Don't be judgy… The Hangman (1928) with Colin Sell, Kennington Bioscope

 

This was a Weimar surprise unearthed on 35mm from the BFI’s archives by the diligence of Tony Fletcher and given its first outing in many years in front of an audience who hadn’t seen it including fearless accompanist Colin Sell! We only had Tony’s word for it but as MC Michelle Facey pointed out in her introduction, there were plenty of quality elements in this tale of crime and punishment and a story that whilst it could be predicted was still so perfectly timed that it allowed a warm glow for the audience much in need of it given prevailing weather conditions in the capital.

 

The Hangman aka Der Henker or Der Staatsanwalt klagt an in German was directed by Theodor Sparkuhl and Adolf Trotz, being the former’s only directed film although he had an incredible career as a cameraman for everyone from Lubitsch in the teens through to Hollywood and some ground-breaking film noir. He has some good ideas here and perhaps the presence of Trotz indicated that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in the role but the results are certainly very interesting.

 

It is a tale of two women or rather four with two men of honesty and rigid morality caught up in a web of bad luck and passion all of whose fate is in the hands of chance as much a judgement. It is also a tale of two very different bars, one a dive joint offering “Varieté” on tatty posters in its grimy windows plus drinks and a good time down below, the other a kind of Weimar dream bar called Spiders with webbed interior design to match and a circular serving area at the centre to which men are inevitably drawn.

Andrée Lafayette

At the heart of this particular parlour, we find the warm smile of French actress Andrée Lafayette who plays the perfect host: a beauty who welcomes her male customers and yet maintains her distance only sipping the champagne they gulp near the centre of the web. She is asked if she is happy doing this work and smiles “not really” but she’s the consummate professional doing what she needs to get by.

 

Also doing the same but in a more precarious environment is Kiki (Irm Cherry) who works as a hostess in the less salubrious venue where she must fend off the attentions of drunken middle-aged men such as the captain played by Georg John who is harmless enough especially when compared with the villain played by Fritz Kampers. She has set her sights higher though and is in love with the tall and prosperous-looking brother of Andrée’s character played by Spanish actor and former FC Barcelona player* (oh yes!) Félix de Pomés. Sorry, there are so few character names, this film is barely out there online and I’m trusting on memory: such is the thrill of the Bioscope and films that only exist on celluloid. Welcome to the future-past of physical media.

 

Now… all of these connections will be vitally important when I outline the plot and this will then revolve around the imposing presence of public prosecutor Leander played by the sharp-featured Bernhard Goetzke a man who looks like he’s walked straight off the Mount Rushmore of chiselled Weimar actors leaving Emil, Conrad and Fritz stuck to the cliff face. Leander is a stickler for the word of the law if not the spirit of justice and as the film begins we see him sending yet another guilty party to their end with the Weimar Republic having retained the death sentence after much debate; the guillotine was the favoured method.

 

The many faces of Félix de Pomés, from the Nou Camp to Hollywood!

He's not a man who can’t let his hair down though and meets Andrée’s character when dragged down to the bar by a colleague. Pretty soon he’s regularly called to the bar to find out more about this fascinating woman who retains such dignity in the face of the inebriated and weak of character.

 

Elsewhere her brother is less restrained as he finds Kitty in the arms of a customer and following the drunken man outside, there’s a scuffle and the older rival falls unconscious to the ground. Sadly, for him, he awakes to find himself being robbed by the aforementioned villain who hits him harder causing him a fatal blow on the back of the head. After the thief makes his escape the body is found and, being the decent man he is, Félix’s character believes he is responsible and confesses.

 

The circumstantial evidence is strong and this confession surely marks this as an open and shut case but, driven not only by her concern for her sibling but also her growing affection for Leander, Andrée’s character determines to try and persuade the prosecutor of the need for understanding in what seems to be a crime of passion as well as an accidental death. As things progress there is some nice interplay between the two leads and even some lighter moments courtesy of Leander’s housekeeper (Anna von Palen) who sees her role being usurped by her employer's new romantic interest. There’s also excellent support from the siblings’ mother, played by Antonie Jaeckel, who has previously been estranged for a long time from her daughter.

 

Irm Cherry wearing a hat in 1928.

The narrative flows with Sparkuhl and Trotz mixing the growing injustice, the family and romantic ties in with solid control and building up the tension as the legal rock meets the moral hard place… It’s heart-felt and heart-breaking when you look forward to the tens of thousands who were to be sentenced to death under the next regime in Germany.

 

The film features lots of pleasing late silent camera movements with clever reverse shots of the characters in the bar and tracking shots as Leander walks with his love. There is also some expressionist overlays as Leander walks dazed through the city streets contemplating what he has become in a literal tumult of conflicted emotions, the pavements and houses revolving around his intense confliction.

 

Colin Sell accompanied sight unseen and provided marvellous flourishes to adorn the twisty tale as the honesty and dogged morality of both men threatens to doom one and kill the other. We shuffled nervously in our seats as the climax approached and well… let’s hope someone else screens this film before too long! It was a hit Tony, a palpable hit!

 

Tony Fletcher also presented the first part of the evening with a look at films made at Fort Lee near New Jersey in the period before Hollywood with excerpts from the fabulous double Milestone/Kino Blu-ray Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee which he had procured in Pordenone.

 

New Jersey, not Hollywood, was the real birthplace of the modern film industry. Fort Lee — just across the Hudson from the Bronx — became a key site for early film production. During the 1910s, motion pictures were a major part of suburban New Jersey community which looks much more like the old country than the dusty modernist landscapes of California. It’s a bit more built up these days and we saw a poignant documentary film showing the decaying lot in excerpts from Theodore Buff's Ghost Town (1935).

 

"Forget your land I have a nice hat..."

The Curtain Pole (1909), a short comedy directed by D.W. Griffith with an uncredited Mack Sennett as a man who search for the titular pole leads to chaos also including Florence Lawrence. The Indian Land Grab (1910), a young Indian chief goes to Washington to stop a land grab and is almost knocked off course by the daughter of the land grabber in question who is instructed to use her womanly wiles to distract him. A shock of the old certainly but the audiences were apparently more upset about the genuine romance that develops between the two than the film’s call for fairness to native Americans. Go figure

 

Talking of shocks, we also had an extract from the legendary The Vampire (1913) which featured an outrageously sexualised dance with Bert French and Alice Eis which captures the essence of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem describing the dangers of women of a certain sort. The dance is watched by Harold Brentwell (Harry F. Millarde) making him consider his relationship with Sybil the Vampire (Alice Hollister) and I can’t wait to find out what happens… The poem and the story were used as the basis of Theda Bara’s A Fool There Was (1915). Women were to blame for so many things back in the day.

Bert French and Alice Eis were once arrested for performing this dance on stage...

 

John Sweeney accompanied and I had to check that his keyboard was not aflame for the above dance sequence, he plays so well anticipating the rhythms and the emotional movements in ways that really help us to connect with these archaic sensibilities, the media meets an audience who are moved to the 1910s as much as the history comes to us now. Here, actions and piano speak more eloquently than words ever could.

 

Yet another special event at the Cinema Museum and thanks to the cast and crew who enabled us to see this long-hidden film. No archive is too deep or too dusty to prevent the determined search of the Bioscope’s researchers!

 

You can order the set from Amazon.com at reasonable rates as well as from Kino in the USA. It’s worth it for The Vampire dance alone but Fort Lee remains a major part of cinematic history!

 

Andrée Lafayette also appeared in the 1923 Hollywood adaptation of Trilby the second of many Svengali features... EYE have a copy!

* Señor de Pomés played for FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol (Barca’s reserves) in the 1910s, during the sport's amateur era and he also played for Catalonia, the national team who strangely, unlike Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland don’t get to compete at World Cups. He was also a skilled swordsman who featured for Spain in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. The Hangman was one of his first feature films and he made over 70 more into the late sixties, including King of Kings (1961) and Lost Command (1966).

28 appearances and one goal for Barça!

 

Love and Death… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Edition 44, Day Two

Harry Solter on the job. Photo from Biograph Project showing restored image on right vs old paper copy...

Oh, Willie, my child dead, dead, dead! and he never knew me, never called me mother!*

Morning Mr Griffith... Something about a woman hiding a jewel thief in case her husband thinks he’s her secret lover, then a bloke gets stranded on an island for years enough to grow a big beard and returns to suspect his wife of “moving on” and then pirate gold is hidden in a kitchen, next to the hob, almost impossible to find when the next generation need it? Yes, these were just three of the scenarios facing the American Bioscope players under DW Griffith’s direction in 1908 and, luckily, they were all able to act their way out of it! To appreciate these films is an act of imagination and sympathy, it’s enabling yourself to ignore 117 years of over sophistication and also the “presentist” view that where we are now is somehow where we’ve always been (and will always stay – even if we vote in authoritarians…) but… no, in 1908 things were quite different and these films remind us of what changes and what stayed broadly The Same.

John Sweeney appreciates this more than most and used to hearing him at the BFI and Bioscope, I have to say he blew the lid off of the slick top-of-the-range Fazioli (if Ferrari made pianos..) and made us believe in these stories.

Blanche Forsythe and the rotter, Fred Morgan

East Lynne (1913) with Philip Carli

East Lynne was all the rage in the 1910s as it had been since the publication of Ellen Wood’s novel of the same name in 1861 and the subsequent attempts to capture the book’s fire in a bottle narrative on stage. Now on film, in the first of a number of adaptations, director Bert Haldane probably assumed familiarity with the story, and that might certainly explain some of the pacing issues.

The DCP screened to day is the result of a restoration of a 35mm nitrate from the collection of Christopher Bird who said at the recent screening in London’s Kennington Bioscope that whilst East Lynne is not a lost film as such but when quality is, as Kevin Brownlow says, the main thing archive cinema has to sell itself to modern audiences, this film has certainly been missing in terms of the vibrancy, contrast and tasty tints we glimpsed today.

Chris obtained an almost complete nitrate copy from a private collector which, compared with the black and white copy held by the BFI maybe missing the first reel but comes with an extra three minutes and those high-quality tints. Together with film archivist Bob Geoghegan and the BFI the restoration work has continued leading to today at the Teatre Verdi – a rare surviving copy of a British feature film from the pre-war era. Graphic designer and blogging wunderkind Fritzi Kramer (aka Movies Silently) has been involved in reconstructing some of the film’s title cards and, as she said to Chris, melodramas like this have to be watched in the spirit in which they were made and meant to be received – “loving the hokum, not taking it too seriously”.

All too true and the film looks good, courtesy of DOP Oscar Bovill, even though the same few locations – “just through the bushes… yes, the same ones as before…” – do a lot of the heavily lifting for “The Outside”, and some of the background actors, notably the partially-animated blonde male servants and a Doctor far younger than his wig,  should have stayed off shot. BUT, and it is a very British But!, there are serviceable performances from Blanche Forsythe as Lady Isobel, handsome Fred Paul as the steadfast Archibald Carlyle and whoever it was playing Barbara Hare, the sister of the man falsely accused of a murder committed by Isobel’s would be paramour, Captain Levison, as played with pantomime menace by Fred Morgan.

As a trained historian (well, they tried!) I delighted in the nods to period politics when Carlyle goes up against the scheming Levison to become the local MP, there are placards calling for the abolishment of the Window Tax and the Corn Tax (Corn Laws), as well as in support of Chartism which indicate that Bad Fred is a radical Whig whilst the goodie is a Tory. The Chartists stood apart from both main parties and were calling for such things like a vote for all men over 21, secret ballots and an end to property qualification for MPs, and, of their six main demands, all but one – annual elections – were achieved by 1919. The fact that Mrs Wood’s next book was A Life’s Secret (serialised in 1862) which attacked what she saw as unscrupulous Trade Unionists tells us all we need to know of her politics. She’d fit right in these days mind…

*East Lynne was adapted into a play - East Lynne. A Domestic Drama in a Prologue and Four Acts by T. A. Palmer in 1874 and it was on stage where the story became a phenomena, almost guaranteeing success and the half-joking line “East Lynne’s playing next week”. It was also the source of much ridicule with Palmer’s line during Little Willie’s death scene, given birth to the term “dead and never called me mother…”

Italia Almirante Manzini in Notte di Tempesta (GIF from the excellent Silents Please!)

Notte di Tempesta (IT 1917) with Meg Morley

Not only do we get to be introduced to La Diva della settimana: Italia Almirante Manzini but we also got to hear jazz specialist Meg Morley on the Fazioli and, it might just be me, but amongst her perfectly in 1917-character improvisations there’s the occasional fluid line of which McKoy Tyner would be proud! Her playing whisked us through this stylish drama which, as with the above, was a melodrama made firmly in the theatrical tradition of the country from which they came.

I’m not sure if Manzini breaks in to the Bertini-Borelli-Menichelli champions league of elite Divas but she is a very effective performer. And, just when I really wished that I had my copy of Angela Dalle Vacche's Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, I find myself revisiting the power of the other three in order to judge Italia, but she is her own woman at the end of the day with the author mentioning Manzini's "operatic, stylised, and statuesque" way of acting, which are much in evidence during Night of the Storm, with Italia as The Storm!

Manzini is stylish, sporty – she plays tennis although always in a way that keeps her in camera shot, leaving herself vulnerable to passing shots from the back line… she plays a lot more too in a film that often falls foul of its narrative convolutions but it’s fun, and anyone falling for a bad Count in this type of undertaking had better be prepared for the consequences.

The Bioscope reviewer of 25^th October 1917, as quoted in the magnificent Giornate catalogue was keen: “It is admirably mounted and its exteriors are full of the glowing sunlight and rich shadow which mark the Italian filmmaker as a supreme pictorial artist. The acting constitutes a good example of the emotional school…” and it does! As much as the light and the shade, this is the mark of a true Diva film!

I look forward to seeing more of her as the week progresses.

 

Japanese Paper Films with Yoko Reikano Kimura and Hikaru Tamaki

This was a treat I didn’t know I needed but through dozens of ultra-quirky flipbooks, so much pleasure was derived especially with the superb accompaniment of Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto, and Hikaru Tamaki on cello. It was a madly compelling session with so much humour and plain silliness all held together by the accompaniment and the ability of the two players to catch and match the mood! Excellent!

 

Fleischers!!

The Clown’s Little Brother (US 1920) leads me to suspect that Max and Dave Fleischer might be highly addictive with their hybrid cartoons showing Max in the studio as his creations create havoc on paper and on the ground. The use of filmic photo-reference gives The Clown a fluidity not always seen in animation at the time and when he is joined by his more dynamic little brother… things go blotto! Later in the day there was more madness with Jumping Beans from 1923. Fleischer's greatest success was still to come with his extraordinary Superman cartoons, his eye for detail as well as motion was unmatched.

This was followed by another in the Ukrainian Children’s Films strand, Lazar Frenkel’s Robinson on His Own (UkrSSR, 1929) which showed the what unites little boys is always greater than what divides them. Daan van den Hurk accompanied both films with elan, humour and humanity.

There were two hours of Charlie Chaplin from the Chaplin Archives and many rare actualities with Stephen Horne accompanying the fact and the fiction.

 

Bernhard Goetzke and Lil Dagover

Der müde Tod (1921), with Ilya Poletaev

Made in 1921 when there were over half a million war-widows in Germany, Fritz Lang’s stunning Destiny or Der müde Tod (literally The Weary Death) suggests that love is stronger than death but no less avoidable. To a nation still mourning the Great War’s devastation, its gothic kindness would have touched so many: fairy-tale frankness masking a more eternal and hopeful message that we go on beyond...

Death is played rather convincingly by Bernhard Goetzke who carries his dark duties with a heavy heart and weary resolution: it’s not easy being the man in black but he wears it well and is nothing if not fair. Lil Dagover is the Maiden who tries to reason with The Glum Reaper after the untimely demise of her love (Walter Janssen) her selfless pursuit of his life touching even his grief-drenched soul.

It is interesting that the man is in distress and not the damsel; she is relentless and willing to risk all and give all to save her love. It is a sad sign of the Weimar’s new hopes that we get to see Lil Dagover playing something of the swashbuckling hero, not that she wasn’t capable just that actresses would be less “allowed” later on and by no means just in Germany.

Ilya Poletaev accompanied on three keyboards: piano, harpsicord and organ bringing dynamism and vivid shades of dark and light as the action demanded for the three segments in which The Maiden fights for her love and the Verdi was, not for the first or last time, transfixed!

The message? Love is stronger than death.

 

A certain Mr Fairbanks was so impressed he would take ideas for his new film about Bagdad...

 

PS: DONNA… In the early evening there was a memorial drink for film historian Donna Hill who passed away not long after this event in 2024. Donna was someone I knew mostly through social media and from our discussions of not just silent film but also cats and the music of Bauhaus. I still owe her a gelato but she was a warm and imaginative person who was always so willing to discuss her passions. Her death affected many in this community and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that this was going to be the first Giornate in which her absence was going to be truly felt. Rest in peace.

 

 

Fever dreams… The Indian Tomb (1921), Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray

I want this tomb to be built by a man from whose hands the stones receive a soul.

 

Fritz Lang later described Thea von Harbou’s novel on which this two-part epic was based as a fever dream and those were exactly my thoughts after spending the last few days emersed in Joe May’s visuals and the hypnotic new score from Irena and Vojtěch Havel. It’s 243 minutes of high-quality atmospherics, drenched in bass desire and the magic ethereality of the imagined sub-continent, all recreated on a grand scale in Woltersdorf, a lake land and forested area not far from Berlin.

On the centenary of its opening Eureka are releasing a 2k digital transfer on Blu-ray as part of the Masters of Cinema series and it fully warrants the treatment. Lang co-scripted with von Harbou and expected to direct only for May to tell him, truthfully or not, that he couldn’t get the financial backing for a directorial novice. Lang would later return to the story for two films in the late fifties showing this was an itch he had to scratch near the end of his career. Budget-busting exotica may have been in vogue, when funding was available, but it’s very interesting to hear comments from film preservation student Sreya Chatterjee who, whilst noting that the film draws from a variety of Indian cultures, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist, sees it as an objective and non-judgemental creation with “respect and fascination” for its subject.

Mr Veidt

Indeed, the depth of characterisation of the “Indians”, including Conrad Veidt’s tour de force portrayal of the conflicted Ayan III, the Maharajah of Bengal, offsets charges of “orientalism”, especially as the whole story is based on love, loss and betrayal not one-dimensional autocracy. It’s also a commentary on British colonialism, certainly a feature of von Harbou’s writing in general, and here the cause of the broken hearts that drive the narrative. It’s even suggested in the excellent video essay from David Cairns and Fiona Watson, that part of the reasons the British kept the writer interned for three months after the second world war, was because of her critique of the Empire. That’s a Nazi party member calling the kettle pot black but these things are complicated… just ask Mr Lang.

Back in 1920, Germany had just lost a ruinous conflict with the British and the film was more escapism for a cash-strapped population who wanted to travel virtually away from their troubles. May’s India was a mix of huge sets of which DeMille would have been proud and the mountains of southern Germany which may or may not have seen the first cinematic use of the wooden rope bridges so beloved of adventure serials from Indiana Jones to Jumanji.

There are still a few properties in Woltersdorf adorned with the remnants off these giant sets

May’s direction is big on grandeur if less on camera mobility but he makes the most of his luminous stars with my hard drive now heavy with screen grabs of close-up Connie emoting. Having seen so much recently of Asta Nielsen’s perfection of the art of screen acting intensity, here we have the next stage of that evolution with a quite incredible range of explosive expression, blood pumping through engorged veins as his heart bursts with anger and utter despair, he’s a stressful watch. Conrad runs the range from unknowingly imperious to devastated wreck always hinting at that vulnerability even when at his most commanding.

The first part is the Mission of the Yogi and here we learn of the maharajah’s plan to recruit a leading German architect, Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fønss) using the mysterious powers of Ramigani 'Rami', the Yogi (Bernhard Goetzke) a fanciful mix of Indian spirituality and a “genie” straight out of the pages of the Arabian Nights. Rami can astrally project, control peoples’ minds and cure the seemingly incurable. Goetzke’s is another remarkable performance with his impassive granite-featured majesty somehow making you convinced of his mystical capabilities.

If you want to obey the command of my lord… you must do so within the hour. But no one must know of your departure, including your bride.

Olaf Fønss and Bernhard Goetzke

The Maharajah wants Rowland to build a huge temple to house his beloved, Princess Savitri (Erna Morena) in a manner echoing the Taj Mahal, built in 1632 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Rowland is shown earlier in the film marvelling at a drawing of the Taj, telling his fiancé, Irene ((Joe May’s wife, Mia, a theatre actor and singer, turned film star under his guidance), how he would love to build something so beautiful. Initially reluctant, the architect agrees to travel out to India with the Yogi under a cloak of secrecy.

 

Irene, however, is a woman to be reckoned with – as are all the female leads – and, despite the Yogi having telekinetically removed Rowland’s illicit note to her, she decides that something is amiss in Rowland’s departure and follows the trial to the coast and from there way out east.

 

Up here, nearer to heaven than earth, I shall raise up the mighty building.

 

Conrad Veidt and Mia May

Arrived in Bengal, Rowland finally meets his new employer who shows him round hid opulent palace, introducing him to his pet tigers and then taking him to the Valley of Sorrow, high up in eth mountains. It is here that he reveals that the person whom the tomb will commemorate, is very much alive… collapsing in grief to the rocks the Maharajah tells Rowland that, you shall not build a tomb for the dead or the living… but for the great love I have squandered, like a god or a fool.

 

It is very much as if destiny has already set these tragic events in stone… a frequent concern of Lang’s work. He even made a film about it with Bernhard Goetzke again uncanny.

 

The players are revealed as the story of Princess Savitri’s love affair with British officer, Mac Allan (Paul Richter) is revealed to Rowland by her faithful maid servant Mirrjha (Lya De Putti) who appeals to him and Irene separately, to save the Englishman from a trap set by the Maharajah. It’s hard not to see the disruption caused by Mac Allan as a reflection of colonial ambition and it’s a classic betrayal that drives the all-powerful Maharajah to punish those who have betrayed him. He’s not going to gain any satisfaction and as the Yogi, the epitome of Indian spirituality, warns, his plans are unconscionable.

 

Paul Richter and Erna Morena

Meanwhile, as Irene walks through the palace’s beautiful gardens and Rowland learns the full story, Mac Allan is ambushed on a tiger hunt by the Maharajah’s henchmen. The officer is an all-action superhero, fighting off dozens with gun and fists before escaping on his horse… all the ingenuity and ferocity that built our Empire and forced the German surrender in 1918. Is he a good guy in the film? He’s as nuanced as the Maharajah in that respect, not everyone in Europe would be rooting for the Brit…

 

Part two, The Tiger of Eschnapur, deals with the coming together of all the players as the action hots up and the full extent of von Harbou and Lang’s vision becomes clear. You don’t want any more of my summary, you need to buy this disc and relax into this moral adventure on a stormy weekend afternoon with a full pot of Darjeeling followed by liberal amounts of schnaps… the later to aid recovery after the tumultuous final segments.

Lya De Outtie and Erna Morena

The release comes with a fulsome collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Philip Kemp along with that superb video essay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson. It is presented in 1080p HD, from 2K restorations undertaken by the Murnau foundation and does this major film due services.

It’s released on Monday 21^st February and you can order direct from Eureka who very kindly send me review copies. No silent home should be without it!

 

Connie improvises with a curious elephant. Master!

All tomorrow's parties... Slums of Berlin (Die Verrufenen) (1925), Edition Filmmuseum DVD

“Poverty and misery, vice and alcohol turn people into what is called the fifth estate. People who cannot escape their fate. A world of its own which we attack rather than fix.”

Weimar cinema is fascinating on so many levels, stylistically and technically but most obviously because – historically - we know what’s coming next. For too long one could lazily assume that there was a failure to address the concerns that would later fuel totalitarianism and yet so many films are concerned with the dangers of a society that was no longer working for the many. In this era of cracked actors trying to reclaim un-historical discourse and myths of nationhood, it’s chilling to view the commitments of those who we know now went on to lose the fight if not the argument.

Gerhard Lamprecht was the son of a prison padre and a humanist committed to moving society forward, a forward-thinking agenda that it’s all too easy to shake your head at: the rise of the most socially-destructive regimes was never inevitable and that is precisely why the recent history is so widely recognised in Germany and why Britain needs to take note.

Slums of Berlin (Die Verrufenen) is the story of an honourable man who through perjuring himself to save the reputation of his fiancé, falls from grace into the realms of the underclass where most cannot afford good manners and easy moral choices. It shows a depth of concern beyond an alarming amount of modern thought and whilst virtue is rewarded for some, for others there is no “levelling up”.

Bernhard Goetzke

Bernhard Goetzke – formerly Death in Fritz Lang’s Destiny – plays Robert Kramer the engineer who takes the fall for his high society girl, Gerda (Hildegard Imhof). We see him on his release from prison, granite features set in painful acceptance of all he has lost and even as he rejects the friendship of fellow con, Gustav (Arthur Bergen) so do his parents reject him in shame, his father refusing him entry as there is no place in his house for and ex-convict. Worse still, the woman he sacrificed everything for has moved on and married a wealthy man.

 

Lacking anyone to stand by him Robert’s only refuge is the doss house and banishment to the slums. Lamprecht depicts the life of the “fifth estate” with inspiration drawn from Heinriche Zille, a German illustrator, caricaturist, lithographer and photographer who was the first to portray the desperate social environment of the Berlin Mietskasernen, the crowded tenements filled with the poor, and he did so in cartoons that we both horrific and humorous. The film has some of this spirit, dropping the viewer into packed single rooms full of mothers and children or penniless men whilst also providing energy and wit chiefly from Gustav who seems to smile at triumph and disaster just the same and finds humour with the children on the street.

 

Arthur Bergen and Aud Egede-Nissen

Talking of which there’s a nifty scene with a young girl talking to a young boy who is ostentatiously smoking a cigarette. Unimpressed she says, “you’re good at taking a drag but have you ever been really drunk?” They grow up quick in the slums and we laugh but we sigh.

 

Goetzke’s intensity dominates the film and he carries the weight of his character’s desperation so convincingly it’s quite a shock to see his features transformed by a smile in one of the flashbacks. He wants to work and rebuild his life but finds nothing and friendless, he climbs onto a bridge to throw himself to death only to be pulled back by a local “working girl”, Emma played by Aud Egede-Nissen, who will go on to provide much of the light to Goetzke’s shade with a distinctly Clara-esque energy.

 

Emma takes him back to her tiny apartment where he meets Gustav again as the three share a basic meal. Emma is earning enough to keep Robert as well but he is determined to work even if it’s only sewing, using the skills learned in jail to make cloth bags using a Singer sewing machine liberated by Gustav during a raid on the local fortune teller’s house… there’s so much vibrant detail.

 

Gerda's husband ridicules the weakness of the poor...

The film has a series of pointed juxtapositions one as Robert is taken by Emma to the dive-bar dance, where the record table spins him round, round, round… until he’s back in a fancy ball with Gerda. In another telling scene, cutting to and from Robert and Emma’s humble meal, Gerda’s pompous husband scoffs at their dining table at the story of a man who had killed himself rather than face starvation, blaming victim for poor choices as… If someone really wants to work, he can always find something. Fine dining and ignorance, the “undeserving” poor and their lack of strategic thinking.

Robert meets a photographer called Rottmann (Eduard Rothauser) on the stairwell of their tenement and, after saying he was an engineer, the older man enlists his help in the business of taking shots of Berliners at play. At one theatre he encounters Gerda and her husband and, she makes her way to his apartment intent on getting him to accept the money to go to America – a new start for him and the end of any “embarrassment” he may cause those who knew him. He refuses and pushes the money back just as Emma returns and – sure of her man – the latter kicks Gerda out.

Bernard Goetzke and Aud Egede-Nissen

Robert has not lost his dignity and, with Emma’s help, he can move forward but good fortune is in short supply in the slums and if it wasn’t for bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all. Robert eventually gets work on a production line in a factory run by Regines Bruder (Christian Bummerstaedt) and his kind, elegantly pretty, sister Regine (Mady Christians). There may be a chance of recovery for the engineer but fate is set by the harsh realities of social indifference and a class system based on self-perpetuated misery. To this extent Lamprecht uses Robert’s journey as a moral challenge for the audience; how are we to feel relief if this educated and decent man is “saved” when all those he leaves behind are doomed to remain. As the children play in the street near the end of the film, we know how fatuous their joy will be but in the context of the time and story, it didn’t need to be.

I watched the Edition Filmmuseum two-disc DVD which comes with Die Unehelichen/Children of no Importance (1926) which carried forward his concerns. Accompaniment for both is provided by the expert hands of Donald Sosin who enhances the emotional depth with some lovely lines and a firm grip on the emotional narrative. The set is available direct from their website.

The director is quoted in the booklet essay as wanting to use film as a social corrective but one critic at least, the educational reformer Siegfried Bernfeld, accused him of creating “a moving entertainment… (that) exhorts tears without obligation…” yet surely it is for the audience to decide how to progress their response to his work? That challenge is there now as much as it was in 1925.

Kids, yesterday... have you ever been really drunk?

Heinriche Zille