They can’t all be winners.
My last post was about the very successful and acclaimed Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I’ll look next at two forgotten films that tried to follow in Caligari’s footsteps… and failed.
Genuine: Tragedy of a Vampire
This was a follow up from Caligari‘s director, Robert Wiene, in which he ill-advisedly tried to dial up the weirdness.
First a disclaimer: there are no undead bloodsuckers in this flick. In 1920 the term ‘vampire’ or ‘vamp’ was more commonly used to refer to a seductive femme fatale, which is the case here.
The story begins with an artist who paints a life-sized portrait of an exotic temple priestess, with which he becomes obsessed. While reading about her exploits he falls asleep…
From childhood onward, Genuine was the high priestess of a strange tribe, at the centre of unspeakable rituals and sacrifices. All very dark and hinted-at. When her tribe is captured she ends up in an African or Arabian-looking slave market. (The location is never made clear.) Because of her barbaric past Genuine is fully feral, slouching and writhing and biting anyone who comes near her.
A creepy old fellow buys her and takes her to his large and bizarre home. (Cue the art designers!)
He imprisons her in an underground garden dome filled with papier maché foliage and birds, complete with a reflecting pool to admire herself in.
There she has nothing to do but lounge around in animal skins and feathers and seduce any young man who chances into the house.
The first of these is Florian, possibly the most Emo Boy of the silent film era, played by Hans Heinreich von Twardowski, who was also in Caligari. (For more about him, see my last post here.)
Genuine talks Florian into killing the old man, which he does, but he stops short of her next request:
Yoiks. Florian declines this loving request, instead running away and having a complete mental breakdown. A second young man seems to reform Genuine through another obsessive love affair, but Florian returns, killing her in a jealous rage while a mob attacks the house.
And then… “what a terrible dream!” The painter wakes up. He sells off the offending painting for a lordly amount, to the old man from the dream.
The main point of this film seems to be to give Fern Andra lots of skimpy costumes to wear. I have read, too, that the film was regarded as particularly scandalous because at least one of the costumes was simply painted on her naked body.
American-born, Fern Andra appeared as a circus tightrope walker at the tender age of four in her mother and stepfather’s act. In her teens she travelled to Europe with the circus and while in Germany met theatre impresario Max Reinhardt and joined his company. She went on to become one of the most popular stars of German silent film, though her popularity faded with the advent of sound.
The art direction has run wild in Genuine, but not to any real evocative or useful effect – it’s simply distracting. Very often I found the actors were lost in the busy backdrops. (Not helped by the terrible quality of the print I was watching.) The various locations don’t really work together either – from the slave market to the slums to the many styles of the old man’s home. (Tiny entrance gate, courtyard, Victorian staircase, weirdly painted study, tropical pleasure dome, etc.) The overall impression is of some kind of colonial outpost.
The colonial setting seems confirmed by the presence of “the Malay”, the old man’s servant. The part is played by Louis Brody, a Cameroonian-born German actor who played many such parts (servants, slaves, medicine men, tribal chiefs, etc) from the silent era right on through the Nazi years and into the 1950s. There was a constant stream of such parts due to the popularity in Germany of pulp fiction with exotic locales. (Germans also had an intense fondness for American westerns during this period.)
This film falls down in so many ways, from the truly over-the-top acting to the slapdash, amateurish sets, to the laziness of the plot. Not to mention its problemmatic assumptions about gender and race. In the end, even Fern Andra and her revealing costumes were not enough to save Genuine from box office failure. This film may have dropped out of sight, but Robert Wiene did go on to make the highly regarded Crime and Punishment (1923) and another horror masterpiece, The Hands of Orlac (1924).
Next: an even bigger Expressionist flop from 1920…
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Hi.
Excellent !
If I may….. a small thing: The second time, “dome” is mentioned, it’s come out as, “done”.
Films such as these may well be a likely reason my Mother, born 1911, was not allowed to see movies.
I never thanked you for this – thank you! I corrected my typo. Yes, films like this would really have been problemmatic for parents back then!