Alraune

Two monsters meet in this second adaptation of Hanns Heinz Ewers' novel: Paul Weneger, actor and director of "Der Golem" (1920), and Brigitte Helm, diva of Fritz Lang's masterpiece "Metropolis" (1927).

Classified as science fiction and horror, the film was more of a fantasy to me. A scientist decides to inseminate a prostitute with a mandrake root that grew thanks to the semen of a murderer who was hanged on a tree. In the first scene, we learn that it is a full moon night and that someone will dig directly under the hanged man's body to remove the root. It will be used for the experiment. The result will be a living creature: Alraune.

The film (or the copy I saw) makes a discreet ellipsis when the prostitute enters the scientist's experiment room, and in the next scene, we see young Alraune (mandrake, in German) in a boarding school ruled by nuns, from which she will escape with the scientist's worthless nephew. In the story that continues, there is no science fiction or terror, but the drama of a woman who ignores her origin. Her attempts to love and live freely are frustrated every time her "father" intrudes. He is convinced that Alraune has inherited anti-social traits from her prostitute mother and murderous father. However, what Alraune really wants is to enjoy life: she escapes with a magician to a circus, flirts with the animal trainer and meets a good viscount who falls for her and proposes marriage. But papa scientist does not give up, so she decides to take revenge.

Brigitte Helm, who, as in "Metropolis", alternates between innocent sweetness and malicious eroticism, contributes to the fascination of the story. Director Henrik Galeen uses expressionist images, although the realistic approach predominates. It is a pity that the restored version is not available and what circulates is a vile copy of a VHS edition in English, with music often out of place and with the name of the protagonist changed to Mandrake. However, curiosity is curiosity and there is no one who can beat our archaeological passion for cinema.

I've just seen the world theatrical premier of the Munich Filmmuseum's restoration of this classic, presented by University of Chicago's Documentary Film Group in cooperation with Chicago's Goethe Institute and Lufthansa. Live piano accompaniment was provided by the excellent Aljoshe Zimmerman with an introduction by Stefan Drößler, director of the Filmmuseum. Zimmerman composed the score for the Filmmuseum and additionally accompanied "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" (also restored and presented as a double feature). The restoration was pieced together largely from surviving reels from Russia and Denmark, which focused on Alraune's mother and father, respectively. The restoration sports quite a few intertitles, in German, some of which were present in the original. Absolutely remarkable, and a must for anyone who appreciates excellent cinema.

There can't be a review giving this silent movie any proper judgement. One star is as possible as ten stars are since you are guessing anyway, because whatever version you watch, it is incomplete: The longest version up to date, being merged from Russian and Italian analog material, is still missing 400 m. Especially a dance performance of vanguard artist Valeska Geert is totally lost, among other scenes. And this might also explain why we don't see laboratory scenes of Alraune's making.

So this movie lacks coherence, though the acting of Wegener and Helm is superb and subtle, unlike common silent movies. Still, if you are not (yet) into silent movies or Brigitte Helm's eyes, better start with one that wasn't so much tampered with. But if you'll watch this one, then you are to enjoy a great allegory about humanity being proud of a creation of its own making, then falling for it which works on the destruction of its creator.

An unscrupulous doctor (Paul Wegener) creates a living 'mandrake', the soulless offspring of a prostitute inseminated with the semen taken from an executed criminal. The unnatural progeny, Alraune (German for mandrake), is played by temptress extraordinaire Brigitte Helm, best known for playing the saintly Maria and her evil Maschinenmensch avatar in Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' (1927). Although the film is sometimes classified as horror/science fiction, it is more of a romantic melodrama, as the doctor slowly becomes infatuated with his creation, who is beginning to aspire to human feelings. Human artificial insemination had been around since the late 1700s, so other than the choice of sperm donor, there is nothing particularly novel about the premise, which is essentially a test of the frequently overly-simplified 'nature/nurture' dichotomy (in reality, it is nature 'plus' nurture, not nature 'or' nurture). The eponymous 1911 novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers had been films twice before this version and several times afterwards but the 1928 silent is considered to be truest to the original story. The film has not aged well - not a lot happens and the silent acting comes off as a bit theatrical. There are several versions on-line, with and without music. The image quality in the one I watched was not great but the score, a mix of recognisable 'classics', helped pass the time spent watching the relatively boring film.

I guess my feeling is what you may hear about this film before you watch it, is actually more interesting than watching the film itself.

Not only are virtually all the scenes in this film dialogue scenes, there is very little going on visually other than photographing these scenes in a static way. To explain other problems I need to go vaguely into some details but they don't contain any real spoilers, no specifics will be gone into.

So you know going in, this is a sort of Frankenstein film, meaning a man creates a being in this case a female. So you'd expect a creation scene? Nope, not in this film. There is an escape scene later, you'd expect that'd be an exciting scene. Nope they tell you about the escape afterwards. The film is just not interesting in anything purely visual, the exception being a couple shots of the Mandrake root. Kind of like Vertigo, which is a film whose unspoken subject in Necrophilia, this film's unspoken subject is Incest. But also like Vertigo the film isn't really about this "unspoken" subject really, it's just there for as Hitch might say, "naughty" people to think about outside the real content of the film itself.

As a talky film and lacking the ability to talk the film moves at a very slow pace. This is the type silent film where they show people's lips and mouths moving for a long time, you cut to the intertitle to explai what they say, then you cut back to the scene and watch them still speaking. This is not a unique thing to this silent film, but the smarter filmmakers didn't do this.

The lead female Alraune is acted pretty well, but all the acting is pretty surface level and pretty "Big," again not something that can be common in silent films, but not in the best of them.

Also as I write this in 2025, no good version of the film exists so the translations I could find from German into English were pretty bad and the visual quality also poor. I hear a restoration exists in HD. That would certainly help the film. It will however remain a static and talky film.