What Does it Profit a Man...

Films: Faust
Format: YouTube video on rockin’ flatscreen.

Faust is one of those stories that, much like Robin Hood, everyone knows, at least in the broadest of strokes but that pretty much no one has read. At the very least, I don’t think I know anyone who has read Faust (cue my comments filling up with people who have read it. Good on you if you have). It is the classic “deal with the devil” tale, though, so everyone seems to have a passing knowledge of the basic story. The 1926 version of the story directed by F.W. Murnau is probably the definitive film version, although there are certainly others. But this is a classic, crafted by one of the true masters of silent cinema. Sure, Fritz Lang could spin a tale with the best, but F.W. Murnau truly was a master.

We begin the tale much as we would were this the story of Job. The demon Mephisto (Emil Jannings) and an archangel (Werner Fuetterer) make a bet with each other over the fate of the world. Faust (Gosta Ekman) is a true man of science and religion despite his dabbling in alchemy. The archangel agrees that if Mephisto can turn him away from God and corrupt him, he will be given dominion over the Earth.

The Greatest Muttonchops in History

Film: Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

My intent was to post this last night, but Blogger was down. And then I had to work all day, so I'm just getting to it now.

It makes a certain amount of sense to me to view silent films and talkies not just as different sorts of film, but as entirely different art forms. The two are extremely different and have different conventions. What works in a silent movie comes off as melodramatic or maudlin in a talkie film. Silents are designed for that sort of melodrama, while there is a much greater possibility for subtlety with talkies. There are different nuances. I don’t mean to say that silent films are simple or simplistic; they aren’t. They’re different, though, and judging them by the standards of talking pictures is more than a touch unfair.

Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, although the literal translation is The Last Man) may well be in one respect the greatest thing to come from the mind of F.W. Murnau, and that’s really saying something, considering the films Murnau put together. What makes this film so interesting is that it tells a complete story, start to finish and does so with an absolute minimum of intertitles. In fact, in terms of traditional intertitles, there is only one, and it comes near the end. Otherwise, the only actual text is a letter and a newspaper.

The story concerns a hotel doorman (Emil Jannings), who has worked at a grand hotel as a doorman for most of his adult life. However, he is now old, bent, and overweight, and is no longer able to perform the job as he once did. Rather than being pitched into the street, his years of dedicated service are rewarded—he’s given a different job. Instead of working as a doorman, he will instead be the washroom attendant.

Rather than being grateful for his continued employment, the unnamed doorman has his entire world shattered. Evidently, his entire definition of himself came from the fact that not only was he a high-profile doorman, he was a doorman at a very prestigious hotel. Cut off from that job, he freezes, unable to comprehend his life without his shiny uniform. And he plots. He sees his old uniform hanging in a locked cupboard. He steals the key, and at his first opportunity, he steals back his hat and coat.

Immediately following this theft, the former doorman is brought into what appears to be a wedding party, and is introduced to everyone there as the hotel doorman. In short, he hides his demotion from as many people as he can to maintain his dignity, since he defined himself entirely through his job. Of course, nothing can be this simple. It is discovered that he is in fact not the hotel doorman but a washroom attendant, and he is ridiculed by everyone who knows him.

So let’s stop right there for a second. This is where I have trouble with this story. The old dude has worked at the hotel for evidently his entire adult life and no one has ever seen him as the doorman? Not a single person of his acquaintance has ever walked past the hotel when he was standing out front? Do they assume that he’s spent the last 40 years lying to them? I can’t say that I’ve seen every single person I know at his or her place of work, but I imagine that someone I know has. The fact that no one has ever seen our hero actually working until after he loses his prestigious job defies imagination.

We also need to discuss the ending , if only because of its native improbability. But hey, chances are that you haven’t seen this, so I’ll tuck it under a spoiler.

*** OPENING THE SPOILER DOOR ***

In the one intertitle we actually get in this film, we are told that the author of the film has taken pity on our poor hero and given him a massive amount of money. This allows the Jannings character to quit his horrible washroom attendant job and get served at the hotel he used to be forced to work at, specifically because a wealthy man dies in his washroom, and the man’s will stipulates that his vast inheritance goes essentially to the person who he is with when he dies. Silly.

*** WASHING UP THE SPOILER ***

There are some fun things in this film. The old hotel doorman gets completely hammered at the wedding, and we get a highly entertaining dream sequence following this in which he is capable of lifting the heaviest of his patrons’ packages with one hand. He then demonstrates his strength by hurling these packages into the air and catching them, to the thunderous applause of everyone else in the hotel. What sells this as a drunken dream, though, is the fact that the entire thing is completely out of focus. Equally entertaining is his drunken ramble the following morning.

