Algol - Tragödie der Macht

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.

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.

I made it through this by dredging up a bit of my college German (the dialogue boxes are in German) and managing to get about a fourth of it and extrapolating the rest. This is more of a film about the evils of ambition than a science fiction film. Once the alien (devil) has had his way with Robert Herne, it now is about him. Herne is given immense power in the form of machine that can produce electricity for the world. Instead of seeing the potential for making things better for humanity, the former lowly coal miner becomes a boss, using his riches for outrageous purposes. He throws away all the relationships he has and pretty much turns his son into a monster. He doesn't seem to get much enjoyment out of the rich, who hang on his every word, but he can't let go. There is a little bit of Von Stroheim's "Greed" here, though that is quite another story. It does go on to tell a morality tale of the life on the farm versus the evils of usurping businesses, the bucolic winning out. But is it really about socialism being the answer? I really believe that this is more about personal evil. If there is anything unfair, it is a basic view of humanity. Here it is simplistic and outrageous. Is there no middle ground here. Apparently, there is no merchant class. People revel in Bacchanalian orgies when given the chance. Anyway, this is a groundbreaking movie whose intentions laid the foundation for future German expressionism, even if it failed at times.

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.

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.