FAUST (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1926)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

F. W. Murnau’s Faust opens with an unleashing of the forces of darkness, the evil dead, circling the earth. A subsequent shot will show the Devil (Emil Jannings, terrifying) as a looming, towering figure, his expansive cloak shadowing the City of Humanity. Early on, the Devil and either God or God’s angel confront one another. “The Earth is mine!” Mephisto says. Its opponent, who, by contrast, appears feeble, counters, “Man belongs to God.” Murnau employs the Faust legend to test the core Western assumption that Man possesses free will. Faust’s mortal fear makes him a ripe candidate for the Devil’s seduction and capture. Man is a battleground, with two grand adversaries claiming ownership—a sly metaphor for humanity’s lack of self-determination. According to Murnau, it is irrelevant whether God or the Devil wins, because in either case Man—Faust—loses. Religion, superstition, mythology—these are determining Man’s nature, depriving him of the free will that is his due.
     Faust is preeminently a film of profound darkness eerily punctuated by diffuse, glowing light. Some will say it is the Devil’s darkness, because the film conventionally identifies the Devil with darkness and God with light; but what Murnau’s fantastic images repeatedly show is the systemic connection between darkness and light—a projection of the cosmic battle in which Faust is embroiled even before the Devil makes a move on him. What difference who owns Man? Murnau’s masterpiece cries out against humanity’s enslavement to restrictive ideas from the past, such as death’s being a punishment that human actions draw.
     A film of human trembling and brooding wonder (as in the phenomenal passage in which Mephisto transports Faust through the heavens across Europe), Faust was incomprehensible in the 90-minute version originally distributed in the U.S. Its restoration is triumphant.

TARTUFFE (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The impersonal result of a contractual obligation, Tartuffe is nevertheless one of F. W. Murnau’s most beautiful films. Like Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow, Master of the House and Ordet, it’s a comedy from someone from whom we do not expect a comedy.
     Molière’s sixteenth-century play exists here as a film-within-the-film; the narrative frame encasing it is modern-day—the addition that scenarist Carl Mayer contributed. Molière’s play attacks various forms of hypocrisy, including religious hypocrisy. In the frame, a rich old man’s disinherited grandson, disguised, shows his grandfather a film of the play in order to expose the housekeeper, to whom the grandfather now plans to leave his fortune, as a greedy manipulator who only pretends to care about her employer. It is she who has convinced the old man that his grandson, an actor, is not to be trusted.
     Both adversaries, ironically, are equally right. Obviously the boy is not to be trusted, as his entire ruse for exposing the housekeeper humorously demonstrates. He comes to us—the camera, that is—after his grandfather and the housekeeper throw him out of the house (on the occasion of a rare visit) to assure us he will not let matters stand as they do. He returns, his identity concealed, and more or less does to the housekeeper what she has done to him. Most feel that the boy is worthy of the inheritance. Hm. Nothing we see suggests he is any more honest, honorable or caring than the housekeeper, and, whatever her duplicity, it is the housekeeper, however imperfectly, who has been taking care of the old man day in, day out. Murnau’s film is a good deal darker and more savvy and complex than is generally acknowledged.
     This also should be noted: Murnau’s shots, for all the comical punctuation, are exquisitely lovely.

PANDORA’S BOX (G. W. Pabst, 1928)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Sensual, capricious, hedonistic, emotionally light-sensitive, but perhaps, really, only self-sensitive, Lulu is the main character of G. W. Pabst’s finest silent film, Pandora’s Box. A cabaret dancer who impresses her lover, Schön, into marriage after his fiancée catches the two of them together backstage, Lulu is the principal model for the behavior of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s flamboyant Cabaret (1972). A reckless girl (played by American dancer Louise Brooks, with luminous eyes and, initially, wearing bangs), Lulu does nothing to discourage her husband’s son’s ardent attentions the night after the wedding. When he catches the two of them together, Schön impresses Lulu into shooting him. Schön’s dying words are a warning to his son that he may be Lulu’s next victim—the conclusion of a superb performance by Fritz Kortner.
     Lulu’s misadventures after fleeing with the boy, following her conviction for manslaughter, account for the remainder of the plot. In London, where she barely survives as a prostitute, fate poignantly intercedes at Christmastime. Intersecting her life is the compulsive path of another outcast, Jack the Ripper, whose sympathy Lulu draws right before becoming his next victim—irony slashing irony.
     One of the film’s most brilliant passages finds Lulu the object of shipboard contemplation by those who would sell her as a sexual commodity to an Egyptian harem. “Worse than prison” is how she describes this looming possibility—a fate seemingly to be decided at a gambling table. Lulu, however, manages to escape, just as she had eluded imprisonment. Isn’t she lucky?
     Only sound would dispel Pabst’s tendency toward melodrama. Still, this is preeminently a film of atmosphere, dizzyingly dense backstage, and haunting off-stage with a tragic sense of destiny. In ravishing contrasts of black and white, Pandora’s Box is lively and heartbreakingly beautiful—like Lulu herself.

GOODBYE AGAIN (Anatole Litvak, 1961)

“You know how much I love you,” businessman Roger Demarest tells Paula, with whom he has had an affair now for five years. “Yes,” she replies; “I know how much you love me”—and the way Ingrid Bergman shades the line, it is as though Paula were saying, “I know exactly how much you love me.” A highly successful interior decorator, and at 40 no fool, Paula is aware and self-aware; she is loyal to her same-age lover who, she knows, takes advantage of their “open” relationship by a string of dalliances with much younger women. If she were as sexually free as Roger is, society would brand her a “slut.” Humiliated by Roger’s endless infidelities, Paula succumbs to the attentions of a lackadaisical 25-year-old lawyer. Even on the score of this fifteen-year difference, society is none too pleased.
     Based on Aimez-vous Brahms?, Françoise Sagan’s popular novel about cages in which women find themselves that men don’t, the film paints a bleak portrait of Paula’s romantic choices. Not having read the book, I have no idea whether Paula, “Madame Tessier,” is widowed or divorced, and if the former is the case, whether her marriage was a happy one. I would also like to know whether Paula worked when married. Despite its two-hour length, the film leaves out a lot, and in the same spirit it caricatures all but the three lead characters.
     Producer-director Anatole Litvak and cutter Bert Bates give the film a breathless pace following characters who are rushing nowhere in an enclosed space. The film ends where it began, with Paula stood-up, trapped.
     Silly moment: Paula, crying while driving, turns on the windshield wipers!
     Yves Montand is engaging as weakling Roger; Anthony Perkins, annoying as spoiled Philip; Bergman, not always convincing as Paula.