Leni sets to work as well, deploying an omnibus format anticipated by such dissimilar works as D. (A fourth figure in the group-identified on the pedestal as Rinaldo Rinaldini, an Italian highway robber-is a remnant of an episode that went unfilmed when the production’s budget ran out.) Instantly inspired by these fearsome simulacra, the Poet sets to work on the “startling tales” requested by his new employer. Warmly welcomed by the twinkly-eyed Showman and his smiling Daughter, the Poet takes the job and meets the establishment’s chief attractions: life-size replicas of Haroun-al-Raschid, the ninth-century caliph of Baghdad Ivan the Terrible, the sixteenth-century Russian czar and Jack the Ripper, here conflated with Spring-Heeled Jack, both being nineteenth-century English murderers. A young man, called the Poet, comes to a bustling fairground armed with a newspaper ad seeking an imaginative writer to pen attention-getting publicity for a wax museum. The title of Waxworks describes the milieu and the concept. One can only speculate on what he would have accomplished if a neglected dental infection hadn’t killed him at age forty-four. Leni also migrated to Hollywood, where his films included The Man Who Laughs as well as The Cat and the Canary (1927), an energetic entry in the old-dark-house genre, and The Last Warning (1929), a mildly entertaining murder mystery. Caligari and soon-to-be title character of Leni’s 1928 masterpiece The Man Who Laughs Werner Krauss, who played Caligari and dozens of other roles and Wilhelm Dieterle, who later became William Dieterle and achieved, like Jannings and Veidt, major Hollywood success. Although his primary instincts appear to have been painterly and sculptural, he was clearly on the same wavelength as cinematographer Helmar Lerski, and he worked wonders with his all-star cast: Emil Jannings, whose legendary performance in Murnau’s The Last Laugh debuted in the same year Conrad Veidt, a veteran of The Cabinet of Dr. After training as a painter, he designed sets and costumes for the theater and then for cinema, making his directorial debut in 1917 and becoming a total filmmaker, deeply engaged with everything from construction and lighting to camera placement and editing. Leni would surely have loved the textured images and the care taken with tinting and toning, which are matched to diverse locales and times of day.
It’s also as refreshingly eccentric as any Expressionist landmark, which is quite a distinction, given the bedrock eccentricity for which the movement is rightly celebrated.Īlthough the full-length original version has been lost since soon after its premiere-the negative was destroyed in a fire, as restorationist Julia Wallmüller notes in a booklet essay and video interview-a surviving version about twenty-five minutes shorter has long been available, and Flicker Alley’s scrupulously produced Blu-ray and DVD edition is as fine a digital rendering as we’re likely to see. By frisky contrast, Waxworks moves at a lively clip, spinning a string of stories (either three or four, depending on how you count) with a variety of moods, tempos, and settings. But the deliberate rhythms and unhurried narratives of such otherwise magisterial productions as Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), and Henrik Galeen’s The Student of Prague (1926) are more conducive to analysis and contemplation than to the kinetic enjoyment provided by movies with less rarefied creative agendas. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)-are as dexterously entertaining as they are aesthetically radical. Caligari (1920), Karlheinz Martin’s From Morn to Midnight (1920), F. All of the greatest German Expressionist films are photographically atmospheric, architecturally inventive, and psychologically magnetic, and some-Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. A Flicker Alley release.Ī defining feature of Paul Leni’s 1924 classic Waxworks, known as Das Wachsfigurenkabinett in its native Germany, is that it’s terrific fun to watch. Blu-ray and DVD, color tinted, 81 min., 1924.
Produced by Leo Birinsky and Alexander Kwartiroff directed by Paul Leni screenplay by Henrik Galeen cinematography by Helmar Lerski art direction by Paul Leni and Alfred Junge starring Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Kraus, Wilhelm Dieterle, Olga Belajeff, John Gottowt, Paul Biensfeldt, and Ernst Legal.
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