Der Geisterzug

At only 58 minutes, there appears to be something missing from this available print of the Anglo-German production directed by Geza von Bolvary and based on the play by Arnold Ridley (misspelled as Redley) in the elaborate and artsy opening credits.

A disparate group of travelers are stranded in a railway station on a dark and stormy night. There's no haunted house in this story, and one is not needed since the train depot is haunted by a stationmaster who was run over by a train that doesn't exist.

As with all of these stories where people are thrown together unexpectedly, we soon learn that they are perhaps not what they at first appear to be. There's a bickering married couple, another couple on their honeymoon, an old temperance woman, a bizarre bearded man, the current station master, and later a mysterious woman and her pursuers.

Although a silent film, the imaginative special effects and and animated titles cards more than make up for the lack of train sounds and certainly hold the viewer's attention.

Ilse Bois (sister of Curt Bois) plays the old maid who is tempted to taste the evil whiskey she has campaigned against. The results are very funny. Guy Newall, the English actor, plays the bearded man who seems to be a total fool. The other actors are all good in their roles.

This proved to be Bois' final film. She eventually fled Germany and worked in theater. Newall transitioned to talkies but died in 1937

Although the title is familiar as the play written by Private Godfrey very few people have actually seen it. Even less familiar is how close the British and Continental film industries were in the twenties, Alfred Hitchcock actually making his first two films in Germany. Despite the lead going to quintessentially English lead Guy Newell the original silent version was filmed in Berlin with photography by Otto Kanturek and design by Oscar Werndorff - both of whom would subsequently settle in Britain - and the chic twenties look of the women all share a very Germanic ambience; while Geza von Bolvary was one of many Magyars to make his mark in British films.

Considering its theatrical origins it works surprisingly well in visual terms, containing such fanciful sights - characteristic of the silent era - as Isle Bois' alcohol-induced vision of an animated pair of bellows joining a pair of items of luggage in a dance.

Michel Curtiz was rumored to have begun this late silent version of the Arnold Ridley standard and that might account for the change of tone between the atmospheric rain swept exteriors and the comic studio indoors material.

The film is spotted with striking images - the Felixtowe passengers scurrying across to the London connection, the station master slumped over the revolving bridge controls, a Guido Seeber style fantasy with multiple eyes. The camera is used inventively and the unfamiliar players inhabit stock types effectively. How this meshes with Bois transformed into Mary Poppins by her umbrella is questionable.

The film is a presentable enough entertainment but absence of the train sounds which make the climax commanding when played in a theatre undermines the work. The dream sequence flashing lights are no substitute.

The film's railway background, eccentric comedy and police intrigue show up here before they will become familiar in the British films of Hitchcock.