Algol - Tragödie der Macht

In the arts and literature there have been a number of works detailing advanced civilizations arriving on earth in their attempt to better the conditions we humans face here on Earth. Cinema is no exception. The first movie to have an alien travel to earth with the intention to create positive change was September 1920's "Algol: The Tragedy of Power." The German-produced film's aim is not so much to illustrate a science fiction technological marvel delivered by the planet Algol, but to reflect mankind's behavior when such an all-powerful energy-producing machine is in the hands of one ordinary person.

A coal miner, Emil Jannings, and his co-laborers face the daily drudgery of descending down the dark passages of earth to extract black coal for producing energy--the main source of heating and electricity back in the early 1900's. The inhabitants of the distant planet Algol observe these poor, retched workers and figure with just one of their clean energy machines, they could introduce to earthlings the power to eliminate coal and produce all the electricity the world would ever need. They send one of their deliverymen to give it to Jannings so he can share the machine's wonders with his fellow beings.

Despite all the good intentions of the Algols, their plan go awry. Jannings isn't going to distribute the knowledge nor the rewards of having Earth's monopoly of free energy with anyone. He creates a corrupt totalitarian hierarchy with his gift, setting an example of what director Hans Werckmeister, who produced just a handful of films in his short career, intended to reflect man's avarice when given such a tremendous treasure of power.

The movie covers a twenty-year span, from 1920 to 1940. It would be easy to see this as a prescient parable of Adolph Hitler's rise to power, creating his own totalitarian dictatorship. Werckmeister's message though was such power shouldn't be used to control the world but, as the Algol's intended, it should be used to elevate the planet's inhabitants.

ALGOL is a bit of a mess in which the film makers have attempted to graft together several recent successes in what is today considered a High Concept film -- producers being notoriously stupid, everything must be explained in less than sixty seconds. Here it's FAUST crossed with HIMMELSKIBBET only we'll do CALIGARI-style art direction. The producer nods ponderously and several months and a young fortune later, you have this mess.

Emil Jannings is a coal miner when the devil, in the form of John Gottowt gives him a machine that will produce endless power. Over the decades he grows immensely wealthy, everyone he cares about leaves him and everyone else is angry because he has bought Naples and wants to divert the Vaal from South Africa to water his garden. All the jobs in coal mines are gone, which also annoys everyone, since who would leave the depths of a coal mine given a choice? His wife dies, his daughter runs off with a socialist and his son kills him for the secret and Erna Morena, everyone dances badly and the movie ends abruptly so they can get another showing in that day.

Now, at first this is actually a good movie, except for John Gottowt, who must be the devil because he is cross-eyed. The UFA art direction is increasingly expressionistic up to the end of the prologue, when Jannings gets the marvelous power machine and the air of hellish fantasy works brilliantly. But after that we get a very Teutonic movie in which the subtext is that Work Makes Free, and people act increasingly badly and stupidly for no clear reason. The sets become massive but nothing is ever done with them. Emil Jannings starts out his starring role with a lovely performance, but by the midpoint everything seems to have been concentrated on putting him in a poor toupee and marcelling his eyebrows.

There is little to take away from this movie except the obvious conclusion that People Are No D***ed Good, and if that is the point.... well, it's far too much for far too little. A director who knew how to deal with the sets might have helped, or a screenwriter who knew how to cut a bloated script. But this is a production that got out of control and no one seems to have figured out what to do with it.

An alien (or perhaps a demon) from the star Algol offers rebellious coalminer Robert Herne (Emil Jennings) a machine that taps the energy of the distant star and generates unlimited electricity on Earth. Seduced by the promise of power and wealth, Herne rejects his devoted friend Maria (Hanna Ralph) and, as only he knows the secret of the alien machine, becomes the most powerful man in an increasingly mechanistic and decadent world. First Maria's son, then Maria herself, tries to convince Herne to reveal the secret so all mankind would benefit equally from the machine, an idea that worries his capitalist colleagues as well as his wastrel son and the son's grasping lover Yella Ward (Erna Morena), who decide to take the secret by force. The story is a simplistic 'power corrupts' cautionary tale, and the running comparison between Herne's cold, capitalistic domain and Maria's bucolic paradise is facile and heavy-handed. The acting is typical of the silent era, with a lot of melodramatic gesturing, and although there are a number deco or cubist images (which are repeated a number of times) and a striking climactic orgy scene (featuring expressionist exotic dancer Sebastian Droste), the film is visually uninteresting. Similar to 'A Message from Mars' (1913), there is only a veneer science fiction on the story. The opening discussions of the star Algol focus more on mysticism than on astronomy, and the character Algol, who tempts Herne, could be just as easily be a supernatural creature as an extraterrestrial. Herne's unlimited electricity comes from a machine that transfers power from the star Algol but it is only glimpsed and the 'technology' is never addressed. The film is essentially a retelling of Faust and the machine is a simply a material stand-in for the magical riches and power offered by the devil in the original tale. Algol is interesting as an example of German expressionist film-making during the Weimer Republic or as example of a very early proto-sci-fi film... interesting, but not very entertaining.

