Unheimliche Geschichten (Richard Oswald, 1932)

Happy soon-to-be Halloween. Our Halloween week movie this year is an obscure German horror film from Richard Oswald, director of the extremely odd mandrake root supernatural drama Alraune (previously reviewed on this site). Unheimliche Geschichten, also released under the titles The Living Dead, Eerie Tales, A Mysterious Affair, Unholy Tales, Tales of the Uncanny, and, strangely, Five Sinister Stories (I thought Germans were good at math), is a creepy, funny, and very weird adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories ("The Black Cat" and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether") and the Robert Louis Stevenson story "The Suicide Club." Instead of presenting these short stories separately, the script by director Oswald, Heinz Goldberg, and Jeno Szatmari turns them into episodic events in a single narrative happening to two main characters, the mad scientist Morder (Paul Wegener, co-director and star of The Golem) and the journalist/newspaper editor determined to bring him down while writing the front page version, Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen).

Intended by director Oswald as an affectionate parody of German Expressionism, Unheimliche Geschichten is not a silly horror-comedy, instead preferring its humor dark and twisted. At less than 90 minutes, the pacing is brisk, yet the stories don't feel rushed (though I wouldn't have minded a bit more of "The Black Cat"). Oswald is a visually imaginative filmmaker, and his sets sometimes look like doll's-house miniatures, but his visceral approach to character and action keeps the frame from being overly fussy. This is a wild, good-looking movie.

The film begins with Briggs and his fiancee, an actress, driving hurriedly to the theater so she can make her curtain call. He hears a woman screaming from a nearby home and tells his fiancee to go on without him. There might be a front-page story here (a running gag throughout the movie is Briggs getting himself into dangerous situations to get a story, which as editor he always puts on the front page, even snatching a story away from another journalist on his staff). What Briggs overheard was the events in the Poe tale "The Black Cat." Mad scientist Morder murders his wife in a rage after her black cat knocks over one of his experiments.

Long story short, Morder escapes the clutches of the police and Briggs, who gives chase on his own. Morder and our intrepid journalist end up fighting it out in a bizarro wax museum with motorized exhibits before they both end up in an insane asylum, where the events of the other Poe story take place. Morder escapes again. The final third takes place five years later, where a hot tip from a reader leads Briggs to a mysterious house with no doors where our fugitive Morder is running the suicide club from the Stevenson story. A dark and twisted final showdown begins. As you can see, a whole lot of stuff happens in this movie in a compressed period of time. Oswald keeps it exciting, spooky, funny, and weird. (By the way, Paulsen as Briggs has one of the loudest, fullest yells of any actor I've ever heard, and his many yelling moments in this film get funnier and funnier.)

As enjoyable as the film is, its stories of hidden evil coincided with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the lives of the filmmakers and actors were about to change drastically. Director Oswald, a Jewish man, fled Germany for the United States in 1938, moving back after the war after failing to land much Hollywood work. Paul Wegener, though most famous for Jewish horror film The Golem, was not Jewish and became a favorite actor of the Nazi regime. He remained in Germany and acted in many Nazi propaganda films and stage productions, though he secretly funneled much of his salary to the resistance and helped hide Jewish friends. After the war, he put much effort into charities that helped poor Berliners but died from heart problems in 1948. Actress Maria Koppenhofer (who memorably plays a singing insane asylum patient) stayed in Germany and was also a popular actress with the Nazis. Koppenhofer's ex-husband was Jewish, and she spent much of her earnings throughout the war hiding her daughter in the countryside.

Harald Paulsen, a dancer-turned-actor and co-lead of this film as journalist Briggs, had a considerably more dishonorable trajectory. Lotte Lenya was quoted as saying that Paulsen "was vain, even for an actor." More devoted to his successful stage and screen career than any conscience he may have had, Paulsen acted in some of the most virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda films throughout the '30s and '40s and shamefully continued to star in popular German films well into the '50s.