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Powell's A Fool There Was is the source, as striking a transmutation of naturalism into stylization as Dalí reworking Millet. "A marvelous portrait" that will not be sold, the painter (Harald Paulsen) dozes off and the vamp steps out of the canvas, Fern Andra like a Klimt model sashaying like Nijinsky's Faun. "Beautiful and perverse," the pagan priestess plucked out of her tent and biting potential bidders at the slave market. The old eccentric (Ernst Gronau) locks his exotic captive in a geodesic dome of a cage, he schedules appointments with a barber despite being bald as a badger and keeps a skeleton with a clock where its skull should be. Freed, the bewitcher sinks her talons on the unfair sex, namely the callow apprentice (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski). "Desire begins to cast its irresistible spell again." The artist's reverie, cinema by any other name, Robert Wiene's camera and Cesar Klein's sets and that ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan. (As in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the deep onscreen strangeness derives from the documentary photographing of expressionistic clutter.) An angular Casbah, where tree trunks have circular stripes and where one suitor's romantic exaltation is another's feverish shiver. Nazimova as Salome is a couple of years away, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs remembers the Malay servant with the proof of the gruesome deed. "Kill yourself, kill yourself... as in the sacrifices of old... what a beautiful proof of love." The heroine ponders a chest of treasures and selects a curved dagger, the vengeful mob after her is dispersed by the awakening of the dreamer, who decides after all that ferocious femininity is best handled as a piece of frozen art. Lang (The Woman in the Window) and Preminger (Laura) complicate the Teutonic line of thought. With Albert Bennefeld, John Gottowt, and Louis Brody. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |