Asphalt

 Asphalt (1929) is the last silent picture made during the Weimar Republic and it's a pity that it isn't better.  The director, Joe May, is usually described as Fritz Lang's less capable competitor and, sometimes, collaborator.  (May directed the Thea von Harbou script of The Indian Tomb -- Frau Harbou was a Lang's wife and, later, an avid Nazi; Lang remade the movie in the early sixties in color as one of his last productions, a two-part picture beginning with The Tiger of Eschnapur; obviously, Lang's rivalry with the director outlived Joe May.)  On the evidence of Asphalt, the critique of May as a less inventive version of Lang seems, more or less, accurate.

Asphalt is poorly paced and feels longer than its 90 minute running time.  The acting is exaggerated -- silent film histrionics after that style of performance had been abandoned in most productions.  The plot is slender and improbable:  an officious traffic cop gets seduced by a vamp who is, also, the girlfriend of a gangster.  The cop kills the vamp's paramour in a brutal fight and, then, confesses to his crimes.  The vamp appears with the cop's mother and provides a statement that it's was all her fault, which is indubitably true, and she's hauled off to jail with the lovestruck cop vowing to wait for her.  This rather banal, and uninteresting narrative, is tricked out with wildly extravagant, even operatic, production values.  The city streets of Berlin, recreated as an enormous set 400 meters long, are packed with hundreds and hundreds of extras.  The city streets look real, but everything is staged in a Zeppelin hanger.  Some of the store-fronts have actual interiors where scenes are filmed and the appearance of the City, shown both by day and night, is like Metropolis -- thronged with crowds, trucks and buses and cars filling intersections, and skyways high overhead, also full of people.  I have no idea why it was thought necessary to spend what must have been millions on these extravagant sets peopled with hundreds of extras plodding this way and that, but the imagery is certainly impressive and the glittering black and white photography, sometimes with moving camera, is undeniably spectacular.  But this spectacle ill-suits what is essentially a rather squalid crime melodrama, a Kammer (or 'chamber') film.  The movie contains an impressive opening montage showing asphalt being poured on a street and another army of workers tamping the stuff down; then, there's an extended "city symphony" sequence, partly abstract with kaleidoscopic effects emphasizing the city's chaos and excitement -- a mob gathers in front of a store selling stockings to watch a siren languorously donning and doffing the things while two gentlemanly pickpockets work the crowd (one of them is an incredibly debonair-looking Hans Albers, rake-thin, wearing a monocle.)  A gorgeous girl, the vamp flirts with an old jeweler, knocks a diamond on the floor, and picks it up with some kind of gum on the tip of her umbrella.  The theft is discovered and the nearby traffic cop, Albert Holk, is summoned from his job directing traffic (a task he does like a symphony orchestra director) to solve the crime and haul the vamp to the station.  (The two gentleman pickpockets sardonically observe that the girl is merely a novice criminal compared to them.)  The vamp sheds copious crocodile tears and persuades the callow, chubby cop to take her to her apartment, ostensibly to get her identification papers.  But the vamp feigns illness, tries to get the cop to drink a cognac with her (ostensibly to calm her nerves) and, then, promptly hops in bed, dressed in a filmy negligee and claiming to be sick.  When the traffic cop tries to flee the vamp's lair, she chases him down and hops on his back like a monkey, pulling his head back by the hair so that she can kiss his lips -- his traffic cop hat, a quasi-military affair with a badge and tall pointed top, falls on the floor, conveniently symbolizing the hero's moral collapse.  After the blackout for the sex, Holk goes home to his father, a stern police sergeant (he peruses the Police Gazette for entertainment), and his doting, care-worn mother.  The cop is devastated by his malfeasance and throws himself in his bed to mourn his undoing.  Meanwhile, the vamp is incongruously mooning over the cop's identification card which she has purloined.  A quick camera pan shows, however, a picture of a sleek, menacing hoodlum, the vamp's boyfriend.  The film, then, embarks on a pointless digression, a scene set in Paris where the gangster boyfriend is supervising a gang of villains who have dug under the street (in the guise of a city maintenance crew), burrowed into a bank and are engaged in using acetylene torches to prize open safe-deposit boxes in the vault.  The sequence is devoid of suspense, and, like everything else in the movie, brilliantly shot, but it goes nowhere at all.  Meanwhile, the vamp decides to send the cop his ID with a box of expensive cigars and her compliments.  The gift is delivered by a courier while the cop's pious parents are at church.  Holk is outraged and goes to the vamp's apartment.  Meanwhile the gangster is on his way home and the audience is treated to aerial shots of Berlin from the thug's Paris to Berlin flight.  The gangster comes to the vamp's apartment as she and the cop are making up (more caresses and embraces) -- there's a big fight, very gruesome and effectively staged, and Holk kills the gangster.  He goes home with blood on his face, confesses to his parents, and his father, donning the rather comical police helmet (with badge and high top) takes his son into the station to be arrested.  But the vamp, who realizes that she loves Holk, goes to his house and, then, with his mother, hustles over to the station so that she can confess that it's all her fault.  The movie's final scenes involve many gloomy corridor shots with people advancing or retreating through these hallways with a dreamy, doomed gait -- Thomas Pynchon drew attention to these weird corridor scenes in one of his effusions in Gravity's Rainbow.  

The vamp is unbelievably gorgeous with hypnotic eyes and a bee-sting mouth; she slinks around like a serpent or chimpanzee in her silk lingerie.  Holk is played by Gustav Froehlich, a strange-looking actor most famous for his role as Freder in Metropolis made three years earlier.  In the interim, Froehlich has bulked up and he seems almost fat in Asphalt.  He has huge bovine eyes and a moon-face and seems a rather improbable leading man, but his cherubic features grow on you as the film gathers momentum.  But this is a misnomer, the movie has no momentum at all -- the mise-en-scene is clogged with huge luminous close-ups which are individually gorgeous but slow everything down as we are invited to gaze with rapture at the movie stars.  A long scene in the police paddy-wagon as the cop and vamp are driven to the station (it seems to be many miles away) stops the action completely -- the shots are bizarrely repetitive and the vamp simpers and the cop tries vainly to avert his eyes and we know what's going to happen without having to sit through ten-minutes of this sequence.  In general, May's pacing is poor and the movie, despite its fantastic photography, is dull.  (The Kino-Lorber DVD that I watched has a remarkably funny and helpful commentary by someone named Anthony Slide -- the DVD is worth acquiring for Slide's sardonic remarks on the film; unlike many commentators he doesn't succumb to the temptation of telling you that the movie is some kind of masterpiece -- in fact, to the contrary he's scathing about the film's defects.)  The vamp, played by Betty Amam, a former Mack Sennet "bathing beauty" is something to behold and she can (sort of) act.