Tag: Georg Alexander

Bonn from afar (2025, day 4)

After yesterday’s exploration of vagrancy and destitution, today we return to the world of the bourgeoisie and to the genre of light comedy. This film was just as much an unknown to me as yesterday’s, and just as welcome a treat…

Was ist los mit Nanette? (1929; Ger.; Holger-Madsen). Otti (Ruth Weyher) is married to the night editor of a newspaper, Richard Curtius (Georg Alexander). Unbeknownst to Richard, Otti has saved him from bankruptcy by living a double life. By day she is a dutiful housewife, but at night she works as “Nanette”, a successful vaudeville dancer. Richard still believes the money came from the will of Otti’s late aunt Finchen, from Batavia. However, things get complex when Aunt Finchen (Margarete Kupfer) turns up on their doorstep. Otti pretends Richard is deeply unwell, so hides her aunt in the attic, along with her pet monkey and a huge amount of luggage. Richard’s rich friend Toto (Harri Hardt), who has a crush on “Nanette”, also comes to stay. Inevitably, events soon spiral out of control. After various farcical chases and confusions, Richard realizes that his wife has been lying to him. Accusing Otti of disloyalty, he decides to pursue other women. First among them is “Nanette”, whom he invites to a night out at the Trocadero club. There, the truth emerges. Richard learns of Otti’s double life and her sacrifice for the sake of their marriage. After recognizing that they still love each other, the couple reconcile. ENDE.

This was the only film produced by Ruth Weyher-Film, the company founded by the star. (She would quit acting at the start of the sound era.) I have seen and liked Weyher in a few productions from earlier in her career, but she is more striking here in this lead role, which drives the whole film. It is very interesting to think of Was ist los mit Nanette? as the work of a female producer and star, since its central concern is with a woman’s agency in the face of male expectations. Otti is introduced very deliberately as “Frau Dr. Curtius”, which is formally correct, but markedly eliminates her given name altogether. By contrast, her friend is introduced as “Anita Morell” (Maria Mindszenty), a woman “widowed young” and “halfway to being remarried”. It is as if the shedding of the dead husband has already given her back her name, and the possibility of agency. We might wonder if being “halfway” to marriage is rather more satisfying than being married. Weyher herself gives a delightful performance. Yes, it’s a chance for her to show off before the camera. She gets to dance on stage, run around, and don disguise. But she always bristles with intelligence and wit, her eyes flashing with playful cunning. The film also gives her plenty of close-ups in which something deeper is revealed, glimpses of emotion (doubt, frustration, longing) that lie beneath the play.

As her husband Richard, Georg Alexander is perfect. I think I’ve seen him in more sound films of the 1930s, so I am rather familiar with his distinctive voice, but here on the silent screen he makes the perfect foil for Otti. Everything about him is fussy, particular – a little vulnerable, a little defensive, a little rigid. His married life quickly unravels, and we realize how limited is his conception of a romantic union. From being a loving husband, he reveals the smallness of his mindset. He soon draws on cliched images of a “painted and deceitful” woman to describe Otti. “They used to burn people like you!” he cries at one point. Otti replies that she won’t forget that insult, and neither will we. It’s an absurd thing to say, but it is said in earnest and in spite. But since this film is, ultimately, a comedy, Richard gets his chance to learn. When he hears Otti’s true history of sacrifice – and a sacrifice for love of him – we see him realize his mistake. Alexander’s performance has enough reality to it (enough seriousness) that we might just have hope for his future with Otti.

Around these two leads are a number of interesting supporting performance. The most significant is Margarete Kupfer as Aunt Finchen. I thought this was a marvellous creation. Her hypochondria makes for some delightful use of costumes and props. Obsessed with her own glands, she travels with a monkey and an enormous spray-pump to ward off germs. The latter she uses as a splendidly phallic weapon to chase Richard around his own home. The former animal is the source of slapstick, but also of some great lines of dialogue. (“My glandular baboon! Preserver of my youth!” Finchen blubs at one point.) But this comedy also enables something more interesting. It is noteworthy how much of the physical slapstick in the film is driven by the women (the wife, the best friend, the aunt, the maid), who give out as much as they take. Echoing Otti’s use of disguise, the aunt also finds the liberation of being in costume. With the aid of Otti’s theatrical manager, Finchen undergoes a beauty treatment, emerging from her frumpy outfit and curled hair into glamorous eveningwear and tastefully modern bob cut. We have come to think of her as a purely comedic, almost buffoonish, character – but in the last act she reveals her worldly wisdom. It is she who advises Richard to feign illness, take to his bed, and earn Otti’s sympathy. He duly does, and the trick reunites husband and wife. Not so daft and dowdy, after all, these aunts.

I have so far talked about the film’s performers and themes, but more broadly I must praise how nice Was ist los mit Nanette? looks, and how well the action is directed. The sets – the house, the office, the theatre, the nightclub – are great, richly detailed and beautifully dressed. Amid all this, Holger-Madsen provides lots of nice touches, such as the striking high-angle shot of the characters looking up through the ceiling light when they hear the noise from upstairs. The shot emphasizes the shock, momentarily turning this into a moment of suspense. The characters are taken by surprise with a sound, and the film transforms this into a moment of surprise for us through visual means. More imaginative camerawork is involved in a rather brilliant dream sequence in which the drunk and depressed Otti dreams of being judged and condemned by Richard in a court of law. Superimposed over Otti writhing in her sleep, this courtroom scene is a little comic gem of editing and choreography. (Compared to yesterday’s dream sequence in Der Vagabund, also involving a character dreaming of being tried and condemned, the equivalent in Was ist los mit Nanette? is much more technically sophisticated and rhythmically polished.) It also links nicely to the opening scene of Richard waking up, when he drowsily reaches for the alarm clock and we see it spinning in a kaleidoscopic multiplication of itself. Both scenes are about the vulnerability of the two characters, each experienced in scenes by themselves. It’s one of many fine touches in Was ist los mit Nanette?, which is filled with pleasing details to reveal character and emotion. The whole film is well staged, well photographed, and well edited. Though one reel of the film suffers from some bad decomposition, it is a great example of how good a film of this era can look.

Music for this presentation from Bonn was by Maud Nelissen and Mykyta Sierov. Their combination of piano and oboe is playful, sympathetic, rhythmic, and melodic – a great accompaniment to the film. Though the live presentation of the film in Bonn (so the online notes tell me) was prefaced by an introduction and rare footage from the Weyher estate, which I would have loved to have seen, Was ist los mit Nanette? by itself is a great feature with an enjoyable score.

I said at the outset that Was ist los mit Nanette? is a very different world to yesterday’s film, Der Vagabund. But Weyher’s comedy also has an edge and offers, in its own way, a subtle critique of the bourgeois world in which it is set. Socialist drama it ain’t, but it also finds a sophisticated way for us to think about what we’ve seen, and question the assumptions we might have: about gender roles, about performance and disguise, and about our expectations and assumptions of what an equal relationship might be. I very much enjoyed this film, which was a total unknown to me. A delightful surprise, beautifully presented.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2024, day 5)

Day 5 of the Bonn festival takes us to Germany, and an exploration of jealousy and marital strife. Described by its opening titles as “A tragicomedy between man and woman”, I was expecting – well, I suppose I was expecting something very much akin to what I got…

Eifersucht (1925; Ger.; Karl Grune)

Act 1 establishes what might be called the rules of the game for the remaining film. The opening scene of a husband strangling his wife is revealed to be a stage performance, and the playwright (Georg Alexander) comes on stage to take the applause. He then returns home with his two friends, a husband (Werner Krauss) and wife (Lya De Putti) whose marriage seems to be ideal. But the playwright keeps questioning whether either of the couple feels jealousy, while trying to flirt with the wife. Act 2 sees the first signs of jealousy: the wife receives flowers and refuses to tell her husband the sender; the wife finds a lock of blonde hair in the husband’s pocket watch. The playwright then arrives and flirts with the wife and convinces them to go to the palais de dance. There, the wife makes both men jealous by dancing with a stranger. The husband ends up striking the stranger and the night ends with husband and wife sleeping in separate beds. In Act 3, after a frosty breakfast the wife becomes intrigued by her husband’s correspondence – reading and then stealing his latest letter. She goes to the playwright, then lies that she has been to her friend Lola’s – and is confronted by her husband. In Act 4, the wife gets Lola to lie for her, covering her absence from home both in the past and on future nights. The husband follows her to a giant apartment store, then loses her and blunders about town in search of her. The wife arrives home, still fuming over the husband’s mysterious letter. The husband tells her how much he loves her and begs to know what she has been doing. She asks for his trust, but he insists on knowing the truth. She demands the truth from him and says he would be ashamed to know the truth from her. He raises his hand to strike her but doesn’t land the blow. In Act 5, the husband follows the wife, this time to a strange building on the outskirts of town. He sees his wife kissing a child who address her as “mummy”. Back home, the husband demands (via a note passed via a servant) that the wife leaves the house. Infuriated by her refusal of the truth about the child, he hurls his wife to the floor. The violence is interrupted by the arrival of the playwright, and the truth is eventually discovered. The letter the wife has stolen from the husband refers to his child, whose carer cannot afford it any longer. The husband falls at his wife’s feet and the two are reconciled. ENDE

As I said, a plot that doesn’t offer any real surprises. It’s well-written, well-mounted, and well-played. I admired the numerous nice touches that shaped the drama, like the repeated detail of the couple’s shoes: hers next to his at the start, then separate from his during their fallout, then reunited in the final images; or the way their first breakfast scene has them sat side-by-side, but the second has then say on opposite sides of the table. Technically, the film was also well executed. There are also some neat moments of superimposition. Some are simple, like the wife imagining the lock of hair in the watch, or later seeing his imagined lover superimposed over her book. Some are more complex, like the husband seeing his wife dancing with another on the crowded dancefloor – only for the other dancers to fade into ghost-like transparencies, revealing his wife and her partner at the centre (a really lovely effect). Though I liked some deep focus compositions in the apartment, it was the exterior scenes that really stood out. There are several big sets/matte painted night cityscapes, which are reminiscent of Grune’s Die Straße. Particularly effective is the apartment store, with a double paternoster lift and a view across to a multistorey wing illuminated from within. You sense the husband’s fear becoming faintly nightmarish in these surroundings, just as you did with the central character in Die Straße.

But what interested me particularly with Eifersucht was its script by Paul Czinner. (I have a longstanding project on Czinner that I have kept delaying for various reasons.) I was struck by how many details in Eifersucht match traits from his other films. There is the jealousy over a bunch of flowers (cf. Der Geiger von Florenz (1926)), conflicts spelt out over a breakfast routine (cf. Ariane (1931) and Der träumende Mund (1932)), the woman reflecting on her image in relation to men (Fräulein Else, 1929), the nods to luck and fate (like the spilling of salt) and life’s reflection of art that haunt numerous of Czinner’s other films. Czinner’s authorship is often overshadowed by the two figures with whom he collaborated: his frequent leading actress, Elisabeth Bergner, and his screenplay collaborator, Carl Meyer (often uncredited). In this sense, it was curious to feel how strongly Eifersucht felt like a Czinner film without either of these two influences at play. But also, this made me like Eifersucht less. The marital strife in Grune’s film is more interestingly played, and played out, in Czinner’s Nju (1924), just as the sense of life imitating the tragedy of art is more potent in Czinner’s Der träumende Mund. And Bergner is an infinitely more subtle, complex, and sympathetic performer than De Putti. Werner Krauss’s character, too, is at the very least equalled by Emil Jannings’s character in Nju, for example, and Georg Alexander’s rather underdeveloped character is a pale shadow next to that of Rudolf Forster in Der träumende Mund. (Der träumende Mund, if you’ve not seen it, is a masterpiece.)

More broadly, in fact, my problem with Eifersucht was precisely this sense that what I was watching I had seen done better, and with more dash, elsewhere. Czinner’s films aside, I also thought of E.A. Dupont’s contemporary Varieté (1925), which features De Putti in a much more powerful drama, and one which allows for more complex, stylish cinematic storytelling. (Dupont’s film was also, confusingly, released under the title “Jealousy” in some regions.) Eifersucht’s theatricality is ultimately a kind of limitation. It is, if anything, too neat and tidy, too precisely organized. (Even the dance hall feels oddly well-mannered to sense the wife’s desire for freedom express itself. Think of how many other Weimar films have great party scenes!) Eifersucht feels like an exercise more than a living, evolving drama. Even the interesting outdoor sets and moments of technical skill didn’t lift the film into something more complex or moving. Indeed, I still await being really moved a Karl Grune film: his are films that I admire without truly liking. (See my pieces on Am Rande der Welt (1927) and Die Straße.) The fact that Eifersucht describes itself as a “tragicomedy” rather sums it up: it is neither comic enough nor tragic enough. (All Czinner’s films are much sharper in their comic touches and more tragic in their outcomes.) It is a good film, but not a great one.

The music for this performance was by Richard Siedhoff and Mykyta Sierov. Their combination of piano and oboe worked well, though its emotional register could never make the film more moving than it was. I must also highlight the excellence of the detailed restoration credits at the start of the film: we are given a history of the film’s release, the location and qualities of surviving prints, the ethics behind the restoration choices, and the precise lengths in metres of various copies, as well as the speed used in the transfer. It should be mandatory to have such information at the outset of all films, especially silents. (Yes, the latest restoration Napoléon, I’m thinking of you.)

Paul Cuff