Silent movies - Eerie Tales

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)

Silent movies - Waxworks

I have to confess that I watched today's movie - "Waxworks" from 1924 - in two installments. "Waxworks" is an anthology in three parts with the first part being the longest, so it was easy to take a break after that one.
It seems that my attention span is suffering severely if temperatures in my flat rise above a limit of about 24 °C (75 °F), right now it's more. I know that sounds weird to others, but I have never been a fan of heat.
Anyhow, I have been struggling a bit. It was also the first time I abandoned a chosen movie (The Student of Prague) for not talking to me, pun intended even if it's a bad one, and making me fall asleep more than once.
If the film quality was to blame - the picture was very blurry - the looks of the protagonist - very superficial of me, I know - the heat which plays havoc with my sleeping pattern or something else, I can't tell you. Maybe I should give it another try some other time.

Original release poster,
public domain
via Wikimedia Commons

You know the drill, here's the plot with spoilers.

A young poet is at a carnival where he's supposed to create stories for some waxworks.
The proprietor and his beautiful daughter show him the three wax models - Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid, Czar Ivan the Terrible, and Spring-Heeled Jack (as the censors weren't happy to have him called Jack the Ripper). He points out that the Caliph has lost his arm which immediately gives the writer an idea for the first story in which ...

Emil Jannings as the Caliph, Wilhelm Dieterle as the writer/Assad,
Olga Belajeff as the daughter/Maimune

... the Caliph is on his roof playing a game of chess, well, actually losing a game of chess. His mood is not improved by the smoke coming up from the chimney of the baker Assad and he sends his vizier to bring him Assad's head.
The vizier takes some men, sharpens his sword too, but then he is distracted by Assad's wife Maimune and her beauty, so instead of killing him he goes back to the Caliph to tell him about her.
Meanwhile the jealous Assad and Maimune get into an argument, and to prove that he's a real man, Assad sets out for the palace to steal the Caliph's wishing ring while the Caliph goes to his house to pay beautiful Maimune a visit.
Assad enters the palace and cuts the sleeping Caliph's arm off to get the ring. Really it is a wax model, though, left behind to hide Haroun's escapade of trying to seduce Maimune.
When Assad comes home, Maimune hides the Caliph in the oven. Assad confesses to his crime and is about to be arrested by the bodyguards, but his wife uses the fake wishing ring on the wax arm to bring the Caliph "back to life".
She also "wishes" Assad to become the baker for Haroun who protectingly takes them under his wide coat.

Happy with the story, the writer starts on the next one for Czar Ivan the Terrible.

Conrad Veidt is a great Ivan the Terrible - I'm sure his incredible 
eyes helped with that!

Ivan isn't called the Terrible for nothing. He likes to have his prisoners poisoned and watches them die while the last grains of sand run through an hourglass with their names on it. When the court astrologist warns him that his name could end up on a glass, Ivan has the poisoner killed, but he has written the Czar's name on a huge hourglass before he dies.
The next day Ivan is invited to the wedding of a noble's daughter. Fearing assassins, he changes clothes with the noble and indeed the man is killed.
At the wedding he forces all the guests who are in grief about the bride's father to dance and celebrate. When he finds the bride crying over her father's dead body, he abducts her and the groom.
Back at the Kremlin, he has the groom tortured when the bride refuses to give in to his advances. When she has almost given up, the astrologer comes in with the huge hourglass bearing the Czar's name. With Ivan distracted by the thought of his death, the bride and groom escape.
Ivan, believing that he has been poisoned, has the idea to prevent the last grains of sand falling and so he keeps turning the hourglass over ... and over ... and over ... until the end of his days.

Werner Krauß as Spring Heeled Jack (Jack the Ripper), very spooky!

When starting the last story about Spring Heeled Jack, the writer falls asleep and begins to dream that he and the propietor's daughter are being followed through the carnival by Jack who means to kill them.
Just when they think they have escaped Jack, he catches up with them and stabs the writer.
The proprietor's daughter wakes him up from his nightmare and he finds he has poked himself with his pen. He admits that he had dreamed Jack had taken her away from him and gets a happy ending to his own story when they kiss.

What you will definitely notice first is that "Waxworks" is one of those early German expressionist films.
The cast is impressive with great actors of the time, Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, and Werner Krauß, wearing elaborate costumes, and the set built by director Paul Leni (together with Walter Maurischat) enhances each story.

Assad's escape from the palace. Does the set remind you of something?
The strange angles of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari perhaps?

There's the small home of the baker and his wife which looks even smaller with the huge Caliph in it. Actually the couple looks quite small standing next to him, too.
The tall Czar made the Kremlin cellars look even more claustrophobic. Veidt was 6'2 or 6'3 (I found both) and also had that burning look that was perfect for this role. Of the three stories this was my favorite one because of him although Iwan is really not a nice guy.
The third story was the shortest, but impressive. I think we would all be able to relate to a nightmare like this one.
Werner Krauß chasing the writer and his love through the carnival could easily be one of my own (luckily rare) bad dreams. The atmosphere is not only emphasized by the set, but also the double exposure with a ghostly Jack following the lovers.

I've read that this is one of the early horror films, but I can't fully agree to that because the Haroun story which took up half the movie is not horror in my opinion.
Unfortunately tyrants who jump from one mood to the other and act on it without thinking about other people have always been around.

The Ivan story is eerie and frightening ... and unfortunately not that far-fetched if you have a look at history.

So that leaves the six minutes with Jack that would fit the category in my opinion. Had that story been longer, there could have been some fine horror, but it got laughed off quite quickly at the end when the writer woke up.

Originally, four stories had been planned, but the story around highwayman Rinaldo Rinaldini after a novel from 1799 had to be dropped for lack of money. Rather ironic, don't you think, if you know Rinaldini was cheated out of his heritage in the book.

I think it would have been better to have a shorter first and a longer third story, but nevertheless I enjoyed the movie.


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: Waxworks (1924) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, February 3, 2013
2. Alex Humphrey: Waxworks [Das Wachsfigurenkabinett] (1924) Review. On: Love Horror, November 6, 2020
3. Graham Fuller: Blu-ray: Waxworks (1924) review. On: theartsdesk.com, November 24, 2020

Nine red bullfinches

In my last post I mentioned an anthology of Christmas stories I got as a child. You can tell I loved the book, it looks very used.
Barbara Bartos-Höppner had the idea for the book. She was a German writer and asked other writers she knew to write Christmas stories. She was surprised that some writers said you can't write stories about Christmas in our time anymore, our time being 1971 when the first edition was published (I was six years old). The only condition was that the stories had to be set between the first advent and Epiphany.
In the end she had 16 very different stories by 15 authors from several European countries.
Its title is "Weihnachtsgeschichten unserer Zeit - Bekannte Schriftsteller erzählen vom Weihnachtswunder" which translates to "Christmas stories of our time - Well-known authors tell of the Christmas miracle".
If you think it's all joy and sparkling lights, you are wrong. The stories are
- heartwarming when a kid gang goes carolling to make some money under the pretense of collecting for sick kids and then one of them spontaneously - and surprisingly to himself - donates the money for a school for deaf children in the last house they go to
- sad when the story is about a nurse in the war who is asked to accompany a group of girls from a children's home and one of the girls dies from appendicitis; the last sentence always made me cry as a child "I never found Helga's parents, though".
- realistic in the story about a separated couple who try to make Christmas nice for their two children despite their differences
- joyful in the story about the homesick boy in Brazil missing snow on Christmas and the girl who makes "snow" for him
- magical in my favorite story.

That story is by Katherine Allfrey, a German-British writer, it is called "White Christmas".

A few days before Christmas, a Christmas elf is born in the yew forest above the Five-Lords-Ground, a rare event that means a White Christmas.
The elf is born because drops of clear silver, a tiny pond from rain or dew, accumulate in the stump of the oldest tree in the forest and are found by a light of ray.
A sparkle awakes in the dark hole and the ray pulls the silver up into the open letting it sink to the ground where it grows and grows until the elf is born, slender like a flame, clear like ice, and bright as a gem. (Isn't that absolutely beautiful?)

Now the elf has three tasks to do for Christmas to become white.
He has to find nine red bullfinches (I love the German word "Gimpel" for them) on a twig, he has to ring the bells of the abandoned church in the Five-Lords-Ground, and he has to bring Jack Frost back from the North.
He doesn't know how to do it, but out of the light snow comes a guide, the last unicorn.
Firstly, the unicorn tells the elf what bullfinches are, but the elf can only find two of them until he stumbles on a paper that has been blown out of a car - and shows nine red bullfinches on a twig. If they are real, he doesn't know, but they are alive.

Male Eurasian bullfinch, Lancashire, UK
© Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Next are the bells in the church, but the old church's walls are crumbling, the door is rotten, the roof has half collapsed - and there are no bells in the tower.
The elf decides to go look for Jack Frost first, a long, dark, and difficult flight for a bright being like him. On the highest of mountains he finds the giant Jack who has turned hard, but he follows the elf, bringing hail and storm with him.
The bullfinches are waiting in the church, but there are still no bells.
On a ledge, however, is a tuft of grasses, fully encased in ice, and when the elf walks by and grazes them, he can hear a little tinkle. Only the hands of an elf can ring those tiny bells with their ethereal chime. The unicorn almost dances with joy, and hearing the bells, Jack Frost turns from a grim giant into a mild king, and the dead, black forest into a shimmering white winter forest.

At midnight, the elf rings the bells again, the rotten door opens. Christmas angels fill the church, the unicorn lays down in front of the old altar, and the bullfinches sit to the left and right like little choristers and whisper.
And they celebrate the Holy Night together until the sun of Christmas morning rises above the white world.

Why a child like me, who never loved snow, loved that story so much, I have no idea. I think it's the peace I am feeling in it, and it's so beautifully written.

I would love to embroider those nine little bullfinches on their twig, hardly until Christmas, but I don't have to hurry it. It will come to me when I'm ready.