I watched John M. Stahl’s Back Street (1932) the other day. It’s a truly great film, gorgeous and heartbreaking, assuredly one of the finest melodramas ever made. It’s my first Stahl film, and one of my first impressions of him is that he’s a remarkably understated filmmaker. It’s a film whose big moments are expressed almost entirely through small gesture and close observation. I worry I make this comparison too lightly sometimes, but I really was reminded of Mizoguchi at points. This makes him in many ways a more difficult filmmaker to write about then, say, Sirk or Minnelli, directors of big gestures and brash images; Back Street works in such a subtle and quiet way that it feels almost obscene to inflict the crudity of language on it. But I’m a crude man, and words are what I know, so nonetheless I’d like to devote a few to one of these small gestures, perhaps the most important one in the whole film, and how it’s shaped by what surrounds it.

The situation, essentially, is that Ray’s (Irene Dunne) lover is married, but not to her. She’s just asked him for a child anyway, because she has little in the way of a life when he’s not with her, whiling her time away alone in the small apartment he provides for her, and he’s with her too little, too little by far, and they are in love, after all. He’s told her it’s impossible, unthinkable – “after all, you’re not my wife.” He sees the look on her face and in an instant apologizes. He didn’t mean to say it, but now it’s been said, and they both know its truth. A minute later he leaves, and for a moment the camera lingers on him in the hallway outside, his back to the camera, unreadable. Then we cut back to her, sitting on the couch, and for the first time you can just how young and carefree she no longer is. Irene Dunne’s expression, her performance, as infinite and subtle in this moment as the shadow of a cloud passing over a fresh grave, are what make the scene, of course, but it’s just as true that the scene could not be made without Stahl’s decision to shoot it wordlessly, unaccompanied, in a silence which is not the “silence” of silent cinema, but the real silence of being suddenly alone in a place that a moment before had seemed full of life, and now is so empty as to be unbearable. It’s this silence that makes her ball her hands into fists and knock them together, so quietly they can barely be heard, that makes her look emptily from place to place, that finally pulls from her a small, bitter laugh as she drifts from couch to window. This laugh must be among the most tragic in all of cinema, containing in its brief sonic flicker an expression of such total, tragic understanding one can scarcely bear to hear it.

A knock at the door finally releases her, as it must, lest the film combust in the projector – but it is a temporary release. She goes away with the man who knocks, a man who is kind, rich, eligible, and in love with her, a man she really does care for. She becomes engaged to him. A good life, good in spirit and good in social standing, it seems, will finally be hers. But her lover follows her, and asks her to take him back. He makes no new promises, gives her no new expectations. Nothing that would give her reason to accept. We wait for her answer… and then there is an ellipse in the narrative, a fade to 20 years later, and it is this absence which completes the agonizing presence of that silence in that lonely apartment. Because she doesn’t marry the kind man. She takes back her lover, and grows old as his mistress – and this passes unseen, because there was never another course, never a decision that could be made. That we understand this is the miracle of the film, that through silence and absence it communicates to us matters of the heart so all-consuming they burn through the very fabric of thought. Without an impassioned declaration, a swell of music, without the need of any of the many reliable tools of the melodramatic arts, we are able to understand, because we already understood from Ray’s laugh, a truly Nietzschean laugh, and from the silence that surrounded it.

I watched Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace the other night. It’s one of his gothic, fog-shrouded Vincent Price vehicles, and although sometimes marketed as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace, the plot is primarily derived from a Lovecraft novella. Like other Price-Corman productions, it’s a fun, enjoyable film that delivers on what it promises, but not really on what it suggests. It’s little wonder to me that Corman ultimately found his calling as a producer, not because he lacks vision or artistry, but because he so clearly finds his meaning and pleasure in the act of putting a film together, of finding ways to realize what the project demands under the interlocking constraints of budget and technical limitation; that the film should actually say anything beyond the fact of its own images is secondary at best. In this sense he is certainly one of cinema’s great materialists, and, like Georges Méliès before him, a clear precursor to the “anti-illusionists” of the ‘70s.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, when one understands this, that the most interesting thing about The Haunted Palace is its usage of the unique materiality of screen performance. The basic premise of the film is that before being burned at the stake, Price, a warlock, places a curse on the mob of townspeople, and then a hundred and ten years later his great-grandson returns to the town and falls under the influence of his evil spirit (via evil painting). This great-grandson is also played by Price, and he returns to a town populated by the same actors as those who formed the original mob, playing their own decedents. This sort of casting strategy is hardly unusual of course, but in this context it takes on a sort of muted horror, closer to Beckett than Lovecraft. In the century since the execution, the village has not really changed, just decayed: its residents have begun developing deformities ranging from mild (Elisha Cook’s character now possesses a webbed hand) to extreme (children wander the streets without eyes), and, in a grim gesture, the tavern has been renamed the “Burning Man.” You can see the memory of agonized screams and crackling flames drip like wax from every distrustful gaze. Seeing, literally, the same people become their own descendants, facing literally the same enemy, unchanged but for the degradation of their bodies, you can only imagine that in another century, or five, or fifty, these same people will be playing out their same roles, stuck in the same closed circuit, an existence trapped between life and death, degenerating with each successive lap. Such an existence could, of course, be suggested in the pages of a Weird tale, but cinema gives it a horrible fleshy physicality which language alone inevitably cannot. At the end of the film, Price again stands before the tree to which he was once lashed and set alight, and a smile plays across his lips.

Some words scratched out in a bare tenement room, across from a movie house and under a yellow bulb, on a cold night a long time ago:

“She’s right there on the floor right in front of you and she’s got blue, blue eyes, you feel ‘em staring at you? You see the blood on the floor? You hear her screaming!?”

There’s a scream and a gunshot and a boy across the street who looks up from his game. He gets shot at too, but not hit. But “she wasn’t spared anything.” He’s already put on a gun before you see her hand, frozen stiff in a rictus claw, with blood under every nail. The two images mean the same thing. Later, many years before, Marlene pauses and carefully lifts her voluminous dress to step over puddle of muddy water. The camera pans down to show you this. You’re supposed to notice it. It’s important. It’s on a soundstage, like nearly every other scene, but here, unavoidably, the filth is real. And despite her best efforts, Marlene’s hem trails through it. She looks cleaner when she first meets him later, dressed in grease and dust and blue jeans, but it’s just another kind of make-up. “Come back ten years ago,” she tells him still later. You understand what she means.

Our hero is our hero because he claims the low card when he gets a high one, because everything he does drives him towards his own death. This is what a hero is, when you strip him to the bone (and such a vivisection was old Fritz’s favorite hobby). He’s like Orpheus in the underworld, except he knows his Eurydice is lost forever. The sheriff turns back at the stream where his jurisdiction ends, but he crosses it like the River Styx. His muses are Hatred, Murder, and Revenge, but before you judge him too harshly, look around: everyone else in this world is a slave to Love or Money, and those are far more dangerous passions. He kills a man without really meaning to. It doesn’t seem to upset him. Maybe he wanted to. Maybe it felt good. “He’s suffered lacerations, contusions, and concussion. His jugular vein is severed in three places. I counted four broken ribs and there was a compound fracture of the skull. To put it briefly, he’s real dead.” For doing this our hero is given $300. He didn’t know his victim.

“Don’t fret, gentlemen. It won’t be the first time they’ve hung a few crooked politicians. It’ll only take a minute or two. It’s a clean way to die, and as quiet as eating a banana.” The 20th century in miniature: three men sit in a jail cell and wonder if they’re going to die, and you wonder if they deserve it. Their jailers wear armbands but their brand of whiskey is full of lockpicks. You only spend long enough in their town to be glad it isn’t your town, or maybe it is, or was. In America the atrocities often predate the cities, so it’s hard for you to say. You have to read it in the wind, or sometimes in the eagerness of the sky to run away from the horizon, and this isn’t a world with any of those things. There’s less air to breathe every day. “Look around you, Altar Keane. What do you see in there, a bedroom or a morgue? Through that window, what’s that, a courtyard or a graveyard?” It’s both.

I am fascinated by this room. It’s a room buried deep inside the threadbare labyrinth of Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), the room where the underlings of “Mabuse” (actually the psychiatrist Baum, operating under something between psychological suggestion and bodily possession by Mabuse) receive their orders. If we were to attempt to locate the “heart” of the film, and perhaps we should, as this is a film which is very much akin to a body, it would be here. Lang, especially in his German films, has a tendency towards imbuing even the most spartan environments with an obfuscating ornamentation of shadow and perspective. Although the Expressionist excess of his silent films has here been tempered somewhat into a sinister aesthetic Modernism, the Langian world, in Testament as most anywhere else, is one of endless fabrications, illusions, and misdirections. But in this room, at the core of all this subterfuge, may at first appear so simple as to make its honesty unquestionable. But, of course, this is not an honest space. Let’s map it in detail: whenever Baum/Mabuse’s gangsters enter, the light are down, and they can briefly see the silhouette of a man seated at a table behind the curtain. Only after the floodlights before the curtain come on, rendering it opaque, does he deliver his instructions. Except this figure isn’t actually Dr. Mabuse, as the gangsters believe, nor is it even Baum. It’s literally nothing but a silhouette, some wood cut into a human shape propped up behind a table. The orders are recordings, played on a simple turntable. The whole apparatus is automatic, dependent on fear and carefully calibrated illusion to sustain itself. Like a horrific perversion of the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is the man.

Although the room appears barren aside from those few objects (the lights, the cut-out, the curtain, etc.) necessary for the trick, that is not the extent of its secrets. As the narrative’s chess board begins to empty of pieces, a gangster with a guilty conscience and his love interest are trapped in the room by Baum/Mabuse before they can report him, with a bomb set to go off in three hours. Within those next three hours it slowly becomes clear that this dingy little box, with its stained wallpaper and dusty boards, is airtight. They break out the floors and pull bricks from the walls, only to be met with impenetrable steel plating. In Mabuse’s world, as in cinema, “simplicity” is a facade behind which elaborate, evil mechanisms lurk.

The two do manage to escape, of course. They break a water pipe running up the wall, slowly flooding the room in the hope that it will save them from the blast, which is sure to blow a hole in the steel. Humans are hopelessly weak; the only course of action is to try to turn the mechanisms against themselves. In doing so, the space is radically transformed. The wood silhouette bobs on the surface as the desk is submerged, broken in two. The beam to which the floodlights are affixed becomes a life preserver to cling to. Finally, when the bomb explodes, the water becomes a churning, filthy whirlpool flecked with splintered wood, filling the room nearly to the ceiling. The characters of a Lang film, any Lang film, are like bugs captured by a sadistic child. Their lives are trifles; they exist to be tormented. The transformation this room undergoes is an object lesson: its mundane facade is stripped away and its true lethality revealed, to demonstrate that you are helpless, that you cannot trust the ground under your feet or the roof over your head, that your death could be around any corner. Any room could become a churning whirlpool, no matter how benign it appears. That the characters do not actually die is irrelevant, the point has been made. The illusion of the “man behind the curtain” is maintained for so long only because it places us into a submissive position, the servant of a hidden master. This dialectic is exploded by the revelation that this “master” is himself psychically enslaved by the real Dr. Mabuse, despite his barely existing beyond pages upon pages of notes and diagrams. Each figure of power, from the murderous gangster, to their deceptive leader, to the traces and shadows of Mabuse, is less physically “real” than the last; in Lang’s malevolent universe, power is immateriality. All that is hidden will be revealed, and with each revelation, paradoxically, we will find less than the previous, until, inevitably, we reach the ultimate blank totality of any movie: its creator. This is what fascinates me about this room.