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Happy hour at Sigmund's, "ein psychoanalytischer film." A blade should gleam, says Hitchcock, the one wielded by the milquetoast scientist (Werner Krauss) for a morning shave leaves a little slash on the neck of the wife (Ruth Weyher). The murder next door sets things loose in his head, among the "inexplicable fears" that suddenly emerge is a terror of knives (a napkin hurriedly conceals the cutlery at the dinner table). Impotence is the problem for the childless couple, the unconscious rival is the wife's cousin (Jack Trevor) whom the slumbering husband imagines perched on a tree with pith helmet and rifle. A downpour outside the bedroom kicks off The Dream: Flight and plunge in jammies, trains charging toward a convex lens, towers sprouting out of the ground with mocking severed heads for bells (cf. Buñuel's Tristana), dolls and shadows and primordial slime. The tormented gentleman is stuck in a stabbing frenzy as he awakens, the key left behind at the tavern is recognized by the psychiatrist (Pavel Pavlov) as the ponderous signifier it is. A hearty session of symbol-busting gets to the bottom of the issue. "You will start by telling me everything you see in your mind's eye." The plot aims to fastidiously keep apart reality and reverie yet G.W. Pabst understands that, in a film set at the crossroads of expressionism and surrealism, every moment is a hallucination. "Shameful situations" with the modest hausfrau in a tropical harem, the doctor who needs to have his meat cut for him, a very humorous analysis. The coda has the cured protagonist in Nature conquering fish and embracing a new scion, Bergman in From the Life of Marionettes supplies the acrid riposte. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |