, but by then producer Herbert M. Dawley had recruited O'Brien with another project, which for the first time presented the animator's creatures alongside real human beings. Or, if not 'alongside', then certainly 'in close proximity to'.Whether because of a lack of technical experience on O'Brien's part, or simply a lack of resources, the plot contrives to show us the dinosaurs from a distance. It's only in the final scene, where Uncle Jack is chased by an angry Tyrannosaurus, that there is any kind of interaction, and this is achieved by cross-cutting rather than showing dinosaur and human in the same shot.

The dinosaur sequences for The Ghost of Slumber Mountain took three months to complete and the finished film, which was mostly live-action, came in at a relatively modest $3,000. It's original running time was said to be over half an hour, although Dawley inexplicably cut the film down to 11 minutes for a later release. The version that survives today runs to just short of 19 minutes at standard speed. Unused footage was given an airing in Dawley's fantasy Along the Moonbeam Trail in 1920.

Dawley, seen on the screen as kindly Uncle Jack, was less avuncular in real life, paying O'Brien only a modest flat fee for his work: we can assume Dawley benefited far more from the film's eventual profits of over $100,000. The relationship between the two men quickly soured, as Dawley, himself a model-maker, attempted to publicly take credit for the film's effects. He obtained patents for the armatures that O'Brien had created for Slumber Mountain and ultimately threatened a lawsuit when O'Brien began work on The Lost World in 1922.

Thankfully, both the courts and history were on O'Brien's side and it was proved that the innovations were his. Primitive though it is, Slumber Mountain represents a great leap forward in cinematic technique, only a couple of brontosaurus-sized strides away from the far more sophisticated Lost World, and its honorary successor King Kong, the undisputed high point of O'Brien's forty-five year career.

Availability:
An 11-minute cut is available as an extra on Planet of The Dinosaurs (Retromedia), along with O'Brien's earlier short The Dinosaur and the Missing Link. The 19-minute version is widely available to view online.

Eyes of the Mummy (Die Augen der Mumie Ma) 1918

2011-09-02T21:29:00.001+01:00

"The Eyes are alive! The Eyes are alive!"

A traveller to Egypt rescues a beautiful girl from the evil influence of her captor, until fate decrees that he follow the lovers to Europe and exact his revenge. A tragic melodrama from the director later famed for his Hollywood comedies.

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Credits:
Pola Negri (Ma), Harry Leidtke (Albert Wendland), Emil Jannings (Radu), Max Laurence (Prince Hohenfels).
Screenplay: Hans Kraly, Emil Rameau, Cinematography: Alfred Hansen, Art Direction: Kurt Richter.
PAGU-Film (UFA), Germany
Running Time 57 mins

Synopsis:

Albert Wendland is a painter travelling in Egypt, intrigued by stories he overhears about the haunted tomb of Queen Ma. The only man he meets who has seen the tomb for himself has been driven insane; all he can tell Wendland of his experience is, “The eyes are alive!”

Undeterred, Wendland makes the journey into the desert. At the entrance to the tomb, he finds an Arab named Radu, who offers to be his guide. Wendland is led inside to where Ma’s casket rests, and is startled when the ancient Queen’s eyes seem to come to life. When Wendland tries to get a closer look, Radu protests violently; the two men fight and Radu is brought down by a pistol shot. Wendland discovers that the casket is a doorway to a hidden chamber, and that the eyes he had seen belong to a beautiful Egyptian girl.

The girl, Ma, explains that Radu has kept her as his slave for several years. Wendland pledges to take her home with him and they abandon the wounded Radu on the tomb’s dusty floor. Radu stumbles into the desert, where he is rescued by Wendland's countryman Prince Hohenfels and his expedition. Radu promises servitude to the Prince in return for saving his life; in secret, he prays to his gods for vengeance on Ma and her lover.

Wendland introduces Ma to German society, where she becomes a celebrated dancer. Prince Hohenfels, returned from Egypt, comes to the theatre one night to see her perform. He is accompanied by Radu, who immediately recognises Ma; she senses Radu's hypnotic gaze, and collapses on stage.

Radu (Emil Jannings) menaces a
helpless Ma (Pola Negri)

Ma is taken ill. She learns that Wendland has sold his portrait of her to the Prince, and begs Wendland to ask him to return it, knowing that Radu is not far away. But Radu has already found the painting and angrily driven a knife into its heart. Wendland’s signature is the final clue that will lead Radu to Ma, and his revenge…

Notes:
Viewers coming to Eyes of the Mummy expecting a supernatural tale of love across the centuries from the same mould (no pun intended) as the 1932 Karloff film will be sorely disappointed. It barely even qualifies as a horror film, instead taking its template from melodramas like the often-filmed Trilby (as did Phantom of the Opera, for that matter), that of an innocent girl rescued from the clutches of a powerful villain, in this case a wild-eyed Emil Jannings in Arab drag.

Some questions arise about the ambiguity of the Egyptian scenes - the name 'Ma' for instance. Is it just coincidence that the girl has the same name as the supposedly ancient Queen? And what exactly is the extent of Radu's influence, when we know Ma is never physically held captive? These avenues are never explored, and in the end it's easier to imagine Radu merely as a sleazy confidence trickster, and the whole saga as a straightforward romance with tragic undertones.

The film was intended as a showcase for the talents of dark-eyed beauty Pola Negri. Director Lubitsch met Negri in 1917 while she was working for Saturn films in Berlin. By then, the woman born Barbara Appolonia Chalupek in 1897 was already an accomplished stage actress and ballerina, and had appeared in several films in her native Warsaw. Convinced of her star quality, Lubitsch persuaded PAGU-Film (then part of state-owned UFA) to devise a large-scale drama with Negri in the lead role.

Of course, it's possible this was just Lubitsch's excuse to expand his repertoire beyond the comedies he was best known for even then. What he ultimately bought to this quasi-horror subject (in which, by the way, there is no actual mummy) was a winning way with his characters, later termed 'the Lubitsch Touch' by his Hollywood contemporaries. Ma's awkward integration into European society, for example, is explored with just as much care as the more conventionally dramatic scenes. But when the action takes over, as in the final confrontation between Radu and Ma, some deftly-handled editing draws the viewer in. Compare with any similar scene of five years earlier for proof of just how rapidly the language of film was developing.

Pola Negri publicity photo

Lubitsch and Negri were something of a mutual appreciation society, Lubitsch calling Negri "one of the most vital persons I have ever known", and Negri in turn praising "...the agility with which he expressed his often brilliant thoughts". They made several more films together in Berlin before the lure of Hollywood proved too strong for them both. Negri's exotic good looks brought her stardom in a string of 'femme fatale' roles for Paramount, teaming up with Lubitsch one last time for Forbidden Paradise in 1924. Lubitsch himself enjoyed great acclaim with musicals and comedies - The Merry Widow, Ninotchka, To Be Or Not To Be and many more.

Emil Jannings, of course, went on to feature in a brace of German expressionist classics: Paul Leni's Waxworks and F.W. Murnau's Faust. Though many of his contemporaries later fled Germany, Jannings continued to work under the Nazi regime, as did his co-star Harry Liedtke. Lieddtke, Ma's celluloid saviour, was killed in his home in 1945 while defending a young lady from Russian soldiers.

Eyes of the Mummy enjoyed some success on it's release in October 1918, but political upheavals in Germany and the arrival of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari a year later meant its time in the public eye was short. When given a belated release in the U.S. in 1922, Variety dismissed it as "another of those labored dime novel dramatic stories from the UFA plant", but at least found the time to praise Pola Negri's dancing skills.

Availability:

Eyes of the Mummy (Grapevine Video)

Satan Triumphant (Satana Likuyushchiy) 1917

2011-08-31T23:04:00.002+01:00

"...And evil awakened in Sandro's soul..."

The insidious influence of our very own Lord of the Manor visits damnation upon two generations of a pious Christian family. A prestige production made during the last days of Tsarist Russia.

Director: Yakov Protazanov

Credits:
Ivan Mozzhukhin (Pastor Talnoks / Sandro), Natalya Lisenko (Esfir), Pavel Pavlov (Pavel, the hunchback), Alexandr Chabrov (Satan), Vera Orlova (Inga).
Scenario: Olga Blazhevich, Cinematography: Fyodor Burgasov, Producer: Iosif Yermoliev.
Yermoliev Film, Russia
Running Time 87 mins

Synopsis: Part One
The stridently ascetic Pastor Talnoks lives with his late wife's sister Esfir and her hunchbacked husband, Pavel in a home with scant warmth and affection. One night, a stranger appears, injured and seeking shelter from the storm. Talnoks takes him in, though the stranger's sly, goading manner soon begins to stir up repressed emotions. The stranger plays 'The Hymn of the Triumphant' on Esfir's piano, a rousing piece of music that seems to bring all their hidden desires to the surface. Talnoks and Esfir struggle to deny their carnal attraction, but after the stranger leaves, Talnoks admits that he "was right... right about everything."

Alexandr Chabrov, in demonic aspect

A 200-year-old painting bearing the stranger's likeness confirms Talnoks' suspicions that the stranger was Satan himself; Talnoks later steals the portrait and hangs it reverently in the church. His ultimate undoing comes when he and Esfir are discovered consummating their affair beneath Satan's painted gaze by an enraged Pavel. The church collapses, and only Esfir survives.

Part Two:
Twenty years later, Esfir is living with her illegitimate son Sandro, who has inherited his mother's talent as a pianist. While looking through old musical scores he finds 'The Hymn of the Triumphant', and almost immediately falls under its spell. "I don't know whether it was composed by an angel or a demon, but it is magnificent!", he tells his mother, who still remembers the terrible night she first heard it. Later, Sandro discovers the portrait of Satan in the collection of an acquaintance, and his mother's worst fears are confirmed.

Satan reappears and strikes up a friendship with Sandro, encouraging him to indulge in all the sensual pleasures he had until now denied himself. Esfir, still troubled by guilt over the events of twenty years ago, pleads with him to mend his ways before it is too late. Sandro tells her, "All joy is based on Evil" and embarks on the conquest of a society girl named Inga. Finally Esfir steals the painting of the stranger from Mikhaels and burns it. Though Esfir dies, Sandro is freed from Satan's evil influence. Sandro and Inga are married.

Notes:
Satan Triumphant (and what a title!) is an old story, and one that's been told often; the Devil places temptation in the path of unwary mortals, and in doing so forces them to face uncomfortable truths (see The Witches of Eastwick or Brimstone and Treacle for a couple of more recent examples). But whether or not you'd enjoy it hinges on the question of whether you could enjoy reading a book when you know the last two chapters have been torn out. Both sections of the film are missing their final act, doubly disappointing considering the impressive bearing of the eighty-seven or so minutes that remain.

Ivan Mozzhukhin as Sandro

What's left of the film undoubtedly belongs to its star, Ivan Mozzhukhin, a leading figure in Russian cinema during the Tsarist era. His dual role as Pastor Talnoks and his illegitimate son Sandro is a model of restraint, miles removed from the overstated posturing that 21st century audiences have come to expect from films of this era. Mozzhukhin was famed for his expressive features and his penetrating gaze, and not just with cinema audiences. Many directors, most notably the theorist and film school founder Lev Kuleshov, cited him as a prime exponent of the acting craft, and a string of love affairs attested to his charm on a more personal level.

Mozzhukhin makes Pastor Talnoks a character perpetually at odds with his own nature, his humourless piety marking him out as doomed from the start. His refusal of a simple gift of flowers from one of his flock ("they suggest a profane vanity") shows the sad extent of his distance from the material world. We are hardly surprised when Alexandr Chabrov's ingratiating Devil awakens him to the charms of his sister-in-law Esfir, effortlessly condemning Talnoks in this world and the next.

In fact, what is probably most appealing about Satan Triumphant is this frankness in matters of sexuality. While never explicit, the film's unambiguous tone makes the character's moral breakdowns that much more believable. At the Devil's urging, Pavel clumsily attempts to claim his "conjugal rights", only to be rebuffed by a clearly repulsed Esfir. Esfir later catches the Pastor stealing a longing glance at her, and though she hurries away guiltily, her expression when she is alone tells a different story. Sexual desire, and its denial, is what drives the four protagonists (including Sandro), and by extension, the entire film.

Ivan Mozzhukhin and Natalya Lisenko make love
under the watchful eye of Satan

Happily, Natalya Lisenko as Esfir (Mozzhukhin's real-life wife at the time) is called on to do more than just react to the male lead. Just as Mozzhukhin is equally convincing in portraying the fall from grace of both the Pastor and his rakish son, so Lisenko describes Esfir's path from dutiful wife to adulteress to remorseful mother with (for 1917) understated dignity. But if all this anguish makes the whole picture a bit gloomy at times, it is at least always watchable.

Satan Triumphant arrived at a turning point in Russian history. By the time it was released in October of 1917, the Tsar had been deposed and the Red Army was slowly moving eastward. The state soon censored practically all of Mozzhukhin's work, including a similar tale of sexual repression, Father Sergius, one of the best-known of all his films and the last of several collaborations with director Protazanov. A year later he had lost his home and possessions to the communists but continued to work under the protection of the White Russians in Yalta (now in Ukraine) until the end of 1919, when he was forced to flee to Europe.

A promising new career in France was curtailed by an ill-advised move to the USA in 1926 at the invitation of Carl Laemmle at Universal. In search of a new Valentino, the studio tried to shoehorn Mozzhekhin into an unsuitable role alongside the Phantom of the Opera's protege Mary Philbin, changing his name to 'John Moskin' and insisting that he had plastic surgery to streamline his features. Though the advent of talkies left the non-English-speaking actor out in the cold, he moved back to Europe where he continued to work all through the thirties.

Availability:
Not available commercially. Be vigilant!

Satanic Rhapsody (Rapsodia Satanica) 1917

2011-08-30T21:19:00.002+01:00

"Dances, flowers, dreams ... and the grinning Demon in the shadows awaits his prey..."

Another starring role for the Lord of the Manor... Poet and dramatist Nino Oxilia's lavish re-imagining of the Faust legend brought stunningly to life with elegant imagery, vibrant colours and an orchestral score by one of Italy's leading composers. Italian diva Lyda Borelli stars.

Director: Nino Oxilia

Credits:

Lyda Borelli (Contessa Alba d'Oltrevita), Andrea Habay (Tristane), Ugo Bazzini (Mephisto), Giovanni Cini (Sergio).

Scenario: Alfa (Alberto Fassini), based on the poem by Fausto Maria Martini, Photography: Giorgio Ricci, Intertitles: Fausto Maria Martini, Musical Score: Pietro Mascagni.

Cines, Rome

Running Time 44 mins

Synopsis:

Saddened by the sight of her youthful guests in her Castle of Illusions, the elderly Contessa Alba d'Oltrevita longs to return to her younger days. Mephisto emerges from a painting of Faust to offer Alba her youth, on the condition that she renounce love forever... she accepts, and Mephisto reverses an hourglass, turning back time...

During springtime festivities, the now young and beautiful Alba is courted by two brothers, Tristano and Sergio as the Devil watches from the shadows. Tristano's affection is frivolous, but Sergio confesses to Alba that he is falling in love with her. At a costume party, Sergio sends Alba a note, threatening suicide if she does not meet him at midnight.

Tristano intervenes for his brother's sake, threatening and pleading with Alba to spare Sergio's life. Alba callously refuses, instead playfully seducing Tristano... as the clock strikes midnight, she and Tristano are locked in an embrace, and from outside the sound of a gunshot is heard... Distraught by the sight of his brother's dead body, Tristano flees the castle. Alba is filled with remorse ... and the first signs of ageing begin to appear on her face...

A Priestess of Love and Death: Lyda Borelli

The Castle of Illusion is closed to outsiders: Alba wanders alone through the gardens, realising in her sorrow that "love is all ... and the rest is poor illusion". Mephisto then reveals to Alba that Tristano has been returning every night on horseback, maintaining his vigil on a hill beyond the castle... Alba once more embraces life, opening the gates to guests, decorating her quarters with the finest flowers from her garden. She covers her face with veils, imagining herself as an emergent butterfly, or as "a Priestess of Love and Death"... Mephisto looks on, knowing that his hour of triumph is approaching...

Notes:

"The cinema must give the spectators fantastic visions, lyric catastrophes, marvels born of the most sturdy imagination. As in the epic poems, it must bring back the marvellous, of today and tomorrow."

So wrote the poet and political activist Gabriele d'Annunzio in an essay titled The Cinema as an Instrument of Liberation and Transfiguration as Art. He'd recently been involved with the production of Cabiria, the Italian historical epic that set new standards of grandeur and technical excellence for the feature film. His comments could apply equally well to Rapsodia Satanica, a film whose synthesis of image, sound and colour explored, according to the original programme, "the possibility of making a projection room into a magical melting-pot of all the artistic sensations in a new whole..."

A thorn amongst roses - Ugo Bazzini as Mephisto

Director Nino Oxilia took his inspiration from Symbolism, a contemporary art movement that valued spirituality and imagination over the mundane naturalism of the preceding generation. It's aim, as famously described by the poet Jean Moreas, was "to clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form." The film was based on a poem by Fausto Maria Martini (who also wrote the intertitles, as d'Annunzio had for Cabiria). Oxilia - himself a celebrated poet, journalist and playwright - developed his ideas so that every aspect of the film's production contributed aesthetically to the whole.

Integral to this grand design was the casting of Lyda Borelli as the Contessa Alba d'Oltrevita (literally, 'dawn-before-life'). Borelli was massively popular in her heyday, even contributing to the language as the word 'Borellismo' was used to describe the particular style and manner adopted by her legions of followers. Her exaggerated acting style, all grand gestures and sensuous movement, suited perfectly those films whose directors wanted an icon rather than a leading lady. Her larger-than-life image made her one of cinema's first true stars; when she retired in 1918 after her marriage to Count Vittorio Cini, her public was devastated.

Borelli is undoubtedly the focal point of the film, which takes care never to let reality intrude on its picturesque world. Careful lighting and composition give many scenes the look of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, through which Borelli and Ugo Bazzini as her tormentor glide like phantoms. Scenes unfold against a backdrop of ornate gardens and lavish ballrooms, at the time a common feature of similar tales of the aristocracy which came to be known as 'tail-coat films'. An extra dimension is added by the vivid colours, created through a time-consuming stencilling process known as 'pochoir', which gave a richer result than the customary tinting.

Cover to the original film score

The last element to be considered was sound; for this Oxilia commissioned a full orchestral score from Pietro Mascagni, one of Italy's most acclaimed composers. Mascagni was best known for his operas, most notably his breakthrough work Cavalliera Rusticana of 1890. Rapsodia Satanica was filmed in 1915, but its release was delayed by two years while Mascagni completed the score. He personally conducted the orchestra at the film's premiere: viewing the film today accompanied by Mascagni's striking music proves that the intervening years have done nothing to lessen its impact.

Relatively obscure today, Rapsodia Satanica has been lauded by those critics in the know as one of the crowning achievements of early Italian cinema. Sadly, Nino Oxilia's finest contribution to cinema would also prove to be his last. He was killed in action just a few months after Rapsodia was released, succumbing to a shrapnel wound sustained during the first battle of Monte Grappa in November 1917.

Availability:
No official release. Patrons are advised to seek out grey market video dealers. The film score, however is still available - and interested parties can find a complete reproduction of the programme for the film's 1917 premiere at this site dedicated to Pietro Mascagni.

Hilde Warren & Death (Hilde Warren und Der Tod) 1917

2011-08-29T10:28:00.002+01:00

"I am the one who relieves sorrow...who beds weary heads on pillows and opens the door to freedom..."

The actress Hilde Warren is offered a choice . . . accept a life marked by violence and tragedy or willingly embrace the cold hand of Death. Which would you choose? A morality tale with an early screenplay by fantasy film-meister Fritz Lang.

Director: Joe May

Credits:
Mia May (Hilde Warren), Hans Mierendorff (Hans Von Wengraf), Bruno Kastner (Hector Royer), Ernst Matray (Egon Warren), Georg John (Death), Hermann Pischa (Hotelartzt)
Producer: Joe May, Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Cinematography: Curt Courant, Art Director: Seigfried Wroblewsky.
May-Film 1917
Running time 40 mins

Synopsis:
Hilde Warren, a successful actress, appears in a play produced by her friend Hans Von Wengraf. Alone after a rehearsal, she is accosted by a spectral vision of Death, who offers her the peace of eternal rest away from life's suffering. She flees in horror, describing her experience to Hans, who then plucks up the courage to ask for her hand in marriage. Hilde turns him down.

Hans (Hans Mierendorff) comforts a distraught
Hilde (Mia May).

Hilde instead is in love with a rogue named Hector Roger, who unknown to her is planning a bank robbery. After the robbery, an exultant Hector agrees to marry Hilde, but the law soon closes in and he is killed by police in a gun battle. The widowed Hilde discovers she is pregnant: again, Death calls on her, and again she refuses his entreaties.
She moves away to the country to raise her child, Egon, alone.

Years pass, and Hans and Hilde are re-acquainted. They marry, despite Hilde's fears that Egon has inherited his father's criminal attributes. As Egon's behaviour grows worse, a frustrated Hans begs Hilde to give up her wayward son. She refuses; shortly after, Hans commits suicide. For the third time, Death offers to end her suffering and is refused.

Egon grows up with all of his father's vanity and malice, emotionally blackmailing his mother into funding his life of vice. The final straw comes for Hilde when Egon, on the run from the police, returns home demanding money: rather than let him escape, his mother shoots him in cold blood. Hilde is arrested for her crime; in her prison cell, she is once again visited by Death, and this time she accepts his embrace.

Notes:
Hilde Warren and Death is worth seeing as a snapshot of film makers who would move on to better things, but is still a fairly pedestrian film, even by the standards of the day. Hilde's ill-fated story is positively drenched in symbolism, yet director Joe May doesn't make the most of the opportunities offered by Fritz Lang's screenplay. Even Lang's characteristic mix of pulp-novel thrills and epic themes is only sketched out in Hilde, eighteen months before his own first stab at directing, though it would take just a few short years for the potency of his ideas to take him to the pinnacle of his profession.

It was Joe May who gave Lang his break as a screenwriter. When Lang wrote the screenplay for Hilde, he was still a lieutenant in the Austrian army, writing to pass the time while convalescing in a military hospital, and already he was tackling grand ideas. When he introduces us to Hilde Warren, she is in rehearsals for The Master of Palmyra, an 1889 symbolist play by A. Wilbrandt concerning the relationship between life and death; specifically, the idea that death is necessary to give life meaning. His deliberate inclusion of Wilbrandt's play underlines Hilde's strong association between Death and romantic love, a theme he would return to in his own film Der Muede Tod ('Weary Death', aka Destiny) four years later.

Hilde's two suitors represent polar opposites (honourable Hans offers security; Hector, vanity and reckless hedonism) that are echoed to an extent in the characters of the kindly Death and the self-centred, impulsive Hilde. In an early scene, we see Hilde speaking with the actor portraying Death, moments before the 'real' Death comes along and frightens her out of her wits. For too long she fails to realise that this Death is not a fearsome reaper of souls but a benign, merciful figure offering her respite from the downward spiral of her existence. A shadowy fourth member of the lover's triangle formed by Hilde, Hans and Hector.

Georg John as Death

It's not easy for us to sympathise with Lang's flighty heroine: though only half the original film survives, what's left shows us a character motivated by vanity and pride. Time and again she is offered escape from her increasingly desperate circumstances either by Hans or by Death himself, and repeatedly she refuses it. Only when things get so bad that she murders her own son does she finally admit defeat.

Tragically, actress Mia May (spouse of Hilde director Joe) was to suffer the loss of a child in real life. In 1924, her daughter Eva, at the time a popular but temperamental rising star, committed suicide aged only 22 when her fiancee Rudolf Seiber left her to be with his future wife Marlene Dietrich. Mia permanently retired from the film industry soon after her daughter's death.

Of all the figures associated with Hilde Warren, it's Fritz Lang's name that looms largest, although he had little direct involvement. Though he and Joe May often worked together, Lang later complained that May never gave him the credit he deserved, and the two parted company for good after collaborating on The Indian Tomb in 1922.

Lang claimed in a 1965 interview to have acted in four roles in Hilde Warren; "an old priest, Death, a young grocer, and another role which I don't remember...", but in what's left of the film there's little evidence of Lang's presence on-screen. Georg John is named in the credits as Death; he went on to appear in many of Lang's German films. You can spot him as the blind balloon-seller in M (1931) who identifies child-killer Peter Lorre by recognising the tune he whistles.

And Lang, to be fair, was not alone in his ill-will for Joe May. Best known nowadays for Asphalt (1929), Joe founded May-Film in 1914 and kept the company afloat with a series of crime dramas featuring heroes Stuart Webb (Eyes of the Mummy's Harry Leidtke) and Joe Deebs. After Hilde, it was his wife Mia (whose stage name he adopted in 1902; he was born Julius Mandl) who got the pick of the starring roles.

Known to be as dictatorial on-set as his fellow Austrian Erich Von Stroheim, he fled Nazi Germany and found work with Universal studios, where his abrasive manner kept him shackled to lowly B-picture material. He returned to fantasy with The Invisible Man Returns in 1940, and wrote The Invisible Woman soon after, but ended his film career a few years later to concentrate on running a Viennese restaurant in Hollywood.

Availability:
Not available commercially - copies of the film's surviving 40 minutes can be seen online or bought from grey-market dealers.

Fear (Furcht) 1917

2011-08-28T21:38:00.008+01:00

"The terrible Buddha priests want their revenge. . . There is no escape from their secret power!"

Horror legend Conrad Veidt's earliest surviving film. Robert (Caligari) Wiene directs the story of a Count who steals a precious Indian idol without reckoning on the consequences . . . FEAR, paranoia and a spectral Priest...

Director: Robert Wiene

Credits:
Bruno Decarli (Graf Greven), Conrad Veidt (Indian Priest), Bernhard Goetzke (Manservant), Mechthildis Thein (Greven's Lover), Hermann Picha (Minister).
Screenplay: Robert Wiene, Art Direction: Ludwig Kamer, Producer: Oskar Messter
Messter-Film, Germany
Running time 55 mins

Synopsis:
Count Greven returns to Osterna Castle after an absence of two years. His servants are shocked to find him fearful and withdrawn, ordering the castle gates bolted shut and refusing all visitors. His only solace seems to be an idol of the Buddha which he locks away from view. Greven later confesses that he has stolen the idol from the Indian temple of Djaba after hearing of it's beauty and mystical healing qualities. Since then he has been tormented by guilt and lives in fear of reprisal from the vengeful Indian priests.

That night, the High Priest appears in the castle grounds. Greven tries to shoot him, but the bullets have no effect. He begs the priest to take his life and end his suffering. The priest refuses, giving Greven seven years to live. Greven wakes suddenly in his bed, thinking the encounter was just a dream - until he sees a note pinned to the base of the idol: "Do not forget . . . today seven years hence!"

Greven loses himself in wild parties and gambling, until the townsfolk's disdain and his own waning enthusiasm lead him elsewhere. Great scientific discoveries are made, and then casually destroyed with a cry of, "To something new!". He finds a lover, from whom he cannot bear to be parted, but the priest's words still prey on his mind. One night he throws the idol in a lake, only to have it reappear in it's cabinet the next morning. Even his devoted lover cannot console him as the day of reckoning draws closer and closer...

Notes:

Spirit photography: a spectral Conrad Veidt
comes to reclaim the stolen idol

Robert Wiene's reputation as a director rests almost entirely on the angular painted shoulders of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Most critics tend to regard that film's success as something of a fluke, citing Wiene's uneven body of work as evidence. The relatively little-known Fear came early in a career which began with Die Waffen Der Jugend in 1913 and ended midway through the filming of spy thriller Ultimatum twenty-five years later. While nowhere near as distinguished a film as Caligari (but then, how many are?), Fear shows us a competent director capable of sustaining an uncanny atmosphere using only the simplest of plots.

Wiene's cast helps Fear rise above the ordinary. Bruno Decarli as the paranoiac Graf Greven throws himself around the scenery with wild abandon, but his manic style works well enough in this context. There's a kind of brooding stillness to the rest of the film, enhanced by the unobtrusive direction and by the restrained manner of Decarli's fellow players. The resulting tension between Greven and his surroundings, whether accidental or not, effectively underlines his psychological isolation as his foretold death looms up on him.

Also looming is Conrad Veidt as the cadaverous Indian priest, in his first of several films with Wiene. Veidt, like so many actors, had been lured away from the theatre by the film industry's financial rewards, making his first film Der Spion (The Spy) shortly after his military discharge in 1916. In Fear, he only appears on screen for a matter of minutes, though this is more than enough for his strikingly gaunt looks and imposing presence to put an indelible stamp on the film. Thanks to Veidt, simple double-exposure shots of the spectral priest walking through the castle's hallways look far more creepy than they ought to. Similarly sinister roles in following years earned him the epithet "The Demonic Veidt" even before his international breakthrough with Caligari.

Count Greven's lover Mechthildis Thein had featured in the Frankenstein-inspired 1916 serial Homonculus, later taking further roles alongside Fear co-stars Veidt and Bernhard Goetzke. Goetzke distinguished himself portraying Death in Fritz Lang's Der Mude Tod (a.k.a. Destiny) in 1924, but later tarnished his reputation by participating in the anti-semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss in 1940. Production company Messter-Film was absorbed into conglomerate UFA not long after the completion of Fear, though founder Oskar Messter continued to distribute films under his own name until the mid-twenties.

Availability:
No official release, though copies can be bought in North America through Reichskino.

Some information taken from "Conrad Veidt On Screen" by John T. Soister and Pat Wilks Battle.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea 1916

2011-08-27T21:14:00.013+01:00

"Tomorrow, I shall show you scenes even more wonderful.... I shall take you for a hunting trip on the very floor of the ocean."

A full-size recreation of Captain Nemo's ship the Nautilus and ground-breaking underwater photography add authenticity to this early adaptation of Jules Verne's stories of the undersea adventurer.

Director: Stuart Paton

Credits:
Allan Holubar (Captain Nemo), Jane Gail (A Child of Nature/Princess Daaker), Dan Hanlon (Professor Arronax), Edna Pendleton (Arronax's daughter), Curtis Benton (Ned Land), Matt Moore (Lt. Bond), Howard Crampton (Cyrus Harding), Wallace Clark (Pencroft), Martin Murphy (Herbert Brown), Leviticus Jones (Neb), William Welch (Charles Denver), Lois Alexander (Princess Daaker's Daughter), Joseph W. Girard (Major Cameron), Noble Johnson.
Screenplay: Stuart Paton, Photography: Eugene Gaudio, Asst. Photographers: Friend Baker, Milton Loryea, Art Director: Frank D. Ormston, Asst. Director: Martin Murphy, Technical Directors: H.H. Barter and James Milburn, Underwater Photography Process by Williamson Submarine Film Corp., Based on the novels '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' and 'Mysterious Island' by Jules Verne.
Universal, USA
Running time 101 mins

Synopsis:
1886; marine scientist Professor Aronnax and his daughter join Ned Land and the crew of the Abraham Lincoln in search of a mysterious 'sea monster' that has been terrorising the oceans. The 'monster' is in reality the Nautilus, a submarine belonging to the vengeful Captain Nemo. The Nautilus sinks the Lincoln, though Nemo shows mercy and rescues the survivors. Aronnax, his daughter, Ned Land and two other crewmen are imprisoned indefinitely aboard the Nautilus.

Meanwhile, a crew of five Union Army scouts led by Lieutenant Bond are cast adrift in a hot air balloon. They come to ground at Mysterious Island, where Bond discovers the island's lone inhabitant, a leopardskin-clad feral girl (a "child of nature"). Bond, gives her some soldier's clothing and persuades her to join his men.

Nemo's crewmen disembark at Mysterious Island

The Nautilus also arrives at the island. Though keeping the ship's presence a secret, Nemo's crew rescue a stranded member of Bond's party and later provide supplies for the castaway soldiers. His compassion aroused, Nemo offers his five captives the freedom of the vessel. He and Aronnax venture out of the Nautilus in diving suits to explore the ocean floor and encounter a group of deadly sharks.

In the mean time, Charles Denver, a retired colonial trader, has brought his yacht and crew to Mysterious Island. The guilt-ridden Denver is searching for his illegitimate child, who he had taken and abandoned here after her mother, Princess Daaker, committed suicide.

After Nemo saves one of Bond's men from the clutches of a giant octopus, the three groups' fates converge. The feral girl tells Bond the story of how she was abandoned on the island while still a child ... later, one of Bond's soldiers, obsessed with the feral girl, abducts her, intending to escape on Denver's yacht. Nemo meanwhile discovers that the yacht's owner is the man he has been seeking revenge on for many years... Bond manages to rescue the girl at before Nemo's a torpedo strike sinks the yacht. Bond and the girl are taken aboard the Nautilus for Nemo to offer final revelations about Denver and his own vendetta against humanity...

Notes:
Watching 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea today somehow brings to mind the films of James Cameron, and not just his maritime epics The Abyss and Titanic. Both Cameron and the current film's director Stuart Paton share an obsessive fascination with technology (on both sides of the camera), not to mention a reliance on spectacle to propel the story and a wanton disregard for expenditure.

The fourth screen adaptation of Jules Verne's story, after versions by Biograph in 1905, Georges Melies in 1907 and Eclair studios in 1913, came to the screen via the breakthroughs in marine photography made by brothers George and John Ernest Williamson. The Williamsons had gone to the Bahamas in 1914 and shot their own film, Thirty Leagues Under The Sea, to demonstrate the capabilities of the 'Williamson tube' underwater camera. Universal sought a way to exploit their innovations commercially and found an ideal vehicle in Verne's novel.

Or, more accurately, 'novels', as Paton's screenplay also mixes in generous helpings of Verne's other Nemo adventure Mysterious Island. It finally abandons both, for an epilogue set in India that is almost entirely Paton's invention. In its defense, Paton's film is one of the few to correctly portray Nemo as the Indian Sultan of the 1870 text. (Incidentally, Verne originally wrote Nemo as a Polish nobleman waging war against Russian oppressors, but his nationality was changed to appease his sensitive publishers at a time when France and Russia were closely allied.)

Captain Nemo (Allan Holubar) surveys the oceans

In light of this, it's disappointing to see that Alan Holubar is a white actor playing Nemo in white beard and blackface make-up (which also makes it hard to spot that he was only 27 years old at the time). The equally white Jane Gail (Alice in the King Baggot version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is equally unconvincing as both the "child of nature" and Princess Daaker, and in the former role is given to prancing around the undergrowth like an excitable wood nymph. None of the cast, it has to be said, are particularly convincing. Nemo is far less ruthless than his literary counterpart, while the novel's narrator Aronnax is reduced to the role of passive observer. The rest of the cast seem to gamely go through the motions as the perfunctory storyline moves them from place to place.

But such criticism is almost beside the point; this film is all about spectacle. When 20,000 Leagues was premiered in Chicago in August 1916, Universal had sunk (literally) almost $500,000 into the production. Filming took place over two years in California and Leonia, New Jersey, with extensive location shoots in the Bahamas where the clear water provided sunlight for the Williamsons' cameras. Also expensive was the full-size (80 feet long or more) and fully mobile mock-up of the Nautilus built for offshore scenes. A miniature Nautilus was used for underwater filming, which looked a good deal more convincing than the giant octopus that almost gets the better of Noble Johnson.

Universal, never the most affluent studio, were alarmed by the balance sheets and refused to consider binging any more Jules Verne to the screen. Until Disney broke the trend with their all-star version of 20,000 Leagues thirty-eight years later, their decision would seem to have been a wise one. Hollywood's next attempt at Verne was MGM's Mysterious Island starring Lionel Barrymore in 1929, which was a financial and critical disaster.

Availability:
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' (Image Entertainment)

Tales of Hoffman (Hoffmans Erzahlungen) 1916

2011-08-26T20:43:00.001+01:00

Based loosely on the opera by Jaques Offenbach, we present the amorous adventures of ETA Hoffman's eponymous hero, possibly the unluckiest lover in the history of mankind... Persecuted at every turn by nefarious nemeses in his romances with a living marionette, a deceitful actress and a girl who dances herself to death...

Director: Richard Oswald

Credits:
Erich Kaiser-Titz (ETA Hoffman), Kurt Wolowsky (Young Hoffman), Werner Krauss (Conte Dapertutto), Max Ruhbeck (The Uncle), Paula Ronay (The Aunt), Friedrich Kuenhe (Coppelius), Lupu Pick (Spalanzani), Ernst Ludwig (Rath Crespel), Relly Ridon (Angela Crespel), AV Horn (Dr Mirakel), Ruth Oswald (Little Antonia), Ferdinand Bonn (Lindorf), Kaete Oswald (Stella), Alice Scheel-Heschy (Olympia), Thea Sandten (Giulietta).
Scenario: Richard Oswald and Fritz Freidmann-Frederich, based on stories by ETA Hoffman and the opera by Jaques Offenbach, Cinematography: Ernst Krohn, Art Director: Manfred Noa, Art objects and interior design: Freidmann and Weber.
Lothar, Germany
Running Time 71mins

Synopsis:
1790: The young Hoffman lives in the care of his aunt and uncle. They receive a visit from the Conte Dapertutto, who Hoffman dislikes intensely. When the insubordinate young Hoffman is later banished to his room, he sneaks out through the window. Soon he encounters the alchemist Coppelius and his associate Spalanzani, who attempt to steal his eyes for their own experiments, but the boy gets away.

Hoffman is taken in by the dancer Angela, and her husband Rath Crespel. The Crespels call in Dr Mirakel to aid Hoffman, but Mirakel is more interested in Angela. Hoffman protects Angela from Mirakel's advances, but Mirakel later returns and hypnotically forces Angela to dance for him. Angela's mysterious illness means that the exertion is too much, and she dies on the spot.

Berlin, 1808: after being spurned by an actress named Stella, Hoffman moves to another town, where he again comes across Coppelius and Spalanzani. Hoffman is invited to a celebration to meet Spalanzani's 'daughter' Olympia, in reality a life-size automaton. Coppelius dupes Hoffman into wearing a pair of magic eyeglasses that make inanimate objects come to life. Hoffman falls in love with Olympia, but when the deception is revealed, tears the automaton to pieces.

Dance of Death: Dr Mirakel (AV Horn)
disposes of Antonia Crespel

Venice: at a theatre, Hoffman sees the despised Dapertutto with his ward, the actress Giulietta. Smitten once again, Hoffman is invited to Giulietta's palace, but soon becomes entangled in a scheme engineered by Dapertutto to get rid of Schlemil, Giulietta's old lover. Schlemil and Hoffman are tricked into fighting a duel and Hoffman kills his rival. Instead of winning Giulietta as expected, Hoffman is left to face the consequences alone as she leaves with Dapertutto in a gondola.

Later, Hoffman is reunited with Antonia, the daughter of Angela and Rath Crespel, though Dr Mirakel is still around and asks Crespel for Antonia's hand in marriage. Crespel refuses. Mirakel jealously tricks Hoffman into making Antonia dance, knowing she shares the affliction that killed her mother. When she collapses from exhaustion, Mirakel is again on hand to pronounce her dead.

Notes:
It's hard to know what to make of this early version of Hoffman's tales after the best part of a century. The storyline differs from both the opera on which it is ostensibly based and the original tales written by ETA Hoffman in the early 19th century. Those three tales, The Sandman, The Cremona Violin and The Lost Reflection, are simplified here; characters and incidents are sometimes omitted, sometimes merged. Coupled with the possibility of lost footage, this often makes the film difficult to follow for anyone not familiar with the source material.

Interestingly, the tales' fantasy elements are downplayed, a surprising approach for a director who seemed rarely to shy away from outlandish material. The Lost Reflection in particular has been shorn completely of its supernatural elements (Dapertutto's scheme to steal Hoffman's reflection) to become a fairly mundane story of love and betrayal. Likewise, the wicked Dr Mirakel's Svengali-like influence over the Crespel women is never fully explored. It's only in the episode featuring Hoffman's delusional love for the mechanical Olympia that we get a real taste of the author's (capital-R) Romanticism, as presented so expertly in Powell and Pressburger's 1951 version.

Exteriors for the present film were, according to the prologue, shot in Jena in eastern Germany. The rather grim and desolate-looking streets and courtyards on screen underline the film's prosaic tone, but ultimately work in its favour. That sense of decay, of a harsh and vaguely hostile environment, adds a texture that studio sets wouldn't have captured. This was the same approach taken by Stellan Rye with The Student of Prague in 1913; though in the end it seems as though director Oswald is aiming for one of those odd hybrids of biography and fiction that we'd see in films like Charles Brabin's The Raven.

Appropriately, the cast of Hoffman features an ensemble gathered from Berlin's finest theatres, including the spectacularly-named Erich Kaiser-Titz in the lead role, and a gruff Werner Krauss, three years before he donned the top hat, cape and gloves of Dr Caligari. Hoffman's persecutors - a reptilian AV Horn as Dr Mirakel and Freidrich Kuhne as Severus-Snape-alike Coppelius - get the meatiest parts: the female leads, as one might expect of a time before the Star System got a foothold, are pretty but interchangeable. In the end it's the director's film, although missing footage and a frustrating lack of information make it hard to see from this distance exactly what Oswald was hoping to achieve.

Availability:
Not available commercially, though prints may be found . . . if one has magic eyeglasses.

Les Vampires 10: The Bloody Wedding 1916

2011-08-25T22:18:00.005+01:00

"We are surrounded by enemies. We must be watchful and keep quiet!"

The final chapter. The Vampires are poised to take revenge on Guerande and his family, and a widow's faith in spiritualism may give them the advantage they need...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:
Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Louise Lagrange (Jeanne Bremontier), Jeanne Marie-Laurent (Mme Bremontier), Frederick Moriss (Venomous), Germaine Rouer (Augustine Charlet), Georgette Farabouis (Dancer).
Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.
Gaumont, France
Running time 55 mins

Synopsis:

Months after their wedding, Phillipe Guerande and Jeanne are living in fear of a revenge attack by the Vampires. Augustine, the widow of poisoned concierge Leon Charlet, is offered a job as the Guerandes' maid. Vampire spies witness Augustine's interest in fortune-telling, and send an anonymous note luring her to the house of spiritualist "Madame d'Alba" at 13, Avenue Junot, the Vampires' latest hideout.

Madame d'Alba shows Augustine 'visions' of her late husband's murderers (not visions but the Vampires themselves), and she is hypnotised into giving the Vampires access to the Guerandes' home. A lovestruck but suspicious Mazamette has secretly been tailing Augustine, and foils the attempt by Venomous and Irma Vep to gas the sleeping Guerandes to death. He, Phillipe and Augustine rush to the police station: meanwhile, Jeanne is abducted from her bedroom by the Vampires...

