The Story of Little Mook

The Story of Little Mook - Jack Zipes is the world's foremost expert on fairy tales. In the seventies and eighties, I know that he was at the University of Minnesota. I think he had some connection to Robert Bly as well. Zipes wrote an excellent book on the Grimm Brothers. In that book, he broadly addressed film versions of famous fairy tales or Maerchen. In Zipes view, the best cinematic versions of these stories had been produced in East Germany by DEFA as part of a series made in the sixties. The Story of Little Mook is one of those pictures, sumptuously staged and elaborately mounted, with very good, athletic direction by Wolfgang Staudte. Staudte was one of the luminaries of East German film and, probably, an estimable director -- we know very little about him in this country. On the evidence of The Story of Little Mook, Staudte seems to have been a virile action director, something along the lines of Fritz Lang with respect to his ingenious use of decor. Indeed, The Story of Little Mook is beautifully shot in gaudy technicolor that looks like the color Lang used for The Tiger of Eschnapur, one of his last films, and made, utilizing large and impressive sets and a large spectacularly dressed cast of extras. Many of the faces are ethnically unique -- the heroine is weirdly exotic-looking, the Sultan immensely fat, a crowd of black slave girls carrying fruit in baskets make a brief but indelible appearance. No expense seems to have been spared -- the detailed sets are crawling with children and animals. Monkeys and exotic birds comment on the action and a big, friendly elephant rescues the beleagured Little Mook, a hunchback, from the mob of children this is harrying him. The movie is an effective entertainment, completely apoliltical as far as I can see. Some of the images in the picture are memorable -- an emaciated magician driven mad by greed searches an abandoned garden all run to seed and, arms outstretched like Frankenstein's monster, in one scene almost staggers off the edge of an immense, overhanging cliff. The criticism that I make of the film is that its chief pleasures are decor, a graceful mise-en-scene, and the incidental delights of the exotic extras, the monkeys and toucans, the beautiful Alhambra-like sets -- we don't really care that much about Little Mook and, after the opening scenes where he is inexplicably, and mercilessly, taunted, the movie proceeds in a flashback in which all threats are too unreal to be taken seriously. (Curiously enough, The Story of Little Mook is not based on the Grimm Brothers, but actually a Romantic-era novella penned by the Wilhelm Hauff).