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An abbreviation of Molière projected in a Berlin household, as befits an F.W. Murnau masterclass under the star of Chardin. "We want no cinema," cries the scheming housekeeper (Rosa Valetti), the disguised illusionist (André Mattoni) knows the medium's function is to reveal the truth so he arranges a screening for his grouchy grandfather (Hermann Picha), who happens to be the gorgon's oblivious employer. Lights are dimmed and curtains parted for the spectacle, "a story of saints and sinners" and masquerades and inheritances sculpted with lambent figures in curving passageways. Coming home in a pious daze, Orgon (Werner Krauss) strips his manor of "sinful frivolity" to accommodate the ostentatious asceticism of Tartuffe (Emil Jannings), "an alarming-looking fellow." In close-up the ponderous charlatan has one eye heavily lidded with sanctimoniousness and the other roving toward his host's jeweled ring, the pocket-sized Bible he buries his nose in is also used to tap the cleavage of Elmire (Lil Dagover). ("I do not recognize him," she weeps over her husband before setting out to uncloak the intruder.) The Nosferatu position, invasion and sacrifice until the spell is broken, recomposed in a pure transmutation of the literary into the cinematic (cf. Lubitsch's Lady Windermere's Fan the same year). The exploration of the proscenium is a merry affair, Murnau dispenses visual gags (grandfather in rocking chair uniting background and foreground, Tartuffe and Orgon blockily marching side to side as if measuring the screen) and a thesis on beauty (camera following servant girl as she zips down three flights of stairs with candelabra in hand). Lusty ogre and "slow but sure poison" are both vanquished, the discoveries along the way are absorbed by Rohmer's The Marquise of O. Cinematography by Karl Freund. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |