YouTube Eurekas: Robert Siodmak, Richard Oswald and more

Hans Stühe in the title role of Richard Oswald's CAGLIOSTRO (1929).

This continues to be a tremendously healthy period for new and remastered films on Blu-ray and DVD, however there comes a time in almost every budget when our appetite for new discovery is held in check by fiscal limitations. With such cold reality in mind, it's heartening to realize there are means out there of placing some rare, arcane treasures within our reach, not so well known because it has no proper publicist - one of which is YouTube, no longer the comfortable dumpster of public domain eyesores. I've been noticing that YouTube has been undergoing a rather quiet redefinition of itself, especially if your voracious appetite for film exceeds the mainstream into more international waters.

The problem with YouTube, of course, is that your discoveries there are often limited to what you type into its Search engine, or what is recommended to you on the basis of your most recent search and past algorithms. With this in mind, I thought I would point out some of the treasures I've discovered over there, hiding as it were in plain sight, which can now even be transferred from your computer or iPad to your largest television screen given technologies like Apple TV's mirroring option. Be that as it may, some of the copies they've made available are less than ideal so a certain amount of visual compression might not be a bad thing. Beggars can't be choosers, you know. 

Fernand Grave and Louis Jouvet in Robert Siodmak's MISTER FLOW (1936).

You must know about the films of noir specialist Robert Siodmak, whether you do or don't. A number of his better-known films are readily available on Blu-ray and DVD here in the US, such as PHANTOM LADY, THE SUSPECT, THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, THE DARK MIRROR, THE KILLERS, THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY, THE CRIMSON PIRATE, as well as very early work such as PEOPLE ON SUNDAY and his latter day Cinerama epic CUSTER OF THE WEST. I recommend them all - but, happily, YouTube is a valuable source for some of his harder-to-see titles, including LOOKING FOR HIS MURDERER (Der Mann, der seine Mörder sucht, 1931), a contemporary retelling of Jules Verne's THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINESE GENTLEMAN written by Billy Wilder and Curt Siodmak, in German with French subtitles); his first French film Tumultes ("Tumult," 1932) with Charles Boyer and Florelle, in French with English subtitles (yes!); Le sexe faible ("The Weaker Sex," 1933) with Pierre Brasseur, in French with Spanish subtitles; MISTER FLOW (1936) with Louis Jouvet, Fernand Gravey and Edwige Feuillière, in French without subtitles - a light suspense thriller based on Gaston Leroux's two-part novel THE MAN OF A HUNDRED FACES and LADY HELENA, OR THE MYSTERIOUS LADY - which was in fact Leroux's thinly disguised sequel to the long-running series of FANTÔMAS novels abandoned by Marcel Allain after the death of his collaborator Pierre Souvestre. 

Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly in Siodmak's startlingly subversive CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944).

I understand that the lack of "English friendly" options can seem an insurmountable hostility to some people, but the films made in the 1930s were not so distant from the silent era and every film I've listed here is a master class in visual technique, even if you can't follow the narrative as closely as you'd like. However, if you're looking for an obscure Siodmak title that's as English friendly as you could hope, find the right night for CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944) starring a pre-MGM musicals Gene Kelly, Deanna Durbin and Gale Sondergaard. Ignore the highly subversive title of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation and be astonished by this story of a young wife who discovers that her devil-may-care husband may be a serial killer. This deeply troubling masterpiece, made at a time when women were welcoming their homecoming husbands and boyfriends at the end of the war, not knowing how many lives they might have taken, deserves to be much better-known than it is.

Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel in Richard Oswald's EERIE TALES (1919). 

Another maestro from the cusp of sound whose work I've been exploring in recent weeks is Richard Oswald, the father of OUTER LIMITS director Gerd Oswald. Oswald père was responsible for making the first horror anthology film, EERIE TALES (Unheimliche geschicten, 1919), which is rarely seen in America but is available on YouTube with an engaging musical accompaniment English subtitles. It contains five stories, the sound version three, both incorporating Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club.” For a film now more than a century old, it feels remarkably contemporary in its filmmaking techniques, production design, and the close attention it pays to facial acting. Three archetypal figures - The Flirt, The Devil, and Death (respectively Anita Berber, Reinhold Schünzel, and Conrad Veidt) - step out of their portraits, which adorn the walls of a used book store, scaring the owner and availing themselves of stories in the books on display. The three of them appear in each of the stories, playing different characters roughly within the same archetype, providing the actors with chances to flaunt their dramatic range. Veidt is predictably outstanding, but Schünzel is a revelation. His Devil is a clear antecedent of the Lugosi vampire image, with his black cape, pasty face, and widow’s peak; his crazy husband character in the first story is the prototype of Cousin Eerie (!); and Peter Lorre clearly had his performance in mind when he essayed the same role on Roger Corman’s TALES OF TERROR almost 50 years later. There are two different uploads of this film on YouTube, but only one has English subtitles; I have linked to the preferable one.

Maria Kopenhofer as "The Black Cat"'s murdered wife in the sound remake.

When the sound era commenced, Oswald remade his groundbreaking film (under the same title, Unheimliche geschichten) with the Paul Wegener (THE GOLEM) in the lead as a crazed character who connects the stories in his mad meanderings. The silent version is excellent, but this - the first sound horror anthology - may be even better; I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s also the first feature-length surrealist work. Its stroke of genius is that there is no framing device; the stories flow one into the next like twists in an already delirious tale. It opens Paul Wegener, truly a great and versatile horror star, starring in an adaptation of the subsequently oft-filmed “The Black Cat,” who makes his escape from the police and hides in a waxworks. Lots of creaky thrills in that before he wriggles his way out of an arrest by being committed to an asylum where the inmates have taken over in an adaptation of Poe’s “Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather,” which may be the film’s highlight - what we would now call Buñuelian. Wegener foils a dedicated newspaper reporter pursuant and disappears for six months, when he is discovered as the ringleader of an ultra-sophisticated suicide club, in an adaptation of RL Stevenson’s classic story whose look anticipates Edgar Ulmer’s feature of THE BLACK CAT in 1934. This segment also includes a very Lugosi-like performance by Wegener and an actual shot that would be repeated in 1935’s THE RAVEN. Also known as THE LIVING DEAD, the version on YouTube also carries English subtitles.

Conrad Veidt and Fritz Schultz in Oswald's groundbreaking DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS (1919).

Also by Oswald and available on YouTube are DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS (1919) with Conrad Veidt and Anita Berber, surviving now only as a 50 minute fragment but said to be the first film ever made about LGBT lives and adversities (it's with English inter titles though sometimes overprinted with unremovable Russian titles); LUCREZIA BORGIA (1922) with Liane Haid, Wegener, Veidt, THE GOLEM's Lothar Müthel, and future director William Dieterle (with English inter titles); and CAGLIOSTRO (1929), Oswald's last silent and an impressive achievement fusing German Expressionism and the 18th century costume romantic heroism mastered during this same period by Abel Gance. It's got French inter titles and Spanish subtitles, but an easy adjustment under Settings allows the user to "auto-translate" the subtitles into many other languages - including English. 

In closing, I'll add one more link to a film I only discovered while rooting around for links for this blog entry. Here's your ticket to the 1919 Thomas Ince silent FALSE FACES, starring Henry B. Walthall as Louis Joseph Vance's heroic spy/detective/master of disguise Michael Lanyard, aka The Lone Wolf! It's apparently a sequel to an earlier film, but this one has special historical interest in that the second male lead is the silent screen's master of false faces, none other than Lon Chaney!


(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.