‘This evening we will leave; we will abandon this abominable house.’
A young painter becomes obsessed with the legend of a priestess who lived in bygone times. He falls asleep and dreams of her and her strange story…
German silent expressionist horror from director Robert Wiene. Fern Andra takes the title role with support from Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Harald Paulsen and Ernst Gronau.
Friends have become concerned for the mental well-being of William Percy (Paulsen), a highly-strung young artist. He has become increasingly withdrawn after completing a painting of Genuine (Andra), a priestess who led exotic rites in the remote past. When an old man (Gronau) offers to buy the work, he stubbornly refuses to sell it at any price. Abandoned by his friends, he continues to obsess over Andra until he falls asleep. He dreams of the painting coming to life (a simple, but finely executed effect) and scenes from Andra’s past, beginning with how she was purchased in a slave market by the wealthy eccentric Lord Melo (Gronau, again). Keeping her incarcerated in his house, Gronau becomes the focus of rumours and gossip, eventually prompting demands of an investigation from local townspeople.
This enquiry involves summoning Gronau’s barber, Guyard (John Gottowt), which makes him unable to fulfil his regular appointment with the testy old man, so he sends his nephew, Florian (von Twardowski) to fulfil the engagement instead. Unfortunately, his visit coincides with Andra breaking out of her room, and as soon as he sets eyes on her, he’s smitten. She commands him to kill Gronau, and he obliges, slitting the man’s throat with a razor. Later, she demands that he kill himself to prove his love for her, but he flees the house instead, heading straight into a nervous breakdown. The house is inherited by Gronau’s grandson, Percy (Paulsen, again), who arrives to find Andra still in residence. One look is enough, and he falls hopelessly in love with her.
Aside from remakes, it’s generally unfair to base critical appraisal for a film on extended comparisons with another project, but circumstances do tend to dictate that here. Wiene’s previous picture was ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari’ (1920), a landmark not only in horror films but also in cinema’s history. Its initial impact was also significant, so perhaps it would be a little harsh to blame Wiene for essentially trying to replicate its success with his immediate follow-up. Unfortunately, that approach invites comparisons, and they are not at all favourable. The film was a commercial and critical failure, and it was a professional setback from which he only recovered with his well-regarded take on Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Raskolnikow’ (1923).
The ghost of ‘Caligari’ haunts this production, from the story structure to many of the design choices. Again, the tale has a framing device; this time, the protagonist falling asleep with his dream forms almost the entire narrative. It is worth noting, however, that although this device seems obvious to a modern audience, it may not have been so clear to the contemporary one, particularly if they were more casual moviegoers. We also get some of the cast playing dual roles, one in the framing story and one in the main narrative, of course. Gronau essentially plays the same character in both. Other surreal touches include the bald Gronau demanding a daily shave from barber Gottowt and the presence of his servant, The Malay, played by Louis Brody, a tall, black American actor in a huge turban.
The most obvious callback, however, is in the set designs painted by the artist César Klein. Although they are not as extreme or artificial as those Hermann Warm created for ‘Caligari’, they are clearly of the same school; flat, painted and angular. These are mostly reserved for the interior of Gronau’s house, reaching their height with the impressive clutter and decoration of the rich man’s study, the most memorable feature being the human skeleton with a clock face for its head. The staircase to its right is also painted entirely black, and anyone ascending or descending seems to be walking on shadows. Andra’s room includes a plant with huge spiked leaves in front of a ladder, which leads to the glass roof through which she escapes. In contrast, the town’s streets, which only appear briefly, seem relatively normal, although the narrow passage outside the barber’s shop has a slight flavour of artificiality.
The other notable design choice is Klein’s costumes, which take things further than ‘Caligari’. Andra spends some of the time in an ensemble that includes feathers almost as tall as she is, giving her the appearance of a gigantic bird, something she plays into with her strange physical movements. Even more striking is von Twardowski’s initial wardrobe, a white jacket with huge lapels a knotted kerchief at his throat. Combined with a bizarre hairstyle that has parts of it plastered to his face, he looks like a cross between an ice cream salesman and a refugee from a 1980s David Bowie music video. Even more impressive is the Magistrate’s tonsorial ensemble, which has to be seen to be believed. All these elements do help to give the film an interesting visual signature but, sadly, Wiene is unable to create a comparable sense of style with his camera, favouring stock setups and angles when it might have been advisable to lean into the more extravagant aspects of the production and try something a little more daring.
