Waxworks (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Leo Birinsky and Alexander Kwartiroff; directed by Paul Leni; screenplay by Henrik Galeen; cinematography by Helmar Lerski; art direction by Paul Leni and Alfred Junge; starring Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Kraus, Wilhelm Dieterle, Olga Belajeff, John Gottowt, Paul Biensfeldt, and Ernst Legal. Blu-ray and DVD, color tinted, 81 min., 1924. A Flicker Alley release.

A defining feature of Paul Leni’s 1924 classic Waxworks, known as Das Wachsfigurenkabinett in its native Germany, is that it’s terrific fun to watch. All of the greatest German Expressionist films are photographically atmospheric, architecturally inventive, and psychologically magnetic, and some—Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Karlheinz Martin’s From Morn to Midnight (1920), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)—are as dexterously entertaining as they are aesthetically radical. But the deliberate rhythms and unhurried narratives of such otherwise magisterial productions as Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), and Henrik Galeen’s The Student of Prague (1926) are more conducive to analysis and contemplation than to the kinetic enjoyment provided by movies with less rarefied creative agendas. By frisky contrast, Waxworks moves at a lively clip, spinning a string of stories (either three or four, depending on how you count) with a variety of moods, tempos, and settings. It’s also as refreshingly eccentric as any Expressionist landmark, which is quite a distinction, given the bedrock eccentricity for which the movement is rightly celebrated. 

Although the full-length original version has been lost since soon after its premiere—the negative was destroyed in a fire, as restorationist Julia Wallmüller notes in a booklet essay and video interview—a surviving version about twenty-five minutes shorter has long been available, and Flicker Alley’s scrupulously produced Blu-ray and DVD edition is as fine a digital rendering as we’re likely to see. Leni would surely have loved the textured images and the care taken with tinting and toning, which are matched to diverse locales and times of day. After training as a painter, he designed sets and costumes for the theater and then for cinema, making his directorial debut in 1917 and becoming a total filmmaker, deeply engaged with everything from construction and lighting to camera placement and editing. Although his primary instincts appear to have been painterly and sculptural, he was clearly on the same wavelength as cinematographer Helmar Lerski, and he worked wonders with his all-star cast: Emil Jannings, whose legendary performance in Murnau’s The Last Laugh debuted in the same year; Conrad Veidt, a veteran of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and soon-to-be title character of Leni’s 1928 masterpiece The Man Who Laughs; Werner Krauss, who played Caligari and dozens of other roles; and Wilhelm Dieterle, who later became William Dieterle and achieved, like Jannings and Veidt, major Hollywood success. Leni also migrated to Hollywood, where his films included The Man Who Laughs as well as The Cat and the Canary (1927), an energetic entry in the old-dark-house genre, and The Last Warning (1929), a mildly entertaining murder mystery. One can only speculate on what he would have accomplished if a neglected dental infection hadn’t killed him at age forty-four.

The title of Waxworks describes the milieu and the concept. A young man, called the Poet, comes to a bustling fairground armed with a newspaper ad seeking an imaginative writer to pen attention-getting publicity for a wax museum. Warmly welcomed by the twinkly-eyed Showman and his smiling Daughter, the Poet takes the job and meets the establishment’s chief attractions: life-size replicas of Haroun-al-Raschid, the ninth-century caliph of Baghdad; Ivan the Terrible, the sixteenth-century Russian czar; and Jack the Ripper, here conflated with Spring-Heeled Jack, both being nineteenth-century English murderers. (A fourth figure in the group—identified on the pedestal as Rinaldo Rinaldini, an Italian highway robber—is a remnant of an episode that went unfilmed when the production’s budget ran out.) Instantly inspired by these fearsome simulacra, the Poet sets to work on the “startling tales” requested by his new employer. Leni sets to work as well, deploying an omnibus format anticipated by such dissimilar works as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) and Fritz Lang’s Destiny (Der müde Tod, 1921), itself a splendid Expressionist achievement, although Lang disliked that label. The structure of Waxworks is as asymmetrical as its dreamlike architecture, with the Haroun-al-Raschid segment filling some forty-five minutes, Ivan the Terrible running half that long, Jack the Ripper squeezed into about five minutes, and the framing episodes adding up to about the same. This lopsided configuration probably stemmed from the production’s shaky finances—a sad reminder of the German hyperinflation that peaked when Waxworks was in the works—but it suits the general tenor of the project just fine. In such delirious circumstances there’s no need for a stopwatch. 

Haroun’s adventures give the picture a jocular start, embodied by roly-poly Jannings sporting extra avoirdupois in a fat suit. Coincidence is the key to this segment: one evening Haroun pays an incognito call on Maimune, the comely wife of a baker named Assad, leaving a dummy in his bed to cover his tracks, and at the same moment Assad sneaks into the royal palace, hoping to steal a magic wishing ring but getting only a facsimile of the ring from the facsimile of the caliph. When he returns home, the cowardly caliph hides in the bakery oven, whereupon a final trick by the wife leads everyone to a happy ending. On paper this is merely farcical but in Leni’s hands it becomes richly phantasmatic, counterpointing broadly comic performances with incidents recalling the narrative extravagance of The Arabian Nights and scenery and décor that Antonio Gaudí might have crafted.

The second episode is vastly darker in mood and even more daring in its grotesquerie. Ivan the Terrible was “a blood-crazed monster…who turned cities into cemeteries,” the Poet writes in his tale, wearing “a tiara of mouldering bones” and employing Death and the Devil as his counselors. His favorite place is a torture chamber where he times the agonizing demise of his victims to the passage of sand through an hourglass. After escaping assassination when an arrow hits the wrong target, he fears that his official poisoner has turned against him and tries to avert death by inverting the fateful hourglass, an act he must endlessly repeat for the rest of his paranoid life. While the acting in the first episode was drolly ridiculous, here it’s morbidly intense, reinforced by chiaroscuro lighting and gloom-laden settings. It’s hard to watch Haroun’s story without flashing on Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad, another 1924 release, and cinephiles viewing the czar’s episode will think of its echoes in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and Sergei Eisenstein’s stylized Ivan the Terrible epics (1944, 1958), which are among its few rivals for fabulous faux-czarist trappings. Ivan’s hourglass is an especially ingenious touch, resembling the ouroboros-like symbol for infinity and evoking the endlessness of the evildoer’s demented future.

Spring-Heeled Jack has the smallest amount of screen time and the greatest amount of competition from Leni’s visual imagination, which throws off all restraints as Waxworks careens through its tumultuous climax. Exhausted from his authorial labors, the Poet falls asleep and dreams that Jack is stalking him and the Daughter through the fairground we saw at the beginning, now a chaotic landscape of skewed proportions, impossible angles, ubiquitous shadows, and oneiric objects, all crashing and colliding in purposefully mismatched juxtapositions and superimpositions as Jack draws ever nearer, a blade in his grasp and malice in his eyes. In storytelling terms, the outcome is stale even for 1924, with the eruption of dread and violence revealed as merely the Poet’s momentary nightmare. But in cinematic terms this segment is the film’s inspired capstone, flooding the eye with visions as extravagant as anything in the Expressionist canon, including the unhinged iconography of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, probably its closest forebear. As his hallucinations fade, the Poet laughs at Jack’s wax statue, kisses the Daughter, and probably vows to write less harrowing stuff in the future.

In the audio commentary for the new release, critic Adrian Martin cites a long roster of experts, from classic sages like Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer to contemporary scholars like David Bordwell and Thomas Elsaesser, while lucidly conveying his own clearheaded views. One theme he emphasizes is the prevalence of doubling, which is built into the very concept of the film, and I’d go even further with that idea, since for me the movie is a veritable symphony of doubles, doppelgängers, and dead ringers. The motif is introduced by the title, amplified in the wax-museum prologue, then reiterated and varied in each of the stories, where the same actors play multiple characters. In the first episode, the caliph’s bulging paunch is doubled by his distended turban; the chess pieces he manipulates are like the people he toys with; he duplicates himself with the bogus decoy in his bed; his attempted adultery is mirrored by Assad’s attempted thievery; and so on. In the second episode, fearful symmetries abound in Ivan’s palace, where doorways bear matching icons and the hourglass has twin globes, and after the czar escapes assassination when the slayer shoots a lookalike, his deranged fear of poisoning turns him into an obsessive-compulsive likeness of his statue in the museum, which is equipped with a windup spring. The last and shortest episode also culminates with doubling, as the Poet dreams of being murdered but finds that Jack’s deadly knife is his own innocent pen poking harmlessly into his chest.

Other examples are everywhere, and the patterns stay fresh because the recurrence of visual and narrative pieces is countered by the volatile strangeness of Waxworks as a whole. Although dreaming doesn’t become an explicit motif until the final segment, every frame has the uncanny aura of uneasy sleep, which is the territory of both Sigmund Freud and David Lynch, intuitive cartographers of the twilight zone where boundaries blur between dream and actuality, original and copy, lifelike waxwork and living prototype, profilmic reality and motion-picture illusion. Martin points out the connections with psychoanalysis and surrealism and adds a healthy reminder that the film’s brooding Gothicism coexists with plenty of comedy.

So many audio commentaries are repetitious, scattered, or glib that I often think the genre has outlived its usefulness, but Martin’s remarks are a happy exception. The disc’s other important extra is the first entry in the Rebus Film series that Leni made in 1925 and 1926. These short entertainments combine his avant-garde inclinations with his flair for entertainment, presenting on-screen crossword puzzles with squares to fill in and motion-picture clues to what letters go where. The puzzles are not puzzling—elephants are a clue for “India,” hep cats hint at “Jazzband,” and the like—but when originally shown, the game derived a soupcon of suspense by appearing in two parts, giving the clues before the evening’s main attraction, the answers after it. While this isn’t high art, it’s energetic fun. The same goes for the disc’s video interview with critic Kim Newman, who likens Spring-Heeled Jack to such later screen slayers as Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers of the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises, and links Waxworks with literary antecedents (e.g., The Arabian Nights, perennially “a big thing in anthology films”) as well as subsequent movie variations on Jack the Ripper, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929). Flicker Alley also provides two music tracks, a piano score by Richard Siedhoff and a score for small ensemble by Bernd Schultheis, both serviceable if not memorable.

In all, this is a first-rate edition of a masterpiece that doesn’t have quite as much élan nowadays as, say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Murnau’s spectacular Faust (1926), but retains enormous power as an exemplar of German Expressionism at its spooky, rambunctious best. Martin describes Jack’s self-reflexive episode as a phantasmagoria of cinema itself, and that’s an apt summation of the mischievous, mercurial movie as a whole.

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 books on film.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3