Yeah, I’ve always loved the little moment of him groping for the door handle.
It's a piercing emotional gesture and also a great piece of physical acting. The whole movie is full of them. I was amazed this time by some of the things Brigitte Helm does with her body as the false Maria; she looks like she has too many joints in her fingers, like her arms and her torso and her hips are all separately articulated or possibly dislocated. I always loved that one slow lolling broken-doll wink, but the way she laughs as the workers are hauling her to the stake—the way she laughs in the fire—is exactly the way she laughed at the young men fighting over her in the Yoshiwara. It's like a combination of broken programming and demonic possession.
I seem to recall he was described as a “pale-faced youth” or something in the novelization, but then I’ve given up trying to guess what age anyone in an old movie is *meant* to be, because hair and clothing styles, etc, often cause me to perceive them as older than the actors actually were, plus I live in an era where social adulthood seems to be pretty fluid and often delayed.
I was going by the actor's age, which is the kind of thing I tend to look up because I am terrible at people's ages full stop. I have always been able to gauge "generally younger than me," "vaguely in my age range," and "obviously older," and otherwise I have no clue. What I find ironic is that this interdeterminacy also appears to apply to me—I spent much of high school being mistaken for a college student and much of college being mistaken for a grad student and now that I haven't been near a university in more than a decade I am regularly mistaken for a college or grad student, which actually bothers me quite a lot, but it's been a constant of my interactions with the Yiddish chorus. I don't know what to do about it. I'm not sure there is anything.
Also I googled Otto Wernicke’s birth date and Inspector Lohmann, in the second movie, is five years younger than I currently am (I have multiple diegetic and non-diegetic thoughts about that), so at this point I’ve just given up and embraced the fact that I’m ancient and also unable to identify anyone else’s age, which is kind of fun because I can pretend I’m a slightly bemused supernatural being who has trouble with human timescales.
I am now older than Hans Conried in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). That's nuts.
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It's a piercing emotional gesture and also a great piece of physical acting. The whole movie is full of them. I was amazed this time by some of the things Brigitte Helm does with her body as the false Maria; she looks like she has too many joints in her fingers, like her arms and her torso and her hips are all separately articulated or possibly dislocated. I always loved that one slow lolling broken-doll wink, but the way she laughs as the workers are hauling her to the stake—the way she laughs in the fire—is exactly the way she laughed at the young men fighting over her in the Yoshiwara. It's like a combination of broken programming and demonic possession.
I seem to recall he was described as a “pale-faced youth” or something in the novelization, but then I’ve given up trying to guess what age anyone in an old movie is *meant* to be, because hair and clothing styles, etc, often cause me to perceive them as older than the actors actually were, plus I live in an era where social adulthood seems to be pretty fluid and often delayed.
I was going by the actor's age, which is the kind of thing I tend to look up because I am terrible at people's ages full stop. I have always been able to gauge "generally younger than me," "vaguely in my age range," and "obviously older," and otherwise I have no clue. What I find ironic is that this interdeterminacy also appears to apply to me—I spent much of high school being mistaken for a college student and much of college being mistaken for a grad student and now that I haven't been near a university in more than a decade I am regularly mistaken for a college or grad student, which actually bothers me quite a lot, but it's been a constant of my interactions with the Yiddish chorus. I don't know what to do about it. I'm not sure there is anything.
Also I googled Otto Wernicke’s birth date and Inspector Lohmann, in the second movie, is five years younger than I currently am (I have multiple diegetic and non-diegetic thoughts about that), so at this point I’ve just given up and embraced the fact that I’m ancient and also unable to identify anyone else’s age, which is kind of fun because I can pretend I’m a slightly bemused supernatural being who has trouble with human timescales.
I am now older than Hans Conried in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). That's nuts.