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Europe between wars as the Art Deco mausoleum erected over the skeletons of genocide, "a masterpiece of construction built upon the ruins of a masterpiece of destruction." A former fortress, a submerged cemetery, a site of betrayal and slaughter. "Few have returned," declares the Hungarian psychiatrist (Bela Lugosi). "I have returned." The bell is rung, a silhouetted figure rises like Caligari's Cesare, and there's the host, the Austrian architect (Boris Karloff) in triangular coif and inky kimono. The end of a cause informs the unfinished business between the two ghouls, the killing of thousands of soldiers plus the fate of the psychiatrist's wife. (She's now the centerpiece of the morbid private harem kept by the architect, who's added an extra wrinkle of perversity by marrying his foe's long-lost daughter.) America, meanwhile, is a callow novelist (David Manners) traversing the continent with his wife (Julie Bishop) and unimpressed by the "supernatural baloney." "Next time, I go to Niagara Falls." Not a Poe adaptation, and not at all "camp," but Edgar G. Ulmer's grandest danse macabre, a magnificently sustained trance. The setting is Bauhaus-streamlined and death-scented, angular planes and verticals trying to paper over the past's unutterable horrors—framed in profile on the balcony, Karloff inhales the winds like sulfur. (The score, with its public-domain earfuls of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Schubert, is a lugubrious entity of its own.) Ulmer's camera, prone to uncanny movements autonomous from the narrative (vide the dissolving tracking shots in the catacombs while Karloff monologues off-screen about death), is just the instrument for the profound spectacle of an expatriate artist recreating UFA in thrifty Universal sets. There's a premonition of the Bride of Frankenstein finale, Bergman's fateful chess game and Polanski's living-room Satanic mass are already here. "Credibility," that crutch of dull reviewers, figures in the punchline. Cinematography by John J. Mescall. With Egon Brecher, Harry Cording, and Lucille Lund. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |