The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ***** (1920, Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover) – Classic Movie Review 1,574

Robert Wiene’s legendary 1920 German silent horror film masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stars Werner Krauss as the mad magician Dr Caligari, who hypnotises his tame somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) to carry out a series of murders.

Director Robert Wiene’s legendary, incalculably influential 1920 German silent horror film masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stars Werner Krauss as the mad magician Dr Caligari, who hypnotises his tame somnambulist Cesare to carry out a series of murders. The 27-year-old Conrad Veidt became a sensation with his role as the murderous sleepwalker.

Widely regarded as the world’s first true horror film, Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari was given the definitive, full 4K digital restoration and re-release treatment in 2014. It is now in glorious condition, in lovely tinted colours throughout with beautiful Expressionist title cards and a thrilling score. This finally makes it a mesmerisingly perfect viewing experience for the first time in living memory.

Francis (Friedrich Fehér) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) are both in love with the same woman, Jane (Lil Dagover), and decide to let her chose between them but to remain friends whatever. The annual fair and carnival comes to their small German town of Holstenwall and they decide to visit The Cabinet of Dr Caligari .

The mysterious doctor and hypnotist Dr Caligari drums up business for his exhibit, where Francis and Alan go inside and join the audience as Dr Caligari presents the somnambulist Cesare, who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers.

Cesare is 23 years old and has slept for 23 years. Alan asks him when he will die, and Cesare terrifies him by replying he will die by morning. And at night the evil doctor wakes Cesare from his death-like sleep to enact his evil bidding.

Previously, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari had dated so badly and often looked so jerky and unconvincing that it was not always easy going to watch and indeed was something of an effort to sit through. Despite restorations in 1980, 1984 and 1995, damaging signs of wear remained.

But the 2014 restoration is a revelation. The Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden has used the film’s camera negative from the German Federal Film Archive for the first time and gathered together all existing historic prints from film archives worldwide. The marvellous digital restoration was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata Film Conservation and Restoration in Bologna.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari has always been revered and studied by film historians as a work of astonishing Expressionist imagination and one that advanced the art of the cinema and influenced the entire history of the fantasy genre. Now, with the 2014 restoration, it has the power to grip, chill and enthral audiences again, and can be truly enjoyed for the masterpiece it is once more.

Its form of storytelling, with its sinister atmosphere, psychological bias and trick ending, and its style of filming with studio exteriors, tilted shots, painted scenery and backdrops, nightmarishly jagged sets and stylised performances continue to fascinate and influence film makers 100 years on. The central images of Krauss’s evil doctor and Veidt’s eerily creeping murderous somnambulist monster are regularly reprinted in the media and are reincarnated in various different guises in modern horror movies. Horror, film noir and gothic cinema are for ever defined and influenced by Dr Caligari.

With the restoration, now all viewers, horror fans and film buffs will find everything they need to admire, inspire their imagination and excite them.

Rudolf Lettinger and Rudolph Klein-Rogge (from Metropolis) co-star.

It is written by anti-authority pacifists Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, inspired by their experiences with the military in World War One. Janowitz served as an officer during the war, but Mayer feigned madness to avoid military service. They were both pacifists when they met in Berlin shortly after the war. Mayer suggested Janowitz work as an author, and together they wrote the script of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari over six weeks in the winter of 1918–19.

It uses a framing story of the madman remembering his past, who then recounts the tale of a girl’s mysterious murder, with a prologue and epilogue, as well as a twist ending, a device forced on the writers, who objected unsuccessfully to the change.

The design is by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, going for an incredibly striking fantastic visual style that has made this film both the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema and forever famous.

The cast are Werner Krauss as Dr Caligari, Conrad Veidt as Cesare, Friedrich Feher as Francis, Lil Dagover as Jane, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski as Alan, Rudolf Lettinger as Dr Olsen, and Rudolph Klein-Rogge as a criminal,

It was remade as The Cabinet of Caligari in 1962 by director Roger Kay, starring Glynis Johns, Dan O’Herlihy, Constance Ford and Dick Davalos, and featuring a screenplay by Psycho novel writer Robert Bloch.

And there is a semi-sequel in 1989, just called Dr Caligari, an American avant-garde horror erotic film co-written and directed by Stephen Sayadian and starring Madeleine Reynal, Laura Albert, Gene Zerna, David Parry, Fox Harris and Jennifer Balgobin.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,574

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