Phantom (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Erich Pommer; directed by F. W. Murnau; screenplay by Thea von Harbou, based on the novel by Gerhart Hauptmann; cinematography by Axel Graatkjär and Theophan Ouchakoff; production design by Hermann Warm; starring Alfred Abel, Lya de Putti, Lil Dagover, Anton Edthofer, Frieda Richard, Aud Egede-Nissen, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Adolf Klein, Olga Engl, Karl Etlinger, Ilka Grüning, Grete Berger, Heinrich Witte. Blu-ray, color tinted, 120 min., 1922. A Flicker Alley release.

It came from the hand of F. W. Murnau and premiered in 1922, the same year as the director’s legendary Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, so one might assume that the ominously titled Phantom is a horror film. But here, as with The Haunted Castle of the previous year, one would be wrong. Although these are moody works, The Haunted Castle is a murder mystery and the deeper, more haunting Phantom is a psychological drama with detours into delusion and delirium that destabilize the protagonist without scaring the audience all that much. Murnau wouldn’t return to anything like horror until 1926, when his magnificent Faust unleashed the fiendish Mephisto in all his diabolical splendor. Still and all, Phantom is a fitting title for a story in which emotions are ruthless, motivations are slippery, and identity itself is dauntingly hard to pin down. This isn’t exactly horror, but parts of it border on nightmare.

Murnau directed almost a dozen films between his debut in 1919 and the four productions he released in 1922, and Phantom is a good marker of his movement away from the full-bore expressionism of Nosferatu and toward the sensitive naturalism found in The Last Laugh (1924) and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). Although his directorial signatures are everywhere in Phantom—vivid settings, supple performances, a powerfully visual approach to material drawn from literature—he had many first-rate collaborators on the project, starting with the enterprising Erich Pommer, who had produced The Haunted Castle and would do the same for every Murnau production from Phantom until the director’s departure for Hollywood in 1927. Pommer ran the important Decla-Bioscop studio and its specialized Ucofilm unit, dedicated to adaptations of serials published in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the first mass-audience German magazine. That was the original home of Phantom, a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1912, mainly for his work as a playwright. Hauptmann does an on-screen cameo during the opening titles of Murnau’s film, striding through a field with a book in his hand, although the book couldn’t be Phantom, which wasn’t published between hard covers until the following year. 

Hauptmann’s imprimatur was important to Pommer and company, and special preview screenings of the film were given in his honor, as film scholar Janet Bergstrom notes in a video essay in Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray edition. Screenplay credit went to Thea von Harbou, who scripted a total of four Murnau pictures as well as some of Fritz Lang’s greatest works, the immortal Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) among them. Another key contributor was production designer Hermann Warm, a relative newcomer whose prior credits were the 1919 installment of Lang’s two-part melodrama The Spiders and Robert Wiene’s paradigm-changing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The cast included Alfred Abel, a star of Metropolis and scads of other films, and Lil Dagover, a veteran of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Lang’s Destiny (1921). Murnau had a distinguished coterie at hand. What he didn’t have was unlimited money, since Weimar Germany was entering the first vicious years of the hyperinflation that later fueled the Nazis’ rise, but budget constraints didn’t noticeably damage the film, a deliberately claustrophobic affair even when characters are out and about in Breslau, where the story is set. 

Most of the narrative is an extended flashback from the perspective of Lorenz Lubota (Abel), a man recalling his past after being released from prison. He’s a low-grade civil servant and aspiring poet who lives with his discontented mother (Frida Richard) and his ne’er-do-well sister, Melanie (Aud Egede-Nissen). Lorenz has a crush on Marie Starke (Dagover), the endearing daughter of a local bookbinder (Karl Etlinger) who believes the young man’s poetry has signs of genius and will make his fortune. That notion dissolves as soon as someone with actual taste gets a look at it, but by this time Lorenz has a new preoccupation. A two-horse carriage driven by gorgeous Veronika Harlan (Lya de Putti) knocks him over in the street, and she helps him to his feet, gazing into his face with hypnotic intensity. Instantly smitten, Lorenz chases Veronika down but learns that she’s wealthy, engaged, and probably unattainable by the likes of him. Seeking solace and distraction, he now sets his sights on Melitta (de Putti again), a Veronika lookalike who has the same rapacious nature as her mother (Ilka Grüning), a greedy baroness. Still fixated on Veronika’s image, Lorenz courts Melitta with money he doesn’t have, borrowing from his Aunt Schwabe (Grete Berger), an avaricious pawnbroker, and then stealing from her in a couple of schemes—first a scam, later an outright burglary—devised by Wigottschinski (Anton Edthofer), who is the aunt’s assistant and also Melanie’s roguish boyfriend. Everything ultimately goes wrong, but there is hope for Lorenz’s future when the story’s feature-length flashback finally ends.

Phantom partakes of familiar expressionist tropes, as Bergstrom rightly notes in her brief but informative video essay. One is the juxtaposition of a passive man and an aggressive woman, here embodied by Lorenz, an unassuming slacker, and several female characters who clearly surpass him in the assertiveness department. Another, more interesting theme is the fascination with doubles and doppelgängers that anchors romantic narratives from Edgar Allan Poe to Oscar Wilde and courses through such major expressionist films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, Paul Leni’s multichapter Waxworks (1924), Arthur Robison’s oneiric Warning Shadows (1923), and The Student of Prague, a recurring favorite that was filmed by Stellan Rye in 1913, again by Henrik Galeen in 1926, and as a talkie by Robison in 1935.

Veronika is the phantom of Phantom, an elusive figure longed for by Lorenz but utterly out of his league, and Melitta, played by the same performer, is a contrasting double who becomes phantomlike herself when the two women merge in cinematic dissolves mirroring Lorenz’s disordered imagination. In a sense, moreover, Lorenz is his own mentally divided double, so lacking in self-awareness that he becomes his own worst enemy, consumed by weakly resisted obsessions that lend other characters—Melitta, Wigottschinski, the baroness—the ability to disrupt his life and curtail his happiness. The power of Murnau’s film has little to do with commonsense psychology, however, and Sigmund Freud’s famous repetition-compulsion syndrome doesn’t explain away the sheer uncanniness (another Freudian term) of the way Lorenz keeps reliving the pivotal carriage accident, which reappears in three iterations, each visualized in a purposefully different way, as Bergstrom’s video illustrates—the first is patently artificial, the second is shrouded in inky darkness, the last is ghostly and harsh. This is cinema as hallucination, and the film’s superficially reassuring frame episodes (another frequent device in Weimar film) don’t dispel the anxiety at the story’s heart.

Whether despite or because of Murnau’s reduced budget, Phantom is punctuated by cinematic trickery that’s as cleverly efficient as it is appropriate to the weird narrative it serves. Warm devised numerous contrivances—detailed miniatures, rotating platforms, scenery cranes and elevators—that bring Lorenz’s disoriented visions and experiences to life, as when the shadows of tall buildings appear to pursue him as he flees down a street, evoking urban paranoia of unnerving strength. Decades later Warm reconstructed some of his original models and designs, and Bergstrom’s video displays some of them. “The great technical effort required for special effects like [these] is not noticeable to the viewer and it must not be,” Warm remarked, adding that “the press usually credits these effects to the cinematographer.” That comment slyly upstages the help he undoubtedly received from not one but two cinematographers, the seasoned Axel Graatkjär and the otherwise obscure Theophan Ouchakoff.

As proficient as Warm’s effects and Murnau’s atmospherics are, the overall look of Phantom is less insistently unhinged than readers of Hauptmann’s novel might expect. While the book and movie tell the same story, Hauptmann’s prose is more emphatically gothic than most of the film, recalling the morbidity of Poe, the fantasticality of E.T.A. Hoffmann, and the inspired decadence of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, which was published soon after Phantom premiered. Murnau is subtler, working more in the finely gauged manner of Abel Gance and Marcel L’Herbier than in the insistently darksome style that Hauptmann embraces. But this doesn’t dilute the saturnine resonance of Murnau’s film. In her classic 1952 study The Haunted Screen, film historian Lotte Eisner connects Phantom with an “Expressionist narcissism” whereby a protagonist’s troubled mindset becomes the hypersubjective lens through which an entire place and time are defined and depicted; in another passage she describes a sequence as “a chaos of objects” with a table that inexplicably turns, streets that are “swept along in a fantastic maelstrom,” and stairs that “go up and down beneath feet which, even when they do not move, seem to be unstable.” These things transpire in a studio-created Breslau that is based on careful scouting by Murnau and Warm yet paradoxically timeless and indistinct, in keeping with the distorted perceptions of Lorenz’s increasingly distressed mentality. 

Murnau was a fine director of actors, and the performances in Phantom underscore the film’s position on the borderline between expressionist otherworldliness and the so-called New Objectivity movement that some of his later films helped crystallize. Abel’s handsome face and gentle demeanor establish Lorenz as an attractive hero in the early scenes and make his deterioration both pathetic and sympathetic later on. The ingenue Marie is a wholly congenial innocent in Dagover’s hands, de Putti is equally persuasive in each of her contrasting roles, and Edthofer is the sort of villain you love to hate. Not one portrayal strikes a false note, and their consistency helps a sometimes phantasmagorical movie keep at least one foot planted in a recognizably real world. 

Apart from Bergstrom’s video essay, the only extras on Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray disc are an orchestral score by Robert Israel, which enhances the film’s drama without ever intruding or showing off, and a string of cast and crew biographies that contain rudimentary information, require a great deal of clicking, and would be far handier if they were printed on a leaflet. But what really matters is the excellent transfer of an excellent restoration, complete with rich color tints and original German intertitles with English subtitles. Phantom is not Murnau’s crowning achievement, but it’s wunderbar all the same.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

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