King Vidor | The Other Half / 1919

 without feelings

by Douglas Messerli

 

King Vidor (screenwriter and director) The Other Half / 1919

 

King Vidor’s 1919 film, The Other Half, shares the theme of World War I soldiers returning home and the “buddy” themes of Harry Lorraine’s The Lads of the Village of the same year and the later William A. Wellman masterwork Wings of 1927. The returning hometown friends turned corporal, Jimmy Davis (David Butler) and office Donald Trent (Charles Meredith) are very similar, in fact, to the hometown pairing of Air Force partners in Wellman’s Wings.

      Beginning with the return home, one might almost argue that Trent has through his military experience been converted to socialism or even possibly an early form of US communism in his new commitment to the elimination of class distinctions and his determination to work alongside the everyday men in his rich father’s mill, built through ruthless Capitalism based on Martin Trent’s (Alfred Allen’s) philosophy of keeping all personal feelings out of business, interrupted later by his son’s fellow feelings for the human race.

      Arguing against his father, who wants him to immediately become President of his factory, Donald insists on working alongside the likes of Johnnie and his girlfriend, Jennie Jones (Zasu Pitts) who also works in the plant.

      One can imagine that if Vidor had been only a little more daring and inclined to social and sexual issues, he might have shored up the male bonding between Jimmy and Donald as the two share lunches and Jimmy’s homelife, but the differences between the two in this film are so different than when Donald returns to the Trent mansion and interacts with his equally wealthy girlfriend, Katherine Boone (played by Vidor’s wife Florence) we can only imagine, what we soon realize as that Donald’s new ethic as merely an experiment.

     While it lasts, it does appear that that something truly interesting might occur in this film, particularly when Jennie faints in the factory laundry and is brought in the hovel in which she and Jimmy share by Donald and his friend. Donald calls up Katherine to come and look after Jennie. At first it appears that she will never be able to make the transformation, as dressed in a proper outfit and furs she arrives at the worker’s quarters and nearly faints at the sight.

      Yet she soon gets over her aversion, wanting to know more people like Jimmy and Jennie, not for charity’s sake, but just to expand her personal vision of the world. She brings flowers and chocolates to Jennie and, even more importantly, when she discovers that the worker’s newspaper The Beacon—one of the few pleasures of the workers’ lives—which is about the cease publishing; Katherine seeks out the editor and offers financial support and her own writing skills.

       As Jennie’s health improves, Donald’s father dies, forcing his son to take over the company. And from that moment on we realize that the ideals Donald has seemingly brought back from his military training are immediately abandoned. Even when Jimmy appears on a list of possible candidates for foreman, Donald, heeding his father’s words, refuses to be the one to make the final decision, suggesting his male secretary select someone for the position; by accident he chooses Jimmy, which leads Donald’s old friend to believe that the relationship between them still exists. But when, as foreman, he argues for plant improvements, Donald himself turns down any new financial investments.

       Katherine, moreover, who has been converted to a more egalitarian approach to life, demonstrates her uncertainly when Donald asks her to marry him, demanding more time to decide.

       In the meantime, a wall collapses on the workers, hospitalizing Jimmie who temporarily loses his sight. When Katherine brings up the issue, first reported by The Beacon, Donald doesn’t even appear to be aware that it was Jimmy who was the hurt statistic, and he never even bothers to visit him. Katherine refuses his marriage proposal. And when the workers threaten to go on strike she encourages Jimmy to seek out a meeting with Donald to explain to him what is about to happen if changes are not made.

      The final scenes of this film have been lost, but evidently Jimmy succeeds, Donald repents his industrialist behavior, Katherine and Donald are married, and Jimmy regains his eyesight. It would have been interesting to see how that all came about, how the meeting with Jimmy and Donald was treated, and whether their old friendship truly played a role or was only a recognized reiteration of Katherine’s criticisms of him. But we cannot imagine, given the vastly different worlds in which they both live, that there might be any permanent friendship on a personal level, despite Donald’s return to his former ideals.

       In the end this film seems to be primarily about social change, the personal being only an expression of values instead of body and blood as they are in Wellman’s love story or even Harry Lorraine’s deeply felt “buddy” fantasy. Often described as one of quartet of films influenced by Vidor’s embracement of Christian Scientism, this film represents a moral position moral rather than matters of the heart.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Jacques Rivette | La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

beauty of destroyer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Gruault and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on the novel by Denis Diderot), Jacques Rivette (director) La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

 

Jacques Rivette’s 1966 picture La Religieuse (The Nun), based on Denis Diderot’s novel of the 18th century, is really four major episodes patched together into a full film. It’s not precisely that the work does not weave together these parts, but that despite the fact that they all center on the adventures of a young innocent, Suzanne Simonin (the always radiant Anna Karina), they offer such entirely perspectives of the period in unreconcilable ways.

      Perhaps I should say there are actually five perspectives, beginning with the seemingly loving home life of the young beauty, which once her elder two sisters are married off with large dowries—a requirement of the day—leave nothing for her, which means for the family that she will have to be sent off to a convent wherein she will nicely disappear from their consciences.

      Surely there must be several books on how second sons and third daughters throughout the 17th-19th centuries were horribly destroyed by the fact that their wealthy parents simply couldn’t afford to marry off and support their younger children.

      Dozens of novels and plays deal with that very fact, usually leading to comical (in the case of Tom Jones) and tragic results of the financial dealings of the gentile lives of their parents. As if they were all “drunken sailors,” parents had to determine what to do with their later offspring whom they simply could not equally support. In a sense, that is even at the heart of many of Jane Austen’s fictions. When marriage equals money, it produces serious problems even up until the 20th-century when in Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles, the temporary husband of the heavy-drinking Bette Davis is forced to play a billiards game in order to settle the matters of the dowry. Even the peaceful family drama of I Remember Mama must pretend to deal with such issues. Women quite obviously needed to be sold off to their husbands, and younger sons were truly a nuisance. Only if you were the heir apparent might you expect to receive a decent survival in a world, particularly for women, it was not a nice place if you didn’t have cash to spend in it.

     

       What is worse is that the beautiful, well raised Suzanne, like Tom Jones, is the product of an illicit romance her religious mother, in this case, has had with another, unnamed man. Her guilt about her actions is confused with her intentions to send her daughter into hell—supposedly a life in a highly religious convent—in order to resolve their financial difficulties and absolve her own guilt.

     Suzanne, given her careful upbringing, is deeply religious young woman; but also is a proto-feminist, who resents the very idea of being sent off, to what Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang has described as a true prison. As Chang beautifully described the second perspective of this movie, it “might be one of the greatest prison movies ever made and certainly one of the most controversial.” For that is precisely, after the young girl, dressed in the wedding dress young novices must wait to wed their lives to God, rejects the “marriage,” declaring that she has no vocation in her commitment to religious conviction, perceived, obviously, as a scandal—after all, 

her mother has also had to pay—through secretly pawned jewelry—for her entry into the convent! Everything in this world is based on financial transactions; a reality, alas, time has not altered.

     Sent back to the convent, this time with the truth of her birth revealed, the beautiful Suzanne, who a bit like the beauty in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, resented by her sisters and mother, is sent off to a castle from which there is no escape—but, in this case, without even a loving father who might come to rescue her. There are elements in this story even of Snow White, a woman forced to suffer torture, particularly after the death of the one caring Mother Superior, Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle), and endless sleep without food—along with torture and beatings.

      Her white knight is the improbable lawyer, Dom Morel (Francisco Rabal), who warns her of what she will have to endure if she brings a lawsuit to escape the clutches of those who have imprisoned her. He even foretells, as what we later perceive is far too true, that she may not win her claim to remain in the world outside the convent walls. The society who has locked her up is determined, for numerous reasons—hypocritical morality, financial concerns, and simply dispassion—to keep her where she is. And, moreover, the social structure does not easily accept change, while the radical alterations she has demanded stand against the very bulwarks of the current French culture, with only a few outspoken figures attempting to totally transform the culture in which they exist. One must imagine an outspoken philosopher, if he or she might still exist, speaking out against the imprisonment of blacks or the immigrant children in our own time: their voices might be loud, but they are seldom heard. Suzanne loses her case.

       Fortunately, or one might proclaim “unfortunately,” Morel helps the suffering Suzanne to escape to another convent, this one a seemingly loving enclave, where she is treated as a kind of special supplicant to the Mother Superior, Madame de Chelles (Liselotte Pulver), a lustful lesbian who is determined to take the new beauty under her personal “wing,” while others, obviously comfortable in this Sapphic paradise, rush laughingly around one another with joy, behaving nothing like women devoted to God. Only Sister Thérèse, the former favorite of Madame de Chelles, warns the new member of their order of the dangers she must face.

      The young innocent nun is confused—by everything, her newly aroused feelings of joy and contentment, her own personal doubts about her religious commitment, and, of course, her own inability to find vocation within the confines of the life she has vowed to live. Confessing to the local monk, she is advised to stay far from the truly “Satanic” influences of Madame de Chelles—ironically a term that had previously been applied to herself. Is she Satan or is Satan present in the world all around her? She has no way, apparently, of even comprehending evil.

         Sent away through a complaint by the Mother Superior (or perhaps by his own tender feelings for the nun to whom he must attend) the elder confessor simply disappears, a new, younger monk taking his position, a man who confesses to his confessor that he feels very much in the same position as her, locked away in a religiously sanctimonious society in which he does not feel at home.

       What also becomes quickly apparent to everyone but Suzanne herself is that he too has fallen in love with her, forcing her to keep a distance from her Mother Superior while he plots her escape. For people like us, he confides, there is only escape or a jump into suicide, his words re-planting the seeds of what Suzanne has already imagined for herself.

 

      Suzanne agrees to his plot, but quickly realizes, when he attempts to rape her, that her actions have been for no avail; that he simply plans another kind of imprisonment for her. And indeed, when his plot is revealed to authorities, he, himself, is imprisoned. She has no choice but to again escape, this time into the indenturement of a cleaning woman for a provincial French household. The newspapers and gossip of the day warn her even away from this rustic world, and she chooses to run again, this time into the poverty of the streets, begging for a few coins in order to survive.

      Once more she is seemingly saved by a passing figure, a well-dressed woman who takes her home in order to protect her. Suzanne is once more pampered and given a beautiful dress to wear until she realizes, at the evening party, that the role she has been chosen to play this time is a courtesan in a high-class bordello. The approach of a customer forces her again to flee, this time through the window the earlier monk had suggested, to her death.

       If this is a true melodrama, it is also an amazingly well-wrought and beautifully filmed New Wave protest against religion, and most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church. Faced with serious challenges by French censorship authorities, Rivette worked time and again to bring the language into a context that did not threaten the church leaders, even adding a ridiculously long introductory statement which expressed that this was, after all, a fiction and did not represent the way the Church had in any way truly behaved.

      All lies, of course, and in a later 2007 film, The Duchess of Langeais, this based on a story by Balzac, some of the same territory is repeated, since the major figure of the work is also incarcerated and tortured in a convent. Religion, we know, has not always been the best source of protection for its believers. Ask the thousand and young men and women preyed upon by priests, or the masses of innocents who have gone to their early graves believing that what the Church spoke was the Holy Word of God.

     Even though Rivette had the permission of the censors, when the movie was about to open the French press and religious figures shouted it down. Only in Cannes did it finally receive a fair hearing, and even then the film did not appear in Paris theaters until the following year.

     Just as importantly, Rivette’s film is not only about religion but about the restraints put upon women, then and now. Suzanne may have never been quite able to comprehend her role as an outspoken representative for her sex—she was clearly just as uncomfortable in the ordinary world as she was in the world of the sacred—but she knew something was wrong, that being forced into a role in which she didn’t feel comfortable to embrace she was being robbed of her identity. Diderot, long before Rivette, realized that instead of being asked, she was being told how to behave and survive in a world not at all accommodating to her own sensibility. Rebelling against the very idea, again and again, she finally was left no choice finally but to destroy herself in the process. The “MeToo” movement, and numerous other contemporary issues all seem, in this film, too close to bone to watch it comfortably. This is an edgy movie even today given the various choices of life it offers its hero: dark and brutal devotion, worlds of sexual difference—lesbianism or licentious heterosexuality—utter slavery, or begging on the streets. Being deeply religious, apparently, is a dangerous occupation for a beautiful young girl.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

Carl Theodor Dreyer | Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House) / 1925

the great tyrant

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer and Sven Rindom (screenplay, based on Rindom’s play), Carl Theodor Dreyer (director) Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House) / 1925

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s sly 1925 silent film, Master of the House is a story about a great tyrant, Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), who narcissistically rules over his domain with total disdain for those who live within—his wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), his children, Karen (Karin Nellemose), Dreng and Barnet and his former nanny, “Mads” (Mathilde Nielsen), who volunteers to help out his wife from time to time—until finally, in one way or another, they all are in psychological duress, the youngest crying endlessly as the “howler monkey” spits out his orders, Dreng forced to stand in the corner while the family eats their frugal supper (even butter is scraped away from their sandwiches in order to slather more of the tyrant’s bread) simply because he has dared play in the streets with friends a bit beyond his allotted time, and Karen being terrified of not meeting his strict demands. When the hard-working Ida is finally sent away to a place to rest—part of a plot that Mads has hatched with Ida’s mother, Alvilda Kryer (Clara Schønfeld), his wife has a nervous breakdown. Sound familiar?

 

     Unlike that grand tyrant of our times, however, Viktor, at least according to Ida’s testimony, is not truly a bad man, but, having lost his business to bankruptcy, has simply transferred his anger to his devoted and now suffering family. And the wise Mads—as the family members have renamed Mathilde—who has watched this monster with a smoldering sense of horror for some time, has plotted out his authoritarian demise. Having safely transplanted Ida to a safe and hidden location, she begins to run the house in a way that forces the tyrant to realize the errors of his ways.

 

    Unlike Ida, she forces him to participate in the daily care of house and family members, which Viktor, recalling her sometimes harsh penalties for misbehavior in his youth, reluctantly obeys. Dreyer brilliantly portrays an increasing series of daily upbraids and orders as she forces him to help with the laundry, now hanging in the kitchen where he has previously forbidden Ida to place it, to help with food preparation, and to light his own fires, fetch his own shoes, and even care for the children he is rearing. Such an exhausting schedule not only does not permit his frequent visits to a local pub, but gradually helps him to realize just how much work his wife has endured previously alone.

     “Mads” is indeed a more than a bit “mad,” but underneath it all, the director helps us realize, she does have a heart of gold, and realizes that it has become necessary to retrain her early pupil. And when he truly shows signs of breaking because he sorely misses his loving wife, she summons the girl home, forcing her to hide in a cabinet for a brief period so that she might witness Viktor’s transformations.

 

    It the entire shift in behavior seems a bit unlikely, and if we wonder whether it might represent a more permanent psychological change, Dreyer’s deft handling of this domestic satire is, nonetheless, entertaining and, more importantly, educational. Beware you male chauvinists, he seems to be claiming in a day when few other males had arrived at this conclusion, the day of reckoning will soon arrive! Ida’s mother even suggests a new career for the baffled tyrant, writing out a check so that he might purchase an available optometrist's shop—perhaps since he has simply come to better see how things are.

      Coming just after Dreyer’s masterful study of a homosexual behavior, Michael, and only 3 years before his significant portrait of Joan of Arc, Master of the House seems purposefully like the lighter piece it is. Yet, the Danes certainly seemed to comprehend its metaphorical implications in the manner of the nearby Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen’s earlier play, A Doll’s House. The film was well-received in Denmark, and is now recognized as a gem of silent-film productions.

      If nothing else, in its straight-forward and spare direction, much like the determinedly level-headed Mads, Dreyer’s film makes it point almost immediately. In just the first 7 minutes of the film, we, like Mads, perceive what’s truly amiss in the Frandsen household, which the rest of the film demonstrates how to solve. If most of Dreyer’s films do not have such seemingly easy solutions, shifting as they do between deep religious and personal compulsions, Master of the House, nevertheless, explores the boundaries between explicit expressions of authority and individual needs and desires, which ultimately can and do trump superficial ideas of power.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017).

Yasujirō Ozu | お早よう (Ohayō) (Good Morning) / 1959, USA 1962

the dog is not the cat: a suburban satire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) お早よう (Ohayō) (Good Morning) / 1959, USA 1962

 

As several critics have reiterated, along with Rick Prelinger, writing in the new Criterion edition of the film, Good Morning is the “wildcard” of Yasujirō Ozu’s films. It doesn’t quite look or behave like Ozu’s other works, and appears, as Prelinger suggests, more like a kind of American TV comedy series of the same period of the late 1950s, than any other Ozu movie. At moments, Good Morning has the feel of a colorized Leave It to Beaver (running at the same time on American TV sets), except that in the Japanese version, the houses of this suburban community are much smaller and coexist in a space that seems a bit more like a commune than the Mapleton and Pine Street houses in the US television series. (My family lived for several years on Maple Drive in just such an American suburb).

 

    Indeed, Good Morning is, at least in part, about television itself. The two sons of the Hayashi household, Minoru (Shitara Koji) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu) are angry, not only because their mother won’t allow them to visit the neighbor’s house to watch TV—the seemingly bohemian couple who wear their pajamas all day, sing scat songs, and have posters of American films on their walls—but refuses to even consider the possibility of buying them a television set. Their father, Keitaro (Chishū Ryū) insists that the new device “will produce 100 million idiots.” And when, after their open rebellion against his viewpoint, he demands they keep quiet, the two boys determine to become permanently silent to all adults, rebelling as nearly all adolescents eventually do, in a manner that threatens not their education, but their very survival, since they refuse to share in family meals—the very center of home activity. Dobie Gillis did the very same thing, at a slightly older age, in the series that bore his name.

      Unlike Ozu’s 1932 silent film, I Was Born, but..., upon which this film was very loosely based, the father no longer has much significance in the family life. Instead, the mother, Tamiko (Kuniko Miyake) is the center of family life—again not so very different from what I have previously argued about American TV situation comedies, including Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show, all of which place their maternal images at the center of control.

     Yet Mrs. Hayashi, given her gossipy behavior, has other problems: she has accused the Treasurer of the neighborhood dues, Mrs Haraguchi (Haruko Sugimura) as perhaps having used their payments for the purchase of a new washing machine. And when it turns out that Haraguchi’s senile mother simply forgot to pass on the payment envelope, all the neighbors begin to turn against Hayashi, returning anything they may have previously borrowed in order to be free of her viperous tongue.

      Subtly, the boys not only somehow assimilate this, but recognize that all their elders say little about truth in their daily polite expressions of “Good morning,” “How are you?” and  “Have a good day.” A bit like more adolescent Holden Caulfields, these two youths, in fact, are rebelling against the banal suburban life in which they are forced to live, despite the fact that their desires—the ability to watch sumo wrestling matches on the TV—are not so very different from the adult males surrounding them.

      To make his point, Ozu goes beyond what any American situation comedy might have portrayed. As the adult males perpetually release flatulents, sometimes even expressing a kind of private language to their wives, the boys play games in which they fart when pressed by their peers on their foreheads. Yet, obviously, their pressed foreheads also represent a kind of “turning on,” just like a television set, which immediately results in their seemingly comical actions. Only one of their group, who regularly “messes” his pants, cannot join in this mockery. In a strange sense, they are repeating the process of their consumer-culture society, literally performing like the machines which they wish to possess.

      In Ozu’s world, the regular walks around neighborhood blocks of a TV comedy such as Leave It to Beaver is replaced with a series of linear structures where people come and go, on several different levels, from right to left, and left to right. The neighborhood women incessantly open and shut the bamboo sliding doors of their friends. As in a hundred stories of suburban living, a drunk neighbor shows up late at night in the wrong house. Ozu presents us with a series of seemingly linear worlds from which there is truly no escape. Each member of this society remains trapped in their own strata.

     The boys finally get their television set, of course, and will surely watch all the Sumo wrestling bouts they might have wished for. But we do have to ask will they ever truly learn their English lessons (“The dog is not the cat.”) that might demonstrate to them the dangers of American culture? Ozu does not answer the question, but suggests that at least the boys’ rebellion has brought their English-language tutor and their aunt to together by film’s end—even if they can only begin their courtship by talking about the weather.

     Maybe this most Japanese of all directors was far more American than we might have imagined him.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

F. W. Murnau | Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) / 1924

the coat in the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Mayer (screenplay), F. W. Murnau (director) Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) / 1924

If one wanted to explain to someone the basic difference between an art film and a cranked-out Hollywood-like production, one could not choose a better example than the two films that make up F. W. Murnau’s German-produced The Last Laugh. For the larger part of this film is one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever filmed, using the camera (strapped to a photographer’s chests, held by cinematographers rolled about on wheelchairs, and dropped from heights via rope) in near constant motion, zooming in and out of the major rooms of the Atlantic Hotel, where most of the action takes place, in a way that was not only ahead of its time, but which has seldom been matched in the art form since.

    From the very first moment of Murnau’s Kammerspielfilm we are awed as we descend, within the glass-encased hotel elevator, into the vast lobby that tells us immediately we are in a world of lavish pomposity and wealth. A few seconds later the camera comes to focus on almost as large of a mass, that hotel’s Charon, the grandly coated doorman, Emil Jannings, the central character in Murnau’s morality play.

     Jannings performs his role with near operatic intensity, but what might have been perceived elsewhere as comically melodramatic, here is perfect to convey the inner man. Although the city in which this hotel exists might be any great metropolis—Alfred Hitchcock, working at the time in the same German studios reported that Murnau had all the street and shop signs translated into a version of Esperanto—we know, simply by the uniform, that The Atlantic exists in Germany. For Jannings' doorman absolutely exudes his pride, not only in his job as guide to the hotel’s cavernous domains, but in the uniform in which the hotel has dressed him: its officious tent-like shape, its several buttons (surely all of gold) and the decorative epaulets. For this doorkeeper, the dress is more important than the man.

     Arriving home from his day at work, we further observe just how important this uniform is in relation to the character’s personal life and community. The gossip-mongering women of his apartment complex, their mean-minded husbands, their nasty and bullying children, all stop what they’re doing as he passes in full dress. Smiles are plastered upon their faces, fights are interrupted, the dust beaten out of dirty clothing and beds, shooed away. Some even salute. So does Murnau make clear in his silent film, without a single title card, the lay of the land. The uniform and the man within is loved and respected. It not only symbolizes his life, but has transformed it. In his uniform he is quite simply a man of some importance.

     His home life, similarly, is presented as nearly idyllic. On the night we first see him at home, his niece is quite apparently overjoyed: she is to be married the very next day. Both wife and niece treat their breadwinner with love and loyalty, overjoyed just to see him strut imperiously through the apartment yard on his way to work.

 

    During the rainy afternoon of the day before, however, we have witnessed a small flaw in this man’s charmed world: rushing in and out, umbrella in hand, to usher the hotel guests back and forth, he has been asked to lift down one of the customer’s huge trunks. Gathering up all his strength, he brings the burden into the hotel, but he is exhausted by act, in need of a small sip of schnapps to regain his vigor. The hotel doorman, it is clear, is growing old, a fact not lost on the Geschätsführer, the hotel manager. The very next morning, the doorman is called in and handed a note. Taking out his glasses, another sign of his age, he slowly reads what’s written upon the paper (the only use of the written word in the central part of Murnau’s film): he has been relieved of his position as a doorman and ordered to replace the hotel’s oldest employee, the washroom attendant.

      Murnau quipped that the switch was actually for the better—“everyone knows that a washroom attendant makes more than a doorman”—but for Jannings' character the change is utterly inconceivable. As the manager forces him to remove his beloved uniform, the former doorman gradually shifts from a Charon into an Atlas, as he replaces the previous burden of a trunk by the weight of the world. Before our eyes, Jannings ages, by scene’s end hardly able to move. The uniform and all that it stands for is locked away into a closet, the key for which this now old man cannot resist stealing.

     Doors, which have previously been busy centers of entry and egress, suddenly grow into objects of gigantean proportions eerily rocking against their jambs without a person in sight. The world of the lavatories lies below the busy first-floor lobby, a journey that takes one through long, arched corridors that cannot help but remind one of entering Hades. Forced to put on a white work jacket, Jennings sits, his huge frame exposed, as if he were now naked.

