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D.W. Griffith on Poe (and Kafka's "The Judgment," too), the ensuing "trances and nightly dreams" serve as vernissage for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Spellbound and Hour of the Wolf and every other film that attempted, in Sternberg's words, "to photograph thought." A characteristically eloquent composition (mother's deathbed in background right, baby's cradle in foreground left, mourners in middle ground) sets the stage, the eye-patched uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken) raises the orphan (Henry B. Walthall), kindly then tyrannically. The old man ejects his nephew's beloved (Blanche Sweet) from home, the distraught fellow ponders spider and fly and ravenous anthill and thus "the birth of the evil thought," he rushes back with "The Tell-Tale Heart" twisting inside his cranium. The pistol in the drawer, the corpse in the fireplace, the grinning visage by the window—violence and the camera, spectacle and audience. Terror, suspicion, the pestering detective ("A great admirer of roses"), ghostly superimpositions, cameos by Jesus and the Reaper, the churning psyche devours it all. The introduction of the Gothic into the pastoral is so intensely imaginative that Griffith takes it upon himself to visualize sound itself, so that guilty cardiac palpitations are transformed into a pencil's accusatory tapping, a clock's swinging pendulum, an owl's cry. Stroheim's caged bird and hungry cat are visible in the "one long system of murder" that is Nature, so is Renoir's coquettish little maid. Celestial hands bearing the titular commandment, Annabel Lee at the bottom of the chasm. The awakening dissipates the nightmare but not the madness, Pan's nymphs replace the brimstone gremlins yet "dark eye glances" linger still. With Ralph Lewis, Mae Marsh, and Robert Harron. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |