Horrible nights

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Movie
Original title Horrible nights
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1921
length 83 minutes, fragment approx. 60 minutes
Rod
Director Lupu pick
script Carl Mayer
production Lupu Pick for Rex-Film GmbH, Berlin
camera Theodor Sparkuhl
occupation

Horrible Nights is a German feature film from 1921 directed by Lupu Pick .

action

Young Evelyne lives with a man, her fiancé Frank, with whom she has a child. But her fiancé is a shabby guy and is always on the bottle. When she wants to separate from him, the drinker breaks up with the boy out of sheer revenge. Years go by and Evelyne has married the well-respected and wealthy consul Whist. Marriage has remained childless, and the stronger the feeling of being a mother and the will to find the child that was once stolen.

Evelyne goes on a search and one day actually finds it. She believes she recognizes her son in a certain boy and adopts him without further ado. But with the supposedly her own flesh and blood, she has brought evil into the house. Horrible, scary nights lie ahead: jewelry disappears and the safe is broken into. Doubts arise in Evelyne: is this child, whose angry face seems more and more alien to her, really her son? In fact, the Roast Satan is caught red-handed in his raid. The consul is shot and the lady of the house is almost strangled.

Evelyne realizes that she is the victim of an all-out scam. “Your boy” is actually a midget , a criminal subject who pursues a highly criminal trade with her depraved ex-fiancé and his lover Worrit, the midget's mother. But in the end justice prevails. Evelyne can find her real child and she gets it. Now nothing stands in the way of a happy family life.

Production notes

The censorship passed gruesome nights on July 27, 1921. The originally five-act, 1879-meter (approx. 83 minutes) long film was banned from young people and premiered on August 26, 1921 in two Berlin premiere theaters. Today's fragment - the third act is missing - is about an hour long.

The film was thought to be lost for a long time, but was rediscovered at Svenska Filminstitutet Stockholm and restored in 2009. The rerun took place on October 27, 2009 in the Zeughaus-Kino of the German Historical Museum .

The film structures were designed by Robert A. Dietrich .

Reviews

Fritz Podehl called the film “a fable whose prerequisites fluctuate, whose core is original. The processing emphasizes the sentimental, the presentation, the staging of Lupu Pick emphasizes the uncanny and the pictorial, effectively combining both. He needs half lights, sharp lights, a lot of shadows, he achieves heart-pounding tension in a new way by not always seeing the processes clearly, sometimes only guessing them. Deliberate emphasis turns what was previously frowned upon as a mistake. Almost every scene has a nerve effect. It's actually not an increase. The effect lies in the whole. In the refined, dazzling work. This also applies to the game. Alfred Abel is the only outstanding achievement, but remains, as it were, torso, sometimes even unclear. The midget, of course - Hans Walker - striking as an infant child. (...) Purely figuratively, there is the finest taste; every apparatus position or movement effectively calculated, resulting in a happy collaboration with the architect. You have to be grateful to Lupu Pick for this pioneering work. "

In the film courier it says: “No horror story. The vision of an infernal thought is its content; a vision out of the darkness of a horrific experience that perhaps consisted only of a gruesome face - perhaps the midget face that is the focus of the film. The film only wants this thought, and it cannot have sprung from empty fantasy. (...) Carl Mayer did not base his idea on the criteria of the average. He pushes everything out of action, makes it disembodied, but it remains real, factual. The action begins, imperceptibly, without a beginning and breaks off like that, indefinitely. The film ends without meaning. Something happened only because in order to paint a picture there has to be color. That's why you can't retell the film, it would get a different meaning. He is only dominated by the horror of a mother who has been blamed for a fake child, a criminal midget, the horror of that horrific creature with the strange, evil face: the terrible vision. That a mother, who longs for the child she loves, holds a predator to her breast, that the mother suddenly recognizes a monster in her child, a beast with a child's body. The face of this demon runs through the film like a motif. Everything around is under this impression, as if the face had been there from the beginning. Lights and shadows know about it. The horror of a novella by Edgar Allan Poe lies in this film, only to then dissolve with almost no weakening. It's a great achievement to direct. Lupu Pick works unsolicited, unbelievably; he composes every single picture and creates a seldom beautiful depth effect, wonderful shades, darkness in darkness, each one carries the author's thoughts. Sometimes one thing gets too long for him, he lasts too long, as if he has lost the distance to the whole. This often tensions the untroubled nerves in the wrong direction. Edith Posca hits a lot, but she doesn't seem the right woman for this role; That alone can be objected to against the film, while Alfred Abel, although undefined, works through objectivity. "

Oskar Kalbus ' Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst wrote: “Two years later, with the nightly spook in Lupu Pick's“ Grausige Nights ”(1921), your hair could almost stand on end. The feature film of supernatural and unconscious things reached its artistic culmination point at the time when so-called expressionism took over the film. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Critic Podehl calls him Hans Walker . But Paul is probably true, since a short actor named Paul Walker also appears in later films well into the 1930s
  2. ↑ Film length calculator, frame rate: 20
  3. ^ Fritz Podehl in: The film. Vol. 6, No. 35, 1921, ZDB -ID 575768-x .
  4. ↑ pm in Film-Kurier , August 29, 1921.
  5. ^ Oskar Kalbus : On the becoming of German film art. 1st part: The silent film. Cigarette picture service, Altona-Bahrenfeld 1935, p. 94 f.