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.
Nosferatu (1922): adapted by Henrik Galeen from Barm Stoker's Dracula; directed by F.W. Murnau; starring Max Schreck (Count Orlok), Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter), Greta Schroder (Ellen), Gustav Botz (Professor Sievers), John Gottowt (The Paracelsian), and Alexander Granach (Knock): Ah, Nosferatu. Director F.W. Murnau and his film team adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula without paying for it. Stoker's estate successfully sued to have all copies of the film destroyed. But the film, like a vampire or Steven Seagal, turned out to be hard to kill.
The trick is to see a decent restored version, as Nosferatu has endless, crappy, public-domain versions floating around on the Internet and on cheapo DVD's. If it's in black-and-white, it's probably crappy: Nosferatu was tinted different colours throughout. The late Nash the Slash used to tour bars with a copy of Nosferatu to accompany with electronic music. Good times!
The film itself remains the finest adaptation of Dracula, legal or otherwise, ever made. It's the sinister, otherworldly quality of Max Schreck as Count Orlok that dominates the film, and memories of that film, a triumph of make-up and silent-film acting and Murnau's compositional talents.
Schreck looks so bafflingly inhuman that a movie was made about Schreck actually being a centuries-old vampire (Shadow of the Vampire). The Schreck vampire designs continues to pop up again and again in pop culture, whether in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu, the 1970's TV adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, or in that episode of Angel set mostly on a submarine during WWII.
Unless you're stoned immaculate, you'll probably want to watch Nosferatu over at least a couple of nights. The pacing is deliberate, which is to say slow and a bit scattered. But again and again visuals show up that are striking and disturbing.
Silent film hadn't started to 'move' much in 1922, so most of the striking visuals are static. Peculiarly effective are shots of forests with the negative flipped, and pretty much any scene with Orlok in it. At times, he's a grasping shadow against a wall. In other shots, one waits in suspense for his appearance. Everybody run! Ship-board shots in which Orlok comes creeping out from hiding or rises board-straight from supine to erect still conjure a sort of abject dread.
The TCM copy I watched was extremely text-heavy -- it made me wonder if Murnau later made the almost-text-free The Last Man/ aka The Last Laugh in part as a reaction to the preponderance of explanatory intertitles required for Nosferatu. Oh, well.
There is some humour in Nosferatu, though most of it is unintentional. The sequence following Orlok's arrival at the town he will soon start depopulating is the height of this inadvertent humour as we follow Orlok, coffin under his arm, as he searches for his new home. Funny as it is, it's still better than anything in any of Bela Lugosi's Dracula films. Highly recommended.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000): written by Steven Katz; directed by E. Elias Merhige; starring Willem Dafoe ('Max Schreck'), John Malcovich (F.W. Murnau), Cary Elwes (Fritz Wagner), Udo Kier (Albin Grau), and Catherine McCormack (Greta): What if that guy who played the spooky vampire in the classic German silent movie Nosferatu (1922) were actually a vampire? That's the premise of Shadow of the Vampire.
The movie works beautifully for long stretches. Its main problem (aside from some wonky historical moments) is its unevenness of tone. Certain deaths (well, murders) of innocents are treated lightly and even comically, as is the character of 'Max Schreck,' the actor who is really an ancient Eastern European vampire. But the climax of the film is pure horror that's undercut by the movie's earlier, lighter tone.
Still, Shadow of the Vampire is a delight in many ways, parts greater than the sum. Willem DaFoe and his make-up job command the screen whenever he's on it as 'Max Schreck.' And Dafoe plays the mix of low comedy and bleak horror better than anyone else in the cast. One doesn't feel sorry for him, but one does feel sorry for the state he's in. A brilliant monologue by 'Schreck' about the saddest scene in Bram Stoker's Dracula fixes the character in our minds as a character (a sad and awful one) and not a caricature.
The rest of the cast is also solid, especially John Malcovich as obsessed director F.W. Murnau and Udo Kier as Murnau's mournful assistant. Catherine McCormack's Greta is the most problematic of characters, treated as a vain, morphine-addicted punchline until suddenly... she's supposed to be a sympathetic subject of horror? Tonally, it doesn't work at all.
Writer Stephen Katz and director E. Elias Merhige have worked sporadically since this film, which is a shame. The movie looks great. And the writing, while tonally uneven, is interesting throughout. And Dafoe... what a performance! Recommended.