ALGOL is a sci-fi morality tale from the Germans following WWI. It is much closer in style to CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI than to the impending works of Lang and Murnau. ALGOL has some interesting Expressionist tendencies, all aimed at the tragic life of the main character, Robert Werne, played by Emil Jannings.

The most interesting part of the film is its science fiction core. An alien from a far away star is beamed to earth and meets Robert Werne. It is very much in vein of the "selling your soul to the devil" films that were popular at this time - in fact the star, Algol, is called a 'devil star'. The alien promises Werne an energy source that can take him far beyond his drudging work of shoveling coal. From this incredible secret, Werne becomes the most powerful man in the world - providing the world with the energy current it needs. Sort of like the Bill Gates story substituting energy for computers. Unlike Gates, however, there is no happiness in the ends of these means.

Jannings is a few years away from THE LAST LAUGH and THE LAST COMMMAND. Maybe, too he need directors on the level of Von Sternberg and Murnau to push him for a large performance. His acting, while excellent, is not on the level of those later works. As a whole, this is very old-fashioned. Again, like CALIGARI, this is rather two-dimensional and lacks the sophisticated touch that would have made it a tour-de-force. The art direction makes up for this. The highly stylized main hall of Werne's home seems to be as long as its distant vanishing point. There are some nice artistic shots of the night skies, showing where the Algol star is located. The costumes are equally stylized, and if the print I viewed were better, I'd imagine some great detail would be evident.

Ultimately, this original alien premise settles into a morality tale and is about the abuse of power and how too much power can overcome a single person. In real life, Bill Gates was able to find that donating much of his huge wealth would become an extremely large project and very worthy of his time and consideration. ALGOL does not even try to ask the question of whether something good could be made of this power. It is too primitive in that way. However, it remains an impressive attempt at sci-fi and reflects well the time and place it was made.

Beautiful art direction, okay acting, but disgusting manipulative MARXIST script that's really shows the region and time when this movie came out; spoiler alert for the people in the 1920's, communism/socialism never worked.

The film is against capitalism and technological advancement and it makes that clear since the very beginning by presenting those elements as a "gift from the Devil" to our protagonist in the shape of a machine that produces unlimited energy; but the film has one fatal flaw, it shoots itself on the foot with how it presents its own message. It completely fails to show communists/socialists on a positive light, though it thinks it does.

The world in the film is divided in two sides, the one that embraced capitalism and technological advancement, and the other smaller one that embraced communism/socialism and rejected the technological advance.

All the characters in the communist/socialist side of the world are conformists that make sure that everyone else is a conformist too, or else they cast them away; as they did to our protagonist; a miner, casted away by his own wife once he wanted to start using his gift to IMPROVE THE LIVING CONDITIONS of humanity, including his own and hers. After the capitalist side prospered for 20 years the socialist side became more selfish, resentful, jealous, and entitled. They had the oportunity to be part of the rest of the world but they rejected their offer because the technological advancement would cost them their job at the coil mine, despite they were clearly tired of it since the very beginning and thought they were being exploited.

*Tip for communist/socialist writers: if you think is wrong to replace human workers with machines, don't show them working on DANGEROUS and MISERABLE conditions that they don't want to go through neither.

So, after 20 years of misery in the communist side, they realized that they needed that technology after all, but they couldn't pay for it as the rest of the world did because they were 20 years behind them; echonomically and technologicaly, thanks to their choice of rejecting it when it was offered in the first place, so now they demanded it for FREE. They called our protagonist "selfish" and said that he had the "obligation" of giving it not only to them but to everyone for free, and if he didn't give it for FREE they threatened him with destroying it so NO ONE in the world could have it. Are they suppossed to be the movie's """"heroes"""?

Meanwhile during the whole film, nobody in the "capitalist" side of the world looked poor, nor miserable, nor being exploited, nor being exploiting the communist side of the world, everyone looked happy and prospering. And the protagonist who is the main representative of capitalism remained rational and positive until almost the very end, because that hit the fan once the communists/socialists took over.

Oh, and in another attempt to make people believe that capitalism is synonym with blind greed on top of "evil"; his son wanted to kill him in order to inherit the energy business and be able to get in bed with a gold digger that put him that condition. That's not capitalism, but if we want count it as such that makes one bad capitalist character against millions of good ones, versus hordes and hordes of destructive communists/socialists, so no check mate for their advocates.

There are two main messages that this film communicates regardless were intended or not: 1- Power and progress are "evil".

2 - Don't seek to improve your own life or the life of others, just wait until others improve their their lives, then take away the product of their effort and somehow that would make you a "better person".

I only give 1 star to movies I think should be destroyed and erased from memory, but this one gets 2 because of its pretty art department, and because it needs to be preserved as part of an embarrasing part of history that needs to be studied in order to never repeat it.

The lesson to learn: Political/ideological propaganda in entertainment ages as good as milk ages in a broken refrigerator.

PS. If you watched Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" you can see this movie had a strong influence in his script; which is arguably as bad as this one.