Waxworks (1924)

Waxworks (1924)

Dir. Paul Leni

Written by Henrick Galeen

Starring Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, William Dieterle

Back when I reviewed director Paul Leni’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, I had to politely point out that despite its grotesque imagery and macbre subject matter, it wasn’t really a horror movie. It’s mostly a kind of gothic melodrama, adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name (which was apparently originally intended as a socially-conscious work of political criticism, though one which does not appear to have a great deal of enduring relevance to our time) which begins with some right proper gothic horror (the horrifically deformed face of its protagonist is said to be the inspiration for The Joker) but gradually decamps into an opaque political thriller and finally an over-the-top action set piece spectacular. It’s still really durn good, though, and appropriately harrowing when it sets its mind to be. So even though LAUGHS was only horror-adjacent, director Leni obviously had such a strong command of the cinematic langauage of horror that I was excited to give him another shot, this time with his 1924 anthology WAXWORKS. Not only was I excited to see Leni take a swing at out-and-out horror, but I’d read multiple places that WAXWORKS was the first-ever anthology horror movie, which as you know is a subset of horror film so dear to my heart that I’m pretty much physically incapable of not enjoying any given outing.

Unfortunately it turns out WAXWORKS is also not really a horror movie. Instead, it’s a two-and-a-half part anthology film which begins as some kind of comic fantasy and segues into something like a gothic historical tale before finally, in its last six minutes, arriving at genuine horror. So calling this the first anthology horror film isn’t quite right; in fact, even if it were more straightforward horror, there appears to be at least one earlier anthology horror/fantasy film, 1919’s EERIE TALES (which as near as I can tell is the first anthology film of any kind; oddly, getting a definitive answer to this question proves quite difficult, and a medium-effort online search seems to reveal no immediate authoritative source on this topic. I swear, as soon as I’m done reviewing the 90,000 horror movies I watched in October I’m gonna have to fix that). That probably makes it slightly less valuable as a historical curiosity, but fortunately thanks to Paul Leni’s German Expressionist mastery, it has plenty of value on its own, even if could use a lot more horror and a lot less uncomfortable brownfaced sex romp.

This is what a Nazi looks like playing a comically buffoonish Arab of great religious significance. I hope to never have to type that particular sentence ever again, if that's OK.

Allow me to explain: the framing story finds a young writer (William Dieterle, better known for his later career as director of such films as THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER and DARK CITY [1950]) hired to craft stories for the four figures in a wax museum (although calling a building with only four wax figure a “museum” seems a little generous, but whatever). These figures are first-century Islamic Golden Age Caliph Harun al-Rashid (Emil Jannings, THE BLUE ANGEL, various Nazi propaganda films), 16th-century Russian Tsar Ivan The Terrible (Conrad Veidt, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, CASABLANCA), a threatening British character alternately referred to as “Jack The Ripper” and “Spring-Heeled Jack” (Warner Krauss, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, more Nazi propaganda films), and the fictional swashbuckler Rinaldo Rinaldini (Dieterle again) from the 1797 novel Rinaldo Rinaldini, The Robber Captain by Christian August Vulpuis. Amusingly, Leni ran out of money and decided to ditch the planned Rinaldini segment, meaning the poor lad only gets 75% of the job done before bailing. While he writes, we get to see the fruits of his imagination, which tend to feature himself as the hero and the museum owner’s beautiful daughter (Russian actress Olga Belajeff) as a romantic interest.

The first, and unfortunately the longest of these imagined tales, concerns Dieterle as first-century brownfaced baker Assad, a hard working stiff who can’t catch a break. When smoke from his bakery irritates Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the ruler quickly decides that he’d like to steal the baker’s beautiful wife, and so he sneaks into the house while Assad is gone to try and steal her away. Coincidentally, Assad is actually simultaneously sneaking into the Caliph’s palace because he’s attempting to steal the “wishing ring” worn by al-Rashid in an effort to win his wife’s affection by ameliorating the grinding poverty she’s always whining to him about. Comic complications ensue which involve an in-story wax figure of the Caliph, a mistaken identity, etc, etc. Or at least a single etc. Frankly it’s a little short on whammy. Even setting aside the now-extremely-uncomfortable brownfacing, stereotyping, and debasing female objectification on display here (and that’s pretty much the whole story), this segment suffers from a lax pace and an unnecessarily protracted setup, taking far too long to even get to the middling slapstick which appears to be its goal. The performances are broad and stilted without being especially fun, and so really the only thing left to enjoy is Leni’s deliciously skewed expressionist production design. That is a joy to look at, and no small one, but probably not quite enough to justify a labored 40 minutes, especially when there are really only a handful of sets to be had here.

