"Nosferatu" - F. W. Murnau (1922)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888 - 1931) was a major German filmmaker in the 1920s and one of the prominent early exponents of German Expressionism in film. His most famous and representative film was Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors, 1922), which was adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), but he is also remembered for The Last Laugh (1925), Faust (1926), Sunrise (1927), and Tabu (1931). One of my interests in reexamining Murnau’s masterpiece is to compare some of its features to Werner Herzog’s reverent remake, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). In this case, each successive adaptation seems to have made improvements over its predecessor. But first, some background about the original filming is in order.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a Gothic horror story set in contemporary London, and it gradually gained fame over the years. Murnau and producer/production designer, Albin Grau, were unable to obtain the rights to film the novel from Stoker’s widow, so they made alterations to the plot and to the names used in the story and proceeded with the filming, anyway. Thus, for example, the characters Count Dracula and Jonathon Harker in Stoker’s novel became Count Orlok and Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu. But the changes were far greater than merely the alteration of names. In the original Dracula, and also in Tod Browning’s authorised remake, Dracula (1931), the story describes a pitched battle between two almost equally matched characters: a representative of darkness, Count Dracula, and a representative of modern science, Doctor Van Helsing. In the end of that original story, Van Helsing succeeds in killing Dracula by stabbing him in the heart. So it’s something like a slam-bang adventure story, only one involving a vampire. Nosferatu, on the other hand, is more cosmic, more haunting and is much closer to the disturbing specters that inhabit our nightmares. Unlike Count Dracula, who is a suave, smooth charmer of women, Count Orlok is a deformed, repulsive rat-like character, signifying pestilence. In addition, the Van Helsing character (Doctor Bulwer) is now diminished to insignificance in Nosferatu, and he is no match for Count Orlok. Orlok is not simply a resourceful adversary, but more an abstraction of horror, an unstoppable force of evil. But Murnau also added an additional key innovative feature that was retained by subsequent purveyors of vampire lore: the vampire is destroyed by sunlight. Thus Orlok is darkness, itself.

Despite all these changes, which all led to enhancements over Stoker’s version, the intended effect was not achieved. Stoker’s surviving widow went ahead and sued Grau’s production company, Prana Films, for copyright infringement and won. The stupidity and inequity of “intellectual property” laws, which burdens modern society and contributes to the oppression of ordinary people everywhere, showed its ugly face again. Prana films went into bankruptcy, and all available negatives of Nosferatu were destroyed. Fortunately, there were some bootlegged prints still out there, and a few of them survived. The diminished condition of modern prints of Nosferatu reflect the difficulty of making reconstructions from the surviving prints that have been found.

The story of Nosferatu begins not in late 19th century London, but in Germany and is said to describe the Great Death of Wisborg in 1843. This fictitious city is thought to refer to the northern Hanseatic German city of Wismar, but some English-language translations of the titles say that the setting is in Bremen in 1838. The titular adjustment to 1838 may be an attempt to match history more closely, since there was a real plague that swept through northern Europe in 1838. In the beginning we are introduced to Thomas Hütter and his wife, Ellen, enraptured with each other in marital bliss. An eccentric housing agent, Knock, assigns Hütter to travel to distant Transylvania and arrange a property purchase in Wisborg with Count Orlok. Hütter sets out, and when he gets to Transylvania, he stops at an inn and orders a meal. Villagers in the inn warn him about evil spirits in the region and advise him that he should not travel at night. In his room he finds a book about vampires and reads a few pages, but he scoffs at such superstitions and falls to sleep. (Some reviewers have complained that a nocturnal scene showing disturbed animals contains the technical error of including a hyena, which would be unnatural to this geographical area. But to my eye, that animal shown is a jackal, and so it could well be native to that part of Europe.)

The next day he sets out, but the driver of his coach stops at the “edge of the land of phantoms” and will go no further. So Hütter continues on foot. Soon he is offered a lift by a mysterious coachman, whose coach proceeds at an unnatural speed to Orlok’s castle and arrives at midnight. He immediately meets the ghoulish-looking Count Orlok, who offers him a late-night snack. The next day, Orlok sees a photograph of Hütter’s wife, Ellen, and expresses great admiration for the beauty of her neck. (You get the idea that this guy Orlok is not someone you want turn your back on.) The photograph, incidentally, probably would have been rather unusual for 1843, since the daguerreotype process was unknown to the world before 1839.

It is midnight again, and Hütter reads more from the vampire book, which he had taken with him to Orlok’s castle. He is now getting pretty suspicious about Orlok and bolts his door, but Orlok is able to make doors open by themselves and enters. Hütter faints with fear, and at the same time back in Wisborg, Ellen wakes up in the night and senses danger. This is an early example of parallel action and cross-counting, which Murnau used effectively throughout Nosferatu. Ellen screams, and this seems to deter Orlok from his apparent intention of sucking Hütter’s blood and causes him to retire from the room.

The next morning Hütter tries to escape from the castle, but discovers that the doors are locked. He fashions a makeshift rope from his sheet and descends from his window, but he is injured in a fall and is taken to a local village inn to recuperate. Meanwhile Orlok has taken a wagon full of coffins and had them loaded onto a boat on the Black sea.

At this point the film cuts to a demonstration of a Venus flytrap and a polyp that Professor Bulwer is presenting to some of his students. This seems to have no connection with the rest of the events in the story, other than to offer us a reminder of Nature's mindless ruthlessness. We then return to the coffin-laden ship, where successive members of the crew are dying from a mysterious illness. There is now a three-way cross-cutting parallel action going on: (a) Nosferatu (Orlok) with the ship, (b) the now-recovered Hütter racing back to Wisborg, and (c) shots of Ellen.

With 25 minutes to go in the film, the ship enters Wisborg’s harbour with noone left alive. The town officials discover the ship’s log about the dead sailors and correctly surmise that they are now about to suffer a similar fate: the plague has come to the city.

Hütter has also made his way back to Wisborg by this time, as well. Ellen, secretly reading from her husband's vampire book, learns that the only way to kill a vampire is for a pure woman to detain him until the cock’s crow signals the vampire-destroying light of the sun -- “of her own free will she would have to give him her blood.” Deciding to sacrifice herself, she tells her husband to go fetch Bulwer, and while he’s gone she offers herself to Orlok. He comes to feast on her blood. There is now more parallel action involving (a) Orlock and Ellen, (b) Thomas fetching Bulwer, and (c) the townspeople chasing after Knock, whom they believe to be a vampire and the cause of their plague.

As we expect, Orlok stays too long, and the cock crows. Orlok and Knock both die. Ellen regains consciousness, but then dies in her husband’s arms.

The entire second half of Nosferatu is essentially different from Dracula, and in my view it is superior. The Orlok character is now more disturbing than Dracula. He’s not a Roman Catholic devil figure, such as in Dracula, which is somewhat dangerous, to be sure, but still containable and more or less limited in scope. Here in Nosferatu, in contrast, Orlok embodies a distinctly Protestant concept: a pervasive force of evil and devastation.

Murnau’s cinematography and production values were undoubtedly monumental in 1922, but a few words need to be said about the viewing experience of Nosferatu today. Foremost in importance is the running speed of the film projection. If you see an 80-minute version of the film today, you are undoubtedly seeing it presented at an inflated speed, which can be ruinous to your appreciation of the film. In contrast to modern day projection speeds of 24 frames per second in the US (25 frames per second in Europe and elsewhere), camera shooting speeds for silent films were mostly 16 frames per second. It is true that theaters and projection houses would often project the films at somewhat higher speeds in order to get people out of the theater more quickly. But elevated running speeds can create a ridiculous agitation to the character movements that destroys the necessary suspension of disbelief. There are DVD versions of Nosferatu that run at 94 minutes, which suggests that they are running at an effective 17 frames per second, and that speed would correspond to a realistic presentation of the film. I recommend that you restrict your viewing of the film to the 94-minute version. You are also advised to turn off any musical accompaniment that may come with a DVD. Although silent films in theaters were many times accompanied by organ or piano music (at big city theaters, this could even be an orchestral accompaniment), this music was primarily to cover theater background noise. Unless very skilfully done, the music is unlikely to suit the film, and you are better off without it. Even with these precautions followed, however, you may still find some of the acting histrionics in Nosferatu hard to take. Though I'll concede that silent screen acting needed to be overtly gestural to convey mental states, both the roles of Hütter and Knock are irritatingly exaggerated for my taste. On the other hand, Max Schreck is excellent as Orlok/Nosferatu, and he gives a lesson in how to be menacing but still under control. In addition, some of the camera effects, such as the stop-action speedup of the coach in the forest, may have been spectacular to audiences in their day, but they don’t evoke any sense of disturbance when I see them now.

It may be useful to close with some commentary from a past film festival that reflects on some of the philosophical implications of Nosferatu [1]:

Murnau’s Nosferatu, the film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, is like Dreyer’s Vampyr, one of the truly expressive horror films. Bela Belazs spoke of its “glacial draughts of air from the beyond.” Murnau and his cameraman, Fritz Arno Wagner, developed all sorts of tricks solely for the purpose of rendering horrors – strips of negative film depicting forests as a maze of ghostly trees set against a black sky and the dark phantom vessel speeding with full sail over a phosphorescent sea. Yet, unlike most films of that time, Nosferatu was filmed mostly in natural settings, away from the studio. Murnau used all that nature had to offer to obtain his images, a technique that further suggests Dreyer. Wagner’s skilful use of unexpected camera angles and suggestive editing seems to give jerky movements to a phantom coach which bears the young traveller off to the land of the undead. Murnau, even more proficiently than his contemporaries, invested inanimate objects with sinister connotations. Here, as in many other cases, the philosophic Germans are super-sensitive to the dread of nonbeing. A vacant room, innocent in itself, becomes, in the hands of the Expressionists, horrifying due to its absence of people.

The ending of Henrik Galeen’s script, which differed from the book by having the monster destroyed by the power of love, may seem ludicrous to “sophisticated” audiences now, but it is consistent with its own Romantic terms. The Germanic fear of the destruction of being through, on the one side an unleashing of chaotic and tyrannical authority in order to keep the dark forces in check, has manifested itself again in our culture and gives German horror films a renewed fascination. It might be added that the thrill of experiencing the dread of non-being (and the consequent positive awareness of one’s own existence) which is today available through the taking of drugs, we experienced in the 1920s through the watching of films like Nosferatu.

The relative achievement of Murnau in 1922 was considerable, but Herzog made some improvements on that work that make his own contribution the superior viewing experience today. His view, as you might expect if you know Herzog, is darker.
★★★

Notes:

1. M. Purvis and R. K. Wood, German Expressionist Film Festival, 1970, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.

"Pickpocket" - Robert Bresson (1959)

Following on from his two masterworks, Diary of a Country Priest (1950) and A Man Escaped (1956), Robert Bresson next made Pickpocket, which combined elements from both of those two earlier films to describe the experiences of a petty criminal. Like Diary of a Country Priest, the story is presented as the visual realisation of a journal account describing the protagonist’s life. And like A Man Escaped, the account focuses intensely on the “confinement” of the main character and his efforts to avoid capture. Thanks largely to Bresson’s bare, minimalist style, critics seem to have imbued the film with extra qualities drawn from their own mindsets and have come up with quite contrasting interpretations. Some see it from a spiritual or moral point of view, others from psychological and even sexual perspectives. There is universal agreement on only one issue, however: this film is not a typical police thriller (but of course the viewer is informed of this in the opening sequence). Many reviewers remark that Pickpocket was inspired or influenced by Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, but I would go further and assert that the film is essentially Bresson’s adaptation of “Crime and Punishment”. Bresson’s fascination with Dostroyevky’s work was further manifested by his subsequent Une Femme Douce (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), which were explicitly acknowledged adaptations.

As is characteristic of Bresson films, there is no background information provided for any of the characters, and throughout the film we only see events seen by the protagonist, Michel. And, again, critical dynamic actions take place offscreen and are only referred to. For example, the opening scene, described in Michel’s voice-over, covers his initial pickpocketing effort at a racetrack, but omits his immediately following arrest by the police.

In the next few of scenes, lasting about twenty minutes, we learn that

1. Michel only occasionally and reluctantly visits his ill and soon-to-die mother, whose attractive young neighbour, Jeanne, looks after her.
2. Michel’s friend Jacques, who is interested in Jeanne, expresses his worries about Michel’s degenerating lifestyle and tells of him of his willingness to loan him money.
3. The police inspector suspects that Michel is a pickpocket, but cannot yet prove anything. Michel tells the inspector his theory that superior individuals should be above the law and be permitted to steal.
4. Michel is befriended by another, more skilled, pickpocket, who shows him some tricks and indicates his willingness to include Michel in his pickpocketing team. Their technique always involves a first person lifting someone’s wallet and immediately passing it to a second person, who then passes it quickly to a third person, who departs the scene.

The ensuing forty minutes depict a series of pickpocketing capers by Michel and his gang, interspersed with encounters variously involving Jacques, Jeanne, and the suspicious police inspector. Eventually, after an extended pickpocketing session at the train station, Michel’s accomplices are arrested by the police, and Jeanne is called in for a police interview. Suspecting that the police are about to arrest him, Michel skips town. We are told in voice-over that he then travelled about Europe performing various acts of thievery, but after two years of this and once again penniless, he returned to Paris. Upon his return he learns Jeanne and Jacques had been lovers and had a child. But Jeanne is now alone with the child, apparently a consequence of her having informed Jacques that she didn’t love him enough to marry him.

Michel vows to help support Jeanne financially and promises to live honestly. But he can’t help succumbing to the old temptation and is soon stung and arrested for attempting to pick the pocket of a police decoy. Jeanne comes to visit Michel in prison, and on her second visit, they merely have to look at each other to recognise finally their deep affinity. They kiss through the bars of the interview window, and in voice-over, Michel says, “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take,” as the film ends.

The comparison with Crime and Punishment merits further discussion, and it is interesting to compare Pickpocket with Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment. In both stories we have

• a talented young protagonist who believes that his intelligence and overall superiority entitle him to commit crimes;
• a mother who dies suspecting that her son is a criminal;
• a police inspector who spars intellectually with the protagonist and dismisses his “superman” theory about criminal justification;
• a close male friend who supports the protagonist;
• a self-sacrificing woman who offers her unconditional love, even knowing that her beloved is a criminal.
• a final moment of surrender and redemption that is accompanied by a submission to the call of love.

But Bresson’s vision has significant differences from Dostoyevsky's. Raskolnikov committed a single, violent act of murder, but he was not a serial murderer. He committed his crime to serve some ends which he felt justified that act. Michel, by contrast, is a petty criminal who has embraced a meaningless life of crime. Much of Crime and Punishment involves the tightening noose of suspicion and guilt that is relentlessly encircling Raskolnikov. We don’t feel that kind of narrative tension in Pickpocket. Michel's activities are unmotivated, and so is Jeanne’s growing affection for him. We don’t get inside Michel’s head and experience his world in quite the way we do with Raskolnikov. In fact the principal aspect of Michel’s life seems to be its emptiness, which is underscored by Bresson’s mise en scene.

Bresson’s characteristic style is to use unprofessional actors who render “flat” performances and show almost no emotion when they read their lines with downcast glances. He is famous for drilling his actors with repeated readings, until there are no thespian elements to a performance, in fact no performance whatsoever. Conversations in his films often feature unmotivated pauses separating the individual statements. Shots often begin with just a static view of a room or a doorway for several seconds before anyone appears to engage in action. At the end of a shot, the actors often depart from the scene, but the camera shot is still held on a now-empty doorway or environment for several seconds. These pauses take us out of the flow of action and into reflection. Many commentators, including director and film scholar, Paul Schrader, claim there are no close-ups in the film, but this is misleading, if not downright false. In fact there are so many medium close-ups and so few establishing long shots that the film has a confined, claustrophobic feeling, reminiscent of the films of Wong Kar Wai. This provides a further sense of the cramped, suffocating existence of Michel. All these techniques give the filmed events a dreamlike quality, as if all the characters are sleepwalking. When we watch this, we feel, that we, too, are in a dream, and we are unconsciously forced to reflect on its meaning – just as we do with our own dreams. We viewers are the ones who must struggle to assemble the parts and make a meaning out of them.

This assembly of unconnected building blocks is particularly appropriate for the story of Pickpocket, because Michel, himself, is unable to find any meaning out of life. Until he gains some revelation at the end of the film, his empty life is just a bunch of disconnected building blocks. So thematically, the Bresonian style is particularly apt for Michel’s tale. But as a narrative approach, it is not so effective here. Although many Bresson enthusiasts consider Pickpocket to be at the top of his achievements, I do not share this feeling. It is difficult for us to identify with Michel, whereas we do identify somewhat with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov, at least, believes in his own specialness. Michel doesn’t seem to believe in anything, and the only source of “energy” he can find in existence is the thrill of committing a crime. But showing this kind of apathy on film is usually only enervating for the viewer. It is true that the final emotional moment in Pickpocket is a welcome relief, but it’s only that. It is basically unmotivated and comes as something of a shock. It is certainly not equal to the brilliant culmination that provides both exhilaration and closure in A Man Escaped.
★★★

"Thoth" - Sarah Kernochan (2002)

Thoth is a forty-minute documentary directed by Sarah Kernochan that portrays the life of a bizarre street performer, S. K. Thoth. The film won the 2002 Oscar for Best Short Documentary, some thirty years after Kernochan’s acclaimed documentary, Marjoe, which also depicted an extravagantly extroverted character, child evangelist Marjoe Gortner. The main difference between the two films is that while Marjoe was essentially an expose of phony evangelical showmanship, Thoth presents the profile of a genuinely eccentric personality.

The narrative style of this film is in the US documentary tradition of “direct cinema”. There is an intention of showing “reality”, with the filmmaker’s voice and perspective hidden from the viewer. The voice-over we hear in the film is that of the film’s subject as he gives an account of his past and his present lifestyle. I personally prefer the European tradition, where the filmmaker’s own personal perspective is overtly identified, with its contextual background and prejudices acknowledged. The European approach gives proper recognition to the idea that “reality” is always contextual and offers more scope for presenting a specifically acknowledged philosophical slant on the subject. Nevertheless, Thoth portrays a fascinating subject that opens questions on several general topics.

S. K. Thoth was born Stephen Kaufman in New York in the late 1950s. His father was a Jewish intellectual and political activist, and his mother was an educated and musically talented black woman. This mixed-race family was frequently subjected to thuggish racial taunts and hostility that left marks on the sensitive boy as he grew up. The later breakup of his parents’ marriage when he was about 10 had a further daunting impact on the boy that apparently led to an intense crisis of self-identity and ultimately the strange journey to where he is today. What was once a sensitive teenage introvert became a wildly extravagant extrovert who separates himself from all social conventions. It led him on a strange journey to where he is today, a street musician in dreadlocks energetically dancing around, playing the violin, and singing strange hymns in an unknown language. The image he presents, indeed his own formulation of his identity, is that of a mysterious mixture of all cultures and races. He has invented a fantasy ethnic culture, "Festad", including legends, creatures, and its incomprehensible language. His appearance when he performs his “prayformances” is equally stunning: in heavy makeup and nearly naked in a gold lame loincloth studded with bells and chimes. The prayformances are wildly energetic and over the top, and he sings linguistically mystifying songs in multiple falsetto voices. He confesses to bisexuality, but he thinks of himself as hermaphroditic. He is unlike anyone you have seen before.

It’s pretty evident that this man is weird, but what makes the film interesting is not just the catalogue of his oddball characteristics and talents. It’s more a question of what made him what he is: what made his life's story follow this strange path? There are a couple of further questions that pique our curiosity but are left unanswered:

• Thoth is clearly articulate and well-educated. He is intelligently reflective about the strangeness of his own lifestyle. What made this shy introvert become his exact opposite? He doesn’t appear to be hiding behind a mask of outrageousness, but is instead openly unguarded. “Take me for what I am”, he seems to be saying. From one point of view, he is rejecting all cultural conventions, but he, in contrast, claims that he represents a unification of all cultures. From his own personal “New Age” perspective, he, alone, is the unguarded one, and everyone else is wearing a mask. But the events in his youth that are said to have marked him so deeply don’t seem to have been any more difficult or unusual than those of Barack Obama, one of the most normal people in public life. Is this all, then, a pose? Is S. K. Thoth authentic or fundamentally inauthentic?
• S. K.’s mother, who raised him in the latter stages of his youth as a single parent, is interviewed in the film, and her story is also fascinating, perhaps even more intriguing than that of her son. Coming from a a poor black family, she studied at New York’s special High School of Music & Art and became a gifted timpanist and the first black person to play for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In the film she is articulate, reasonable, and down-to-earth. Even in what must be her late sixties, she is still beautiful. We want to know more about her own path and her own views on what must have been a very interesting life. But we are given only a few minutes.

You can watch this film on S. K. Thoth’s own web site.

★★★

"Crime and Punishment" - Josef von Sternberg (1935)

After making seven brilliantly lush and romantic films with Marlene Dietrich at Paramount, Josef von Sternberg obtained an assignment in 1935 with the less luxurious Columbia Pictures to shoot Crime and Punishment. Based on Fyodor Dostoyevski’s famous 1866 novel of the same name, von Sternberg managed to compress most of the 600-page novel into a taut 88 minute viewing experience. The film starred Peter Lorre, whose first appearance in an English-language film, The Man Who Knew Too Much had only been shot a year earlier and in which it is said he had to learn much of his dialogue phonetically. Whatever limitations he may have had in 1934 were certainly overcome by the following year, because Lorre gives a stellar performance in the lead role of Roderick Raskolnikov. Edward Arnold, as Inspector Porfiry, and Marian Marsh, as Sonya, also make strong dramatic contributions.

Dostoyevsky’s novel, of course, is a classic, but, like much of his work, it is not one that easily translates into film form. Raskolnikov commits a senseless murder very early in the story, and the rest of the tale consists of a psychological examination, from several perspectives, of his attempts to conceal the evidence and of his gradual agonising sense of guilt. Dostoyevsky wrote the book shortly after he had lost all his money due to his own gambling addiction, and the story deals with issues that must have arisen in connection with his own penniless circumstances at the time. In addition, Dostoyevsky, who had earlier been imprisoned for being a political radical, had now turned against Western liberalism, and he forcefully presented his criticisms in Crime and Punishment from his new perspective. In Russia in those days, the more pronounced forms of Western rationalism were seen by their opponents, such as Ivan Turgenev, as being “nihilistic” and accused of being antireligious and disloyal to Russian ethnic culture. Doystoyevky was one of these critics of nihilism and wished to expose the dangers of this way of thinking. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is portrayed as an intense young intellectual who has succumbed to the lure of nihilistic thinking and has come to believe that a man can achieve almost anything by virtue of his genius. If one does have this genius, so the presumed thinking of Raskolnikov goes, then one is elevated above the rabble of humanity and should not be judged by the same standards as those applied to ordinary men. Such geniuses should be given the authority to manifest their greatness.

As the story unfolds, Raskolnikov finds himself in dire poverty, a paradoxical circumstance to him in view of his conviction that his intelligence is of an unusually high standard. When he finds himself being scorned and abused by an old woman pawnbroker, he reasons to himself that this woman is of no value to anyone, and it would be better to kill her so that her hoarded-away cash could be put to better use by himself. Not very long after thinking in this manner and in an extended fit of anger, he carries out the brutal murder. Since Raskolnikov, himself, is a student of criminology, he is convinced that he can easily outwit the police and escape capture.

Von Sternberg manages to tell this tale in a manner reasonably faithful to the novel's storyline. For example after only five minutes, we have already (a) been informed that Raskolnikov is a top scholar, (b) been introduced to his mother, his sister (Atonya), and his best friend (Dimitri), (c) learned that he has just published a brilliant article on criminology, and (d) learned that he is being hounded for his landlady for not paying his rent. Very soon afterwards we are also introduced to the woman pawnbroker and her patron, Sonya, a young woman forced by poverty to become a streetwalker. After Raskolnikov learns that the poverty of his mother and sister are forcing his sister to accept the marriage proposal of the pompous and domineering Lushin, Raskolnikov goes off and kills the pawnbroker in order to get money and rescue his sister. All this has been accomplished just 22 minutes into the story and has set the stage for the real action of the film: the unravelling of Raskolnikov’s mind.

As the story progresses further, Raskolnikov wavers between the lows of his guilt feelings and the highs induced by his own efforts to bolster his confidence in his superior intellect. There is a gradual descent into a mental Hell, though, as he feels himself progressively threatened and frustrated by Inspector Porfiry’s mental game-playing and insinuations, and he struggles to conceal his increasing anxiety. At the same time he is more and more moved by the simple piety of Sonya’s Christian faith and her innocent love. Thus there are three poles engaged in two ongoing dialogues: Porfiry-Raskalnikov and Sonya-Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov represents the mental frame of "nihilism" -- the belief that "man is the measure of all things", the over reliance on human-centered rational prescriptions, and the Objectivist-Romantic cult of "genius". Porfiry represents the mental frame of morality and traditional values. Sonya represents the frame of humility, faith, and love. The two dialogues proceed in their separate ways to achieve Raskolnikov's salvation. But this is not just a moral tale; it is an existentialist tale, too, and that's what has given it its enduring significance.

The interplay among Raskolnikov, Sonya, and Porfiry is skilfully managed by von Sternberg to maintain a steadily increasing sense of tension. At first I thought that Edward Arnold had perhaps overplayed the role of Porfiry, at least when compared to that character’s role in the novel. But on reflection, I think that it was probably necessary to intensify his personality for the purposes of the film. Similarly, the simplicity and innocence of Sonya is compactly handled by von Sternberg and Marsh. As might be expected, von Sternberg knows how to present Marsh in a way that maximises her particular womanly appeal, without pulling her out of her role in the narrative. It is Lorre, though, who carries the action and manages to convey the conflicting emotional pressures in a dramatic and expressive manner. The existentialist aspect to the story is difficult to convey, but Lorre does well to conjure up those overtones that are covered in much greater depth in the novel. A quite different slant on the existentialist overtones of Crime and Punishment was adopted by Robert Bresson in his Pickpocket (1959), also an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel. Bresson has configured his main character in an even less sympathetic fashion that did Dostoyevsky, and it is an interesting exercise to compare von Sternberg's and Bresson's contrasting cinematic realisations of Dostoyevky's themes.

In summary, we can say that von Sternberg's Crime and Punishment concerns human emotions and passions, but it is not exclusively a romantic film, as had been the nature of many of his previous efforts. In fact it's something different, an existentialist film noir – and one of the quality early examples.
★★★½ 

"The Curse of the Cat People" - Val Lewton (directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944)

The Curse of the Cat People (1944) was the sixth in a series of “horror” films produced by Val Lewton during the early 1940s and is plotted as a sequel to the first film in that sequence, Cat People. But this sequel, directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise (his first directorial outing), is vastly different from the earlier film (directed by Jacques Tourneur) and suffers in the comparison. It is an ingenius characteristic of Lewton’s films that the expressionistic presentation evokes a sense of dread suggesting supernatural events are in play. At the same time there is always a rational explanation for these same events, and the viewers are kept on the dividing line between the two contrasting interpretations. It is this very sense of doubt that make the films plausible for the more sophisticated viewer: the viewer’s imagination is always kept on this knife edge. In The Curse of the Cat People, however, the sense of dread is only toyed with, but largely suppressed. On this occasion it is a child’s clearly imaginary fantasies which are evoked and in which we are suppose to engage, but it doesn’t really work. Instead of truly immersing ourselves in the child's fantasy world, we are only able to see her from the outside – sympathetically, to be sure – but it's not the same sense of shared participation as in other Lewton films.

The story picks up some years after the events of Cat People. Oliver and Alice, who were lovers at the end of that movie, are now married and have a six-year-old daughter, Amy, who is criticised by her parents for being too dreamy. After seeing an old photograph of Oliver’s first wife, Irena, Amy conjures up a special imaginary friend with Irena’s form. Amy also stumbles upon a spooky house in the neighbourhood, where an eccentric old actress befriends Amy and tells her scary tales. Amy wanders off one evening and gets lost, eventually finding her way to the spooky old house. Her alarmed parents alert the police and set about searching for her. They finally trace her to the old house, and the film ends happily, with the parents accepting a child psychologist’s prescription that if they love her unconditionally, Amy will stop making up imaginary characters.

This film fails on several levels, and I find it surprising that many reviewers revere the movie as a wonderful fantasy.

1. The narrative, such as it is, barely moves forward. The only issue is that there is a child who is criticised by her parents for making up imaginary friends. She gets a spanking for this and is ostracised by her friends. At the end, the only resolution is that she still has her imaginary friend, but her parents are now more accepting of her. This is not a compelling plot.
2. The whole intriguing idea of “cat people” (people transformed into ferocious cats when their passions are arounsed) from the earlier film is dropped here. There are no cat people in the film, and there is no curse. At one point in the film, Alice asks rhetorically if their family has been cursed – a line that was perhaps inserted into the dialogue merely to justify the film’s title.
3. The cinematography and editing are below the standards of Lewton’s films with Tourneur and Robson. In fact there are so many jarring jump cuts in the film that one has to wonder if Wise deserves his editing credit for Citizen Kane (1941). There are numerous meaningless overhead shots that don’t fit in, and the dramatic changes in lighting that are supposed to signal Amy’s fantasies appear very artificial and are ineffective.
4. There does appear to be some potential for drama at the old house, but this is just a tease. For example, there’s a tense, dramatic moment when Amy and family servant, Edward, are trying to leave the spooky old house and are unable to open the door to get out. But this is a complete red herring and doesn't lead anywhere. In fact the entire drama between the old actress and her estranged daughter is empty and comes to nothing, despite the poorly motivated suggestion at the end of the film that the daughter is about to murder Amy.
5. And speaking of that daughter, since many of the characters from Cat People reappear in Curse of the Cat People and are played by the same actors and actresses, there is a particular problem with the old actress’s daughter, Barbara Farren. This role is played by Elizabeth Russell, who appeared in Cat People as a mysterious cat-like women who taunted Irena and spoke Serbian. Although the physical identification of Russell is obvious, there’s no indication in The Curse of the Cat People that Barbara Farren, not exactly a Serbian name, is this same person that was in Cat People. What are we supposed to make of this duplication?

There are a couple of redeeming elements to The Curse of the Cat People. The scenes at the old house and the old actress’s (Julia Dean's) scary storytelling do pick up our interest a bit.  There was potential here, but it was just left hanging without being developed. And Ann Carter, in the role of Amy, is wonderfully sensitive and believable. She carries the entire film on her back, so to speak, and almost makes it worthwhile. But not quite.
★★