Tangled web… The Spiders (1919-20)

Gadget girl: Lio Sha spies on a Spiders meeting using a TV screen

This blog is yet to feature Fritz Lang and I’ve no idea why it’s taken so long to discuss the director of M, Doctor Mabuses and Metropolis – one of the main films that sparked my silent interest – not to mention The Big Heat and other personal favourites like Clash by Night (featuring Barbara Stanwyck on blistering form).

The Spiders includes Lang’s fourth and sixth films, made in his late twenties when he was clearly still developing his style and whilst they’re not absolute classics, they contain plenty of invention and hints at later themes – Dr Mabuse especially in terms of over-organised crime, hi-tech, mind-power and relentless, high-detail plotlines.

The Spiders' hi-tech base

The series was clearly influenced by Louise Feuillade – with Das Spinnen resembling Les Vampires with a bigger budget and femme fatale Lio Sha just a black jumpsuit away from Irma Vep whilst the bank robbers in part two wear Judex masks and the plot is hand-to-mouth in a breathless sequence of extended jeopardies.

The action runs away with itself from time to time and, whilst this could be down to missing footage, it also reflects Lang’s occasionally rushed editing. His shots are wonderfully framed and filmed by his cinematographers (Carl Freund, Carl Hoffmann and Emil Schünemann) but sometimes they don’t always explain themselves… Hero Kay Hoog flies over the Spiders’ base and climbs out of the plane, next we see him on their roof -  without a parachute: surely not? Similarly when Hoog is trapped by the Spiders in an airtight room and they start filling it with water he somehow finds a way out and is seen swimming towards a friendly rowing boat.

Locations for grand adventure

But these are quibbles as both films are high octane adventures that crack along at pace with many a surprise along the way: the jeopardy is convincing enough.

Part One: Der Goldene See (1919) (The Golden Sea although The Golden Lake is apparently a closer translation)

Events begin with a prologue in which an older man is being pursued along a cliff by an Inca warrior. He writes a last desperate message and seals it in a bottle, throwing it into the sea just as he is felled by the warrior’s arrow.

The scene shifts to a San Franciscan hotel in which are gathered various wealthy adventurers including one Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt) who has found the bottle and managed to decipher it. He tells the assembled audience that the sender had found an undiscovered Incan civilisation which jealously guards their untold riches, killing any outsiders who learn of their whereabouts. Our proto-Indiana Jones has no option but to seek out this hoard for himself…

Kay Hoog tells his tale whilst Lio Sha listens on...

Amongst his rapt audience is one Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) who camps it up wonderfully for the camera. She listens all too carefully to Hoog’s tale and is soon revealed to be one of the leaders of an organised crime gang called The Spiders. They attempt to steal the note and location of the treasure but not before Hoog has worked out the location. So begins a race to win the gold.

Hoog arrives and makes his way through the jungle to lake where he sees the beautiful Inca Princess Naela (Caligari’s Lil Dagover) bathing. Just as a massive boa constrictor is about to fall onto her Hoog rushes in and despatches the snake thereby ensuring the Princess’ gratitude and soon much more…

Hoog spies the princess swimming in the Golden Lake...

The Spiders are less careful and the Inca steal Lio Sha away intending her for human sacrifice at the hands of the unwilling Princess. Naturally Hog cannot allow this and leaps to the rescue of his criminal foe and as he is about to be overwhelmed, the Spiders arrive en mass armed with rifles... all hell breaks loose.

Sha and Hoog briefly join forces

The Europeans end up in the treasure caves but there are surprises in store that place all of their loves in peril and not everyone gets out alive...

Part Two: Das Brillantenschiff (1920) (The Diamond Ship)

The next instalment finds Hoog still in pursuit of The Spiders whose ambition and organisation looks to have grown.

Hoog had learned of the existence of a diamond shaped like the head of Buddha in the first film and now the chase is on for this mystical jewel which The Spiders believe will enable them to rule all of Asia (natch). They are robbing as many banks as possible in the hope of tracking down the diamond and Lio Sha is overseeing an operation running like a “well-oiled engine” and stretching from San Francisco across to the Orient.

The well-oiled machine at work...

Hoog manages to track down the group’s lair but the subsequent raid is not quick enough to prevent their escape and his group is almost crushed in a steel chamber as they take a hidden elevator to their freedom. Learning of a hidden city beneath Chinatown using a clue from the raid Hoog succeeds in infiltrating a Spiders meeting only to be trapped and almost drowned. He manages to escape having learned about the gang’s “Diamond Ship” on which he smuggles himself aboard hidden in a well kitted out packing crate – all mod cons!

Hoog examines the evidence

Meanwhile we learn of the Spiders’ Master (Georg John) - a man of great willpower who can hypnotise almost anyone to do his bidding. He is shown in India forcing Yogi All-hab-mah (Friedrich Kühne) into revealing who may have the diamond. We are shown an English privateer who acquired the diamond and this changes as the generations pass to that of his descendant, the Diamond King, John Terry (Rudolf Lettinger).

Yogi All-hab-mah senses the Diamond King...

Hoog leaves his crate long enough to intercept the Master’s message to his crew: the orders are to set sail for England to find Terry. Hoog makes a daring escape from the ship running up the rigging pursued by dozens of men and diving off one of the masts to swim ashore.

Yet, by the time he reaches Terry’s house, his daughter Ellen (Thea Zander) has been kidnapped by the Spiders who were unable to locate the diamond in his house and are now holding her to ransom in exchange. The problem is... Terry doesn’t know where the jewel is…

Hoog in action

But Hoog is a master of intuitive detective work and noticing the portrait of Terry’s forebear: the privateer who originally obtained the jewel, he is quickly able to piece together the clues to discover that the old pirate had buried his treasure in a cave on the Falkland Islands before he and his crew had fallen victim to an unexplained catastrophe… which left only the captain left standing and able to return home.

As Hoog and Terry discus the location they are overheard by a spy from the Spiders: Fourfinger-John (Edgar Pauly). They catch him but cannot prevent him from alerting his comrades via homing pigeon: the race is on.

Lio Sha watches as The Master hypnotizes Ellen Terry

The climax is every bit as climactic as you’d expect as Hoog and Lio Sha engage in one final conflict: who will emerge victorious and will Terry ever see his daughter again?! You’ll just have to watch the films to find out.

The Spiders is great fun and shows a more playful side to Lang than I’ve seen in his later work. It may be uneven in parts but there’s a lot packed into a relentless story that feels more like conjoined episodes of a serial than two feature films.

Hoog closes in on the treasure... but so does Lio Sha

I watched the Kino DVD which comes complete with a super score from Ben Model who keeps pace with the action with expert invention. It’s available directfrom Kino and other online retailers.

Art of darkness… The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Unique and, as it transpired, un-repeatable, yet so influential… It’s difficult to write “new” about one of the established silent film canon but that’s not what these blogs are really about: it’s your personal interaction with the subject, your discovery and not your opinion where the work should stand as an objectively verifiable “great film”.

With Caligari and a select few, it’s also not a question of when you should watch it but where... The DVD’s long been burning a mark on my shelf but I leapt at the chance to watch the film in the bowels of London’s neoclassical marvel Somerset House.

A select mix of middle-aged cognoscenti and film studies undergrads were ushered into the comfort of the House’s screening room to watch what many consider to be the first true “art” film and the most important horror film of its age.

Cesare carries Jane

Caligari did not disappoint and it did, indeed, surprise… the cause of which I won’t go into here: if I can hold out long enough to see this film as nature intended then so should you…

Its enduring popularity can be attributable to this robust narrative but also to the most artfully artful mis-en-scene in cinematic history. We all know how Caligari looks even if we haven’t seen the film and the image of its central character, Cesare, the somnambulistic seer, is etched across a thousand t-shirts (Bela Lugosi's Dead* but Conrad Veidt is only sleeping…).

Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover

Produced by Erich Pommer and directed by Robert Wiene - as Fritz Lang was busy (on Die Spinnen) - Caligari utilised the stunning art direction of Hermann Warm and his painters Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig. Whilst this work was highly stylised there is logic in the way it was used with almost the whole tale told against a backdrop of demented splashes of white on distorted angular black. Only the Asylum looks anything like a real  space along with the garden at the film’s beginning... but there’s a reason for that…

The story was written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and controversially the film toned down their anti-establishment, post-war, pacifist narrative… but, if millions of soldiers could be convinced into killing each other, surely one man could be hypnotised into murder on demand?

Friedrich Fehér in the garden

The story begins with a young man, Francis (Friedrich Fehér) talking to an older friend in a sparse winter garden. A young woman appears dressed in a nightgown; she looks deeply disturbed and walks past as in a dream, oblivious to her surroundings. Francis says that she is his fiancée and starts to tell the tale of how she came to be so afflicted.

The scenery shifts to impressionistic landscapes with mad lines, rough swathes of white and black paint and uniform irregularity – there’s hardly a right angle in sight and the world seems moulded around the characters. The title cards are also similarly wrought, fully integrated with the style of the sets, mini-artworks in their own right.

Whether this was a popularisation of expressionist art or a daring innovation in cinema is beside the point: nothing else looks like this and it works supremely well in reflecting the psychic state of the narrator… The film melds the emerging science of psychiatry with expressionist art to question the reliability of human perception and will.

Werner Krauss at the fair

Back in the town where Francis lived he was involved in a contest with his best friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) for the heart of the local beauty Jane Olsen (Lil Dagover). The boys visit a travelling fair and witness Cesare the somnambulist (young Conrad Veidt) who emerges from Cailigari's cabinet, mysteriously controlled by the strange Doctor (Werner Krauss).

Cesare has slept for most of his 23 years and this has seemingly given him the power to see the future. He forecasts Alan’s death by “dawn tomorrow”, the two laugh it off – cheered by meeting Jane on their way home – but a notice concerning the murder of a local bureaucrat shakes them.

Caligari un-boxes Cesare

The prophecy of Cesare comes true and we see a figure shadowed against Alan’s bedroom wall, strike a dagger into the young man. Francis is distraught and begins to investigate Caligari and his sleeping partner with the help of Jane’s father and the police.

An attempted murder elsewhere in the town provides a temporary alibi for Caligari and Francis realises his original suspicions may still be accurate. By this point Jane has gone to the fair in search of her father but only finds Cailgari who delights in introducing her to Cesare, Jane flees in terror and the Doctor has his next target.

After Alan’s funeral Francis goes in search of his suspects and as he stakes out Caligari’s caravan, a dummy lying in the cabinet makes it appear that Cesare is still there... yet the somnambulist has already been sent to murder Jane.

Can Cesare control himself?

This sequence is probably the most iconic in the film as Veidt snakes his way along moonlit walls and into Jane’s room – all soft edges and pure white. But Cesare is captivated by Jane and cannot kill her… instead he abducts her, carrying her off over rooftops and alongside wonky roads as a growing army of townsfolk pursue.

Cesare has to drop Jane and runs on alone… as Francis uncovers the Doctor’s ruse and follows him into the grounds of a mental hospital where the real secret of Dr Caligari will be revealed not once but twice or even possibly three times…

Caligari confronted

For a film with such an uncompromisingly stylised look, Caligari’s narrative is surprisingly conventional as you can probably tell from my convoluted summary above. But this is what makes it work so well: the natural flow of human events in stark contrast to the fear and loathing evident in much of the stage sets. If the exterior play of the actors was as deranged as much of the landscape it would be less… un-nerving.

Robert Wiene’s direction is superb and very disciplined. Even with a fixed camera the story telling is dynamic and the director cuts quickly between emotionally charged scenes, often using an off-centre iris shot to open and close each act.

Friedrich Fehér, Rudolf Lettinger and Lil Dagover

The actors are also excellent, with Friedrich Fehér having to achieve a huge amount as the heroic Francis – our main connection to this uncertain world whilst Lil Dagover fulfils the role of damaged heroine with aplomb and is also very good at being carried  when catatonic...

Caligari assailed by obsessive compulsion...

Werner Krauss is wonderfully malevolent as the Doctor driven by an obsession to understand the psychology of slaughter – is he the epitome of unrelenting militaristic-scientific advancement? But it’s Conrad Veidt who creates the icon, his Cesare being a balletic forerunner of so many scissor-handed, Frankenstein monsters with hearts of gold… and you can’t really blame him for Goth.

The version we saw was the 1996 restoration which was enhanced by the excellent but unrelenting score from Timothy Brock which was just that little bit louder than would have been comfortable… or at least it felt that way.

Both are available on the Eureka DVD (available from Movie Mail) which has an informative audio essay/commentary from film historian Mike Budd as well as Wiene’s Caligari follow-up Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire (1920).

Mrs Joyce takes in the view at Somerset House before the film begins...

*Northampton goth band, Bauhaus' debut single from 1979...