Masters of Cinema moves closer to its goal of releasing every extant film directed by F. W. Murnau with Phantom (1922) and Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (The Grand Duke’s Finances, 1924), a superb, two-disc set of two lesser-known pictures made between Nosferatu in 1922 and Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) in 1924.
Phantom, a Kammerspiel study of sexual obsession based on a work by Gerhard Hauptmann, stars versatile Alfred Abel as a besotted semi-somnambulistic suitor and Lya de Putti as the elusive object of his affections. The Expressionistic dream sequence in which buildings topple down upon Abel as he creeps furtively down the street was used again by Murnau two years later to even greater effect, with structures crashinging down upon Emil Jannings in Der letzte Mann.
The Grand Duke’s Finances, which boasts opulent Babelsberg sets by Rochus Gliese and Erich Czerwonski and Karl Freund’s incomparable cinematography, is a delightful Mediterranean - not Ruritanian - comedy (a genre in which Murnau seldom worked) about a penniless grand duke (Harry Liedtke), an oily confidence trickster (Alfred Abel), assorted revolutionaries, and the Crown Princess of Russia (Mady Christians). Although Alfred Abel is remembered only for his role in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), his performances in the two Murnau pictures as well as Dimitri Buchowetsky’s Sappho are appreciably more memorable.
Phantom comes to us in a stunning multi-tinted restoration from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Institut, The Grand Duke’s Finances an equally magnificent multi-tinted restoration by the Lumiere Project.
The most recent film restorations, licenced from the F.W. Murnau Stiftung, Germany
Original German-language intertitles with newly translated optional English-language subtitles
Audio commentary by film-scholar David Kalat on Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs
A lengthy booklet containing a new essay on both films by professor and film-scholar Janet Bergstrom
More!
Film Description
Two Films by F.W. Murnau. After filming the landmark Nosferatu, the silent cinema's master innovator demonstrated his versatility with a pair of films that explored the dimensions of the psychodrama and the adventure-programmer. All the Murnau characteristics are present: a vibrant naturalism, exquisite imagery, passages of dreamlike reverie, and an atmosphere redolent with romantic longing.
In Phantom, an aspiring poet on the verge of what he takes for a big break experiences a chance encounter with a beautiful woman in the street - and falls headlong into love and fantasy. With debts piling up and his promised literary celebrity failing to materialise, the poet descends into obsession, deception, and, ultimately, a criminal act in this delirious film that stands as an early precursor of Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs sees Murnau exploiting the Mediterranean clime to film the tale of a rakish duke whose lifestyle has dried up his noble coffers. When word arrives about the existence of valuable sulphur deposits on his tiny duchy of Abacco, a comic adventure of high-seas intrigue, 'animal impersonators', and the Crown Princess of Russia unreels at a sprightly pace. Max Schreck (the mythic actor behind the makeup of Nosferatu's Count Orlok two years earlier) appears in a supporting role, in Murnau's nimblest film.
