Murnau [6 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

DVD box set includes Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, Tartuffe, Finances of the Grand Duke, The Haunted Castle

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 6
• Screen: Color
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)

AWARDS

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2000

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Emil Jannings - The doorman
       Alexander Granach - Knock
       Camilla Horn - Marguerite
       Greta Schroeder - Ellen Hutter
       Alfred Abel - Philip Collins
       Adolf Engers - don Esteban Paqueno
       Emil Jannings - Tartuffe
       Eric Barclay - Duke of Parma
       Hanna Ralph - Duchess of Parma
       Georg August Koch - Dangerous Conspirator
       Max Schreck - Sinister Conspirator
       Albert Venohr - Seaman

• Director:

  F.W. Murnau

• Producer:

  Albin Grau, Enrico Dieckmann, Erich Pommer, David Shepard

• Screenwriter:

  Henrik Galeen

• Book Author:

  Bram Stoker

• Play Author:

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Screenwriter:

  Carl Mayer

• Play Author:

  Jean Baptiste Molière

• Book Author:

  Rudolph Stratz

• Screenwriter:

  Thea von Harbou

• Book Author:

  Frank Heller

• Cinematographer:

  Gunther Krampf, Fritz Arno Wagner, Carl Hoffmann, Robert Baberske, Karl W. Freund, Laszlo Schaeffer, Franz Planer

• Composer (Music Score):

  Hans Erdmann, Werner Richard Heymann, Timothy Brock

• Featured Music:

  The Olympia Chamber Orchestra

• Composer (Music Score):

  Dr. Giuseppe Becce, Neil Brandt, Ekkehard Wölk

• Production Designer:

  Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig

• Art Director:

  Albin Grau, Robert Herlth

• Set Designer:

  Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig, Rochus Gliese, Erich Czerwonsky

• Costume Designer:

  Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig

REVIEWS:

• Hailed at the time of its release as the finest film ever made, Der Letzte Mann wowed domestic and international audiences with its stunning technical and stylistic innovation. Concerning the downward spiral of a proud hotel doorman who becomes a lowly bathroom attendant, the film captures the shame and humiliation felt by the German people in the aftermath of their World War I defeat, artfully fusing gritty social realism with the sort of expressionistic visual style found in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). When the doorman is stripped of his military-like uniform, this once proud and erect figure seems slumped and broken. Brought to life by Emil Jannings's once-in-a-lifetime performance, the defrocked Doorman clings to the walls as if the weight of his disgrace threatens to crush him. His almost fetishistic attachment to his uniform both mirrored Germany's longing for order after its forced, post-WWI disarmament and eerily presaged its slide into Nazism. Yet what proved to be the most influential aspect of this film was director F. W. Murnau's striking visual style. What cinematographer Karl Freund dubbed the "unchained camera" was strikingly mobile for its time, starting with the opening shot, in which the camera descends to a hotel lobby in an elevator and is then propelled through the room towards a revolving door and the protagonist. Murnau's and Freund's inventive camerawork broadened cinema's emotional palette. Never before had a film so penetrated the individual psyche of an individual character in the context of a more or less straightforward narrative. At one point in the film, after the Doorman steals the uniform, he perceives that the hotel is about to fall on top of him; in another, a montage of distorted and grotesque imagery brilliantly evokes the Doorman's drunken, dispirited point-of-view. Despite its absurdly tacked-on happy ending, reportedly forced by the studio, Der Letzte Mann remains a towering cinematic achievement that still moves and dazzles. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
• The film that brought one of German cinema's masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of Dracula, even if the Bram Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
• While not as well known today as Nosferatu or The Last Laugh, Faust is perhaps director F.W. Murnau's masterpiece; few films by any director can match it for the sweeping impact and beauty of its visuals or the power of its storytelling. Murnau approaches Goethe's tragedy of a man who learns all too well the price of his soul with appropriately broad dramatic strokes, and if the effect seems a bit over the top in the early reels, it hits with full melodramatic force at the end; the full, horrible impact of Faust's comeuppance is as disturbing today as it was in 1926. Gosta Ekman is fine as the luckless Faust and Emil Jannings is brilliant as Mephisto, the embodiment of cunning and evil. And the camerawork by Carl Hoffman and production design by Robert Herlith and Walter Rohrig are nothing short of astounding, creating a brilliantly controlled and beautifully painterly visual sense that's the ideal backdrop for this fable. Anyone who thinks of silent films as sluggish and amateurish has obviously never seen Faust; the home video release on Kino compliments the film's striking visuals with a superb original score by the American composer Timothy Brock that's worthy of attention on its own merits. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi