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Ingmar Bergman assumes the mantle of Lang by dint of extensive acquisition, the Weimar setting makes for a striking study of dread made tangible. The artist is a Jewish trapezist (David Carradine) in 1923 Berlin, the mixed reception at the boarding house has a dining-room singalong and upstairs the brother with his brains splattered. Grayish crowds and painted cabaret, the dead man's wife (Liv Ullman) is a cut-rate Dietrich amid transvestites and dwarfs, in due time even the stage goes up in flames. Currency has no value, "nothing works properly except fear." A string of deaths investigated by the inspector (Gert Fröbe) has subterranean significance, it leads to the local clinic with underground archives out of Kafka, the childhood chum (Heinz Bennent) conducts obscene scientific experiments. Hitler ("an incredible scatterbrain") waits in the wings. The full panoply of despair, an engulfing state of mind (cp. Losey's Mr. Klein). Much material from Shame and Hour of the Wolf dilated to match Dino De Laurentiis' knack for lurid spectacle, James Whitmore essays the obligatory halfhearted priest in a deadpan send-up of a confessional: "Forgive my apathy and my indifference." Hell on earth means not being able to get hard for a couple of jeering prostitutes, horse meat offered to the camera adduces a raw note from Rossellini's Germany Year Zero. Inspector Lohmann and Doctor Vergerus, familiar names that pop up as in a nightmare, George Grosz via The Joyless Street. The Mabuse paranoia, seconded by Bergman—there really is poison seeping into the home, there really is a camera behind the mirror. (The projector that once screened slapstick in Prison now documents "inconceivable human suffering.") The reptilian future is already formed, the sardonic present toasts it with cyanide. With Walter Schmidinger, Hans Quest, Edith Heerdegen, Toni Berger, and Glynn Turman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |