Muenchhausen

 The 25th anniversary of the founding UFA, the German film studio, occurred during a dark time, 1943.  Dr. Goebbels decreed that the 25th Jubilee for UFA would be marked by the production of a prestige film, a new version of the fantastic adventures of Baron Muenchhausen.  A Hungarian director, Josef von Beky, was engaged to direct the film and the picture was written by a famous German novelist and critic, Erich Kaestner.  (Kaestner was under a cloud with the regime as pacifist and his ingenious script was not credited until the 2017 restoration supervised by the Murnau Stiftung).  The movie was shot in AGFA-color, a German technicolor process in which reds and greens are dramatically highlighted by warm, amber or honey-colored browns and flesh-tones.  (AGFA has a peculiar color register and is easily recognizable as the film stock used in German pictures of this era -- when the Russian, Sokurov, made a film about Hitler and Eva Brann at Berchtesgarten, he chose colors approximating AGFA technicolor process.)  Muenchhausen stars Hans Albers as the titular figure and he seems ageless with radiant shining eyes of the kind that are associated with Nazi ideals of leadership and charisma. His performance is roguish and the film is, in effect, a picaresque exercise on a massive scale.  Exactly, how the picture was supposed to aid the war effort is completely unclear -- the film is highly stylized, full of miracles and camera tricks, and its politics are opaque:  the movie was released around the time of the German defeat at Stalingrad and depicts a German nobleman enthusiastically serving as a general in the Russian army.  Presumably, Goebbels thought that the long-suffering German public in the fourth year of a war that had commenced in 1939 needed something to distract them from the problems at the Front.

Muenchhausen begins with a lavish ballroom sequence that seems to be set in the time of Mozart.  (Raspe's Muenchhausen stories were first published in the 1780's).  A young woman engaged to a rather effete prince throws herself at the Baron while he is shooting pool.  She seems ready and willing to abandon her fiance for the charismatic adventurer.  Some nude statuary on a grand stairway seems curiously out-of-place -- it looks oddly expressionist and, of course, we wonder about the talent of the set decorator.  But the appearance of these statues is soon enough explained -- Muenchhausen sends the girl home with her betrothed, first turning on the electric lights on the front the manor to illuminate the Mercedes Benz cars parked there.  In fact, the party is a costume ball taking place in the present.  Muenchhausen's wife seems sad and much older than him; she has silver hair and the party is for her birthday.  The next day Muenchausen with his wife meets the Prince and his fiancee on the resplendent back terrace of the manor.  There, he narrates some of the adventures of his famous forbear, the 18th century Baron.  In this flashback, we see Muenchhausen returning to his elderly father in an elaborately reconstructed German village.  He is with his servant, Christian Kuchenreutter, a sort of Sancho Panza figure.  After some strange adventures at home -- Kuchenreutter has a salve that grows whiskers in a few seconds, some clothing begins to howl like wolves and has to be gunned down, and there's a gun that can shoot 100 miles with a viewfinder to match -- Baron Hieronymus Muenchhausen departs again with his servant, summoned to St.Petersburg.  (We discover that he is one of Catherine the Great's lovers.)  Along the way, women throw themselves at the libertine baron and it's' so cold musical notes get frozen into a post-horn and only emerge to sound as they are melting.  Muenchhausen meets the politically ambitious sorcerer Cagliostro who performs some tricks and suggests that they use their powers to capture Poland.  Muenchhausen isn't interested in anything but wine, women, and song and so he rejects the offer.  In St. Petersberg, Muenchhausen enters a grand ball in which a dwarf inside of a sort of pastry Faberge egg is playing the harpsichord.  He is ostentatiously greeted by the icy Catherine who immediately escorts him to her boudoir.  His romance with Catherine leads to a so-called "Cuckoo duel" with the jealous Prince Potemkin, a fight with pistols in a completely darkened room -- this gives von Beky the opportunity to shoot flashes of action when the pistols discharge and scenes lit by tiny rays of light in the otherwise inky blackness.  Wounded, Muenchhausen is treated by Cagliostro who gives him an invisibility ring and a potion that confers immortality on the hero.  Muenchhausen is sent to Turkey to fight the sultan.  There he acquires the aid of a man who can run so fast that he can make it from Anatolia to Vienna (and back again) in one hour.  The Sultan is a sadistic nitwit and there is much violence and torture in his court where Muenchhausen befriends a fat eunuch who speaks in a high-pitched voice.  The film is notable for its sexual frankness -- the eunuch's plight is the subject of several explicit jokes and the harem girls are often shown bathing, either naked or topless.  Muenchhausen manages to rescue a captured Christian princess and decamps with her to Venice.  In Venice, the couple arrive during the famous carnival and the film shows spectacular scenes of flower-laden gondolas plying the crowded Venetian canals while rains of petals fall from the picturesque bridges.  Muenchhausen's dalliance with the Venetian princess is interrupted by the aging Casanova, a long-time friend of the Baron, who counsels caution because of the depredations of the Inquisition.  And, sure enough, the inquisitors attempt to apprehend Muenchhausen -- he, then, escapes in a beautifully rendered hot-air balloon and reaches the moon.  The moon is a strange landscape of huge garish trees with giant fruit like those in Bosch's terrestrial paradise.  There's a clownlike figure on the moon, a sort of pedantic doctor, who carries a woman's head under his arm like a loaf of bread.  On the moon, heads and bodies are separable -- the beautiful woman has left her body in the safekeeping of others, locked-up so that she won't be tempted to have sex with Muenchhausen.  She and the clown tell Muenchhausen that when a man dies on the moon, he simply turns into a cloud of smoke that the wind wafts away.  On the moon, die Zeit ist kaputt ("Time itself is broken") -- one day equals a year.  Muenchhausen, of course, doesn't mind because he's immortal but poor Kuechruetter ages and, then, dies.  As he dies, his body turns to smoke which, in turn, is revealed to be the cigar smoke of Muenchhausen telling the story, now at twilight to his wife and the young people from the ball.  We learn that Muenchhausen is immortal and that he is telling these stories as personal experiences.  This terrifies the young people who flee in their expensive car.  Muenchhausen says to his wife that he loves her and doesn't want to be immortal any longer.  Then, he blows out the candles on his candelabra and the smoke spells out the words "The End".  I've left out various miracles and tricks, including a famous, if unconvincing, sequence in which Muenchhausen rides on a cannonball a little like Major King Kong mounting the nuke like a bucking  bronco in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.  The film is cleverly written with re-occurring motifs -- for instance, there are portraits that come to life and the image of people blowing (for instance, to make a sailboat fly over the waves) are also repeated at several times in the picture.  There are two duels, both of them comical, and, generally, every trick occurs once and, then, later in a variant form.  The dialogue is literate and, even, at the end, a bit melancholy -- eternal life turns out to be a little tedious (as are parts of the movie).  Near the end, Muenchhausen says of himself Wenn er nicht gestorben ist, lebt er heute ("If he isn't dead, he's still living), a truism frequently used in the fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers.  "A man of great imagination rules the world," Muenchhausen assures us.  One of his lady-friends says:  "Fortune only lends us luck and, then, at high interest."  The film is surprisingly "adult" given its fairytale aspects, although, of course, it's only Disney that makes us think of fairytales as being for children.  As would be true of a Hollywood picture of the era, the film is casually racist, although those elements aren't offensive except if you want them to be.  The set design is marvelous, particularly the craggy moon with craters burping with geysers.  The picture is more highly regarded by film directors than audiences, I think, it's been remade several times including by the great Czech director,Karel Zeman, and, of course, by Terry Gilliam.  There's a slightly melancholy aspect to the movie that is responsible for its faded poetic elegance.    

(Hans Albers was a famous German movie star between 1920 and 1960.  He was also under a cloud because of his Jewish girlfriend, Hansi Burg.  Albers and Burg lived on Lake Stamberg in Bavaria where the Mad King, Ludwig, either drowned or was assassinated.)