Fritz Lang – { feuilleton }

The ghost at the window

I’ve been taking advantage of the Spook Season to finally watch some of the horror films that I’ve known about for decades but never managed to see until now. Among the collection has been Ishiro Honda’s fungal nightmare, Matango (1963), and the Poe-themed Spirits of the Dead (1968), one of those Italian anthology films that proliferated in the 1960s, this one featuring episodes directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. Still to come is Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi’s ghost film.

Topping the list was Curse of the Dead (1966), another ghost film directed by Mario Bava. Ten years ago I wrote a post about a black-and-white still from Bava’s film (see above) which has proved surprisingly popular, finding its way onto a number of book and record covers. The still is one of many that fill the pages of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (1973), and had intrigued me long before I started to notice its use elsewhere. Gifford, however, wasn’t much help when trying to find out more about the film itself. Curse of the Dead is one of the few films that he doesn’t discuss in his book, and its title compounded the mystery when nothing with that name was listed in film guides. The problem turned out to be one that plagues horror films, especially the older variety, whereby a film’s title changes each time it crosses a national border. Gifford was using the British name given to something originally released in Italy as Operazione Paura (Operation Fear). Curse of the Dead is rather vague—it would suit any number of other films—but it’s preferable to the Italian one, which makes it sound like a spy thriller, and far better than the other alternatives. Since America dominates the film business it’s usually the American title, Kill, Baby, Kill, that you see this one listed under, a typical piece of overkill (so to speak) from US distributors AIP. In Germany it was released as The Thousand Eyes of Dr Dracula, a ridiculous play on Fritz Lang’s final Dr Mabuse film.

Curse of the Dead.

Whatever the title, Bava’s film is well worth seeking out. The story concerns a doctor who arrives at a small Carpathian village to perform an autopsy on a young woman who has died in mysterious circumstances. The death is one of several that have blighted the village, all caused by a blonde ghost girl whose appearance at night—always dressed in white, and playing with a bouncing white ball—seals the doom of anyone who encounters her. A story that in other hands might be rote and predictable (hello, Hammer Films) is anything but, thanks to Bava’s visual artistry and inventiveness in the face of a severely limited budget. Halfway through the film the narrative logic dissolves into an extended nocturnal investigation punctuated by remarkable dreamlike moments, notably a scene in which the doctor ends up chasing himself through a succession of doors in identical rooms twenty-five years before Agent Cooper did something similar in Twin Peaks. The “Carpathian” exteriors are mostly Italian countryside, filmed in a mountain village whose ruined nature adds a great deal to the atmosphere. As for the intriguing hands-at-the-window moment, I was prepared to be disappointed by its eventual appearance but Bava makes it a key moment after teasing us with other shots like the one above, showing spectral hands and faces at windows.

Toby Dammit.

Bava’s ghost (or a version of her) reappeared two years later in the Fellini episode of Spirits of the Dead, a detail I’d forgotten about until this week. Fellini’s Toby Dammit is the best part of the anthology feature but the Poe story he was adapting, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, doesn’t involve any blonde ghost girls. Terence Stamp is the title character, playing an actor rather like himself who succumbs to an alcohol-fuelled breakdown while being flattered and harassed by fans, paparazzi and a gallery of grotesques from the Italian film business. The ghost haunting him for inexplicable reasons is less a homage than an outright theft (she even has a bouncing white ball), something that apparently dismayed Mario Bava, understandably so after the problems he had to get his own film made. That said, Toby Dammit still carries a spooky charge even if Fellini’s spectre is a poor relation to Bava’s, with the whole episode playing like a particularly nightmarish out-take from 8 1/2.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Juliet of the Spirits
• A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford
• Design as virus 14: Curse of the Dead

Metropolis Magazine, 1927

When Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was released in Britain the distributors, Wardour Films Ltd, produced a 32-page guide to the film filled with production stills and brief pieces written by the cast and crew. I have a facsimile copy of this publication, a limited reprint by Phantasm Press, but the original document is also available for reading or downloading at the Internet Archive. Publications like this were the standalone equivalent of promotional pieces created for the readers of film magazines; Metropolis was Ufa’s most expensive production to date so there would have been a need for serious promotion.

None of this effort helped make the film a success, however. Lang’s epic is a masterpiece of direction and production design but Thea von Harbou’s script was the kind of absurd and naive fare you often get from writers incapable of projecting the complexities of the present day into their visions of the future. (HG Wells was unsparing in his review of “the silliest film”.) A lack of audience enthusiasm prompted foreign distributors to take out their editing scissors, but cutting a quarter of the footage didn’t help either, especially when the cuts made nonsense of the motivations of Rotwang the inventor. One thing you can see in the programme is shots from sequences like the race-track scene which were subsequently removed and wouldn’t be seen in anything other than still form for many decades.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blade Runner vs Metropolis
• The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss
• Metropolis!
• Metropolis posters

Weekend links 602

High Times, May 1980. Cover art by Frank Frazetta.

• Desperately Seeking Mothman: “The Scythian Lamb, after all, was equal parts Venus flytrap and baby lamb, a mysterious woolly gourd,” says Tara Isabella Burton, on the trail of cryptids old and new.