What’s more impressive is how much Murnau was able to do without giving us speech. Almost the entire film is told in silent movie pantomime, and the acting has to tell the story, because we are not given anything else to help us. This, if nothing else, shows the incredible skill with which Murnau could wield a camera—storytelling without any dialogue of any sort is quite impressive.

And yet ultimately, even Murnau himself commented that the film was ridiculous on its face. Washroom attendants made a better salary than doormen did, which meant that in a very real way, this devastating loss of identity and self came with a promotion and a pay raise.

Really, that’s my objection to this entire film. It’s ultimately quite silly, as are the reactions of every single person in the film to every part of the film. Okay, so the old man was a doorman and is now humiliated by being a washroom attendant—so the common reaction is for everyone to point and laugh and ridicule him? My experience in things like this is that most people would probably shrug and figure he was either trying to make himself look better, or that something had happened. It’s not like there’d suddenly be jokes circulating through my town about the bathroom dude who wants to open doors for people. And this really is what it’s like. Once the people from the wedding discover that he is a lowly washroom attendant, it’s just painful minute after painful minute and scene after scene of the poor old dude getting sand kicked in his face. In fact, the bat-faced woman who discovers the reality gives such an evil laugh and look that it’s like the Wicked Witch of the West contemplating the death of Dorothy. Jeez. And, after he’s found out, his next customer acts like not getting washroom service is like being castrated. Really, who takes anything this seriously?

It should also be noted that in this film, Emil Jannings has some of the most impressive facial hair ever filmed. Seriously, it has its own area code.

Why to watch Der Letzte Mann: A story you can follow without reading.
Why not to watch: The story is pretty silly and stupid.

A Pearl of Great Price

Film: Tabu
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

Is there a story more common, more well-known than that of the star-crossed, doomed lovers? Probably not. It’s a tale oft told and loved. Harlequin Romances have made more than a cottage industry on the idea of pairing the frail, idealistic woman with the dangerous, romantic hero. At least I think that’s true. That’s what the movies have taught me, at least. Having never read a Harlequin Romance, I’m basing this off what I remember from Romancing the Stone.

But hey, Romeo and Juliet has been kicked around in various fashion since long before Billy the Shake (Shakespeare’s MC name) crafted the version with those particular lovers. The Greeks and Romans had their share of doomed couples, and almost certainly the Sumerians and Babylonians before them did as well.

Tabu is such a tale set on the South Seas island of Bora Bora, demonstrating that awesome tendency toward reduplication so common in many Austronesian languages. The film concerns, of course, a pair of young lovers. The boy (yes, that’s his name in the credits; he’s played by Matahi, who has only one name, and is generally referred to in the film as Matahi) is a good hunter and fisherman, two important skills in this community. The girl (credited in a piece of fake ethnology as Reri, but actually played by Anne Chevalier) is of shocking beauty. Matahi meets her and falls for her instantly, and the two are happy.

The problem occurs when the chief of all of the islands arrives with news. The maid of the gods has died, and the successor to her must come from this island. The old warrior (Hitu) announces that the girl Reri has been selected to become the new maiden of the gods. It’s a great honor, but it comes with a substantial downside. Betrothed to the gods, Reri immediately becomes taboo; no one can touch her or even look upon her with desire or will suffer immediate death. And thus we have our doomed lovers and a plot for the final hour of the film.

What happens next will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen any film involving this plot, or indeed read a single story that involves this idea. The boy sneaks onto the boat holding the girl and preparing to send her away from him forever, absconds with her, and sails off away from the rest of his people to find a place where the two of them can live together, regardless of the taboo against touching her. Naturally, they are pursued by the man charged with her retrieval.

Additionally, the pair is also taken advantage of by those more aware of the workings of the world than they are. Unused to the concept of money, the boy frequently gives away valuables, and then must risk his life to pay off huge debts he didn’t know he’d acquired and wasn’t aware that he’d have to pay. It’s almost impossible to avoid some level of stereotyping in a film like this on one level or another. The boy and girl are shown as being hopelessly naïve and backward, and are cheated by not a white man, but a Chinese one.

F.W. Murnau is credited with the direction this film, and he did do most of it except for the opening sequence. But the film is helped in no small part by the work of Robert Flaherty, best known for Nanook of the North. Tabu is not an ethnography and doesn’t purport itself to be anything other than a love story, but there is a sense of the people in the film being portrayed in more or less a realistic fashion. Of course, Flaherty wasn’t above staging things for his other films, and thus the reality here needs to be questioned.

While nothing here is particularly shocking, for the time it almost certainly was. Not the story, nor the characters, but the clothing. More specifically, the lack thereof. Tabu is from 1931, and for at least a portion of the film, many of the young, nubile Bora Boran (that’s a guess, but if it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be) girls are topless, adorned from the waist up only with a lei that covers nothing. This film was also likely the introduction for many people to the hula, or similar dances, and it is certainly suggestive for the cultural standards of the early 1930s. All that pelvic thrusting and such.

A couple of things are worth noting, both about the film in general and the version that I watched. First is that this was the final film of the great F.W. Murnau. My age when he died, Murnau was killed in a car accident just a week before the premiere of this film in New York. While not my favorite of his movies, it’s a fitting end to a career cut far too short.

Second, while the transfer I watched was a good one in terms of the film quality, this version from Milestone has a terrible soundtrack in places. For the most part, the music is unremarkable and relatively appropriate, but some of it is flat terrible. The instrumental pieces are good, but several of the songs also have vocals, and these are borderline embarrassing. Several of the songs sound like Alpine yodeling while others are closer to what it would sound like if very very white people who have never been closer to the South Seas than Des Moines tried to get funky.

Silent films are often very stylized and overacted. It was a function of the time and a function of not having sound. Surprisingly, from the guy who created the hyper-stylized Nosferatu that this film does not really come across as overacted in the style common for silent dramas. Because of that, to modern eyes, the film comes across as more honest than it otherwise might.

Unusual for the time, unusual by some standards even today, the film does not condescend regarding the natives. A particularly rich pearl bed, for instance, is considered taboo because of native superstition according to the police on the island our couple goes to after fleeing. When one diver breaks the taboo and dives there, he is killed by a huge shark, demonstrating that there might be something to the taboo after all. Of course, just as he has broken the taboo by stealing the girl, Matahi will eventually break this taboo as well.

Is this a great movie? Probably. Silent films, or at least silent dramas, always lose something in the translation to a modern audience. But Murnau was nothing if not ahead of his time. The shocks still work, and the scenery is beautiful, especially when considering the equipment available at the time.

Why to watch Tabu: Exotic locales, exotic people.
Why not to watch: Same old story.

Who Said Vampires are Romantic?

Film: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre)
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol' television (Symphony), DVD from Scott Community College Library through interlibrary loan on itty bitty bedroom television (Vampyre).





















If you went to Wheaton North High School in the 1980s, you had three choices when it came to taking a foreign language. Most people took Spanish, another group took French, and a small, select few opted for German with Herr Kurtz. If you took German, you could be assured of a few things every given year. First, Herr Kurtz would spend some days not so much teaching as talking about other stuff like reminiscences of his childhood. Second, you could be sure that Herr Kurtz would screen two movies: Der Blaue Engel and Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens.

This was years ago for me, so my memories of this may well be hazy. As I recall, though, the further along we got in our knowledge of Deutsch, the less Herr Kurtz translated for us. I understood him showing us Der Blaue Engel, but I never really got why it seemed so important for us to watch Nosferatu. I suppose it allowed us a chance to follow written German rather than spoken, or perhaps Herr Kurtz just really liked Nosferatu. I kept hoping he’d show us Das Boot to no avail.

Today is probably the first time I’ve seen Nosferatu in 25 years, the last time I was in a high school German class. Despite this, there are parts of the film I remembered almost completely and almost perfectly. Murnau’s film still resonates despite its age and still has enough power to be compelling. The story is nothing new—if you’re remotely familiar with the Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you’ve seen this with different names.

Horror movies rely strongly on their ability to shock and stun, which means that many older horror movies lose their power over time. Once we can see the strings, the scare is gone. It can be argued that the average of the movie-going public has had expectations reduced due to lowered standards and limited attention spans. It can just as easily be argued that this same public has gotten smarter. We understand how movies are made and many of the tricks that are used. We know how the effects are done, which limits the ability of those effects to terrify. This is particularly true of very old films like Nosferatu. The stop motion of the carriage, for instance, looks silly now but must have startled audiences in the 1920s.

And yet, much of it still works and works beautifully. Early in the film as Harker/Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) arrives in Transylvania, a werewolf is heard outside the inn he stays in. We get a few close-ups of the beast…and it looks damn good. In truth it’s just film of a hyena, but how often have you seen a hyena at close range? They’re creepy looking, and the thing still works as an otherworldly, dark creature.

What really works here is Max Schreck as Count Orlok. He is a disturbing and evil presence, eyes rimmed with black, huge hooked nose, pointed ears, and sharp, needle-like teeth. He has several particular mannerisms that still come off as exceedingly bizarre and terrifying, even now because they have so seldom been duplicated or done as well. He walks stiffly, arms at his sides, giving him a corpse-like quality, or at least a quality of unnaturalness that even today is disturbing. Second, and far creepier and more effective is his habit of moving first his head and then his eyes, as if his eyes are compelled to turn where his head leads him. It is impossible to describe the effect of this other than to say it is horrifying because of how naturally Schreck does this and how unnatural it appears. Schreck appears as Count Orlok for about 10 minutes, yet he dominates the entire film.

It’s worth noting that but for some savvy film lovers, Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens would not exist today. Because the film is essentially the Dracula story with new names substituted, the widow of Bram Stoker sued, and as part of the settlement, all known prints and negatives of Murnau’s film were destroyed. Fortunately, versions of the film survived in other countries, allowing this film to live on, as well it should.

It’s valid to say that Nosferatu no longer has the ability to frighten a modern audience. In truth, for an audience used to more explicit violence, more graphic gore, and far better special effects, much of Nosferatu may appear silly or juvenile. And yet it is still fantastic, still beautiful, and still a film to be reckoned with. Scary or not, its influence is still felt. And imagine the terror of an audience in 1922, seeing a creation like Count Orlok for the first time. Viewed in the context of its time, it is one of the greatest films ever made.


Normally, I’m a purist when it comes to remakes. I’m aware enough to realize that there are some remakes that are as good or better than the original, but I also wonder at the necessity for the vast number of them that seem to be happening now. Most remakes don’t match up to the original because they are changed dramatically or dumbed down for the assumed dumb audience. Time and time again, we discover that the dumbed down versions of films aren’t received as well as the originals, because once again, the movie companies have vastly underestimated the smarts of the typical movie audience.

Essentially, I think that directors should avoid remakes of films that are less than 50 years old. If you’re going to remake a film, at least choose one that has been out of the public consciousness for a good amount of time. Additionally, you should avoid redoing a true classic. Only the very best can get away with redoing something that has achieved that status.

Werner Herzog tried with his version of Nosferatu. He filmed it simultaneously in English and German, so there are some differences between the two, but they are essentially the same. A difference certainly exists from previou films in tone—the opening montage of mummified human remains is disturbing and off-putting, and indicates with no uncertainty that this will be a very different Nosferatu. Because the copyright had died off the original Dracula story, Herzog went with the more familiar names from Stoker’s book, including using the name Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) for his vampire. Still, he stuck with the story of the original Murnau film rather than sticking with Stoker’s book. So, Harker (Bruno Ganz) is not engaged to Mina, but is married to Lucy (Isabelle Adjani). I’m not sure of the reason for this—it would be simple to just switch the names of the two women to stick with the book.

Regardless, the story is again one that you know in general. Kinski is made up to look as much like Max Schreck from the original film as possible, and it’s a good job. If anything, the appearance is far more disturbing in color than it was in black and white. Rather than being simply pale and pasty, here the vampire is the color of a frozen corpse, sort of pale blue-white. Most disturbing are the needle-like front teeth that prevent Kinski from closing his mouth. Kinski does manage to capture some of the style and movement of Schreck, which adds to the validity of this film.

There are some really notable performances here. Isabelle Adjani is fine, although her main function is to look pretty and have incredibly huge eyes that are constantly as wide as possible. Still, for eye candy, she fits the role. The insane Renfield (Roland Topor) punctuates every sentence with an annoying insane giggle that speaks very much to his character. Ganz’s portrayal of Harker is compelling, particularly as he falls further and further under the spell of Dracula, ending up as a pale shadow of himself, acting somewhere slightly more sane than Renfield, but certainly headed toward madness.

The real performance of note is Kinski’s. Perhaps it is the color, or perhaps it is merely the sound of his voice, but this version of Dracula is the most sympathetic I have seen. He is a tormented figure, one to be feared but also one to be pitied. He wants desperately to be loved, but is so hideous a countenance that no one could possibly love him. Where Schreck was merely fearsome, Lugosi was romantic, and Christopher Lee was powerful and even masculine/sexy, this Dracula is really tragic, filled with pain, longing, and palpable angst.

It’s not the original, but it’s not half bad. What’s most surprising and welcome here is the twist at the very end that changes this particular bloodsucker film into something rich and strange.

For the record, I watched the English version.

Why to watch Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens: Incredible influence that is felt today.
Why not to watch: You can’t put yourself in that 1920s mindset.

Why to watch Nosferatu the Vampyre: An interesting update on a classic film with an odd poignancy and a surprising twist.
Why not to watch: You can’t decide between the English or the German version.