     At the close of the day, this destroyed being is now reduced to sneaking into the manager’s office, escaping the harsh light of the hotel watchman, in order to retrieve his treasured coat. As he slinks out of the hotel, his whole being is possessed by a vision of the world that can only remind one of the First World War-time depictions of the German Expressionists, everything is askew, at an angle, dizzying in perspective.

    This man’s return home is now a painful one, but since he has returned in uniform, no one notices, and his family is delighted with his arrival, for now they can celebrate his nieces’ wedding. Yet if the day before life had seemed idyllic, it is now filled with drunken souses, figures out of peasant carousals. The former doorman, himself, becomes inebriated, his head spinning out of control. By morning he is little better, as his earlier militarist 

strut is replaced by a stumbling, slightly drunken reeling forward motion. He arrives at his lavatory post late.

     He has also forgotten his lunch, and we soon witness his joyful wife on her way to deliver it to him. She quickly shows herself at the front door, darting behind a nearby wall to await his appearance. When he doesn’t show, she moves forward again, but cannot spot him; another man has apparently taken his place. An inquiry leads her into the hotel’s bowels where she sends a message for him to appear. When he does, she faces the nobody he has become, shocked, angry, ashamed. The new attendant painfully sits out the day, but by the time he picks up his former uniform in a train station check where he has left it, word has gotten out among the apartment dwellers: he has lost his job!

     Dressed once more in his magnificent attire, he is this time mocked by all the envious gossips, rejected even in his own apartment by his wife, niece, and her husband. With nowhere else to go, he returns to the grand hotel. This time he does not hide, but seeks out the night watchman, and, in one of the most painful scenes in all of film history, sheepishly hands him the stolen uniform. With apparent love and regret, his friend the night watchman hangs it, once more, in the forbidden closet.

     Together the two descend into the inferno of the men’s lavatory, where the watchman gently strokes his friend’s head and covers him with a coat before leaving, the camera documenting the sad heap of the proud man he once was, leaving him finally in a symbolic death.

     So ends this great work of art.

 

Or so it should have ended. Universum Film (UFA) executives demanded a more positive close, forcing the director and writer to add an epilogue, prefaced for the first time with an actual title card reading: “Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.” Mocking both the epilogue and the reason for it, the title card makes clear the creative partner’s perspective. And, in fact, the rest of the tale is acted out mostly with the other characters laughing at reading the newspaper reports of the former doorman’s sudden wealth and in derision of the new pomposity after having inherited a fortune from an American millionaire named A. G. Money, a patron who died in his arms in the hotel bathroom. Or perhaps they are just laughing at this ludicrous appendage to the original story.

 

     Throughout the film’s early scenes, we have observed the lavish dinners served in the restaurant just off the lobby. Now, at the very center of that posh establishment sits the well-dressed new millionaire, sloppily slurping up a gargantuan dessert as he awaits the arrival of his former night watchman friend, for whom he orders up platter after platter of meats, fish, vegetables, and finally scoops of caviar which his friend clearly has never before tasted.  Finishing the feast, while the watchman falls to sleep at the table with a pipe, the former washroom attendant descends for the last time into the bowels of the Atlantic Hotel, where he tips the new attendant profusely. Back upstairs, the two, now clearly presented as a same sex couple, exit through the door which he once guarded, awarding tips to all the hotel employees before employing one of the very carriages from and into which he had escorted numerous hotel guests. In that scene, it is quite clear that Murnau had the very last laugh.

     Where is this unlikely couple going, one well might ask? Why, like Murnau himself, to Hollywood, of course, where the director showed up two years later, to escape, as a homosexual, Germany’s severe penal code! Cut to “sunrise,” the name of his next feature, which won the first and only Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for the “Best Unique and Artistic Picture.”

    The actor, Jennings, alas stayed in Germany, appearing in The Blue Angel in 1930 and winning the Academy Award for the Best Actor for his performances in both Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh (1927) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1929), but after collaborating with the Nazis throughout World War II, became unemployable, his career lost and diminished.

     The actor who played the Night Watchman Georg John (born Georg Jacobsohn) was Jewish and was deported in autumn 1941 to the Łódź Ghetto where he died on November, 18, 1941 at the age of 62.

 

Los Angeles, May 21, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review May 2012).