The Golem (1920)

The Golem is one of the classics of German expressionist horror. Released the same year as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it's neither as famous nor as great as that genre-defining landmark, but it's still an interesting film with a striking visual style. Directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, and shot by the always fantastic Karl Freund, The Golem has a moody gothic style and some rudimentary but nonetheless creepy special effects. The film's sets aren't as stylized or twisted as the famously angular designs for Caligari, but this tale of a Jewish rabbi creating a monstrous servant made of clay takes place in a Polish ghetto the design of which is balanced neatly between realism and expressionism. The sets seem more solid and historically grounded than in Caligari, but there are still unmotivated, spiky shadows stretched across the walls and angular design flourishes everywhere. In one of the most compelling flourishes, the centerpiece of the rabbi's home is a twisting spiral staircase that looks oddly like the fleshy folds of a human ear.

The story, derived from Jewish mysticism, is familiar: a venerable rabbi (Albert Steinrück) conjures a Golem (Wegener), a man shaped out of clay who comes to life to serve as a stoical servant and protector of the ghetto. Obviously, any pre-World War II German film dealing with Jewish religion and ethnicity is going to be automatically interesting for reasons having little to do with the film, and this one is especially fascinating in its contradictions. It is ostensibly a story that portrays the mistreatment of Jews sympathetically, though the film's message is ultimately more tangled than that. Towards the beginning of the film, the Jews in the ghetto receive a chilling edict from the emperor that orders them to evacuate, that they are being kicked out of their homes, a reflection of the pogroms and abuses endured by the Jewish people in Europe even before the Nazis came to power. This is a reflection of the historical roots of Nazism in deeply engrained anti-Semitism, and yet the film itself doesn't avoid these stereotypes and prejudices, either.

Notably, the emperor's edict lists among the Jews' crimes participating in "the black arts," and indeed the film itself passes that stereotype along rather than denying it. True, the story of the Golem is rooted in Jewish mysticism, but the film presents the Jewish elders as a cross between wizards and mad scientists, participating in the dark arts and summoning demons to do their bidding. In one of the creepiest scenes, the rabbi performs a ritual — later echoed by F.W. Murnau in Faust — to summon a demon, who appears as a disembodied head floating in the darkness, smoke pouring from his gaping maw. The Jewish temple is rendered as a place of mysticism where the worshippers ritually bow and sway while the rabbi, dramatically posed in front of a row of gleaming candles, exhorts them from above. The film's presentation of Judaism is unavoidably tangled in myth, empathizing with the ghettoization and punishment of Jews while also revelling in familiar stereotypes and libels about demon worship and dark magic.


That contradictory subtext aside, the film is mostly compelling but tonally imbalanced. The true creepy horror moments are few, and for most of the film the Golem is less a threatening monster than a curiously practical servant who's used to fetch groceries and fetch wood, scenes that are played for deadpan humor as much as anything. There's also a wan subplot with the rabbi's daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova) being wooed by the non-Jewish knight Florian (Lothar Müthel), a romance that's surprising in its sexual frankness — Florian places his hand on Miriam's breast and at one point wakes up by her bedside, both of them half-dressed — but otherwise serves simply to set up an expected tragic conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the most memorable scenes are those in which the film's expressionist horror gets free rein. Wegener's lumbering Golem was an obvious visual reference point for James Whale's Frankenstein, with his bulky, awkward form and the sentimental emotionality lurking beneath the monster's horrific visage. For a man made of clay, Wegener's Golem is very expressive, even hammy, always glancing around with an ironically arched eyebrow, gritting his teeth and widening his eyes to convey anger, his mouth horribly twisted into a hybrid of a grimace and a grin. He's undone, ultimately, by his sentimentality: like Frankenstein's monster after him, he's capable of love and warm feelings, and when he's moved by the sight of a little girl, she's able to innocently, playfully remove the amulet that gives him life.

The Golem, with its plodding pace and contradictory ideas about its Jewish subject, hasn't dated as well as some of its more famous contemporaries from the German silent era. But it's still a fascinating, visually striking film that, like Caligari, was a major influence on the horror films that would follow it.

Just Pals

Just Pals is a warm, pleasant, low-key early silent from John Ford, a simple and rather loose film about a town bum and the young rail-riding kid who he befriends. Bim (Buck Jones) is a layabout, reviled all around town as a good-for-nothing bum who will never trouble himself to do a bit of work that he doesn't have to do. In one nice shot early on, Ford shows Bim lounging around in a hayloft while, in the deep focus background, laborers work hard down below. Bim shouts out to them, in a title card, that even just watching them work is too much work for him, and that sums up his character pretty well. But his restlessness, shifting around trying to get comfortable after seeing the workers, suggests that maybe he isn't as content with his shiftless reputation and laziness as he tries to pretend he is.

Bim soon makes friends with a young kid named Bill (George Stone), who, like most other kids and no adults, instantly likes the laidback Bim. They have a warm friendship that Ford depicts in a few scenes — most humorously, a great scene when Bim tries to give the resisting kid a bath by dangling him from a barn rafter with a rope tied around his midsection — before the film ambles on to something else. The plot's surprisingly overstuffed for a film that's not even an hour long, and the second half builds much of the action around a crooked accountant (William Buckley) who gets his sweet schoolteacher girlfriend Mary (Helen Ferguson) in trouble by "borrowing" money from her. The film also crams in a suicide attempt, a bank robbery, a child kidnapping, a lynch mob, and some frenzied action scenes.

This means that the film switches tones every five or ten minutes, sometimes pitched as a light humanist comedy (in tone, anyway; there aren't many actual jokes), sometimes as a Western actioner with Bim trying to foil a gang of bank robbers, sometimes as a melodrama with the schoolteacher suffering for the crimes of her no-good boyfriend and Bim trying to save her from harm. The one throughline is the very Fordian Western theme that the lazy bum turns out to be a noble, decent man while the seemingly sophisticated businessman is actually a crooked scoundrel who reveals his true colors in the finale. It's a version of the noble-country-versus-corrupt-city dichotomy of many old-school Westerns — Ford's own Bucking Broadway included — even if here all the characters belong, geographically if not spiritually, to the country.


There are some excellent scenes along the way, too. In one scene, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the narrative, a young boy is supposed to throw a bag full of kittens into the river, but he can't go through with it, and he just dumps the cats out in the grass instead. Mary looks on in horror, instinctively turning her face away and covering her mouth, and in the next scene the town is abuzz because she's thrown herself in the river, distraught over the scandal in which she's stuck. The connection between the kid's act of mercy and Mary's suicide attempt is ambiguous but very resonant.

Later, during the bank robbery, Ford employs Griffith-like crosscutting to enhance the building tension as the robbers blow the vault, Bim races to save the day, and in the church, the rest of the townsfolk are totally oblivious. That includes the clueless sheriff (Duke R. Lee), the broadest comic caricature here, a gnarly old man who, when the collection box comes around in church, flashes his badge as though that exempts him from donating. At the very end of the film, he disrupts the romanticism of the finale with an almost surreal flourish when he pokes his head out of a hole in a tree like a cartoon animal.

This is a rather strange little film, and a very enjoyable one as well. Its arc of redemption is predictable, but still poignant, and Jones' heartfelt performance makes it especially easy to feel the heartbreaking regret that the seemingly easygoing Bim actually feels about his his lowly place within this town. And the film is just packed with so much, offering some lush melodrama one moment, a gang of thieves riding into town, kicking up dust, the next. Throughout his career, Ford would always combine genres and tones like this, often more smoothly than here, but Just Pals already shows the director deftly juggling comedy and drama, equally interested in tugging heartstrings and delivering brawling pile-ups and gunfights.

The Parson's Widow

Comedy is one of the last things one would expect from Carl Theodor Dreyer, but his second feature, The Parson's Widow, is in fact a gentle rural comedy. Of course, it's a comedy as directed by Dreyer, which means that it's a curiously slow and lethargic comedy, a moody and patiently paced tale of sexual frustration, poverty and religion. That is to say, it's not exactly a laugh-a-minute comedy, though its somber pace and austere visual style only makes its occasional bursts of goofy humor all the more bracing and startling.

The film's story is extremely old-fashioned, and must have been even when it was made in 1920. It's rooted in rural values and the power of tradition. The poor young man Söfren (Einar Röd) has traveled to a small village to try out for the position of village parson. He wants the post because then he'll be able to marry his sweetheart Mari (Greta Almroth), but in a cruelly ironic twist, he gets the job only to find out that by local tradition he'll have to marry the elderly widow (Hildur Carlberg) of the previous parson. He marries the old woman, partially tricked into it by drunkeness and, perhaps, an enchanted piece of herring, and passes Mari off as his sister, biding his time for the old woman to die so that he'll be able to marry his lover instead.

Dreyer exploits the scenario for some broad comic set pieces, the tone of which jars against the film's general melancholy. Söfren's attempts to evade the widow and get some time alone with his real beloved are comically satisfying, especially when he continually thinks he's flirting with his lover when actually he's accidentally making loving gestures at the widow's equally ancient servant. Also very funny is the early sequence in which Söfren observes two stuffy rivals who are trying out for the parson's job; he sabotages one of them by sticking a feather on his head so that his preaching inspires only laughter from the parishioners. The strangest moment, though, is the scene where Söfren dresses up as the devil, presumably to scare his elderly bride, wearing a sheet painted with a frightening face, with horns and big flopping ears.


Despite the many comic moments, the overall tone of the film is grim and melancholy. Dreyer portrays the widow mostly as a foreboding, exaggeratedly dour presence, her face heavily lined, her mouth permanently twisted into a scowl, captured in numerous closeups of her looking disapprovingly at her unhappy husband. Towards the end of the film, though, the treatment of the widow abruptly shifts to a much more sentimental depiction, pretty much without warning: at one moment Dreyer portrays her as a witch and a harridan, and the next he's suddenly treating her much more warmly, fleshing out the tragic details of her past and making her a much more sympathetic character. The shift to sentimental romanticism is clumsily handled, perhaps, but it makes the film's ending movingly poetic, unexpectedly exploring the pathos of the widow's situation rather than just using her attachment to Söfren as a source of comic relief.

At its best, The Parson's Widow is a tribute to rural tradition, capturing the feel of this small and tight-knit community where old ways are still dominant and life paths are decided by customs passed down through the generations. Dreyer shot on location in the countryside, and this lends the film a grounded, clear-eyed realism, with ascetically beautiful natural landscapes, billowing waterfalls, fields of waving grassy stalks. The locals dance and celebrate, and Dreyer shows real affection for these rural rituals, rooted as they are in ancient traditions and made necessary by poverty and limited means. This is an interesting early film from the future master, a comedy that neatly balances its humor with the darker emotions at its core.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the classics of the German Expressionist style, a defining work of the era. A story of madness and murder, it's sometimes cited as the first true horror movie ever made, and in any event it undoubtedly provided a powerful template for much of the horror to come. Caligari (Werner Krauss) is a carnival showman with a macabre and sensational show in which the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) tells fortunes, correctly predicting death for anyone who dares to seek his advice — which of course begs the question of how Caligari ever gets any repeat business, but such logical questions are outside the purview of a movie that's simply about a widespread and seemingly contagious insanity. Just how contagious is foreshadowed in the opening, in which Francis (Friedrich Feher), telling the story of Caligari to a companion, observes a woman in white (Lil Dagover) go sleepwalking past in a daze, staring straight ahead and taking no notice of the two men. "That's my fiancée," Francis says, in a darkly humorous suggestion that this story's insanity might be catching, spreading from the mad doctor and his zombie-like killer assistant to those they come in contact with.

Cesare is a terrifying prototype for the movie monster to come, dressed all in black, tall and sleek with a heavily made up face and a gruesome smile rimmed with lipstick, his eyes hidden by deep pools of black. He lurches and plods through his actions with a dreamy slowness, killing in his sleep, a walking nightmare. In one key moment, Cesare advances on the sleeping woman, with her inert form in the foreground, stretched out amidst the fluffy white finery of her bedsheets, while the black-clad sleepwalker advances step by plodding step in the background. His progress is deliberately slow and inexorable, gradually moving towards the moment when the creepy killer, prefiguring countless movie boogeymen to come, raises his knife to stab his latest victim and finds that, inexplicably, he is unable to go through with it — as with so many of his descendants, the man within the monster has suddenly been awakened by the sight of helpless female beauty.

Cesare isn't the only one in the film who seems to be moving in his sleep. The whole film has a soporific quality that infuses it with the quality of a dream, and many of the other performances — particularly Dagover as the damsel in distress — have the same drowning-in-molasses quality, a deliberate slowness to every gesture. It's as though Cesare is simply an exaggerated caricature of the other characters in the film, who are in truth as deeply asleep as he is and only pretending otherwise. This is just one of the film's many perverse touches; its strangeness lies much deeper than the macabre surface of the narrative, which makes it all the more unsettling.


The first of Cesare's nighttime crimes is seemingly motivated by Caligari's petty desire for revenge, but there's no rationale for the rest of the pair's actions, and indeed the second murder — killing a man who Cesare had just publicly predicted would die by morning — could only serve to draw suspicion to their act. These crimes are inherently irrational, feeding into and arising from a world that seems to have gone mad at some fundamental level. Within the narrative, it's Caligari who's gone mad — or Francis, if the tacked-on twist ending is to be believed — but the madness seems not to emanate from any one person. The madness is rooted in the world itself, in the twisted design of the buildings and streets in which this drama plays out, in the beautifully baroque distortions that reveal the warped ugliness underneath the appearance of order and normality that we think of as reality. This film presents a world that looks as perverse and frightening as it feels to the people living in it — which must have been a very resonant truth to the people of Germany in the fragmented, despairing time between the two World Wars.

The film's buildings are inescapably mad, leaning over, all odd angles, seemingly on the verge of collapse. This is like no architecture ever seen, it's an architecture of the mind, as flimsy as a thought, the shadows painted on in jagged shapes that have no relation to any light source or object that could conceivably conspire to cast such a shadow. Everything has become unmoored, the foundations of reality itself twisted until the world resembles a nightmare, with everyone strolling around as if nothing's wrong while the buildings all around them totter and lean ominously, and the shadows stretch out, disconnected from physicality, potentially hiding all sorts of horrors. At the flashback climax of the film, Caligari staggers around the town, seeing the famous words "you must become Caligari" floating in the air everywhere around him, drawn in the tree limbs or graffitied on the walls of the buildings, evaporating as soon as he gets too close. The world is literally egging him on to madness here, but even when it's not so blatant about it, the design of everything from the buildings to the spiky dangling plants to the seemingly unstable streets whispers and screams madness; there is no way to exist within such a destabilized and distorted world and remain sane.