However, the main culprit behind the film’s failure to engage is the script by Carl Meyer. It’s unfocused, repetitive and more than a little vague. Yes, the narrative is a dream, so a lack of formal story beats can be accepted, but there’s very little for the audience to grab onto here, proving the film’s undoing. It’s a shame because there is some potential and a story to tell, but it’s delivered with a fatal lack of clarity. Although the film is generally referred to with the ‘Vampire’ subtitle, the status of Andra’s character remains ambiguous throughout. In the terminology of the time, ‘Vampire’ did not necessarily refer to a member of the undead but was more commonly used as a catch-all term for a predatory woman. This femme fatale would typically ruin a man both emotionally and financially, often just for the hell of it. It’s debatable which meaning was intended here, although it has been suggested that the original German subtitle is better translated as ‘The Tragedy of the Strange House’.
Other commentators have pegged Andra’s Genuine as a succubus to explain her instant command over the young men who cross her path. Similar to her status as ‘a priestess of exotic rites’, there’s no specific evidence to support that contention, other than the men in question stretched out on her bed at times looking a little the worse for wear. What arguably should have been the film’s primary focus is her apparent ‘humanisation’ as events progress. When Gronau buys her at the slave market, she’s violent and feral after being brutalised by her original captors. She’s not so demonstrative in Gronau’s house but still demands that von Twardowski kill her new owner, sending servant Brody after him when he refuses to commit suicide. However, when she meets Paulsen, she starts to develop real feelings for him, and her wardrobe assumes steadily less fantastical aspects as she does. Sadly, this part of the tale receives less attention than it merits. Instead, the film gets bogged down in repetition.
Performances are of their time, of course, and not assisted by Weine’s apparent determination to stretch out individual scenes to no evident purpose. Andra’s contribution is also likely to be a little divisive. On the one hand, some of her physicality is striking, particularly her movement in the earlier passages when the character still operates on her aggressive instincts. Still, it is all very theatrical and exaggerated, and there are several occasions when she seems to be enjoying the taste of the scenery a little too much. This approach doesn’t help to convey the character’s evolution towards more humanistic behaviour, and, coupled with the leaden pacing, the drama is left stifled and somewhat monotonous. Gronau’s performance merits a second look due to his upright posture and stiff-legged walk. Combined those with his bald head, and there’s more than an echo of Max Schreck’s Graf Orlock in Murnau’s masterpiece ‘Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror/Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens’ (1922).
Andra was born as Vernal Edna Andrews in Watseka, Illinois, in 1893. Her father died before she was five years old, and her mother, an opera singer, married again shortly afterwards. Andra’s stepfather was Frank St. Clair, an actor in vaudeville and a tightrope walker in the circus. In no time, Andra was also performing on the high wire and travelling with the circus. After a one-off appearance in a New York film at the age of 6, her next encounter with acting resulted from meeting the famous theatrical director Max Rheinhardt in Berlin in 1913. After appearing in ‘Das Ave Maria’ (1913), she forged an onscreen partnership with the actor Alfred Abel and became very popular with the German public. During World War One, she spied for the Americans, delivering coded messages to agents in Copenhagen. When she came under suspicion, a marriage was arranged with nobleman Baron Friedrich von Weichs of the Hohenzollern family.
During and after the war, Andra wrote and directed a number of the films in which she starred, although only the circus drama ‘Um Krone und Peitsche’ (1919) seems to have survived. An aviation enthusiast, Andra learnt to fly and, not long after gaining her licence, co-piloted a plane on the Hamburg-Berlin mail run on 4th July 1922. The pilot was Lothar von Richthofen, the younger brother of the famous World War One flying ace known as ‘The Red Baron.’ The plane crashed due to engine failure, and von Richthofen was killed. Andra survived along with her business partner George Bluen, although both were seriously injured and initially reported as dead (a mistake repeated for many years in Bluen’s case). Andra’s screen popularity faded in the mid-1920s, and she failed to transition into talking pictures. She transferred to the stage in the 1930s but seems to have retired from acting after marrying General Samuel Edge Dockrell in 1938. She passed away at the age of 80 in 1974.
The production has some interesting aspects, but it’s largely quite the disappointment.