Cauchemars et hallucinations

The latest entry on my kick of watching at least one film from every year and in reverse chronological order.

For half my life the oldest movie I'd ever seen was Calagari and I found a worthy successor.

Did I have to watch this in bursts? Yes. But I was happy to dip into what in a different era might have been an anthology series instead.

The wraparound holds it together and doesn't take up too much time. Each of the stories are efficiently told but linger in that agreeable way for those who just want to bask in the vintageness of shadowy, chiaroscuro black and white will the actors where the perfect amount of mascara.

It took me a while to notice that they re-use the same few actors a lot which really is the mark of good actin. I think bold acting is perfect for silent features. It's hard to really see them in the less than Standard definition anyway...

The stories all seem familiar now but perhaps that's for the best in case you want to skip this.

A feature very much of its time but what a time.

The original negative of Eerie Tales is lost; what remains is a partial restoration.

The film, an anthology, begins with a prelude in an antiquarian bookshop. After the shopkeeper turns out the lights at night, the characters in three portraits -- the Devil, a prostitute, and Death -- come alive and read scary stories, each tale depicted featuring the same actors (Reinhold Schünzel, Anita Berber and Conrad Veidt) who play the living paintings.

In the first story, the Apparition, a man falls for a woman who is being stalked by her abusive ex-husband. When the woman disappears, the man discovers that the woman died of the plague. Or at least I think that is what happened. I have to admit that I was little confused, the lack of adequate title cards for the dialogue making this one difficult to follow.

Next up is The Hand. Two men play a game of dice to decide which of them will romance the beauty that they both have the hots for. The loser of the game promptly strangles the winner, but is haunted by the dead man's ghost. A mediocre tale of the macabre, although the ghostly footprints and the spectral hand effects were fun.

Director Richard Oswald tackles Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat next. I am sure you know the story to this one, suffice to say that this version holds few surprises but is still reasonably entertaining.

The penultimate story is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club, in which a man is inducted into a club where the members gamble with their lives. This one is a lot of fun, as the man draws the unlucky Ace of Spades from a deck of cards and is given only a few minutes left to live. Both The Black Cat and The Suicide Club would be revisited by Oswald for his superior 1932 talkie Tales of the Uncanny.

Lastly, we have The Spectre, a rather weak tale to finish with. A married woman is romanced by a baron, her jealous husband pulling some spooky pranks to frighten the bounder.

Having read their stories, the three characters from the portraits resume their places within their frames.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for all of the heavy black eye make-up.

Any devotee of vintage horror films will want to see Conrad Veidt in an anthology of fantastic tales, but will be disappointed if he expects another "Waxworks" or "Destiny." This looks as if it had been tossed together rather casually, as an actors' lark, and the actors, especially Veidt, mug exuberantly. The five tales, sketchily told, are "The Black Cat," "The Suicide Club," stories of hauntings real and fake, and the old anecdote about the man whose wife disappears from an inn where everyone swears she was never there. These are read by three figures who have stepped out of paintings in an antiquarian bookshop and driven off the (exceedingly odd) owner. The three appear in all the stories, usually with the two men as rivals for the woman. The tone of the framing story and one of the tales from the books is comic, and that of the others deliberately exaggerated. The prevailing weirdness tends to neutralize the scary moments, and so does the Wagnerian music with which the version distributed by LS Video has been unwisely scored. This version doesn't look bad compared to some old films on video (one can clearly make out the actors' faces), but the condition of the print makes it impossible to tell how the film looked originally. It's no classic, but an entertaining view of a young Veidt running the gamut of extreme emoting.

"Richard Oswald's "Eerie Tales" debuted with a length of 2318 metres, July 16, 1920, after a premiere on November 6, 1919. The original negative is considered lost. This restoration is from Cinematheque Francaise. The film currently has a length of 2230 metres."

Paintings of Death, the devil, and a prostitute come to life in a bookstore, after hours, and read each other five tales of horror, to amuse themselves, in this early anthology film.

Each of the three leads take on different roles in each of the five stories, giving each actor an opportunity to show a wide range, and the film has a good look to it, plus I've always had a certain affinity for anthology horrors, but the problem with this is that it's not scary. I was hoping for a bit more fright for my 31 Days of Halloween horror. Die Erscheinung, by Anselma Heine, and Poe's Die Schwarze Katze were the best of the segments, while the rest were overly dramatic.

EERIE TALES is perhaps the earliest example of the horror anthology film. It has a wraparound tale starring Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schunzel, and Anita Berber as characters in bookshop portraits come to life. The stories are:

THE APPARITION- A man (Veidt) saves a woman (Berber) from an attack by her insane husband (Schunzel). When the two new acquaintances arrive at a hotel, things take a strange and unpredictable turn.

THE HAND- Two men (Veidt and Schunzel) roll dice to determine who will go out with the woman (Berber) they both desire. The outcome leads to tragedy for one, and a haunting for the other. A seance proves to be very interesting.

THE BLACK CAT- A man (Veidt) covets a drunkard's (Schunzel) beautiful wife (Berber). When loverboy makes his move, the besotted husband gets wise. Horror ensues. This is a particularly good version of Edgar Allan Poe's story about the pesky feline of the title.

THE SUICIDE CLUB- A man (Schunzel) becomes curious about a group of men meeting in a supposedly uninhabited house. They're led by a mysterious figure (Veidt). Upon being allowed to join the club of the title, he realizes that it's far darker than he could ever have imagined. This one has a nice twist at the end. Ms. Berber has a very small part.

THE SPECTRE- The bored, neglected wife (Berber) of a nobleman (Veidt) believes that her luck may be changing when a handsome Baron (Schunzel) happens to need lodging for the evening. When the husband is called away suddenly, the Baron sees his chance for romance. This one is the weakest of the stories. It's okay, but sort of a letdown after the other four.

The wraparound wraps up in comedic fashion. All in all, a solid, silent classic worth watching...