|
"To beautiful, gay Vienna." The image is a perpetual night, soupy and congested, Grosz's Street Scene is concurrent. Meat in times of hunger is worth more than gold, the lustful butcher (Werner Krauss) lords over the starved masses. (An exceptional tracking shot surveys the endless line outside the shop, each grim face meeting the camera's eye.) Across the way is the fashion salon that doubles as a "private club," the toast of wealthy lechers and schemers, run by the grand Weimar Gremlin herself, Valeska Gert. Cherchez la femme is already G.W. Pabst's motto, a pair of women down the same path with contrasting ends. The tubercular streetwalker (Asta Nielsen) can't interest the secretary (Henry Stuart) and plays dour mistress to the goatish consul (Robert Garrison). Meanwhile, the brothel beckons the counselor's daughter (Greta Garbo) increasingly desperate to feed her family. (A rare joke has the butcher dressed to the nines yet turned down by the doleful newbie, medicating himself with a slice of cake.) "You cannot open any door here without coming face to face with naked misery!" Fur coats and beef carcasses, expressionistic delirium seeping into "the New Objectivity." Garbo barely out of her teens is a beacon of Nordic softness amid the Teutonic grime, Nielsen's showstopper is a murder reenactment as if in a trance, Habuki headdress and all. Old morals in modern environs—the stock market giveth and the stock market taketh away, he who lives by the cleaver dies by the cleaver. "You belong to us, to all of Melchior Alley!" An uprising in the year of Potemkin, the hopeful final note with baby and burning building is from Lang's Der müde Tod. With Ágnes Esterházy, Einar Hanson, Gregori Chmara, Karl Etlinger, Ilka Grüning, and Jaro Fürth. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |