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Polanski in The Tenant voices the terror, "what right has my head to call itself me?" The concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) rushes home aboard a train, a sharp cut leaps from opposing locomotives one millisecond before their collision to panic in the control room, the aftermath takes note of Gance's La Roue. "Save his hands," pleads the wife (Alexandra Sorina), "his hands are his life." Transplanted appendages come by way of an executed convict, and with them sinister visions. A smirking head by the hospital's window, a gigantic fist looming over the patient's bed, the irresistible pull of an x-marked knife. "What's under these bandages?" Weimar-era paroxysms are Robert Wiene's métier, the doppelgänger within the self means a body in upheaval. Étude de mains, the protagonist is too alarmed to shake the doctor's hand, let alone provide the missus with the caresses she craves. He glares at the grafted mitts like arachnids sprouting from his wrists, "you demand blood... crimes... murder." Ruination is a line of creditors in matching starched collars, madness is a blackmailer (Fritz Kortner) wearing the guillotine's mark and modeling metallic limbs for Metropolis. Heightened frenzies in realistic sets, a miser entombed in his mansion of vaulted halls, calligraphic notes turned jagged scribbles. "I feel it also go out... The arms spread... Until then, in the soul... Cold, terrible, grim." At the center is Veidt's ballet of visceral expressiveness, jabbing the air with an invisible dagger as veins crack his brow like a Max Pechstein woodcut. Being able to touch your lover is the reward. "It's odd, but I don't know whether I am experiencing reality or a dream." The lineage extends from Freund's Mad Love and Florey's The Beast with Five Fingers to Stone's The Hand and Red's Body Parts. With Carmen Cartellieri, Hans Homma, and Fritz Strassny. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |