WAXWORKS Movie Review

Paul Leni's 1924 Waxworks is a striking and still scary example of German expressionism used to make nightmares come to life. In the film, a poet strolls through a waxworks exhibit at a local carnival, encountering the figures of the tyrannical Haroun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper. One at a time, the figures come to life in the mind of the poet, and grotesquely distorted sets and lighting suggest the poet's internalized terrors. Staircases in particular are twisted and forbidding in Waxworks, and have been widely interpreted as powerfully suggestive symbols of sexual longing and anxiety. Director Paul Leni—a collaborator of Max Reinhardt's—was quoted in Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen: “I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality. It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event, which is more profoundly effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes, and I equally believe that the cinema can reproduce this truth, heightened effectively.” Leni was referring primarily to the expressionistic techniques that he and directors like F.W. Murnau were experimenting with at the time, but his statement could well be a summary of the basic power of all cinema to create a world based on a heightened, inner reality. Features The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari‘s Werner Krauss as Jack the Ripper, Emil Jannings as Haroun al Raschid, and Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible, in the sequence that Sergei Eisenstein cited as a major influence on his own interpretation of Ivan 20 years later. The actor who plays the poet is William Dieterle, who in Hollywood in 1939 directed the superb Charles Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

NEXT STOP … The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 & 2

1924 63m/B GE William Dieterle, Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, John Gottowt, Olga Belajeff; D: Paul Leni; W: Henrik Galeen. VHS SNC, NOS, ART