F. W. Murnau directed this adaptation of Moliere's 17th century comedy Tartuffe at UFA in 1926 The picture is short, only 70 minutes (an American version is shorter yet, clocking in at a mere hour). Murnau was a prestige director in Berlin and the movie features A-list Weimar-era actors. Lil Dagover and Werner Krauss, famous for their appearance in Robert Wiene's 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, here play the parts of Elmire and Orgon, a married couple under assault by the monstrous hypocrite Tartuffe. Emil Jannings is grotesque as the titular character -- he's got a pointed head, the worst haircut ever shown in cinema, and is so spectacularly slovenly and repulsive that you can almost smell him. The movie preserves only a couple characters from Moliere's play, a badly compromised and incoherent work in any event -- after its premiere at Versailles in 1664, the theater piece was censored and banned from the stage; it was re-written several times, banned again in 1666 and, finally, performed in its present form in 1669. As a result, the piece is crammed with mis-starts, redundant passages, and, finally, climaxes in the most egregious deux ex machina denouement that I know -- Louis XIV, the Sun King no less, has to swoop into the proceedings to clean up the horrible mess. Although Tartuffe or The Imposter is one of Moliere's most iconic and frequently performed plays, truth to tell the text is seriously corrupt and, often, doesn't make much sense. Carl Mayer and Murnau as scenarists preserve only the central situation in the play, eliminate almost all the characters, and turn the show into a melodramatic vehicle in which Elmire redeems her husband from Tartuffe's clutches by seducing the monster. If this scenario seems familiar, it is because Herr Tartuffe is essentially a remake of Murnau's much more famous Dracula film, Nosferatu, a picture currently much in the news due to Robert Eggers elaborate recent re-make. Tartuffe is hideous and a monster in his own right and like Count Orlok (Dracula) in the horror film, he has Orgon, the master of the house, in his thrall, apparently hypnotized to do his bidding. Tartuffe paces around with Orgon (Werner Krauss) following him like an obedient puppy. He prowls Orgon's palace casting immense misshapen shadows on it walls and gloats satanically in an impressive scene in which he swills wine and prepares to bed Elmire -- she is offering herself to the creature to demonstrate to her husband that the ostensibly pious Tartuffe is, in fact, a lecherous criminal (in fact, he's branded with a number on his shoulder, a somewhat eerie effect when one considers the Nazi use of tattoos fifteen years later to identify their concentration camp inmates.) Janning chews the scenery impressively and Murnau, not one for subtle effects, rubs your nose in the villain's swinish behavior -- the camera is making love to Jannings just as the villain imposes himself in close-up on the leading lady. Moliere's comedy, although a misfire on many levels, is intended as critique of hypocritical religious fanaticism and features truly Christian characters who denounce Tartuffe as an imposter when it comes to piety; the play wholly unequivocal and unambiguous about the title figure's villainy -- in a petition to the King, Moliere defends the play by noting that it doesn't attack religion per se, but merely religious hypocrisy and that the playwright has labored to make it as clear as possible that Tartuffe's wickedness is obvious to everyone except the benighted Orgon who has fallen under the creature's malign influence. If anything, Murnau makes Tartuffe even more spectacularly wicked than the character in the play. The film is, in effect, a horror movie, obedient to the rules of that genre -- elements of witty social satire in the original work, of course, can't be translated into a silent film so what remains, as if by default, is the monstrous aspects of the situation.
Since Tartuffe (Moliere's source work) has been stripped to its situation, the movie doesn't have much in the way of a complex or, even, well-developed plot. This deficit is repaired by adding a frame story to the film. A nasty, middle-aged housekeeper plots to acquire the estate of an old man whom she is systematically poisoning. The housekeeper is as monstrous in her own way as Jannings' Tartuffe; she's got a big belly and morose, saturnine features that seem overlarge for her lumpy head. Murnau is a cruel director, often showing his characters in the most unflattering light, and the old man is a pathetic, feeble, whining miser -- he is thoroughly unsympathetic and callously indifferent to his grandson, an actor who actually loves him. When the actor is mistreated by the housekeeper and expelled from the premises, with the collusion of the old man (a Greis as the German credits inform us), the grandson contrives an elaborate plot to unmask the slow poisoner and elder abuse perpetrator. He disguises himself and arrives by wagon as a traveling promoter of films shown in a sort of traveling cinema. The movie that he happens to show for the wicked maid and the old man is Herr Tartuffe --obviously intended as a commentary on the housemaid's exploitation of her master and the misgovernance in the household. (This elaborate frame-story begs more questions that it answers: did the actor somehow produce the Tartuffe film? how did he get access to the print of the movie and the projection device used to show the movie in one of the old man's chambers in his gloomy house?) The film is deliberately stylized and theatrical. It features some exterior shots that are obviously painted flats -- again, not a defect, but an indication that the movie within the movie is intended to be theatrical and, therefore, not realistic. The characters in the play live in an elaborate three-story palace designed like a spectacular Weimar era stage set -- the Moliere play had been staged successfully by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1922 and the mise-en-scene apparently refers to that production. A miniature carriage is shown trotting up the entry drive to the palace; the carriage is obviously a mechanical toy, an uncanny effect that resonates with the fast-motion carriage sequences in Nosferatu. Sometimes, we see the little palace, toylike under a sky full of painted stars. Elmire arrives after being absent for several days to find her husband entranced and enchanted by the malevolent Tartuffe. With the connivance of a wily servant, Elmire plots to induce Tartuffe to seduce her so that she can provide (as Moliere says) "ocular proof" of the religious fanatic's infamy. The scenes involving Elmire and Tartuffe are bawdy and overtly sexual.
Murnau's direction and pacing is impeccable. His camera placement is intentionally jarring -- the lens always seems too close to the hideous figures on-screen and we are invited to luxuriate in their grotesquerie. (At times, you want to recoil from the images and back away from them.) Carefully contrived inserts drive the action forward - a close-up of the poison bottle or a pair of the old man's slippers. There's something inexplicably wrong with actor-hero in the frame story -- he's extremely gay in both senses of the word. (Murnau was homosexual.) Murnau was versatile and could work in many styles -- the film lacks the gritty, documentary style realism in Nosferatu and, for that matter, Murnau's last movie Tabu. It's not a huge special effects spectacle like Faust and doesn't feature the virtuosic camera movement in The Last Laugh or the Hollywood picture Sunrise. But this is an impressive movie in its own right, important, I think, for preserving on-screen specimens of extravagant expressionistic acting -- people swoon and there are fake ecstasies, fits of rage and lust, and wild tempestuous emotions on display. The huge set with three levels of balcony and dozens of doors inset in white walls seems emblematic of the plight of the characters -- its a lavish, Piranesi-style prison with twisting baroque stairways in a garish schnoerkelig (sinous twisting and turning stair banisters) art nouveau style. And it shows a unique approach to Moliere, transforming the French playwright's brittle society comedies into a horror show, a scary and menacing "creature feature."
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