Faust (1926)

Faust (1926): adapted from the Goethe text by Hans Kyser and Gerhart Hauptmann; directed by F.W. Murnau; starring Gosta Ekman (Faust), Emil Jannings (Mephisto), Camilla Horn (Gretchen/ Marguerite), and Werner Fuetterer (Archangel): 

The great German film director F.W. Murnau is best known today for his seminal vampire film Nosferatu (1922). Faust, his last German-language film before he moved to America, is better than that film, or at least more consistently interesting in its retelling of the German legend/Goethe work in which the elderly Faust sells his soul in exchange for youth and a certain measure of power.

The first 40 minutes or so are especially striking and visually stylized. An archangel and a demon wager on the corruptibility of Faust, a good man trying to find a cure for the Plague during the Middle Ages. The special effects are still stunning at points, not in a realistic way but in an ionographic way that showcases the imaginative powers of Murnau and his collaborators.

Young Faust (or perhaps 'de-aged Faust) is a bit of a bland fellow as played by Gosta Ekman. He struggles to hold the screen as he plays many scenes opposite the great Emil Jannings as the demon Mephisto. Jannings is one of the great screen 'Satans' of all time here, menacing and droll. Murnau also comes up with a simple way to make Mephisto distressingly omnipresent in a succession of cuts that other horror film-makers should study.

Murnau also offers what may be the first example of the "swinging ceiling light" scene in cinematic history, to be made iconically famous in Psycho and bolstered in its appeal by Night of the Living Dead.

After the visually dazzling first 40 minutes of the film, Faust shifts into a deceptively comic, idyllic sequence in which Faust falls in love with the virtuous village girl Gretchen. Does Mephisto help Faust woo and win her? Of course. But the devil is an asshole. The film's sudden descent into tragedy and a realistically grim medieval fate for Gretchen after Faust has knocked her up and fled a horde of enraged villagers is quite a whiplash, but it works marvelously. 

It's in these later sections that Murnau shows his skill at portraying the horrors and squalor of the poor and working class, as in his splendid earlier film The Last Laugh (aka The Last Man). Combining these with the visual wonders and horrors of the first section of the film in one movie is something of a masterstroke, punctuated by the comedic idyll that separates the two sections. 

How well the almost-literally deus ex machina conclusion works is, I guess, up to you. If nothing else, it returns us to the world of the striking, stylized visuals in its depiction of a final confrontation between avenging archangel and Mephisto. What a talent Murnau was! Few had his ability to span the stylized and the quotidian. Highly recommended.