Paul Leni's 1924 film Das Wachsenfigurenkabinett (literally The Cabinet of Waxwork Figures, an allusion The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is the last great monument of German Expressionist film, a style that Pauline Kael called "monstrous", and a movie that is probably more interesting to review and analyze than to watch. Designed to within an inch of its life, and laden with intricate visual leit motifs all rhyming thematically with one another, the film is fantastically complex visually and has been enormously influential -- but it is also claustrophobic, stylized to the point of emotionally inert abstraction, and, although inspired, oddly airless and dead. On first watching, the film's oppressive decor and wild-eyed pantomime put me to sleep. Viewed with commentary, the movie comes fitfully alive. It must be seen by anyone interested in film history. You won't feel any affection for this film but it is certainly admirable in its own icy way.
Silent films were less like today's movies and more like kits of footage that projectionists could assemble in various ways to please their audiences. There is no definitive version of Waxworks today. The original negative burned in a freak fire in 1925 and, in fact, the German version of the movie was probably projected with the sequences in a different order than the film screened in Britain. The picture has been reconstructed from the British print which is largely intact, although, nonetheless, about 25 minutes shorter than what was premiered in Berlin. (Apparently, the frame story was more elaborate but the three episodes in this anthology or omnibus film also were each slightly longer.) Even as originally projected, the film, in keeping with its expressionistic aesthetic, was ungainly and disproportionate -- a long sequence set in Baghdad and involving Haroun al-Rashid dominates the picture and accounts for more than half of its length. There is sequence involving Ivan the Terrible that obviously influenced Eisenstein immensely. That sequence is about half the length of the Baghdad scenes. The final episode involving "Spring-heeled Jack", the name inexplicably used in the British version for Jack the Ripper, is very short and non-narrative, a kind of abstract summary of themes developed as plot in other parts of the film. A fourth episode involving the Neapolitan Rinaldo Rinaldini, a brigand, was never shot, although the sequence is set up by images showing the waxwork of that character in the "cabinet". The picture ran aground on the reef of the deadly German inflation in November 1924 and the Rinaldini episode couldn't be shot -- money (or, at least, currency) ran out. The film's director, Paul Leni, is undoubtedly one of the ugliest men ever to work in movies -- he has a shapeless body and a face like a goblin adorned with two huge and pointed ears similar to those that we see on the sides of Nosferatu's skull. Leni was lured to Hollywood where he was very successful and there directed one of the last great flowerings of Expressionist film in America, 1928's The Man who Laughs (with Conrad Veidt). Leni pioneered the genre of horror-comedy with pictures like The Cat and the Canary. He neglected an abscessed tooth and died of blood poisoning in 1929 when he was only 44.
In Waxworks, a young poet (played by Wilhelm Dieterle who was later to direct many films in the United States) is wandering through a phantasmagoric fun-fair, a sort of amusement park that is, in fact, called "Luna Park". The poet is lured into a museum of waxworks where he meets a beautiful young girl and her rather sinister, derelict-looking father, the proprietor of the place. The poet is retained to write stories about three of the waxworks -- Haroun al-Rashid (played by a very fat and impish Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (played by Conrad Veidt), and Spring-heeled Jack (Werner Krauss from Caligari). (We see Rinaldo Rinaldini's waxwork but there is no intertitle introducing that figure -- he was to played by Dieterle.) Haroun's arm is broken off and the young poet, inspired by that injury to the waxwork, dashes off a story about the Baghdad Caliph. This tale is extremely perverse and is intended to be broadly comical. A poor baker, enamoured with his beautiful wife Zarah, is making bread in his oven in a sort of organic cavern at the base of a bulbous structure sprouting onion-dome minarets like tumors. Atop this odd structure, Haroun is playing chess with his Grand Vizier. The smoke from the bread-oven upsets him and he demands that his Vizier send the poor baker "to Allah" by beheading him. The Vizier confronts the baker and sees that he has a beautiful wife. The Vizier, then, reports on the woman to the Caliph and, that night, Haroun sneaks out to seduce the Baker's wife. Haroun's nocturnal prowls involve the huge fat man leaving a sort of doll of himself in his bed so that he will not be reported as absent from the palace. Haroun has a magic, wish-bestowing ring and the baker, who has had a bad fight with his wife, sets out into the night to steal the ring. Haroun courts the Baker's wife in a hole that looks like the greasy interior of someone's intestinal tract. The Baker enters Haroun's sleeping chamber and hacks off the arm of the doll in order to seized the ring. Haroun's minions pursue the Baker who escapes in a spectacular scene -- he hurls himself off the round dome of a minaret onto a palm tree that breaks his fall as he drops about a hundred feet to the ground. The Baker finds his wife being seduced by the Caliph. But instead of being angry, he seems flattered. Haroun winks at him and, then, spreading his vast cloak, enwraps the baker and his unfaithful wife in a close embrace -- the man and woman cling to the Caliph's huge belly. This is all bizarrely perverse. The set design is hallucinatory -- Baghdad is like an enormous bloated body full of weird sockets and indentations arranged in a kind of spiral pattern. The Caliph's enormous turban is about five feet tall. Everyone has to duck and crouch to creep through tubes in the set -- it's as if the film is shot inside one of El Greco's liquescent backdrops. The lighting is astounding and everything is brilliantly staged and, yet, completely lifeless. The poet writes himself and his sweetheart, the Waxworks proprietor's daughter, into the scenarios that he invents. In the Baghdad sequence, the poet appears as the baker and the girl is his frisky wife.
Ivan the Terrible is an oriental monster as well. He has a torture chamber in which his Court Poisoner is slowly killing people -- he calculates the time of his victims' death to the second and, then, uses barbell-shaped crystal hourglasses to torment them with the image of their lives slipping away as the sand drizzles from the upper to the lower chamber of the time-piece. Offended by Ivan, the Court Poisoner makes a hourglass for the despot and labels it with his name. (The torture chamber is like something from Monty Python, a black pit in which ancient bearded wretches in chains are strung up on wet, dripping block walls.) Ivan goes to a wedding party to exercise his "first-night" rights with the Bride. Knowing that he is pursued by assassins, he makes her father wear his crown and as he goes outside the monumental hulking banquet hall, the old man is shot with an arrow and dies in the snow. (The film is full of doubles and doubles of doubles -- Haroun al-Rashid is doubled by a waxwork and the doll that occupies his bed when he embarks on his nocturnal forays.) Ivan seizes the young woman. He drags her to his bedchamber where he sleeps inside a cocoon-like fistula, something similar to a melted imperial crown. She resists him and so Ivan has her fiancee (the poet) tortured in his baroque torture chamber. The young woman relents, but, at that moment, Ivan sees the hourglass with his name inscribed on it and promptly goes completely mad with terror -- he thinks he can keep his life from ebbing away by continuously turning and re-turning the hourglass. In fact, he doesn't even need the hourglass -- in the end, he just rotates his hands around empty air.
The final scene is set in the Cabinet of Waxworks. Spring-heeled Jack comes alive and hunts down the poet, ultimately stabbing him in the heart. The poet wakes up with his pen poking his breast. It's all been a nightmare. He embraces the girl and the film ends. This last sequence comes close to experimental cinema -- the figures appear in a pictorial maze of superimpositions with the slavering, goggle-eyed Jack relentlessly hunting them through the glistening light and profound shadow of the labyrinth of images. Space has been completely abolished; there's no up or down, foreground or background. It's all a palimpsest of superimposed pictures.
The movie is full of bizarre touches -- for instance, Ivan's waxwork is a kind of automaton. Individual frames of the film have an awesome, tallowy half-melted beauty. Everything seems to be melting like wax. There are curiously sexualized motifs -- the baker kneads his dough with a sort of orgiastic enthusiasm while the vizier, unseen behind him, simulates his movements by whetting the blade of his scimitar. The baker seizes the breasts of his wife with his hands covered in dough and leaves globs of the white stuff on her bosom, something that triggers their quarrel. In the scenes involving Ivan the Terrible, the wedding party is gathered under a vast lowering ceiling made of huge painted and primitively carved beams. It's all grotesque and barbaric. Everything seems to be shot inside the body-cavity of some enormous rotting corpse. I'm happy someone did this once. You would not want to see this done more than once.
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