The photo play ALRAUNE could easily become a sensation
were only its name: BRIGITTE HELM! 1
Santa delivered and this release is one of the finest of
this or any year – if you haven’t already voted in Silent London’s annual poll,
please do so now and come back to my ramblings when you have. We have restored
and remastered versions of two films directed by Henrik Galeen, The Student of
Prague (1926), now running at 133 minutes, and Alraune from the same year and
clocking in at a wonderfully clear and tinted 131 minutes (I’ve previously only
seen a 98-minute version). For both it’s their first time on Blu-ray and in
these restored to within a gnat’s crochet of their original running time.
Born on 17th March 1908 in the Schöneberg district
of Berlin, Brigitte Helm was astonishingly still only 19 when this film was
released having started her ten-year career at 17 years old on Lang’s Metropolis
after which she was offered a UFA contract. But it’s not just her youth but
also her lack of formal training that is notable. According to filmportal.de
she had featured in school plays and been interested in acting – presumably dancing
too – from an early age none of which would have recommended her so much as her
poise and presence to Fritz Lang when casting her in his epic.
After the success came the contract which defined and
delimited her career, she retired in 1935 after transitioning to the talkies
and left Nazi Germany for Switzerland where she raised four children and, until
her death aged 88 in 1996, refusing to discuss her film career as far as I can
tell? She came she saw, performed like few others and left on her terms as
society took an horrific twist. I recall GW Pabst talking about her playing a
blind person in The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) in the British Close Up
film magazine:
“Do you know the scene when she walks with Jeanne Ney in
the streets of Paris, she was almost killed. The actor driving the taxi was not
a driver really but had had to learn. He was not very sure of his steering.
Brigitte Helm walked right in front of him. I had to run before the camera to
save her. Do you know why? She was blind. She simply did not see it.”2
 |
| Brigitte Helm |
Helm was the daughter of a merchant father who sadly passed
away when she was just five, so who can tell what influence this had on the
course of her interests. She attended the Johanna-Stift Gymnasium in Werftpfuhl
secondary school which focused on the arts and, according to its Wikipedia
page, it was here that Fritz Lang saw her perform in William Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream. Other sources claim that her mother sent her
photograph to the director and pushed her case, maybe both are true but there’s
no denying her magnificence and instinct.
The same skills are in evidence in Galeen’s film with the
director dwelling on her face and sinewy, almost balletic expressiveness – her hunched
shadow contorted against the walls, her hands twisted with murderous hate
hovering over her “father” and tormentor’s throat as he sleeps, her huge eyes
drooping as the innate furies fill her mind, freezing all compassion and
flushing stone cold across her face. It’s an exercise in meaningful movement
that you would normally see only through dance.
The story is based on the outrageous 1911 novel of
the same name by actor, poet and all-round oddball, Hanns Heinz Ewers which
took the medieval myth of the human-shaped mandrake root which was believed to
be the result of the semen of hanged criminals somehow impregnating the plant
underneath the gallows. Modern science would disagree but who trusts the
experts… other than the educated? Anyway, it makes for a ripping yarn in
which the new techniques of artificial insemination are used to enable an
examination of innate evil versus the nurture of responsible upbringing.
A scientist, Professor Jakob ten Brinken, conducts an
experiment using the root, a (dead) hanged murderer and a prostitute to produce
a baby girl whom he christens Mandrake/Alraune and attempts to civilise. In the
novel the inherent evil is dialled up to the max with Alraune capable of all
kinds of perverse behaviour but whilst this no doubt led to the success of the
book, it couldn’t be reproduced directly in a feature film, even in Weimar
Germany.
The book was the second part of a trilogy featuring one Franz
Braun, a cipher for the author, who encounters the supernatural and arcane in
books entitled: The Sorcerer's Apprentice or the Devil Hunters, Alraune
and Vampire: A Wild Story in Scrap and Colours encourages the Professor
to conduct the experiment whereas in the film, he (played by Iván Petrovich) is
the one calling for the scientist (Paul Wegener) to think again. The Professor
is not for turning though and is determined to play God and put his theories to
the practical test with the mystical promise that the resulting child has
strange qualities that cause people to love her and that leads them to
destruction. She may bring luck but also ruin…
Alraune ten Brinken (Brigitte Helm) is the fully grown results
of his experiment, and we find her at boarding school and is first seen toying
with fly as it attempts to escape from a glass of water, she reaches out, not
to rescue but to push it back, not the behaviour of a well-educated young
woman. There is more to come as she leads her classmates into acts of
rebellion, she dances, wears cologne and plants a stag beetle on the mother
superior’s robes. All of this is but a hint of the novel’s decadence with Baum
describing her as the “wild, sinful sister of my hot nights”, her “wild soul
stretches forth, glad of all shame, full of all poison…”3
Alraune has out-grown school and to facilitate her escape
has lured a young man, Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer) into loving her: getting him to
steal money from his family so they can run away. Once on their train to
freedom she quickly proves faithless, ordering champagne and flirting with a
likely lad who spies her from the corridor. Then a troop of circus performers
join the train and Alraune is immediately impressed by the magician’s sleight
of hand especially when in one sexually obvious moment he lets a mouse run up
her skirt; she leans back and looks him straight in the eye when even Bad Maria
might think twice.
