Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu. Screenplay: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film editing: Arthur A. Brooks. 

Humankind is its own serpent in the garden. If you expect F.W. Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas to be yet another fable about innocence spoiled by civilization, you're wrong. For Murnau, the fault lies in humans themselves, in their insistence on proscribing natural and instinctive behavior. The taboo that precipitates the crisis in the filn is not imposed by the colonizing Europeans, although we see the consequences of the clash between their value system and that of the islanders well enough, but in the tribal imperative that prevents Matahi and Reri from consummating their love. Reri is chosen to become the tribe's sacred virgin, an honor she doesn't want, so she flees with Matahi and is pursued by the tribal elder, Hitu, who is tasked with putting the lovers to death. On the French-colonized island where they land, they encounter a culture they don't understand, particularly its attitude toward money, a foreign concept that will be their undoing. But the valorizing of virginity produces the central taboo of the film. Much has been made of the "gay gaze" in the film: the camera's lingering on beautiful male bodies, which is attributed to Murnau's own gayness. But if Tabu is in any way a product of Murnau's sexual orientation, it's in the emphasis on the central theme: the proscription of desire. In Murnau's case it was the desire for others of his own sex, so the virginity taboo is a metaphor for the rejection of queerness that Murnau encountered in his own life. 

The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)

Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh

 Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Emilie Kurz, Hans Unterkircher, George John. Screenplay: Carl Mayer. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer. Film editing: Elfi Böttrich. 

F.W. Murnau's landmark film The Last Laugh tells a simple story: An elderly, preening doorman (Emil Jannings) at a luxury hotel struggles to unload a large trunk one rainy evening, and the hotel manager (Hans Unterkircher) takes notice. The doorman goes home to his apartment building where he's greeted with the usual deference accorded to his regal bearing and his brass-buttoned uniform. But when he returns to work the next day he finds a new doorman wearing a copy of the uniform. The hotel manager tells him that he's been replaced, and to turn in the uniform and report to his new job: lavatory attendant. Appalled and crushed, he swipes his old uniform and goes home that night wearing it as if nothing has happened. His niece (Maly Delschaft) is being married. and the ex-doorman celebrates well into the night. Still tipsy the next day, he goes back to the hotel and his new job, stashing the uniform in a checkroom at the railroad station. He bumbles through his duties, but when he returns home he's mocked by his neighbors, who have discovered his fall from grace. The next day he's even more disenchanted with his new job, and incurs the anger of a patron who reports him to the hotel manager, who reprimands him. That night he stays in the washroom, where he's found by the night watchman (Georg John), who helps him retrieve the old uniform and return it to storage. Exhausted, he falls asleep in his chair, and the night watchman tenderly covers him with his coat. And that's where the one and only intertitle occurs: It proclaims that this is where the story would most likely end in reality, with the lavatory attendant living out the rest of his days with "little to look forward to but death." But instead, "The author took pity on him ... and provided quite an improbable epilogue." In short, the protagonist inherits a fortune and invites the night watchman to join him as they're wined and dined by the hotel. It's an audacious ending to a remarkably innovative film. The innovations have received most of the attention, especially Karl Freund's camerawork, which involved far more movement than was usual for the day, with Freund sometimes mounting the camera on a wheelchair or strapping it to his body and riding a bicycle through the sets. The doorman's drunkenness is simulated with a subjective camera, double-exposures, and focus changes. The absence of intertitles is also striking, with no loss of narrative coherence and only a little uncertainty about who some of the characters are: I wasn't sure about the identity of the bride until I saw her listed as his niece in the credits on IMDb. But it's the provision of an alternate ending that strikes me as most audacious. The English title, The Last Laugh, seems to derive from this "improbable epilogue." (The German title,  Der letzte Mann, means "the last man.") Does the last laugh really belong to Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer, mocking the audience's sentimentality in wanting an unearned happy ending? 

Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

George O'Brien and Margaret Livingston in Sunrise

The Man: George O'Brien
The Wife: Janet Gaynor
The Woman From the City: Margaret Livingston
The Maid: Bodil Rosing
The Photographer: J. Farrell MacDonald
The Barber: Ralph Sipperly
The Manicure Girl: Jane Winton
The Obtrusive Gentleman: Arthur Housman
The Obliging Gentleman: Eddie Boland

Director: F.W. Murnau
Screenplay: Carl Mayer
Based on a story by Hermann Sudermann
Cinematography: Charles Rosher, Carl Struss
Art direction: Rochus Gliese
Film editing: Harold D. Schuster

Sunrise has always seemed to me a triumph of style and technique over substance, which is why I'm not over-eager to join in the chorus hailing it as a masterpiece. Extraordinary, ingenious things are brought to bear on material that seems to me tired and derivative: the town-country divide, the good wife vs. the scheming vixen, the rescues and revelations, the sentimentalizing of the simple folk. All of these were clichés in 1827, let alone 1927. The pretentious subtitle, "A Song of Two Humans," and the labels pasted onto the characters instead of names seem to me laborious attempts to heighten the material into a significance it doesn't really have. That F.W. Murnau, with the considerable help of cast and cinematographers and designers, was able to overcome these flaws and give us something of lasting distinction is undeniable. But a masterpiece would have given us something new, the way, for example, Fritz Lang was able to do the same year in Metropolis, a film that rises above its banalities in visionary ways. There are great moments in Sunrise, but too much of it is horseplay like the pig chase sequence and condescending hokum like the "peasant dance" performed by the Man and the Wife for the amusement of the city slickers. That said, it's possible to be moved by Sunrise without being completely snookered by it.

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Power corrupts, as we knew long before John Dalberg-Acton so nicely formulated it for us. It's the truth underlying so many myths, from the Garden of Eden to the Nibelungenlied to the Faust legend. Goethe's Faust is a philosophical poem, a closet drama not designed for stage or film, but that hasn't prevented playwrights, opera librettists, or screenwriters from making the attempt. F.W. Murnau's version is probably the most distinguished cinematic attempt, but not because of its fidelity to the source. Murnau's version works because it concentrates on the power struggle, initially between Good, as represented by the archangel (Werner Fuetterer), and Evil, as represented by Mephisto (Emil Jannings), and later by the attempt of Faust (Gösta Ekman) to obtain mastery over Time. It begins with a wager, borrowed from the book of Job, between the archangel and Mephisto, over whom Faust's soul will belong to. Then it eventually devolves into what is the core of most dramatic treatments of Goethe's story, the seduction of Gretchen (Camilla Horn), with the aid of Mephisto. In the end, both Gretchen and Faust are redeemed by his willingness to sacrifice himself, an abnegation of power. But that too-familiar story is distinguished by Murnau's staging of it, with the significant help of Carl Hoffmann's cinematography and the art direction of Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig. This is one of the most beautiful of silent films because of the interplay between light and dark, a superb evocation of the paintings of Rembrandt in the way scenes are composed and lighted. The tone of the film is set near the beginning by the spectacular image (above) of a gigantic Mephisto looming over a German town, which clearly influenced the similar scene in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Jannings manages to be both sinister and gross as Mephisto -- the latter mode most in evidence in his scenes with Gretchen's lustful Aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert). (If Guilbert looks familiar it's because, as a Parisian cabaret singer during the Belle Époque, she was the subject of numerous portraits by Toulouse-Lautrec.) This was the last of Murnau's films in Germany: The following year he moved to Hollywood, where he made probably his greatest film, Sunrise. He was soon followed to America by the actor who played Gretchen's brother, Valentin, William Dieterle, who became a prominent Hollywood director.

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

As Bram Stoker first described him, Count Dracula was by no means hideous. Creepy, yes, but with his long white mustache, his aquiline nose, and his "extraordinary pallor," he must have been at least striking to see. Most of the incarnations of Count Dracula on screen have been more or less attractive men: Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Frank Langella, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, among many others. And lately, since Anne Rice's novels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters), the tendency has been to portray vampires as hot young dudes like the ones seen on the CW's The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Vampires, it seems, have been getting more human. But not the very first version of Dracula portrayed on screen: With his steady glare, his beaky nose, his batlike ears, his long taloned fingers, his implacable stiff-legged gait, and his posture suggestive of someone who has been crammed for a long time into a coffin, Max Schreck's Count Orlok (the name has been changed to protect the studio, which it didn't) is decidedly non-human. He's a mutant, perhaps, or an alien. He is also not sexy, which is something of a paradox because vampirism, with its night prowling and exchange of fluids, is all about sex -- or the fear of it. And yet this is probably the greatest film version of Dracula, even allowing for the fact that it's a ripoff, designed to allow the producers Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau to avoid having to pay the Stoker estate for the rights. They were sued, and according to the terms of the settlement all prints of the film were supposed to be destroyed. The studio went out of business, but Nosferatu was undead -- enough copies survived that it could be pieced together for posterity. Undead, but not undated: Some of the opening scenes involving Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), the novel's Harker, are a bit laughable given the actor's puppyish grin, and the character of Knock (Alexander Granach), the novel's Renfield, is wildly over-the-top. But Murnau knew how to create atmosphere, and he keeps the action grounded in plausibility by using real locations and natural settings. The scene in which a long procession of coffins filled with plague victims moves down a street (actually in Lübeck) is haunting. But most of all, it's Schreck's uncanny performance that makes Nosferatu still able to stalk through dreams after more than 90 years.