Today's film is sliiiightly longer than the last two and so is the post (sorry). We will stay in the Halloween spirit with it.
I just wanted to say that I didn't have one like it on my blog before, but then I remembered "Waxworks" - it's another anthology film, bonus point is it's also with Conrad Veidt (and Anita Berber and Reinhold Schünzel)!
Welcome to "Eerie Tales" from 1919 (the original title is "Unheimliche Geschichten" or "Grausige Nächte").
Here's the plot or really the plots as we have a frame story and five episodes within it.
We are in a used bookshop shortly before closing time.
There are three huge paintings on the walls, "The Devil", "The Harlot", and "Death".
As the shop owner has left, the three emerge from their frames and start reading.
1. "The Apparition" by Anselma Heine
Dr. Riedhammer walks through the park and helps a young woman who is assaulted by a man - her husband as she tells him later. They check into two rooms at a hotel. Although they feel attracted to another and kiss, he then leaves her alone as she isn't feeling well.
Riedhammer spends the evening with friends, but goes to the woman's room when he comes back.
He finds it completely empty, she is gone, all the furniture is gone. The wall looks like blood and as if the paper has been torn off it.
When he asks for her the next day, everyone tells him that he has checked in alone, and the room looks normal again, too. At the police where he also gets attacked by her husband, they also tell him that they are informed and that he has been alone.
He's beginning to doubt himself, but then he's told by an undertaker that she had been taken away secretly because she died of the plague that night ...
2. "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann
Two men are in love with a woman.
When she dances with another man, they get jealous, go home, and decide to roll the dice for the right to court her.
The loser can't bear it, though, and strangles the winner, then escapes after he has pried the dead man's hand from his sleeve.
Years later, he meets the woman again, she invites him to her first dance performance, but there he has hallucinations seeing his opponent. Then they invite him to a séance and the dead man comes back ...
3. "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe
A man is interested in a drunkard's wife. When the husband notices, he takes it out on his wife's beloved black cat, but doing so, he kills her instead and then walls her body up in the cellar.
The man hears rumors about the drunkard's wife having disappeared. He calls the police and they search the house. When they come to the cellar, they hear a strange wailing noise ...
4. "The Suicide Club" by Robert Louis Stevenson
A man joins a special club. You join the regular way, but you leave it only by death. Whoever draws the ace of spades, well, you know ... and unfortunately the new member is the "lucky winner".
The president locks him in his chair by pushing a button (don't ask me how that works) and tells him that he will die at midnight. Then he unlocks the chair and leaves the panicking man behind going through a passage in the clock.
And then the man dies, killed by the fear. Or does he?
5. "The Specter" by Richard Oswald
A cavalier has an accident with his carriage and is taken to a castle where he immediately starts flirting with the owner's neglected wife.
Then the husband has a plan ...
The bookshop owner comes back, shocked to find the three in his shop. He fetches the police and is relieved to see the them back in their paintings. When the policemen are gone, however, they come back to life and he runs off.
Let's have a look at the stories behind the stories now.
Anselma Heine was a German writer.
Her novella "Die Erscheinung" from 1912 has a lot of atmosphere and explores the Dr. Riedhammer's feelings when he first sees Johne Stevens in a cloud of dust looking like an apparition, then meets her on his ship slowly growing closer to her, and then his shock when Johne suddenly disappears. I was glad to find it online and really liked it.
As we have three leads, that episode adds the strange husband, who is just mentioned in the novella, and also leaves out the backstory.
In my opinion, it's the strongest and eeriest story of the five.
Robert Liebmann was one of the most successful scriptwriters in the Weimar Republic.
The story is a classic, a guilt-stricken man being haunted by his victim, but not before he meets the woman again who was the reason for his crime. Also, he's not the only who can see him.
A special treat is that Berber actually has a short dance scene in this episode. You may (or not) know, for example through the famous painting of hers by Otto Dix, that she was an icon in the Berlin clubs as a dancer and known for the scandals in her short life.
I don't think I have to say anything about Edgar Allan Poe.
Knowing the story, I was wary about watching this episode (while the animal abuse was toned down and no cat was killed, I still wasn't happy at all about the way the drunk husband treated the black cat in one scene).
We have another triangle to allow for the three actors.
The ending could have been more dramatic, but I thought it was okay given you couldn't hear the wailing cat.
I haven't read "The Suicide Club" (actually there are three stories about the club) by Stevenson yet, but from the synopsis that I skimmed they really just kept the concept of the club for this episode.
There's a very nice twist at the end.
The last story was written by the director and, how should I say it, it's not eerie, but seems more like comic relief to me.
Frankly, I thought it was boring because you mostly saw the cavalier and the wife smiling at each other weirdly, uhm, I meant flirting with each other.
I don't know what the director intended with this one, but think the movie would have been better off by putting the episode first or leave it out completely. The costumes are nice, though.
All in all, I enjoyed the movie. Putting eye makeup on Veidt would make any movie eerie, don't you think?
Seriously, though, he did a fine job. Schünzel, on the other hand, was a little too dramatic for my taste as the crazy or drunk husband. Berber was best as the cat loving wife (no, I'm not saying that because Gundel made me!).
Further reading:
1. Fritzi Kramer: Eerie Tales (1919) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, September 22, 2024
2. ?: Movie Review - Eerie Tales (1919). On: The Revenant Review, October 27, 2015 (interesting more for the part about the leads than the short review)
I just wanted to say that I didn't have one like it on my blog before, but then I remembered "Waxworks" - it's another anthology film, bonus point is it's also with Conrad Veidt (and Anita Berber and Reinhold Schünzel)!
Welcome to "Eerie Tales" from 1919 (the original title is "Unheimliche Geschichten" or "Grausige Nächte").
Here's the plot or really the plots as we have a frame story and five episodes within it.
We are in a used bookshop shortly before closing time.
There are three huge paintings on the walls, "The Devil", "The Harlot", and "Death".
As the shop owner has left, the three emerge from their frames and start reading.
1. "The Apparition" by Anselma Heine
Dr. Riedhammer walks through the park and helps a young woman who is assaulted by a man - her husband as she tells him later. They check into two rooms at a hotel. Although they feel attracted to another and kiss, he then leaves her alone as she isn't feeling well.
Riedhammer spends the evening with friends, but goes to the woman's room when he comes back.
He finds it completely empty, she is gone, all the furniture is gone. The wall looks like blood and as if the paper has been torn off it.
When he asks for her the next day, everyone tells him that he has checked in alone, and the room looks normal again, too. At the police where he also gets attacked by her husband, they also tell him that they are informed and that he has been alone.
He's beginning to doubt himself, but then he's told by an undertaker that she had been taken away secretly because she died of the plague that night ...
2. "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann
Two men are in love with a woman.
When she dances with another man, they get jealous, go home, and decide to roll the dice for the right to court her.
The loser can't bear it, though, and strangles the winner, then escapes after he has pried the dead man's hand from his sleeve.
Years later, he meets the woman again, she invites him to her first dance performance, but there he has hallucinations seeing his opponent. Then they invite him to a séance and the dead man comes back ...
3. "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe
A man is interested in a drunkard's wife. When the husband notices, he takes it out on his wife's beloved black cat, but doing so, he kills her instead and then walls her body up in the cellar.
The man hears rumors about the drunkard's wife having disappeared. He calls the police and they search the house. When they come to the cellar, they hear a strange wailing noise ...
4. "The Suicide Club" by Robert Louis Stevenson
A man joins a special club. You join the regular way, but you leave it only by death. Whoever draws the ace of spades, well, you know ... and unfortunately the new member is the "lucky winner".
The president locks him in his chair by pushing a button (don't ask me how that works) and tells him that he will die at midnight. Then he unlocks the chair and leaves the panicking man behind going through a passage in the clock.
And then the man dies, killed by the fear. Or does he?
5. "The Specter" by Richard Oswald
A cavalier has an accident with his carriage and is taken to a castle where he immediately starts flirting with the owner's neglected wife.
Then the husband has a plan ...
The bookshop owner comes back, shocked to find the three in his shop. He fetches the police and is relieved to see the them back in their paintings. When the policemen are gone, however, they come back to life and he runs off.
Let's have a look at the stories behind the stories now.
Anselma Heine was a German writer.
Her novella "Die Erscheinung" from 1912 has a lot of atmosphere and explores the Dr. Riedhammer's feelings when he first sees Johne Stevens in a cloud of dust looking like an apparition, then meets her on his ship slowly growing closer to her, and then his shock when Johne suddenly disappears. I was glad to find it online and really liked it.
As we have three leads, that episode adds the strange husband, who is just mentioned in the novella, and also leaves out the backstory.
In my opinion, it's the strongest and eeriest story of the five.
Robert Liebmann was one of the most successful scriptwriters in the Weimar Republic.
The story is a classic, a guilt-stricken man being haunted by his victim, but not before he meets the woman again who was the reason for his crime. Also, he's not the only who can see him.
A special treat is that Berber actually has a short dance scene in this episode. You may (or not) know, for example through the famous painting of hers by Otto Dix, that she was an icon in the Berlin clubs as a dancer and known for the scandals in her short life.
I don't think I have to say anything about Edgar Allan Poe.
Knowing the story, I was wary about watching this episode (while the animal abuse was toned down and no cat was killed, I still wasn't happy at all about the way the drunk husband treated the black cat in one scene).
We have another triangle to allow for the three actors.
The ending could have been more dramatic, but I thought it was okay given you couldn't hear the wailing cat.
I haven't read "The Suicide Club" (actually there are three stories about the club) by Stevenson yet, but from the synopsis that I skimmed they really just kept the concept of the club for this episode.
There's a very nice twist at the end.
The last story was written by the director and, how should I say it, it's not eerie, but seems more like comic relief to me.
Frankly, I thought it was boring because you mostly saw the cavalier and the wife smiling at each other weirdly, uhm, I meant flirting with each other.
I don't know what the director intended with this one, but think the movie would have been better off by putting the episode first or leave it out completely. The costumes are nice, though.
All in all, I enjoyed the movie. Putting eye makeup on Veidt would make any movie eerie, don't you think?
Seriously, though, he did a fine job. Schünzel, on the other hand, was a little too dramatic for my taste as the crazy or drunk husband. Berber was best as the cat loving wife (no, I'm not saying that because Gundel made me!).
Further reading:
1. Fritzi Kramer: Eerie Tales (1919) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, September 22, 2024
2. ?: Movie Review - Eerie Tales (1919). On: The Revenant Review, October 27, 2015 (interesting more for the part about the leads than the short review)