Guerande leads the police raid on 13 Avenue Junot. The Vampires again evade capture, kidnapping Augustine as she exits the house; Mazamette shoots a hole in the tank of their getaway car, which leaves a trail of leaking oil... Guerande, having discovered that Jeanne is also missing, sneaks into the Vampires' chateau. While the Vampires are inside drunkenly celebrating Venomous and Irma Vep's imminent wedding, Guerande sets a trap on the nearest balcony...

The Vampires are still celebrating when the police raid the chateau at dawn. Several are killed by gunfire. Venomous and others attempt escape via the balcony, but Guerande has cut through the floorboards, and they fall two storeys to their deaths. Irma Vep, meanwhile, has been hiding away from the police battle; she slips away from the conflict unnoticed and enters the basement where Augustine and Jeanne are being held hostage, armed with a revolver...

Notes:

...and the question of whether or not Irma Vep survives is one I won't reveal here. Vep is Louis Feuillade's most enduring character, with the exception of Fantomas who, although more well-known as a cinematic figure, was the creation of authors Allain and Souvestre. Thanks to the surrealists, and thanks to film historian Henri Langlois (who championed Les Vampires tirelessly), her legacy is still with us. Feuillade's story inspired Olivier Assayer's 1996 film Irma Vep (starring Maggie Cheung) and, indirectly, The Mystery of Irma Vep, a play by Charles Ludlum, and it's Brazilian film adaptation, Irma Vep - She's Back!.

Many of the cast of Les Vampires subsequently appeared in Judex, and Feuillade himself produced other crime serials into the 1920's, most notably Tih Minh and Barrabas. The main cast came together to film a small section of wartime fundraiser For The Children in 1916 (included on the Image DVD version of Les Vampires), and Musidora and Edouarde Mathe had cameo roles in Jaques Feyder's 1916 satire The Clutching Foot.

The influence of Les Vampires is difficult to pin down: as with so many silent films, it's success on release did not extend its shelf life into the sound era. Even so, it fits perfectly the definition of "cult film", having had a small but dedicated following ever since. From Fantomas onwards, Feuillade's images and ideas have become part of film language. It's probably more appropriate, therefore, to imagine the serial working in the same way as the Vampires themselves; mostly unseen yet omnipresent, hidden behind a myriad of celluloid disguises, making it's presence felt before retreating stealthily back into the shadows...

Availability:

The most complete version of Les Vampires is the Gaumont DVD set, but a cheaper alternative is a US version available from Image Entertainment.

Les Vampires 9: The Poisoner 1916

2011-08-23T10:24:00.008+01:00

"Madam, dinner is served..."

In episode nine of Louis Feuillade's classic serial, Venomous, the new Grand Vampire, arranges a deadly dinner party. Will reporter Phillipe Guerande and his fiancee survive to end the Vampires' reign of terror?

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:
Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep / Aurelie Plateau), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Louise Lagrange (Jeanne Bremontier), Jeanne Marie-Laurent (Mme Bremontier) Delphine Renot (Mme Guerande), Frederick Moriss (Venomous), Suzanne Le Bret (Hortense).
Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.
Gaumont, France
Running time 48 mins

Synopsis:
Venomous and Irma Vep are working in Venomous's chemical lab when they receive news of a vacant apartment above that of Jeanne Bremontier, the fiancee of their nemesis Phillipe Guerande. Vep rents out the apartment, under the alias Aurelie Plateau, while Guerande and Jeanne are downstairs with their mothers arranging the engagement party. When Vep's maid Hortense learns of the party, the Vampires put a scheme into action.

Venomous and his cronies pose as caterers from Bechamel House, intending to poison the assembled guests. Leon the concierge dies from drinking the tainted champagne while Mazamette is boring the other diners with a long speech. Their maid raises the alarm and the Vampires are once again forced to flee across the rooftops.

Fearing further attacks on his family-to-be, Guerande arranges for them to leave in secret at midnight for a villa in Chailly. Irma Vep discovers their plan and waits by their car in ambush. Mazamette, who has been hiding in the trunk, attempts to disarm Vep, but she gasses him unconscious and hides in his place. As soon as he comes to at the police station, Mazamette telephones to warn Guerande, but Vep escapes the villa in the Bremontiers' car before Guerande can catch her.

Guerande arranges to meet Mazamette at a restaurant near the chateau, where he is startled to see Irma Vep waiting to rendezvous with Venemous. Guerande and Mazamette overpower Vep and use her to bait a trap. Venomous however proves difficult to catch, and the two heroes are soon engaging the Vampires in a death-defying chase...

Notes:
This penultimate episode of Les Vampires is bookended by two set-pieces that neatly exemplify two of the main stylistic strands woven through the whole of the serial. There's the sinister gothic melodrama of the deadly dinner party, where the Vampires almost succeed in bumping off most of the main cast in one fell swoop, as contrasted with the action-adventure finale, in which Venomous and the ever-elusive Irma Vep are pursued in a car chase until, in the grand tradition of many a silent drama, Guerande follows Venomous as he leaps off a bridge onto the roof of a speeding train. One can imagine that the latter is the kind of derring-do that Gaumont wanted in their desire for a domestic rival to the American Exploits of Elaine. Director Feuillade's dedication to popular entertainment was never more evident.

All the time Les Vampires was in production, Feuillade was busy putting together the third of his best-known thriller serials, Judex. The chronology is a bit sketchy from a present-day perspective, but it appears that 'Judex' was begun before Les Vampires. Production was postponed until after the latter was completed, and the first installment was eventually given a limited release in December of 1916.

If some dates that appear on-screen during Les Vampires are accurate (a letter in episode five dated November 15th, etc.), it appears there was a period of three or four months between shooting and release. No information was available at the time of writing about the reasons for Judex's long gestation period, but one can infer that shooting was interrupted by Feuillade's stint in the military. His prodigious output must also be taken into account, as he would undoubtedly be working on several projects at once, at times averaging a completed film per week.

Feuillade regular Rene Creste was the Shadow-like eponymous hero, supported by Musidora as the gang leader 'Diana Monti' and several other featured cast members of the current serial. Once again, there are cunning disguises, outlandish gadgetry and daring escapes. Although he produced other serials for Gaumont, Judex could almost be considered the third part of a trilogy, so similar is it in style and content to Fantomas and Les Vampires.

One significant difference is that the title character, while still a mysterious black-clad vigilante, is this time working on the side of the law. This was most likely a reaction to the regular accusations aimed at Feullade that his dramas served to glorify the exploits of their criminals they portrayed. The grim goings-on in Judex were tempered by pacifist sentiments and the series ended with a peaceful reconciliation of all sides of the conflict.

Did the saga of the Vampires share the same harmonious denouement?

Find out as the story is concluded in Part 10: 'The Bloody Wedding'!

Les Vampires 8: The Thunder Master 1916

2011-08-17T23:35:00.007+01:00

"GOD SEES YOU. Oh wicked women, place your trust in He who sees all. When He calls you before His tribunal, THE TRUTH WILL BE REVEALED"

The net is at last closing around the Vampires, thanks to journalist Phillipe Guerande and his associates. But their leader Satanas is still at large, armed with a powerful and deadly weapon...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:
Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Louis Leubas (Satanas / Father Silence / Jaques Bretal), Bout-de-Zan (Eustache Mazamette), Delphine Renot (Mme Guerande), Renee Carl (The Andalusian), Georgette Faraboui (Dancer), Frederick Moriss (Venomous).
Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.
Gaumont, France
Running time 50 mins

Synopsis:
Guerande and Mazamette have succeeded in capturing Juan Moreno and Irma Vep. They visit St Lazarus' prison, where Irma Vep is being held before deportation to an Algerian penal colony. Vep asks about Moreno, only to be told that he had been guillotined that same morning.

The Grand Vampire Satanas, disguised as 'Father Silence', brings his electronic cannon to Port Vendres, where he offers to give spiritual guidance to the prisoners about to be transported to Algiers. He passes a coded message to Irma Vep telling her that he will destroy the penal ship, offering her the chance of escape - or a martyr's death. Satanas operates the cannon from his hotel room; the ship is sunk as it leaves port and it is reported that there are no survivors.

Later, Guerande uses the code book stolen from the Vampires to track down their base of operations. Mazamette and his son Eustache go undercover as rag-pickers and find Satanas' address in Montmartre. Meanwhile Satanas pays Guerande a visit; he paralyses the reporter with his poisoned glove and plants a bomb in his apartment. Mazamette arrives at an opportune moment and remove the bomb just in the nick of time.

Using Eustache as a decoy, Mazamette manages to sneak into Satanas' apartment. In the scuffle that follows, Mazamette gets his nose shot off: the police break in and the Grand Vampire is captured. As Satanas is taken to Sante Prison, it seems all is lost for the Vampires. But elsewhere, a train pulls in to a quiet rural station with a bruised woman in ragged clothing clinging to its underside... Irma Vep is alive...

Notes:
The current Episode of Les Vampires (released May 1916) is notable for a surplus of plot twists and an unusually high body count. Although all the deaths take place off-screen, two prominent Vampires and an entire ship full of women prisoners meet a sticky end. Guerande and Mazamette's persistence finally seems to be paying off, leaving most of their antagonists either dead or behind bars by the end of the episode. But the hydra-like Vampire gang soon spawns another leader, the poisoner 'Venomous', introduced towards the end of this episode (more on him next time).

Also making a guest appearance is Bout-de-Zan, the mischievous star of the series of one-reel comedies that Louis Feuillade had producied over the past few years. The director casts him to type here as Mazamette's wayward son, recently kicked out of boarding school for some unspecified but heinous misdemeanour. Louis Leubas' Satanas makes for a sinister cleric in his guise as Father Silence, while the indestructible Irma Vep again proves more than a match for the authorities.

Feuillade, it has been noted, was never particularly fond of cross-cutting or moving his camera; he filmed most scenes using static medium shots, which he punctuated with occasional close-ups to pick out fine details. That said, there is considerable visual variety on show here; more animated anagrams, like the poster in episode two which changes from "IRMA VEP" to "VAMPIRE" and back again; the stock footage of bombarded ships; the peep-holes in Satanas' apartment behind a Chinese mask.

But for all Feuillades inventiveness, the contemporary view of his work (at least, of his crime thrillers in particular) was one that has dogged genre film makers before and since; that he was slumming it. The last word goes to an anonymous critic from the Hebdo-Film journal from April 1916: "That a man of talent, an artist, as the director of most of the great films which have been the success and glory of Gaumont, starts again to deal with this unhealthy genre, obsolete and condemned by all peole of taste, remains for me a real problem."

To be continued in Part 9: 'The Poisoner'!

Les Vampires 7: Satanas 1916

2011-08-14T18:58:00.011+01:00

"Since you refuse to surrender, you will see proof of my power at two o'clock. It is useless to try and escape."

The new Grand Vampire asserts his power over Moreno and Irma Vep with a poisoned glove, a weapon of mass destruction and a scheme to steal the identity - and the cash - of an American millionaire...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:
Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep / Marie Boissier / Noemie Patoche), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Louis Leubas (Satanas / Claude Dupont-Verchier), Fernand Hermann (Juan Moreno), Suzanne Delve (Fleur-de-Lys) Emile Keppens (George Baldwin)
Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.
Gaumont, France
Running time 42 mins

Synopsis:
Moreno and Irma Vep are busy disposing of the murdered Grand Vampire's corpse when the man who calls himself Satanas pays a visit, explaining that he is the true Grand Vampire. As a warning, he temporarily paralyses Moreno with a poison dart concealed in his glove.

Later, Moreno and Irma visit the Happy Shack cabaret, where they receive a message from Satanas threatening revenge at two o'clock. As the deadline arrives, Satanas fires a shell across Paris from an electronically-operated cannon, destroying the Happy Shack. Moreno and Irma Vep escape unharmed. Meanwhile Mazamette, who had been at the cabaret earlier that evening, thwarts a robbery by three of Moreno's accomplices.

An abashed Moreno seeks favour with Satanas by hatching a plot to rob George Baldwin, a visiting American millionaire. Under assumed identities, Moreno's accomplice Fleur-de-Lys acquires Baldwin's signature, and Irma Vep takes a phonograph recording of his voice. Thus prepared, Fleur-de-Lys is able to take a hundred thousand dollars from Baldwin's bank account. But Mazamette is also at the bank, and recognises Fleur-de-Lys as one of the women who had earlier tried to rob him. He follows her back to her apartment, and a trap is sprung...

Notes:
With episode seven, Les Vampires takes a few strides further into territory soon to be explored by Fritz Lang in The Spiders and Dr Mabuse. The gadgetry employed by new Grand Vampire Satanus identifies him as a Mabuse-like super-criminal, more than a match for the mesmerist Moreno. The Vampires may still be reliant on traditionally anarchic vices like poisoning, kidnapping and shooting, but a more modernist slant is added by the 'identity theft' carried out on George Baldwin; and the electronically-controlled cannon that destroys the cabaret is a weapon worthy of a Bond villain.

Some years later, the Surrealist movement became notorious for holding similarly anarchic and anti-traditionalist views. It's not surprising that they revered Feuillade's serials, and kept his name alive throughout the twenties and thirties. Rene Magritte, himself a lover of trashy crime novels who illustrated several during his career, painted 'The Threatening Murderer' in 1926. This was one of several direct copies of visual motifs from the Fantomas films, taking it's lead perhaps from cubist Juan Gris's 'Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper)' from 1915. Founder of the Surrealist movement Andre Breton sang the praises of Les Vampires in a 1929 article is Les Varietes, declaring it "Beyond Fashion! Beyond Taste!".

No less a personage than Luis Bunuel was also an admirer. Fabrice Zagury, quoting historian Georges Sadoul, explains how Bunuel, like the rest of the Surrealists, were contemptuous of the self-conscious artiness of the avant-garde cinema of the time, praising instead the popular serials of the time and singling out Les Vampires for its "direct translation, without affected manners, of an unusual reality".

The semi-improvised nature of Les Vampires (only the last couple of episodes had a script of any kind) had strong appeal among a group of artists who valued automatic writing and spontaneous creation over mannered sophistication and studied technique. More appealing still for those with strident anti-establishment views was the vicarious thrill of chaos and destruction on a grand scale. More of which was to be seen in the next episode...

To be continued in part 8: 'The Master of Thunder'!

Les Vampires 6: The Eyes That Fascinate 1916

2011-06-23T23:15:00.006+01:00

"Moreno's gaze had a terrible hypnotic power..."

Guerande and Mazamette follow the Vampires' trail to Fontainebleau: the assembled criminal fraternity converges on the Master of the Royal Hunt Hotel, where their quarry is a cache of stolen US dollars. In this tangled web of deceit, betrayal - and bullfighting - who will emerge the victor?

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:

Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep / Viscount Guy Kerlor), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (The Grand Vampire / Count Kerlor), Fernand Hermann (Juan Moreno), Mlle. Maxa (Laura), Miss Edith (Comtesse de Kerlor).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 54 mins

Synopsis:

The Grand Vampire and Irma Vep are in Fontainebleau, posing as Count Kerlor and his son Guy. They discover that a fellow hotel guest, 'Horatio Werner', is really Raphael Norton, an American manservant who has stolen a large sum of money from his employer. Meanwhile, Moreno, pursuing a vendetta against the Vampires, arrives at the hotel in disguise. Also on the Vampires' trail are Guerande and Mazamette; Their suspicions aroused, they follow 'Mr Werner' out into the countryside and discover his stash of stolen dollars.

Later, while 'Count Kerlor' entertains the other guests with tales of a bullfighting ancestor, Irma Vep sneaks into 'Werner'/Norton's room to search for a map showing the stolen loot's location. She is ambushed by Moreno, who sends his hypnotised maid Laura in her place to pass the map to the Grand Vampire.

The Grand Vampire sends the 'Countess Kerlor' to retrieve the loot, but she finds only a note left by Guerande stating that he has taken the money for safekeeping. On her way back to the hotel, the 'Countess' is intercepted by Moreno. Finding her empty-handed, he gives her a ransom note stating that he is holding Irma Vep captive. Moreno, secretly in love with Vep, mesmerises her into submission, forcing her to write a confession of her past crimes. When the Grand Vampire calls on Moreno to demand her return, Moreno orders her to kill him...

Notes:

Anyone stumbling onto Episode Six of Les Vampires without having seen previous chapters would have struggled to make sense of it all. Almost none of the characters are who they say they are, and a further layer of ambiguity is added by the rise to prominence of Moreno, a skilled hypnotist who can mesmerise women - even the strong-willed Irma Vep - into acting completely out of character. And the plot is of no help: as Fabrice Zagury puts it in his essay on Les Vampires: "...Feuillade's narrative seldom originates from principles of cause and effect... Rather it unwinds following labyrinthine and spiral-shaped paths."

To fully map out a complex yet coherent plot would have taken time, and this was a luxury Feuillade could not afford. The serial had come about when Gaumont studios got wind of Pathe's plan to release of the Pearl White serial Les Mysteres de New York, originally known in the U.S. as The Exploits of Elaine, and co-starring future Mr Hyde Sheldon Lewis as villain 'The Clutching Hand'. Feuillade was given the task of getting a rival production into cinemas with the tightest of deadlines, and Les Vampires was the result.

Intentionally or otherwise, the characters in Les Vampires refuse to accept the usual social, moral or sexual boundaries, and in doing so create their own world of ambiguities, driven by imagination rather than logic. As a result, this world becomes more surreal by nature, the wilder it's extravagances get. Whether or not these transgressions are accidental is ultimately beside the point when it's a safe bet that the audience has no idea what will happen next...

To be continued in Part 7: 'Satanas'!

Les Vampires 5: Dead Man's Escape, 1916

2011-06-20T23:11:00.003+01:00

"A delicate perfume filters through the ballroom..."

Moreno continues his crime spree after his most daring escape yet... from the morgue! The Vampires asphyxiate the aristocracy, and Guerande feels the grip of a hangman's noose...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:

Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep / Mlle de Mortesaignes), Fernand Hermann (Juan Moreno), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (The Grand Vampire / Baron de Mortesaignes), Jaques Feyder (unknown).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 36 mins

Synopsis:

The Vampires are still at large. In Paris, the thief Moreno is brought before the magistrate Hamel, but he swallows what is thought to be a cyanide capsule before he can be questioned. His body is taken to the morgue, but that night he regains consciousness and escapes in a guard's uniform. Meanwhile, Guerande is kidnapped by the Vampires. Dragged out of his apartment, he is locked inside a trunk attached to their getaway car. En route, he manages to disengage himself, forcing the Vampires to flee empty-handed.

Guerande learns that the trunk had been hired from a costumier named Pugene by one 'Baron de Mortesaignes'. While tracking down Pugene, Guerande stumbles across Moreno, but the police he calls on for assistance are Moreno's henchmen in disguise. They take him back to their hideout, intending to hang him: Guerande stalls for time by telling Moreno of his discovery of the Vampire plot at the Baron de Mortesaignes' chateau...

The 'Baron' and his niece are of course the Grand Vampire and Irma Vep, who announce to their party guests: "At midnight, there will be a surprise!". When midnight comes, the exits are sealed and gas is pumped in to the room. As the last of the assembled aristocrats falls unconscious, the doors open and in walk the black-garbed Vampires to collect the spoils...

Notes:

The physical landscape in Les Vampires is as slippery and duplicitous as the characters who populate it. Windows, chimneys and skylights are utilised just as often as doors, and a fast car or express train is usually waiting nearby to propel the story ever onwards.

There are two separate scenes in Dead Man's Escape involving incarceration, where the sealed exits - symbolically at least - invoke the expiry of those incarcerated; Moreno's spell in the morgue, and the Baron's party, where the Vampires gas the trapped aristocrats into unconsciousness (not death, disappointingly). Immobility, as the workaholic Feuillade might agree, is identified with extinction. An appropriate point of view, one could argue, for a country mired in a devastating war and only a handful of years away from the high-speed thrills of the Jazz Age.

This restlessness of spirit found it's expression in personalities such as that of the undoubted star of Les Vampires, Musidora. Born Jeanne Roques in 1889 to a socialist father and a feminist mother, she was an infant prodigy who'd written her first novel by the age of fifteen. She later graduated to the stage, befriending performer and author Colette (best known for writing the novel 'Gigi', as immortalised on film by Leslie Caron). By 1914 she had made her first movie, Les Miseres de l'Aiguille.

Adopting her new name from a poem by Theodore Gautier (it means 'gift of the muses'), she joined forces with Louis Feuillade for Les Vampires in late 1915, and saw a considerable raise in her public profile as a result. Her dark-eyed, seductively vampish image paralleled that of Theda Bara on the opposite side of the Atlantic, and the enigmatic nature of her on-screen characters - Irma Vep in particular - only added to her personal mystique as an actress.

With Feuillade's help, she further sought to use film as a means of self-expression. While appearing in his 1917 seial Judex as Diana Monti, she embarked on a succession of films which she produced wrote, and directed herself. According to reports, only two of those ten survive today: Soleil et Ombre from 1922, and La Terre des Taureaux from 1924. Although she achieved some success behind the camera, her acting career was by that time on the wane. From then on, she remained only peripherally involved in the cinema.

In 1950, she directed and performed in a short film tribute to her old mentor Feuillade, Le Magique Image, her last venture into movie-making. Sadly not as seemingly indestructible as her on-screen counterpart Irma Vep, Musidora quietly passed away in Paris in December 1957. R.I.P.

To Be Continued in Part 6: "The Eyes That Fascinate"!

Les Vampires 4: The Spectre 1916

2011-06-19T17:53:00.012+01:00

"And now the 300,000 francs are mine!"

Enter the mysterious Juan Moreno, a rival to the Vampires in their scheme to intercept a bank's money transfer. Who will win the race for the stolen prize, and what of the murder victim that won't stay dead?

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:

Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep), Fernand Hermann (Juan-Jose Moreno), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (Mr. Treps / The Grand Vampire).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 30 mins

Synopsis:

The Grand Vampire poses as an estate agent, 'M. Treps'. His curiosity is aroused when a new client, Moreno, asks to lease a property with a large safe. 'Treps' arranges a suitable apartment, though neglects to mention that the safe has a false back panel that leads through to an adjacent room belonging to Irma Vep.

Meanwhile, Vep is posing as Juliette Barteaux, a clerk at the Renoux-Duval bank. She learns that banker M. Metardier is shortly to oversee a cash transfer of 300,000 francs. When Metardier invites 'Juliette' to accompany him to the cinema that night ("I'm a film fanatic!"), the Vampires seize the opportunity for an ambush: travelling home after the cinema, Metardier is stabbed in the neck with a hatpin and thrown from a moving train.

'Juliette' is shocked to see the dead man collect the 300,000 francs next morning. The Grand Vampire gives chase, but the new 'Metardier' gives him the slip by escaping down a manhole. Shortly, acting on a tip-off, Phillipe Guerande visits the bank in disguise, at once recognising Irma Vep. He acquires her address and later, with Mazamette's aid, gains entry to her apartment. Inside, Vep and the Grand Vampire have found Metardier's body crammed into Moreno's safe, but before they can act on their discovery, Guerande reveals himself, holding them both at gunpoint...

Notes:

Episode four, released on the seventh of January 1916, introduces another recurring character, the master thief and hypnotist Juan Moreno. This time around, the nominal protagonist Guerande's involvement in the plot is substantially reduced as Feuillade instead concentrates on the complex schemes and counter-schemes of the various criminals involved.

The forces of law and order, as represented by the Paris police, barely get a look in. Their primary plot function is to clear up the mess created by the heroes and villlains in their relentless pursuit of each other, both sides operating with scant regard for the law. Guerande, like his nemesis the Grand Vampire, uses subterfuge to get into the bank and to acquire Irma Vep's address. When he is subsequently found alone in Vep's apartment with a loaded gun and the trussed-up body of the recently-deceased Metardier, it's perhaps not surprising that les flics don't seem overly concerned.

A clue to the philosophy of Les Vampires may be seen in episode five. Guerande presents a copy of Jean de la Fontaine's 'Fables' as justification for his complicity with Moreno, showing a passage which reads: 'In all things, one must take the end into account'. More to the point, it's worth remembering how Feuillade saw himself and his endeavours: "A film is not a sermon nor a conference," he wrote, "even less a rebus, but a means to entertain the eyes and the spirit". And who would deny that it's always the villains who provide the best entertainment?

It seems the authorities did not agree. Les Vampires was briefly banned during it's initial run for its supposed glorification of crime - and also, one would assume, for the implied ineptitude of the police force. They relented after a personal appeal from a member of the cast, who reportedly charmed the chief of police in the same way she charmed the audience of Les Vampires: Irma Vep herself, a.k.a. the actress, poet, film director and novelist Musidora...

To Be Continued in Part 5: "Dead Man's Escape"!

Les Vampires 3: The Red Cryptogram 1915

2011-06-14T23:21:00.008+01:00

"The crimes of the Vampires are consigned to these pages. Those who attempt to learn these terrible secrets will be cursed. Beware!"

The serial's third episode sees investigative reporter Phillipe Guerande applying some sneaky subterfuge of his own in his attempts to infiltrate the Vampires. Director Feuillade introduces iconic femme fatale Irma Vep, in the person of vampish silent sex symbol Musidora.

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:

Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Musidora (Irma Vep), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (The Grand Vampire), Delphine Renot (Mme. Guerande), Maurice Lugnet (De Villement), Renee Carl (The Andalusian), Georgette Farabouie (Vampire Dancer), Louis Leubas (Father Silence).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 39 mins

Synopsis:

Phillipe Guerande, having survived his last encounter with the Vampires, has stolen the codebook containing details of their crimes. He feigns an illness to make the Vampires believe he is housebound. Sneaking out in disguise, he visits the Howling Cat nightclub and witnesses a performance by the singer Irma Vep, whom he realises is part of the Vampires' inner circle.

After the club closes, the Vampires continue carousing, Vep and the Grand Vampire plotting to retrieve their codebook. Back at home, Guerande is secretly visited by his associate Mazamette, now an undertaker. For protection, he offers Guerande a poisoned fountain pen stolen from the Vampires. Meanwhile, the Guerande household acquires a new maid, who Phillipe soon realises is Irma Vep herself. That night, his mother is unexpectedly summoned to a family emergency, leaving Phillipe alone with the murderous Vep...

Notes:

It's in this third episode that Les Vampires hits it's stride, introducing legendary villainess Irma Vep (more on her later) and presenting a twisting plot that is characteristic of the series as a whole; disguises abound, no-one is quite who or what they seem for very long, and characters move from place to place using a bewildering combination of rooftops, chimneys and speeding cars.

Director Feuillade was no stranger to these kind of exploits, having led his cast through the tremendously popular serial Fantomas the year before. Fantomas, arch criminal and master of disguise, was played by Rene Navarre in a saga which pitted his ruthless wits against those of the reporter Jerome Fandor (Georges Melchior) and Edmund Breon's hapless Inspector Juve. The serial's five films (In the Shadow of the Guillotine, Juve Versus Fantomas, The Murderous Corpse, Fantomas Versus Fantomas and The False Magistrate) were based on a run of thirty-two books by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, published between 1911 and 1913.

There had been precedents, both literary and cinematic: the adventures of master thief Arsene Lupin had already been transferred to film, as had a series featuring pulp detective Nick Carter, made by Eclair studios between 1908 and 1910. Yet the lurid crimes of the sociopathic villain Fantomas took the excitement a step further. Gaumont Studios won the bidding war with Pathe to buy the rights to the Fantomas novels, and Feuillade's subsequent dramatisation captured the imagination of the French public in the same way as its written counterparts had, becoming an instant hit.

After the death of Pierre Souvestre, his co-writer Marcel Allain went on to produce another eleven Fantomas novels. His character has since continued to appear in films, comic books and television series practically to the present day. That the public had an ongoing appetite for this kind of skullduggery was a fact not lost on Feuillade, who put his follow-up project, Les Vampires into production less than a year after the last Fantomas drama was released.

To Be Continued in Part 4: "The Spectre"!

Les Vampires 2: The Ring That Kills 1915

2011-06-13T23:56:00.012+01:00

"At midnight, the prisoner will be interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor of the Vampires. At dawn he will be executed in the presence of the Black Committee".

