Arthur Robison | Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1935

the sentimental dreamer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hans Kyser and Arthur Robison (screenplay, based on the original story and screenplay by Hanns Heinz Ewers and Henrik Galeen), Arthur Robison (director) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1935

 

The young Prague student Balduin (Anton Walbrook) of Arthur Robison’s 1935 version of The Student of Prague, first filmed in 1913 and again in 1926 is quite different in many respects from the two before him.

     For one, instead of moping alone at the beginning of the story, worrying about his finances, this young student, popular with his peers, sits in a drinking hall celebrating with his other friends the birthday of his girlfriend, Lydia (Edna de Greyff). He is a healthy, loving individual, not the moody outsider of the Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye movie.

     The student drinking bar, moreover, is visited by a new guest in the village, the opera singer Julia (Dorothea Wieck), performing for a few nights at the Prague opera, she too being a very different creature from the wealthy local Countess Margit Schwarzenberg of the original.

      A friendly woman, Julia, delighted by the student’s recognition of her, even is gracious enough to perform a song for her admirers, not from her opera repertoire but a student drinking song very different from the anthem with which the students begin the film.

      Her song, composed by Theo Mackeben, recounts, according to the English translation, two men Straight and Bent, the latter of whom “loves his totties,” while the former drinks “rum.” Straight dies and Bent, amazingly survives. It is a very odd foretelling of the two aspects of Balduin’s later personality.

      Read today, of course, is very tempting to perceive it as a kind of straight/gay dichotomy, “bent” in British English often meaning a “queer” or “faggot.” But according to most sources, that meaning of word “bent” appeared in England only in the 1950s. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, “bent,” long associated with ideas of corruption, being spoiled, or ruined, meant to get or to be drunk. It is perfectly reasonable, accordingly, for the bent man (or drunkard) to love his “totties” (a variation presumably of the Irish hot toddy) and the straight man—he who also takes his liquor straight—to prefer rum. The excuse of drinking a “hot toddy” is usually to keep out the cold and fortify the system, which would also help to explain why the bent man survived, while the straight man died.

       But I still find it difficult to believe that Mackeben, who composed popular songs and operettas in Weimar Berlin as well as playing in cafes and dance bands early on, might not be also be hinting at some sexual manifestation in the German original; and I refuse to believe that by 1935 some smart British queer who had spent a while in the Berlin gay bars could not easily have realized that the opposite of someone who is sexually straight might be described as an “eccentric” or “ruined being,” other meanings associated with the word bent—not to ignore the obvious verbal oppositions of the two words. In Scottish, moreover, a “tottie” means a “tot” or young boy or girl (“children”) while in British it is also a sexual slur of a young woman; and “rum” in British signifies someone who is “eccentric,” “strange,” or “queer.” In short, the bent man loves his kiddies or young ladies while the straight man loves the queer. I’ll come back to this song and its conundrums later in the essay.

       Even more remarkable from the early versions, this 1935 version of original Edgar Allan Poe conceit of the doppelgänger casts the Faustian figure named Scapinelli in the 1913 version as a far more dangerous man of the world who appears to have been something close to a Pygmalion regarding Julia, having, so the script hints, provided her or taught her how to become an opera singer of such charm, and, accordingly, she is still under his sway, although she has gotten him to promise to leave her alone, which as the film opens he has for a long year, this Scapinelli, named Dr. Carpis (Theodor Loos) finally finding it impossible to be without Julia’s golden voice.

       As in the earlier version, Balduin falls madly in love with Julia (the substitute for Countess Margit) and quickly forgets his former innocent serving girl Lydia, even fighting over the mis- treatment of Julia with a fellow student through a fencing match which he bloodlessly wins.

       If Carpis is hopelessly in love with Julia, he nonetheless spends the entire evening at the opera, to which Julia has invited Balduin for his courtly manner, starring at the handsome young student through his opera glasses, suggesting an interest far deeper than a mere matter of checking out the boy’s infatuation for Julia. To further involve himself with Balduin, he helps the student to discover the opera singer’s lost bracelet, and encourages him to attend the annual opera ball to gain the attention of the diva.

       Unlike Scapinelli, who offers his Balduin a vast fortune for the mirror (and, of course, the image of Balduin in it), Carpis only demands that Balduin should cover the mirror over with a drape, keeping the being who he describes as Balduin’s “sentimental dreamer” self under wraps, a clear reference to  Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in this case hiding the innocent, beautiful self in the closet, while permitting the competitive, brutal lover—the “straight” would-be Casanova—to go freely about the world.

       Balduin gains his fortune from the gambling tables, after being “taught” by Carpis; and indeed throughout the rest of the film, the man later realizes that he cannot lose any game of chance and nearly goes mad proving it.

       As I wrote in my 2021 essay on the early version of this film, the Wilde story has just as much significance there; but here it is far more explicit, and Balduin’s adoration of his younger, innocent self makes for more sense in this 1935 film, whereas in the earlier version, in which the mirror image was let free as well, it was harder to sympathize with the mirror image, which had become the monster. Here, in a reversal of Dorian Gray story, it is the straight “free” Dorian whose physiognomy begins to change, while his visions of his earlier self remain beautiful and pure.

       The mirror image is not set upon the world, but appears, so it seems, only in the imagination of increasingly brutal Balduin, who when he fights with Julia’s other suitor, Baron Waldis (Erich Fielder), despite his promise not to kill him, can no longer control himself.

        Julia finally realizes that she cannot escape Carpis, while this version of the devil, having attained his revenge, determines to leave her alone now forever. 

      Unlike both the 1913 and 1926 versions which used Expressionist cinematic conceits to great advantage in representing Balduin’s fear of his other, far more dangerous self—the very reasons why most critics still today prefer those silent films over this 1930s talkie*—here it is quite clear that Balduin merely conjures up his mirror image, he is not a being who can enact his own desires.

And in this manner, we recognize the true villain as being Balduin himself and not the monstrous doppelgänger. Admittedly, that removes most of the film’s horror. As Dan Stumpf observed in Fantasy-Horror Movie Review, “This Student wouldn’t scare a nervous cat.”

     But its ending is even better, I would argue than was Henrik Galen’s 1926 version with the memorable Conrad Veidt. I wrote of that 1920s ending:

 

“What Galeen reveals in the final show-down between Balduin and his shadow is that the man-without-a shadow has terribly aged, becoming a hardened and howling older man, while his shadow self is still an attractive young student. And in some respects, his murder of his former self equally represents jealousy and revenge for that fact. Galeen handles the final shooting of Balduin far better than did the 1913 version. Here the shadow, returned to the mirror, pulls his own shirt open to prepare a naked target for the gunman, who when he shoots, observes the fragments of self fall into pieces of glass around him, some of the fragments still revealing his own reflection. At first, unaware of his own wounds, he seems to take comfort in that fact, that his “other” image is now trapped in the glass, but gradually he realizes that those fragments are the last images of a dying man, himself.”

       Knowing that the gunman is the truly evil being beforehand as we do in Robison’s retelling, the scene is even more touching, and far more openly homoerotic. To Mackeben’s music that might remind one of an Alfred Hitchcock score in its driving rhythms and lyrical melody, Balduin literally begins to tear his room apart in his search for the now missing other. Gun in hand, he watches his own delusions, as the mirror image returns, entering the room and walking past Balduin as it returns to stand in front of the mirror. as in the 1926 version, he pulls open his shirt to allow Balduin’s bullet to enter directly into his body.

       Balduin shoots, cracking the mirror. He moves toward the mirror, his own image growing ever larger. Looking at himself very close up, almost in a kiss of his own image, he observes: “There he is again, the sentimental…dreamer.”

      Opening his own shirt he sees his wound, touching it, before puts his finger up to touch lips of the mirror image before sliding, along with the mirror image, to the floor. He picks up one fragment, looking into at his own face, before it drops and he falls dead.

      Narcissus has never before been played out so marvelously.

      And so. the straight man does indeed love his rum, his queer self, while the bent man loves his own totties, his own youth symbolized by the “sentimental dreamer.”  Whether Julia’s song was sexual or not, the ending of this film is most clearly homo-sexual, representing a deep love of the same sex, and, in this case, the same being. 

   There is no question that the earlier scenes and even perhaps the abstraction of the silent film version’s story made for superior works of cinema. But Robison’s Student is in many ways far more logical and even more complex; and its ending is my favorite of the three.

 

*The most famous commentator on this film was Graham Greene, who described this film, in his 1936 review, as “dull [and] a curiosity, a relic of the classical German film of silent days.” Unfortunately, I fear, some critics believed him at his word without bothering to explore the 1935 film themselves.”

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).