• “In my youth of course I indulged in such stunts as bringing forth a Boramez, or a so-called vegetable lamb.” It’s that lamb again, in a translation of pages from The Voynich Manuscript.

• “2022: Be willing to be dazzled,” says S. Elizabeth. Also, follow her blog because she’s always turning up strange and wonderful things.

• “Why do we count down to the New Year?” Alexis McCrossen explores the history of countdowns, from Fritz Lang to the present day.

• “Snow coats reality in a fresh layer of strangeness,” says Charlie Fox.

• Spending the War Without You: Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lectures.

• New music: Our Hands Against The Dusk by Rachika Nayar.

• Mix of the week: Fact Mix 840 by Time Is Away.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Piet Zwart.

• Does It Matter Irene? (1979) by The Mothmen | Tardis (Sweep Is Dead, Long Live Sweep) (1981) by The Mothmen | Mothman (1981) by The Mothmen

Hands with a mind of their own

My weekend viewing included two films based on The Hands of Orlac (1920), a novel by Maurice Renard. This is one of those books that remains little read and seldom discussed even though its central idea—a concert pianist injured in a train wreck is given the hands of an executed murderer in a transplant operation—has prompted many film adaptations, almost enough to make the novel the origin of a sub-genre of hand-transplant horror. Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac was the first screen adaptation made in 1924, and is another in the long list of silent films I’ve known about for decades but had to wait until now to see. The film is notable for reuniting the director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with Conrad Veidt, the actor who portrayed Caligari’s murderous somnambulist, Cesare, in a mute role that mostly required stalking around acutely-angled sets in a black body stocking.

The Hands of Orlac: Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt) is besieged by nightmares in his colossal hospital room.

Veidt has much more to do as the lead in The Hands of Orlac, giving a suitably tormented performance as the pianist convinced that his new hands retain the violent impulses of their former owner. The acting from Veidt and Alexandra Sorina as Orlac’s wife, Yvonne, is often wildly emotive, surprisingly so for a film made near the end of the silent era when the mannerisms of early silent pictures were being replaced by greater naturalism. Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen explains this in terms of the Expressionist influence which was still prevalent in German cinema, and which extends beyond lighting and set design. A scene in which Orlac is overwhelmed by his predicament is described by Eisner as “an Expressionist ballet”; when Orlac holds a dagger aloft this becomes an unmistakable mirroring of a climactic moment in Caligari.

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The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Among the weekend’s viewing was the third and final film in Fritz Lang’s Mabuse cycle, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). This was also Lang’s final feature, made after his return to Germany in the late 1950s, and another film of his that for many years I knew only as an impossible-to-find title. I’d read about the Mabuse series in Lotte Eisner’s study of Lang’s career even before the name and character was co-opted by Propaganda for their first single in 1984, but the only films of Lang’s that ever used to appear on TV were the Hollywood features or, if you were lucky, a poor print of Metropolis. Mabuse was a source of fascination for the way the character connected the beginning and ends of the director’s career, as well as being a German take on the Moriarty-like super-criminal. The first film in the series, Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), condenses the corruption of Weimar Germany into a potent physical icon, while the sequel, The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), reflects the fevered moment when real super-criminals were taking control of the nation. The Nazis were sufficiently discomforted by Testament to ban it shortly after its release.

Cornelius the psychic with insurance salesman Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig and police inspector Kras.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse appeared just as new super-villains were emerging to oppose James Bond and his imitators. One of Bond’s early adversaries, Auric Goldfinger, was portrayed on screen by Gert Fröbe who appears here on the opposite side of the law as homicide inspector Kras. Fröbe’s tenacious policeman is one of the few fixed points in a plot filled with twists and deceptive identities. Assassinations and double-crosses are a staple of this type of thriller but Lang also gives us an early example of electronic surveillance in a contemporary setting, together with a séance that harks back to a similar scene in the first Mabuse film. The séance is an unusual touch in a story otherwise devoid of similar moments, prompted by the film’s most mysterious character, Cornelius the blind psychic. With an appearance reminiscent of the late Karl Lagerfeld, Cornelius is an overt throwback to Lang’s pre-war films, many of which hinted at the mystical or supernatural even when such hints seemed unnecessary; Rotwang, the robot-builder in Metropolis (played by the original screen Mabuse, Rudolph Klein-Rogge) is a mechanical genius who just happens to live in a house more suited to an alchemist, with a huge inverted pentagram on one of its walls. The sinister motives of Cornelius aren’t so baldly stated but his consulting room is lavishly decorated with astrological diagrams. The psychic, together with the criminals and the police inspector, create a problem common to films of this kind in which the more colourful characters generate greater interest for the viewer than do the romantic leads. After a succession of breathless opening scenes, Thousand Eyes sags a little while wealthy industrialist Henry Travers (Peter Van Eyck) is getting to know Marion Menil (Dawn Addams), a woman he rescues from a suicide attempt. The film also lacks the subtext of the earlier episodes, although Mabuse’s scheme turns out to be diabolical enough for any of James Bond’s Cold War enemies.

The séance.

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