At the circus things move on and Alraune is seen sharing a
cigarette with the lion tamer (Louis Ralph) standing so close that she can
light his fire with her own as it were. Chided for her wanton troublesome-ness
Alraune walks into the lions’ cage challenging the beasts to come and have a go
if they think they’re feline enough. The animals don’t move until the tamer
rushes in with his whip…
The Professor finally catches up on his “daughter” after
years of searching and whisks her off to polite society where she plays tennis
with Der Vicomte (handsome Britisher John Loder out of The First Born)
who soon proposes… But he’s not the only man to have fallen for Alraune and the
Professor blackmails her into staying under his “care” as his mind is lost to
passion for his subject and scientific rigour is relaced by the need for sexual
ownership…
I’ve seen the film on screen before but this restoration
adds so much to a story that is still missing a few sections, most notably
Valeska Gert dancing in front of a den of iniquity – this is represented by a
still and a descriptive intertitle. This digital restoration was made by the
Filmmuseum München, supervised by Stefan Drössler and was made from a number of
sources which still leaves the film some 12 minutes short of the original
German release which no longer exists. Distribution elements from the Danish
Film Institute and Russian archive were merged with the censor’s report and the
director’s script for the second half of the film helping to recreate the running
order and intertitles.
One wonders again and again how it is possible that a
girl so young as Brigitte Helm is able to play her part with such highly subtle
artistry the character of the leading part needing such spiritual and inner
comprehension.4
The film was a sensation at the time and further cemented
Helm’s position as a European star with reviews seeing the emergence of a star
of similar sexual magnitude to Garbo and others who played the “vamp” role so
popular in America. To the vampire gallery, which runs from Theda Bara to
Greta Garbo, let me add the German Brigitte… wrote C. Hooper Trask breathlessly
in The New York Times whilst "Trask" in Variety noted that
Galeen "squeezes all the horror juice out of [Ewer’s story], and
Brigitte Helm, the vamp, is at least 200 percent… When will some American
director take a look at this extraordinary fascinating girl. She has an
individuality of her own."
Well, Brigitte had a mind of her own and when the time came
she would walk away aged just 27… TWENTY SEVEN! Probably thinking like Norma
Talmadge that the movies didn’t need her anymore and she, certainly didn’t need
them, at least the films that Hitler’s Germany was offering.
Both films are available on DVD from EditionFilmuseum and
these Blu-rays are from the Deaf Crocodile imprint in the UDS which include
some excellent extras:
- Excerpt from AUF GEFÄHRLICHEN SPUREN (DANGEROUS PATHS), 1924, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, 15 min. This clip from the 1924 crime film is a rare opportunity to see Galeen’s work as both writer and actor, alongside frequent collaborator, director Harry Piel.
- New video interview with Stefan Drössler of the Filmmuseum München about the preservation of Galeen’s films, moderated by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile (90 min., in English).
- New audio commentaries by film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, former director of the UCLA Film & TV Archive and the Filmmuseum München.
- Reversible Wrap Art by Beth Morris
Sadly, there wasn’t space to include Helm’s 1930 talkie
remake as directed by Richard Oswald, I’ve only seen it on grimy YouTube and
Brigitte is quite different… singing and acting like she’s working in Der
blaue Engel… things were moving fast!
There’s more on the Limited Edition including a booklet and
Dave McKean cover but you’ll have to look on eBay as it’s sold out!
Details on the Deaf Crocodile site and all good online
retailers.
The EditionFilmuseum DVD set is available on their site.
- Close Up, December 1928
- Two films by Henrik Galeen: Der Student vonPrag (1926) and Alraune (1928), translated from the original German by Paul Cuff*, on therealmofsilence.com
- Erich Hellmund-Waldow, Close Up March 1928
*Paul Cuff also has a book on Brigitte Helm in
the works and I am positive that I am not alone in awaiting the results
enthusiastically!
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