Fortunately, the second segment is much better. It introduces us to notorious Russian tyrant Ivan the Terrible, and he’s played by Conrad Veidt, so right away you know whatever happens it’s gonna be pretty good to watch. I mean, the guy is just an arrestingly intense presence on screen, with his piercing eyes and expressive pre-sound physical acting. He’s also pretty much the only person on-screen who didn’t end up having his career tainted by enthusiastically appearing in Nazi propaganda films (he fled Germany in 1933 with his Jewish wife), so that’s a nice bonus there too. Gaunt and wild-eyed, and sporting a wicked mephistopheles beard t’boot, Veidt definitely looks every inch a madman, but somewhat runs afoul of a script which doesn’t give him anything to do which quite measures up to the intensity of his performance. Most of the segment just involves him wandering around acting like a total fucking asshole to everyone he encounters, particularly when he crashes a wedding with the corpse of the bride’s father in tow (!) and impulsively decides he’d actually like the bride for himself thank you very much (in a particularly grim reimagining of the first segment’s central conflict). There’s plenty of bad behavior, and a smattering of grim, expressionistically-enhanced torture scenes, but that doesn’t exactly add up to a story in any meaningful way. The result is that Veidt’s fierce performance is somewhat blunted by its lack of narrative direction, though admittedly the climax -- which finds Ivan getting his comeuppance in an appropriately psycho-sadistic German fashion-- has some real bite to it. Disappointingly, Leni also doesn’t go as wild on the production design in this segment as you might hope; aside from Ivan’s fabulous faberge-egg-shaped bed, the sets are the minimalist sort of expressionism, cool-looking but not independently stunning. Nothing here is exactly bad, mind you, and a lot of it is pretty damn good, but it’s also kind of hard to not feel like this was something of a missed opportunity considering the talent involved. The upside is that supposedly Sergei Eisenstein liked the segment so much that he pilfered a lot of its imagery for his own 1944/1957 two-part epic masterpiece IVAN THE TERRIBLE; I’ve seen that tidbit repeated all over the web, though I can find no independent verification. Then again, I’ve also seen it said repeatedly that the al-Rashid segment influenced Douglas Fairbanks to make THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, which at least one source points out is impossible since THIEF actually premiered a few months ahead of WAXWORKS in Germany (and a full two years in America). So I’m starting to think some of the trivia here is a little suspect.

Fortunately, after a weak opening and a decent but uninspired second segment, WAXWORKS finally gets to the good stuff. Unfortunately it’s only for the last six minutes of the movie, but hey, we take what we can get. After behaving himself with the broad al-Rashid story and the serious-minded Ivan bit, Leni finally lets his freak flag fly with the Jack The Ripper / Spring-Heeled Jack sequence (even though the script uses both names interchangeably, I’m pretty sure they mean Jack The Ripper since Spring-Heeled Jack is pretty, uh, distinct) and we get some true horror goods out of him, at long last. There’s really not much story here at all, just an abstract nightmare of persecution, where the Ripper seems to be appearing everywhere and nowhere to the terrified writer, as he stumbles through a disassembled cityscape of layered, superimposed imagery and menacing shadows. Narratively simple but stylistically audacious, you’d be hard pressed to find a more perfect bit of pure cinema in the horror genre. It’s a supremely bold, absolutely avant-garde use of the medium, and lest we forget, it was fucking 1924. If there was any doubt that Leni was an absolute master visualist, check out this bit where the lurking shadow of the Ripper is reduced to cubist chaos by the spinning ferris wheel skulking somewhere in the indefinite background:

Unfortunately Leni would never quite get a chance to deliver on the promise of this final segment; he would make only one “true” horror film, THE CAT AND THE CANARY, before his untimely death in 1929 at the age of 44. Supposedly (and, again, I’m finding a lot of “supposedly” in the writing which surrounds this movie) Leni and Veidt were Universal’s top picks for their newly-acquired rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Leni’s death put the production off for around a year while they searched for a new director.* The mind reels to imagine what he could have accomplished if he’d really been set loose on American horror as the genre started to become more distinct. Alas, it was not to be. But the slim six minutes here are a stunning monument to an imagination and a mastery of craft, combined with solid horror instincts, that in many ways remains peerless to this day.

*I’m not sure how much of that I believe, considering Lugosi was hired off the hugely successful stage production of the book which seems certain to have been a big inspiration behind the movie version, but whatever. This is exactly the kind of legend I’ll happily believe over the truth.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	Yup, there’s totally a waxworks.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None listed, although the intended fourth segment (apparently never filmed) was to adapt the 1797 novel Rinaldo Rinaldini, The Robber Captain by Christian August Vulpuis
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	Anthony Hickox’s 1988 horror-comedy WAXWORKS isn’t a direct remake, but is surely inspired by this one.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Germany
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher/stalker / Torture Porn
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Kind of hard to determine how famous these actors were at the time, but obviously Veidt is a beloved classic actor today. And Dieterle would go on to be a highly respected director.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Veidt?
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah, both of the longer sections allow the villain to sexually menace a young lady, though it’s 1924 and obviously they couldn’t actually show anything going too far.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes, Ivan’s
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t die in 1929 at the age of 44, for fuck’s sake. Nobody needs that shit.

The filmmaking on display here is just too strong to go less than four, although the entertainment value varies. 

The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Dir. Paul Leni

Written by J. Grubb Alexander, Walter Anthony, Mary McLean, Charles E. Whittaker from the novel by Victor Hugo

Starring Conrad Veidt, Mary Philbin, Brandon Hurst, Olga Baklanova, Cesare Gravina

Despite the startling visage of the title character, this gloomy expressionist melodrama isn’t quite a horror film. But you’d never know that from the way it opens: a sadistic king (James II of England) is malevolently taunting a nobleman who has displeased him, sending him to cruel death in an iron maiden moments after informing him that his devilish jester Barkilphedro has instructed gypsys to horribly mutilate his son’’s face into a permanent grin, “to laugh forever at his fool of a father." Since we don’t see the boy, you at first gotta assume that he’s just yankin’ the poor guy’s chain, no one would really do that. I mean, who would even think to do that, let alone actually go to the trouble of finding gypsies willing to pull the trigger on this cockamimie plan, especially since the victim’s father ain’t gonna live to see the finished product anyway. I figured this was going to be like Sam Jackson’s made-up bible passage from PULP FICTION, just a bunch of cold-blooded game James II likes to talk to some sucker before busting a cap in his ass (in this case, busting many spikes throughout his whole body. Talk about getting medieval on your ass!). But then I remembered that the title of this film is THE MAN WHO LAUGHS and figured no, that’s probably literally true.

Sure enough, we meet our unlucky hero --name o’ Gwynplaine-- while he’s still a child, his mouth already butchered and covered by a bandana. The gypsies that were supposed to take him to some other country for some reason panic and dump him, and he wanders homeless through a truly chilling expressionistic landscape of hanged corpses and swirling ice. On the way, he pulls a baby out of the arms of its dead and frozen parent, and nearly dies of exposure himself before being taken in by the kindly Ursus (Cesare Gravina, 1915’s MADAME BUTTERFLY).

Just hangin' around. If there's a narrative reason this looks like some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, the movie sure doesn't make it clear. But I love it.

Everything up to this point is most definitely horror; the king’s room is absolutely drenched in gloomy shadows and weird, exaggerated statues which seem to imply some kind of sinister but unknowable agenda that has set all this suffering in motion. Likewise, the grim hellscape through which wanders the disfigured child carrying an orphaned baby is as nightmarish an image as I have ever seen. The whole experience is immensely immersive and unnerving, truly one of the most powerful openings to a film I’ve seen in a long, long time. Director Paul Leni created (as near as I can tell) the very first ever horror anthology, the 1926 WAXWORKS,* and also the hugely influential ghost story THE CAT AND THE CANARY, so he certainly knew his way around horror imagery, and probably even helped invent the whole concept of horror cinema (he died of blood poisoning only one year after this was released, the mind reels as to what he might have done had he made it to the sound era). With Leni’s talent for atmosphere combined with the grotesqueness of the imagery and of the wounds suffered by the innocent child, there’s clearly a really disturbing horror movie being set up here.

You haven't truly made it as an intimidating statue til an evil jester has come out of a secret door hidden in your ass.

But then the movie more or less abandons the explicit horror imagery and moves in another direction entirely. We catch up with the adult Gwynplaine, now played by an almost unbelievably good Conrad Veidt (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI), working as a kind of combination actor/sideshow freak, exhibiting his deformity as part of a play conceived his his adopted father Ursus. He’s enormously self-conscious about his appearance, but audiences are fascinated by him, he’s achieved some minor celebrity and, if not wealth, at least financial stability through this setup, even though we can see it tears him up inside to have people gawking at him all day. He’s also in love with the now-grown baby he saved all those years ago, which actually seems incredibly creepy since they grew up together and everything but I guess that was OK back then. At least it’s not as bad as Wuthering Heights. But jesus, people of the past, how bout romantically fixating on someone outside your immediate circle of adopted siblings, huh?

Yes, this  in the hero of our little tale.

Anyway, what follows is sort of an emotionally brutal melodrama, as Gwynplaine moons over the admittedly adorable (but blind, forgot to mention that) Drea (Mary Philbin, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA) and also gets involved with an extremely unlikely plot twist whereby this former enemies discover his true identity, arrest him, …..aaaand then try to give him back the enormous fortune left to him by his nobleman father? Not quite sure how that one works out or why they would try to do that, but anyway there’s a catch, he has to marry the openly villainous Duchess Josiana (the immensely delectable Olga Baklanova) in order to seal the deal. There’s a weird scene where he meets her and she kinda seems like she’s into him, they almost seal the deal, but what the fuck is happening here I surely do not know. By the end, some sort of courtly intrigue has happened which causes Gwynplaine to run away from about a thousand armed extras and go on an extravagant chase scene (complete with stunts and special effects) across the London rooftops.

This is all perfectly fine, but I must confess that despite a phenomenal performance from Veidt the movie lessens in impact dramatically as it goes along and moves farther away from the Gwynplaine’s  personal pain into the weird political machinations of Duchesses and queens and jesters (the one who ordered his disfigurement is now some sort of machiavellian power-behind-the-throne advisor, who would have thought that a career in jesting would offer so many opportunities for advancement? Damn you a third time, high school guidance counselor!). Intertitles are not the best medium to convey subtle nuances in plot, so I must confess I don’t really understand what the villains were trying to accomplish here, or if they managed to do whatever it was or not. Veidt conveys so much achingly raw emotion with just his eyes that even though his melodrama with Drea is a little arch, it still manages to be enormously effecting and the movie is absolutely gripping even when not much happens. But Gwynplaine has a lot less personally invested in the whole plot to get his inheritance back; all he wants is to bone his blind adopted sister and so he’s completely passive about the whole inheritance thing. Since there’s not really a ton at stake here, as the movie shifts ever more to this plotline it deflates, despite the obvious expense put into recreating the House of Lords and the enormous action sequence that follows it (reportedly Universal poured over $1,000,000 dollars into this production, an unheard-of fortune for that time).

I think we've all been here.

Scale, of course, is almost always the enemy of good horror. Horror is personal, painful, grueling; scale is more the purview of the action film, which is more or less what THE MAN WHO LAUGHS becomes by its end. Gwyplaine is undoubtedly in danger with thousands of armed Englishmen chasing him through the streets, but so is James Bond from his armies of orange-jumpsuited henchmen. But it’s just not all that scary when something gets this energetic and frantic and removed from the intimate, the personal and the psychological. Running away from a bunch of hired goons is hard, but there’s an excitement to the danger, almost a giddy joy in the act of escape. But living everyday with your face carved into a ghastly clown grimace? That’s something truly, deeply scary, the kind of thing that sticks with you, that worms its way into your subconscious and stays there. That’s horror.

Gwynplaine is a great character and Veidt gives a truly classic performance in a difficult role with painful facial prosthetics. But Hugo’s novel, which seems to be some kind of cultural critique on the aristocratic classes, doesn’t translate that well to the modern age and to silent cinema. The film looks consistently beautiful, but the further it gets from Gwynplaine’s personal tragedy, the more alienating and incomprehensible it gets, a real shame considering how stunning the first half is. It never gets outright bad, it simply downplays its best aspects and ends up merely good, not quite sublime like it is in its best moments. Still, as a whole it’s a highly worthwhile effort, full of amazing imagery which has inspired everything from Batman’s Joker (reputedly designed after artist Bill Finger watched the movie) to De Palma’s 2006 THE BLACK DAHLIA (the real life murder victim had her mouth slices open in a similar way, and the De Palma incorporated images from this into his movie). There’s something by equal measures tragic and profoundly unsettling about Veidt’s performance and appearance here which transcends any problems the film has and moves directly to being independently transcendent and iconic. Who’s laughing now, cruel world?

* which is now officially on my radar for next year

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yes, from Victor Hugo's novel of the same name.
• SEQUEL: None, that would be cool though.
• REMAKE: There have been two other adaptations of the book, one by Sergio Corbucci of all fool people. While not direct remakes, I think this movie is too iconic for it not to count.
• FOREIGNER: Nah, Leni and Veidt are German, but working in Hollywood here.
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: Nope, looks quite fetching in fact.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Nah
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Viedt was in both this and CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, plus WAXWORKS and THE HANDS OR ORLAC. So he counts.
• BOOBIES: Not a lot of 'em in 1928, or so the movies would have us believe.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Actually Gwynplaine kinda gets worked over by the Dutchess, and it's not like he can really refuse. It's not super graphic or anything but I'll warrant it's uncomfortable enough to count.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Disfigurement and iron maiden, but no severing.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: None
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): James II, I guess, although we only see him kill the one guy.
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, Gwynplaine has his whole face disfigured
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Lowish. Well-beloved classic.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't hire gypsies to disfigure young children in an effort to punish their noblemen fathers (and then never even let the dad see the results) and then have subsequent generations of aristocrats try to give back said children's inheritance on the condition that they marry bitchy dutchesses. Seriously bro, don't be that guy.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Well, he's not really laughing, but it's poetic so I'll let it go.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

I was tempted to give this four, just to teach it a lesson about hustling harder. But I can't deny the amazing greatness oft he first half and the second half isn't bad enough to really doom it, it's just not as good as the first part, like FULL METAL JACKET. Call this a provisional A-. Plus, his face is on there already.

Planet of the Vampires

Planet of the Vampires (1965)
Dir. Mario Bava
Written by Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Callisto Cosulich, Antonio Roman, Rafael J. Salvia
Starring Barry Sullivan, Ivan Rassimov, Norma Bengell

Literally nothing on this poster has anything to do with the movie. There are no giant chameleon men, no windmills, no vampires, and what's the deal with this "10,000 years ago..." text?

So, this is kind of a psychological horror sci-fi that Mario Bava did in 1965, five years after BLACK SUNDAY, but still six years before he would change horror forever with TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE. It concerns a bunch of indistinguishable Italian actors landing on a planet which would have looked laughable in an episode of Star Trek and mostly hanging around their bland white spaceship wondering what will happen next. And for some reason, decades later Ridely Scott decided that it would be a good idea to remake it for 130 million dollars and call it PROMETHEUS, so I guess in retrospect it’s some kind of cultural icon. But even if he hadn’t, it’s a movie which is extremely odd and even sort of good in a shitty kind of way. I sort of liked it.

It concerns two crews of identical middle-aged Italians (as far as I could tell, all named “Carter” although later I learned from wikipedia that the captain is named “Mark Marky”) who get sucked down by mysterious forces onto a seemingly dead planet of paper mache rocks and dry ice. Mysteriously, they immediately go into a violent trance-like state, saved from slaughtering each other only by the convenient fact that a good punch in the face (for men) or a hard slap (women) wakes them up. They set out to discover the mystery of the planet (which does not turn out to have any literal vampires, leaving one to assume it's named after its discoverer, Sir. Reginald S. Vampires) but, finding no sign of life, resort to a strategy of assigning single crewmembers to isolated guard duty (what they’re guarding is never clear) and then returning to find them mysteriously killed. This turns out to be an unexpectedly effective strategy because eventually the mysterious evil forces of the Planet of the Vampires just come out and explain everything.

We don't later find out this was just a suit, making this alien race clearly better than the pale bald dudes from PROMETHEUS.

All things considered, this is a ludicrous, hilariously inept film which generally feels like the campiest TWILIGHT ZONE ever. But somehow it’s also kind of good. The sparse, expressionistic and minimalistic sets and general lack of music gives it an austere, almost darkly absurdist feel (it could easily be staged as a play, should anyone care to attempt it) and it has a few genuinely good ideas and cool images. Most memorably, a few crew members explore the interior of another ship marooned on the planet, finding it filled with gigantic skeletons (don’t worry, they leave a guy by himself outside as a guard). There’s something evocative about the discovery of this other mystery ship, united with our crew by their common predicament but bizarre and alien in every other way. I can see why Ridley Scott would want to rip it off more successfully in ALIEN and less successfully in PROMETHEUS. Most of it is simply too bland and slow to be worth your time, but the film has its moments, including a pleasantly silly dark twist at the end. Probably more valuable as a cultural artifact that lead to better things, but surprisingly not entirely without its own charms. 

Every conversation in this movie. One of the dramatic highlights of the film comes at the turn of the third act, when someone puts on a new outfit.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.

BOOBIES: No, it’s rare enough that these ladies even take off their hats. You call this an Italian film?!

> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: A little corpse mutilation, but not much considering it’s Bava.

SEQUEL: No.

OBSCURITY LEVEL: Fairly high.

MONSTERS: Aliens, if that counts.

SATANISTS: Religion is not mentioned.

ZOMBIES: Reanimated corpses, but not traditional zombies

VAMPIRES: None, oddly.

SLASHERS: No, only shooters.

CURSES: None

ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Almost. Mostly.