The second installment of Louis Feuillade's awe-inspiring serial. The murder of a ballerina draws Guerande into a deadly trap as the Vampires continue their reign of terror...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:
Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (The Grand Vampire / Count Noirmoutier), Delphine Renot (Mme. Guerande), Stacia Napierkowska (Marfa Koutiloff).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 13 mins

Synopsis:

At the exclusive Blue Camelia Club, the Count de Noirmoutier (aka the Grand Vampire) learns of a performance that evening by the ballerina Marfa Koutiloff, who is engaged to the reporter Phillipe Guerande. An associate gives the Count a poison-laced ring, which he takes to Koutiloff that evening.

Koutiloff accepts the Count's gift, scratching her skin on it's sharpened edge as she puts it on: while performing her 'Vampire Dance' on stage shortly afterwards, she collapses and dies. Guerande, who is also present at the ballet, recognises the fleeing Count to be the same man who had earlier posed as Dr Nox, and gives chase. A confrontation takes place above a quarry on the outskirts of the city; Guerande is overpowered and taken prisoner by a group of Vampires. They sentence him to be executed at dawn...

Notes:

The Ring That Kills mostly takes place in the gentleman's clubs and ballets of Parisian high society, yet Les Vampires as a whole is a cosmopolitan affair, showing no obvious political or social bias. Though Feuillade himself was raised in a conservatively middle-class Catholic family, it's perhaps a sign of his well-documented deference to his audience that there is something in its serpentine plot to appeal to everyone.

Feuillade, who considered himself a craftsman rather than an artist, would no doubt have scoffed had he heard himself described as an auteur by later scholars of film theory. But it was his guiding hand, and the plot ideas he would scribble down on any nearby menu, envelope, napkin or newspaper, that steered the chaos through ten episodes and almost seven hours. Without doubt, Les Vampires is solely his creation, as emphasised by the autobiographical references that are scattered throughout.

Feuillade was born in the southern French town of Lunel on February the 19th, 1873. His family were in the wine trade, and though the young Louis was an avid writer of plays, poems and magazine articles, when he arrived in Paris in 1898 it was as a representative of wine merchants Muscat de Lunel. (His character Mazamette poses as a salesman for that very same company in Les Vampires episode four.) His entry into films came some seven years later, by which time he was married and scraping a living as a journalist - like his protagonist Guerande - for the Revue Mondiale.

He was advised to seek a position at Gaumont Films, where director Alice Guy (at the time France's leading female director, albeit in a field of one) offered him a position as scriptwriter. Guy left Gaumont in 1907, by which time Feuillade was sufficiently experienced to be named her successor as head of production. His progress was no doubt helped by his ferocious work ethic. At his own estimate, he had produced around 800 films by the end of his career in 1925.

Much of Feuillade's productivity during this time centered on a number of continuing series, which were becoming increasingly popular with audiences eager for familiar faces on screen and studios hoping to encourage repeat business. There were comic shorts featuring child stars 'Bebe' and 'Bout-de-Zan' (who would appear in a later episode of Les Vampires), and a series of "essays in realism", Life As It Is. But it was in 1914 that Feuillade was to embark upon his best-remembered work, a serial based on the exploits of a master criminal whose written adventures had already caused a storm in pre-war France. His name was Fantomas...

To Be Continued in Part 3: "The Red Cryptogram"!

Les Vampires 1: The Severed Head 1915

2011-06-12T22:58:00.009+01:00

"DECAPITATED BODY NATIONAL SECURITY AGENT DURTAL, IN CHARGE OF VAMPIRE INVESTIGATIONS, FOUND IN SWAMPS NEAR SAINT-CLEMENT-SUR-CHER. HEAD REMAINS MISSING."

Intrepid reporter Phillipe Guerande follows the trail of the Vampires, arch-criminals of Paris, to the scene of a gruesome murder in the first of ten chapters in Louis Feuillade's thrilling serial...

Director: Louis Feuillade

Credits:

Edouarde Mathe (Phillipe Guerande), Marcel Levesque (Oscar Mazamette), Jean Ayme (The Grand Vampire / Dr Nox), Delphine Renot (Mme. Guerande), Rita Herlor (Mrs. Simpson).

Scenario: Louis Feuillade, Photography: Manichoux.

Gaumont, France

Running time 31 mins

Synopsis:

Phillipe Guerande, investigative reporter at the Paris Chronicle, is shocked to discover the theft of his files on The Vampires, a secret society of criminals that have been terrorising Paris. His associate Mazamette is caught with the stolen files, but persuades Guerande not to hand him over to the police.

A tip-off leads the reporter to the scene of a recent murder in St-Clement-Sur-Cher. The local police are reluctant to offer any information, so on his mother's advice, he seeks out Dr Nox, a childhood friend of his father who lives nearby. However, Guerande soon has good cause to involve the police. Nox's chateau reveals some dark secrets when night falls, and even the doctor himself may not be what he seems...

Notes:

A number of mysterious posters began to appear on the streets of Paris in November 1915. They showed a row of three masked female faces, each encircled by a question mark like a hangman's noose, and beneath each one, the same four unanswered questions: "Who? What? When? Where...?". Thanks to the war, the streets were far emptier than they should have been, but anyone who failed to notice these enigmatic signs outdoors could have found a further clue in an ad in that morning's papers: "Of the moonless nights they are kings, darkness is their kingdom. Carrying death and sowing terror, the dark Vampires fly, with great suede wings, ready not only to do evil... but to do even worse..."

Thus were the public alerted to the beginning of the latest serial-play by Louis Feuillade, the man who just a year ago had brought the immensely popular exploits of the master criminal Fantomas to the cinema screen. In 'Les Vampires', the authorities and the bourgeoise were forced to contend with not just one, but a whole gang of homicidal black-masked villains, their identities constantly changing, their methods encompassing the very latest of technologies and the foulest of murder weapons.

Feuillade's most accomplished work was a crime drama shrouded in a cloak of gothic horror. The world of The Vampires is a world of midnight intruders, of trap doors and vanishing corpses, high-speed chases and daring escapes across Parisian rooftops. Semi-improvised and filmed at a ferocious speed, the serial was mocked by contemporary critics and almost banned outright by an incensed police force, though it soon found favour with a public eager to escape from the less exotic horrors of war, and with a whole generation of artists and poets who revelled in it's depiction of a recognisably real world infused with mystery and danger...

To Be Continued in Part 2: "The Ring That Kills"!

The Madness of Dr Tube (La Folie du Docteur Tube), 1915

2011-06-05T23:24:00.009+01:00

The dome-headed Doctor's special white powder creates distortions in reality in an oddball early comic short from Abel Gance, director of the famed Napoleon, and one of the renowned innovators of cinema.

Director: Abel Gance

Credits:
Albert Dieudonne (Dr. Tube)
Scenario: Abel Gance, Photography: Leonce-Henry Burel, Producer: Louis Nalpas
Film D'Art, France
Running time 11 mins

Synopsis:
Dr Tube awakes in his laboratory, idly polishing his head as he pores over his notes. To his amusement, he discovers that the white powder he has produced distorts the appearance of the things around him, trying it out first on his dog, then his houseboy. Shortly he douses two lady visitors in the powder, who express dismay at their odd appearance. When their suitors arrive, the Doctor also 'powders' them, thus avoiding any further embarrassment for the ladies. Order soon prevails and the re-normalised couples settle down together in the Doctor's lab for a drink. Meanwhile the Doctor places his head inside a metal cage, brandishing some odd instruments in readiness for his next experiment.

Notes:

The powder takes effect...

The films that Abel Gance is best known for, Napoleon, and J'accuse, maintain their reputation thanks to the many innovative techniques in both editing and cinematography employed by their director. Gance's intention was to make films that audiences could immerse themselves in, and it's an early experiment with subjective viewpoints that provides the backbone of Dr Tube.

It looks as though the film's entire raison d'etre is as a vehicle for the effects Gance was able to create by filming the action through distorting mirrors. It's not clear whether the consequent druggy overtones (springing from the idea that the Doctor uses a white powder to alter reality, hmm...) are intentional or accidental. Some sources report that the producers, on seeing Gance's completed film, were 'outraged' and refused to release it. If true, this would seem to endorse the distinctly trippy qualities of the visuals that the modern viewer can't help but notice.

Gance left his job in a law office in 1909 to start his career as an actor and screenwriter, making his debut as a director with La Digue (which was apparently never released) two years later. His restless ambition led him for a short while to the theater, where an attempt to stage the play "Victoire de Samothrace" with Sarah Bernhardt was prevented by the outbreak of war. Dr Tube was the first film Gance produced on his return to the industry, and less than two years later he scored his first significant success with Mater Dolorosa. The anti-war opus J'Accuse followed in 1919, establishing a reputation that would be confirmed in the 1920's by later triumphs such as Napoleon and La Roue.

The misshapen bodies in the film were shot by cameraman Leonce-Henry Burel. Dr Tube could be considered a trial run for the kind of techniques Burel would put to use in his future collaborations with Gance to place their audience in the thick of the action. Cameras were suspended on wires, swung from pendulums, tied to running horses, and more. This experimental streak was arguably put to it's best use for the epic Napoleon, which, like the present film, starred Dieudonne - this time, minus the pointed head - in the title role. But where the restored Napoleon's revival in 1980 saw it hailed as a masterpiece, Dr Tube would appear to provoke the same reactions now as it probably did in 1915: curiosity, and mild bewilderment...

Availability:
Included as a supplemental feature on Lucrezia Borgia (Image Entertainment)

The Raven 1915

2011-05-17T01:03:00.049+01:00

"...Darkness there, and nothing more..."

Picture the scene... the young poet Edgar Allen Poe joins his friends in a toast to his sweetheart, Virginia Clemm. As they raise their glasses, a dark shape passes across the sun... and Poe shrinks in horror as, for the briefest moment, the shadow of black wings fall upon him... 'The Raven' is a little-known, fanciful re-telling of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, from a childhood blighted by the early death of his parents to an adult life measured in equal parts by romance and tragedy...

Director: Charles Brabin

Credits:

Henry B. Walthall (Edgar Allan Poe), Warda Howard (Virginia Clemm / Helen Whitman / Lenore / An Angel),Ernest Maupain (John Allan), Eleanor Thompson (Mrs Allan), Maran Skinner (Mrs Clemm), Harry Dunkinson (Tony), Grant Foreman (George Graham), Hugh Tompson (David Poe, Jr), Peggy Meredith (Mrs Hopkins Poe), Frank Hamilton (David Poe, Sr), Billy Robinson (Joseph Reed), Burt Weston (Negro slave), Charles K Harris (Mr Pelham)

Writer / Producer: Charles Brabin, based on the novel and play "The Raven: the Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe" by George C. Hazleton.

Essanay Film Co. USA

Running time 58 mins

Synopsis:

We first of all see Edgar Allan Poe's ancestors - John, a settler in the New World, David Sr, a revolutionary patriot - before being introduced to his parents, David Jr and Mrs Hopkins, who marry in 1805. After his parents' death, the young Edgar and his sister Rosalie are adopted by John Allan and his wife. As a young man, Edgar becomes a heavy drinker and accrues many gambling debts, becoming prone to disturbing drink-induced hallucinations. One night, as "...the insidious wine weaves strange fancies in his brain", he imagines his doppelganger cheating him at cards and later shooting him in a pistol duel.

A romance blossoms between Edgar and Virginia Clemm; he enchants her with the story of a girl and a hunter brought together by a mischievous sprite, later showing a caring side as he buys a negro slave from his cruel owner. This only adds to his debts, exasperating his father: meanwhile Virginia must fight off the advances of Edgar's friend Tony.

Soon Edgar and Virginia are married, but their happiness is short-lived. His manuscripts fail to sell and their meagre living conditions cause Virginia to fall ill. Eventually she dies, and the stricken Edgar cannot escape the visions of her that constantly haunt him. . .

Notes:

Essanay's 'The Raven' was the third account of the genesis of Poe's most famous work to make it to the cinema screen. The first was D.W. Griffith's short Edgar Allen Poe (sic) from 1909, a melodramatic sketch in which the poverty-stricken Poe finds a publisher for his poem, just before returning home to find his wife dead from consumption. Griffith of course went on to further explore Poe's literary legacy in 1915's The Avenging Conscience, but this time in an entirely (as opposed to mostly) fictional context.

Next, also titled The Raven, was a two-reeler released by Eclair USA in 1912. This latter film shared a happy disregard for facts with the earlier Griffith short, and shared it's source material with the 1915 Essanay production - namely, The Raven: The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe, a play by George Cochrane Hazleton that was first produced in 1895, and adapted by the author into a novel in 1909. Subtitled "twixt fact and fancy", it interwove a highly romanticised portrayal of Poe's life story with the narrative of the eponymous poem.

Author Hazleton apparently made a specialty of this kind of dramatised biography, and it's this unconventional construction that gives The Raven its appeal. Nowadays, casting the writer as hero of his own fiction is a well-used trick that would perhaps point to some measure of post-modern artiness (see Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Crash, or Dennis Potter's Lewis Carroll fantasy Dream Child for example). But there's a lack of self-consciousness here, suggesting that Hazleton was instead tapping into the literary tradition of mythologising real-life figures that goes all the way back to ancient Greece.

"Strange fancies in his brain": Henry Walthall
as Poe

The portrayal of the protagonist is in this case one of the film's strengths. Essanay, a Chicago-based studio best known nowadays for its Chaplin comedies, were lucky enough to have the talented Henry B Walthall under contract, who had left D.W. Griffith's company just a few months earlier. Walthall, at that time very much in the public eye thanks to his starring role as Colonel Cameron in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, was no doubt cast in The Raven with his earlier role in the Poe-themed Avenging Conscience very much in mind. If anything, his performance in The Raven is the more impressive of the two - but whether this is down to an absence of Griffith's controlling influence is debateable. Regardless, contemporary critics praised him as "the image of Poe", and for a short time he became identified with the writer in the movie-going public's imagination.

Here, Walthall is called on to play Poe as the tragic hero, presumably one for whom drinking and gambling are the fatal flaws which mar his otherwise noble intentions. As you might expect, the less palatable realities of the author's life are glossed over or ignored; it's an idealised Poe - devoted husband, liberator of slaves - that this scenario, a self-proclaimed romance, offers us. There are comic interludes too, involving the rivalry over Virginia Clemm between Edgar and his portly friend Tony. In the original play, it was Poe's associate Mr Pelham who had designs on the belaboured Virginia, though his character is obscurely sidelined in this film version.

Comic relief aside, the tone of the story is generally downbeat. Walthall is given his best opportunity to make an impression in the film's final third as his character sinks deeper into mania and alcoholic despair. In fact, it's strongly implied throughout that the fantastic elements of The Raven can all be attributed to Poe's alcoholism. Luckily, this rather mundane explanation of the film's hallucinatory horrors doesn't hamper things as much as one might expect. It's easier to imagine that said alcoholism is just director Brabin's olive branch to the audience, a prop that allows him free rein in his later, freely subjective portrayal of Poe's mental breakdown.

An extra level of psychological ambiguity is added by the contribution of Warda Howard, who had co-starred with Walthall in The Tempter earlier in 1915. Howard plays all the significant women in Poe's life, real and fictional: his wife, Virginia; the Cupid-like sprite in Poe's imagined tale of a love-struck hunter; Poe's later real-life romantic interest Helen Whitman: The Raven's heroine Lenore; and finally the Angel of Death. It's not entirely clear whether this is intended to represent Poe's obsessive love of Virginia Clemm (in reality, his first cousin, whom he married when she was just thirteen) or to illustrate a blurring of fantasy and reality in Poe's delusional mind. It may help to consider that the raven itself is visually linked with Virginia throughout, appearing several times (in Poe's imagination?) at significant points in their relationship.

The ominous bird of yore finally takes center stage during the film's final sequence, which describes the titular poem in an unapologetically straightforward fashion, leaving behind all pretence of reality in the process. And whereas the earlier Avenging Conscience undermines it's own imaginative flights of fancy with a disappointingly contrived ending, Charles Brabin allows The Raven a satisfyingly grim conclusion much more in keeping with present-day tastes. This wouldn't be Brabin's last encounter with the dark side; he would go on to direct Karloff in 1932's The Mask of Fu Manchu. In 1921, he married legendary silent femme fatale Theda Bara, at which time she retired from the screen. The couple stayed together until Bara's death from cancer in 1955.

Availability:

'The Raven'/'Ghosts' (Grapevine Video)

Information on the George Hazleton play taken from Liz Kingsley's website "And You Call Yourself A Scientist!". Thanks are due.

The Avenging Conscience, 1914

2011-05-13T22:58:00.024+01:00

"I saw all things in Heaven and Earth. I saw many things in Hell..."

A young man with a passion for the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe finds that his romantic and literary aspirations are stifled by his possessive Uncle. Forced to break up with his Sweetheart, his thoughts turn to murder... but instead of liberating him, his Uncle's death serves only to unleash the terrifying phantoms that lie in the depths of his subconscious . . .

Director: D.W. Griffith

Credits:

Henry B. Walthall (the Nephew), Spottiswoode Aitken (the Uncle), Blanche Sweet (the Sweetheart), George Seigmann (the Italian), Ralph Lewis (the Detective), Mae Marsh (the Maid), Robert Harron (the Grocery Boy), Josephine Crowell (the Sweetheart's Mother). Also starring George Berranger, Donald Crisp, Dorothy Gish, Walter Long, Wallace Reid (uncredited).

Screenplay: D.W. Griffith and Frank E Woods, Photography: G.W. Bitzer, Camera: Karl Brown, Editing: Rose and James Smith, Music Score (1914): S.L. Rothapfel. Loosely adapted from "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.

(UK title: 'Thou Shalt Not Kill')

Majestic Motion Picture Company, USA

Running time 85 mins

Synopsis:

An orphaned boy is raised by his indulgent Uncle, whose care becomes increasingly oppressive as the boy grows to manhood. The Nephew's literary ambitions, inspired by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, are hampered by constant demands on his time, and the Sweetheart he has called his 'Annabel Lee', in honour of the heroine of Poe's verse, bears the brunt of the Uncle's callous insults.

The young lovers attend a garden party, where they reluctantly agree that they must separate for the sake of his Uncle. As 'Annabel' leaves in tears, the Uncle is at home, brooding unhappily over his Nephew's fate. The lovelorn Nephew, meanwhile, distractedly observes the cruel hand of Nature at work; a spider trapping an unwary fly, which is in turn smothered by scores of devouring ants. Soon, a diabolical plan begins to form in his mind... he strangles his Uncle to death while the locals believe him to be out of town, and walls up his body in the fireplace.

The Uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken) meets his demise

The Nephew duly inherits his 'missing' Uncle's estate, and is later visited by his Sweetheart, who is disturbed by his neurotic behaviour. Plagued by visions of his victim, he commits himself to a sanatorium, but discovers on his return home that a friend of his Uncle, suspicious about his alleged disappearance, has enlisted the services of a Detective. The Nephew, his paranoia deepening, persuades the Italian to spy on the Detective. He is tormented by hallucinations of a skeletal Death-figure, an accusing Christ, and a stone tablet bearing the words of the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not Kill!". . .

Notes:

Opinions still differ as to whether D.W. Griffith was the cinematic artist and innovator he declared himself to be, or simply a craftsman who understood the mechanisms of the film making better than most of his contemporaries. Either way, The Avenging Conscience was one of the rare occasions throughout his career when Griffith applied his considerable talents to a supernatural theme. Conscience was one of four films (the others being The Escape, Home Sweet Home and Battle of the Sexes) that Griffith made for Harry E. Aitken's Majestic Pictures in early 1914. Chances are it's relative obscurity today is thanks to it being made in the brief transitional period between two of his most significant works, Judith of Bethulia and The Birth of a Nation.

The year before, Griffith had upset his previous employers Biograph by sneaking his cast and crew off to Chatsworth, California to make biblical story Judith of Bethulia without studio interference. Biograph, still convinced that 1913 audiences were unwilling to sit through anything longer than a two-reeler, took exception when Griffith presented them with an hour-long feature and a bill for $36,000, and refused to release it. Griffith's response was to take out a full-page ad in the New York Dramatic Mirror outlining his many achievements thus far and announcing his departure from Biograph in no uncertain terms. He took most of his regular cast and crew with him to Majestic, thus setting an important example to the rest of the industry by establishing his autonomy in defiance of a major studio. Judith was eventually released in May 1914 (when Biograph were sure Griffith was no longer able to profit from it), and proved a critical and financial success.

Griffith's first three Majestic pictures, all around an hour in length, were later dismissed by the director as "potboilers". One can infer that The Avenging Conscience was, while still a time-filler, a project closer to his heart. Griffith had a lifelong fascination with Victorian literature, and Poe was a particular favourite (he'd filmed the short - and mis-spelt - Edgar Allen Poe in 1909 to coincide with the centenary of Poe's birth). For Conscience, he took the basic premise from Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, decorating his story with extensive quotations from the poem Annabel Lee and references to several other works by Poe. 'The Black Cat', 'The Cask of Amontillado', 'The Bells' and more all get dropped into the mix.

More importantly, Griffith was taking advantage of the freedom his Majestic contract offered him to continue his explorations of the form and vocabulary of the film medium itself. He later told his assistant Karl Brown that his objective was "to photograph thought". Every device at his disposal was used to express the depths and subtleties of storytelling and characterisation that he knew movies - his movies, at least - were capable of.

The Nephew (Henry Walthall) confronts the
image of Death

The psychological aspects of Poe's morbid tales proved an ideal vehicle for Griffith's ideas. In one particularly effective sequence taken directly from The Tell-Tale Heart, the murderous Nephew (Henry B. Walthall) is being interrogated by the detective. Losing his nerve, he becomes increasingly agitated by the detective tapping his pen on the table, imagining he can hear his dead Uncle's heartbeat. Griffith uses his trademark cross-cutting - to the pen, a tapping foot, a ticking clock - to both illustrate the sound in purely visual terms, and to emphasise the Nephew's mounting anxiety.

Walthall's archetypal protagonist (none of the characters have names, you'll notice) generally comes across as sympathetic, despite his homicidal actions, and despite some histrionics in the final act. It's fair to say that all the main players - with the possible exception of Blanche Sweet's 'Sweetheart', whose character acts mainly as a foil for Walthall - manage to add some quite subtle shades to their performances. That they are given the space to do so, however, is down to Griffith's expansive vision, and it's on his contribution that the film ultimately stands or falls.

Understandably, not everything works so well. There are comic and romantic interludes early in the film, mainly the one centred on the Grocery Boy's courtship of the Maid, that seem overlong and out of place. The pious/sentimental streak running through much of the film (as Griffith's Victorian sensibility shows through) makes such scenes hard to swallow for a modern audience, and the contrived ending is, to say the least, a big disappointment.

But any shortcomings The Avenging Conscience might have, might well be down to timing. By mid-1914, when the film was in production, Griffith was already focusing his ambitions on his next project, The Birth of A Nation, one that cast such a long shadow, his earlier work couldn't help but suffer in comparison. It's also worth bearing in mind that like that latter film (unbelievably!), Conscience was created without a written script, it's director preferring to develop the scenario during the shooting itself. Given these circumstances, the film becomes a remarkable achievement in its own right. Arguably, it wouldn't be until Germany in the 1920s that this kind of psychological horror would be explored as thoroughly again.

Finally, spare a thought for Robert Harron, Griffith's love-struck Grocery Boy. Harron, who went on to feature in Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and True Heart Susie, among many others, later found himself being overlooked by Griffith in favour of up-and-coming Richard Barthelmess. Griffith cast Barthelmess as the lead in Way Down East in 1920. On September 5th, the night before the film's New York premiere, Harron shot himself in the lung in his hotel room with a newly-purchased revolver. The official verdict was accidental death.

Availability:

"The Avenging Conscience" (Kino)

The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola (1913)

2011-03-05T14:38:00.003Z

"Tenth parallel north, latitude 150. We are sinking. In a few moments we won't be any longer. We entrust to God and to the waves our beloved child Saturnino Farandola."

So begins Saturnino's bizarre life of adventure. Orphaned by a shipwreck, raised by apes and destined to travel the globe in search of excitement, our hero Saturnino squares up to wild beasts, cannibals, insane naturalists, murderous Mandarins and the villainous schemes of an evil Phineas Fogg in this demented pastiche of the works of Jules Verne.

Directors: Marcel Fabre and Luigi Maggi

Credits:

Marcel Fabre (Saturnino Farandola), Nilde Baracchi (Mysore), with Alfredo Bertone, Filippo Castamagna, Oreste Grandi, Luciano Manara, Felice Minotti, Armando Pilotti, Norina Rasero, Dario Silvestri, Luigi Stinchi, Vittorio Tettoni

Screenplay: Guido Volante, from the novel by Albert Robida, Producer: Arturo Ambrosio, Cinematography: Ottavio De Matteis, Art Director: Decoroso Bonifante, Enrico Luigi.

Ambrosio Film, Italy

Running Time 77 mins

Synopsis:

Baby Saturnino arrives on Monkey Island

Part 1: Monkey Island
The only survivor of a shipwreck, the infant Saturnino is washed ashore on Pomotu, an island inhabited by apes, who raise him as one of their own. Years pass, and Saturnino, a hairless, tail-less social outcast, leaves the island and is picked up by the sailing ship 'Bella Leocadia', where he quickly rises to the rank of ensign. When crew members are later captured by Chief Bora Bora's pirate horde, Saturnino leads a daring rescue mission; the ship's Captain is killed by the pirates but the crew unanimously elect Saturnino to be his successor.

Later, Saturnino and his beloved Mysora are deep sea diving when Mysora is swallowed by a whale. Saturnino calls on his old simian friends when rescuing Mysora from Professor Cronknuff, who holds Mysora and the whale in captivity at the Melbourne Aquarium, believing her to be some kind of mermaid. Mysora and Saturnino are reunited, and Cronknuff is eaten by the Aquarium's giant squid.

Part 2: Search for the White Elephant
Saturnino and Mysora learn of the theft of the King of Siam's precious white elephant, and offer their help in returning it. The elephant has in fact been stolen by the King's police chief Ching-Nao, working with a rival Mandarin. He captures Saturnino and his crew and condemns them to death. Meanwhile, Ching-Nao has taken a shine to Mysora: she seizes an opportunity to dope her guards with opium and help Saturnino escape. His crew, confined in barrels, are floated downriver to safety, and the elephant safely returned.

Marcel Fabre and Nilde Barrachi (in bearskins)
rescue the Makalolo queens

Part 3: Queen of Makalolo
While boating on the Nile, Saturnino and Mysora rescue two young girls from the cannibalistic Nian-Nian by dressing in bear skins to scare off their captors. The girls are queens of the Makalolo, who Saturnino then protects from hungry lions using a lion-proof safari suit, only to find they have been captured by gorillas. Fluent in ape language since childhood, Saturnino persuades the gorillas to let the two queens go, and they are safely returned to their homeland.

Part 4: Farandola v. Fileas-Fogg
Eager for more adventures, Saturnino joins forces with the people of South Milligan, USA in their scheme to move the whole of Niagara Falls into their territory. Also involved is the explorer Fileas Fogg, who teams up with Indian chief Red Bison to sabotage their plan. Red Bison's warriors capture Saturnino and Mysora, but their tribeswoman Rising Moon takes pity on Saturnino and helps him to escape. While Mysora is still held captive by Fogg, Saturnino sides with the South Milligan people and a civil war ensues. Fogg is ultimately killed in an aerial battle and Saturnino returns to Monkey Island to raise a family with Mysora.

Notes:
And here is one of those instances where one can justifiably dredge up the old cliche, "they don't make them like that any more". L'Avventura Straordinarissime Di Saturnina Farandola, to give it it's full and grandiose title, was created before the rule book was written about how movies should be. It merrily and unselfconsciously skips from fantasy to maritime adventure to science fiction to slapstick comedy, often in the space of a few minutes. The film's mission is to entertain, and it's method is to refuse to let its audience get bored for even a minute.

Saturnino (Marcel Fabre) in his
lion-proof suit

The story originates with a novel by Albert Robida written in 1879 as a pastiche of the works of Jules Verne. Part parody, part tribute, it's full title was The Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnino Farandola, in the Five or Six Parts of the World and in All Countries Known and Unknown to Mr Jules Verne. Illustrated throughout by the author, it featured many of the characters from Verne's novels, and was popular enough to be translated into French and Spanish. According to some sources, this film adaptation was, like the novel, originally released in serial form, consisting of eighteen two- and three-reel episodes. Sadly, we only have four left, which were restored by Lobster-Film in 1997 and screened in the feature-length form discussed here.

The star of Saturnino, Marcel Fabre, was a Spanish comic actor and ex-circus clown (real name Marcel Perez) well known in Italy for his character 'Robinet', whom he portrayed in around forty films for Arturo Ambrosio's studio from 1910 onwards. Marcel makes an engagingly good-natured hero amidst the mayhem, hard to dislike despite Saturnino's occasional lapses into animal slaughter, violence and racism; present-day viewers will have to make their own excuses for the toe-curling parade of ethnic stereotypes seen throughout Saturnino.

Depth of field: the war in the clouds

Fabre's (uncredited) co-director, Luigi Maggi, made his mark with The Last Days of Pompeii in 1908, also for Ambrosio. Not having seen either man's other films, it's hard to say whose, if any, is the guiding hand. There's a hint of the influence of Méliès in some of the more fantastical scenes here, but with a major difference: depth. Even with his later films, Méliès was still moving his players from right to left, as on a theatre stage. In Saturnino, though there are very few close-ups, many individual shots make effective use of perspective, with the actors emerging from or disappearing into the far distance. And even when this device is not used for dramatic effect, there is usually some kind of business happening in the background to add visual interest to expository scenes.

All of which makes Saturnino a more appealing experience for today's short-attention-span audiences than many of its contemporaries. The pace of the film in the form we can see it now never lets up, and makes just as much sense (or just as little) as a single narrative as the four episodes would have individually. In the end, events come full circle as Saturnino returns to Monkey Island to start a family; the film's suggestive final shot is one of baby Capuchin monkeys climbing over rose bushes.

Saturnino, in Italy at least, has proved his longevity as a character: Robida's novel stayed in print well into the nineteen thirties and has inspired several comic books and a 1970s TV series as well as this film adaptation. Not bad for a boy raised by monkeys.

Saturnino (Marcel Fabre) boards the Bella Locardia

Availability:
No official release. The current version first appeared on German television in 2010, restored and with a new soundtrack, and is available to view online.

The Man With Wax Faces (Figures de Cire) 1913

2011-02-05T22:23:00.002Z

"The wind howls and the darkness lends the static forms a sense of mystery and danger..."

A grisly tale from Paris's Grand Guignol theatre comes to the screen as a man wagers he can spend the night locked in a wax museum. Of course, he has nothing to fear; the gruesome yet lifeless figures within cannot harm him . . . or can they . . . ?

Director: Maurice Tourneur

Credits:

Henry Roussel (Pierre de Lionne), Emile Trament (Jacques), Henri Gouget (Waxworks Owner)

Scenario: Andre de Lorde, from his play.

Eclair, France

Running Time 15 mins

Synopsis:

Following a discussion about the nature of fear at a dinner party, Pierre de Lionne blithely accepts a wager of 100 francs from his friend Jacques that he could spend a night in any place, no matter how terrifying. The pair stroll through a funfair, and Jacques persuades the proprietor of a waxworks museum to lock Pierre in for the night. At first, Pierre is unperturbed, but being among the sinister, shadowy wax figures soon begins to fray his nerves.

Pierre (Henry Roussel) succumbs to the
waxworks' oppressive atmosphere

Meanwhile, Jacques and his other friends are carousing until the early hours. When his fellow revellers go home, Jacques decides to pay Pierre a surprise visit, not realising the gruesome fate that waits for him in the darkness of the waxworks...

Notes:

Frenchman Maurice Tourneur, father of fellow director and Val Lewton alumnus Jacques, cemented his reputation as a director when his employers Eclair transferred him to the American branch of their studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1914. A string of popular dramas such as The Wishing Ring, Trilby, Poor Little Rich Girl (with Mary Pickford) and The Blue Bird saw him acclaimed as a successor to the great D.W. Griffith. Tourneur brought his own working aesthetic and elegant visual style to his Americal films, for which he is still rightfully praised by film historians today.

Before then, while still working at Eclair's Parisian studios, the young director produced two short horror subjects based on plays by Andre de Lorde. The first, Le Systeme du Dr Goudron et du Prof. Plume (released in the USA as 'The Lunatics') was based on an Edgar Allan Poe story and concerned inmates overrunning an insane asylum; it contained the memorably chilling image of a victim's blood seeping under a doorway... an image that Jacques Tourneur was to reprise for a scene in 1943's The Leopard Man.

Waxworks owner Henri Gouget
shows his true colours

The second, Figures de Cire, was likewise based on a play written by de Lorde for the notorious Grand Guignol theatre, a long-standing Paris institution whose patrons were treated to a nightly feast of bloodthirsty one-act plays involving mutilation, torture and violent death in varying degrees. Both film adaptations starred Henry Roussel and Henri Gouget, the latter of whom was also a regular on the Guignol's stage. Both adaptations, one can assume, were considerably toned down for cinema presentation.

Figures de Cire was presumed lost for many years, a tinted copy resurfacing as recently as 2007 and restored by Lobster Films to the 11-minute version seen here. While one can't expect so short a film to sustain much of an atmosphere, its structure is sound, and there's enough visual variety here to offer at least a hint of the style that Tourneur would later become famous for. The wax figures themselves, which often appear to be made-up actors rather than mannequins, are well-lit rather than shadowy and indistinct , providing just the right amount of understated menace.

Interestingly, and rather surreally, the damage to the film negative becomes more prominent at around the eight minute mark. Rather than being a distraction, it almost seems appropriate; just as an intertitle announces "Deep into the night, the wax figures become more terrifying...", the celluloid disintegrates into a blurry mass of corrosion - a fitting visual metaphor for the final stages of the not-so-brave Pierre's final breakdown...

Availability:

No official release, though DVD copies can be found here.

The Student Of Prague (Der Student Von Prag) 1913

2011-01-05T23:51:00.027Z

"Where thou art shall I be, into the hour when I seat me on the stone of thy grave..."

Written by a self-confessed Satanist, this re-invention of the legend of Faust concerns an impoverished student tricked into a bargain with my esteemed employer. A landmark in German film, it's makers went on to create several classic examples of expressionist cinema over the next decade.

Director: Stellan Rye

Credits:

Paul Wegener (Balduin), John Gottowt (Scapinelli), Greta Berger (Countess Margit Schwarzenberg), Lyda Salmonova (Lydushka), Lother Korner (Count Schwarzenberg), Fritz Walderman (Baron Waldis Schwarzenberg)

Screenplay: Hanss Heinz Ewers and Henrik Galeen, Photography: Guido Seeber, Art Direction; Robert A. Dietrich and K. Richter, Music Score: Josef Weiss. Loosely based on 'Sylvesternacht' by E.T.A. Hoffman, and 'William Wilson' by Edgar Allan Poe.

(USA Title: 'A Bargain With Satan')

Deutsche Bioscop, Germany

Running Time 58 mins

Synopsis:

Balduin, "Prague's finest swordsman and wildest student", is stricken by poverty and boredom. He attracts the attentions of the gypsy girl Lydushka, but ignores her advances. Only when a mysterious stranger who introduces himself as Scapinelli promises Balduin wealth and happiness is his interest aroused. Scapinelli is with Balduin when they come across Countess Margit Schwarzenberg; Balduin rescues her from a river when she is thrown by her horse. The lovestruck Balduin later pays the countess a visit, but is banished by Baron Waldis, her betrothed.

Scapinelli calls on Balduin to offer 10,000 gold pieces in exchange for an item of his choice from Balduin's room. When the eager student agrees, Scapinelli claims Balduin's reflection, which steps out of the mirror and leaves by Scapinelli's side. The shaken but suddenly wealthy Balduin begins a furtive courtship of the Countess. They are shadowed by both a jealous Lydushka and by Balduin's spectral double, who vows to follow Balduin always...

When Lydushka reveals the Countess' affair to Baron Waldis, he challenges Balduin to a duel. The Countess' father, mindful of Balduin's reputation as a swordsman, begs him not to kill Waldis. For the sake of the Schwarzenberg's honour, Balduin agrees. Then he discovers to his horror that his doppelganger has fought the duel in his place, killing the Baron in cold blood...

Notes:

Hanss Heinz Ewers was a charismatic, larger than life figure; a writer of lurid horror fiction, public speaker, strident nationalist and sometime spy, who early on championed the potential of film as a legitimate art form. The doppelganger myth, long established in German fiction and folklore, had an obvious visual appeal which Ewers and his co-writer Henrik Galeen exploited fully for The Student of Prague, their first exercise in the film medium. For this variation on the Faust legend, itself a staple of cinema by 1913, they drew on stories by Poe and ETA Hoffman for inspiration, creating something ground-breakingly original in the process.

Ewers cultivated an exotically diabolic persona. Frank Braun, the thrill-seeking protagonist of his most famous novels (including the often-filmed Alraune) was a thinly-disguised alter-ego of Ewers himself. Thriving on notoriety, Ewers lectured publicly on the virtues of Satanism and experimented with writing under the influence of hallucinogenics. His personal secretary and collaborator Galeen likewise had a fascination with the occult, later going on to script such classics as The Golem, Waxworks and Nosferatu, and direct Student of Prague's 1926 remake.

A game of cards: Balduin (Paul Wegener) and his
doppelganger

Set in 1821, much of the original version was shot on location in a city with a long history of occultism. Though the local Hebrew community refused to allow filming in the Jewish cemetery, several scenes were filmed on Prague's 'Golden Lane', also known as 'Street of the Alchemists', whose former occupants reputedly included figures such as Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa and Dr Johan Faustus, the eponymous inspiration behind Christopher Marlowe's 1589 play. It was here that star Paul Wegener first became aware of the legend of the Golem, a myth he would explore through three film versions, beginning in 1915.

The low-key way in which the story's supernatural elements are introduced into these romantic locations adds greatly to the film's uncanny atmosphere, thanks also in no small part to Guido Seeber's delicately-lit cinematography. John Gottowt's Scapinelli, quite obviously Mephistopheles in human guise, is a subtly sinister top-hatted gentleman far removed from the cloaked and horned pantomime villain of cinema's recent past. Balduin's spectral double is a similarly malign presence often depicted, effectively and unnervingly, in wholly mundane surroundings.

Credit should be given to Danish director Stellan Rye for avoiding the cliches and bringing his phantom out of the shadows and into sunlit terraces and drawing-rooms. The credit, however, may not be entirely his, as it has been suggested that both screenwriter Ewers and star Wegener had a substantial input into the staging of the film. Rye, incidentally, had allegedly spent three months in prison in his native country for homosexuality before being 'hired' by Ewers to direct Student of Prague. He fought for Germany during the first World War and later died in a French POW hospital.

The Student of Prague was premiered in Berlin (to adults only) on August the 22nd, 1913 with a specially-composed musical score, and was an immediate hit. Audiences thrilled to the spectacle of Wegener's malicious doppelganger, and critics lavished it with praise, calling it "...a pioneering innovation" and "...a total success". Though it would be derided as primitive on it's 1926 re-issue, the film's initial reception suggests that Ewers' artistic ambitions were entirely justified: four remakes (in 1926, 1935, 1990 and 2004) testify to the story's enduring appeal.

(Some information for this post was drawn from 'The Satanic Screen' by Nicholas Shreck, and Gareth Walters' blog 'The Amazing Movie Show'. Thanks are due.)

Availability:

The Student of Prague (Alpha Video). This incomplete video-transfer print, the only commercially available version, runs to 41 minutes, though a diligent search of Ebay can often yield an almost-complete 56 minute copy.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1913

2011-01-02T22:59:00.019Z

"In the dead silence of the night, Dr Jekyll plans to set free his evil self..."

A pious Dr Jekyll unleashes a comically bizarre Hyde in this seldom-seen version. It bears the proud distinction of being the first real horror movie released by the studio that was later to become Universal Pictures.

Director: Herbert Brenon

Credits:

King Baggot (Jekyll/Hyde), Jane Gail (Alice), Matt Snyder (Alice's father), Howard Crampton (Dr Lanyon), William Sorelle (Utterson)

Producer: Carl Laemmle, Screenplay: Herbert Brenon. Based on the novel by R.L. Stevenson

IMP, USA

Running Time 33 mins

Synopsis:

When not with his sweetheart Alice, Dr Jekyll devotes his time to his many charity patients, though his real interest lies in his theories about separating Man's good and evil natures. He explains his ideas to his colleagues Utterson and Lanyon, who casually dismiss them; but later that night, Jekyll successfully frees Hyde, his evil self. Hyde seeks out lodgings where he is free to pursue his debauched activities well away from Jekyll's surgery. Later, when he violently beats a crippled boy in the street, angry bystanders force him to pay for the boy's treatment.

Jekyll eventually begins to transform into Hyde without the aid of the drug. He resolves to end his relationship with Alice and write out a will, making Hyde the sole benefactor. But after Hyde kills a visitor at Alice's home, Jekyll begs Lanyon's help and so is obliged to reveal his secret. Hyde narrowly evades capture several more times, before discovering to his horror that he has used up the last of the antidote...

Notes:
IMP (Independent Motion Pictures) was the film company founded by Carl Laemmle in 1909 in protest against being excluded from Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Trust, formed that same year. Laemmle was later instrumental in breaking the Trust's monopoly on film distribution, and was among the first studio heads to establish a base in Hollywood. More significantly, IMP later morphed into Universal pictures, so one can argue that here lies the first ever Universal Horror film.

King Baggott as Jekyll holds the mob at bay

A longer running time than previous quickie versions allows some flesh to be added to the bare bones of the story, but the production rarely rises above the conventional, and is hampered to a great extent by it's star. While the hugely popular King Baggot (IMP's biggest attraction, hailed at the time as "The Most Photographed Man In The World") makes a suitably upstanding and pious Jekyll, his Hyde is a buck-toothed, twitching travesty who spends most of the film bent double as though inhabiting the back of a pantomime horse. It's hard to imagine how even the less sophisticated movie-goer of 1913 would be able to take him entirely seriously.

Nevertheless, this version of Jekyll and Hyde reportedly did well at the box-office. Its Director, ex-pat Dubliner Herbert Brenon, would find greater recognition when his drama Sorrell and Son got a nomination at the first Oscar ceremony in 1929. He'd directed Lon Chaney, Sr. in Laugh, Clown, Laugh the year before.

At around the time the IMP Jekyll and Hyde was on general release, a rival British production from Kineto-Kinemacolour also appeared. This version used an early colour system involving two interlocking red and green projectors. The cumbersome equipment required to show it meant that the film received only limited distribution.

Availability:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1911 and 1913 (Retroflix)