Silent Alarm.

The German silent cinema was (and remains) one of the most interesting collections of work done on film. The Erich Pommer productions, Caligari, Metropolis, Variety, Asphalt and the rest, set a standard of skill and imagination that Hollywood was pressed to match, even though they kept on buying Pommer’s talents away from him. 

 

However if you consider the filmographies of the major performers from this period, an enormous number of unfamiliar titles come up. There’s always the hope that these will be lost masterpieces but, even when they are not, what these people got up to remains fascinating.

Giftgas of 1929 is an oddity directed by Mikhail Dubson, one of the rare European leftists who put it where their mouths were. He served out his subsequent career in the Soviets. A Late German silent free of almost all the "Expressionist" cinema trappings, the film is  played in August Rinaldi’s (seven films that year) rectangular would-be realistic factory and home decors. An unsophisticated message piece, it brings an A feature cast to a predictable plot.

  Hans Stüwe

Idealistic chemist Hans Stüwe (Tschaikowski in Carl Froelich’s 1939  Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht) delights in completing his formula for a revolutionary fertilizer and is congratulated by supervisor Alfred Abel, (the father from Metropolis) who was once characterised to me as “the German Gielgud.” However Alfred’s report to the board of (legendary Max Reinhardt actor) Fritz Kortner’s Ten Straaten Corporation alerts them to the possibility of using the formula as Vita, a Weapon of Mass Destruction - “only a small amount would be enough to destroy a whole city.”  While they plot mass human killings, one director reprimands an associate for not considering the director’s poodle - not over blessed with subtlety this one.

Immediate developments are encouraging. The Company’s stock  goes up 160 points and the workers are delighted with a fifteen percent rise. Stüwe is rewarded but outraged at the use of his invention, so Abel dismisses him and appoints a bald successor.

Facing penury while raising their small child, Hans’ wife Lissi Arna (Dämon des Meeres, The Squeaker) goes to see the board members, trying to make them relent - scene of the Buddha ornament on the table resembling its owner and being filmed from behind when he refuses. She is reduced to selling on the street the flowers the factory sends to win back Hans. He is outraged again. 

Giftgas - Vera Baranovskaya

 An accident in the “perfume” section of the chemical works kills worker Gerhard Dammann and his angry wife, peasant-featured Vera Baranovskaya blames Hans. I started to register that the scenes with Baranovskaya were the best parts of the film. I should have recognised her as the name character in Pudovkin’s Mat/ Mother, who had a later career in Europe. She turns up later again in Litvak’s Mayerling without my having spotted her there either.

Her shift from the indignation, which makes her break out her dead husband’s straight

razor, to sympathy with grief striken Arna tending the child, is surprisingly the most effective section of the film and this when Baranovskaya is up against the heavies doing their showy turns, Kortner smiling while smoking and inserting his monocle at the same time and Abel offering his head stroking or hand raising "halt" gestures familiar from Metropolis.

 

There’s a track along the workers lining up for protective masks which run out. One desperate man moves on Lissy to get her mask (good scene).  We get an abrupt change to a mix of montage and the Gance J’accuse with train passengers and their pet parrot and the driver overcome by the fumes, alternating indignant citizens and streaming city lights to represent the effect of poison gas. “We accuse!” This is not bad.

The film’s laboratory toxic gas finale is a Teutonic mob panic disaster sequence that places it in a  line with the 1915 William Wauer Der Tunnel re-made in 1933,  Metropolis, Gold 1934 and Kurt Maetzig’s 1950 Der Rat der Götter/ Council of the Gods. Throw in an end  that will turn up again in This Gun For Hire.

Giftgas puts established figures of the German entertainment scene alongside Baranovskaya in a simple minded but occasionally attention getting message piece.  It remains an intriguing record of major talents trying for significance.

Then there’s Richard Eichberg’s 1923 Fräulein Raffke which has Dr. Caligari himself, Werner Krauss going all out as Business Czar Emil Raffke with a desk full of telephones (nice multiple exposure of world activities surrounding his close up). I always thought of him as the German cinema’s most effective performer. His Iago walks all over Emil Jannings’ Othello - in a classic rivalry.  

Surprisingly in this film Hans Albers does rather better as a seedy, monocle (again) wearing aristocrat. This is the earliest of Albers’ work I’ve seen and it offers him in an entirely different persona. If it’s not being doubled, he also gets to strike out in heavy surf in his black one piece.

The opening has promise - lines of flunkies, bathing beauties, a palais de danse and lots
of acting from Krauss continually adjusting his comb over. 

Russian poster for Fraulein Raffke.

 

Krauss’ daughter Lee Parry (wife of director Eichberg), then considered a great beauty, derisively mimes Hans screwing the monocle into his eye. Hans has designs on the Raffke fortune via a marriage to Parry and Werner is on board, planning an entry into the nobility through Hans’ title. However Lee forestalls the plan by a hasty (vignetted on black) wedding to Werner’s secretary Harry Hardt. Werner is all set to announce the Albers' engagement at the lavish diner with its line of synchronised waiters pouring champagne, when Lee declares herself already married. She gets banished from the palatial Raffke home.

However Werner has nor really abandoned her and has slipped cash to an associate to sink into Hardt’s business. When he learns he is a grandfather, the magnate goes to the humble family residence embracing the baby but is turned away by Hardt. This upsets Werner no end and he has the associate demand back the cash advance, though he knows it will mean ruin for his son in law.

Unable to meet his commitments, Hardt leaves the family apartment to earn enough to support his family. So that her child will not suffer, Mother Lydia Potechina has been secretly slipping Parry Deutschmarks. Albers comes on benign and gives her money against a surety which must be co-signed by Krauss and Lee forges her dad’s signature.

We get one “Expressionist” rectangular decor sequence when the postman continues to push Hardt’s letters under the empty flat door. When Hardt returns to find them on the mat, his family is no longer there. Attempts to  contact them are repulsed by Krauss.

In the film’s one surprise, Hans produces the incriminating document at a moment when the discovery of the  faking could be devastating, only to rip it up in Parry’s presence. Hans’ Gypsy sweet heart Vivian Gibson sees through the move as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Raffke family and puts a round into Hans, giving him a chance to do an great acrobatic death fall.

However growing child Loni Nest, misses daddy and sets out with the family dog to find him,
getting drenched and catching fever. The family is re-united by this crisis - implausible happy ending.

Parry in outsize string and fabric hats goes the range from the laughing center of attention for the pack of Krauss’ clerks and distributing bon bons among the kids who swarm over the then luxury car, to suffering raising a baby in domestic penury.

The production is quite ambitious with big, none too imaginative sets and hoards of extras. This one has community with the contemporary melodramas of Michael Curtiz and Cecil B. De Mille - there's even a Golden Calf ball - but at this length, it's not as much fun.

Fraulein Raffke - Hardt, Krauss, Parry, Potechina, Nest, Albers

Eichberg is something of a disappointment. A major player in the pre-WW2 period, the few of his films that do remain in circulation are ordinary, though he worked with legendary stars - Krauss & Albers, Anton Walbrook, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong.

The You-Tube copies on both of these are poor. Pity the effort didn’t go into them rather than the beautiful restoration of draggy Algol - Tragödie der Macht. Fraulein Raffke has two language captions - German and French. If you can’t deal with either of those, the information above should carry you through a viewing.

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2021