Fear/Furcht (1917)

‘The terrible Buddha priests want their revenge!’

After two years of world travelling, a once carefree young nobleman returns to his castle a changed man. He demands that all the gates are closed, and strangers kept out, and he lives in a constant state of terror…

Noteworthy early German psychological horror from director Robert Wiene. It’s also the oldest surviving film featuring future star Conrad Veidt, who shares the screen with the top-billed Bruno Decarli.

A passion for great art has driven Count Greven (Decarli) to the four corners of the earth in search of treasures. When he returns to his home to Osterna Castle, his servants, including butler Bernhard Goetzke, find him a changed man. Gone is the carefree young nobleman, transformed into a highly-strung bundle of nerves, who immediately orders his estate out of bounds to strangers. Once alone, he brings out a strange Indian idol and places it on a hidden pedestal in his room.

Worried about his master’s behaviour, Goetzke calls in local minister Hermann Picha. The frightened nobleman confesses all to his former teacher; he stole the statue from the Temple of Djaba in India and lives in fear of reprisals from the Buddhist Priests led by Veidt. That night, Decarli is woken from an uneasy sleep and finds Veidt on the lawn outside his window. He shoots the holy man with pistols, but the bullets have no effect. The distraught Decarli begs for death in the face of this supernatural power, but Veidt pronounces a curse instead: Decarli will die seven years later to the day, slain by the hand of the one he loves the most.

Realising he is safe for now, Decarli decides to live life to the fullest. Osterna Castle becomes the site of a permanent house party, an orgy of women, booze and gambling. Eventually growing weary of such frivolity, Decarli goes in search of fame instead, setting up a laboratory in the castle and working tirelessly to convert nitrogen into protein and end world hunger. He’s acclaimed for his discoveries but destroys his work on a whim and becomes involved with a young woman named Gräfin (Mechthildis Thein) instead. Eventually, they marry, but he becomes increasingly terrified as the seven-year deadline approaches.

Tales of the mystical East, fabulous treasures and the curses that come with them were deeply rooted in the European public’s consciousness in the early 20th Century. Improvements in communication and world travel had created greater access to far-off lands that were previously just strange names on a map or a globe. Adventurers returned with unusual trinkets and still more unusual stories, and the public lapped up these glimpses of the exotic and the unknown. It was still five years before Howard Carter would find Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, but the idea of curses attached to the plundering of such treasures was not a new one.

Cleverly, Wiene uses this notion as the building block of an examination of the psychological effects of fear and guilt. For most of the proceedings, it’s never clear whether the curse is all in our principal’s head or whether he has been marked for death by supernatural forces. Veidt’s midnight appearance on the lawn is shot without any fantastical touches. Yet, it’s preceded, and succeeded, by Decarli waking up in bed, so the reality of it is still ambiguous. It would have been more satisfying had this approach been maintained throughout, but the final moments seem to support the supernatural viewpoint. It’s tempting to view this as a similar ‘cop-out’ to the ending of Wiene and Veidt’s most famous collaboration ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari’ (1920), and suggest that it was forced on the filmmaker by producers who wanted a more conventional conclusion. That could have been the case here, but the idea that ‘Caligari’ suffered from such tampering has been largely debunked in recent years.

The legend of Faust is an obvious touchstone here, with the young nobleman living a life of indulgence and excess in the shadow of an awful destiny. The difference is that Decarli does not need any Mephistophelean intervention; he’s clearly his own devil, driven on by unbridled passions and a lack of remorse. Guilt only touches him in terms of consequences and possible punishment. When he romances and marries Thein, it seems as much for the joy of new sensations as any genuine feelings he may have for her. These character elements of Weine’s story are most effective, even if events sometimes lack credibility. The most obvious example is when Decarli destroys his scientific breakthrough without any apparent consequences (apart from the deaths of starving millions, of course).

Given the talent involved here, many silent film aficionados will probably come to this film looking for signposts to ‘Caligari.’ However, Wiene was apparently a late replacement for Fritz Lang as director of the project, and there are few points of commonality between them. Both have a protagonist with a questionable perception of reality, but that was a recurring theme in Wiene’s work anyway. The sets don’t have the ultra-stylised designs of Caligari, of course, but they are still of interest, nevertheless. The castle’s rooms are large but cluttered, Wiene placing items of furniture in the foreground and at the edge of the frame. Actors invariably enter in plain sight through doors in the very rear of the shot. These choices sell the depth and reality of these areas as living spaces. These choices could have been a conscious effort to help ground the more fantastical aspects of the film, or perhaps it was simply to avoid the feel of a filmed stage performance, something still present in the cinema of the period.

Overall, the film is primarily a one-man show in terms of performance, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Acting techniques of the period can appear overstated and a little ridiculous to a modern audience. It’s unfortunate to report that Decarli fully embraces the exaggerated gestures and face-pulling that were sometimes involved. In mitigation, this was clearly quite a difficult gig. He’s rarely offscreen and frequently plays scenes on his own, attempting to convey extreme emotional states without the assistance of close-ups or dialogue.

In contrast to Decarli, Veidt completely underplays his role, with a stillness in his gaunt features and piercing eyes that perfectly embody a man who has renounced the physical, everyday world in favour of a spiritual life. Unfortunately, his appearances are disappointingly brief. A more extended version of the film than that which is readily accessible apparently resides at the Swedish Film Institute, and it can only be hoped that it’s made widely available in the future. Reportedly, it contains an additional 17 minutes of footage, which may feature more of Veidt’s performance.

Wiene was born in 1873 into a theatrical family in a part of Poland, then under German control. After first studying law and working as an attorney, he moved to Vienna in 1908 to help found a theatre and take minor roles on the stage. He entered the film business by writing and directing short subject ‘Die Waffen der Jugend’ (1913) and moved into features a year later. By 1916, he was already working with actors Emil Jennings and Henny Porten, helping to establish her as a star. He followed ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari’ (1920) with the more traditional horrors of ‘Genuine/Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses’ (1920), but it flopped at the box office. He tackled many other genres before reteaming with Veidt for ‘The Hands of Orlac/Orlacs Hände’ (1924). Although it’s unconfirmed, it’s possible that Wiene was Jewish, which would explain why he left Germany in 1933, never to return. A year later, he went to London and Paris, trying to mount a sound remake of ‘Caligari’, along with visionary director Jean Cocteau, but the project never materialised. He died in the French capital in 1938 during the production of his final film, which was finished by his friend Robert Siodmak.

An intriguing drama with some notable elements. It’s no ‘Caligari’, but then what is?